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Thu, 30 Sep 2021
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Vader

The deeper story behind Soleimani's assassination: Thwarting Chinese reconstruction of Iraq

Federico Pieraccini
Strategic Culture Foundation
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 17:04 UTC
soleimani funeral baghdad
© Abein Taherkenareh/EPA-EFE/REX)
Iranians attend the funeral ceremony of Qassem Soleimani
Days after the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, new and important information is coming to light from a speech given by the Iraqi prime minister. The story behind Soleimani's assassination seems to go much deeper than what has thus far been reported, involving Saudi Arabia and China as well the U.S. dollar's role as the global reserve currency.

The Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has revealed details of his interactions with Trump in the weeks leading up to Soleimani's assassination in a speech to the Iraqi parliament. He tried to explain several times on live television how Washington had been browbeating him and other Iraqi members of parliament to toe the American line, even threatening to engage in false-flag sniper shootings of both protesters and security personnel in order to inflame the situation, recalling similar modi operandi seen in Cairo in 2009, Libya in 2011, and Maidan in 2014. The purpose of such cynicism was to throw Iraq into chaos.

Comment: That is really dynamite stuff from the Iraqi PM. Trump apparently threatened to assassinate him... to his face. As for siccing snipers on rent-a-crowds, now we have clear proof - from the horse's mouth - that this is what the US does to other countries.

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Pirates

ISIS praises US murder of Soleimani as 'divine intervention' that will help them rise again


RT
Sat, 11 Jan 2020 17:23 UTC
ISIS
© Flickr / Day Donaldson
Islamic State terrorists rejoiced at the death of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani at the hands of his American 'allies,' according to a weekly newspaper affiliated with the group that once controlled much of Syria and Iraq.

Soleimani was killed by a US drone strike on January 3, as he was being driven, with others, near Baghdad international airport. In reprisal, Iran launched a limited strike on US bases in Iraq with ballistic missiles on Tuesday, causing no casualties but demonstrating a capability to hit US assets at will.

The weekly Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) newspaper Al-Naba portrayed Soleimani's death as an act of god in support of its cause, and Muslims in general, according to BBC Monitoring.


Comment: Yep, you read that right. ISIS's god is acting through the American military, apparently.



An editorial in the jihadi paper was careful not to credit the US or even mention Soleimani by name. It couched the gloating in a historical analogy, referring to "Roman-Persian wars" that enabled early Muslims to overrun both Persia - today's Iran - and parts of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium.

Comment: It's not just ISIS. Shaikh Muhaysni, tied to al-Qaeda in Syria, is also ecstatic that Soleimani is dead. You'd think more people would find it a bit curious that ISIS, al-Qaeda, the U.S. and Israel all share the same outlook.

You'd almost think they're working together on some level.

But no, that's just crazy talk... right?



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Star of David

Israelis like me don't want to be America's pawns in the Middle East any longer

Etan Nechin
The Independent
Sat, 11 Jan 2020 04:36 UTC
israel jerusalem flag
I spent my childhood and my young adulthood in bomb shelters every time America had a spat with one of our neighbors. But the truth is we have so much more in common with Arab countries than with WASPs in New Hampshire

When I was nine years old, my family and I, all wearing gas masks, would huddle in our bomb shelter, which doubles as my parents' closet. It was the Gulf War, and Saddam Hussein was lobbing Scud missiles at Israel in retaliation to the US and its allies invading Iraq.

In 2003, in the ramp-up to the second Iraq war, tensions were high again: I took my gas mask to the bar in which I worked. People sat with their brown boxes to their sides, sipping beer and waiting to hear whether the air siren would sound.

It's been this way ever since I can remember. Besides the direct daily conflict with Palestinians and tensions with our neighbors, every time the White House gave out a "special statement" about the region, we Israelis began to brace ourselves for the unknown.

Comment: We know it's a tall order for most Israelis, but the alternative is allowing their leaders to lead their country to its utter destruction. Israel must either become a normal country in the region, or it's doomed. It has lived off the largesse of American taxpayers and stolen tech for far too long. It's time for the U.S. to cut the cord and let Israel work out its future for good or ill, on its own.

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Vader

Dems denounced Soleimani assassination, while Reps cheered Trump. But all sides feel cheated he didn't start a war

Michael Rectenwald
RT
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 16:18 UTC
protest US iraq occupation washington
© Alex Edelman / Getty Images / Agence France-Presse
Donald Trump's response to the Iranian missile attack on US military bases in Iraq is defying the expectations (and perhaps the hopes) of both Democratic and Republican neocon hawks.

After he ordered the drone strike that killed Iran's "second-most popular" leader, General Qassem Soleimani, Trump has faced condemnation from Democratic lawmakers, as well as criticism from a prominent member of the otherwise pro-Trump media and at least one member of his own party. They claim that he has been treading dangerously close to a war with Iran.

"President Trump just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox," stated former vice president and 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden, in response to the action.

Comment: See also:

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Camcorder

'Deeply troubling': Jail video of Jeffrey Epstein's first suicide attempt was deleted, prosecutors reveal. Literally no one is surprised

Dan Mangan and Kevin Breuninger
CNBC
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 17:01 UTC
Jeffrey Epstein
© New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services | Handout | Reuters
U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein appears in a photograph taken for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ sex offender registry March 28, 2017 and obtained by Reuters July 10, 2019.
Surveillance video footage from outside the jail cell of accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein during his first reported suicide attempt in July has been inadvertently deleted, federal prosecutors revealed Thursday.


Comment: Inadvertently? Give. Us. A. Break.


Prosecutors, in a filing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said the video was deleted as the result of a jailhouse computer error about the location of Epstein's cellmate at the time Epstein tried to kill himself.

