Showing posts with label KAL-007. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KAL-007. Show all posts

Saturday 20 December 2014

Lockerbie



"The local police force, Dumfries and Galloway, they were most concerned at the SWARMS of Americans, fiddling with bodies, and shall we say tampering with those things that the police were carefully checking themselves. 

I'm not pretending that they said they were from the FBI or the CIA - they were just Americans, who seemed to have arrived extremely quickly, on the scene..." - Tam Dalyell MP

The Maltese Double Cross discusses evidence and witnesses that would eventually figure at the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial in 2000:

The Mebo MST-13 timer fragment, which Thomas Thurman of the FBI's forensic laboratory said that he identified on June 15, 1990;

Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, former prime minister of Iran, discusses the idea that Iran took revenge for the shootdown by the USS Vincennes of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988.

• Mebo's Swiss owner, Edwin Bollier, is interviewed at length;

• Forensic scientist, Dr Michael Scott, describes DERA's 'forensic expert', Alan Feraday, as a technician without any formal qualifications as a scientist;

Solicitor, Alastair Logan, criticises DERA's Dr Thomas Hayes for the forensic evidence that was used to convict the Maguire Seven;

Former CIA operative, Oswald LeWinter says the appointment of 'Libyan dirty tricks expert', Vincent Cannistraro, to head the CIA's team investigating Lockerbie 'would be funny, if it were not an obscenity';

Department of Defense Whistle Blower Lester Coleman linked the bomb to a terrorist cell trained by CIA operative, Edwin P. Wilson; and,

• Best-selling author, David Yallop, reviews the available evidence and looks at who might have been responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.

The documentary disputes the conclusion reached by the official investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, instead advancing the theory that the bomb was introduced onto the aircraft by an unwitting drug mule, Khaled Jafaar, in what the filmmaker claims is a CIA-protected suitcase.

Directed by Allan Francovich 

The film had been the focus of active attempts at suppression. Francovich died of an apparent heart attack while going through U.S. customs in Houston, with documents in his possession that would exonerate whistleblower Lester Coleman and implicate the Reagan and Bush administrations and the CIA in a number of unsavory and illegal activities.



Q7. Mr. Dalyell : To ask the Prime Minister if he will make a statement on representations from Arab countries about sanctions against Libya.

The Prime Minister : We have had various approaches from Arab countries about sanctions against Libya. We and the Arab League share the same objective--to see a satisfactory outcome to the Lockerbie problem. This, as the Arab League well knows, will require Libya's full compliance with United Nations Security Council resolution 731.

Mr. Dalyell : In the light of my two letters to the Prime Minister on this subject, will he consider putting in the Library a response to the cover story of Time magazine--not exactly a publication of the left--which challenges the whole basis of the Anglo-American position? Will the right hon. Gentleman also consider approaching Spain on the legal proceedings relating to Monzer al Kassar, a Syrian drugs and arms dealer?

The Prime Minister : I saw the article in Time magazine ; I examined it and sought advice on it. The theories about involvement and links with drugs are not new. They were thoroughly examined by the police during the investigation and were discounted at that stage, at the conclusion of the investigation. No evidence has yet been found to link the Syrian, al Kassar, to Lockerbie--but I shall, of course, examine the matter again in view of the hon. Gentleman's representations.

Mr. Wilkinson :
Can my right hon. Friend enlighten the House about any dealings between Government officials and the Government of Libya over links between the Libyan regime and the Irish Republican Army? Has the IRA received any supplies from Libya recently? Have the Libyan authorities given assurances to the Government that they will not continue to supply the IRA?
The Prime Minister : The Libyans have provided some information to the Government about their relationships with the IRA ; they did so in Geneva on 9 June. The preliminary assessment of that information suggests that although in places it was incomplete and unsatisfactory, it contains some positive elements which may well prove useful. One positive development is the fact that the Libyans have indicated to us that they wish to cease providing assistance to the IRA. We are not convinced that that is yet the case.



