Tag: news

Authored by Guillaume Durocher via The Unz Review,

After a great deal of delay and kvetching, Brexit is finally happening. This doesn’t mean all that much in the grand scheme of things. While leftists may hysterically accuse Boris Johnson of being “racist” – seemingly only for speaking humorously of burqas as resembling letter-boxes – the Prime Minister and his multicultural team can be counted on to pursue a policy of Globalism in One Country. The main significance is this: getting liberal/globalist elites to respect democratic outcomes even if they don’t like them. This is an important precedent.

In truth, Britain’s position within the EU but outside both the Schengen Area of free movement of people and of the Eurozone was arguably optimal. This granted London considerable influence over a major economic bloc while staying out of the zanier schemes. The only real downside of EU membership was in preventing any legal way of keeping Eastern European Gypsies out of the country.

Despite “Remoaner” hysteria, leaving the EU is not the end of the world either. I’m sure Britain will be able to get on fine outside the EU and indeed both the British and the Continentals have strong incentives to get along. Perhaps Britain will reinvent itself as a global tax haven. After all, Europe’s share of global GDP has been rapidly declining over the past decades.

Britain’s departure is a major economic blow to the EU. Brexit will leave a €7.5-billion hole in the EU budget, Britain being the biggest contributors besides the Germans. Britain was one of the EU’s few dynamic major economies (along with Germany and, to a more limited extent, France) and the only one with a semi-serious tech sector. The bloc will be reduced to 450 million inhabitants and will become a distant third in terms of GDP behind China and the United States of America.

On the positive side, Brexit may make the EU a more cohesive Union. Without Britain, the bloc is already taking a hard protectionist turn. Indeed, the Latins and Eastern Europeans are all protectionist, while Germany has a discovered a newfound interest in ‘industrial policy,’ leaving the free-trading Dutch and Nordics a small minority. While European foreign and defense policies are mostly empty talk, the EU is a genuinely powerful trade bloc, with real clout on market regulation (witness those annoying GDPR privacy popups), antitrust, anti-dumping, and trade negotiations.

Still, I would not expect miracles. Despite lack of British participation, the Continentals have yet to make anything coherent of the Eurozone. During the Cold War, Western Europeans were subject to much more significant geopolitical pressure – economic, military, and cultural dependence on the United States, a massive Soviet military threat, humiliating energy dependence on the Mideast manifest in the Oil Shocks – without this leading to any serious attempt by the Europeans to recover their sovereignty and power. The postwar European democracies were satisfied with the Pursuit of Purchasing Power. The threats of today really are less immediate or downright minor in comparison.

Charles de Gaulle at a press conference, ever pedagogical.

Brexit happening seems a good time to recall a farsighted Frenchman who predicted that none of this would work: Charles de Gaulle. President de Gaulle twice vetoed Britain’s candidacy to join the then-European Economic Community (EEC), causing an uproar in Atlanticist circles.

De Gaulle had long thought that the so-called “Europeanists” were not sincere and/or coherent in their claim to be building a strong and independent federal Europe. He said in a May 1962 press conference:

France’s proposals [on Europe] have raised two objections, which incidentally are perfectly contradictory even though they are presented by the same people. . . . These critics tell us: “You want to create a Europe of nations, while we want to create supranational Europe.” As if a simple phrase were sufficient to confound these powerfully established entities that are the nations and the States. And then, these same critics simultaneously tell us: “England has submitted its candidacy to join the [European] Common Market. So long as they are not in, we won’t be able to do anything political.”

And yet, everyone knows that England, as a great State and a nation true to itself, will never consent to being dissolved in some utopian construct.

Prescient words!

The British comedy show Yes, Minister! has a scene very humorously making the same point.

Six months later, De Gaulle vetoed Britain’s entry of the EEC, citing British ties to the United States, economic relations with the Commonwealth, and general differences with those he called “the Continentals.” In January 1963, De Gaulle said that in the event of British membership:

We can expect that the cohesion of all the members, which would be very numerous and very diverse, would not last long and that, in the end, there would emerge a colossal Atlantic Community under American dependence and leadership, which would soon absorb the European Community.

