Puppet MastersS


Light Sabers

Trump impeached: Now the coup becomes a civil war

death of a nation
© newslocker.com
The Democrats declared war yesterday. Not on Donald Trump but on the United States and the Constitution.

What started as a coup to overturn the 2016 election has now morphed into a Civil War as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Fran-feces) presided over the passage of a bill which creates a clear Constitutional Crisis. And that means we have multiple factions vying for control of our government, the definition of a Civil War.

In passing these articles of impeachment against President Trump, Congress has arrogated to itself powers it does not have.

The first article asserts a motive to Trump's actions to invalidate his role as chief law enforcement officer for the country. It doesn't matter if you like him or any President having this power, he does have it.

Read that first article and then apply it to a country other than Ukraine where Trump didn't have 'probable cause' for investigation into corruption and malfeasance there.

That could be Abuse of Power. But this happened in Ukraine where Trump clearly has probable cause.

Comment: The disintegration of the American society began decades ago. What we now see is a clear correlation: the systematic ebbing of rights and the rot manifesting in government. Will this manufactured travesty of justice be a rude wake up call? Or will the American public underestimate the true extent and vile purpose of this blatant exhibition of injustice?


Star of David

Best of the Web: Bolivia: How it was a coup for Israel too

Pic Evo
© AFPDemonstration in support of Bolivia's overthrown president Evo Morales, in Buenos Aires.
The right wing seeks to reconquer Bolivia, dismantling solidarity with Palestine and bringing in Israeli advisors to help crush protests

Shortly after left-wing Bolivian President Evo Morales was ousted in a US-supported coup in November - disguised as a noble reaction to alleged electoral fraud - the self-appointed, fanatically right-wing Bolivian "interim" government announced the renewal of diplomatic relations with Israel.

These had been severed by Morales in 2009 during Israel's Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, which killed some 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children. Though Israel naturally cast itself as the singular victim of the affair, the ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian deaths was 400:1.

During a subsequent Israeli-inflicted bloodbath in Gaza in 2014, this one by the name of Operation Protective Edge and entailing the slaughter of 2,251 Palestinians (including 299 women and 551 children), Morales denounced Israel as a "terrorist state" - a perfectly accurate assessment, given the circumstances and Israel's track record.

Comment: Beware the tendrils of Israel and all it reprehensibly represents! The speed at which the usurpers of the Morales government called upon Israeli expertise leaves no doubt as to who collaborated in the coup and what they anticipate to gain by adding Bolivia to their collection.


Attention

AG Barr warns: Soros' meddling in prosecutors' elections could worsen crime in the US

George Soros
© 1CC BY-SA 3.0/Niccolò CarantiGeorge Soros
The attorney general reportedly claimed that Soros relies on a combination of low voter turnout and sizeable financial contributions to the candidates of his choice to achieve his goals.

US Attorney General William Barr warned that the influence exerted by George Soros in prosecutor elections across the United States may have a detrimental effect on law enforcement in the states where candidates bankrolled by the billionaire prevail, Fox News reports.

During an interview on The Story, Barr claimed that Soros allegedly banks on a usually low voter turnout in "largely Democratic" primary elections, as well as on generous financial contributions to the candidates of his choice. The attorney general warned:
"There's this recent development [where] George Soros has been coming in, in largely Democratic primaries where there has not been much voter turnout and putting in a lot of money to elect people who are not very supportive of law enforcement and don't view the office as bringing to trial and prosecuting criminals but pursuing other social agendas."
Barr noted that such victorious candidates, in his opinion, have not given "the proper support to the police", adding that this trend may lead to "more violent crime" and to law enforcement officers possibly re-evaluating the relationship between themselves and the leadership of their municipalities.

Comment: See also:


Camcorder

Whistleblower: The NSA has 'lied to the courts all along' as judges approve warrantless surveillance

NSA chip
© CPO Magazine
The National Security Agency can gather the data of US citizens without a warrant - as long as it gathers this data by mistake, a court has ruled. However, this suits the agency just fine, whistleblower William Binney told RT.

The NSA is permitted to gather data on US citizens abroad, or "foreign connected" Americans at home. The dragnet surveillance operation necessary to gather this information also sucks up data on millions of Americans with no foreign contacts, a process critics say is unconstitutional.

