Puppet MastersS


Radar

Arctic tensions rise as Britain leads show of force against Russia in the Barents Sea

Paul Antonopoulos
InfoBrics
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
submarine in Arctic
In the first such operation of its kind in 20 years, the British Navy were joined by American, Danish and Norwegian forces to supposedly demonstrate freedom of navigation against "Russian attempts" to control the Barents Sea in the Arctic, the British Ministry of Defense said in a statement.

"The ships undertook training with each other to further develop their Navies' interoperability while asserting our nations' commitment to upholding peace in the region," the British Ministry of Defense added.

This is a rather curious claim to make, not only because the Arctic is already one of the most peaceful regions in the world, but Britain, unlike Russia, the US, Denmark (Greenland) and Norway, is not an Arctic country. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Britain intends to "re-engage more" in the Barents Sea in the future. This suggests that London is not motivated by "upholding peace," but in pressurizing Russia and securing its own influence in the Arctic via not only NATO, but also the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) that was created in 2012 and includes Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland.
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Snakes in Suits

FBI Director and Deep State puppet Christopher Wray says Russia 'very active' in 2020 election; Antifa not a terror group

Kevin Johnson
USA Today
Thu, 17 Sep 2020 16:59 UTC
FBI Director Chris Wray
FBI Director Chris Wray
Less than two months before the presidential election, FBI Director Chris Wray told lawmakers Thursday that Russia remains "very active" in its effort to disrupt the vote, primarily by denigrating Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

"The intelligence community's consensus is that Russia continues to try to influence our election," Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee, adding that the Kremlin's effort has focused on sowing discord and disparaging the candidacy of the former vice president.


Comment: UNbelievable! That Wray would double down on the "Russian interference" nonsense after the dismal failure that was the Mueller report - and everything that's come out since - really shows what team Wray is working for. The guy is a despicable Deep State shill of the first order.


Wray's assessment tracked an earlier analysis published in August by the National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center, which called out pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach for spreading false corruption claims to undermine Biden's bid and the Democratic Party.

Comment: Again Wray shows where his allegiance lies in ruling out that Antifa is anything less than a terror group. Why? Because Antifa's terror tactics are part of the larger (failing) strategy to oust Trump at all costs. Which Wray would seem to be on board with given the narratives he's feeding into.

Have a look:

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Attention

Senior Biden campaign cybersecurity expert participated in racist internet troll group


Washington Examiner
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 08:00 UTC
Joe Biden Andrew Auernheimer
Joe Biden/Andrew Auernheimer
A senior cybersecurity adviser to Joe Biden's presidential campaign spent years affiliating with a hacking organization and boasted on a personal blog about breaking into her neighbor's computers.

Jackie Singh, who joined the Biden campaign in July as a senior cyber incident responder and threat analyst, was an affiliate of the hacking organization the Gay N----- Association of America, once headed by white nationalist Andrew Auernheimer.

Logs obtained by the Washington Examiner from various Internet Relay Chat rooms, a messaging platform dating back to the 1980s that is popular with hackers, show Singh to be a contributor to a toxic culture of overt racism. In August, Singh wrote on Twitter that her role with the Biden campaign focused on "working tirelessly to ensure the digital safety of this campaign."
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Info

Trump admin to block TikTok and WeChat downloads starting Sunday

Ryan Lovelace
The Washington Times
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:01 UTC
tiktok
© AP Photo/FileThis Feb. 25, 2020, file photo, shows the icon for TikTok in New York. TikTok's owner has chosen Oracle over Microsoft as its preferred suitor to buy the popular video-sharing app, according to a source familiar with the deal, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2020.
The Department of Commerce said Friday that it would start banning U.S. transactions with TikTok and WeChat beginning on Sunday.

The Commerce Department said it will implement the ban of the China-owned social media apps under authority provided by President Trump's August 2020 executive order and will do so to safeguard Americans' national security.

"Today's actions prove once again that President Trump will do everything in his power to guarantee our national security and protect Americans from the threats of the Chinese Communist Party," Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said in a statement. "At the president's direction, we have taken significant action to combat China's malicious collection of American citizens' personal data, while promoting our national values, democratic rules-based norms, and aggressive enforcement of U.S. laws and regulations."

