Conspiracy or Truth - Was Boston Bomber “Radicalized” at US Sponsored Counterterrorism Workshop?

Promoting "Instability and Extremism in Southern Regions of Russia"

Just as the US supported Bin Laden and the precursor of Al Qaeda in order to fight the Soviets, the US has supported Chechen terrorists in order to fight Russia. On Wednesday, the Russian newspaper Izvestia alleged that the older Boston Tamarlan bombing brother attended a workshop – sponsored by an American organization – on destabilizing the Russian satellite states:

By Washington's Blog
Global Research

Who Radicalized the Boston Bomber?

    At the disposal of “Izvestia” has documents Counterintelligence Department Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia, confirming that the Georgian organization “Fund of Caucasus” [here's their website], which cooperates with the U.S. non-profit organization “Jamestown” (the board of directors of NGOs previously entered one of the ideologists of U.S. foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski), was engaged in recruiting residents North Caucasus to work in the interests of the United States and Georgia.
    According to the reports of Colonel Chief Directorate Counterintelligence Department Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia Gregory Chanturia to the Minister of Internal Affairs Irakli Garibashvili, “Caucasian fund” in cooperation with the Foundation “Jamestown” in the summer of 2012 conducted workshops and seminars for young people of the Caucasus, including its Russian part. Some of them attended Tsarnaev Tamerlane, who was in Russia from January to July 2012.
    “Caucasian fund” writes Tchanturia was established November 7, 2008, just after the Georgian-Ossetian conflict, “to control the processes taking place in the North Caucasus region.” Accordingly, the Department of the Interior Ministry counterintelligence case was brought intelligence operations called “DTV”. Main purpose is to recruit young people and intellectuals of the North Caucasus to enhance instability and extremism in the southern regions of Russia.

    ***
    In addition, Colonel counterintelligence Tbilisi reports that security forces in Chechnya through Georgia “Caucasian fund” and fund “Jamestown” are sympathetic to the Georgian people, who are invited to various events in the republic under the innocent pretexts. In these seminars, the Russians are recruiting and preparing acts of terrorism.

    ***
    Director General of the National Strategy Council Valery Hamsters argues that exaggerated the force of external enemy in Georgia may be beneficial to the management of the North Caucasian republics. [In other words, they are creating a strategy of tension.]
    - I think the danger is exaggerated Georgian factor – the expert believes. – Personally, I have no doubt that Georgia only deals with the introduction of its spies and recruit Russian citizens.

    ***
    Jamestown Foundation has repeatedly demonstrated its interest in Georgia and the state of affairs in Russia’s North Caucasus. In 2007, the Foundation held a seminar “The Future of Ingushetia,” which was attended by former fighters of Aslan Maskhadov.

    ***
    The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly responded to the ongoing policy of the fund, handing over a protest note to U.S. in Moscow.

Izvestia – being a Russian state-run newspaper – obviously has an axe to grind, and is biased against Georgian interests. However, the Russian government contracted the U.S. multiple times to warn them about Tamerlan Tsarnaev … who was on a U.S. watch list for terrorism.

The sponsor of the seminar – the Jamestown Foundation – was founded with help from CIA director William Casey, has extensive links to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, and is closely connected with key Neocons.

John Kerry Coming To Athens To Talk (Geo)Politics

US Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to visit Greece in mid-May in an effort to renew ties between the two countries as well as discuss Greece's role in helping keep stability in a region critical to American interests, particularly the ongoing unrest in Syria.

The trip was arranged when the US Secretary of State met with Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos earlier this week on the sidelines of a NATO conference in Brussels. At their 40-minute meeting they discussed the economic crisis in Greece and other pending issues.

Greek government officials are seeking to renew Washington's trust in Athens's ability to play a stabilizing geopolitical role in the region.

Anastasiades: No intention to penalise political life

Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades said on Wednesday that the government neither intends nor aims at penalising political life, noting at the same time that no one enjoys immunity with respect to the investigations into the circumstances that have led economic hardship.

Speaking at the Presidential Palace during the swearing-in ceremony of the new member of the Investigation Committee on the responsibilities for the Republic of Cyprus' economic situation Eliana Nicolaou, who substituted Panagiotis Kallis who resigned on Monday from the Committee, Anastasiades noted that "any criminal responsibilities that may emerge lie within the responsibility of the independent judiciary and not the government."

Addressing Nicolaou, Anastasiades said that the government has provided the Investigation Committee with very broad terms of reference and added: "it is your sole responsibility to fulfill your mandate based on sound judgment, ethics and your career and experience," noting that Nicolaou as well as the President of the Committee George Pikis and the member of the Committee Andreas Kramvis are highly regarded in the Cypriot society. (CNA)

BUSTED - Authorities Crack Down On Illegal Medicines Trafficking

The Greek police's Organized Crime Squad together with the financial crimes squad (SDOE) is conducting a major operation in Athens and in other cities nationwide, targeting the members of a huge network that is apparently active in, and/or engaged in the trafficking of, illegal drugs (medicines) used in assisted reproduction procedures.

Reports in Athens are saying that involved in the network are pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies as well as specific individuals. The same reports also note that a few suspects have already been questioned by authorities, while considerable quantities of the illegal medicines have also been confiscated.

Child Hunger Is Exploding In Greece – 14 Signs That It Is Now In The US Too

The world is heading into a horrific economic nightmare, and an inordinate amount of the suffering is going to fall on innocent children.  If you want to get an idea of what America is going to look like in the not too distant future, just check out what is happening in Greece.  At this point, Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic depression.  As I have written about previously, the unemployment rate in Greece has now risen to 27 percent, which is much higher than the peak unemployment rate that the U.S. economy experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And as you will read about below, child hunger is absolutely exploding in Greece right now.

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse Blog

Some families are literally trying to survive on pasta and ketchup.  But don't think for a moment that it can't happen here.  Sadly, the truth is that child hunger is already rising very rapidly in our poverty-stricken cities.  Never before have we had so many Americans unable to take care of themselves. Food stamp enrollment and child homelessness have soared to brand new all-time records, and there are actually thousands of Americans who are so poor that they live in tunnels underneath our cities.

But for millions of other Americans, the suffering is not quite so dramatic.  Instead, they just watch their hopes and their dreams slowly slip away as they struggle to find a way to make it from month to month.  There are millions of parents that lead lives that are filled with constant stress and anxiety as they try to figure out how to provide the basics for their children.  How do you tell a child that you can't give them any dinner even though you have been trying as hard as you can?  What many families go through on a regular basis is absolutely heartbreaking.  Unfortunately, more poor families slip through the cracks with each passing day, and these are supposedly times in which we are experiencing an "economic recovery".  So what are things going to look like when the next major economic downturn strikes?

A recent New York Times article detailed the horrifying child hunger that we are witnessing in Greece right now.  At some schools there are reports of children actually begging for food from their classmates...

    As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.
    “He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground. He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.

