Puppet MastersS


Eagle

Pentagon seeking to resume top-secret programs in Ukraine - WaPo


RT
Sat, 11 Feb 2023 03:01 UTC
US Army soldiers
© AP Photo/Maya AlleruzzoUS Army soldiers from 7th Special Forces Group.
The US Department of Defense is trying to convince lawmakers to fund two top-secret programs in Ukraine, which were put on hold after Russia launched its military operation in the country last year, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

If the Pentagon gets its way, the operations involving US Special Forces could resume in 2024, the newspaper claimed.

The Post, citing unnamed current and former US officials, alleged that the schemes in question would allow US commandos to employ Ukrainian operatives to "observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation."

It said the programs are considered to be a form of "irregular warfare" intended for use against adversaries with whom Washington is not engaged in a military conflict.

While the Pentagon has already begun preparing its case for the resumption of these operations, Congress is unlikely to make a decision on the matter before the fall of 2023, the paper reported.

Comment: So far, at least, the Americans have mastered the art of the international bully poke. Just enough provocation and violence to avoid officially classifying as a fight. This includes getting others to fight for them (i.e. Ukraine), giving them orders and intelligence behind the scenes while avoiding getting their hands dirty and putting themselves at risk. And if the one being poked (i.e. Russia) punches back, they will cry to teacher that they didn't do anything wrong, they didn't throw the first punch.

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Bullseye

Exiled Ukrainian opposition leader accuses Western-backed forces of using neo-Nazis in proxy war against Russia


RT
Wed, 08 Feb 2023 10:12 UTC
Medvedchuk
© Reuters/Serhii NuzhenenkoFILE PHOTO: Ukraine opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk. The US and EU have a vested interest in the country, no matter how radical the government becomes, Viktor Medvedchuk said.
Radical political forces are a weapon routinely used by Western-backed actors in Ukraine to stifle opponents, exiled opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk believes. The US and its allies are willing to overlook this as long as it serves their interests, he said.

"Neo-Nazism is the cudgel that pro-Western forces turn to when they lose. Then, the mask of democracy and peacemaking comes off instantly, and opponents find themselves back in the harsh reality of political cannibalism," the Ukrainian politician wrote in an analysis of the ongoing conflict, which was published on Wednesday by RIA Novosti.

Medvedchuk's Opposition Platform - For Life party was the largest opposition faction in the Ukrainian parliament before a government crack down led by President Vladimir Zelensky banned the bloc for supposedly being pro-Russian.

Comment: See also: 'All the real skinheads went to Ukraine': An American Neo-Nazi outlines the crimes of his Ukrainian 'colleagues'

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Sherlock

US jets shoot down 'high-altitude object' off waters of Alaska


RT
Sat, 11 Feb 2023 20:57 UTC
Kirby
© screenshotFILE PHOTO: White House National Security Council Press Secretary John Kirby
Fighter jets shot down an object in US airspace near Alaska, which was deemed a hazard to civilian air traffic, the White House said on Friday afternoon. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby did not say what the object was. The announcement comes just days after a Chinese "spy balloon" was shot down over the Atlantic.

"The Department of Defense was tracking a high-altitude object over Alaska airspace in the last 24 hours," Kirby said at the White House briefing. He added that the object was flying at 40,000 feet - approximately 12 kilometers - and "posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight."

Comment:

UPDATE: Since they haven't identified it, we guess this technically counts as a UFO. According to the White House, the object was cylindrical in shape, metallic, and ... floating.
It was described as "cylindrical and silver-ish gray" and seemed to be floating, a U.S. official said.

Asked if was "balloon-like," the official said, "All I say is that it wasn't 'flying' with any sort of propulsion, so if that is 'balloon-like' well -- we just don't have enough at this point."

"We don't know who owns this object," he said.

The object came to U.S. attention Thursday evening, Kirby said.

"It did not appear to have maneuverability capability, he said. "It was virtually at the whim of the wind."

The object was traveling "northeasterly across Alaska" and two F-35 fighters were sent up to identify it last night, the Pentagon said later Friday evening.

On Friday, two F-22's from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson tracked it and one of them fired the AIM-9X sidewinder missile near the location of Deadhorse, Alaska which is right on Prudhoe Bay, according to the Pentagon.

Fighter aircraft checked if it was manned and determined it wasn't, Kirby said.

"We were able to get some fighter aircraft up and around it before the order to shoot it down. And the pilots' assessment was that this was not manned," he said.

"It was difficult for the pilots to glean a whole lot of information," he said, adding, "There was a limit to how much they could divine."

