Putin Suggests U.S. Provocation in Georgia Clash

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
NEW YORK TIMES

Published: August 28, 2008

MOSCOW — As Russia struggled to rally international support for its military action in Georgia, Vladimir V. Putin, the country’s paramount leader, lashed out at the United States on Thursday, contending that the White House may have orchestrated the conflict to benefit one of the candidates in the American presidential election.

Mr. Putin’s comments in a television interview, his most extensive to date on Russia’s decision to send troops into Georgia earlier this month, sought to present the military operation as a response to brazen, cold war-style provocations by the United States. In tones that seemed alternately angry and mischievous, he suggested that the Bush administration may have tried to create a crisis that would influence American voters in the choice of a successor to President Bush.

“The suspicion would arise that someone in the United States created this conflict on purpose to stir up the situation and to create an advantage for one of the candidates in the competitive race for the presidency in the United States,” Mr. Putin said in an interview with CNN.

He added, “They needed a small victorious war.”

Mr. Putin did not specify which candidate he had in mind, but there was no doubt that he was referring to Senator John McCain, the Republican. Mr. McCain is loathed in the Kremlin because he has a close relationship with Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and has called for imposing stiff penalties on Russia, including throwing it out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations.

Mr. Putin offered scant evidence to support his assertion, and the White House called his comments absurd. But they underscored the depth of the rift between Moscow and Washington over the Georgia crisis, which flared three weeks ago when the Georgian military tried to reclaim a breakaway enclave allied with Russia. They also suggested that the Russian leader was deeply concerned about the possibility that Mr. McCain, widely viewed here as having a strong bias against Russia, could become president.

Only last spring, Mr. Putin, the president at the time, held a summit meeting with Mr. Bush in which the two expressed personal affection for each other and sought to smooth over tensions in the bilateral relationship.

Russia has been struggling to persuade the outside world to back its action in Georgia. On Thursday, China and four other countries meeting with Russia for the annual summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security alliance, declined to back Russia’s military action in a joint communiqué.

Mr. Putin’s interview came after his protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, spoke to several foreign news outlets this week as part of a concerted move by the Kremlin to counter Georgia’s public relations offensive in the international media. Mr. Medvedev’s tone was less harsh, though he also criticized the West.

On Thursday, Mr. Putin, now prime minister, also said Russian defense officials believed that United States citizens were in the conflict area supporting the Georgian military when it attacked the separatist region of South Ossetia.

“Even during the cold war, during the time of tough confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we have always avoided direct clashes between our civilians, let alone our servicemen,” Mr. Putin said. “We have serious reasons to believe that directly, in the combat zone, citizens of the United States were present.”

“If the facts are confirmed,” he added, “that United States citizens were present in the combat zone, that means only one thing — that they could be there only on the direct instruction of their leadership. And if this is so, then it means that American citizens are in the combat zone, performing their duties, and they can only do that following a direct order from their leader, and not on their own initiative.”

In Washington, the White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino, dismissed Mr. Putin’s remarks. “To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate just sounds not rational,” she said.

She added, “It also sounds like his defense officials who said they believe this to be true are giving him really bad advice.”

A senior Russian defense official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, said at a news conference in Moscow on Thursday that Russian forces had found a United States passport in a ruined building near Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. The position, he said, had been occupied by Georgian Interior Ministry forces.

“What was the gentleman’s purpose of being among the special forces and what he is doing today, I so far cannot answer,” General Nogovitsyn said, holding up what he said was a color copy of the passport. He said members of the Georgian unit had been killed, and the building destroyed.

When the war broke out, the United States had about 130 military trainers in Georgia preparing Georgian troops for service in Iraq. The American Embassy in Tbilisi said these trainers were not involved in the fighting; about 100 remain and are assisting with the delivery of aid to Georgia that is arriving on military planes and ships.

General Nogovitsyn said the passport was in the name of Michael Lee White of Texas, but gave no information on whether Russians believed that he was a member of the United States military. The United States Embassy in Georgia told The Associated Press that it had no information on the matter.

Mr. Putin said in the CNN interview that Russia had thought that the United States would prevent Georgia from attacking South Ossetia, but suggested that he now believed that the Bush administration encouraged Mr. Saakashvili to send in his military.

“The American side in fact armed and trained the Georgian Army,” Mr. Putin said. “Why hold years of difficult talks and seek complex compromise solutions in interethnic conflicts? It’s easier to arm one of the sides and push it into the murder of the other side, and it’s over. It seemed like an easy solution. The thing is, it turns out that it’s not always so.”

