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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia

How Biden became the godfather of corruption in Ukraine

2021-08-31

Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Dmitry Steshin Former Lieutenant Colonel of the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) Vasily Prozorov, who has lived in Russia since 2019, has taken up research into the abyss of Ukrainian corruption. There was a whole book of material! On the eve of its release, he told kp.ru about a disease that endures the consciousness of the Ukrainian statehood. Vasily Nikolaevich Prozorov: Born on 06/29/1975 in the city of Berdyansk, Ukrainian SSR. Ex-employee of the Security Service of Ukraine, lieutenant colonel. Since 2014, after the coup d'etat on the Maidan, he collaborated with the Russian special services for reasons of principle. The head of the Investigation Center is Vasily Prozorov. Part of the materials of the book being prepared for publication has been published on the website of the Center in the public domain. TWO VARIETIES OF THEFT - AT ZELENSKY AND Poroshenko As you know, one of the official reasons for the Maidan was the allegedly incredible corruption of the past government. Of course, it did not go anywhere after 2014, but only grew and multiplied, continuing to spoil life in today's Ukraine. For example, the European Union says it does not take Ukraine into its membership because of its corruption. Maybe this is just a formal reason for the refusal? I asked Vasily Prozorov to estimate the scale. It turns out that there are two types of corruption, one worse than the other: "While studying Ukrainian corruption, I divided the post-Maid period into two parts: 'under Poroshenko' and 'under Zelensky.' What amazed me was that under Poroshenko, the level of corruption was off scale, but the stolen money remained in the country. Corrupt officials under Poroshenko did not separate themselves from Ukraine. It was a kind of 'pro-Ukrainian corruption,' people stealing money saw their future in Ukraine - oligarchs, businessmen, Rada deputies. Under Zelenskiy, everything turned 180 degrees, corruption became pro-Western. - Like this? - This is theft in the interests of other countries. Corruption in itself destroys the state, the social and political system, the economy, but when money is stolen in the interests of other countries. - There is a feeling that Ukraine has been "degreased" in recent years. The country left the USSR with a GDP at the level of Germany. It is clear that in the 90s all the former Soviet republics had a hard time, but Ukraine became the only one of them that never reached its 1991 level. - So, Ukraine is losing billions of dollars, I was amazed when I began to delve into it. The claims of the European Union are not empty, they have grounds. Moreover, corruption at all levels - from regional hospitals to the president himself. But I think that in Ukraine, too, they are right: the EU uses corruption as a reason for refusing to integrate. They are simply afraid to get involved with Ukraine. DO NOT FIGHT BUT CONTROL What can Europe fear with its well-oiled state machine? According to Prozorov, this corruption is systematic. In fact, this is an artificial model of state governance: - The European Union knows that corruption in Ukraine is systemic. Moreover, the West has created in Kiev a vertical of bodies controlling corruption - the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (hereinafter NABU. - Auth.), A specialized “anti-corruption” prosecutor's office and the Anti-Corruption Court. That is, the West has an operational investigation in Ukraine, and support for accusations in court - prosecutor's supervision, and the court itself, which is considering all these cases. - Tight bundle! Corruption should have been defeated long ago! - Yes, it is a closed, self-sufficient system. But what's the problem: it is completely controlled by Western countries! And then this system has undeclared opportunities - a body that fights against the system of corruption receives dirt on any official and