Could you imagine that happening to your children or your grandchildren? Don't think that it can't happen. Just a few years ago the Greek middle class was vibrant and thriving. And we are starting to see hunger explode in other European countries as well.  For example, in the UK the number of people receiving emergency food rations has increased by 170 percent over the past year.

This is one of the reasons why I get upset when people say that "things are getting better".  Yes, the stock market has been setting record highs lately, but things are most definitely not getting better.

Even during this false bubble of debt-fueled economic stability that we are enjoying right now, we continue to see hunger and poverty rise dramatically in America.

Since Barack Obama has been president, the number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 32 million to more than 47 million.

Will we all be on food stamps eventually?

Will we all become dependent on the government for our survival at some point?

According to the Boston Herald, even Tamerlan Tsarnaev was receiving government welfare benefits...

    Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.
    State officials confirmed that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits.

Isn't that crazy?

And yes, there are some people out there that are abusing the system. In fact, the cost of food stamp fraud has risen sharply to approximately $750 million in recent years. But most of the people on these programs really need the help. Thanks to our incredibly foolish economic policies, there are not enough good jobs for everyone and there never will be again. The percentage of Americans that are unable to take care of themselves is going to continue to rise, and the suffering that we are witnessing right now is going to get much, much worse.

Not that things aren't really, really bad already.  Here are some signs that child hunger in America has already started to explode...

• 1. Today, approximately 17 million children in the United States are facing food insecurity.  In other words, that means that "one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life."
• 2. We are told that we live in the "wealthiest nation" on the planet, and yet more than one out of every four children in the United States is enrolled in the food stamp program.
• 3. The average food stamp benefit breaks down to approximately $4 per person per day.
• 4. It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps before they reach the age of 18.
• 5. It may be hard to believe, but approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are currently living in homes that are either considered to be either "low income" or impoverished.
• 6. The number of children living on $2.00 a day or less in the United States has grown to 2.8 million.  That number has increased by 130 percent since 1996.
• 7. According to Feeding America, "households with children reported food insecurity at a significantly higher rate than those without children, 20.6 percent compared to 12.2 percent".
• 8. According to a Feeding America hunger study, more than 37 million Americans are now being served by food pantries and soup kitchens.
• 9. For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless.  That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
• 10. Approximately 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.
• 11. One university study estimates that child poverty costs the U.S. economy 500 billion dollars each year.
• 12. In Miami, 45 percent of all children are living in poverty.
• 13. In Cleveland, more than 50 percent of all children are living in poverty.
• 14. According to a recently released report, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

For many more facts about the dramatic explosion of poverty in this country, please see my previous article entitled "21 Statistics About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America That Everyone Should Know".

Unfortunately, most of the time statistics don't really tell the whole story.  Numbers alone cannot really communicate the soul-crushing despair that millions of American families are enduring on a daily basis at this point. How can numbers communicate the pain that a child feels when her grandmother does not eat because there is not enough food for everyone in the family?  But this is what some families in America actually go through because there is not enough money...

    Vanyshia tells about the sacrifices her Grandmother makes so that she and her siblings can eat. “Sometimes my Grandma can’t even eat because she has to feed me and my brother and sister. Sometimes I don’t eat as much as I want to because I leave some for my Grandma because I don’t want her to sit there and starve. Sometimes she doesn’t have enough money to buy food, so she has to go to the bank and borrow money. It makes me feel sad. I don’t want her to be hungry. I just feel sad sometimes,” says Vanyshia.

Things can be particularly tough when you are a single parent.  The BBC recently profiled a single mother that is struggling to raise two young children in Iowa...

    "We don't get three meals a day like breakfast, lunch and then dinner," says Kaylie. "When I feel hungry I feel sad and droopy."
    Kaylie and Tyler live with their mother Barbara, who used to work in a factory. After losing her job, she was entitled to unemployment benefit and food stamps - this comes to $1,480 (£974) a month.
    But they were no longer able to afford to live in their house, which along with bills cost $1,326 (£873) a month, leaving little for food or petrol.
    Kaylie supplemented their income by collecting cans along the railway track near their old home - earning between two and five cents per can.

For more examples like this one, I encourage everyone to go watch a recent BBC documentary entitled "America's Poor Kids" that you can see right here. I wonder why we don't see more stuff like this on the mainstream news? Could it be that the mainstream media does not want to admit how bad things have really gotten?

All of this is also a reminder that we need to be generous to those in need.

Times are going to get much, much harder than this, and we are all going to need one another.

So do you have any stories of poverty or child hunger from your area of the country to share? Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below...

This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog.  Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Consensus Shredded - Main Stream Media Up Against The Wall - MUST READ

Television news is shriveling. And it’s under attack from a new breed. You can call them counter-programmers, video freaks, whatever. But they’re winning. Every dollar and inch of technology the networks employ move toward an irrefutable image on the screen. “Here it is. Look.” And counter-programmers say, “Look again. See those guys in the yellow jackets standing right near the bomb when it goes off? They don’t move at all. They’re fine.”

by Jon Rappoport
www.nomorefakenews.com

There is something very powerful in that response, because people are addicted to images. When the image you’re watching blows up, because somebody forces you to see something new, you start to wake up and effect a cure, even if you don’t want to.

Image-addiction is sacred to people.

No one goes to the movies and comes out saying, “You know, images don’t really add up to anything. It’s a waste of time.”

No one walks into the Sistine Chapel, looks at Michelangelo’s ceiling, and says, “Why did they bother? They could have just written down a message to explain what the ceiling means.”

No one asks, “Why did they have the president sit there in the Oval Office and address the nation? He could have written a statement or talked on radio.”

Image.

Unbeatable.

So when major media cover a monster of the story, on television, they’re producing images by the ton, day after day, and the anchors are telling us what they add up to, and most viewers soak it all in and accept the force of it as irresistible truth.

If television presents Aurora, Sandy Hook, Boston, and if it pours thousands of impact images at us and tells us what they mean, what are the chances television will, upon learning new facts, reverse course?

What are the odds?

Virtually zero.

Of course, the networks are unwilling to admit mistakes or lies. But at another level, this is television’s unwillingness to injure the medium itself and what it does.

    “We showed you all those images and we burned them into your brains, to program you, and now we’re going to say that was an illusion?”

Never happens.

The people who own and run television never turn around, on a huge story, and endanger their medium by admitting that the images were deceptions. Because they’re drug dealers, and their drug is Image.

If the Constitution were written today, people would want to watch it being done, in the room in Philadelphia. They’d want to watch the men at work. They’d want to make up their minds about the Constitution as they would any other television show.

    “Well, today, amid long-winded arguments about the proposed Bill of Rights, audience share dropped eight points.”

Why does Obama take the Sandy Hook parents around with him, as he promotes his gun agenda? So audiences can hear them speak? So audiences can see them speak.

Why do the networks lay on those interminable news-talk programs, with hosts and guests? Why don’t they consign them to radio? Because people want to see the participants talk.

Image.

