The Arctic "would have looked very similar to the vegetation we now see in Florida," says Dr Appy Sluijs of Utrecht University [generic link] in the Netherlands who led the international study.
Evidence of palms has never been found so far north before.
"The presence of palm pollen implies that coldest month mean
temperatures over the Arctic land masses were no less than 8°C", the
scientists, based in the Netherlands and Germany, write in the journal Nature Geoscience. [generic link]
That contradicts computer model simulations, also used to predict
future temperatures, that suggest winter temperatures were below
freezing even in the unexplained hothouse period that lasted between
50,000 and 200,000 years ago during the Eocene epoch.
Climate surprises
Sluijs
says that it was also striking that palms, which do not lose their
leaves in winter, grew in an area where the sun does not shine for about
five months. Experiments with modern palms indicate that they can
survive prolonged darkness.
The scientists say the presence of palms, it was not clear if they
were trees or plants, hinted that the modern climate system could yield
big surprises.
According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global temperatures are rising, due in part to human-made greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels.
In 2007, Arctic ice shrank to its smallest size since satellite measurements began in the 1970s.
One possibility for the ancient spike in temperatures was an abrupt
rise in carbon dioxide levels, far beyond current concentrations.
That
might have been caused by volcanic eruptions, or a melt of frozen
methane trapped in the seabed.
"If the ocean was very warm it's possible that these clouds form at a
higher latitude than now," he says. Such effects caused by new cloud
formation could be an unexpected tripwire in accelerating modern climate
change."
Disobedient Media
has reported on previous instances of the UN’s support for groups who
have been accused of serious human rights abuses,, including the KLA
during the Kosovo conflict.
I. Hamas Leadership in UNRWA
The UNRWA has deep ties to the terror organization Hamas; In a 2004 interview, then UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen, stated
that he is “sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I
don’t see that as a crime.” That the Commissioner of the UN Agency in
question would not only admit, but defend the UNRWA’s connection with a
terror group is extremely disturbing, and raises serious questions
regarding US financial support for UNRWA.
In 2016, Avi Dichter, the former head of the Israeli Security Agency (ISA), claimed that almost 100% of UNRWA workers in the Gaza region are active members of Hamas.
In February, the UNRWA was forced to terminate
the employment of the chairman of its Palestinian workers’ union,
Suhail al-Hindi, after it was discovered that he had been elected to Hamas’s leadership.
That same month, it was reported
that Muhammad al-Jamassi, a senior engineer employed by the UNRWA, was
also elected to Hamas leadership. Jamassi has held various positions in
Hamas since 2007, including serving in Hamas’ public relations department, as well as many of its affiliated charities.
It has also been found that the UNRWA has been cooperating and working directly with Hamas’s terrorist activities.
In fact, this cooperation is so great, that Hamas’ own Minister of Religion stated:
“Hamas’ relationship with UNRWA is good, very good! We assist UNRWA and
Hamas cooperates with UNRWA on many levels. Now a direct connection
exists between UNRWA and Hamas.”
In 2014 the head of the IDF’s Maglan commando, Lt. Gen. Yuval, stated
that Hamas was using equipment supplied by the UNRWA to dig their
longest tunnels under Israeli territory. Within these tunnels, Israeli
Defense Forces found weapons and bunkers capable of withstanding air strikes, as well as supplies from the UNRWA. In July of 2014, the UNRWA reported
that during a “routine inspection” they had discovered rockets being
stored in one of their Gaza schools.This was the third such incident to
take place that month. After confiscating the weapons, the UNRWA handed
them over to “local authorities”, who, in turn, answer to Hamas.
III. UNRWA Schools Complicit in Teaching Radicalism
UNRWA Schools in Hamas controlled regions have been found to be
teaching anti-Israeli lessons, as well as promoting the radicalization
of youth. This is allowed to happen in schools in these particular
regions because of the UNRWAs’ policy that, “UNRWA’s Schoolchildren in UNRWA schools follow the host authorities’ curricula and textbooks.”
In the documentary “Children’s Army of Hamas”, the Center for Near East Policy Research (CNEPR) exposes the relationship between UNRWA schools and Hamas. The film documents
how the UNRWA allocates cash from donor nations in order to provide
military training for students in UNRWA classrooms, alongside weapons
training camps organized by Al-Kutla al-Islamiya, a division of Hamas.
