Puppet MastersS


Question

Trump says he 'thinks he knows' who was behind 9/11


RT
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 15:10 UTC
trump wtc world trade center 9/11
© Reuters / Jeff ChristensenReal estate developer Donald Trump gestures as he addresses reporters next to a model of the proposed World Trade Center known as the 'TWIN TOWERS II', Tuesday, May 18, 2005 in New York.
US President Donald Trump has cryptically suggested he knows who is responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but would not name the names.

Speaking to ABC's George Stephanopoulos in the Rose Garden of the White House this weekend, the president digressed from the subject of the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the infamous terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington in 2001.

"By the way, Iraq did not knock down the World Trade Center," the president said.
It was not Iraq. It was other people. And I think I know who the other people were.
"And you might also," he added, looking at Stephanopoulos.

Comment:

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Snakes in Suits

Israeli firm boasts it can hack all iPhones, Android and Flagship Samsungs


Sputnik
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 17:39 UTC
iphone
© REUTERS / Clodagh Kilcoyne
Israeli-based Cellebrite, whose clients reportedly included the FBI, has already been criticised over its refusal to cooperate with Apple and report the discovered vulnerabilities of the latest iOS, allowing the tech giant's technicians to eliminate them and boost the security of its devices.

Israeli tech company Cellebrite, based in Petah Tikva and specialising in getting access to mobile phone data, has claimed on its website it has a solution "to unlock and extract crucial mobile phone evidence" from all iPhones and many Android-based devices, including flagship Samsungs.

The company marketed one of its products in this way. It promises clients to get "a full file system extraction" on any iOS and many high-end Android phones and pads, as well as a physical extraction for the latter.

Comment: As if people needed any more reasons to switch over to Huawei:

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Arrow Up

US chipmakers quietly lobby to ease Huawei ban

Alexandra Alper
Reuters
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 01:06 UTC
Huawei
© REUTERS/Aly SongFILE PHOTO: A Huawei company logo is seen at a shopping mall in Shanghai, China June 3, 2019.
Huawei's American chip suppliers, including Qualcomm and Intel, are quietly pressing the U.S. government to ease its ban on sales to the Chinese tech giant, even as Huawei itself avoids typical government lobbying, people familiar with the situation said.

Executives from top U.S. chipmakers Intel and Xilinx Inc attended a meeting in late May with the Commerce Department to discuss a response to Huawei's placement on the black list, one person said.

The ban bars U.S. suppliers from selling to Huawei, the world's largest telecommunications equipment company, without special approval, because of what the government said were national security issues.

Qualcomm has also pressed the Commerce Department over the issue, four people said.

Comment: If this were truly a national security issue it's likely US companies would gladly comply however there is no reason to believe Huawei nor China itself has any intent to deliberately harm the US, this is just another ill-conceived attempt from Washington to maintain US dominance in a world that has moved on and is fast leaving the US behind:

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Bad Guys

Washington, Russia, China and the probability of World War III in the not too distant future

Federico Pieraccini
Strategic Culture Foundation
Tue, 11 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
mushroom cloud
Those who are familiar with my articles would be aware that I am not given to catastrophism or alarmism. But perhaps the time has come to reflect on who will be president after Trump (whether after this or the next term) and what this will mean for relations with Russia and China.

What will the United States' relations with Russia and China be like when the 46th president of the United States takes office in 2025? This is a question that I often ask myself, especially in light of Trump's political choices regarding international arms-control treaties (INF Treaty), nuclear proliferation, economic war with China, a financial crisis that is artificially postponed thanks to QE, out-of-control military spending, an increasingly aggressive NATO stance towards the Russian Federation, and continuous provocations against the People's Republic of China. Where will we end up with after another five years of provocations? For how much longer will Putin and Xi Jinping maintain the "strategic patience" not to respond to Washington with drastic measures?