    “Here, let’s sit down and watch these six people talk. Let’s see what they look like when they talk.”

    “I love watching Chris Matthews talk.”

Now, when a person gets on (Internet) TV and blows up major media and exposes it and tears it from stem to stern, that’s different. That’s counter-programming. People start to come out of a dream-state and realize they’re finally watching something they’ve been longing for:

    “Here’s a television image. See it? It’s a lie. It’s not what you think it is. Let’s do this in slow motion, one frame at a time. Look at the corner over there. Do you see the yellow glare suddenly appearing at the top of the screen? Just beyond the plume of smoke? At the top left? That yellow glare isn’t connected to the burning fertilizer factory in the center of the screen. It’s separate! It’s coming in from the left. And then, less than a second later, the whole building explodes! See it? So what was that glare at the top left? Think about it. Consider the possibilities. For example, the burning building wouldn’t have blown up all on its own … something came in from the left and blew it up …”

    Taking an image apart.

It’s the beginning of the end of television.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now, 24/7, wherever videos are posted on the Net. The assault is well underway.

    “Look at that gas mask on the ground behind the Aurora theater. Who does it belong to? Was a second shooter wearing it? And there on the pavement, is that a trail of blood leading into the theater?”

Don’t worry about the fact that some of these counter-programmers are making mistakes or unwarranted leaps of judgment. The overall force is taking down television.

Impaling it on its own sword: image.

Television desperately needs events like Aurora, Sandy Hook, and Boston. When the big tragedies hit, and the elite anchors go on the road and show up in the towns where the blood is spilling and the people are in a state of extreme shock, the television audience at home gets another deep injection of mass mind control, through image-insertion.

But now, within days, even hours, counter-programmers are striking back, by playing network broadcast footage and pointing out flaws and contradictions and mistakes and deceptions, and posting these findings.

    “You thought image was the end-all and be-all. All right, look at this!”

Crash a picture, take it apart, re-explain it, and you make people think.

This is the formula that’s burying television.

It’s exactly what surrealists did a hundred years ago. Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Alfred Jarry, Dali. But today, it’s happening to the news, to television. Right now. Story by story. For all to see.

The Matrix Revealed

Among many other reasons, this is why we’re witnessing the effort to censor and control the Internet. The news networks want to assert a propriety of copyright on their footage and punish those who use it against them.

Backed by billions of dollars, Brian Williams and Scott Pelley and Diane Sawyer say this and show that, and one guy in Ohio says NO and I’LL PROVE IT TO YOU WITH YOUR OWN IMAGES.

The hounds are loose.

These hounds are sitting in rooms making the networks and the greatest law-enforcement agencies in the world look like cheap hawkers at carnivals.

Frame by frame.

Umberto Eco, in 1979, wrote:

    “A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection—not an invitation for hypnosis.”

No, Umberto, there was never any chance of that happening. Not as an official program of the culture. Instead, we have a new breed now. And they’re buzzsawing those images, splitting them open.

Big newspapers have so-called television critics who size up shows and comment on them. The Internet has television critics who magnify news footage and point to what nobody saw in it.

    “Watch this Sandy Hook father who just lost his child come to the podium to speak. Watch. See him smiling and laughing? Watch it again. Here it is. What do you make of that? Keep looking. See him get into character all of a sudden? See him make himself grieve right there? Are you kidding? What’s really going on here?”
    “See the puff of smoke from the first bomb in Boston? It goes straight up. Not out into the street. See those people near the explosion? Do they look bothered by it in any way? They’re just standing there.”

These counter-programmers are cracking people’s junk-image-addiction by showing them a “higher order” of those images.

Remember Wag the Dog, that splendid movie about inventing a fictitious war in order to get a president re-elected? The president had to have a war. He was sagging in the polls. So the war was put on television.

But there’s another layer to the story. Television needed the fake war, too. It always needs staged events. Without them it would shrivel and die.

Except the events have to look exactly like “real life.”

When counter-programmers get busy, they reveal the staging, and the whole business falls to pieces.

    “Hooked? Do you feel like you’re going to die if you don’t turn on the TV set? Sign up for our ten-day cure. We’ll turn you into a counter-programmer. We’ll take you through our wake-up course in image analysis, and you’ll come out the other side as a meta-wizard, ready to take on the world of false news.”

To say this is corrosive to network television news is a vast understatement. It’s a Waterloo.

Against the citizen video-analysts, television would have only one solution: stop broadcasting footage.

Exit From the Matrix

Here is a fragment from a short story I wrote a few days after the Aurora theater massacre. It illustrates the potential effect of a counter-programmer:

I sat in my private cabin and watched wall screens displaying decks on the slow-moving airship; I understood there were seven levels. On Deck Three, I saw Mr. R. Smith-Jones, a fifth-generation android, who was occupying two rows. He was propped up on a wheelchair-couch. He was growling and snarling at a doughy flight attendant turned out in a jeans tuxedo and a sombrero made of balloons and artificial peacock feathers.

Smith-Jones’ infamous three-year case, tried in the Superior Court of Newfoundland New York, had ground to a halt, when Judge Sleepy Shigitz decided Smith-Jones had earned the right to multiple classifications of Life Disabled.

On the screen, Smith-Jones was waving two objects which, to me, looked like cataclysmic salt shakers. They were spewing crystals that emitted smoke when they hit the air. Passengers started coughing.

Then I realized Smith-Jones was holding patterning cylinders he’d pulled from his innards. These cylinders played a major role in what his Alamo designers called Repetitive Accommodation. I knew this because Smith-Jones had pulled the trick a number of times, on each occasion subsequently filing suit for environmental incursion. Once, as porters were pushing him up the Matterhorn in his wheel-chair couch, he’d yanked out the cylinders, asserting the thinning atmosphere was slowing down his speech-recognition faculty; he’d won a major settlement in a Swiss tribunal.

All in all, over the course of a hundred years, Smith-Jones’ lawsuits had earned him more than twenty billion dollars.

Now he was foaming at the mouth and spitting. He doubled over and a siren went off. It was amplified by a speaker in his skull. A security guard appeared with a riot baton and sent a blue fork of electricity into his genitals, quieting him somewhat.

Smith-Jones was the majority stockholder of NBCCBSABC Networks, Inc. As such, he had at his disposal the InZap technology.

He deployed it now.

At horrific high speed, he began broadcasting images of a flaming city and people dying and crackling in the heat. Then, black tanks appeared. Soldiers dressed in combat gear moved in and sprayed streets with chemical retardant from wide hoses.

The flames died. Other soldiers ran down and arrested two fleeing suspects, and the InZAP emitted waves of relief throughout Smith-Jones’ cabin. People wept in their seats.

Smith-Jones said, “Thus we are rescued.”

“Thank God,” one passenger said.

A scruffy boy stood up and aimed his cell at a white wall. Pictures appeared there. “As you can see,” he said, “ people actually fried and died, but over at the far right of the street, a soldier is setting the initial fire. See him? The two suspects they caught later were patsies.”