This eventuality may appear perfectly legitimate in the eyes of some, but it is not at all what France wished to do and has done, which is a genuinely European construct.

In short, De Gaulle accused the British of being a kind of American Trojan Horse . . . and who could blame him?

In 1967, De Gaulle again vetoed British membership citing basically the same concerns. Britain could not join the EEC unless Britain either changed or “if the Continentals forever gave up on creating a Europe which is European.” Historically, the latter view prevailed.

As a rule, the early “European federalists” were never interested in creating a strong and independent Europe. Like Jean Monnet and Walter Hallstein, they were just Atlanticist networkers, whose personal prosperity depended on these deracinated and foreign circles, rather than on Europe’s native power. I cannot tell you how revolted I was when I tried to read the memoirs of both Monnet (600 pages of nothing) and Hallstein (who claimed, in 1970s, when the EEC was barely an entity at all, that the Europeans were “halfway” to federation and just needed one last push to get there).

Anyway, Britain’s departure from the European Union opens the way for the Continentals to try, a bit more earnestly, to create a truly sovereign and independent “European Europe.” This is not an absurd ambition. London was in some ways Europe’s only top-tier “global city.” Paris, Berlin, and Brussels really are secondary nodes. There’s a charmingly provincial quality to European politics which must be preserved. While in the Anglosphere Jews and Asians have massively displaced White Gentiles among their cultural and economic elites, the same is not really true in Continental Europe, certainly outside of France. Time will tell.

A year after four Americans died in a bomb blast in northern Syria – the single deadliest day for the some 700 troops still there – another US solider has died. 

A 22-year-old U.S. Army Reserve soldier identified by the Pentagon as Spc. Antonio Moore was killed Friday in a vehicle rollover accident. 

His combat engineering unit based out of North Carolina was conducting a route clearing operation in Deir Ezzor province in Syria’s east, where US forces have been supporting Syrian Kurdish forces (SDF) in “securing the oil fields” — as President Trump has recently described the mission. 

Though numbers have varied, most reports put current troops levels in Syria at over 500, with the AP in a new report saying 750 troops deployed in the country, citing Defense Department officials. 

An official Army statement issued Saturday reads: “The 363rd Engineer Battalion is deeply saddened at the loss of Spec. Antonio Moore.” It continued: “Antonio was one of the best in our formation. He will be missed by all who served with him. We will now focus on supporting his family and honoring his legacy and sacrifice.”

Moore’s reserve unit – 363rd Engineer Battalion, 411th Engineer Brigade, out of Knightdale, N.C. – was only somewhat recently established, in 2015, and includes only 100 service members.

Congressional critics of US policy in Syria have questioned the White House’s unilaterally stationing troops in harm’s way, with no war powers vote — concerns which have only grown after Trump’s public remarks about “taking the oil” in Syria. 

Meanwhile, the theater is growing more dangerous for the small American presence which is not wanted either by Syria, Russia, Turkey, or Iran. Concern has also grown that pro-Iran militias operating both in Syria and Iraq will seek to target US troops throughout the region and Washington’s showdown with Iran grows more direct and confrontational. 

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

A suggestion by the UK Committee on Climate Change to burn more wood and plant replacement trees as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels has drawn criticism from think tank Chatham House, which says this is hardly the best approach to reducing emissions.

“Expanding forest cover is undoubtedly a good thing, if you’re leaving them standing,” energy expert Duncan Brack told the Daily Telegraph. However, Brack, who served as special adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, suggested that burning wood for heating was not the most sustainable way forward. Calling wood burning a carbon neutral process is “highly dubious,” Brack added.

These claims, according to the Telegraph’s environment editor, Emma Gatten, rest on the assumption that the carbon footprint of chopping down trees and burning them is offset by planting new trees to replace them. This assumption excludes the fact that older trees absorb more carbon and that it takes time to replace a forest.

“You can leave trees standing and they will continue to absorb carbon for decades,” Brack says.

“But the biomass industry implicitly assumes that forests at some point stop reach a saturation point for carbon intake and can be harvested and simply replaced.” 

The benefit of planting trees to mitigate the effects of climate change has been put to the test on a wider scale as well. A study released last year found that reforestation could work, but it had to be done at a massive scale.