civil servant. - That is, this is how the notorious "external control" of Ukraine works? - I will give an example of pro-Western corruption that is literally killing the country. There was such a Nikolai Martynenko, an oligarch, was engaged in nuclear energy. His firms collaborated with Rosatom and ensured the operation of Ukrainian nuclear power plants. Martynenko supported the Maidan, became one of the leaders of the "Popular Front" of Arseniy Yatsenyuk. It was even called the "Popular Front" purse. And here such a giant as Westinghouse from the USA lays an eye on the Ukrainian nuclear industry. Cases of corruption are quickly initiated, the oligarch is knocked out of business, from all spheres, he is even imprisoned for a while. As a result, Westinghouse enters Ukraine, and now it supplies TVEL (the main fuel cell in nuclear reactors - Ed.) For nuclear power plants, moreover, it is 30 percent more expensive than similar ones from Rosatom. The new Ukrainian government obediently signs contracts, and by 2025 60 percent of TVEL in the country will be from the United States. I think this is already a betrayal of the motherland. - This is really something innovative in public administration - externally controlled corruption. Like the Film "Aliens," but American, by the way. COLONIALISM 5.0 - Nobody denies the commercial interest of the USA in Ukraine. On the contrary, the Ukrainian authorities are very proud of cooperation with such a powerful country. But here in your book the scandalous story with the private gas production company "Burisma" is disclosed in detail. Where, by a strange coincidence, the son of the current American president ended up on the board of directors - Yes, it became known that Biden's son was paid from $3 million to $10 million dollars, such a form of bribe, and not only to the son, but also to the father. This is true. But against the background of the schemes that worked in the Ukrainian Naftogaz, corruption in Burisma is a trifle. And Vice President Joe Biden was directly involved in these schemes. - What were these schemes? - The loudest one is “reverse gas deliveries”. Gas is supplied to Europe via a Ukrainian pipeline, and then from Slovakia, Poland and Hungary is returned back through "gasket firms". - And his price is already different? - So different that, according to some estimates, from 2015 to 2020, about 2 billion dollars were pulled out of the pockets of Ukrainians. And this scheme was lobbied by Biden, who achieved the appointment of his assistant, Amos Hochstein, as a member of the supervisory board of Naftogaz with very broad powers, up to participation in resolving personnel issues and monitoring the execution of transactions. Without his personal involvement, the "Russian gas reverse" scam would not have materialized. - Now all the reasons for the US suffering over Nord Stream 2 are becoming clear. - What's interesting: when Zelensky came to power, he perfectly understood what kind of scheme it was. Representatives of the Trump administration, lawyer and politician Rudolph Giuliani, for example: they needed dirt on Biden for the presidential elections, immediately became frequent visitors to him . Zelenskiy and his advisers decided to drag out until the last moment, without taking sides. But in the event of Trump's victory, they were ready to rewrite this shop to other owners. US Energy Secretary Rick Perry came, held meetings with Zelensky. He urged him to replace the head of Naftogaz in order to appoint his own man. But Zelensky got out of it, remained "neither yours, nor ours." Unlike Poroshenko, who bet on Biden, and Trump won. - I see a new colonial system of the world, it works even without guns and landings on the coast. - Yes, this is no longer necessary, the money is taken away and so, and the competing enterprises are liquidated. GARBAGE ARMOR - There is probably also corruption in the Ukrainian defense industry - it is for special people who are not afraid of blood. It is already openly said that it is largely for this reason that Kiev needs the war in Donbass to last as long as possible. - I was