Everyone looked, and everyone froze.

Smith-Jones said, “You don’t understand. I can take all those images away, as if they’d never existed. I own them.”

    “Right,” the boy said. “But then what are you going to put on television? Giraffes? Peaceful streets at night under a warm moon?”

Three days later, I would learn that: reclining in his suite at the Ritz Hotel in Beverly Hills, sketching out yet another cause-for-action, this time for improper Hotel tech support on his (merely decorative) breathing apparatus, Smith-Jones stopped functioning. He entered a state of paralysis. He shut down. According to Hotel employees, he wore an unchanging expression of sadness.

On his night table, he’d left a note:

    “My existence is zero. I seem to be employing an unending string of morons who can’t plan and execute a disaster without exposing themselves.
    “It’s a bit ironic that the desecration of IQ I’ve fostered all these years, through the medium I own and control, has also been my undoing. Operatives are now unable to perform. I hire them; they fail me.
    “The entire population has brains of oatmeal. Yet, when some nobody points out a fatal flaw in my news stream, they all begin to wake up. How is that possible?
    “I could sue and sue and sue and gain all the money in the world, but it appears I’m incapable of placing humans in a trance whereby they forget I’m just a machine, a heartless bastard of a machine.
    “And that’s all I ever wanted. To make people think of me as one of their own. But I never will. And now I am Not.”

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Turkish Daily Publishes Map Showing Ottoman Occupation of Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, etc.

credit novinite.com

Talk about audacity! In another provocative move, the Turkish Milliyet daily recently published a map of what it characterized was the "New Turkey" and which appears to “occupy” large territories in Northern Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, northern regions of Syria, northern Iraq, and even regions in Azerbaijan and Georgia! The map and relevant article were apparently published on March 23rd, 2013, but unknown until today.

According to the Russian Regnum news agency, the report in the Turkish daily left it to be understood that a powerful new republic is going to be set up within the border of the former Ottoman Empire. And we ask... How much more will it take until someone, somewhere actually asks them to sh***t the f**ck up!

But it only gets worse, the Russian news agency said that a related report was also published in the Hurriyet daily, under the title (more or less) the Great Turkey. The article said that Cyprus and Greece are on the edge of a complete collapse and that the only thing Athens and Nicosia can hope for is that Turkey can feel pity for them and agree to give them a piece of the energy deposits in the Mediterranean Sea. (Incredible audacity!!!)

HellasFrappe still hasn't seen any reaction by Greek authorities on this, but we did log on to novinite.com and were pleasantly surprised to see that only did Bulgarian authorities react to this map, but Bulgarian Prime Minister Marin Raykov even said that he finds the map to be absolutely scandalous!

The Turkish paper’s article argued in favor of the establishment of a powerful new state within the former Ottoman Empire, according to Bulgarian media.

    “The map is so scandalous that it does not deserve a comment from a Prime Minister, but only his disdain,” the Bulgarian PM told reporters.

However, Raykov did say that Turkey should not be held responsible for the publication. (We beg to differ, because we are in the opinion that these two particular newspapers are the eyes and ears of the government and they do not print something up by chance, everything is done for a reason.)

Let's see when the Greek government will react.

Tick... tock... tick... tock...

References
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=149834
http://www.focus-fen.net/index.php?id=n304968

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• TRAGIC - Greek Businessman Actually Begs Turks to Save Greek Factories
• Turks Buying Up Land In Thrace - Gold To Austria Via Thessaloniki, Erdogan's Purge & Mario Draghicula
• PROVOCATION - Turkey To Cyprus: "You Will Share Your Deposits!"
• Strong Neo-Ottoman Influence In The Balkans

Boston Bombing: Citizen Journalists Create Problems for Controlled Media - MUST READ

The following article is from Jon Rappoport  and it was posted on Activist Post. This is a wonderful article about the information war between the mainstream media, and citizen journalism (such as blogs). As a blog, HellasFrappe highly recommends that everyone reads this article. With a bit of sarcasm and a delightful twist of wit, Mr. Rappoport really gets his point across. However, we don't know if we believe that there were actors involved in this particular terrorist attack, -sounds a little stretched- or at least we do not want to believe that authorities would stoop that low. That indeed would be shocking if proven. HellasFrappe might be a blog that focuses on Greek news, we cannot help but be curious about this story, because let's face it, it affects the whole world. Also, we cannot help but be curious as to why this particular tragedy in Boston, and everything that has been reported about it does not have any consistency. There is much to much conflicting information that was given by the mainstream media, which was only changed once bloggers began to reveal another side to the story. If this hurt the media, tuff luck, they should have been doing their jobs. This is what journalism should be about. It is not about having your 5 minutes of fame in front of a television camera. Also, we believe that this is why people are interested in this particular story so much, because they see that the truth only began being unearthed only after citizen journalists, and/or alternative news sites, began actually posting another side to the story. We believe that this is a good thing, especially for North America and Europe, because if we want to promote democracy to other nations, then freedom of speech and thought should be the first thing that must be endorsed. Moreoever, haven't you all had enough with stupidity? We know we have... And we don't really fancy feeling like m@lakes with everything we read, when we see that its just not so. Also, the tragedy in Boston and everything that occurred after that should inspire the mainstream media worldwide to finally begin reporting, instead of acting like parrots of a formal news agency. We here at HellasFrappe truly believe that the world has been fed much too much propaganda about global events, and believe that all of those who continue to want to leave us in the dark are doing so because they are cowards to face up to what is obviously a very, very foul smelling system. This article is therefore a MUST READ in our book!

Jon Rappoport 
Activist Post 

You’re a reporter for a TV news outlet. You’ve become aware of a disturbing trend. Thousands of private citizens are now analyzing video and photographs of crime scenes and posting their findings. They’re hounds, and they can’t be stopped. They’re looking at news footage, casual video, photos, and what they’re coming up with challenges the official story lines your network pushes. Some of the their analysis is ridiculous, but some of it isn’t.

For example, video footage of the first bomb in Boston doesn’t appear to show any shrapnel damage to the fencing near the explosion, or to the blue canopy just above the street. You, the reporter, wonder about that.

The now-famous 78-year-old runner who fell down in the street, just after the first explosion? Security personnel wearing yellow jackets were standing closer to the bomb, but they didn’t wobble or duck or waver. You, the reporter, wonder about that, too.

You, the reporter, see a photo of a storefront which was presumably right next to the first bomb. The windows are blown out. But all the glass is lying in the street, which would indicate the force of the explosion was coming from inside the store. How is that possible, you ask yourself.

Then there are the quickly circulating photos of the man in the wheelchair. He’s missing large parts of both legs. People are pushing the chair. His legs are bleeding. But other posted photos? Do they show he already was wearing prosthetics? Is it true he should already be dead from the massive blood loss? You, the reporter, are disturbed by this.