This allows children at UN-affiliated schools to learn how to shoot weapons, use grenades, and ultimately pave the way for recruitment into Hamas’ military wing.
Furthermore, in February of 2017, the watchdog group “UN Watch”, released a 130-page report
detailing the actions of teachers and staff engaged in inciting their
students to jihadist terrorism and antisemitism. The report lists the names of those involved, providing examples
of their participation. These examples include: celebrating the
kidnapping of Israeli teenagers by terrorists, cheering rockets being
fired at Israeli civilian centers, praising Hitler and posting with his
photo, erasing Israel off the face of the map, as well as endorsing
various forms of violence against Israelis.
As a result, the radicalization in these schools has become so
prevalent, that Former Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Officer,
Jonathan Halevi, has estimated that nearly 60 percent of homicide bombers were educated in UNRWA schools.
Comment: This is the oppositeof what Trump voters had reason to believe he would do (per his 3/21/2016 speech excerpted below).It's exactly what people like the Kushners and George Soros would do while imagining themselves the compassionate ones. From candidate Trump's 3/21/2016 speech at AIPAC:
With President Obama in his
final year, discussions have been swirling about an attempt to bring a
security council resolution on the terms of an eventual agreement
between Israel and Palestine.
Let me be clear: An agreement imposed by
the UN would be a total and complete disaster. The United States must
oppose this resolution and use the power of our veto. Why? Because
that's not how you make a deal.
Deals are made when parties come
to the table and negotiate. Each side must give up something it values
in exchange for something it requires. A deal that imposes conditions on
Israel and the Palestinian Authority will do nothing to bring peace. It
will only further delegitimize Israel and it would reward Palestinian
terrorism, because every day they are stabbing Israelis – and even
Americans.
Just last week, American Taylor Allen Force, a West
Point grad who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was murdered in the
street by a knife-wielding Palestinian. You don't reward that behavior,
you confront it!
It's not up the United Nations to impose a
solution. The parties must negotiate a resolution themselves. The United
States can be useful as a facilitator of negotiations, but no one
should be telling Israel it must abide by some agreement made by others
thousands of miles away that don't even really know what's happening. When
I'm president, believe me, I will veto any attempt by the UN to impose
its will on the Jewish state....
We know Israel is willing to
deal. Israel has been trying to sit down at the negotiating table,
without pre-conditions, for years. You had Camp David in 2000, where
Prime Minister Barak made an incredible offer – maybe even too generous.
Arafat rejected it.
In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert made an
equally generous offer.
The Palestinian Authority rejected it. Then John
Kerry tried to come up with a framework and Abbas didn't even respond,
not even to the Secretary of State of the United States of America!
When
I become President, the days of treating Israel like a second-class
citizen will end on Day One. I will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu
immediately. I have known him for many years and we will be able to work
closely together to help bring stability and peace to Israel and to the
entire region.
Meanwhile, every single day, you have rampant
incitement and children being taught to hate Israel and hate the Jews.
When you live in a society where the firefighters are the hero’s, little
kids want to be firefighters.
When you live in a society where
athletes and movie stars are heroes, little kids want to be athletes and
movie stars. In Palestinian society, the heroes are those who murder
Jews - we can't let this continue. You cannot achieve peace if
terrorists are treated as martyrs. Glorifying terrorists is a tremendous
barrier to peace. In Palestinian textbooks and mosques, you’ve
got a culture of hatred that has been fermenting there for years, and if
we want to achieve peace, they’ve got to end this indoctrination of
hatred.
There is no moral equivalency. Israel does not name public
squares after terrorists. Israel does not pay its children to stab
random Palestinians.
You see, what President Obama gets wrong
about deal making is that he constantly applies pressure to our friends
and rewards our enemies. That pattern, practiced by the President and
his administration, including former Secretary of State, Hillary
Clinton, has repeated itself over and over and has done nothing but
embolden those who hate America. We saw that with releasing $150 billion
to Iran in the hope that they would magically join the world community -
It's the same with Israel and Palestine.