Wednesday 6 August 2014

Sarajevo & the Serbian Black Hand : Synthetic Terror - Made in the British Foreign Office




"The colossal bloodletting of World War I began in Sarajevo, Bosnia with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist fanatic named Gavrilo Prinkip, an activist of the group called the Black Hand, a Mazzini-style Serbian underground national liberation group. But the Black Hand was controlled by Serbian military intelligence. Colonel Apis of Serbian military intelligence was in turn an asset of the Okhrana, the Russian intelligence, through the Russian military attaché in Belgrade, and he and Prinkip may also have been under the influence of the British-backed Grand Orient freemasons, which had been working towards a general European war since about 1906-7."

Webster Tarpley, 
9/11 : Synthetic Terror - Made in USA


"Unbelievable that old Biff could have chosen that particular date!!

It could mean that that point in time inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance..... Almost as if it were the temporal junction point for the entire space-time continuum.... 


On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence."

Webster Tarpley on Ariel Sharon, Abu Nidal, the ADL and International Terrorism (1986) from Spike EP on Vimeo.
"General Ariel Sharon has two members on the Council of the Abu Nidal Organisation"

(People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), anti-Arraffat guerrillas.)

Thursday 31 July 2014

MH370/MH17 : Israel's Spare Malaysian 777




"A top pro-Russia rebel commander in eastern Ukraine has given a bizarre version of events surrounding the Malaysian jetliner crash — suggesting many of the victims may have died days before the plane took off.

The pro-rebel website Russkaya Vesna on Friday quoted Igor Girkin as saying he was told by people at the crash site that “a significant number of the bodies weren’t fresh,” adding that he was told they were drained of blood and reeked of decomposition."

Associated Press


"Why has this plane, a former Malaysia Airlines plane exactly like the missing MH370, been kept in Israel by GA Telesis, a supposedly Florida-based company? 

This photo is from an Israeli planespotter forum that identifies the plane as GA Telesis N105GT at Tel Aviv airport on December 2, 2013."



GA Telesis only has one plane in its fleet, a Boeing 777 with a registration number N105GT. Why did GA Telesis give the plane a new registration number if it was scheduled for dismantling?  



Well, it was renumbered in Florida, photographed taking off from there, and photographed again in a hanger in Tel Aviv in April.

To complicate matters, the original MH370 is confirmed as having landed in Diego Garcia, and appears to have been transferred elsewhere by commercial freighter - destination unknown.

It's a fair bet that at least at some point there will have been two Malaysian Airline 777-ERs flying around with identical tail numbers (and identical transponder codes too, presumably).

Which shows, I think, just how truly stupid and gullible they really must think we all are - nothing on Earth is more rigourously logged and audited than aircraft components and maintainence schedules - it's impossible to conduct a basic air crash investigation without that information.

Every piece of the plane has a serial number on it and a full service history - that being the case, you may as well not both renumbering the plane itself with a new tail number, since none of the parts will match the records kept for that plane.




Rebecca C. Longo
GA Telesis, LLC
1850 NW 49th Street
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309

Dear Ms Longo,

I am a journalist who would like to ask a couple questions about a plane that belongs to your company, or did so until quite recently: N105GT GA Telesis Boeing 777.

This is a former Malaysia Airlines plane that was reported to have been scheduled for dismantling in Fort Lauderdale, as per the GA Telesis press release of July 10, 2013, which bears your name at the bottom.

Your press release has the MSN of this plane as 28418? Is that the correct MSN?


My questions are about the status of this plane today. Is this the same plane that is described in the following webpage of Planespotters.net? This plane has the MSN 28416. Are these two different planes or is one of the MSN numbers incorrect? The Operator History has this plane listed as operated by GA Telesis but stored in Tel Aviv since November 4, 2013.


Why was the GA Telesis plane scheduled for dismantling in the United States given a new registration number (N105GT) and then flown to Tel Aviv?  What is the status of this plane today?

With many thanks for your prompt consideration of my questions.

Christopher Bollyn



THE ISRAELI CONNECTION

In January 2011, GA Telesis acquired an Israeli-run company called Ultimate Aircraft Composites, LLC.  Aviv Tzur, an Israeli, was the executive chairman of Ultimate Aircraft Composites and remained in that position in the company that was re-named GA Telesis Composite Repair Group, LLC, a subsidiary of GA Telesis.