The Georgia conflict has become a flash point in the United States presidential campaign, with Senator McCain assailing what he refers to as “revanchist Russia” and asserting that he is far more qualified to handle such a crisis than the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. McCain has long been friendly with Mr. Saakashvili, who has said he talks to Mr. McCain regularly. Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Georgian government, and Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, traveled to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, this week on a humanitarian aid mission.

All these ties, combined with Mr. McCain’s criticism of Russia, have earned him a kind of notoriety in Moscow. When Parliament passed a resolution this week urging that Russia recognize the independence of the two breakaway enclaves, some lawmakers not only praised the courage of the South Ossetians, but also threw a few barbs at Mr. McCain.

U.S. Economy: Consumer Spending Slows, Inflation Accelerates

By Shobhana Chandra

Aug. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Spending by U.S. consumers slowed in July as the impact of the tax rebates faded and a pickup in inflation eroded Americans' buying power.

Purchases rose 0.2 percent, one-third the pace in June, the Commerce Department said today in Washington, while prices surged the most in 17 years. The Reuters/University of Michigan final index of consumer sentiment was at 63 this month, from 61.2 in July.

The figures on spending, which accounts for more than two- thirds of the economy, underscore projections for growth to slow from the 3.3 percent pace last quarter that the government reported yesterday. With unemployment rising and home values dropping, Americans are cutting back on big-ticket items like automobiles and furniture, today's report showed. Stocks fell.

``We are looking for a clear slowdown in the economy,'' said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts, who accurately forecast the gain in spending. ``Inflation has been eating into spending power.''

The Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index dropped 1 percent to 1,287.57 at 11:00 a.m. in New York. Treasuries also slipped, with yields on benchmark 10-year notes at 3.80 percent, compared with yesterday's close of 3.78 percent.

A separate private report indicated business activity advanced in August as commodity prices retreated from record levels. The National Association of Purchasing Management-Chicago said its business index increased to 57.9 from 50.8. Fifty is the dividing line between expansion and contraction.

Economists' Forecasts

The increase in spending matched the median forecast of 75 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

Incomes dropped 0.7 percent, the first decrease since August 2005, reflecting the end of the rebates, after a 0.1 percent gain the prior month. The median projection was a decline of 0.2 percent.

As domestic demand wanes, the U.S. may also be hit by a slowdown in economies abroad that would erode export gains. Europeans' confidence fell more than forecast this month as the economy teetered on the brink of a recession, a report showed today. The European Commission's index of executive and consumer sentiment dropped to 88.8 from 89.5 in July.

The Commerce Department report's price gauge tied to spending patterns jumped 4.5 percent from July 2007, the biggest 12-month gain since 1991.

Fed Forecast

The Federal Reserve's preferred gauge of prices, which excludes food and fuel, climbed 0.3 percent for a second month. The so-called core price measure was up 2.4 percent from a year before, the most since February 2007. That compares with the 1.8 percent to 2 percent median forecast of Fed officials for 2010, which is an indication of their target for the measure.

Adjusted for inflation, spending plunged 0.4 percent, the biggest drop in four years. Price-adjusted purchases of durable goods, such as autos, furniture, and other long-lasting items, dropped 1.6 percent. Spending on non-durable goods decreased 0.9 percent, and services, which account for almost 60 percent of all outlays, were unchanged.

Concern over both slower growth and rising prices led Fed policy makers to hold the benchmark interest rate at 2 percent this month.

Rising unemployment, falling stock and house prices and stricter lending rules ``were viewed as pointing towards weak growth in personal consumption expenditures during the second half of 2008,'' minutes of the Fed's Aug. 5 meeting released this week showed.

Savings Rate

The drop in incomes pushed the savings rate down to 1.2 percent from 2.5 percent the prior month.

Disposable income, or the money left over after taxes, decreased 1.1 percent. Adjusted for inflation, it fell 1.7 percent after declining 2.6 percent in June.

Other reports indicate purchases of big-ticket items are weakening. Sales of autos and light trucks plunged in July to a 12.5 million annual pace, the lowest since 1993, according to Bloomberg calculations based on industry data.

The real-estate slump in also hurting purchases of household goods. Williams-Sonoma Inc., the biggest U.S. gourmet-cookware chain, said yesterday that second-quarter earnings dropped 29 percent and reduced its annual sales forecast.

Weakening trends continued through August and are worst in cities most affected by the housing slump, Chief Executive Officer Howard Lester said on a conference call. At Pottery Barn and West Elm, for example, purchases have suffered in Southern California, Nevada and south Florida, he said.

``It is extremely difficult to know how the consumer will respond in the back half of the year,'' Lester said in a statement. ``We are also looking forward to 2009 with a very cautious outlook.''