You also look at several photos of the pressure-cooker bomb. In the twisted metal remains, you see discoloration, but no signs the nails or ball bearings in the bomb penetrated the pressure cooker or pitted it or ended up embedded in it.

You look at photos of men standing near the Marathon finish line, the men in identical uniforms, who have variously been described as Navy Seals, Coast Guard, and Craft International security personnel.

What were they doing there? Running a drill?

Watching suspects or patsies or bomb-planters?

What was going on?

You look at a photo of the younger Tsarnaev brother leaving the scene after the bombs went off. He’s still … wearing his backpack? And another photo, the one of the ripped-apart backpack on the ground. Is that a white square on it? Because one of the Seal-Craft-Coast Guard guys had a white square on his intact backpack … and is that him, leaving the scene of the bombing without that backpack?

Hmmm…

You, the reporter, now face several quandaries.

First, if you decide to look into all this, you’ll have to do actual work. Investigation. That isn’t part of your job description. You basically talk to official sources, obtain their statements, repeat them, and sound like you know what you’re talking about.
Investigation?

What’s that?

Second, if you undertake a serious inquiry, you’re going to have to verify that all these photos and all this video footage are pristine and haven’t been altered or cropped in order to mislead.

You’ll have to find experts to help you.

More work.

You’re already feeling exhausted, just thinking about it.

On the other hand, your network has shown faked and cropped photos and edited footage in the past, to slant stories. So maybe you can get by with less work. However, there is a rule in your business. Reporters aren’t allowed to follow their noses.

They aren’t allowed to do investigations on their own. They most definitely aren’t permitted to do technical analysis of evidence, like crime-scene photos or video. No, all technical interpretation has to come from government agencies.

If you go off the reservation, you’ll take heavy hits from your bosses.

But all this is meaningless. It’s just mental masturbation, because, finally, you know there is no possible way your producer will allow you to present evidence that the official Boston scenario has gaping holes in it.

Your own network has the explicit job of promoting that scenario.

You’d be torpedoing your own people.

Professional suicide.

Just walking into your producer’s office and pointing to issues raised by private-citizen analysis of video?

It would put you on a watch list.

Your producer would think, “this guy’s gone soft in the head. He wants to pursue a story on his own. He must be some kind of grandstanding goof. He doesn’t have a firm grip on things. He doesn’t know what his job really is. And he wants to raise doubts about the Boston bombing? Wow…”

To the degree that you have any shred of conscience left, you’re in a bind. Maybe it’s the moment to offload that last bit of idealism and go completely corporate. It’s not as if you’ve been challenging your bosses; you’ve just been asking yourself questions privately.

So what’s the problem?

Just stop asking the questions.

Maybe you’re depressed. Maybe you should go in and see a shrink and get a script for Zoloft. Something to take the edge off. Of course, then you’d have to cut back on your drinking.

Screw that.

Just up the booze.

Have a few more every night after work. Make the coffee stronger in the morning.

Wait. An idea is forming.

It’s coming.

Sit there. Let it formulate.

Mmmm….

Yes. Yes! Here it is.

Some of these video hounds are saying no one at all was hurt or killed in Boston; the whole bombing thing was a hoax. Well, tell that to the doctors at the hospitals who were doing amputations.

Okay. Okay. Now you’re on to something. You can feel it. There’s an obvious way to destroy all this wildcat video evidence in one fell swoop and, at the same time, endear yourself to your bosses.

They’ll be grateful. You can rack up some brownie points. They’ll think of you as a company man. A tough defender of the realm, their realm.

Anyway, you’ve got a deadline to meet. You have to put something together. It may as well be this:

Take the most radical opinions these video hounds are promoting, package them all into one article, and imply that every hound is a complete freak.

All their video analysis must be wrong, because they’re all crazy.

It’s the old rejection by generality. And by ad hominem. By straw man. Didn’t you learn something about those logical fallacies in college?

Time to put them to use.

Do the conspiracy-theorist thing. Say these weirdos have far too much time on their hands. And what else? They’re dangerous.

Sure.

Refer back to that FBI dude who’s in charge of the Boston investigation, DesLauriers, who said people should focus on helping the investigation by looking at certain photos and no others.

How did he put it? He said there were irrelevant photos out there, and if people tipped the FBI to them, they’d overload agents and delay the search for the bombers.

That’s it. These private video hounds are dangerous. They’re giving people too much information.

So they have crazy ideas, one. They’re saying nobody was hurt, there were no bombs, two. They’re claiming all the bleeding people at the Marathon were actors brought in from some outfit in Colorado, three. They’re saying these massacre ops are designed to shut down freedom in America, four. They’re dangerous, five.

Roll all that up into a ball and you’re good to go. Whatever they’ve actually got in terms of troubling and disturbing and truthful video and photo evidence will disappear in a sea of ridicule.

Perfect.

Imply there are two basic classes of people: the normals and the crazies. The crazies are threatening the rest of us. They’re multiplying like fruit flies. They’re swarming the Internet. They’re disrespecting the wounded and dead - don’t forget that one. How dare they come out with all this insanity as the families are grieving and in turmoil.

Yeah. There is only one true stream of information, and the public has to know it. It (ONLY) comes from the major networks.

There has to be a central story line, because if there isn’t, the whole country will fall into chaos. Don’t actually say that, but realize you’re on the side of the angels here. You’re standing tall against the barbarians at the gates.

Right. You’re giving the audience a choice. Do they want to be nuts, or do they want to be normal. Normal is the wave of the future. Soon, that’s all there will be. The others will be wiped out. They have no cache. They have no right to challenge the order of things.

Isn’t that what Arthur Jensen said in the movie Network? There is one planetary, galactic order of things, and everybody has live under it.

Expand the piece. Take it all the way back to 9/11, and the loonies who claimed the towers couldn’t have been taken down by the planes. Yeah. They said there were bombs inside the buildings. They said Building 7 didn’t go down from a fire. Idiots.

Why not do history? Makes you sound smarter. JFK. “Oswald didn’t act alone.” That’s where it all started, that’s how the conspiracy germ spread. It was a disease.

That’s a great metaphor. The plague of conspiracy theories. It had a ground zero, in Dallas, on November 22nd, 1963. From there, the virus moved through time. It’s all one epidemic.

Call a few shrinks. Get comments from them. A psychological pandemic. These guys always want face time. Give it to them. Let them speculate on why the plague is accelerating.

Geez. Maybe this could become a three-part series. “We investigate the trend of conspiracy thinking. Why is it happening? Who are these people? Where do they come from? What do they really want?”

Then … oh yeah. We find some guy who was a conspiracy nut but he woke up and realized he was about to go off the cliff, so he stepped back. He was addicted. It was an addiction. He had alienated his whole family and all his friends.