Aviv Tzur is also the vice chairman and treasurer of the Israel-American Chamber of Commerce, Florida Region.  He has worked with Israeli aircraft companies in south Florida since the 1990s. One of his companies specialized in converting passenger planes into cargo planes, like the planes that were used on 9-11 are thought to have been.

Aviv Tzur, Yoel Saraf, and Michael Navon, are the only directors of GA Telesis Composite Repair Group, LLC, according to company information from Businessweek.  Tzur and Saraf are certainly Israeli; Navon probably is also.

I called Aviv Tzur to ask about the plane being kept in Israel.  When I told him that GA Telesis had a plane identical to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in a hangar in Tel Aviv, he laughed and told me that I should ask GA Telesis.  I told him that the people who answered the phone at GA Telesis Composite Repair Group, LLC, did not recognize his name when I called although he is listed as executive chairman of the company.  He told me that only the guys at the top would know about his position with the company, which I find odd.  Tzur has several companies that are all registered at the same address as GA Telesis Composite Repair Group at 3420 NW 53rd St. in Fort Lauderdale.




Aviv Tzur is listed as Executive Chairman and member of the board of GA Telesis Composite Repair Group, LLC, but the telephone receptionist said he had never heard of Tzur or his Israeli buddies, Saraf and Navon.  What kind of company is this?  Source:  Businessweek.com

As I have pointed out in the Solving 9-11 books, in false-front business operations it is often the unseen Israeli component of what appears to be an American company that is actually controlling the company.  This appears to be the case with Aviv Tzur at GA Telesis and would explain why the only plane in their fleet, a twin of the missing MH370, is in a hangar in Tel Aviv - and why no one at the company wants to talk about it.

If GA Telesis has a valid business reason for sending the only plane in its fleet to Israel, why is it so reluctant to provide an explanation?  Why did Aviv Tzur laugh when I told him that a plane identical to the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 is in a hangar in Tel Aviv?  Is there a diabolic plan to use the plane as a doppelganger of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in a false-flag terror operation?  If there were such a plan, the exposure of the GA Telesis' twin plane in a hangar in Tel Aviv may have prevented it from being carried out. 

Sources and Recommended Reading:

Aviv Tzur, Israel American Chamber of Commerce, iacc-fl.org, April 17, 2014

Aviv Tzur, profile, Businessweek.com, April 17, 2014
investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp

Board Members of GA Telesis Composite Repair Group, LLC, Businessweek.com, April 17, 2014

Company Overview of GA Telesis Composite Repair Group, LLC, Businessweek.com, April 18, 2014

GA Telesis current fleet information
www.planespotters.net/Airline/GA-Telesis

"The Planes of 9-11" by Christopher Bollyn, from Solving 9-11: The Deception that Changed the World


The Maltese Double Cross






"The local police force, Dumfries and Galloway, they were most concerned at the SWARMS of Americans, fiddling with bodies, and shall we say tampering with those things that the police were carefully checking themselves. 

I'm not pretending that they said they were from the FBI or the CIA - they were just Americans, who seemed to have arrived extremely quickly, on the secne..." 
- Tam Dalyell MP




The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie discusses evidence and witnesses that would eventually figure at the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial in 2000:

• The Mebo MST — 13 timer fragment, which Thomas Thurman of the FBI's forensic laboratory said that he identified on June 15, 1990;

• Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, former prime minister of Iran, discusses the idea that Iran took revenge for the shootdown by the USS Vincennes of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988.

• Mebo's Swiss owner, Edwin Bollier, is interviewed at length;

• Forensic scientist, Dr Michael Scott, describes DERA's 'forensic expert', Alan Feraday, as a technician without any formal qualifications as a scientist;

• Solicitor, Alastair Logan, criticises DERA's Dr Thomas Hayes for the forensic evidence that was used to convict the Maguire Seven;

• Former CIA operative, Oswald LeWinter says the appointment of 'Libyan dirty tricks expert', Vincent Cannistraro, to head the CIA's team investigating Lockerbie 'would be funny, if it were not an obscenity';

• Department of Defense Whistle Blower Lester Coleman linked the bomb to a terrorist cell trained by CIA operative, Edwin P. Wilson; and,

• Best-selling author, David Yallop, reviews the available evidence and looks at who might have been responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.