The longest expansion in consumer spending on record will probably end this year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg earlier this month. Retail sales fell in July for the first time in five months, led by a slump in auto purchases, according to Commerce data.

Medvedev: We're not afraid of Cold War

Youtube
With the Russian parliament backing the independence of the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, President Dmitry Medvedev gives his views on the issue in an exclusive interview with RT.

Full text of this interview is here: http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/...

U.S., Russian Ships Square Off in Black Sea

Ian Traynor
The Guardian
August 27, 2008

US and Russian warships took up positions in the Black Sea today in a risky war of nerves on opposing sides of the Georgia conflict.

With the Russians effectively controlling Georgia's main naval base of Poti, Moscow also dispatched the Moskva missile cruiser and two smaller craft on "peacekeeping" duties at the port of Sukhumi on the coast of Abkhazia, the breakaway region that the Kremlin recognised as independent yesterday.

The Americans, wary of escalating an already fraught situation, cancelled the scheduled docking in Poti of the US Coast Guard vessel, the Dallas, and instead sent it to the southern Georgian-controlled port of Batumi, 200km (124 miles) from the Russian ships, where it delivered humanitarian aid.

"Let's hope we don't see any direct confrontation," said Dmitri Peskov, the spokesman for the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, as the Russians challenged the US policy of using military aircraft and ships to deliver relief supplies.

"The decision to deliver aid using Nato battleships is something that hardly can be explained," said Peskov. "It's not a common practice."

He said Russian naval forces were taking "some measures of precaution" around the Black Sea as the worsening dispute caused by Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia independence brought strong criticism from the key European countries most reluctant to sever relations with Russia.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, spoke to President Dmitri Medvedev today, the first western leader to talk to the Kremlin since Medvedev announced the recognition of the two secessionist regions of Georgia. She made it plain she had voiced her strong disapproval to the Russian leader.

"I made clear above all that I would have expected that we would talk about these questions in [international] organisations before unilateral recognition happened," she said. "There are several UN Security Council resolutions in which the territorial integrity of Georgia was stressed, which Russia also worked on."

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said Russia had broken international law and, along with other senior European officials, worried that Russia's decision to redraw Georgia's borders would encourage Moscow to act similarly with other former parts of the Soviet Union such as Ukraine.

"We cannot accept these violations of international law ... of a territory by the army of a neighboring country," he said.

Germany and France, who opposed the US and Britain in April in blocking Georgian negotiations to join Nato, have been the most reluctant to punish Russia for the Georgian conflict of the past three weeks and are desperate to try to revive the Russia-Georgia peace plan mediated by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, a fortnight ago.

Paris and Berlin agree the unilateral recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by Russia left the peace plan ineffectual. A summit of EU leaders in Brussels on Monday is to ponder Europe's options.

With mounting warnings of western economic or trade sanctions against Russia, an EU official admitted that threats to block Russian membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were meaningless. The push for Russian admission being driven not by Moscow but by western business interests keen to tap the large Russian market, he said.

Peskov warned that trade sanctions against Moscow would hurt the west as much as Russia.

He admitted that South Ossetia, a mountainous region of 70,000 people, would struggle to establish itself as an independent state, but stressed that Russia's constitution made it possible for Russia to expand.

"My country will extend the arm of cooperation and friendship to ease the transition period [for South Ossetia]," he said.

EU officials complained that Moscow was seeking to control the distribution of international relief. EU aid officials were demanding entry to the Russian controlled regions, but were being barred unless they handed over the aid to the Russian authorities for distribution.

FDIC may borrow money from Treasury: report

(Reuters) - Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The borrowing could be needed to cover short-term cash-flow pressures caused by reimbursing depositors immediately after the failure of a bank, the paper said.

The borrowed money would be repaid once the assets of that failed bank are sold.

"I would not rule out the possibility that at some point we may need to tap into (short-term) lines of credit with the Treasury for working capital, not to cover our losses," Chairman Sheila Bair said in an interview with the paper.

Bair said such a scenario was unlikely in the "near term." With a rise in the number of troubled banks, the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund used to repay insured deposits at failed banks has been drained.

In a bid to replenish the $45.2 billion fund, Bair had said on Tuesday that the FDIC will consider a plan in October to raise the premium rates banks pay into the fund, a move that will further squeeze the industry.

The agency also plans to charge banks that engage in risky lending practices significantly higher premiums than other U.S. banks, Bair said.

The last time the FDIC had borrowed funds from the Treasury was at nearly the tail end of the savings-and-loan crisis in the early 1990s after thousands of banks were shuttered.

