11 August 2011 — Stop NATO
- Southern Africa Liberation Movements Youth Groups: All NATO Leaders War Criminals
- U.S. Launches Anti-Libya African Offensive
- Blueprint For NATO Attack On Syria Revealed
- Prompt Global Strike: Pentagon To Launch New Hypersonic Aircraft
- Contra U.S.-NATO ABM System: Russia Restoring Missile Umbrella
- New Russian Submarine Supermissile Can Penetrate U.S. Missile Shield
Southern Africa Liberation Movements Youth Groups: All NATO Leaders War Criminals
Politicsweb (South Africa)
August 10, 2011
All NATO leaders are war criminals – NLM Youth Wings
John Moonde
Meeting calls on Botswana to explain its puzzling pro-Western stance
Meeting of the Former Liberation Movements in Southern Africa, Session of Youth Wings, Windhoek, Namibia, Hilton Hotel, August 9 2011
[Excerpts]
We, the youth of Former Liberation Movements in Southern Africa, represented by members of the Executive Leadership of SPYL of Namibia, ANCYL of South Africa, UVCCM of Tanzania, OJM of Mozambique, JMPLA of Angola and ZANU-PF YL of Zimbabwe having gathered at the Hilton Hotel Windhoek, Namibia on the 9th of August, 2011.
Having presented, discussed and reflected on the following:
1. Opening Statements by Heads of Youth delegations and welcoming remarks by Comrade Dr Elijah Ngurare, Secretary SPYL of Namibia.
2. A presentation on the importance of Sister Party meetings, by Cde Peya Mushelenga, MP Secretary for International affairs of Namibia and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Namibia.
3. Youth Economic Empowerment and the Development Agenda by Cde Ronald Lamola, Deputy President of ANC Youth League.
4. The Youth wings and the task of fighting the effects of cultural (media) imperialism which gave rise to the social ill in our societies by Cde Martine Shigela, Secretary General, UVCCM of Tanzania.
And having further noted and appreciated that:
1. The efforts of the leadership of our parties in having realised the outcome of the Dar es Salaam Declaration taken in 2010 by the Presidents of our Parties, which called for regular interaction and cooperation at all levels of our parties, including with those of the youth, women and veteran’s wings of our respective movements.
2. Namibia for hosting of this meeting and extend appreciation to the SWAPO Party and the people of Namibia for the hospitable and comradely conditions in which this meeting was held.
…
Declare as follows in relation to Inter Party Cooperation, Culture and African Issues:
1. Africa’s political leaders must be bolder in defending the interest of the continent, and must not compromise on the sovereignty of the continent. African leaders must further ensure the strengthening of mechanisms to ensure that African problems are solved by Africans. In this regard, Africa must ensure the further establishment of African based monitoring and warning systems to help us detect and respond to African problems.
2. That our governments must peruse all means including the forming of alliances to defend the sovereignty and integrity of our countries, included here must also be amongst other measures, the establishment of party schools, establishment of media houses free of western influence and the cementing of inter party relations of our respective movements at all levels.
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8. Solidarity must be reinforced and actualised in the true sense of the word and in practical terms. Imperialism will continue to score victories over our countries as long as we don’t stand in true unity and in defence of our peoples.
9. That the Eurocentric International Criminal Court (ICC) is done away with as a matter of urgency, unless it is able to transform itself to conform to the will of all the peoples of the world. That we declare all NATO leaders as war criminals.
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Issued by John Moonde, Secretariat, Youth Wings of Former Liberation Movements in Southern Africa, August 10 2011 (via the ANC Youth League.)
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U.S. Launches Anti-Libya African Offensive
Agence France-Presse
August 10, 2011
US launches anti-Gaddafi Africa offensive
The United States has launched a diplomatic offensive against Libya among African nations as Tripoli accused NATO of a ‘massacre’ of 85 villagers in air strikes in support of rebels.
Meanwhile, Libyan state television broadcast images of a man it says is Muammar Gaddafi’s youngest son, footage that looks to undercut rebel claims of his death at a time when the opposition is showing signs of strain and disarray six months into its battle with the Libyan leader.