picking schemes in Ukroboronprom. There were two such people, Sergei Pashinsky and Oleg Gladkovsky, under Poroshenko they were called "shadow kings of the defense industry." Pashinsky was a deputy and chairman of the Defense Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, and Gladkovsky was the deputy head of the National Security Council. They were spinning billion-dollar schemes. - Are there examples? - For the Ukrainian army, outdated BMP-1s, still Soviet ones, were purchased in Poland and the Czech Republic. They were bought through Cypriot and Polish firms at the price of scrap metal, 25,000 euros per unit. Moreover, the hull and the tower were delivered to Ukraine separately, according to some estimates, "Ukrooboronprom" paid about 170,000 euros for them. At the Zhytomyr armored plant for 30,000 euros they were collected, slightly modernized. They put up a connection and welded on the grilles from hits from a grenade launcher. As a result, one BMP-1 cost the budget 200 thousand euros. But! There is one detail: Ukrainian officials and the Ukrainian plant made money on this. The money as a whole remained in the country. Under Poroshenko. - And under Zelensky? - 2019, "Ukrooboronprom" is completely transferred under the control of the West. It was a raider takeover. They changed the leadership, announced a reform of the structure. Moreover, the plan for this reform was developed by the British Department of Defense! Then the Americans landed at all the enterprises of Ukroboronprom, analyzed and determined which industries are competitive with the West and which are not. And they took action. - What else did they consider a threat to their business? - The shipbuilding industry, inherited by Ukraine from the USSR. Three giant factories in the city of Nikolaev, capable of producing even aircraft carriers, with a hundred-year history, have gone bankrupt. The Black Sea shipbuilding plant was liquidated. And now Zelenskiy says he is going to strengthen the Ukrainian fleet by purchasing ships from the UK. - The sales market was completely squeezed out. MORTARS OF DEATH - There was also a story that profits for corrupt officials are more expensive than people's lives. Almost two dozen of their own crews were killed by the Ukrainian Molot mortars. - I was in rotation as deputy commander of the ATO (Anti-terrorist operation - as the war in Donbass was called in Kiev. - Ed.), And Colonel-General Mikhail Koval came to one closed meeting. And he said: "Nobody will give up Molotov, because this is our Ukrainian production, the Mayak plant in Kiev." - And what about the military? - They shrugged their shoulders, "Hammers" were accepted, but they did not use them. And when you start digging into this story, it turns out that the Hammers were lobbied by Mr. Pashinsky, and each mortar cost the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense 400,000 hryvnias (about 1 million rubles - Ed.). And the Mayak plant received only 150,000 for the mortar, the rest went to the gasket firms. Naturally, Mr. Pashinsky was interested in having as many of these mortars in the troops as possible. - And what was wrong with them, sorted it out? - According to my information, the guides in the barrels were made with a defect, therefore, when fired, the mortar burst, the mine went off in the barrel. - Have you punished someone? - No, all corruption scandals do not develop in Ukraine. There are no judgments and court decisions. Russia, which Ukraine loves to nod at, jails corrupt officials every week. With confiscation. There are no untouchables! And in Ukraine they are persecuted only for politics. It is not accepted for corruption. - What will happen to Ukraine if the state of affairs continues in the next decade? - This is my opinion, but I am afraid that Ukraine does not have this decade. And the future too. And it's not even about officials who steal and run away, but about quite prosaic things. For example, in the deterioration of infrastructure. I do not think that there will be an offensive in the Donbass in the fall, but the freezing Ukrainian cities are quite real.