We need to plant 25 percent more trees than there are on Earth right now, or more than half a trillion in total, the study found. This would reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by a quarter, erasing 20 years of emissions. Yet it would not solve the climate problem on its own, without a sustained effort to cut emissions, commentators on the study said.

As if the world’s facing a looming new global pandemic weren’t enough, here’s yet another rare occurrence of apocalyptic proportions threatening to devastate the economy and way of life on an entire continent: the worse outbreak of desert locusts in seventy years is ravaging East Africa — specifically Kenya as hundreds of millions have swarmed in from Somolia and Ethiopia, reports the Associated Press. 

The hum of millions of locusts on the move is broken by the screams of farmers and the clanging of pots and pans. But their noise-making does little to stop the voracious insects from feasting on their crops in this rural community.

The by all accounts “huge” infestation is threatening to devastate communities and a region already long struggling with food security. One news source likened it to a Biblical Locust Plague With Swarms the Size of Cities.

The invading locusts are “deadly” in the sense that these ‘mega-swarms’ devour crops at incredibly rapid pace — at a faster rate of destruction than other natural disasters.  

The numbers and immediate destructive force are staggering, according to quotes in the AP:

• About 70,000 hectares (172,973 acres) of land in Kenya are already infested.
• A single swarm can contain up to 150 million locusts per square kilometer of farmland, an area the size of almost 250 football fields, regional authorities say.
• One especially large swarm in northeastern Kenya measured 60 kilometers long by 40 kilometers wide (37 miles long by 25 miles wide).
• Farmers are afraid to let their cattle out for grazing, and their crops of millet, sorghum and maize are vulnerable, but there is little they can do.

“Even cows are wondering what is happening,” one local farmer laments in the AP report. “Corn, sorghum, cowpeas, they have eaten everything.”

This as the mega-swarms consume the very fodder the livestock survive on.

There’s additional concern that new rains after March could bring another explosion of the fast breeding locusts prior to the dry season taking their numbers back down.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization is reportedly mobilizing an emergency response, given even small swarms can wipe out crop fields at sizes constituting enough food that could have fed tens of thousands of people in a single day, which makes it a humanitarian disaster in the making. 

It’s both the nature of their small size (about a finger’s length) and the fact that they swarm in millions at a time that make preventative measures nearly impossible.

The UN agency listed some creative but futile methods suggested and/or initiated in the past: “Although giant nets, flamethrowers, lasers and huge vacuums have been proposed in the past, these are not in use for locust control.”

It added, “People and birds often eat locusts but usually not enough to significantly reduce population levels over large areas.”

Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,

First there was the beheading of 11 Nigerian Christians during the recent Christmas celebration. The next day, a Catholic woman, Martha Bulus, was beheaded in the Nigerian state of Borno with her bridesmaids, five days before the wedding. Then there was a raid on the village of Gora-Gan in the Nigerian state of Kaduna, where terrorists shot anyone they met in the square where the evangelical community had gathered, killing two young Christian women. There was also a Christian student killed by Islamic extremists who recorded his execution. Then pastor Lawan Andimi, a local leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria, was beheaded.

“Every day”, says Father Joseph Bature Fidelis, of the Diocese of Maiduguri, “Our brothers and sisters are slaughtered in the streets. Please help us not be silent in the face of this immense extermination that is taking place in silence”.

The Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria described the area as “killing fields”, like the ones the Khmer Rouge created in Cambodia to exterminate the population. Most of the 4,300 Christians killed for their faith during the last year came from Nigeria. Nina Shea, an expert in Religious Freedom, recently wrote:

“An ongoing Islamic extremist project to exterminate Christians in sub-Saharan Africa is even more brutal and more consequential for the Church than it is in the Middle East, the place where Christians suffered ISIS ‘genocide’, as the U.S. government officially designated.”

Unfortunately, the murder of these Christians during the last month has been largely ignored by the Western media.

“A slow-motion war is under way in Africa’s most populous country. It’s a massacre of Christians, massive in scale and horrific in brutality and the world has hardly noticed”, wrote the French philosopher, Bernard Henri Lévy.