Comment: See also:

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Water

Latest Navalny Novichok water bottle poisoning claim stretches all credibility, but Western media swallows it without question

Bryan MacDonald
RT
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 13:41 UTC
Alexei Navalny
© Getty Images / Evgeny Feldman for Alexei Navalny's Campaign /Anadolu AgencyAlexei Navalny's campaign shows Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny attending a meeting of an action group to support his nomination as a candidate for Russian presidency in Moscow, Russia, 24 December 2017
We are now expected to believe that Kremlin assassins used a new, even more powerful, Novichok poison on Alexey Navalny, and his aides brought a water bottle laced with it to Germany, but nobody suffered any side effects.

At this point, Western reporters covering the story are either completely high on the Kool-Aid or they are going to intense lengths to suppress their skepticism, because so much of the narrative simply doesn't add up.

The opposition figure's condition when he was first hospitalized, in Siberia, was clearly very grave. He was placed into an induced coma and attached to a ventilator. The situation was so serious that his wife and associates demanded he be moved abroad, to Germany, for treatment. A request Russian authorities acquiesced to the following evening, after a tense day when the doctors treating him in Omsk stated that they felt he was too unwell to travel, and his associates alleged they were stalling.

Since Navalny's arrival in Berlin, things have become politicized, and there has been talk of sanctions and other diplomatic and economic penalties being directed at Russia. Germany insists that its experts found traces of the extremely lethal Novichok poison in the activist's system. Angela Merkel herself has more-or-less accused the Russian government of being behind what she has described as an "attempted murder."

Comment: If they can sell the Skripal story, why not an even more ridiculous version? See also:

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Document

Julian Assange held back 15,000 documents to prevent harm to US government

Bill Goodwin
Computer Weekly
Wed, 16 Sep 2020 15:58 UTC
John Goetz/Assange supporters
© Ard-Hauptstadtstudio, UnknownSenior Editor of Investigations NDR John Goetz • Assange supporters
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange held back 15,000 documents from publication at the request of the US government, a court heard today.

John Goetz, senior editor of investigations at NDR in Germany, told the court that WikiLeaks and its media partners took measures to make sure no one was harmed by the release of the documents. Goetz was speaking on the seventh day of the extradition hearing against Assange at the Old Bailey in London.

Assange has been charged with 17 offences under the US Espionage Act after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a former US Army soldier turned whistleblower. The 49-year-old defendant faces a further charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and is alleged to have encouraged hacking groups to obtain information for WikiLeaks

The US government has accused Assange of purposely publishing classified documents containing the unredacted names of innocent people who risk their lives to provide information to the US and its allies.

Goetz, who previously worked at Der Spiegel, said he was asked to meet with The Guardian and Assange in June 2010 to work on tens of thousands of leaked documents on the Afghan war obtained by WikiLeaks. "They were a first-hand eyewitness diary of what was happening in Afghanistan as it was happening," said Goetz.

Comment: As per this testimony, Assange and Wikileaks worked in conjunction with the US Gov and other mainstream news outlets.

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Arrow Up

Study: Up to 95% of 2020 US riots are linked to Black Lives Matter

Joy Pullmann
The Federalist
Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
Riot Damage
© Evita Duffy/The FederalistRiot Damage
Contrary to corporate media narratives, up to 95 percent of this summer's riots are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.

ACLED is a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict across the globe. Its U.S. project that collected the summer protest data is supported by Princeton University. The project's spreadsheet collating tens of thousands of data points documents 12,045 incidents of U.S. civil unrest from May 26, 2020 to Sept. 5, 2020. May 26 is the day after George Floyd's death in police custody with enough fentanyl in his system to have died of an overdose if police had never touched him.

Of the 633 incidents coded as riots, 88 percent are recorded as involving Black Lives Matter activists. Data for 51 incidents lack information about the perpetrators' identities. BLM activists were involved in 95 percent of the riots for which there is information about the perpetrators' affiliation.

Comment:

See also:

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Attention

Russia demands answers from Washington on whether the US is facilitating terrorist attacks in Crimea, after NBC's report


RT
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 03:14 UTC
Azov Battalion
© Reuters/Gleb GaranichMembers of Azov Battalion, a far-right militia incorporated into the Ukranian National Guard, Kiev Ukraine.
Russia's embassy in the US has demanded clarification after an unnamed American official was cited in a report stating that US forces are providing weapons to militant units in Crimea as they launch attacks on Russian troops.

The embassy said it treated the statement with "grave concern" in a social media post on Thursday, asking Washington to provide further details as to whether American weapons were being passed to Ukrainian fighters carrying out clandestine operations in Crimea. The embassy said on Facebook:
"Unnamed US officials speak about their country's support of terrorist activities in third countries. In this case, they talk specifically about Russia.