President Obama thinks
that applying pressure to Israel will force the issue, but it's
precisely the opposite. Already, half the population of Palestine has
been taken over by the Palestinian ISIS in Hamas, and the other half
refuses to confront the first half, so it’s a very difficult situation
but when the United States stands with Israel, the chances of peace
actually rise. That's what will happen when I’m president.
The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the
bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable. They must come
to the table willing and able to stop the terror being committed on a
daily basis against Israel and they must come to the table willing to
accept that Israel is a Jewish State and it will forever exist as a
Jewish State."...
"The result of the debate excerpted below was to limit new immigrants
to 3 percent of the nationalities represented in the census of 1910. In
1924 immigration was limited even further. -smv"
"{17} MR. [FREDERICK W.] ROWE [R.-N.Y.]. Mr. Chairman...
Hagedorn, who
was nearly elected by that swing, was among the candidates who refused
to take a stand on Ryan this week. Saying he did not want to alienate
any potential supporters, even “Washington Republicans,”he suggested
that it was too early to ask candidates who they’d back for speaker."...
"The Race Card is the most rapid-fire, all purpose, over used and abused, ad hominem
and vapid weapon of smear, mass deception and diversion ever conceived
by man. It is a weapon under which weak minds are servilely
crouched and can be fired with the greatest of ease by even the most
reason and integrity challenged, and in fact, was designed especially
for use by them. It is void of justice. It is void of liberty. It
needs no footing in rationality. It is, in plain and clear fact,similar to a lynching. It has no expiration date"...
The attacks have largely emerged after
Obama took office, with the first serious outbreak occurring in
Philadelphia in 2009. The New York Times must be racist
for reporting on that event. Of course it's "race-baiting" to point
out unique problems that have emerged or worsened under this president
-- like flash mobs, debt, and entitlements.... Pareene [of Slate] took Drudge to task for reporting on the vicious beating death of Derrion Albert. "The violent death of a young man is definitely news...in Chicago,
where it happened. It had very little to do with whether Chicago is a
suitable venue for the Olympics." The Olympic Committee probably
thought otherwise. Mainstream outlets like CBS news
questioned whether the murder hurt Chicago's Olympics bid. A
reasonable Olympic Committee would want to find a less violent place to
hold the Olympics, just as many reasonable people have fled cities for
the same reason....
Pareene
goes on: "this world of race riots and constant violent attacks on
innocent Caucasians exists only in the imaginations of Matt Drudge and
the paranoid suburban and exurban white people he wants to keep
terrified." But Drudge is not generating the terror; black violence is. Yen Nguyen was terrified as she watched her 72-year-old husband being
beaten to deathby blacks in the senseless "knock out" game.
Let Pareene find a story where whites did something similar and it was
swept beneath the rug. Shaina Perry was terrified when she was being taunted and beaten in Milwaukee. Carter Strange was terrified while his skull was fractured in South Carolina, and Dawid Strucinski was terrified while being beaten into a coma in Bayonne. Anna Taylor, Emily Guendelsberger, and Thomas Fitzgerald were terrified as they were kicked on the ground in separate flash mobs. The 38 blacks who were arrested for four month's worth of mayhem in Denver, including the murder of Andrew Graham, are the source of terror, not Drudge.
John Cook at the Gawker
takes a slightly less myopic approach than Pareene. He says, "young
people in large groups often make poor decisions" and that Drudge
"rounded up a slew of run-of-the-mill summer crime stories that happen
to involve black people and suggestively weaved them into a nationwide race riot."
Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington
Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic
participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in
the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage."
Most damning is a long quote from a Spencer Ackerman, who worked for something called the Washington Independent:
"I
do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It's not
necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright's defense. What is necessary is
to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words,
find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window.
Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas cardto let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant
fear.Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
And I
think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either
defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the
game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them--Fred Barnes, Karl
Rove, who cares--andcall them racists.Ask: why do they have such a
deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?What
lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which
in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."
Smashing
somebody's [sic] through a plate-glass window seems like an odd way to
thread a needle, but atrocious prose is the least of the problems here.
The problem here isn't bias, either. Assuming Ackerman was an opinion
writer rather than a straight-news reporter, he was entitled not only to
hold his opinions but to express them.