While Christians were murdered in Nigeria, the global media ran a story of a pig being tied up and shoved off a bungee tower at a new theme park in China. The story went viral on BBC, The Independent, The New York Times, Sky News, Deutsche Welle and many other mainstream media outlets. The Chinese pig got more media coverage than any of these murdered Christians in Nigeria. You often have to search for these martyrs on local African sites. “Pig Bungee Jumping Stunt In China Prompts Global Outcry”, wrote the Huffington Post. Where has been the global outcry for the serial butchering of Christians just because they are Christians?

The killing of a gorilla in a Cincinnati zoo, committed to save a child’s life, triggered more emotion and media coverage than the beheading of 21 Christians on a beach in Libya while they invoked the name of Jesus in Arabic and whispered prayers. ABC, CBS and NBC devoted six times more coverage to the death of one gorilla than they did on the mass execution of Christians.

“The world prefers to worry about pandas rather than about us, threatened with extinction in the land where we were born”, said Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf, the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul as well as a refugee in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, home to many of the Christians who fled jihadis. When the Archbishop said that four years ago, it looked as if it were just provocation to shock Western public opinion. But Archbishop Sharaf was right.

The French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf also noted “threats to pandas cause more emotion” than threats to Christians. Archbishop Sharaf gave another example:

“In Australia they take care of frogs. One of our Syriac citizens, who’s a builder, bought land, took money from a bank and wanted to build houses and sell them. Then when he wanted to get a certificate to build, in the middle of the land, he came across a hole with eight frogs in it. The government of Sydney told him: ‘You can’t build on this land’. He said: ‘But I’ve taken money from the bank and I must get to work’ and they pushed him to build in another place, making him pay $1.4 million to build a different place for these eight frogs. And yet we are the last people who speak Jesus’ language. We are Aramaic people and we don’t have this right to have anyone protect us? Look upon us as frogs, we’ll accept that — just protect us so we can stay in our land”.

In an era of round-the-clock information on our mobile phones, computers, televisions and social media, the abominations suffered by Christians have been left without images, while the brutality against the Chinese pig was streamed all over. Christians are an endangered species; pigs are not. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has several categories to define the danger of extinction that various species face today”, according to Benedict Kiely, the founder of Nasarean.org, which helps the Christians of the Middle East.

“Using a percentage of population decline, the categories range from ‘vulnerable species’ (a 30-50 per cent decline), to ‘critically endangered’ (80-90 per cent) and finally to extinction. The Christian population of Iraq has shrunk by 83 per cent, putting it in the category of ‘critically endangered'”.

If you search for a cover dedicated to this extinction you have to go on the confessional media, such as the British weekly Catholic Herald, which just noted “The end of Iraqi Christianity?” Or the French Catholic media, La Croix, telling the story of Syrian Christians:

“Before the start of the civil war in 2012, 20,000 Assyrians populated the banks of the Khabur, a river that crosses northeastern Syria and flows into the Euphrates. The occupation of part of the region by Isis in 2015 forced the majority into exile. The Khabur is today a dead valley”.

One of the last Nigerian Christians was executed by an Islamic State child soldier. Slaughterhouses’ workers go on trial in France for abuses to animals. But the same France has already repatriated more than 250 ISIS fighters, the same people who turn Iraqi churches into slaughterhouses.

Western media stirred global indignation about Russia’s laws against “homosexual propaganda” prior to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. But the same Western media never protested the Islamist regimes that punish people with the death for converting to Christianity or countries where Christians are threatened with death if they do not convert to Islam.

Mauro Armanino, a priest of the Society for African Missions in Niger, who describes a situation of open genocide, writes:

“The repeated threats to the Christian communities in the border area with Burkina Faso have achieved the aim they set: to decapitate the communities and then fall prey to the fear of professing faith in Sunday prayers in the chapels….On Tuesday, January 14, in a village not far from Bomoanga, which, for over a year, has helplessly witnessed the kidnapping of Father Pierluigi Maccalli, a group of criminals who went to settle the scores with the chief nurse who works in a dispensary in the area, took the nephew from his home and was beheaded. In Bomoanga people no longer go to church on Sunday”.

