Finian Cunningham
RTThu, 07 Sep 2017 17:46 UTC
© Ammar Safarjalani / Global Look Press
The breaking of the siege of Deir ez-Zor by the Syrian army and its Russian ally marks the defeat of not just foreign-backed anti-government militants. It signals victory over the regime-change plot orchestrated by the US and its partners.
For three years, the eastern Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor had been besieged by militants affiliated with the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terror network. This week the Syrian army broke the stranglehold and liberated the city with crucial help from Russian air power.
Russian President Vladimir Putin
reportedly sent a letter of congratulations to Syria's Bashar Assad, a measure of the strategic significance of the event.
Deir ez-Zor on the Euphrates River had been the main terror hub in the country, serving as a supply corridor for IS between neighboring Iraq and Syria,
according to Russia's Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi. Now with the vanquishing of that hub, the terrorist remnants in Syria "face a crushing defeat."
Comment: Over three years under siege, Deir-ez-Zor joins Aleppo and Homs as some of the longest besieged cities in all history.
And now it's (almost) liberated, thanks to Russian and Syrian allied forces. With it, the last remaining substantial pocket of ISIS forces is removed from Syria.
Hurrah!
Sibel Edmonds
NewsbudWed, 06 Sep 2017 00:12 UTC
Editor's note: Read this article and extrapolate to many other alleged 'Muslim terror masterminds'. Most likely, all of them were, in one way or another, assets of US intelligence agencies, tasked with creating the 'reality' of a terror threat to the USA in order that the US government could respond by invading and occupying nations around the world as part of the long war against Russia and China and securing the Middle East in particular for the 'new American century'.
A Notorious Terrorist, a Major in Egypt's Army Intelligence, a CIA Operative, a Member of the Elite Green Berets & an FBI Informant Let's say a script writer approaches a Hollywood production company with a proposal for a
realistic spy-action thriller that features a dark action hero who is a Major in the Egyptian Army's Military Intelligence Unit, who is selected by an Elite Special Forces Unit in the United States Army, simultaneously gets recruited by the CIA as an operative, teaches courses at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, and is on the FBI Payroll. Then he triple crosses the Elite U.S. military Forces, the CIA and the FBI, uses his U.S. military information to train al-Qaeda and other radical Muslim militants, becomes Bin Laden's bodyguard (all this while he is still on the payroll of the U.S. military, the CIA and the FBI), blows up U.S. embassies around the world (while still on the triple payroll) - is
the most dangerous man in the world according to the U.S. Justice Department. Then he gets caught, is tried and indicted in a secret U.S. court behind closed doors, yet manages to evade sentencing, skips jail, and continues his terror operations around the globe.
What do you think the production company's response would be? An unrealistic, far-fetched delirium, probably imagined and written while under some sort of psychedelic drug?
What if I were to tell you that everything in the script above, and some more, is a well-documented, government-confirmed, real life case?
© Atef Safadi/EPAIsraeli tourists watch smoke rising near the Syrian-Israeli border as the fighting Syrian army fights to regain control of the Quneitra border crossing from rebel groups.
Because Israel has staked first its survival and ultimately its growth into a dominant regional power on the disunity of its neighboring nations, it comes as no surprise that, faced with a winding-down of the Syrian conflict, it is now moving sharply against that development.
After years of fomenting the Syrian conflict from the shadows, the U.S. has recently seemed to
back away from its push to militarily intervene in the embattled nation, instead choosing to focus its saber-rattling and destabilization efforts on other theaters. The consequence of this has seemingly been the winding down of the long-running conflict, now entering its seventh year.
Buoyed by Russia, Iran and Lebanon, the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad has managed to retake vast swaths of territory, all while surviving and growing stronger over the course of a largely foreign-funded onslaught. As a result, many of the governments that were instrumental in funding and arming the so-called "moderate" opposition have begun to extricate themselves, unwilling to further test the resilience of Assad or the Syrian people.
With some anticipating the
long-awaited conclusion of the Syrian conflict, recent threats from Israel's government to assassinate Assad by bombing his residence seemed to appear out of the blue. According to
the Jerusalem Post, a senior Israeli official accompanying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a recent visit to Russia warned the Kremlin that if Iran continues to "extend its reach" in Syria, Israel would bomb the presidential palace in Damascus.
Here's what the media isn't telling you about North Korea's recent missile tests.
Last Monday, the DPRK fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan's Hokkaido Island. The missile landed in the waters beyond the island harming neither people nor property.
The media immediately condemned the test as a "bold and provocative act" that showed the North's defiance of UN resolutions and "contempt for its neighbors." President Trump sharply criticized the missile test saying:
"Threatening and destabilizing actions only increase the North Korean regime's isolation in the region and among all nations of the world. All options are on the table."
What the media failed to mention was that, for the last three weeks, Japan, South Korea and the US have been engaged in large-scale joint-military drills on Hokkaido Island and in South Korea.