"Spencer,
you're wrong," wrote Mark Schmitt, now an editor at the American
Prospect. "Calling Fred Barnes a racist doesn't further the argument,
and not just because Juan Williams is his new black friend, but because
that makes it all about character. The goal is to get to the point where
you can contrast some _thing_--Obama's substantive agenda--with this
crap." . .
Kevin Drum, then of Washington
Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman's strategy. "I think it's worth
keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he's trying) to run a
campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking
about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the
Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out
he's not going [to] change the way politics works?"
But it was Ackerman who had the last word. "Kevin, I'm not saying OBAMA should do this. I'm saying WE should do this."
If
anybody on the list objected in principle toAckerman's idea of
slandering people, including a fellow journalist, as racist, the Caller
missed that part of the story. (We'll be happy to report it if a
Journolist member would care to supply us with the evidence.) What
Ackerman proposed was to carry out a political dirty trick in order to
suppress the news and thereby aid a candidate for public office. That's
about as unethical as journalism can get.
The final product of this debate was a pathetic "open letter," which, as we noted at the time,
was signed by 41 self-described "journalists and media analysts,"
nearly all of whom were affiliated with universities, left-wing
publications or left-wing think tanks.The letter does seem to have been
more of a collaborative effort than we guessed back then: the Caller
lists eight people who contributed to its drafting. Even so, what
self-respecting journalist shares a byline with 40 other guys?
"The
letter caused a brief splash and won the attention of the New York
Times," the Caller reports, but thereafter was deservedly forgotten
until now. Obama weathered the Wright revelations, but it seems a
stretch to give Journolist the credit (or, if you prefer, the blame) for
that. On the other hand, are there other stories they did succeed in
suppressing? We cannot know as long as the full Journolist archives are
secret.
These revelations also belie Journolist founder (and now Washington Post commentator) Ezra Klein's defense of the enterprise back in March 2009:
"As
for sinister implications, is it "secret?" No. Is it off-the-record?
Yes. The point is to create a space where experts feel comfortable
offering informal analysis and testing out ideas. Is it an ornate temple
where liberals get together to work out "talking points?" Of course
not. Half the membership would instantly quit if anything like that
emerged."
In 2009
Klein wrote that Journolist's policy of excluding conservatives was "not
about fostering ideology but preventing a collapse into flame war. The
emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology."
Mail sent via Gmail fills in the name of the account-holder of 123 as Nathan Bennett, whose LinkedIn profile
says his individual legislative portfolio covers “national security and
foreign affairs” and includes work on the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence.
The member Bennett works for, Carson, is a member of both the House
Intelligence and House Homeland Security Committees, and previously
employed Awan.
A spokeswoman for Carson, Jessica Gail, did not express concern or
surprise when contacted by TheDCNF about Awan’s still-active email
address Monday morning. Bennett said Tuesday morning Gail had not even
informed him of the details.
Bennett, who is Carson’s deputy chief of staff,told TheDCNF he has
no control over the 123 address. “However this happened, it was not with
my consent or control,” he said in an email. “For the record, I do not,
nor have I ever, had control of the 123@mail.house.gov email account or
any other account connected with Imran Awan or his family.” That could
not be confirmed by the House’s chief administrative officer (CAO)
because spokesman Dan Weiser has said “the CAO will not comment on
matters pertaining to this ongoing investigation.”
Bennett’s response raises questions about whether Awan was misusing Carson’s office, access or staffers.
Gail declined to comment on Awan, or state whether the office is
concerned he may have misused Bennett’s identity. She also declined to
state whether the office has taken any measures to assess its data
security since Awan’s problems came to the attention of the office in
September 2016.
Gail directed TheDCNF to the House Information Resources Office
(HIR). “Our office has no control over House email addresses,” she said.
“Those are controlled through the House Information Resources office.
Any questions regarding the 123@mail.house.gov address should be directed to that office.”
Until last year, email addresses were created by individual offices,
but now members have to request HIR to set up new addresses.
Gilani said the second wife’s name is Sumaira Sidiq, also spelled
Saddiq, and that Awan divorced her the same month that court records say
he stopped paying rent on Morningside. TheDCNF visited the apartment,
but no one responded to a knock on the door.