Then he had a revelation. He saw what had happened to him. Get a few juicy quotes. “I needed a way to rebel against society, so I chose this. It was a fad. I joined up. It was a kind of cult. I made new friends. But then I saw that these people weren’t like me. I was ruining my life. I was walking around paranoid all the time … I finally came to my senses …”

Nail down the place and time when he woke up. Maybe take a camera crew there. “This was the spot. I was walking along this stretch of beach one night, all alone, and it hit me. I was isolated. I had no ties left to my community …”

Yeah. Plays very well. Do you want to be in the cold, on the outside, or do you want to be near the hearth, where the tribe is safe?

With a series, a three-part “investigation,” you could establish yourself as the go-to guy whenever a new conspiracy theory pops up. They’d come to you. You, the expert. This could be a very good career move.

And why pretend? That’s what you’re in this for, isn’t it? A career? So stop fooling around with all the freakazoid photo and video evidence. Just go for it.

It’s a war. The independent journalists and bloggers and video loons are trying to steal food out of your kids’ mouths. You can lie down in the road or you can fight back. If you’re going to fight, take off the gloves. Screw that half-way stuff.

Who knows more about conspiracies than anyone else? The CIA, the FBI, the intelligence community. Hell, after a few years of attacking the weirdos and nutballs out there, you might graduate up into a more distinguished and rarefied atmosphere, where real conspiracies are planned and carried out for the sake of national security. The real stuff, the right stuff.

You could become a “national intelligence correspondent.” Wouldn’t that be something. You’d have access to the big boys and some of their secrets. You’d prove you could be trusted.

You’d never have to look at another foot of video put together by losers who’ll never get within a thousand miles of real news.

You’ll never have to wonder whether you’re doing the right thing. You’ll live in a place that’s far from the madding crowd. You’ll drink single malt instead of rotgut. You’ll sit down with senators and lobbyists and bankers and diplomats.

You’ll turn into a controlled drunk who knows when to start and when to stop. You’ll find inner peace and all that crap, knowing you’re serving the best interests of your country and the people who own it and run it.

You’ll write a movie script about the Agency stopping a terrorist plot in New York. You’ll meet people from Hollywood.

One night, high above the city of angels, a beautiful actress will take you in her arms…

And some day, through your CIA connections, you’ll learn about a brain-bending scandal that’s brewing under the surface of Washington, and they’ll give you the green light to go out there and dig up the information you already have in your back pocket.

You’ll be Bob Woodward and the doors will open for you wherever you go.

You’ll be unstoppable.

You’ll be the man who finds out all the secrets ...

... except the real ones.

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Greek Shipowners Gift Boats To Coast Guard

Greek shipowners apparently gifted two high-speed boats for the Coast Guard's underwater missions, in the framework of showing that they are sympathetic to the difficulties that the Greek people are facing. The 700,000- euro gift by the Union of Greek Shipowners was presented to the government at the Ministry of Shipping and the Aegean at the Vassiliadis section of Greece's main port of Piraeus.

Some would say that this was an act of kindness, and it is, but considering how much money these shipowners save from not paying taxes to the Greek state then we here at HellasFrappe can boldly say that they got off cheap! Nonetheless, their donation to the poor and suffering Greek state is appreciated. The boats are expected to assist the unit of underwater missions with eradicating any illegal acts in Greek waters and help the Coast Guard in its systematic and arduous efforts of patrolling the sea borders of Greece.

At the presentation earlier this week, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras affirmed his commitment to the Shipping and Aegean Ministry, and noted that "for Greece not to have a Shipping Ministry is like Saudi Arabia not having an Oil Ministry."

    "Today I am at the headquarters of Greek shipping which we built after great effort and whose reconstitution was affirmed two days ago by the drafting and voting of the relevant draft bill," he dded.

Prior to his speech, the premier was given a tour of the search and rescue centre at the Coast Guard and briefed on its operations, including those dealing with illegal migrants in the eastern Aegean.

Members Of Greek Brokerage Firm Arrested For BILLIONS In Unpaid Debts

Three former board members of the Athens-based brokerage firm Acropolis Securities SA were arrested and are now facing charges for unpaid debts to the state reaching the whopping sum of 6.4 billion Euros (roughly 3 percent of Greece's GDP). (!!!!!!!!)

The Greek state news agency said that the arrest of the 40-year-old former vice-president of the brokerage, Theodoros Priniotakis, and his two sisters Christina and Katerina, aged 30 and 37, both former board members, followed the arrest a few days ago of the company's former president.

The brokerage firm was involved in the structured bonds scandal that erupted in Greece in 2007 and has since had its license revoked.

8th Int’l Alexander the Great Marathon: Thessaloniki to Boston

credit alexanderthegreatmarathon

All over the world, and especially in Greece, people stand united in the same spirit of freedom to participate in mass athletic events such as marathons in the framework of communicating the values of brotherhood, peace, solidarity and healthy competition. The 8th International Alexander the Great Marathon was held in Thessaloniki at the weekend with the participation of more than 12,500 runners who were wearing a black bracelet saying "Thessaloniki to Boston" and the message "Why? Γιατί;".

The winner of the race was Teklu Geto Metaferia from Ethiopia who finished first for the second year in a row, while Ethiopia’s Tefera Dedas Abate and Greece’s Antonis Papadimitriou won the second and the third place respectively.

The annual event, started in Pella, capital of Philip II of Macedon, birthplace of Alexander, and runners covered the full 42.2km Marathon distance to the White Tower trademark square in Thessaloniki.

Subsequent 5km and 10km running distances also took place, as well as a 1.000m race for children and "social responsibility".

Participants and sponsors included the Hellenic Society for Protection and Rehabilitation of Mentally of Physically Challenged Children, the NGO "Desmos" assisting welfare foundations, the "SOS child village" refuge, the A21 Campaign against human trafficking, the Down Syndrome Association and the "Melissa" girl orphanage, etc.

Reference - http://alexanderthegreatmarathon.org/index.php

Has The Economic Crisis Left The Greek Military Outgunned?

Struggling with a crushing economic crisis that has cut government spending across the board, Greece’s military is seeing itself unable to keep pace with rival countries such as Turkey in armaments, (nonetheless Greek troops are still well prepared for any confrontation, mainly because of expert training).

The cuts have meant that Greek pilots have not been able to be as effective in preventing Turkish fighters from violating Greek air space, and the Navy is limited in trying to follow Turkish vessels that come into Greek territorial waters. Turkey’s expanding military is the second largest in NATO.

    “The military isn’t just bleeding — it’s boiling,” Hellenic Navy officer Yannis Katsaroulis said in an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Well. Officials acknowledged that the Greek military, with a $7.5 billion budget in 2012, could not maintain its assets amid deep budget cuts.

They said the Hellenic Air Force could no longer fly many of its F-16 multi-role fighters because of a lack of spare parts and maintenance. The Hellenic Navy has also been forced to restrict operations amid a fuel shortage.

The Hellenic Army has been unable to receive 400 US-origin Abrams main battle tanks because it couldn’t afford to transport them from the United States. Military personnel have seen a 37 percent cut in their salaries.