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Home Front: Politix

Philadelphia's Fall: A Microcosm of Democrat Devastation

2021-05-11

[THEBLUESTATECONSERVATIVE] Large American cities, the vast majority of which are run entirely by Democrats, are deteriorating before our eyes; and the phenomenon is not due to the COVID pandemic. New York City is in rapid decay, reverting to its pre-Rudolph Giuliani condition as Mayor Bill DeBlasio is more concerned about wokeness and virtue-signaling than he is about effectively running the city’s government. In the Socialist paradise of San Francisco ...where God struck dead Anton LaVey, home of the Sydney Ducks, ruled by Vigilance Committee from 1859 through 1867, reliably and volubly Democrat since 1964... and Los Angeles, homelessness is out of control, their treasuries are effectively broke, and residents have been fleeing in record numbers. And in Portland, Mayor Ted Wheeler ...Poindextrous lefty Dem mayor of Portland, Oregon. Allowed a year and a half of Antifa/BLM riots to destroy downtown sections of his city while playing catch and release with the perpetrators and hamstringing his police. He got reelected in the course of all that because the alternative was worse... has stood by as riots have been ravaging the city for almost a year now, with empty hotels across the city as tourists stay away in droves.

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-PC Follies

What to do with Trump terrorists

2021-01-28

[Atlantic] At noon tomorrow, our four-year experiment in being governed by the political equivalent of the Insane Clown Posse will finally end. It is ending in Juggalo style (some have called it “Trumpalo”), violently and pointlessly, with a handful of deaths, the smearing of various bodily fluids, and a riot on the way out. After any bacchanal of this magnitude, the sober dawn is almost as disorienting as the hysteria itself—and the most urgent task, after wiping the shit from the Capitol hallways, is to prevent a repeat performance. Not terribly erudite beginning, there, Graham First, the Senate must convict Donald Trump. I confess bewilderment that the Senate will have to deliberate at all: Inciting an insurrection that threatens to kidnap and possibly murder members of the Senate (including the vice president of the United States) seems to me the kind of activity the Senate should frown upon. Enemies of Ted Cruz like to point out that Trump called Cruz’s wife a hag and insinuated that his father killed John F. Kennedy, and Cruz cuddled up to Trump anyway. Any senator who excuses his own near lynching by a shirtless, horned shaman will make Cruz’s self-debasement look dignified by comparison. There was no insurrection. Antifa and BLM destroying towns and beating random people, while being paid an hourly wag, and having their taxes deducted from their net pay doesn't make them insurrection. Nor does a small coterie of people at a protest who did commit acts of violence, including the cops, doesn't not make the capital protests a riot. Second, law enforcement should hunt down and charge all of the insurrectionists, from the flex-cuff guys to the grannies posing for photos. The vigor with which federal prosecutors have been pursuing them proves that the United States has not been corrupted completely. Prisons exist to hold people such as these. If this was an insurrection, the feds will never make it back to lockup with their presumed prisoners. Here ends the easy part. Options for what comes next are harder to imagine, and have left everyone casting into a dark, vacant pool for the right paradigm. The Federalist Papers do not contemplate a Juggalo-in-exile postpresidency, so we search in unlikely places for comparably miserable predicaments to guide us. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan argues that we should think of Trump’s followers as if they were al-Qaeda members, who move freely among us because they are white Note, the author of this dribble is white rathe,r than brown and Muslim. The former DHS official Juliette Kayyem agrees that we should treat MAGA as a terrorist movement and Trump as its Osama bin Laden. What do we do with terror movements? “Decapitate” their leadership. In this case, she says the decapitation should be figurative: Isolate Trump; embarrass his followers; make Trump repudiate them. As I have said/written elsewhere, decapitation never works. The US has tried it for 20 year, Russia even before that. The problem for fascists like the writer is that the MAGA movement is leaderless, and 4th generation warfare. So, decapitate away, but the idea of returning to the freedom enshrined in the American Constitution won't go away and it will never die, not matter how many are killed or imprisoned. Whiteness, as Hasan suggests, is one difference between MAGA and al-Qaeda. Another is MAGA’s failure thus far to murder 3,000 people in a single day and promise to keep it up until the survivors surrender. So disappointing when your political opponents don't commit the genocidal murders that you would. The U.S. did not kill bin Laden because he prayed to Allah instead of Q, and the latter is going to be much harder to neutralize. (Thomas Hegghammer also notes a strange tension in Hasan’s position: If Trumpism is like al-Qaeda—or worse—and the authorities are giving it a free pass, why is the Trumpalo-terrorist body count in the single digits?) Because bin Laden still looms as the villain par excellence in the American imagination, to bin Laden we turn for analogy when trying to impress upon one another the gravity of a threat. But when the analogy guides policy and is wrong—and here it is not even close—it leaves the real threat unbothered, and everyone as defenseless as the Capitol was two weeks ago. The comparison fails even though the mob in the Capitol included at least a few honest-to-goodness, unambiguous terrorists, who came there with the express purpose of violently scaring the hell out of politicians in an effort to change policy. It fails because the