On Wednesday, the 2nd Court of Appeals in New York declared this "incidental collection" of information permissible. The NSA has maintained that it is incapable of separating properly and improperly gathered data, but former NSA Technical Director William Binney told RT that this is simply untrue:
"They've been lying to the courts all along. They've had the capability to sort that stuff out. It's just that they don't want to. This gives them power over everyone, the ability to look into political opponents like they did with President Trump."
While the court ruling gives the NSA free rein to suck up data on Americans' phone and internet communications, it did not authorize the US' other intelligence and law enforcement agencies to dig through this data. However, according to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court ruling issued last year, the FBI accessed this data trove some 3.1 million times in 2017.


Comment: With the power and capabilities of the NSA, how long would a judge last adjudicating against this rampant system of surveillance and blatant disregard of rights? Not long. Thus we see the judicial vindication of NSA's mode of operation, a nod to the power of this agency.


Gold Bar

Sanctioned Muslim nations discuss trading gold to bypass restrictions

Erdogan/Rouhani
© Presidential Press Service via AP, PooTurkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, Kuala Lumpur Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Iran, Turkey, Qatar and Malaysia are weighing trading among themselves in gold and other currencies in an effort to combat current and future sanctions imposed against them, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Saturday.

"I have suggested that we re-visit the idea of trading using the gold dinar and barter trade among us," the Reuters news agency quoted Mohamad as saying at the conclusion of a summit in Malaysia for Islamic states. "We are seriously looking into this and we hope that we will be able to find a mechanism to put it into effect."

Two years ago, Saudi Arabia the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar over allegations it was financing terrorism. Iran has been forced to deal with similar isolation due to crippling sanctions reimposed by the US in 2018.

"With the world witnessing nations making unilateral decisions to impose such punitive measures, Malaysia and other nations must always bear in mind that it can be imposed on any of us," the Malaysian leader said, lauding Tehran and Doha for weathering the sanctions imposed against them.

Bullseye

Ex-MP Norman Baker: Salisbury novichok poisonings are a pack of lies

skripals salisbury
© REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/Dylan Martinez/Global Look PressSoldiers wearing protective suits work at an ambulance station in Salisbury
There could hardly have been a more brazen statement of intent. And when Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found close to death on a park bench in Salisbury on March 4, 2018, there was one blindingly obvious conclusion to be drawn - that Russian President Vladimir Putin had just tried to assassinate a well-known enemy of the Russian state on British soil.

Theresa May, then Prime Minister, was in no mood for uncertainty, declaring to the House of Commons that the Russian Federation was directly responsible for 'an attempted murder here in our country... an indiscriminate and reckless act against the United Kingdom, putting the lives of innocent civilians at risk'.

The evidence pointing towards Moscow seemed clear. For a start, Skripal looked to be an obvious target.

A former member of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, he had spied on behalf of Britain for several years before he was caught and sent to a Siberian jail. He arrived in Britain as part of a prisoner swap.

Then there was the nerve agent said to have been used in the attack: Novichok is a rare and especially deadly poison developed in a Russian laboratory, we were told.

Later, we would learn that two Russian agents had been visiting the cathedral city at the time of the attack. Convincing as it might sound, however, this widely accepted account of the events in Salisbury does not add up.

Had it been submitted to a publisher of fiction, it would have been rejected as having more holes than a Swiss cheese.

Comment: Despite the fact that it is couched in the standard "the Russians are coming to get us" narrative, it's quite significant that this piece was published. It's probably one of the first skeptical pieces in any mainstream publication on the Skripal affair. John Helmer, Craig Murray and Rob Slane have pointed out all the observations above, and more, already, but it is interesting to see some of their common-sense points raised in the mainstream. We'll just have to see if this starts a trend. In the meantime, Helmer has some Skripal updates.

First, while the whereabouts of the Skripals are currently unknown, there's evidence they were being held at a U.S. base in the weeks after their recovery:
English plane spotters and bird watchers have discovered the location of the Skripals in Gloucestershire. An hour and a half's drive north of their well-known home in Salisbury, Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been hidden inside an airbase operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) for long-range B-52 and B-2 bombers armed with nuclear weapons targeted on Russia.
...
The evidence of the location can be found in the film prepared by the Reuters organisation of New York and broadcast on May 23. Watch closely the scripted speech and the full video clip.