Katsaroulis said Greek military officers warned Defense Minister Panos Panagiotopoulos of growing unrest. They said the budget cuts, which reached nearly 30 percent since 2010, were pushing many of the officers to vote for right-wing parties and with many officers leaving.

    “We recently met with the defense minister to voice our anger about the cuts and one of us, a brigadier, piped up and said that we are all dead set on voting for (the far right-wing) Golden Dawn in the next elections,” he said. Katsaroulis added: “Don’t be surprised if tanks roll out onto the street and a military rebellion occurs. Everything is possible at this point.”

Other officers agreed. They said Greece, which spends more on defense than another other European Union member, could no longer compete with Turkey, which routinely enters air space and waters claimed by Athens. “

Just the other day, a Turkish battleship strayed twice in Greek waters, and what did we do?” Yiorgos Glitsis, a retired submarine officer, recalled. “We chased it halfway through the Aegean with a ship half its size, like a dinghy.”

Submariners World

Kickbacks And Money-Laundering Focus Of Day 1 At Tsohatzopoulos Trial (VIDEO)

Appearing in an Athens court on Monday, along with another 18 defendants facing money-laundering and kickbacks charges linked to armament procurements programs, former Greek defence minister Akis Tsohatzopoulos pleaded not guilty and denied all the charges against him. The trial of the decade began early in the morning before an Athens criminal appeals court. Following the session, the trial was adjourned and will resume after the Easter holiday, on May 8.

    "I absolutely and categorically deny the charges, with which there is a systematic attempt to give the impression that there was some illegal criminal organisation, a gang, whose purpose was to launder money and that behind this, supposedly, was the defence minister of Greece, when for six years we did the best that could be done for the country," Tsohatzopoulos said, looking stern and visibly irritated.

The former minister said he felt insulted that he was obliged to constantly repeat the same things, claiming the existence of a "centrally guided course" behind his prosecution.

    "For 12 months I have been held on remand, myself and my wife and my daughter; it is unfair, there is state force exercised against us," he complained.

He asked the court to release his wife Vicky Stamatis, who he said was in prison on his account.
Unlike the minister, his cousin and long-term partner Nikos Zigras pleaded guilty to all the charges to which he had confessed in testimony to an examining magistrate, saying that he had been embroiled in the affair by Tsohatzopoulos.

    "I apologise to everyone and ask for your mercy," he told the court.

Speaking through her counsel, the minister's wife said that her only crime was to marry the former government vice-president and she denied knowing any of the other defendants with the exception of Zigras, whom she claimed to know only on a social level.

All the remaining defendants pleaded not guilty and denied the charges against them, while the lawyer representing Tsohatzopoulos' daughter and ex-wife said his clients were unable to be present in the courtroom due to their "psychosomatic condition".

Earlier, there was tension in the court when the deputy public prosecutor Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos was reading out the charges. The defence protested that the public prosecutor's tone was "too intense" and that he appeared to be making an address rather than merely announcing the charges.

Panagiotopoulos, on his part, countered that the court did not say anything other than the words used in the indictment.

The defence has also petitioned that the Greek state be expelled from the court as a civil party, with a court decision on the request still pending.

Tsohatzopoulos and another 18 defendants are accused of taking kickbacks to grant Greek state armament contracts and of "political money laundering".

The former minister, who is in custody pending trial, on Friday sent letters to 10 former members of the Government Council for Foreign Affairs and Defence (KYSEA) of that period, asking them to appear in court and testify at his trial. All were in office when the purchase of the German submarines and the Russian-designed anti-aircraft missile system TOR M1 was approved but none of the witnesses proposed by Tsohatzopoulos attended.

Those on the stand, apart from Tsohatzopoulos, include his wife Vicky Stamati, his daughter Areti Tsohatzopoulou, his German ex-wife Gudrun, a close aide and former armaments secretary general Yannis Sbokos and 13 other individuals, for whom there is incriminating evidence indicating active participation in the scandal.

Tsohatzopoulos is accused of laundering money using offshore firms that he owned, which he used for real estate transactions or other investment activities to legalize the money he received as kickbacks from military procurement deals signed when he was defence minister. Based on the charges against, he was assisted in his actions by businessmen, lawyers, his former and present wife and his daughter.

Other defendants include his brother-in-law, Vicky Stamati's brother Panagiotis, accountant Efrosyni Lambropoulou, land developer Asterios Economidis, businessman George Sahpatzidis, lawyer Talita Tsekoura, the representative of the Morelia offshore company Horatio Melas, alleged co-owners of the offshore company Torcaso Constantinos Antoniadis and Pantelis Zahariadis, alleged owner of the offshore company Nobilis Nicos Georgoulakis.

The trial is taking place in the Areios Paghos (Supreme Court) building's ceremonies hall.

Five defendants - Tsohatzopoulos' daughter Areti , his former wife Gudrun, Melas, Georgoulakis and Antoniadis - did not show up for the proceedings and were represented by state-appointed defence attorneys.

The court went into recess for approximately one hour, while the court president informed all the witnesses present that they may leave, given that the first day will be taken up with procedural matters.

AMNA

The Trial Of The Decade Begins - Tsohatzopoulos Finally Faces Justice

The talk of the day is centered around former PASOK defence minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos. The former PASOK Minister as well as 18 others are implicated in a money laundering, and kickbacks in armaments procurement programs scandal that has rocked the nation for well over a decade. A Council of Court of Appeals Judges indicted Tsohatzopoulos to stand trial along with his wife Vicky Stamati, his daughter Areti Tsohatzopoulou, his former wife Gudrun, his close aide and former armaments secretary general Yannis Sbokos and 13 other individuals, on whom incriminating evidence of active participation in a scandal that is a result of a very lengthy judicial investigation.

Tsohatzopoulos, who is the main defendant in the case, is accused of money laundering via offshore companies that he owned, and which he used for real estate transactions and/or other investment activities to legalize (or launder) the money that he received as kickbacks from military procurement deals, that were signed when he was serving as defence minister under the PASOK led Simitis government. In his actions he was apparently assisted by businessmen, lawyers, his former and present wife and even his daughter.

Two deals in particular have been under scrutiny: The TOR M1 missile defense system and the purchase of submarines for the Hellenic Navy.

Prosecutors believe that some 160 million euros in bribes were paid as part of the two deals. With the help of former Defense Ministry official Yiannis Sbokos and others, Tsochatzopoulos allegedly siphoned this money off using offshore companies.

So far, authorities have only traced 57 million Euros.

Tsochatzopoulos denies all the charges, as do the others in this case.

Some reports said on Monday that in the face of the evidence against him, Tsochatzopoulos will attempt to convince the court that his prosecution is politically motivated and that he did not bear sole responsibility for approving the contracts in question.

This explains the request he made last n Friday, to the other members of the Government Council for Foreign Affairs and Defense (KYSEA), which approved the deals, to appear in court under the Simitis government.