The fact that the agency is considering the option again, after the collapse of just nine banks this year, illustrates the concern among Washington regulators about the weakness of the U.S. banking system in the wake of the credit crisis, the Journal said.

(Reporting by Sweta Singh in Bangalore; Editing by Erica Billingham)

'NATO whitewash and rearm criminal regime of Georgia'

YOUTUBE _ RUSSIA TODAY
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has commented on the result of Tuesday's NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels.

Russian General Says Georgia May Commit False Flag Terror Attacks

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, August 18, 2008

Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn warns that Georgia may be planning to commit false flag terror attacks by using mercenaries dressed in Russian uniforms, as Russia moved to guard sensitive infrastructure against terrorist attacks.

In a news briefing on Monday, he said: “I cannot rule out that they might use mercenaries with Slavic appearance for a provocation, clad in the uniform of Russian servicemen, in order to commit subversive acts both on Ossetian and Russian territory.”

In response to the threat, Russia has stationed troops around the Inguri Hydroelectric Plant, viewed as a potential target.

Nogovitsyn’s warning that Georgia may resort to subversion in order to enhance its well-groomed image of being the victim of a war that it started with the horrific bombardment of civilian targets in South Ossetia on August 8th, arrives amidst more examples of pro-Georgian western media bias.

Following in the footsteps of the BBC, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News used footage of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali in ruins after the Georgian assault and claimed it was the Georgian town of Gori after it was attacked by the Russians.

In reality, 70% of Tskhinvali was destroyed, whereas Gori suffered relatively little damage according to a United Nations aid convoy.

“Russia ’s TV channel Zvezda, which has five camera crews working in Tskhinvali, aired the same footage two days before, on Monday,” reports Pravda. “Sky News showed its report with no sound, whereas the people showed in the Russian report could be heard speaking Russian and Ossetian languages. The crying people shown in the report were heard cursing Georgian President Saakashvili for destructions and manslaughter.”

After the controversy came to light yesterday, the Sky News clip was quickly pulled from You Tube.

In addition, CNN last week showed Georgian forces attacking Russian civilians in Tskhinvali, the provincial capital of South Ossetia, but then claimed it showed Russians attacking Georgians in the Georgian town of Gori.

A 12-year-old American girl who was caught up in the brutal assault by Georgia on South Ossetia attempted to tell the truth about who the real aggressors were during a live Fox News interview, but she was quickly silenced by the host.

Western media coverage of the conflict has reflected a virulently pro-Georgia bias since the very start, once again proving that the press is not independent, but simply a mouthpiece for the same Anglo-American power structure for whom Georgia is merely another client state.

Georgia is a U.S. Project - Russian FM

Russia Today
Friday, Aug 15, 2008

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has criticised Georgia’s relationship with the U.S. in the aftermath of the trouble in South Ossetia. In a news conference he addressed a wide range of issues surrounding the future of the Caucasus region including Abkhazia, the role of the U.S. and media coverage of the conflict.

“The repercussions of blood spilled in the Caucasus will last for centuries, not decades. We can now start counting centuries from August 8, 2008,” he said.

“It’s an open secret – Western analysts have been writing about it, that the current Georgian leadership is a special project of the United States. And of course it must be hurtful to see a protégé making such a sleazy performance.”

Saakashvili Defends the “New World Order” On Glenn Beck

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
August 12, 2008

At one minute, five seconds into the clip here from Glenn Beck’s neocon propaganda hour, we hear the sock puppet Saakashvili make reference to the New World Order. According to Saakashvili, he is not concerned so much for his own personal safety, he is more worried about the “region,” in other words the little globalist and NATO fiefdoms carved out of the corpse of the former Soviet Union, only the latest additions to the New World Order.

Saakashvili actually uses this phrase, same as George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, and other minions of the globalist elite. Of course, Saakashvili is no Bush or Clinton, in fact he is little more than a rag doll that will be thrown on the growing pyre after he outlives his usefulness. He is but another disposable Mafia don and one low on the criminal syndicate’s totem pole. One day he is on Glenn Back telling brazen lies, the next he may share the fate Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated in the back of an APC because he was no longer of any use to the United States in Vietnam. Misha the useful tool will undoubtedly become a footnote in short order. In the meantime, he takes his marching orders from the neocons and their musical chair fellows, the neolibs.

As Paul Craig Roberts notes, Saakashvili is a product of NED and the neocons. “Back in the Reagan years the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a cold war tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states,” writes Roberts, who should know as a former member of the Reagan administration. “The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union.”