The documentary disputes the conclusion reached by the official investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, instead advancing the theory that the bomb was introduced onto the aircraft by an unwitting drug mule, Khaled Jafaar, in what the filmmaker claims is a CIA-protected suitcase.

Directed by Allan Francovich

The film had been the focus of active attempts at suppression. 

Francovich died of an apparent heart attack while going through U.S. customs in Houston, with documents in his possession that would exonerate whistleblower Lester Coleman and implicate the Reagan and Bush administrations and the CIA in a number of unsavory and illegal activities.


In The Maltese Double-Cross, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, former Prime Minister of Iran, discusses the idea that Iran took revenge for the shootdown by the USS Vincennes of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988 by authorising the downing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

In the second half of 1988, it was well-known and common knowledge that the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran had raised and made available a $1 million bounty for any person or group who could bring down a US passenger jet - a fact exploited to the full by Oliver North, George HW Bush and The Secret Team, using Mossad front-group, the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command) (PFLP-GC), under the command of Ahmed Jabril, proxy of General Ariel Sharron and North's partners in the Heroin trade in the Bekkar Valley as a conduit through which to smuggle aboard the bomb.

Wednesday 30 July 2014

The Washington Post : In-House Organ of the Left Warmongers



Bond Air is Go: The Secret History of MH17 - The Flight of the Dead




"A top pro-Russia rebel commander in eastern Ukraine has given a bizarre version of events surrounding the Malaysian jetliner crash — suggesting many of the victims may have died days before the plane took off.

The pro-rebel website Russkaya Vesna on Friday quoted Igor Girkin as saying he was told by people at the crash site that “a significant number of the bodies weren’t fresh,” adding that he was told they were drained of blood and reeked of decomposition. "

Associated Press

"8. It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be subsituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being transmitting on the inter- national distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by the destruction of aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow IACO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident.



"....the war scare was an expression of a genuine belief on the part of Soviet leaders that US was planning a nuclear first strike, causing Sov[iet] military to prepare for this eventuality, for example by readying forces for a Sov[iet] preemptive strike."

- Summary of the most extensive (and still classified) analysis of Able Archer 83, 
a 110-page President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board report to President George H.W. Bush, 1990





These are not real people.

Human beings do not look like this.

These are VicSims.












"In direct contrast to every other country's response to the disaster, Russia's Ministry of Defence claimed it saw MH17 detour from its route at the same time a Ukrainian warplane flew overhead and a US satellite flew over Ukraine.
Lieutenant-General Igor Makushev told a news briefing in Moscow that Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jets had flown within 3km and 5km (2 to 3 miles) of the Malaysian Airlines jet prior to it crashing."

You're not even going to look at the charts, radar tapes and raw data, are you?
No, I thought not...




FINAL – Spanish Air Controller @ Kiev Borispol Airport: Ukraine Military Shot Down Boeing #MH17