“He’s a really bad guy, he laid the pressure on so heavily,” she told
TheDCNF. “He absolutely is capable of trying to extort money....
He
presents himself well — a clean-cut articulate man — but when he turns
snake, I can’t think for a minute that he didn’t turn dishonest in his
work [in Congress].”"
Comment: It's accepted that once American citizens elect you, you'll immediately go to work for everyone in the world except American citizens. This is true for both political parties, not just democrats. There's no donor money for making America First. Globalist donors only make money if American interests are placed last.
Court records were sealed to protect Sater’s
identity, so his role in the fraud case stayed secret for a decade [through 2008] while
he was at Bayrock. After a court hearing in 2009, he was fined $25,000
but was not sent to prison or ordered to pay restitution.
At his sentencing hearing, several FBI officials vouched for Sater's help. He got his biggest endorsement in January 2015 when Loretta Lynch was asked at her Senate confirmation hearing for U.S. attorney general why court records had been sealed in the fraud case.
Sater
had secretly worked with federal prosecutors and the FBI for more than
10 years, “providing information crucial to national security and the
conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for
committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra” — the
Mafia — according to Lynch, who had served as U.S. attorney in the
Eastern District in New York.
Sater’s lawyer, Robert W. Wolf,
gives his client more credit, saying he worked with “numerous U.S.
national security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” Sater
says he helped hunt “America’s greatest enemies” in Afghanistan and
elsewhere.
There is no independent verification of those assertions.
Former
CIA officials who worked in counter-terrorism and Russian affairs said
they never heard of Sater and doubt his cloak-and-dagger claims of
chasing down terrorists.
“We should not take this guy’s statements
at face value,” said Glenn Carle, a former CIA operations officer who
retired in 2007. “There are all sorts of people who seek protection by
wrapping themselves in the American and CIA flags.”
A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.
Sater’s business history with Trump is well documented, however.
In
their first deal, in November 2003, the Trump Organization and Bayrock
announced plans to build a 19-story condominium tower and hotel complex
in Phoenix.
Residents who objected that the project was too large
forced a citywide referendum to block construction, however. Trump
pulled out in 2005, and the project was never built.
The following
year, Bayrock licensed Trump’s name and began construction of a
24-story hotel and condominium complex in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The
project ran out of money and was hit by lawsuits and claims of fraud by
buyers. Trump was dropped from the lawsuits after asserting he was not
the developer and was not responsible for the problems.
The Trump
Organization and Bayrock developed the Trump Soho hotel in Lower
Manhattan starting in 2006. Sater appeared with Trump at a launch party
in September 2007.
Sater left Bayrock the following year [2008] after
news stories first revealed his criminal record. He continued to
work with the Trump Organization — he had business cards that called him
a “special advisor” and kept his offices in Trump Tower — trying to put
together real estate deals through 2010.
Sater said he had signed
several development deals with Trump’s company, including one for a
Trump Tower in Moscow, but none were built.
“We were looking to do
deals in various capitals, in London, Paris — we had no special
affinity for Moscow,” Sater said in the interview.
Sater says he
was still pitching deals to the Trump Organization in 2015. A lawyer for
the Trump company did not return requests for comment.
In a sworn deposition in 2013 in a civil suit, Trump said he barely knew Sater.
“If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump said.
Sater became a licensed stock broker, but
he stabbed a man with a broken margarita glassduring a bar fight in
1991. He was convicted of felony assault and served about a year in
prison
. During his years as an informant, Sater sometimes confided in his rabbi — who thought he was making up his exploits.
“I thought perhaps he had watched too many James Bond movies and read one too many Tom Clancy novels,” Rabbi Shalom M. Paltiel saidin a 2014 speech naming Sater “man of the year” for his service to his Chabad congregation on Long Island. Paltiel said Sater then invited him to a secret thank-you ceremony at a federal building in New York.
Several lawsuits paint a less flattering portrait of Sater, however.In
one, Ernest Mennes, an investor in the Phoenix project, sued Sater and
Bayrock in Arizona Superior Court in 2007, alleging that they had
skimmed an unspecified amount of moneyand that Sater had threatened to
kill Mennes if he disclosed Sater’s criminal record.