category of terrorism is diverse, and so is the category of MAGA. What? Even if we agree that Trump is a “terrorist,” consider how unlike other terrorists he is. Trump resembles bin Laden not at all: One was an ascetic who gave up riches to live in dangerous and squalid isolation; the other avoids even mild danger or physical discomfort, and will humiliate himself to add mere pennies to his bank account. One commands the military of the United States, for at least a few more hours, and the other never had more than a few thousand men swinging on monkey bars in Afghanistan to his name. Trump had powers bin Laden only dreamed of (and that if he had, he would have used genocidally). I consider Trump the biggest threat to American democracy since Robert E. Lee—a terrorist who had at his disposal a great army and used it to great effect. Trump’s strategy, by contrast, was to keep and maintain power, by gathering, very loosely, a gang of self-marginalizing anti-Semites, cosplay brownshirts, and flabby gun nuts, plus others who may be high-functioning in normal life but on January 6 were too stupid to refrain from geotagging their crimes on Facebook. Robert E. Lee was no terrorist, you idiot. Seventy-four million Americans voted for Trump, and tens of millions believe his lies about a rigged election. These numbers do not suggest that this credulous minority is on to something—but they virtually guarantee that treating the post-Trump problem like a terrorist movement will fail. If you think MAGA is a terror movement, you will trick yourself into thinking that the United States can subdue and destroy it using the tools that have destroyed al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and many terror groups before them. MAGA is far more entrenched, and impossible to eradicate using any means dreamt of by counterterrorism. But the democratic federal legislature is damned sure going to try. This problem cannot be decapitated like a terrorist movement, and it will not go away when one man is droned to bits or apprehended and perp-walked in his underpants. First thing the author has gotten right. Besides, contrary to Kayyem’s suggestion, even terrorist movements do not reliably end with decapitation, and one trait that makes them resilient against decapitation is having extensive popular support. Of course those who murder cops and raid government buildings should enjoy a long, leisurely prison stay, similar to those meted out to terrorists. (Someday they can emerge and tell their grandchildren that they committed sedition because a bat-faced incompetent named Rudolph Giuliani told them to, and he was very persuasive.) But you cannot treat tens of millions this way—and that means we need to lure back many of the 74 million, including some whose brains have been pickled by exposure to QAnon and 8chan. Start by distinguishing among MAGA subtypes. In the past week, some erstwhile Trump supporters have turned on him. In Congress, most of these disavowed him when doing so became pragmatic—Mitch McConnell, for example, saw his majority slip away because of Trump’s Georgia strategy. To the extent possible, their repentance must be accepted, even with some light denial of their former MAGA fervor. “When this is all over,” David Frum prophesied, “nobody will admit to ever having supported it.” You're using Frum an a conservative exemplar? That is the way of many sheepish ex-radicals. Plenty of reformed hippies prefer to remember the free love, doobies, and social justice, without dwelling on the gonorrhea, heroin, and murder. If Trumpists are embarrassed enough to deny what they have done, then fine. When their denials shade into wistfulness, we have pictures and tweets to remind them of what they said and did. (I would rather have gonorrhea than a record of passionate and convinced #MAGA tweeting.) I'm sure someone will come right along and deliver unto you a fresh, steaming load of veneriel disease. Opportunistic amnesia is, like terrorism, a manageable problem. Far worse—and, I believe, nearer to the source of the disease—is a mental defect afflicting MAGA extremists as well as normal people: a near-total vulnerability to the hyperstimulation of our political senses. The proper response to these extremists isn’t counterterrorism. It is mental hygiene. Now he's dipping into the Soviet Union playbook. A young, successful politician once told me that at his events, he always deals with shouting protesters in the same way: He sends staff to escort them to the front of the audience, where they can shower him with spittle and fan him with their placards. The fight makes better TV, especially if a protester loses it and says or does something really crazy, such as disrobing. Wild TV clips are a source of endless attention, which is a currency fully convertible into power. Unless the camera is on you, you lose. That is the lesson of Trump, in a sentence. This annihilating tactic has rendered truth irrelevant, and like some horrible viral variant, it has rapidly come to dominate as a hysterical style in American politics. To see the MAGA insurrection and the dissociative, unhinged words of full-blown QAnon believers is to observe the hysterical style as a way of life. It resists persuasion by ordinary argument, because it persuades instead by domination of attention. The left's "ordinary argument" is to resort to invective, which this article is chock full of. When Trump said in his inaugural that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” it turns out his most fervent supporters thought that the best way to resist oblivion is to dominate others’ attention for attention’s own sake—for example, by prancing half-naked wearing body paint and pelts and threatening violence if their attention flags. Nothing matters more than the production of images too bonkers to ignore, and ensuring that everyone is looking at you and not at someone else. Some subset of the population lacks natural immunity to this performance and surrenders entirely. More crazy drivel at the link