FLASH UPDATEIndustry Outlet Confirms Carlos (@spainbuca) as ATC at Borispol in Kiev
(See the Text of Carlos / @spainbuca Tweets Below the Article)
OriginalEturboNews (ETN Global Travel Industry News) – July 17, 2014
ETN received information from an air traffic controller in Kiev on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
This Kiev air traffic controller is a citizen of Spain and was working in the Ukraine. He was taken off duty as a civil air-traffic controller along with other foreigners immediately after a Malaysia Airlines passenger aircraft was shot down over the Eastern Ukraine killing 295 passengers and crew on board.
The air traffic controller suggested in a private evaluation and basing it on military sources in Kiev, that the Ukrainian military was behind this shoot down. Radar records were immediately confiscated after it became clear a passenger jet was shot down.
Military air traffic controllers in internal communication acknowledged the military was involved, and some military chatter said they did not know where the order to shoot down the plane originated from.
Obviously it happened after a series of errors, since the very same plane was escorted by two Ukrainian fighter jets until 3 minutes before it disappeared from radar.
Radar screen shots also show an unexplained change of course of the Malaysian Boeing. The change of course took the aircraft directly over the Eastern Ukraine conflict region.
Some tweets received suggest this may have been a secret military uprising against the current Ukrainian president under the direction of formerly-jailed Prime Minister Timoshenko.
According to other rumors, the black box for this crashed Malaysian Airlines flight was taken by Donetsk separatists. A spokesperson for the rebel group said this black box would be sent to the Interstate Aviation Committee headquartered in Moscow.
The First Deputy Prime Minister of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, Andrew Purgin, stated that the flight recorders of the crashed aircraft will be transferred to Moscow for examination.
Sources say the Rebel group leadership hopes this would confirm the Ukrainian military actually shot down this aircraft. This was reported by the news agency Interfax-Ukraine.
ETN statement: The information in this article is independently confirmed and based on the statement of one airline controller and other tweets received.

Translated from Spanish by Luis Lopez
Source: Tweets by Spanish Air Controller – @spainbuca

You notice no-one is jumping to the conclusion that the Malinese or Red China shot down the other two planes, even though they have more cause to do so.

This is what we call The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.


"Gregory, let me recommend to your attention this singular epidemic among the sheep. Drive on, coachman!"

   Colonel Ross still wore an expression which showed the poor opinion which he had formed of my companion's ability, but I saw by the Inspector's face that his attention had been keenly aroused.

   "You consider that to be important?" he asked.

   "Exceedingly so."

   "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"


   'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

   "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

   "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes. 



Yup, they said it - storms.

Over the Sahara Desert.

This is doubley shameful when you consider that there is a war currently ongoing in Mali, of the re-colonising French Forces against the "al-Qaeda" of Mali and Chad.





"The local police force, Dumfries and Galloway, they were most concerned at the SWARMS of Americans, fiddling with bodies, and shall we say tampering with those things that the police were carefully checking themselves. 

I'm not pretending that they said they were from the FBI or the CIA - they were just Americans, who seemed to have arrived extremely quickly, on the secne..." 
- Tam Dalyell MP




The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie discusses evidence and witnesses that would eventually figure at the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial in 2000:

• The Mebo MST — 13 timer fragment, which Thomas Thurman of the FBI's forensic laboratory said that he identified on June 15, 1990;

• Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, former prime minister of Iran, discusses the idea that Iran took revenge for the shootdown by the USS Vincennes of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988.

• Mebo's Swiss owner, Edwin Bollier, is interviewed at length;

• Forensic scientist, Dr Michael Scott, describes DERA's 'forensic expert', Alan Feraday, as a technician without any formal qualifications as a scientist;

• Solicitor, Alastair Logan, criticises DERA's Dr Thomas Hayes for the forensic evidence that was used to convict the Maguire Seven;

• Former CIA operative, Oswald LeWinter says the appointment of 'Libyan dirty tricks expert', Vincent Cannistraro, to head the CIA's team investigating Lockerbie 'would be funny, if it were not an obscenity';

• Department of Defense Whistle Blower Lester Coleman linked the bomb to a terrorist cell trained by CIA operative, Edwin P. Wilson; and,

• Best-selling author, David Yallop, reviews the available evidence and looks at who might have been responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.

The documentary disputes the conclusion reached by the official investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, instead advancing the theory that the bomb was introduced onto the aircraft by an unwitting drug mule, Khaled Jafaar, in what the filmmaker claims is a CIA-protected suitcase.

Directed by Allan Francovich 

The film had been the focus of active attempts at suppression. 

Francovich died of an apparent heart attack while going through U.S. customs in Houston, with documents in his possession that would exonerate whistleblower Lester Coleman and implicate the Reagan and Bush administrations and the CIA in a number of unsavory and illegal activities.