For the full story, including the Reuters English transcript, the video clip, and additional furtive signals by Yulia Skripal, read this.
...
The newly recognized evidence of Yulia Skripal's location at RAF Fairford in May 2018 falls short of proving that she and her father continue to live there now. The newly available evidence suggests that the US Government took control of the Skripals immediately after their hospitalisation. Although MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, had provided their home and security in Salisbury until March 4, 2018, it appears that Sergei Skripal is now a priority interest for the US.

"Being under US control is obviously why Russia has been denied consular access to the Skripals," comments a Russian source. "HMG [Her Majesty's Government] doesn't have them."
...
The sources suspect there was an agreement between MI6 and CIA for relocating the Skripals to the US, where they are less likely to be recognized. To fly them there by a US military plane from RAF Fairford was a simple, short-term expedient.

Moscow sources aren't sure whether Sergei Skripal has recovered. They acknowledge that if he has, the US is the likely hiding place for him. They are sure of one thing: whether her father is alive or dead, Yulia Skripal will never be permitted to return to Russia as she told her cousin she wanted in the clandestine telephone call of April 5.
Second, a British Defence Ministry document reveals that the Skripals' blood evidence is 'missing':
A British Ministry of Defence document, issued on March 12 but unnoticed since then, reports the ministry has searched its files and records of the blood sampling and testing for Novichok in the blood of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, but "failed to locate any information that provides the exact time that the samples were collected." The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is the parent organization for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), the UK's chemical warfare centre at Porton Down. Porton Down, as the laboratory is usually known, is the source of British evidence that Novichok was detected in the bloodstreams of the two Skripals.
...
National Health Service (NHS) hospital manuals, English nursing sources and biochemists all say it is impossible for patient blood samples to lack precise date and time data. The Skripal samples with these data are therefore missing, while the samples analyzed by Porton Down aren't provably from the Skripals at all.

If the Defence Ministry is telling the truth, its admission that it "failed to locate" the required blood specimen logs means there is no legal chain of custody for the evidence the British Government has publicly alleged, identifying a Russian nerve agent called Novichok, and Russian military personnel and the Kremlin as responsible for attacking the Skripals in Salisbury on March 4, 2018. Without this chain of custody, no British court can lawfully admit the prosecution's evidence to support the government charges in the Skripal case. The Wiltshire coroner's inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess, also alleged to have resulted from a Russian Novichok attack, will be unable, lawfully, to admit the alleged evidence.

If the ministry is lying in its March 12, 2019, document, this demonstrates the collapse of the British government's Novichok narrative into evidence of a political frame-up.
...
Which of the several Skripal blood samples was delivered to Porton Down? For there to be a lawful chain of custody the Porton Down receipt data should match the hospital's patient blood records. There must have been a hospital sign-out paper; plus a courier identification for the pick-up, and then the hand-over at Porton Down. If these data are missing from the 1845 receipt, then it's possible the blood received didn't come from the hospital — or from the Skripals at all.
...
The MOD report implies that by comparison, no "full chain of custody" protected the blood samples analyzed by Porton Down, before the OPCW arrived. If that's the case, then the briefing and data presentation Porton Down officials gave the OPCW team is hearsay, juridically worthless. This means that between the samples OPCW collected from the Skripals on or about March 23 and the samples the hospital obtained on March 4 and 5, no comparison is valid and admissible in a criminal proceeding or inquest; or a comparison with the samples Porton Down says it examined between the evening of March 5 and the announcement of Porton Down's findings on the morning of March 6.
...
A British organic chemist disputes the OPCW's report of purity. "Once the chemical is in the field, purity makes no sense. You pour beer into a dirty glass, then how do you determine the purity of the beer? What was in the beer originally — what made the glass dirty? It's nonsense." He believes the new evidence points to Porton Down spiking the Skripal blood samples with a high-concentration chemical of its own source.
Third, there is now evidence Sergei Skripal may still be in Britain (and not the U.S., as speculated above). He apparently made three short calls to his niece Viktoria in Russia, in April, May and June of 2019:
The authenticity of Skripal's calls, each of them from a different telephone number, has been confirmed by Viktoria. They are the first evidence that he is alive; moreover, that he is well enough to testify about the alleged attack by a nerve agent the British Government has called Novichok.