American diplomats are visiting several African countries as part of efforts to urge leaders to press Muammar Gaddafi to leave power immediately, officials in Washington said on Tuesday.
Several African states…have been reluctant to call for him to step down, and have criticised the NATO-led military campaign in Libya.
Gene Cretz, the US ambassador who left Tripoli…in February, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Donald Yamamoto arrived Monday in Addis Ababa, headquarters of the African Union, State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said.
They ‘are in Africa to meet with African Union members to discuss the crisis in Libya and the need for Gaddafi to relinquish power now’, he told Agence France-Presse.
Gaddafi, meanwhile, said world powers would be held responsible for the ‘ugly massacre committed by NATO’ on the village of Majer where 85 people were killed, Libya’s official JANA news agency reported.
Majer, east of Tripoli, was attacked late on Monday to try to help rebel fighters enter the government-held city from the south, government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said.
‘After the first three bombs dropped at around 11pm on Monday, many residents of the area ran to the bombed houses to try to save their loved ones. Three more bombs struck,’ he told reporters on an organised visit.
Thirty-three children, 32 women and 20 men from 12 families were killed in the ‘massacre’, Mussa said.
Reporters attended the funerals of victims and saw 28 bodies buried at the local cemetery where hundreds of people vented their anger against NATO.
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The images broadcast on state television of a man said to be Gaddafi’s youngest son, Khamis Gaddafi, showed him visiting several people wounded in a NATO airstrike.
Khamis Gaddafi’s appearance at a Tripoli hospital on Tuesday, if genuine, would make the first time he has been seen in public since the reports of his death.
The rebels had claimed on Friday that the younger Gaddafi was killed in a NATO airstrike on the western front-line town of Zlitan.
Tripoli had dismissed the report as an attempt to deflect attention from the killing of the rebels’ top military chief, Abdel-Fattah Younis, possibly by other rebels.
Younis’ body was found two weeks ago, dumped outside the rebel’s de facto eastern capital, Benghazi, along with the bodies of two colonels who were his top aides. They had been shot and their bodies burned.
Tensions over Younis’ death spurred the leaders to sack their own cabinet late Monday and on Tuesday order the movement’s various armed factions to integrate in hopes of imposing some order.
The footage of Khamis Gaddafi could add to the troubles of the opposition, raising questions about the veracity of their reports even as they try to shore up their image after Younis’ killing through the cabinet reshuffle.
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Blueprint For NATO Attack On Syria Revealed
http://euobserver.com/13/113245
EUobserver
August 10, 2011
Strike on Syria is technically feasible, former French general says
By Andrew Rettman
A Nato strike to disable the Syrian army is technically feasible according to experts, such as former French air chief Jean Rannou. But it could make the country’s internal situation worse.
Nato member countries would begin by using satellite technology to spot Syrian air defences. A few days later, warplanes, in larger numbers than Libya, would take off from the UK base in Cyprus and spend some 48 hours destroying Syrian surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and jets. Alliance aircraft would then start an open-ended bombardment of Syrian tanks and ground troops.
The scenario is based on analysts in the French military, from the specialist British publication Jane’s Defence Weekly and from Israel’s Channel 10 TV station.
The Syrian air force is said to pose little threat. It has around 60 Russian-made MiG-29s. But the rest – some 160 MiG-21s, 80 MiG-23s, 60 MiG-23BNs, 50 Su-22s and 20 Su-24MKs – is out of date.
Its latest SAMs could shoot down a handful of Nato pilots. In the past three years, Syria deployed hundreds of Russian-made SA-17s, which come up on radars for a very short time before firing. Israel in 2007 bombed a suspected nuclear site in Syria using a cyber attack cut electricity to air defences. The SA-17s are believed to be cyber-insulated and Israel might not share its secrets with Nato, however.
Syria in 2006 bought around 30 Russian-made Pantsyr-S1 anti-aircaft cannon…It has stocked up on modern SA-18 missiles from Belarus and Russia. But these are short-range weapons that would only pose a danger to Nato helicopters in a later stage of the operation.