In The Maltese Double-Cross, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, former Prime Minister of Iran, discusses the idea that Iran took revenge for the shootdown by the USS Vincennes of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988 by authorising the downing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

In the second half of 1988, it was well-known and common knowledge that the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran had raised and made available a $1 million bounty for any person or group who could bring down a US passenger jet - a fact exploited to the full by Oliver North, George HW Bush and The Secret Team, using Mossad front-group, the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command) (PFLP-GC), under the command of Ahmed Jabril, proxy of General Ariel Sharron and North's partners in the Heroin trade in the Bekkar Valley as a conduit through which to smuggle aboard the bomb.

Saturday 26 July 2014

The Flight of the Dead : Korean Airlines Flight KAL-007





"8. It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be subsituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being transmitting on the inter- national distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by the destruction of aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow IACO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident.

Friday 25 July 2014

The Curious Incidents of the Passenger Airliners in the Night-Time


You notice no-one is jumping to the conclusion that the Malinese or Red China shot down the other two planes, even though they have more cause to do so.

This is what we call The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.


"Gregory, let me recommend to your attention this singular epidemic among the sheep. Drive on, coachman!"

   Colonel Ross still wore an expression which showed the poor opinion which he had formed of my companion's ability, but I saw by the Inspector's face that his attention had been keenly aroused.

   "You consider that to be important?" he asked.

   "Exceedingly so."

   "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"


   'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

   "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

   "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes. 



Yup, they said it - storms.

Over the Sahara Desert.

Tuesday 22 July 2014

IATA: Whatever Happened to MH17, the Kiev Criminals are to Blame





Statement on MH17 by IATA Director General and CEO Tony Tyler


Geneva, Switzerland - 15:30GMT
I share the shock and sadness expressed by so many around the world on the terrible loss of MH 17. At this time, it is important we are very clear: safety is the top priority. No airline will risk the safety of their passengers, crew and aircraft for the sake of fuel savings. Airlines depend on governments and air traffic control authorities to advise which air space is available for flight, and they plan within those limits. 
 
It is very similar to driving a car. If the road is open, you assume that it is safe. If it’s closed you find an alternate route. 
 
Civil aircraft are not military targets. Governments agreed that in the Chicago Convention. And what happened with MH 17 is a tragedy for 298 souls that should not have happened in any airspace.

Salami Tactics - NATO and the Near Abroad


Salami Tactics : NATO History 1989-Present from Spike EP on Vimeo.


Who are, or what is, the near abroad? Who coined the phrase in Russian, and who first translated it into this English phrase? What does it mean, and is it important?
The answer to the last is: you bet it's important, because the words deal with the new relationship between Russia and the other republics of the former Soviet Union. Tension on the border of Ukraine and Russia, for example -- with Moscow claiming influence over ethnic Russian brethren within Ukraine -- cannot be reported without the use of this big diplomatic term.
A fishhook in this space last month, citing a few not-so-early uses of near abroad -- the best translation of the Russian blizhneye zarubezhye -- drew some nibbles from sources more adept than me at the use of data bases.
The earliest use in Nexis, Fred Shapiro of New Haven writes, is an article in The Russian Press Digest of June 9, 1992, titled "Near Abroad Wants to Be Far"; by Dec. 7 of that year, Strobe Talbott -- then a Time magazine columnist, now Deputy Secretary of State -- had picked up the troublesome phrase: "Many Russians have not yet been able to accept the idea that the 14 non-Russian republics of the U.S.S.R. are today independent foreign countries. Russian politicians have even coined a new phrase -- the near abroad -- to distinguish between the former republics and the rest of the world."