These persecuted Christians feel more and more alone in a world that sees them as intruders. They are as if suspended in a limbo, between an amnesic and weak West and a rising radical Islam. There seems to be no way to push the Western world to become aware of this tragedy that no one talks about and which could have fatal consequences for the future of our civilization.

“Out of fatigue or shame, or both, we close our eyes”, writes Franz-Olivier Giesbert.

“Does the life of Christians from East, Africa or Asia count for a negligible amount? This is a question that we have the right to ask when we see the place that our dear media give to the killings and discrimination that Catholics and Protestants are subjected to on the planet: nothing or almost nothing, with a few happy exceptions. It is our hypocrisy that feeds the clash of civilizations”.

So, shall we now return to our hypocritical indignation about the cruelty inflicted on Chinese pigs?

Submitted by SouthFront,

The existing system of international relations and arms control treaties is slowly, but steadily crumbling. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is dead, with both Washington and Moscow publicly developing previously banned short-to-medium range missiles. The New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) is also moving towards its end in 2021, and it is likely that New START will not be renewed. The United States, China and Russia are developing hypersonic weapons, which are not limited by any existing arms control treaties. The major powers are preparing for a possible global conflict. The dismantlement of the system of international treaties is another factor increasing military tensions around the world.

Russia is actively working towards restoring lost Soviet capabilities and developing new strategic deterrence projects. One of them is the Dead Hand, also known as the Perimeter. This Cold War-era automatic nuclear weapons-control system is one of the most protected secrets and most important deterrence tools of the USSR and Russia.

The Dead Hand is the last line of deterrence in the event of a crippling nuclear strike. It entered into service in 1985, shortly after a major escalation in 1983, which had almost led to war between the US and the Soviet Union. It has been likened to a real-life doomsday machine. Upon activation and determination of an ongoing nuclear strike, the system sends out command missiles with special warheads that pass encrypted launch commands to all nuclear weapon carriers of the sea, air and ground components of the Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces.

In peacetime conditions, the system slumbers, waiting for a turn-on command or an alarm signal from the missile attack early-warning system. It has a human “firewall,” for example, an on-duty officer who would switch it into the fully automated mode. Therefore, there is no risk of an accidental or unauthorized missile launch. Having received a command or signal about missiles being launched from the territory of other countries, this Dead Hand goes into an automated combat mode. Through a wide-scale sensor network, it monitors signs of an incoming nuclear strike.

The decision to launch command missiles is made by an autonomous control and command system – a complex pseudo-artificial intelligence system. The system receives and analyzes a variety of information about seismic activity, radiation, atmospheric pressure, and the intensity of chatter on military radio frequencies. It monitors telemetry from the observation posts of the strategic missile force and data from early warning systems.

Before launching, the system reportedly checks for four conditions:

1. Once the system is activated it first determines if a nuclear explosion has taken place on Russian territory;

2. If this is determined, the system will then check the communication link with the General Staff operation center;

3. If a connection is established the system will After some time – from 15 minutes to 1 hour – passing without any further signs of an attack, it will assume that a number of the officials with the authority to give the order to strike are still alive  and the system will shut down;

4. If the General Staff operation center does not respond, the system sends a request to Kazbek, the automatic system for command and control of the Strategic Nuclear Forces. If there is no response there either, the system automatically transfers launch authority to the command bunker personnel and launches the retaliatory strike.

All of the channels through which the Dead Hand receives its information are backed up multiple times, to remove the possibility of false information being fed to it.

According to openly available data, the Dead Hand is an integral part of the “Zveno” system of air command posts, the development of which was carried out in the Soviet Union. The “Zveno” includes the airborne command and control post on the Il-86VKP aircraft, airborne radio relay on the Il-76RT aircraft, silo-based command missiles ‘Perimeter’ and mobile command missiles ‘Gorn’. In a period of threat, three Il-86VKPs would have the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff respectively on board. The Il-86VKP is able to launch an 8 km long antenna, which not even impulses from nuclear explosions can affect. Using this antenna the aircraft can transmit commands to launch all the country’s intercontinental missiles even if all underground command posts are destroyed by the aggressor’s nuclear strike. The radio relay aircraft Il-76RT would transmit commands to launch missiles in distant regions, including those deployed on submarines. In this way, the Dead Hand guarantees a devastating retaliatory strike in the event of communications disruption and the destruction of command posts after the first-strike surprise nuclear attack by the enemy. Its command missiles launch their warheads into space, where no hostile satellite or nuclear explosions can reach them and from there “wake up” nuclear forces to strike the aggressor.