Speaking to the Sunday edition of Real News and supporting his decision on the purchase of the TOR M1 systems, Tsochatzopoulos told the Sunday Edition of Real News two weeks ago that the following names should be called to testify: (Get a load at the names! ououhhhouou)

• George Papandreou
• Costas Simitis
• Theodore Pangalos
• Costas Laliotis
• Yannos Papantoniou
• Romaios
• Papadopoulos
• and other defence officials.

The request was unfortunately declined but Tsochatzopoulos is expected to bring the matter up again during the trial.

The case files on the purchase of German-made submarines and Russian-designed TOR M1 anti-aircraft systems - when Tsohatzopoulos was serving as defence minister- as well as seized documents from the defendants' residences, were all forwarded to the prosecutor's office. Reports claim that among the seized documents are detailed notes allegedly kept by Tsohatzopoulos in the form of a journal which are believed to include names of journalists and military analysts who Akis had on a "payroll" and were more or less accepting kickbacks for being pro-government with funds from several offshore companies.

Some Background to This Story

Between 2002-04, Ferrostaal paid 7.5m euros to PDM and Zelan. No activity of any substance can be traced to this Cypriot-based duo, and all the record of directors have vapourised. But their job was to ‘facilitate contract awards’ by Greek ministries. ‘The complete lack of any documentation supporting performance by these companies raises serious concerns’, says a confidential German report. In 2004, Dusseldorf prosecutors fingered Sotiris Emmanouil, the head of Hellenic Shipyards, as the recipient of illegal bribes running into millions of euros by yet another intermediary – HDW – and a later report showed he had indeed received 2.2 million euros via an affiliate in October of that year. Again, no evidence of services supplied exists. In July 2007, 11 million euros were handed to shady ‘facilitators’ Dolmarton. No back-up of tasks performed.

But when it comes to the Greek government’s purchase of four 214 Class submarines from Germany after 2000, you have to see the amounts syphoned off to believe them. Says the legal investigation referred to earlier:

‘    The Project Archimedes [submarine supply] contract was signed in 2000. It was in the volume of 1.14bn euros…..the [German supplier] consortium incurred additional offset obligations of 1.53 billion euros.’

So the price to the Greek taxpayer doubled…. entirely due to corrupt payments made to the Greek governing elite.

A fourth submarine supply contract was signed May 2002. The audit investigation quoted above states that it ‘had a volume of approximately 464.9m euros….and offset obligations of 563 million…’

Again, backhanders doubled the price. And, say several Greek sources, even the ‘real’ price had been stuffed with additional items that represented profiteering by Ferrostaal and its associates. This is hardly surprising when you consider Ferrostaal’s onerous expenses: between 2000 and 2003, the German supplier paid MIE a staggering 84 million euros, of which over 50 million went on bribing the necessary signees in the never-ending line of outstretched hands called the Greek Elite.

But it is the now even more heavily burdened taxpayers of Greece who are paying the price for this crude rip-off. Most of the perpetrators are doing very nicely thank you. For example, Ferrostaal worked with Yannis Beltsios and paid him €1 million because Greek Defense Minister Akis Tsohatzopolous instructed them to. In April 2011, Parliament voted to prosecute Tsohatzopoulos for corruption….but in August, Greece’s Supreme Court ruled against pursuing the bribery charge because the charge of accepting bribes has been barred by the 2005 immunity law.

That law was authored and pushed through by….Evangelos Venizelos. And naturally, Akis Tsochatzopoulos and Evangelos Venizelos have been colleagues together in PASOK for nearly two decades.

Ever more outward go the tentacles of Greek elite squids, these gigantic deep-bribed calamares. George Lanaras’s ex-wife, following years of corrupt sales to South Africa, married F W de Klerk. Lanaras’s son in law Tony Georgiades is a billionaire shipping magnate, and alleged key sanctions-buster under apartheid. He reportedly had the ear of South African President Thabo Mbeki while acting as a lobbyist for  Ferrostaal, which led the German submarine global marketing consortium. No matter who’s in power – black or white – these eminences grises are always there in the shadows.

READ MORE BY CLICKING HERE
How Paying Double For German Subs Helped To Sink Greece
http://hellasfrappe.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-paying-double-for-german-subs.html

Also

An Introduction And Analysis Of The Siemens and Ferrostaal Scandals
http://hellasfrappe.blogspot.com/2012/06/introduction-and-analysis-of-siemens.html

EXPOSED - Classified Documents About Bribery From German Arms Manufacturers To Greek Politicians
http://hellasfrappe.blogspot.com/2012/07/exposed-classified-documents-about.html

Forgiving Siemens And German Corruption in Greece
http://hellasfrappe.blogspot.com/2012/07/forgiving-siemens-and-german-corruption.html

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John Kerry: US Strongly Encourages Reopening of Halki Seminary

credit ta nea

The US Secretary of State, Mr. John Kerry met with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. at the Phanar on Monday where discussions centered on the reopening of the Halki seminary as well as matters concerning religious freedoms in Turkey. Following the meeting, Kerry said:

    "It's such a privilege to talk with somebody who has been such a voice for tolerance, a voice for interfaith understanding, who most recently visited with His Holiness Pope Francis and was at his investiture, and who has consistently talked out about protecting rights of minorities, protecting religious rights, and who is struggling for larger understanding in the world".
    "He is also an ardent environmentalist and has been honored by any number of universities, including our great University of Tufts in Massachusetts, with honorary degrees. He has a great following. I have many, many of his flock that I was privileged to represent for years in Massachusetts and have attended Orthodox services in Lowell, Massachusetts and other places, in Boston," the US official continued.
    "So for me to visit here with this protector of the rights of people to practice their religion and to try to bring people together in interfaith understanding is a great, great privilege for me. And I want to thank you so much, Your Holiness," Kerry added.

During a briefing on the airplane that brought Kerry to Turkey, an accompanying State Department official said that one of the issues that Kerry would raise with the Turkish government is the Halki seminary, noting that the "Halki seminary was closed in 1971", and adding that ".

And we have been strongly encouraging the Turkish Government to reopen Halki seminary" which, he said "would be an important step forward in terms of signaling Turkey's accord for openness, religious freedom, and tolerance".

As for Kerry's meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch, the State Department official said "clearly just the Secretary's presence there signals our support for the important issue of reopening Halki seminary and our commitment to religious freedom".

Bartholomew, in turn, said in the recent months and years " we have positive progress in the attitude of the (Turkish) government towards our Patriarchate and 9n general toward the minorities, and obviously we look forward to the resolution of our existing problems, such as the reopening of the Halki seminary, which is a great need for or Patriarchate, at present and for its future," the Ecumenical Patriarch told Kerry at the start of their meeting.

    "We do not have the ability to have better-trained young people and we do not have any other means outside the seminary, which was established in 1844 but unfortunately closed in 1071 and despite our efforts the government has not reopened it to date," Bartholomew said, adding that "we are optimistic, we are convinced that there is good will on the part of Prime Minister (Recep Tayyip) Erdogan".

Combined Reports) In Greek Ta Nea - In English AMNA