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Executive Intelligence Review
June 7, 2016 (EIRNS)--NATO's Exercise Anaconda 16 got underway yesterday, with an opening in Warsaw attended by both Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz and U.S. Ambassador Paul W. Jones. Activities in the exercise publicly announced so far, include a parachute drop of 1,130 paratroopers, a crossing of the Vistula River and a nighttime assault using 35 helicopters. All told, the exercise involves some 31,000 troops from 24 nations, including 14,000 from the US, 12,000 from Poland, and 800 from the UK, with 3,000 vehicles, and 105 airplanes and helicopters, along with 12 Navy ships. Most media coverage of the exercise notes that Anaconda will be the first time since 1941, when Adolph Hitler launched the Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union, that German tanks will be moving eastward across Poland.
A defense attache at a European embassy in Warsaw told the {Guardian} that the "nightmare scenario" of the exercise would be "a mishap, a miscalculation which the Russians construe, or choose to construe, as an offensive action."
"Construe" is the wrong word, Lyndon LaRouche commented today. NATO is in fact provoking Russia in increasingly dangerous ways, and the Russians will make their own decision in their own way, in response to these probes.
Grushko: NATO Lives in Surrealistic Reality
June 7, 2016 (EIRNS)--Alexander Grushko, Russia's ambassador to NATO, said in an interview on Rossiya 24 television yesterday, that the idea of a Russian threat to NATO is "a myth which gives a possibility to pursue the policy that NATO pursues, and at the same time to solve other tasks of strategic nature." Grushko said this myth is used as an external factor to substantiate that "NATO is seen as an additional band to fix unity of the West...
All these games of NATO's fearfulness, they must end sooner or later, as it is difficult to live all the time in the smoke of an ideological campaign built on nothing."
Grushko was speaking as giant NATO exercises are underway in both the Baltic region and in Poland.
"What we are seeing today in the Baltic states, as a matter of fact, is nothing but attempts towards force development with the hostile policy pursued by NATO in the recent time. I would not say that it is a direct threat for Russia but, nevertheless, it obviously creates serious risks as we see an absolutely new military reality forming along our border," he said. He called statements out of Warsaw that Russia is preparing to invade Poland, absurd. "Recently the [NATO] secretary general visited Poland, and during these visits the Polish side was making statements that now Russia knows that an attack against Poland is an attack against NATO, which is completely absurd, as they are discussing the problem that does not exist," he said. "There are no plans to attack Poland."
The problem is that NATO's warnings of a non-existent Russian threat can materialize into actions. "The policy [of NATO] lives in surrealistic reality, and the most dangerous thing is that it now starts taking shape of military planning and military preparations carried out on territories along our borders," Grushko said. He said NATO's decisions that are now materialized as exercises could soon acquire a more dangerous nature.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, during a joint press conference yesterday in Moscow with Finnish Foreign Minister Timo Soini, reiterated that Russia will take measures in response to the NATO military build-up.
"We do not hide our negative attitude to the movement of NATO's military infrastructure towards our borders, to dragging new states into the military activity of the block," Lavrov said. "Here we will invoke Russia's sovereign right to ensure its security with measures adequate to the current risks. I am confident that our Finnish friends and neighbors also understand this."
BREITBART
9/11 FAMILIES TO OBAMA: RELEASE 28 SECRET PAGES OF 9/11 REPORT
A group composed of 21 family members and survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks wrote a letter to the White House, imploring President Barack Obama to declassify 28 pages from a bipartisan joint congressional inquiry into intelligence failures surrounding the al-Qaeda strike.
The letter's authors pleaded with President Obama to immediately release the secret portion of the 838-page Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees and published in December 2002.
"Not a single day of further delay can be justified," wrote the advocates in the letter dated June 6.
Some of the few U.S. lawmakers who have been granted access to the 28 pages claim it documents evidence linking the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, nominally a U.S. ally, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"As you know, this September will mark the 15th anniversary of the horrific attacks that claimed the lives of our innocent loved ones, and transformed our nation and world," the families and survivors told the White House in their letter. "We know from our efforts since that day to pursue justice on behalf of our loved ones that individuals and institutions that bear culpability for their murders - many of them Saudi - have never been held to account."
"We are encouraged that you have initiated a process to address that injustice, and look forward to working with you and your administration in any way possible towards that goal," they added.