There are also assymetric threats – Nato countries have vulnerable troops in Unifil, the UN mission in neighbouring Lebanon…
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‘I don’t see any purely military problems. Syria has no defence against Western systems … [But] it would be more risky than Libya. It would be a heavy military operation,’ Jean Rannou, the former chief of the French air force, told EUobserver. He added that action is highly unlikely because Russia would veto a UN mandate, Nato assets are stretched in Afghanistan and Libya and Nato countries are in financial crisis.
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Robert Baer, a former CIA officer in Syria, said there is small hope a Nato strike would bring peace: ‘Any force used on Syria would be a total shot in the dark, a hope the military under attack will turn on the regime. But when has this ever happened? It didn’t with [late Iraqi leader] Saddam or [Libyan leader] Gaddafi.’
Baer previously told this website the turmoil in Syria is more complicated than the image in mainstream media of a downtrodden Sunni Muslim majority calling for reform by the Shia Muslim ruling elite.
Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 officer and high-level EU advisor who runs an NGO in Beirut, backed up Baer’s views.
‘Syrians want change. But whether Westerners believe it or not, most people in Damascus, in Aleppo, the middle classes, the merchant classes and the [sectarian] minorities believe Assad is the only person who can bring in reforms,’ he said. ‘They fear two things above all else – civil war and Western intervention … They would like to avoid the example of Libya because it would lead them into civil war.’
Crooke said two important forces behind events are Sunni radicals and Syrian exile groups in France and the US.
He said the radicals follow the teaching of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a late Jordanian Islamist, who aimed to create a Sunni emirate in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria called Bilad a-Sham. They are experienced urban guerillas who fought in Iraq and have outside finance. They infilitrate protests to attack Assad forces, as in Jisr al-Shagour in June, where they inflicted heavy casualties.
Crooke said the exile groups aim to topple the anti-Israeli regime. They are funded and trained by the US. They pay Sunni tribal chiefs to put people on the streets, work with NGOs to feed uncorroborated stories of atrocities to Western media and co-operate with radicals in the hope that escalating violence will justify Nato intervention.
‘There is a huge difference with [the revolution in] Egypt,’ he added. ‘But the picture you see in the European and American press is that you are dealing with peaceful protests and that Assad has nothing better than to do than to kill his own people.’
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Prompt Global Strike: Pentagon To Launch New Hypersonic Aircraft
Lompoc Record
August 9, 2011
Hypersonic vehicle to make second flight, first failed in 2010
Minotaur rocket to carry military weapon
By Janene Scully
More than 15 months after the first one failed, the Defense Department plans a second test of its super-fast weapon that will ride in a rocket scheduled to launch Wednesday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
The Minotaur 4 Lite rocket, assembled by Orbital Sciences Corp. crews from retired Peacekeeper missile stages, is scheduled to blast off between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. Wednesday from Space Launch Complex-8 on South Base.
The rocket will carry the Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle or HTV-2 for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Tactical Projects Office.
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HTV-2 is an arrowhead-shaped weapon that can fly at super fast speeds, a way to deliver a conventional warhead anywhere in the world.
‘The ultimate goal is a capability that can reach anywhere in the world in less than an hour,’ DARPA’s website says.
Pentagon officials have dubbed this Conventional Prompt Global Strike capability.
Specifically, the weapon is designed to fly at Mach 20, or 13,000 mph, DARPA officials said. For perspective, this speed means a flight between New York City and Los Angeles would last less than 12 minutes, DARPA says on its website.
The total projected cost for the development, fabrication and flight test of the two HTV-2 vehicles is $308 million, a DARPA official said in 2010. Earlier, Air Force officials put a $40 million price on the cost of each launch.
Another Minotaur 4 Lite rocket launched in April 2010 with the first HTV-2, but DARPA officials announced the day after the blastoff that the experiment had failed.
Before the flop, the HTV gathered nine minutes of flight data, ‘including 139 seconds of Mach 22 to Mach 17 aerodynamic data.’
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Contra U.S.-NATO ABM System: Russia Restoring Missile Umbrella
http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c32/201969.html
Itar-Tass
August 11, 2011
Defence Ministry restoring missile umbrella
MOSCOW: The Russian Space Troops will receive two sophisticated Voronezh-DM radars in December 2011, to be incorporated in the system of early warning of missile launches.