Sater angrily
denied the allegation. “You think I’m doing Trump Towers [deals] and
telling someone I would…cut their legs off? Are you crazy?” he said in
the interview.
Bayrock settled the case for an undisclosed amount.
In an interview, Mennes praised Sater, saying he “served the U.S. well”
and was “a great partner.”" ..................
Following is transcription of 2014 remarks(via You Tube, about 4 and a half minutes) relevant to Felix Sater's career as a much admired asset of the US Deep State. The comments are from a Rabbi and close friend of Sater's. (Per LA Times article, it appears this is Rabbi Shalom M. Paltiel). The occasion is to deliver to Sater the Port Washington, NY Chabad chapter's Man of the Year Award. Video documentation follows:
Begins 1:20, ends 5:58,Rabbi speaking: "One fine day two and a half years ago [2011-2012], Felix invited my to join him at a private, closed door session in the Federal Building in New York. Only his immediate family members were allowed in, and he had gotten special clearance for his Rabbi to be there as well. I get there and to my amazement,I seedozens of US intelligence officers from all of the various three letter intelligence agencies of this country, including some I had never even known existed. They're taking turns standing up one after the other, offering praise for Felix. Praising him as an American hero for his work andhis assistance in the highest levels of this country's national security interests. They were speaking about Felix Sater, my Felix. They're talking about his clandestine activitiesto help the government and protect the country. They elaborated in great detail stuff that was more fantastic and more unbelievable than anything he had been telling me. I vividly recall one of the officers proudly statingand I quote, "Felix Sater probably saved tens of thousands of US lives, maybe even millions. Her certainly saved the lives of hundreds of not thousands of US servicemen and women through the brave work that he's done.Battling at the risk of his own life with this country's greatest enemies. Friends, I sat there open-mouthed, I was flabbergasted. Here I was listening to these stories for the past decade,...and here I am hearing them being said by federal agents about my Felix Sater. He wasn't just bragging,...and I realized that he only told me one tenth of what really went on.I'm not going to elaborate more because I'm not allowed to,probably said more than I should, but I felt it's important, that I have to say something. To tell the world, to tell you the rest of the story, to tell you the things about my dear friend Felix Sater that you won't read in the newspaper, but that I heard with my own ears along with his family and a few others sitting here tonight. Just as he stood up then andrisked his life for his country,possibly the fact that we're sitting here tonight in safety as a result of his efforts. He did the same at his Chabad, this Chabad so near and dear to all of us. He didn't have to....Felix, I want to personally thank you for your service to your country."...
........................
Added: The NY Times wants so badly for something to be true:
On Tuesday, for instance, the Times published a front-page article
designed to advance the Russia-gate narrative, stating: “A business
associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate
deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he
said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.”
Wow, that sounds pretty devastating! The Times is finally tying
together the loose and scattered threads of the
Russia-influencing-the-U.S.-election story. Here you have a supposed
business deal in which Putin was to help Trump both make money and get
elected. That is surely how a casual reader or a Russia-gate true
believer would read it--and was meant to read it. But the lede is
misleading.
But highlighting that reality would not serve the Times’ endless
promotion of Russia-gate. So, this counter-evidence gets buried deep in
the story, after a reprise of the “scandal” and the Times hyping the
significance of Sater’s emails from 2015 and early 2016. For good
measure, the Times includes a brief and dishonest summary of the Ukraine
crisis.
The Times reported: “Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had
lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian
bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s
efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater
envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow. ‘I will get Putin on
this program and we will get Donald elected,’ Mr. Sater wrote.”
But the idea that Russia acted “to undermine democracy in Ukraine” is
another example of the Times’ descent into outright propaganda. The
reality is that the U.S. government supported – and indeed encouraged – a
coup on Feb. 22, 2014, that overthrew the democratically elected
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych even after he offered to move up
scheduled elections so he could be voted out of office through a
democratic process.