The survivors and family members called on the Obama administration to release any information, beyond the classified pages, that provides evidence associating the government of Saudi Arabia to the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
"As we have indicated on many occasions, any meaningful effort to provide the American public with the truth concerning Saudi Arabia's role in the emergence of al Qaeda and events of 9/11 must encompass the full spectrum of evidence bearing on questions of Saudi culpability, and not merely the 28 pages," they wrote.
Read full article here:
British Freakout, Demand JASTA Be Blocked
June 6, 2016 (EIRNS)--The British have now directly weighed in to save their Saudi assets in the ongoing battle in the United States (now extended into Germany) to expose the direct Anglo-Saudi hand behind 9/11 and all the other jihadist terror attacks over the past decades. A {Daily Telegraph} article by Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, former adviser to the Chief of the Defence Staff, argues that if JASTA passes, British intelligence and the British government could be sued for ``past'' support for terrorists in Londonistan. The article is bluntly headlined ``Why a US law to let 9/11 families sue Saudi Arabia is a threat to Britain and its intelligence agencies.''
While the JASTA bill is not explicitly aimed against Britain, which enjoys close intelligence cooperation with the US, ``Under the bill, US citizens might sue the British government claiming negligent lack of effort to tackle Islamic radicalism in earlier decades. Some in the US already accuse Britain of tolerating radical preachers in `Londonistan' during the nineties, an approach they say spawned terrorism.''
The author cites the case of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, who was radicalized at Finsbury Park Mosque under the watchful eye of MI5 and MI6. ``A lawsuit brought under Jasta might force the UK government to reveal intelligence about the plot, why it failed to act and its reasons for doing so. Alternatively, Britain would have to agree to a financial settlement. Either way, Britain's reputation would be severely damaged.''
The author notes that there is a worst-case option, even under JASTA, which is for the President to invoke state secret privilege, which he can do even in private litigation. But, Tugendhat warns, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are supporting JASTA's passage and might not be inclined to act. One more reminder that the British and Saudi Monarchies are attached at the hip--and elsewhere.
Of course, while it is true that ``Londonistan'' is truly the world capital of global terrorism, the British freakout is not about Richard Reid the ``shoe bomber'' or the Findsbury Park Mosque. The British are directly implicated in 9/11 through the BAE Systems Al Yamamah program, through which Prince Bandar was receiving enormous sums via the Bank of England, at the same time he was funding the San Diego 9/11 terrorist cell.
The real issue is that the release of the 28 pages opens the entire Pandora's Box of Anglo-Saudi-Bush collusion in the biggest terrorist massacre ever to take place on US soil. The full expose of Bandar's role immediately puts the entire BAE Al Yamamah issue back in the spotlight and forces a full reinvestigation of everything surrounding 9/11.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Describes U.S. War in Afghanistan as "Graveyard of Empires"--Comments on US Elections
June 7, 2016 (EIRNS)--In an exclusive interview with Sputnik's "Loud and Clear" program published today, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, comments on the disaster that fifteen years of the U.S.'s permanent warfare has wrought in Afghanistan.
Asked if he thought that the U.S. would still be in Afghanistan 15 years after the 9/11 attacks, Wilkerson replied, "I would have to say that yes, there were some of us who saw Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires, some of us who were students of history. The U.S. got stuck in that graveyeard, or they called it a quagmire, and it all comes back to the great geopolitical game played out by the British and other empires for many years."
Sputnik notes in its introductory remarks that there have been 2,326 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan over the past 15 years, in addition to 1,173 U.S. civilian contractor deaths.
Two-thirds of those deaths occurred since Barack Obama took office in 2009, when he promised to ramp down the conflict. The death toll for Afgan civilians has been horrendous: 91,000 resulting directly from the conflict and another 360,000 indirectly related.
Placing the blame largely on the "military-industrial" complex in the U.S., Wilkerson then notes in a final comment, "Look at our two choices for President--Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. There is not an iota worth of difference between them, excepting that Trump is incoherent and Clinton, unfortunately, is very coherent about the fact that she would continue this playbook on foreign policy that we have carried out for the past thirty years, that is extremely expensive and extremely dangerous. It bleeds our Treasury and it bleeds our people, while less than 1% of our population serves in the military, bleeding and dying."
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Executive Intelligence Review