One of them will start operating in Armavir, and the other in Kaliningrad, the Russian westernmost city. This radar will ensure Russian nuclear parity in case a Euro ABM is deployed, writes the Izvestia newspaper on Thursday. In 2012 a similar facility will be put into operation in the Irkutsk Region.
The task of the advanced radars will be to detect missiles, blasted off from other countries. Using these radar stations, Russia will fully restore control over air space around its borders.
‘The commissioning of the Voronezh-DM radars is to restore the integrity of radar control over air space. In some cases, we plug the present gaps, in others, we increase capacities of old stations,’ the newspaper learnt at the Space Troops.
In contrast to ‘Soviet predecessors’ – the radars in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan – the new radars will be stationed in Russian territory. Besides, they consume 40 percent less energy and can see what is going on in the skies and outer-space at a distance of 4,500 kilometres.
The first new-type radar Voronezh-DM was handed over for test operation in 2009 near St. Petersburg, in the village of Lekhtusi. It will be already combat-ready in December. Its operation offset the loss of a radar in Latvia. The Space Troops got the chance to see air space from the Morocco coast to Shpitsbergen as well as the US east coast.
The next year witnesses the commissioning of the second radar in Armavir, ‘inspecting’ South Europe up to the North Africa coast. Its capacities closed the gap that formed as a result of Moscow’s refusal to operate a station in Sevastopol.
‘The construction of the radar in the Kaliningrad Region, in the village of Pionerskoye, covers the western sector which was guarded by stations in Mukachevo and Belarussian Baranovichi. The second station under construction in Armavir will supplement capacities of the Gabalinskaya radar in Azerbaijan.
The next year will see the commissioning of a facility in the Irkutsk Region, which will ‘search’ the space from China to the US western coast. Following this, ‘we can say that we fully restored the radar system of early warning of a missile attack,’ the Space Troops emphasised.
Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov who recently visited the Azerbaijan Gabalinskaya radar (‘Daryal’), said that the military leadership does not intend to abandon the old Soviet stations, located in neighbouring republics. ‘Everything remains as it is for the time being. We do not give up a single station and do not plan to,’ Serdyukov said.
According to Izvestia, Russia is not likely to stop with construction of the radar near Irkutsk. The Defence Ministry’s plans provide for complete replacement, under the state programme of armaments till 2020, of all Soviet long-distance radars with the new Voronezh-DM and construction of several new ones.
It is planned to spend several billion roubles for their erection. The military say that the Arctic alone remains inaccessible.
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New Russian Submarine Supermissile Can Penetrate U.S. Missile Shield
http://rt.com/news/new-nuclear-submarine-missile/
RT
August 10, 2011
New submarine supermissile can pierce ABM shield
The new Russian liquid-fuel Liner missile is world’s most advanced submarine-based strategic weapon with range and payload capabilities surpassing every model deployed by any other country, its developer says.
The submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) Liner can carry up to 12 low-yield MIRV nuclear warheads and has a payload/mass ratio surpassing any solid-fuel strategic missiles designed by the US, UK, France and China, the developer Makeyev State Rocket Center said in a statement. It is very flexible in terms of what its payload can be, varying and mixing warheads of different capabilities.
The design bureau believes that the missile, which was first tested on May 20, will ensure the use of Delta IV class submarines until at least 2030.
There are seven vessels of this class in the Russian Navy, and they are armed with the SLMBs Sineva. The Liner is a highly advanced version of the Sineva missile.
There is little further detail about the Liner’s specifications so far. Sineva is a three-stage ballistic missile. It has a reported operational range of almost 12,000 kilometers, listed throw-weigh of 2.8 tonnes and can be launched from up to 55 meters deep.
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‘Submarines armed with such missiles can operate from Russia’s safe territorial waters, where they are covered by the Russian Air Force and its surface Navy. They can also have electronic equipment, necessary to suppress the US antiballistic missile system, as part of their payload in addition to the warheads themselves,’ Igor Khokhlov from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations explained.
The New Dark Age 
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