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-Obits-

Vacancy at Federal Prison Butner, NC: Madoff pal Carmine 'The Snake' Persico dead at 85

2019-03-09

[MAIL] The longtime boss of the infamous Colombo crime family, Carmine 'The Snake' Persico, has died at the age of 85. Attorney Benson Weintraub says Persico died on Thursday at the Duke University Medical Center. He had been serving what was effectively a life sentence at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. Persico was convicted of racketeering and murder in a prosecution of mob bosses led by then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. Prosecutors said Persico took over the murderous New York-based crime organization in the early 1970s when it was at the height of its powers. He was sentenced to more than a century in prison during the 1986 'Commission Trial' targeting the heads of New York's mafia families. Persico served as his own lawyer during the trial. Persico was sentenced to 139 years in prison, though he was said to continue running the Colombo crime family from behind bars, according to the New York Daily News.

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Home Front: Politix

Cohen Phone Wiretapped.

2018-05-04

NBC Exclusive: Feds set up wiretap on Trump lawyer's phones weeks before FBI raid. Spokespeople for the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI in New York declined comment. After the raid, members of Trump's legal team advised the president not to speak to Cohen, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Two sources close to Trump's newest attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, say he learned that days after the raid the president had made a call to Cohen, and told Trump never to call again out of concern the call was being recorded by prosecutors. Giuliani told Fox News Wednesday night that Trump repaid Cohen the $130,000 he used to keep the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, from going public with allegations about her affair with Trump. Giuliani is also described as having warned Trump that Cohen is likely to flip on him, something Trump pushed back on, telling Giuliani that he has known Cohen for years and expects him to be loyal, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the conversations. Giuliani and a lawyer for Cohen, Steve Ryan, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House referred NBC News to outside counsel.

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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Paying the Price

2015-06-03

[REALCLEARPOLITICS] The B.O. regime's Department of Justice has been leading the charge, when it comes to presuming the police to be guilty -- not only until proven innocent, but even after grand juries have gone over all the facts and acquitted the police. Not only Attorney General Holder, but President B.O. himself, has repeatedly come out with public statements against the police in racial cases, long before the full facts were known. Nor have they confined their intervention to inflammatory words. The Department of Justice has threatened various local police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the federal government's ideas about how police work should be done. The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department is going to have to settle the case by bowing to the Justice Department's demands -- not on the merits, but because the federal government has a lot more money than a local police department, and can litigate the case until the local police department runs out of the money needed to do their work. By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing. This is not a new idea, nor an idea that has not been tested in practice. It was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins ...the former mayor of New York. He sez he lost to Rudy Giuliani in 1993 because of racism, which is pervasive in places like Manhattan... more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach was also tested when Dinkins was succeeded as mayor by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies -- which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been under Dinkins. Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means that there are no dangers. That is why New York's current mayor is moving back in the direction of Mayor Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do. And innocent men, women and kiddies -- most of them black -- will pay with their lives in New York, as they have in Baltimore and elsewhere.

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Home Front: Politix

Giuliani to de Blasio: Put Cops Back in Mosques After Charlie Hebdo Massacre

2015-01-11

[OBSERVER] Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called on current Mayor Bill de Blasio to place NYPD personnel in the citys mosques yesterday, after Islamic Lions of Islam slaughtered the staff of the Gay Pareeian magazine Charlie Hebdo ...A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe... Speaking on Fox News, Mr. Giuliani criticized his successor for ending a two decade-old policy of planting police informants in Moslem houses of worship, and urged him to again assign cops to keep tabs on the religious institutions. The former mayor argued such action was justified because the conspirators behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack met in mosques, and subsequent investigations led to arrest and the conviction of bully boy Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who hoped to launch attacks in the transit system. The mayor of New York, one of the first things he did was he pulled all of the police out of the mosques. Well, you know who put the police in the mosques? I did. You know who increased the number of police in the mosques? Kelly and Bloomberg, Mr. Giuliani told host Greta Van Susteren. And why did I do it? Because the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 was organized in a mosque. The blind sheikh, who went to jail for a hundred years, was planning to blow up our subways in a mosque. Mr. Giuliani argued that the threat of terrorism today is greater than ever, as exemplified by the massacre in La Belle France. I think it is becoming more difficult for us, he said. I think we have to expect this is going to happen in the United States, I hate to say that.