After Yanukovych’s violent ouster and after the coup regime
dispatched military forces to crush resistance among anti-coup, mostly
ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the east, Russia provided help to prevent
their destruction from an assault spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other
extreme Ukrainian nationalists. But that reality would not fit the
Times’ preferred Ukraine narrative, so it gets summarized as Moscow
trying “to undermine democracy in Ukraine.”
Empty Boasts
However, leaving aside the Times’ propagandistic approach to Ukraine,
there is this more immediate point about Russia-gate: none of Sater’s
boastful claims proved true and this incident really underscored the
lack of useful connections between Trump’s people and the Kremlin. One
of Trump’s lawyers, Michael Cohen even used a general press email
address in a plea for assistance from Putin’s personal spokesman.
Deeper in the story, the Times admits these inconvenient facts:
In other words, the Russia-gate narrative – that somehow Putin
foresaw Trump’s election (although almost no one else did) and sought to
curry favor with the future U.S. president by lining Trump’s pockets
with lucrative real estate deals while doing whatever he could to help
Trump win – is knocked down by these new disclosures, not supported by
them.
And, this failed building project was not the first Trump proposal in
Russia to fall apart. A couple of years earlier, a Moscow hotel plan
died apparently because Trump would not – or could not – put up adequate
financing for his share, overvaluing the magic of the Trump brand. But
one would think that if the Kremlin were grooming Trump to be its
Manchurian candidate and take over the U.S. government, money would have
been no obstacle.
Along the same lines, there’s the relative pittance that RT paid Gen.
Michael Flynn to speak at the TV network’s tenth anniversary in Moscow
in December 2015. The amount totaled $45,386 with Flynn netting $33,750
after his speakers’ bureau took its cut. Democrats and the U.S.
mainstream media treated this fact as important evidence of Russia
buying influence in the Trump campaign and White House, since Flynn was
both a campaign adviser and briefly national security adviser.
But the actual evidence suggests something quite different. Besides
Flynn’s relatively modest speaking fee, it turned out that RT negotiated
Flynn’s rate downward, a fact that The Washington Post burieddeep inside an article on Flynn’s Russia-connected payments. The Post
wrote, “RT balked at paying Flynn’s original asking price. ‘Sorry it
took us longer to get back to you but the problem is that the speaking
fee is a bit too high and exceeds our budget at the moment,’ Alina
Mikhaleva, RT’s head of marketing, wrote a Flynn associate about a month
before the event.”
Yet, if Putin were splurging to induce Americans near Trump to betray their country, it makes no sense
that Putin’s supposed flunkies at RT would be quibbling with Flynn over
a relatively modest speaking fee; they’d be falling over themselves to
pay him more.
But that recognition of reality would undermine the much beloved
story of Putin-Trump collusion, so the key facts and the clear logic are
downplayed or ignored – all the better to deceive Americans who are
dependent on the Times, the Post and the mainstream media."
"Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the
Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com)."
Comment: The NY Times will not change until the US has two separate political parties. Today, the entire US political class and its media support the democrat party and happily cheer on the NY Times. Absolutely no one is on the side of the country or the American people. The entire US political class is intent on silencing ordinary Americans who under no circumstances can be allowed to choose a US president. These Americans on whom war is being waged have no political party behind them and haven't for many years. Everyone is just waiting for these Americans to die off. In the interim, they're viewed as no better than ignorant slaves. The Republican Party is by no means passive, it aggressively runs interference for its democrat partners. Thus the US is effectively a dictatorship. There are no checks and balances to protect citizens from a brute force central government and a weaponized media. The "Republicans" nearly unanimously joined Democrats in nullifying Trump's election,the votes of 63 million Americans (who still want the detente with Russia they voted for), and removed any possibility that the most meaningful foreign policy promise of the 2016 election will ever be realized. Without bothering to announce that they were changing the Constitution, Congress transferred decisions about Russia from the Executive branch to the legislature. The country has been overthrown. It was brought to the point that they (the political class) would only be stopped by violent revolution. We voted for regime change and they simply ignored us. Now it's over. Ordinary Americans will continue to be rendered mute, while being forced to pay all the bills of their slave masters. The only solution I see is for Trump to announce formation of a new political party with himself as head, an actual second party, an opposition party to the Dem-Republican UniParty. This assumes Trump retains the views of candidate Trump and not the views of the Kushners.