The recovery operation was taking place in a mix of ice and snow with active duty and National Guard units stationed in Alaska, the Pentagon said.
...
Fighter aircraft first saw it late Thursday night, it was a small object, and they were flying at high speed, he said. They did another flight "early this morning" to try to learn more. That flight "ended in a shootdown," Kirby said.
...
"We do expect to be able to recover the debris since it fell not only within our territorial space, but on what we what we believe is frozen water," Kirby said. "So, a recovery effort will be made, and we're hopeful that it will be successful and then we can learn a little bit more about it."


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Broom

Moldovan pro-Western Prime Minister resigns, government falls apart


Le Monde
Fri, 10 Feb 2023 12:47 UTC
Natalia Gavrilita
© VIRGINIA MAYO / APMoldova's Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita waits for the start of the EU-Moldova Association Council at the European Council building in Brussels on February 7, 2023.
Moldova's government collapsed on Friday, February 10, as pro-Western Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita resigned, adding to a series of crises that have gripped the small nation since Russia invaded its neighbor, Ukraine.

Gavrilita told a news conference that the "time has come for me to announce my resignation" and said no one expected her government, elected in the summer of 2021, "would have to manage so many crises caused by Russian aggression in Ukraine."

Gavrilita's premiership was marked by a long string of problems. These include an acute energy crisis; skyrocketing inflation; and several troublesome incidents such as missiles from the war in neighboring Ukraine traversing its skies.


Comment: An energy crisis caused by Western sanctions (that Moldova participated in?); inflation is mostly due to corrupt Western governments and their banking cartels; missiles may be 'traversing' their skies but whose are they? Because at least one that exploded in Moldova was Ukrainian.


Comment: Note that 59% of Moldova's citizens believe their country is controlled by Western forces, which doesn't exactly support the PM's accusations.

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Magnify

Best of the Web: Here's what's wrong with the Hersh report on the Nord Stream attacks

John Helmer
Dances With Bears
Fri, 10 Feb 2023 21:55 UTC
sy hersh
© John Helmer
Seymour Hersh's (lead image) report on President Joseph Biden's decision to destroy the Nord Stream gas pipelines on the Baltic seabed on September 26, 2022, and the involvement of the US Navy in preparing the explosives, has been based on a single anonymous US source with what Hersh calls "direct knowledge of the process".

From the full text of the Hersh report, it appears that neither the source nor Hersh has "direct knowledge" of the history of US-led operations to sabotage and destroy the pipelines which became public more than a year before; they directly involved the Polish government and the Danish government. In fact, by error of omission Hersh and his man are ignorant of those operations and of that history.

Also, the two of them are ignorant of the British government's role in this history, and in the final destruction, which was revealed publicly by then-Prime Minister Elizabeth Truss to Secretary of State Antony Blinken sixty seconds after the detonation; and by the Russian government when it announced its knowledge of the British involvement.
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Heart - Black

Best of the Web: Western sanctions will mean that more Syrians die after the earthquakes

Eva Bartlett
RT
Fri, 10 Feb 2023 15:42 UTC
Syrian quake survivors
© Muhammed Said/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesSyrian quake survivors stay at tents following 7.7 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes centered in Turkiye's Kahramanmaras, in Salqin district of Idlib, Syria on February 09, 2023
Following the devastating earthquakes that rocked Türkiye, Syria and their neighboring countries on February 6, leaving more than 20,000 dead, Damascus is struggling to deal with this unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe as it remains under brutal Western sanctions that have brought the country to its knees.

The West's war on Syria that began in early 2011 failed to topple its elected president, but the subsequent years of increasingly cruel sanctions - all in the name of 'helping the Syrian people' - have succeeded in rendering life miserable and near impossible, with most unable to afford to properly feed their families, much less heat their homes.

Now, in a time of crisis, the Syrian people cannot even receive donations or emergency support from abroad. One supporter set up a GoFundMe campaign, only to have it taken down due to the sanctions. Type the word "Ukraine" into the search field on PayPal or GoFundMe and you'll see countless appeals for sending money to Ukraine. But for Syrians, Western platforms like these are off-limits, and have been for years.
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Chess

Russia's strategic aims - in consequence to a collapsing US empire

Alastair Crooke
Strategic Culture
Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00 UTC
peeking
© ZDNet/istock
Weak leadership has lifted the lid on the European Pandora's box, Alastair Crooke writes.

Things are getting psychotic. As you listen to EU leaders, all parroting identical 'good news' speaking points, they nonetheless radiate basal disquietude - presumably a reflection of the psychic stress from, on the one hand, repeating 'Ukraine is winning: Russia's defeat is coming', when, on the other, they know the exact opposite to be true: That 'no way' can Europe defeat a large Russian army on the landmass of Eurasia.

Even the colossus of Washington confines the use of American military power to conflicts that Americans could afford to lose - wars lost to weak opponents that no one could gainsay whether the outcome was no loss, but somehow 'victory'.

Yet, war with Russia (whether financial or military) is substantially different from fighting small poorly equipped and dispersed insurgent movements, or collapsing the economies of fragile states, such as Lebanon.