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Israel-Palestine-Jordan

Israel Arresting Killers, But Letting Instigators Be

2014-06-29

[Ynet] It's time to deal with Nazi-like propaganda and education systems maintained by Paleostinian Authority. The arrest of hard boyz released in the Shalit deal somewhat helped Israel regain its place in the family of sane nations, but getting out of the isolation ward entirely requires us to deal with the Nazi-like propaganda and education systems maintained by the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas ... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial... in Ramallah, which bear as much responsibility for the kidnapping and murder of Jews as what sent Der Stürmer editor Julius Streicher to the gallows. After the fall of Nazism, those who sought to restore Germany's humanity began in the kindergarten. They replaced the textbooks, closed the partisan press and outlawed any Nazi book, song, symbol and slogan. To this very day, any expression of solidarity with that regime is considered a criminal offense. No one had a doubt as to the casual relation between systematic education to murder and the murder itself. The education and propaganda which go together with the Paleostinian terror are a spitting image of the Goebbels doctrine which laid the foundations for the Holocaust, and they are blooming and thriving under Israel's rule. This suicidal policy was led by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who targeted the murderers and pampered the inciters. In Berlin, one couldn't get hold of "Mein Kampf"; in Jerusalem — unrestrictedly. In Nuremberg today, one cannot write that the Jews are an inferior race, while in Ramallah it is obligatory literature to call them "the sons of apes and pigs." In Germany, an Adolf Hitler ...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days as a politician somebody doesn't like... Boulevard, a high school named after Heinrich Himmler or a sports competition in memory of Herman Göring are unimaginable. In the Paleostinian Authority, according to the Paleostinian Media Watch, a child can walk on Abu Jihad Street (named after the criminal mastermind of the bus hijacking which left 37 Israelis killed) on his way to Ahmad Yassin School (named after the founder of Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason,), play soccer as part of a competition in memory of Abdel Basset Uda (who murdered 31) and end his day at a youth club named after Abu Iyad (who was responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich). At some point, the left re-linked the casual relation between the inciting word and the criminal act, but only in regards to Jews — when after the Goldstein massacre and the Rabin murder, they began asking what kind of flowerbeds produced these flowers of evil. However, ars longa, vita brevis... until this very day, they won't ask the same question about the thousands of Jewish victims of Arab terrorism. Had the settlers' radio broadcast something like "the hero prisoner Yigal Amir, who in his patience and strong resistance performed the most respectable acts of heroism," how many minutes would have passed before the police shut down the station and conducted arrests? But these words were broadcast by the Paleostinian television to glorify Nasser Awis, who murdered 14 people, and Israel didn't bat an eyelid. These nights, the IDF is pulling some of the killers out of their beds, but letting those whose words kill be. Why won't those who educate to murder and preach kidnapping be put on trial in Israel too? We learned from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani that the war on heavy crimes begins in being strict about the smallest sins, and in a place where people are punished for littering, the homicide rate drops too. In nationalistic crimes too, there is one sequence leading from worshipping the martyr to a stone, a knife, kidnapping and murder. Israel is abandoning itself on the diplomatic level too. It is ignoring, for example, the PLO's commitment in the Oslo Accords to act "efficiently and effectively against acts or threats of terrorism, violence or incitement." Do you think, for example, that the government will refuse to hold negotiation as long as Ramallah fails to remove the names of Jews' killers from its streets and institutions and fails to eliminate the incitement in its education and media?

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Home Front: Culture Wars

Jihad attacks on US not the fault of Islam says CAIR-Michigan Dude

2010-05-17

I've changed his disingenuous title to make it more obvious Recent attempted extremist attacks with international connections should prompt us to take a deeper look at root motives instead of simplistically faulting religion. The tired cries of the un-nuanced, such as former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani...Many of these criminal acts are direct blowback in response to our foreign policy missteps. The admitted Times Square attacker, Faisal Shahzad, who is of Pakistani origin and ethnically Pashtun, did not have a history of radicalism up until close to one year ago. Like the overwhelmingly majority of Pakistanis, Shahzad held a sharply negative view of the expansion of drone attacks in the Wazirstan province of Pakistan, which have resulted in a large percentage of civilian causalities.

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-Lurid Crime Tales-

ACORN: A Cautionary Tale

2009-09-27

Wendy Kaminer When is thievery not a crime but a personal tragedy? When is lying for personal gain or political expedience a mere error in judgment? The answer is obvious to any partisan. Your political enemies engage in criminal or morally repugnant acts; your allies, friends, and relations make mistakes or bend the rules for the greater good. As Rudolph Giuliani remarked during his presidential campaign, the definition of torture "depends on who does it." Waterboarding was "aggressive questioning," when Americans inflicted it. "It was a judgment call," (not a criminal conspiracy,) ACORN president Maud Hurd said in 2008, describing the decision to cover-up the embezzlement of nearly a million dollars by Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. No, I don't mean to suggest that torture and embezzlement are moral equivalents. I do mean to state that activists, advocacy groups, politicians, and pundits, left and right, display equivalent moral hypocrisy when rationalizing illegal or unethical conduct by some of their own. It's the hypocrisy bred by the self-righteousness of people convinced that they're on the side of the angels, that their commitment to the right cause makes them incapable of doing wrong. It's the hypocrisy that led the ACLU national board to trivialize, misrepresent, or conceal serious misconduct by its staff and lay leaders (the subject of my book, Worst Instincts.) It's the hypocrisy that has consistently characterized the "progressive" response to recent and still unfolding ACORN scandals. By ignoring, minimizing, or rationalizing grossly unethical and even criminal conduct, ACORN's left-wing friends have harmed it more than its right wing enemies ever could.

