11 February 2020 — National Security Archive
Encryption revelations raise questions about U.S. official knowledge of Argentina “dirty war” atrocities, Chile’s Letelier assassination, Southern Cone military dictatorships
11 February 2020 — Global Research
Coronavirus is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest epidemic tragedies of our times. Hundreds of dead people and thousands of ill ones are the proof of it. For any person with good faith and interested in the well-being of people, it is a reason of preoccupation and compassion towards the victims. However, this good intention with people does not seem to be observed in some western countries.
11 February 2020 — Global Research
Anouk Aimee and Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’
A considerable spectrum of the liberal West takes the American interpretation of what civilization consists of to be something like an immutable law of nature. But what if this interpretation is on the verge of an irreparable breakdown?
Michael Vlahos has argued that the US is not a mere nation-state but a “system leader” – “a civilizational power like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire.” And, we should add, China – which he did not mention. The system leader is “a universalistic identity framework tied to a state. This vantage is helpful because the United States clearly owns this identity framework today.”
11 February 2020 — Moon of Alabama
The Washington Post is warming up an old crypto story:
For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.
The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.
The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.
But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.
The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project.
11 February 2020 — Novara Media
Despite unprecedented public outrage, a deportation flight to Jamaica left at dawn on Tuesday morning with 17 people onboard. A last minute court order meant another 25 people who had been threatened with removal remained in the UK.
11 February 2020 — New Eastern Outlook
While using a civilian airliner as a cover, four Israeli F-16 fighters approched the outskirts of Damascus and launched an attack on local residential areas late at night on February 6. There’s no disputing that by adopting this tactics the Israeli Air Force endangered the civilian aircraft – Airbus A320, owned by the Syrian private airline Cham Wings Airlines, that was arriving to Damascus from Najaf International Airport (NJF) in Iraq with 172 passengers on board. This Syrian airliner was running late and it’s clear from the data provided by FlightrRadar24, that the Israeli military aircraft were clearly expecting the arrival of yet another A320, owned by SyrianAir that was due to arrive from Tehran, hoping to provoke local air defence units into destroying the liner by mistake.
10 February 2020 —American Herald Tribune
Palestinian chiefs say that Trump’s so-called peace plan contains 300 violations of international law and they will take it up with the Security Council. That’s nearly two violations per page. Given the document was put together by America and Israel, both lawless and criminal to the core, no-one is surprised. It is a brazen expression of criminal intent from start to finish.
11 February 2020 — RT
A bulletproof vest displayed at the OPCW headquarters at The Hague, the Netherlands. April 2017. © AFP / John Thys
10th February 2020 — True Publica
By TruePublica: Dalia Hatuqa – a journalist at The Economist, Washington Post and Foreign Policy confirms that “Israel is now banning Palestinians from exporting goods to international markets. This came after it banned them from exporting vegetables & fruit to Israel. This is HUGE. In 2018, agricultural exports to Israel were 68% of the total no. of exports ($88m).”
HuffPost UK ran yet another hit piece smearing academic critics of the dirty war on Syria as Russian stooges. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Jess Brammar assists a British government program that censors journalism that may “compromise UK military and intelligence operations.”
10 February 2020 — New Eastern Outlook
Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist and Breitbart editor,was finally kicked out of an Italian monastery, which even Newsweek wittily described as a“far-right boot camp”.
This author, along with a few others, has been warning for some time that the former Trump’s top advisor had crossed all lines, and began directly interfering in the internal affairs of the European Union, by promoting and amalgamizing dangerous extreme right-wing alliances of all natures; political, philosophical and religious. The monastery was supposed to offer “classes”, which Bannon described as “the kind of underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West”.
11 February 2020 — Michael Roberts
Last month at the gathering of the great but not good, the rich and infamous, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, US Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, formerly a hedge fund manager, was asked whether he agreed that calls by teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg for public and private-sector divestment from fossil fuel companies would threaten US growth. He said it would and Mnuchin jibed: “Is she the chief economist? Who is she, I’m confused… After she goes and studies economics in college she can come back and explain that to us.” Thunberg retorted: “My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realise that our remaining 1,5° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up.”
The New Dark Age 