Initial U.S. braggadocio has imploded. Russia neither collapsed internally to Washington's financial assault, nor fell into chaotic regime change as predicted by western officials. Washington underestimated Russia's societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions.

The question worrying the West is what the Russians now will do next: Continue to attrit the Ukrainian army, whilst simultaneously de-stocking NATO's weapons inventory? Or roll out the gathering Russian offensive forces across Ukraine?
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Beaker

Colin Powell's anthrax vial taught the US a valuable lesson - that it can get away with any lie it wants

Scott Ritter
RT
Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:26 UTC
powell
© Timothy A. Clary/AFPThen US Sec of State Colin Powell, addressing the United Nations, holds a vial that could hold anthrax
Twenty years ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now-infamous address before the United Nations Security Council, making the case for war against Iraq.

The presentation would later be revealed as lies. Sadly, it would also turn out that no one seemed to care. On February 5, 2003, I watched it all with a sense of boiling anger. The day before, I had made the following prediction to Japanese media:
"He's [Powell] going to present circumstantial evidence that packaged together and presented will make a compelling case that [UN weapons] inspections don't work, inspections can't work, that Iraq is actively conspiring against inspections, thereby, denigrating the efficacy of inspections, while the world waits for inspectors to do their job. The purpose of Colin Powell's presentation tomorrow is to destroy international trust and confidence in weapons inspections and that is a darn shame."
I was 100% correct in my assessment.

Comment: Duping Americans into docile acceptance without the filter of critical thinking was an important PTB accomplishment. It gave us 9/11, color revolutions and subsequent wars disguised as 'democracy'. The world was not fooled; Americans were.

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Jet3

Russia cautions against Western warplanes for Kiev


RT
Thu, 09 Feb 2023 14:01 UTC
militaryJet
© Adrian Dennis/AFPThe Eurofighter Typhoon
Russia will achieve its goals in the conflict with Ukraine regardless of whether the UK provides Kiev with fighter jets, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. The comments came after Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky pleaded with British MPs for warplanes.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Peskov said the UK, Germany, and France are becoming increasingly involved in the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. "The line between indirect and direct involvement is gradually disappearing," said the presidential spokesman, adding that this fuels further escalation.

According to Peskov, Western arms shipments are "prolonging this conflict, making [it] more painful and torturous for Ukraine."

Western efforts to shore up the Ukrainian military will not change the outcome of the hostilities nor the "trajectory that our country is following in terms of reaching [its] goals," he stated.

President Zelensky paid an official visit to London on Wednesday. Speaking to British lawmakers in the House of Commons, he asked the UK to provide combat aircraft for Ukraine, describing fighter jets as "wings for freedom."

Comment: Zelensky said: 'Wings for freedom'. He meant: 'Wings for free'.

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Attention

The War of Terror of a Rogue Superpower: Cui Bono?

Pepe Escobar
Strategic Culture
Fri, 10 Feb 2023 18:14 UTC
US Senile
© Public Domain
Everyone with a brain already knew the Empire did it. Now Seymour Hersh's bombshell report not only details how Nord Stream 1 and 2 were attacked, but also names names: from the toxic Straussian neoliberal-con trio Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland all the way to the Teleprompter Reader-in-Chief.

Arguably the most incandescent nugget in Hersh's narrative is to point ultimate responsibility directly at the White House. The CIA, for its part, gets away with it. The whole report may be read as the framing of a scapegoat. A very fragile, shoddy scapegoat - what with those classified documents in the garage, the endless stares into the void, the cornucopia of incomprehensible mumbling, and of course the whole, ghastly, years-long family corruption carousel in and around Ukraine, still to be completely unveiled.

Hersh's report happened to pop up immediately after the deadly earthquakes in Turkey/Syria. This is an investigative journalism earthquake in itself, straddling over fault lines and revealing countless open air fissures, nuggets of truth gasping for air amidst the rubble.

But is that all there is? Does the narrative hold from start to finish? Yes and no. First of all, why now? This is a leak - essentially from one Deep State insider, Hersh's key source. This 21st century "Deep Throat" remix may be appalled at the toxicity of the system, but at the same time he knows that whatever he says, there will be no consequences.

Cowardly Berlin - ignoring the nuts and bolts of the scheme all along - will not even squeak. After all the Green gang has been ecstatic, because the terror attack has thoroughly advanced their medieval de-industrialization agenda. In parallel, as an extra bonus, all the other European vassals receive further confirmation this is the fate that awaits them if they don't follow His Master's Voice.

Hersh's narrative frames the Norwegians as the essential accessory to terror. Hardly surprising: NATO's Jens "Peace is War" Stoltenberg has been a CIA asset for perhaps half a century. And Oslo of course had its own motives to be part of the deal; to collect loads of extra cash selling whatever spare energy it had for desperate European customers.
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