A lawyer for Epstein's former cellmate said that it was "deeply troubling" to learn that the footage no longer exists. That lawyer, Bruce Barket, has been trying since July to obtain the video.

Comment: So they'd like us to believe that a 'computer error' lead to the loss or erasure of the tape and its backup? How stupid do they think we are? Either Epstein committed suicide and a series of next-to-impossible coincidences have stood in the way of confirming this, or there is some kind of foul play. Only the most ardent coincidence theorist could possibly buy the former.

See also:

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Light Saber

Iranian airstrikes on US bases in Iraq provide a window for peace

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk
Wed, 08 Jan 2020 07:48 UTC
missile attack iraq
© reuters
There is this morning a chink of light to avoid yet more devastation in the Middle East. Iran's missile strikes last night were calibrated to satisfy honour while avoiding damage that would trigger automatically the next round. The missiles appear to have been fitted out with very light warhead payloads indeed - their purpose was to look good in the dark going up into the night sky. There is every reason to believe the apparent lack of US casualties was deliberate.

Even more important was the Iraqi statement that "proportionate measures" had been "taken and concluded" and they did not seek "further escalation".

I agree their response was proportionate and I would say that I regard the Iranian action so far, unlike the assassination of Soleimani by the US, legal in international law.

The entire world should congratulate Iran for its maturity in handling the illegal assassination of its General, who was on a peace mission, travelling as a civilian on a commercial flight, carrying a mediation message the US had been instrumental in instigating. If as seems possible the US actively manipulated the diplomatic process to assassinate someone on a diplomatic mission and traveling on a diplomatic passport, that is a dreadful outrage which will come back to haunt them. Life insurance rates for US diplomats no doubt just went up.

Comment: See also:

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Bad Guys

Iran didn't want to kill US troops with its strike, it wanted to make point to Trump about its missile tech & resolve. It did that

Scott Ritter
RT
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 16:50 UTC
Iran missile
© AFP / BBC Persian
Iran's anticipated retaliation for the US assassination of Qassem Soleimani sent a clear signal to Donald Trump that while the current round of violence may be over, Iran stands ready to respond to any future US provocation.

Tehran warned Iraq to spare US soldiers

On Tuesday night, the Iranian nation buried the body of Qassem Soleimani, the charismatic senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officer assassinated by the US this past week. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, that task completed, Soleimani's IRGC comrades, acting on the orders of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, launched some 22 ballistic missiles from Iranian territory into neighboring Iraq, targeting the huge US air base Al Asad, in western Iraq, and the US consulate in the city of Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Comment: Yes, it seems likely that Iran happy to display its high tech-missiles, but the fact that these attacks were coordinated with the US points to something more going on. See Joe Quinn's SOTT Focus: What War Was Trump Trying to Stop by Killing Iranian General Soleimani? and his appearance on PressTV:



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Question

The more we find out about Tehran plane crash, the more questions we have. Here are the main ones

Finian Cunningham
RT
Wed, 08 Jan 2020 17:22 UTC
plane crash
The crash of the Ukrainian plane in Iran so soon after the country launched a missile strike would have been a geopolitical event no matter what. Then came the strangely certain statements, and the retractions.

Iran blames technical issues, Ukraine not so sure

Iranian authorities were quick to blame a technical fault for the fatal crash of the Ukrainian airliner which took off from Tehran bound for Kiev Wednesday morning, with all 176 onboard losing their lives.

Ali Abedzedah, head of Iran's civil aviation authority, attributed the cause of the crash to engine failure, and said there was no involvement of terrorism.

While Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky warned against "speculation and unchecked theories", his prime minister Oleksiy Honcharuk told a press conference that he was not ruling out the possibility that a missile could have brought down the plane.
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Sherlock

America escalates its "democratic" oil war in the Near East

Michael Hudson
Counter Punch
Mon, 06 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
oil rig
© CC BY-SA 3.0 / www.dragonoil.com
The mainstream media are carefully sidestepping the method behind America's seeming madness in assassinating Islamic Revolutionary Guard general Qassim Suleimani to start the New Year. The logic behind the assassination was a long-standing application of U.S. global policy, not just a personality quirk of Donald Trump's impulsive action. His assassination of Iranian military leader Suleimani was indeed a unilateral act of war in violation of international law, but it was a logical step in a long-standing U.S. strategy. It was explicitly authorized by the Senate in the funding bill for the Pentagon that it passed last year.

The assassination was intended to escalate America's presence in Iraq to keep control of the region's oil reserves, and to back Saudi Arabia's Wahabi troops (Isis, Al Quaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America's foreign legion) to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of the U.S. dollar. That remains the key to understanding this policy, and why it is in the process of escalating, not dying down.

Comment: See also: What War Was Trump Trying to Stop by Killing Iranian General Soleimani?

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Seismograph

Major quake strikes near Iranian nuclear power plant as Iran launches airstrikes against US bases in Iraq

Millie Bull
The Express
Wed, 08 Jan 2020 03:39 UTC

Comment: Just a coincidence, nothing to worry about!

Or was it?


Iran earthquake Jan 2020
© USGS
The earthquake had a magnitude of 4.9
An earthquake has struck near the Bushehr nuclear power plant on a crucial day for Iran which has seen tensions in the Middle East erupt.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) said the earthquake struck 10km southeast of Borazjan in Iran with a magnitude of 4.9. The quake also struck at a depth of 10km. Borazjan is a almost a 70km drive away from Bushehr.

The quake struck at 3.19am this morning.

Comment: Hmmm. This could have been the result of some hi-tech response by the 'deep state/Usual Suspects' to Iran's ballsy response to the American assassination of Soleimani... or it could have been the cosmos itself chiming in on the portentous events afoot in that region.

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