The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 led to a deep social and economic crisis on the territory of the former Soviet republics. The Russian Armed Forces also entered a period of crisis. In 1995, the Dead Hand was removed from combat duty. After the start of the ‘Putin era’ and the restoration of proper funding for the Russian Armed Forces in the 2000s,  national security once again became one of the key priorities of the Russian leadership. In 2011, it was officially confirmed that the Dead Hand had been put on combat duty. The successful test launch of the 15Yu75 missile took place in Plesetsk in 2016. Furthermore, the Dead Hand is also being modernized. In December 2019, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced plans to sign a contract for the new Sirena-M missile complex. The Sirena-M is the most modern variant of the “command missile system” and “command missile” for the Dead Hand. The tests of the Sirena-M missile, which is based on the first version of the Topol intercontinental ballistic missile, began in 1990. All of them were carried out successfully. The Sirena-M system will enter service in the period up to 2025.

One of the architects of the US government’s waterboarding program, known as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” confirmed the role of a CIA officer known only as “the Preacher,” who would provoke detainees on a deeply religious level while working to extract information from them.

According to James Mitchell – one of three men authorized by the CIA to conduct waterboarding during America’s war on terror – said last Thursday during a pre-trial hearing at Guantánamo Bay, that the Preacher “would at random times put one hand on the forehead of a detainee, raise the other high in the air, and in a deep Southern drawl say things like, ‘Can you feel it, son? Can you feel the spirit moving down my arm, into your body?’“

According to The Guardian, Mitchell confirmed the chilling description written in his memoir, Enhanced Interrogation – confirming the Preacher’s role at CIA black sites during testimony at a pre-trial hearing in the case against five defendants charged in the September 11, 2001 attacks, including mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Mitchell, together with his friend and business partner, Bruce Jessen – who is due to testify next week – have been the public face of the US torture programme for five years, settling out of court in 2017 in a civil suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three prisoners.

Almost everyone else involved in the extensive programme, involving a network of black sites around the world, has remained in the shadows. In terms of legality, it is still the dark side of the moon.

Defence lawyers at the Guantánamo military commission hearings have asked to examine 52 witnesses. They have so far been permitted to question only two, Mitchell and Jessen.

James Connell, representing defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, lost his patience on Thursday when prosecutors objected that he was asking Mitchell about events he had not directly witnessed.

“He’s the only witness we’ve got. The government has blocked all the CIA witnesses,” Connell complained. –The Guardian

According to the report, government prosecutors changed classification rules four days before the current pre-trial hearing, amending them on Monday in order to reclassify facts which defense attorneys were forced to scramble to reframe before the next day of questioning. The Guardian suggests that “The longer the hearings have continued, the clearer it has become that the Mitchell and Jessen partnership was just a small part of the infrastructure of torture, with its own bureaucracy and personal rivalries. In his testimony, Mitchell railed repeatedly against the “middle management” who he believed was plotting against him.”

Mitchell became embroiled in a vicious turf war with a rival, the CIA chief of interrogations, for mastery of the “enhanced programme”. Each sought to use their links to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to get the other removed from their post. In that struggle the detainees were used as bargaining counters. The two men had them tortured for training or demonstration purposes.

In the courtroom this week, the interrogations chief has been referred to by the code NX2. Mitchell calls him the “new sheriff”, but it has been reported his real name was Charlie Wise, who had honed his craft carrying out interrogations for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s. He apparently died of a heart attack in 2003, just weeks after being dismissed.

According to declassified cables and courtroom testimony, Wise set up his own training programme, and took his students to a black site in Afghanistan, codenamed Cobalt, to practise their techniques on Ammar al-Baluchi and other prisoners. During that training, Baluchi was repeatedly slammed against a wall, suffering brain trauma as a result. –The Guardian

The CIA used an unsanctioned waterboard at the Cobalt site, according to defense attorneys, who say it was used on at least one detainee.