The evidence of the calls also suggests that Sergei and Yulia Skripal are prevented from communicating freely with their Russian kin, and may be physically under lock and key.
In one of the calls, he tells Viktoria: "Well, OK. I'm alright, Yulia too. Everything is normal, [I congratulate] Mama on the holiday, with Victory Day. Well, that's all, bye." In another, he can allegedly be heard asking someone in English for permission to leave a voicemail. In another, he states that he doesn't intend to return to Russia.


Document

What we know so far about Russia-Ukraine gas transit deal

Kiev gas
© Reuters / Gleb GaranichFILE PHOTO: A gas compressor station in the village of Boyarka, outside Kiev
After multiple rounds of talks, Russia and Ukraine have finally hammered out an extension to the current gas agreement that is set to expire at the end of the year.

While the agreement "in principle" was reached earlier this week, the sides revealed the key points on Saturday. Here are the details of the breakthrough deal.

Terms of agreement

The new contract will ensure gas supplies to Europe for the next five years, and the deal might be further prolonged for another ten years. The deal stipulates the transit of 65 billion cubic meters of gas next year, and 40 billion cubic meters per year for the rest of the time, from 2021 through 2024, judging by the transport capacities booked by Gazprom.

Comment: Russia is being as fair as it can be, one wonders whether those nefarious forces working within Ukraine will allow such positive developments to continue:


Chart Bar

Study shows Swedish justice ministry manipulated crime statistics

malmo shooting
© Reuters / Johan NilssonA police officer investigates the scene of a fatal shooting in Malmo, Sweden
Sweden's Ministry of Justice pressured the country's Crime Prevention Council to hide, manipulate, or ignore potentially embarrassing crime statistics, a university study has found.

Sweden's Crime Prevention Council (Brå) has a difficult task. In a country where media outlets omit police-circulated descriptions of suspects' ethnicity, and the government actively downplays the surge in gun crime and bombings in its immigrant ghettoes, Brå is charged with compiling factual, accurate crime statistics.

According to a study published by Linköping University this week, the government intervenes here too to downplay "politically sensitive" data.

Employees told the university researchers that their managers - acting on orders from the country's Justice Ministry - instructed them to manipulate results on "hot potato" issues. Presumably, these results were ones that could embarrass the government, and likely dealt with issues of race or immigration.

One interviewee stated that "methodological deficiencies" was the reason given for the change.

Comment: The media's role today of dis/misinforming the public, not informing it, is clear as day here. No matter the country, bureaucrats and politicians love quick fixes. They're incapable of long-term thinking. In this case, the short-term gains of hiding the truth from the public are all they see. But in the end, it will be their undoing. Censorship of this sort only serves to ruin their credibility in the long term. Thus, the Sweden Democrats' rise in popularity.

See also:


Eye 2

Best of the Web: Macron's Achilles Heel: The Corrupt Privatization of Toulouse Airport

macron on throne
© Charles Platiau/AFP/Getty
Emmanuel Macron is a spiv, a first class spiv. Yet Emmanuel Macron is President of the French Republic, which is a worry.

The stamp of the man could have been readily gauged from his curious appointment and period as Economy Minister, August 2014 to August 2016, under President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Macron's first action as Economy Minister was the privatization of the Toulouse-Blagnac airport (SATB). It was a process steeped in anomalies, for which reason it has been the subject of unprecedented court proceedings.

This is a story of deception, incompetence and corruption at the highest levels of the French state. This account is essentially drawn from Laurent Mauduit, tireless investigative journalist with the online daily Mediapart.

Magic Hat

Kabuki theater: Pelosi & Trump pretend 'business as usual' for SOTU, while supporters root for each to stab the other in the back

trump pelosi
© Reuters / Leah Millis / Yuri GripasUS President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
US President Donald Trump has accepted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's invitation to give the annual State of the Union address, extended just two days after the House voted to impeach. Does she have something up her sleeve? Does he?

Trump accepted the invitation to deliver the yearly speech before Congress February 4, less than two hours after Pelosi sent it on Friday - an incongruously civil act of business-as-usual amid the chaos of impeachment that has seen both parties trade insults all week. The date could see Trump delivering the SOTU while the Senate oversees his trial, and falls the day after the first Democratic primary caucus.