Meanwhile, Mary V. McGlynn of Brussels was searching News Retrieval, a Dow Jones product, and scorning that service's discouraging word that near was a linking word used in searching and not usable as a keyword. She found: "With regard to conflict situations in countries of the near abroad," wrote Sovinfolink, The Soviet Press Digest, on Aug. 20, 1992, summarizing in English a piece in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, " [ Russian Foreign Minister Andrei ] Kozyrev is critical about attempts to threaten neighbors."
An earlier Kozyrev use was found by Paul Brock, a consultant for Dialog, Knight-Ridder's data retrieval service: "Foreign Minister Kozyrev warns that every Russian gesture of 'heroic patriotism' will trigger Russophobia in Ukraine," Mark Frankland wrote in The Observer on April 26, 1992, "and the rest of what Moscow now calls 'the near abroad,' that is the old Soviet Union."
That's the printed-citation winner so far of that phrase in English. Other translators in early 1992 were reaching for the best way to handle the Russian idea. Roger Donway, managing editor of Orbis in Philadelphia, culled the Foreign Broadcast Information Service for its translations of the Russian phrase. On Jan. 15, 1992, Izvestiya referred to "the concept of 'abroad close at hand,' " putting the phrase in quotation marks. Tass, on April 9, 1992, used "nearby foreign lands"; three days later, the Moscow Russian Television Network spoke of what the broadcast information service reported as "countries not far abroad, as they call it." Later that month, Interfax, in English, wrote of "the emergence of a new geopolitical entity, which is often referred to as the Near Foreign Countries."
The seminal phrase, blizhneye zarubezhye, was obviously giving translators a hard time. Blizhneye is the neuter of blizhniy, an adjective meaning "near" (Near East is Blizhniy Vostok), but "zarubezhye is a noun with no English equivalent," writes Kenneth Katzner of Washington, author of the English-Russian, Russian-English Dictionary, based on American English. "It is built around rubezh, a word meaning 'border.' The prefix za means 'beyond.' "
Mr. Katzner thinks that the translation near abroad, with or without capitals, is an abomination because abroad is essentially an adverb that should not be preceded by a modifier, and that the translator is someone "we should string up by his heels," apparently an old authoritarian custom.
This position is countered by Christian Caryl of Berlin, who writes: "Both German and Russian routinely and naturally use abroad as a noun. When confronted with near abroad for the first time, I remember wondering how I'd translate it into English, where abroad is so strictly adjectival -- the 'nearby foreign countries'? Imagine my delight when I began to see others blithely breaking the rules. Now abroad has entered English as a noun."
My Berlin correspondent says he noted in his diary on June 7, 1991, this explanation of the concept in Russian: " 'The term originally had an ironic nuance,' said the historian Ivan Ivanovich. 'People spoke of nastoyashchyeye za rubezhye, "the present-day abroad." But now the words have acquired a purely informational meaning, in order to distinguish the new states of the C.I.S. [ Commonwealth of Independent States, a title now in the dustbin of history ] from the "original" abroad.' "
To follow up the history of the phrase in Russian, without citations: "Near abroad was used extensively by Soviet dissidents in the 1970's and 80's," notes Terry Thompson of Ellicott City, Md. "Russians under Brezhnev used the expression in either ironic or wistful tones. The serious connotation of the phrase was that the Russian people had to sacrifice a higher standard of living to support their 'socialist comrades' everywhere."
William Bodie of Los Angeles first heard the expression in January 1992 from Paul Goble of the Carnegie Endowment as a term in use throughout political Moscow referring to the non-Russian republics of the recently defunct U.S.S.R. He sees the phrase as political rather than geographical or demographic.
"Rightly or wrongly," Mr. Bodie writes, "Russia's political classes have difficulty viewing the republics on its periphery as fully sovereign entities; use of the term near abroad, in addition to qualifying their independence, signifies to the 'far abroad' that Russia claims certain rights in the region that transcend traditional diplomatic conventions."
Many of the people in those adjacent countries, especially the non-Russians, reject this heavy-handed Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine that some Moscow officials call a "hen gathering up its chicks."
Mr. Bodie notes, "In Riga, Kiyiv and a dozen other capitals, the chicks consider Russian policy to be the Roosevelt Corollary as interpreted by Ivan the Terrible."
Thus, what we know so far about this most significant diplomatic coinage since the popularization of detente in the early 70's is that it made the jump into English in early 1992, and that near abroad means "the claim by Russia of political interest and influence in states adjacent to it that were once part of the Soviet Union." Some political lexicographers (namely, me) insist that it has a second sense of "ethnic Russians living as a minority, sometimes supposedly oppressed, outside the borders of Russia."