After the existence of the CIA’s main interrogation center was revealed by the New York Times, it was forced to close down in 2002 – after which “high value detainees” were transferred to a new site in Poland, codenamed Blue, and which was run by Wise.

Read the rest of the report here.

Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Goldman Sachs has made a major stand for diversity by declaring that they are going to start “refusing IPOs if all directors are white straight men”. This is unusual because most diversity pushes come from the mainstream media or companies that offer concrete consumer products and need to market themselves by connecting feelings or political leanings to their product. Normally, big international finance and banking stays as neutral as possible, having to work with actually diverse groups of people across the globe. Finance does not demand any sort of emotional bond with the public at-large for positive brand recognition. So, this bold move by Goldman Sachs is a huge leap forward for proponents of race-based employment but ultimately it appears to be a means of distracting mainstream journalists from the company’s questionable past.

Firstly, when talking about corporations taking moral stands we should never forget the dirty  past of these multinational giants. Volkswagen for example, was a creation of the Nazis that went on to “fight” on the side of a Democratic West Germany as a symbol of how great capitalism is. Now they are more than happy to show themselves as an SJW/LGBT organization. Why is this so? Because businesses serve any master who comes to them with money and if the current status quo in Germany is rainbow gay then VW will orient its sexuality to said status quo. If there was to be a Nationalism/Nazi takeover of Germany in the upcoming years VW would somehow “find the courage” to remember their “heritage”. This is not to demonize Volkswagen as all big multinationals do exactly the same thing. This logic, of course, applies to Goldman Sachs as well.

In fact, for the foreseeable future this new diversity policy only applies to the Western World. Ikea catalogues in the West are full of gay couples, in Russia they have only nuclear families and in Saudi Arabia they feature only men. When push comes to shove and money is at play morality in business becomes flexible. Goldman Sachs even admitted that “it intends to eventually expand its board-diversity mandate beyond the U.S. and Europe”. By eventually they mean, at the point in time when being diverse becomes cool/trendy in those countries, which could be the day after never. Goldman Sachs with this move is just trying go play ball in the West where their financial world currently sits.

Secondly, it is always best to be skeptical of any sort of corporate philanthropy and morality not just because they will lick any boot presented to them but because their hypocrisy is rampant. If we remember back to the Greek Debt Crisis of just a few years ago, our TV screens were filled with images of young people fighting with police in Athens as employment for those in their 20s was approaching zero. Furthermore, the elderly and many state employees were seeing a lot of their social securities/guarantees dry up right in front of their eyes and it is very possible that Goldman Sachs is directly to blame for all this.

As The Nation writer Robert B. Reich put it

“The investment bank (Goldman Sachs) made millions by helping to hide the true extent of the debt, and in the process almost doubled it.“

Additionally, and also relatively recently, the US Department of Justice found Goldman Sachs liable for their role in the 2008 (subprime) financial crisis in the United States, which had a lot of international blowback as well affecting economies globally. According to Business Insider up to 10,000,000 homes were lost between 2006-2014 as a result of the crisis that Goldman Sachs bears partial responsibility for.

Meaning that when it comes to the real life suffering of millions of Americans and Greeks (and beyond) who lost their jobs, homes, or social safety net, Goldman Sachs doesn’t give a damn. Forcing a handful of diversity hires (even if these were demonstrably proven to be a boon for society) would be one drop of generous blessing in a canyon of financial sins.

Large companies and media organizations are quick to throw relatively tiny amounts of money at charity, but completely unwilling to do anything to actually help society. This attempt at mandating diversity (only in the West) is a 21st century means of playing ball and playing up to certain people’s current moral absolutes of the month. If they really and truly wanted to put a human face to a massive financial giant they could at least pull some sorts of stunts or projects that would get thousands of Greek youth into the workforce, better the lives of an untold number of Greek elderly or try to find a viable way to get millions of Americans into homes they can afford thus partially undoing the 2008 crisis.

But that will never happen. Diversity is a word used for virtue signaling, which costs nothing and impresses the exact type of people who don’t care about the millions of diverse Americans who lost their homes. Diversity is our strength because it gets results while requiring zero actual action.