These needlessly provocative war games are designed to simulate an invasion of North Korea and a "decapitation" operation to remove (Re: Kill) the regime. North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong-un has asked the US repeatedly to end these military exercises, but the US has stubbornly refused. The US reserves the right to threaten anyone, anytime and anywhere even right on their doorstep. It's part of what makes the US exceptional. Check out this excerpt from an article at Fox News:
Five nights a week, at least $100 million in crisp new $100 bills is flown from JFK nonstop to Moscow, where it is used to finance the Russian mob's vast and growing international crime syndicate. State and Federal officials believe it is part of a multi-billion-dollar money-laundering operation. The Republic National Bank and the Federal Reserve prefer not to think so.It's a darkening afternoon. The usual assortment of passengers mills about Gate 14 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, waiting to board Delta Flight 30 nonstop to Moscow: American businessmen prospecting the new Russian capitalism, Russian entrepreneurs returning from investor hunting, expatriates going home to visit family, tourists. One passenger, though, is there only for the nine-hour flight and knows something none of the other passengers knows: that the plane will be carrying 1 million fresh hundred-dollar bills in its belly.
The red, white, and blue Boeing 767 is on the tarmac when, at about 5pm, a cream-colored armored truck drives up. While Delta workers casually go about tossing luggage into the hold, two armed guards begin placing large white canvas bags on a conveyor belt. In the bags are stacks of uncirculated new $100 bills, all still in their Federal Reserve wrappers, dozens to a bag. And there are dozens of bags.
A few minutes later, another armored truck rolls up and unloads another series of even larger bags. In total, this flight will carry about 2,300 pounds of $100 bills, or $100 million.
Comment: Edmond Safra, majority owner of Republic National Bank, the primary conduit for this gargantuan scheme to bilk Russia, was arguably
the money-laundering man for the Middle East and South America.
In the 1980s, he was implicated in money laundering $800 million in Colombian and Turkish drug money, and as a conduit in the Iran-Contra scandal. His power and influence was such that, as Alex Krainer writes in
The Killing of William Browder, "
wherever the American deep state ran covert operations, Edmond Safra was among their choice providers of financial logistics."
Among other things, Safra co-founded, with fellow-traveller William Browder, Hermitage Capital, the world's most successful hedge fund from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, pilfering the Russian state and that country's resources with free abandon until Browder was banned from the country in 2006.
Tried
in absentia, Browder was found guilty of defrauding the Russian state, a crime he has since frantically denied by lobbying Western governments to accept his version of events (that the Russian state, he claims, defrauded itself - and that everything wrong in that country is Putin's fault). Browder's successful efforts - and near total, global media coverage in his favor - led to the Magnitsky Act, the first round of unilateral, US-led anti-Russian sanctions in 2012.
Safra, meanwhile, also operated unmolested, successfully fending off every litigation brought against him. His bank was itself eventually 'laundered'. In 1999, Republic was absorbed into the British HSBC banking empire for $10 billion... on the same day as Safra's funeral after he had died in a mysterious fire at his home in Monaco.
In the immediate aftermath of the publication of the above article by Friedman, the US deep state kicked into high gear to limit its fallout, with none other than Senator (then Representative) Chuck Schumer (D, NY) taking to the Congress floor to record testimonies of support for Safra
into the Congressional record:
HON. CHARLES E. SCHUMER of New York in the House of Representatives
Tuesday, February 13, 1996
"Mr. Speaker, a weekly magazine recently published a lengthy article raising serious questions about the business activities conducted by Republic National Bank of New York with Russian banks. Republic is a large, well-respected institution serving the New York community and employing thousands of its residents. In the interest of fairness, so that the other side of the story can be heard, I would like to submit for the Record the attached materials. Included among them are several letters from law enforcement agencies and bank regulatory bodies. These letters testify to the bank's record of compliance with the law and cooperation with law enforcement officials and bank regulators."
In the madness of exploiting the 'Wild East' after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, US geopolitical designs to take control of Russian resources, and ultimately dismember that country, led to the raising of ferocious new 'democratic' elites there.
These elites have steadily been checked within Russia since Putin came to power, but to this day 'the Russian mob' is considered 'the most dangerous organized crime group in the world'.
Editor's note: Read this article and extrapolate to many other alleged 'Muslim terror masterminds'. Most likely, all of them were, in one way or another, assets of US intelligence agencies, tasked with creating the 'reality' of a terror threat to the USA in order that the US government could respond by invading and occupying nations around the world as part of the long war against Russia and China and securing the Middle East in particular for the 'new American century'.
From quasi investigative reports to legitimate leaks, whistleblowers and numerous court documents, several key 9/11 operatives have been identified and confirmed as assets and or informants of the United States government. All details of these operatives' positions, functions and employment records have been sealed and protected as
beyond and above top secret classified. Further, despite the established facts and undeniable trail of evidentiary crumbs, the mainstream and pseudo-alternative tentacles of the establishment continue to downplay or plainly disregard these cases, and parrot the long ago debunked official narrative. According to them the sum of two plus two plus more twos equals ... well, a solid 'zero.'
© InfoWars
America's Deep State players have tied down President Trump on Russian sanctions and other foreign and economic policies but that doesn't mean the struggle is over, writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.