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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Ted Kennedy to receive knighthood

2009-03-04

"I dub thee Sir Rhosis!" Veteran US senator Ted Kennedy, 77, is to be awarded an honorary knighthood. The Queen has agreed the honour for the brother of former US president John F Kennedy for services to the US-UK relationship and to Northern Ireland. Gordon Brown is to formally announce the award during his address to both houses of Congress on Wednesday. The prime minister's speech comes on the second full day of his visit to which featured brief talks with President Obama on Tuesday. Mr Kennedy, who has been a senator for his home state of Massachusetts for more than 46 years, is being treated for a brain tumour. The most senior living member of the famous Irish-American political dynasty, he was diagnosed with brain cancer in May last year after being rushed to hospital with stroke-like symptoms. He has since had chemotherapy and radiation to treat the malignant glioma, an aggressive type of brain tumour. The father-of-five was elected to the US Senate as a Democrat in 1962 following the election of his brother as president. Apart from his famous family connections, he is probably best known in the UK for his work on the Northern Ireland peace process. He has been intricately involved in politics there, meeting Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and other politicians during and beyond the Good Friday agreement. He famously snubbed Adams during the latter's St Patrick's Day trip to the US in 2005 following the brutal killing of Robert McCartney. The IRA, closely allied to Sinn Fein, was accused of involvement in his murder. Mr Kennedy joins a select band of overseas nationals given an honorary knighthood. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, former president George Bush senior, former mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani and the film director Steven Spielberg have also received the honour. I am sure he will do just swimmingly in that crowd.

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Home Front: WoT

Guiliani overrode report, put NYPD command center in WTC

2008-01-27

A detailed 1998 New York Police Department analysis opposed the city's plans to locate its emergency command center at the World Trade Center but then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration overrode the objections, The New York Times reported on Saturday. No axe to grind here, weekend before the Florida primary, nope, nope ... "Seven World Trade Center is a poor choice for the site of a crucial command center for the top leadership of the City of New York," the Times quoted a panel of police experts aided by the Secret Service as having concluded in a confidential Police Department memorandum which has not been previously disclosed. The longest of the analysis' nine sections, headed "Explosives," describes a blast analysis of the likely impact of various types of bombs, and concluded that the largest of truck bombs would have led to the building's collapse, the Times report said. The command center was destroyed during the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center that also destroyed the twin towers in the seven-building complex. All Rudy's fault, too. I'm waiting for the Troofers to jump on this. Among the location's vulnerabilities was its history as a target, the report said. One of the World Trade Center's twin towers was attacked by truck bomb in 1993 that killed 6 people and injured more than 1,000. Giuliani, currently campaigning in Florida for the Republican presidential nomination, has acknowledged some skepticism by the police about the choice, but characterized it as a dispute between government officials and departments, the Times said. "This group's finding is that the security of the proposed O.E.M. Command Center cannot be reasonably guaranteed," the July 1998 memo to the city's police commissioner concluded. The Times said it obtained the document from a law enforcement official who it noted was not affiliated with any rival political campaign. Giuliani's campaign declined to answer questions about the memo but spokeswoman Maria Comella said the former mayor's administration had considered 50 different sites and examined varying factors before choosing the site. "This is one memo out of a variety of memos that were presented," she told the Times. There was a huge push to set up emergency command centers in cities like NY during the mid-90s, integrating police, fire, medical agencies. NYC in particular got a lot of federal help in risk analysis after the first WTC attack. NYPD was the lead agency in that planning IIRC. Chicago got one of these too, though it's not in the Hancock Building.

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