Roberts tells us the neocons are criminally insane and along with “the Israeli-occupied American media” are pushing “the innocent world toward nuclear war.” Glenn Beck, always an eager little servant, helps this lunatic effort by providing Saakashvili with a corporate media platform to spew his nonsense and lies. Beck, of course, simply does what he is told.

Saakashvili’s usage of the term “New World Order” provides us with more evidence of who is actually calling the shots in Georgia — not the Georgians, but the ruling elite. Saakashvili owes his ascendancy to NED and USAID and the “entire panoply of ‘democracy promoting’ devices” plied by the globalists as an alternate way to overthrow governments.

“During the late 1970s there was new thinking at the highest levels of the U.S. foreign policymakers, and they reconsidered whether these ugly murderous military dictatorships of the 1970s were really the best way to preserve U.S. interests in these countries,” writes former CIA officer Philip Agee. “This new thinking led to the establishment in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy. They had chosen the German pattern in which the major political parties in Germany have foundations financed by the federal government. They did more or less the same thing with the establishment of the NED as a private foundation – there is really nothing private about it, and all its money comes from the Congress.”

“A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” boasts Allen Weinstein, a UNESCO globalist. Mr. Weinstein should know, as he was chosen to serve as acting president of NED in 1983 when it was taking over CIA duties of subversion and subterfuge.

It make sense that Capo Bastone Saakashvili, the throughly disposable underling to the international banking crime syndicate, would appear on Beck. After all, the Operation Mockingbird corporate media is a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA, an effort launched out of the psychological warfare labs of the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations with gobs of money diverted from the Marshall Plan back in the day. Beck is simply the latest manifestation of this ongoing disinformation and propaganda campaign, never mind the complete if not absurd transparency of the effort to portray the grubby little Saakashvili as a democrat.

US hampering Russian peace efforts – Putin

August 11, 2008, 15:11
RussiaToday

The Prime Minister has accused Washington of undermining Russia’s attempts to restore peace in the South Ossetian conflict zone. Vladimir Putin said a decision by the US military to fly 800 Georgian soldiers from Iraq to Georgia showed America was ‘trying to get in the way’. In a stinging attack on the US, Putin told government ministers: "It's a pity that some of our partners, instead of helping, are trying to get in the way”.

He said the US was using “its military transport aircraft to relocate Georgia's military contingent from Iraq virtually into the conflict zone”.

He also voiced his frustration at the inability of Russia's western partners to adequately assess the situation in South Ossetia.

“I’m amazed by their skills at seeing black as white, of portraying aggressors as victims and of blamimg the real victims for the consequences of the conflict.

Putin also accused the West of double standards when it comes to judging war crimes.

“As we all know, Saddam Hussein was hanged for burning down several Shiite villages. But now suddenly the situation is different. The Georgian leaders who in a matter of hours wiped out ten Ossetian villages, who ran over children and the elderly with tanks, who burned civilians alive, those people have to be protected,” he said.


Meanwhile, American Joe Mestas, who witnessed days of shelling, has said U.S. and Georgian leaders are responsible for the violence that has killed 2,000 people in the region. He told RT that Washington will have to answer for the violence.

“I thought that since U.S. is supporting Georgia there would be some control over the situation in South Ossetia and that there would be a peaceful solution to the conflict. But what is happening there now it’s not just war, but war crimes. George Bush and [Georgian president] Mikhail Saakashvili should answer to the crimes that are being committed – the killing of innocent people, running over by tanks of children and women, throwing grenades into cellars where people are hiding,” Mestas said.

“The war is when military fight against military. But the Georgian army is killing innocent civilians. This is genocide,” he added.

Nancy Pelosi talks about the New World Order Plan

You Tube | August 7, 2008

This was on Pelosi’s book tour stop in Coral Gables, Florida on August 8th, 2008. Pelosi speaks about the New World Order and explains how it’s written on the One dollar bill.

WeAreChangeFL.org
FederalJack.com

Vision 2015: a Globally Networked and Integrated Intelligence Enterprise

Published July 2008

The Director of National Intelligence produced this report; it states, "the purpose of this Vision document is to chart a new path forward for a globally networked and integrated Intelligence Enterprise for the 21st century based on the principles of integration, collaboration, and innovation."

Essential Documents are vital primary sources underpinning the foreign policy debate.

Report

• Vision 2015: a Globally Networked and Integrated Intelligence Enterprise

Sy Hersh at Campus Progress journalism conference

Sy Hersh and Faiz Shakir. First reported here:
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/31/c...

Proposed False Flag event for an excuse to attack Iran.

Vaccine: Secret Shots given to soldiers, covered by Military

Vaccines - Secret Shots given to soldiers & covered up by Military
Youtube