President Trump has had his foreign policy hands and feet tied by the Russia (and Iran) Sanctions Act. He now has been rendered "helpless": in respect to détente with Russia - gulliverized, spitefully, by his own party, working with the Democrats, to empty Trump's constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy - and to seize them for Congress.And in a further humiliation,
Trump has been "rolled" by his military minders (Generals James Mattis, H.R. McMaster and John Kelly) on his Afghan policy: he has relinquished civilian oversight of this military expedition in Afghanistan to McMaster and Mattis - the former being the presumed author of the "new" Afghan policy. The President was "rolled" on his foreign military prerogatives too - as Commander in Chief - by his triumvirate of military minders in the White House.
The "civilian" leadership has given place to the "military."The question is whether these humiliating concessions will appease his opponents sufficiently to allow the President to "live on," albeit as an incapacitated President, or is this just the
hors d'oeuvre?
It seems that the entrée may be being planned as the complete discrediting of Trump's base - ordinary Republicans being lashed to the Trump "Titanic" - to be sunk along with its captain - as "white-supremacists, white bigots and Nazis."
Comment: In some respects, Trump has had to give away whole chunks of his power in order to keep the wolves at bay. His team has dissipated and those left to advise him seem to be those in place with varying and different agendas. Will his personality, quick-to-judgement tendencies, and brashness give way to his forte of keeping them guessing while working behind the scenes, or is he deluding himself that what he can do matters?
His best and only choice may be the support of the people, if he manages to wake them up. Even then, he will not be able to control the deep state, the heavy-handed influence of Israel, nor likely prevent a civil war. We can speculate the last thing the deep state wants is a rejuvenated American public that pays attention to its circumstances and will go all out to keep that from happening.
Pay attention to the upcoming 'debt ceiling deal'; this may very well be the moment the phony leveraging of 'the markets' is suspended and economic hell breaks loose.
© AP/Hassan AmmarA young boy rides his bike through the destruction of the once Jalloum neighborhood in the eastern Aleppo, Syria after it was liberated from Syrian rebels, Jan. 20, 2017
In early 2016 the hillside town of Madaya, just northwest of Damascus, was the focus of sudden Western and Gulf
media campaigns featuring harrowing photos of emaciated elderly and children splashed widely across print, online and social media. Throughout 2016, these stories continued in Madaya, as well as
in al-Waer, Homs, and in eastern-Aleppo areas.
The Syrian government was accused of not allowing in food and medical aid, of deliberately starving its people; the terrorists' presence was largely unmentioned. On Madaya,
The Telegraph ran a headline, "Starving Syrians in besieged town of Madaya are reduced to eating cats and dogs," and subheadline, "The people of Madaya outside Damascus - besieged by regime forces and Hezbollah since July - are surviving on boiled leaves and street animals," with no mention of al-Qaeda or Ahrar al-Sham.
The Independent accused the "Assad regime" of deliberately starving 40,000 civilians and, while citing the Red Cross in the article, neglected to cite that organization stating it had sent in food aid in October 2015, and also failed to mention al-Qaeda's presence in the town. In the same vein,
the New York Times ran a piece stating aid was denied from coming in, while also ignoring the realities on the ground and prior aid deliveries.
Has it ever occurred to you that when you have no cash, you have no privacy?
An operation that began as a seemingly obscure academic discussion three years ago is now becoming a full-blown propaganda campaign by some of the most powerful institutions in the industrialized world. This is what rightly should be termed the War on Cash. Like the War on Terror, the War on Cancer or the War on Drugs, its true agenda is sinister and opaque.
If we are foolish enough to swallow the propaganda for complete elimination of cash in favor of pure digital bank money, we can pretty much kiss our remaining autonomy and privacy goodbye. George Orwell's 1984 will be here on steroids.Let me be clear. Here we discuss not various block-chain digital technologies, so-called crypto-currencies. We are not addressing private payment systems such as China's WeChat. Nor do we discuss e-banking or use of bank credit cards such as Visa or Master Card or others. These are of an entirely different quality from the goal of the ongoing sinister war on cash. They are all private services not state.
What we are discussing is a plot, and it is a plot, by leading central banks, select governments, the International Monetary Fund in collusion with major international banks to force citizens-in other words, us!-to give up holding cash or using it to pay for purchases. Instead we would be forced to use digital bank credits. The difference, subtle though it may at first seem, is huge. As in India following the mad Modi US-inspired war on cash late in 2016, citizens would forever lose their personal freedom to decide how to pay or their privacy in terms of money. If I want to buy a car and pay cash to avoid bank interest charges, I cannot. My bank will limit the amount of digital money I can withdraw on any given day. If I want to stay in a nice hotel to celebrate a special day and pay cash for reasons of privacy, not possible. But this is just the surface.
Comment: Over three years under siege, Deir-ez-Zor joins Aleppo and Homs as some of the longest besieged cities in all history.
And now it's (almost) liberated, thanks to Russian and Syrian allied forces. With it, the last remaining substantial pocket of ISIS forces is removed from Syria.
Hurrah!