"If it is true... we then demand the US side to clarify whether or not Washington directly or indirectly has facilitated the SBU [Ukrainian security services] in organizing terrorist attacks against the people of Crimea."
Published by NBC News on Monday, the report in question centered on allegations that Moscow had paid "bounties" to Taliban fighters who killed American troops in Afghanistan, a claim that first surfaced in a June New York Times story. However, buried in the article's 12th paragraph, an anonymous official, as is customary in US media, is cited as saying that US intelligence had assumed a "bounty program" existed, as it believed it was "a proportional response to the US arming of Ukrainian units fighting Russian forces in Crimea."

Comment: Russia poses a fair question to the US, given MSM's agenda-driven news reality and unregulated actions by non-governmental, ulteriorly-funded entities.

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Bullseye

Caitlin Johnstone: Exposing war crimes should always be legal. Committing and hiding them should not

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 18:41 UTC
Assange
Julian Assange
The Kafkaesque extradition trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues, with each frustrating day making it clearer than the day before that what we are watching is nothing other than a staged performance by the US and UK governments to explain why it's okay for powerful governments to jail journalists who expose inconvenient truths about them.

The Assange defense team is performing admirably, making the arguments they need to make to try and prevent an extradition that will set a precedent which will imperil press freedoms and creating a chilling effect on all adversarial national security investigative journalism around the world. These arguments appear to fall on deaf ears before Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who has from the beginning been acting like someone who has already made up her mind and who has been reading from pre-written judgements at the trial regardless of the points presented to her (an unusual behavior made all the more suspicious by her supervision under Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who has a massive conflict of interest in this case).

And while it is essential to fight this fight with every intention of winning, I'd also like to issue a friendly reminder that this entire trial is illegitimate at its very foundation.
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Mr. Potato

A tale of two bottles: Navalny poison slowest-acting weapon in assassination history

John Helmer
johnhelmer.net
Thu, 17 Sep 2020 18:29 UTC
navalny
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times - this is how Charles Dickens opened his story of regime change in Paris during the French revolution. Also for Alexei Navalny (lead image) and his roommate in Tomsk on the evening of August 19, Maria Pevchikh of London.

They haven't read the rest of Dickens' opening. "It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity."

For incredulity, the new film by Navalny and Pevchikh is not quite up to the Dickens standard. Now presented to the world as evidence of a murder plot, their tale of the two bottles invites an epoch-load of incredulity.

In the version of the film which the Murdoch press has published in London, along with a commentary by Dominic Raab, the British Foreign Secretary, the bare feet, shaven legs, and yellow slip of one woman, and the voice of another woman, have been removed.

Woman 1: "While you don't have an official permission, I can't give you anything."
Woman 2: "We don't need a permission to take the empty bottles."
Woman 1: "If you want to take any bottles, you need the permission of the police."

This dramatic dialogue reveals that the blue-capped Saint Springs water bottle shown in the film - actually, three bottles are recorded, two on one side of the bed, one on the other side; all of them empty - were not allowed out of the Tomsk hotel room on police orders.

Comment: Kremlin spokesman Peskov:
"The thing is that we're being told about traces of Novichok on a bottle, but specialists say that, if there were actually traces of Novichok on the bottle, at least those who touched it or were standing nearby would have been exposed," Peskov said.

"This goes against the conclusions drawn by experts. If there was a bottle, then why was it taken away? Perhaps someone has no interest in holding an investigation. There is too much in this story that is absurd, which keeps us from believing these statements without proof," he added.
It is absurd. Bryan MacDonald sums it up well:
When it comes to Russia, the mainstream Western media operates in a self-contained pit of rumor, fear, braggadocio, bulls**t, and propaganda. Thus its correspondents have treated the Navalny case in a predictable fashion: Any pronouncements from the opposition figure's associates, and the German government - even when contradictory or scarcely believable - are treated like gospel truth, but anything Russian officials say is immediately disparaged.

Before Thursday, the most blatant example of this came on September 9, when, to quote Max Seddon, a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, "Germany apparently concluded (that) Navalny was poisoned with a substance 'that the world did not know until this attack, but which is more malicious and deadly than all known offshoots of the Novichok family,' and that Russian security must have done it."
Unknown, yet identifiable by nameless German military specialists. More malicious and deadly than all other novichoks, yet can't kill its target or harm other people handing the contaminated murder weapon. Who writes this BS?

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