Let us imagine we are in 2025

The four current global hot spots - Iran, Syria, Venezuela and DPRK - have maintained their resistance to Washington's diktats and have emerged more or less victorious. Syrian territory in its entirety is now under the control of Damascus; Iran has established enough deterrents not to be attacked; Pyongyang continues in its negotiations with Washington as the reunification of the two Koreas continues along; the Bolivarian revolution still lives on in Venezuela.


Comment: All these predictions may be overly optimistic, however.

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Nuke

SOTT Focus: Stephen Cohen's 2017 Prophecy About The Nuclear Threat of Russiagate is Coming True

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 22:59 UTC
nyt cyberattacks russia
The New York Times has published an anonymously sourced report titled "U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia's Power Grid" about the "placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before" which could potentially "plunge Russia into darkness or cripple its military," with one anonymous official reporting that "We are doing things at a scale that we never contemplated a few years ago."

Obviously this is yet another serious escalation in the continually mounting series of steps that have been taken into a new cold war between the planet's two nuclear superpowers. Had a report been leaked to Russian media from anonymous Kremlin officials that Moscow was escalating its cyber-aggressions against America's energy grid, this would doubtless be labeled an act of war by the political/media class of the US and its allies with demands for immediate retaliation.

To put this in perspective, The New York Times reported last year that the Pentagon was pushing for the US Nuclear Posture Review to include the strategy of retaliating against serious Russian cyberattacks on American power grids with nuclear weapons.
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Blue Planet

Iran at the center of the Eurasian riddle

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 20:10 UTC
Putin Xi Rouhani
© AFP / Vyacheslav OseledkoRussian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani walk as they attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Heads of State in Bishkek on June 14, 2019.
President Rouhani blasts US leader Donald Trump as 'a serious threat to regional and world stability', offers preferential treatment to SCO companies that invest in his country

With the dogs of war on full alert, something extraordinary happened at the 19th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) late last week in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Virtually unknown across the West, the SCO is the foremost Eurasian political, economic and security alliance. It's not a Eurasian NATO. It's not planning any humanitarian imperialist adventures. A single picture in Bishkek tells a quite significant story, as we see China's Xi, Russia's Putin, India's Modi and Pakistan's Imran Khan aligned with the leaders of four Central Asian "stans".

These leaders represent the current eight members of the SCO. Then there are four observer states - Afghanistan, Belarus, Mongolia and, crucially, Iran - plus six dialogue partners: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and, crucially, Turkey.

Comment: See also: "The bombing will be massive": US planning a 'tactical assault' in Iran - UN officials

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Calendar

Modi-Xi-Putin Meeting at SCO Summit Vital For Re-Shaping the World Order

Matthew Ehret
Sott.net
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 20:57 UTC
sco 2019 bishkek
An important convergence of nations occured during the June 13-14 annual Shanghai Cooperation Summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where Presidents Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi met at an event designed to bring together the majority of the Eurasian world under a banner of cooperation. Kyrgyzstan is especially important as it is a gateway uniting the east and west via the Belt and Road Initiative and China-Kyrgyzstan Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. This event comes hot off the heels of Putin and Xi Jinping's historic meeting at the Kremlin on June 5 where the two leaders solidified their unbreakable friendship, which is quickly reshaping the entire world order.

Modi's announcement of bilateral meetings at the upcoming summit shows great promise as the previous meeting he held with Xi Jinping in Wuhan in 2018 was a leading factor behind the diffusing of tensions being cooked up between both governments by Anglo-American manipulation, and which many were fearing could lead to war.
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Cowboy Hat

Russia pushes back against US "Freedom Gas", floods European market

Haley Zaremba
Oilprice.com
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 14:00 UTC
gas tanker
So far this year, Russia has been flooding the European markets with an oversupply of natural gas despite the fact that the glut is pushing natural gas prices lower. Booming exports from Russia, which had already been the largest supplier of natural gas to the continent, have nearly maxed out European natural gas storage capacity and added to what was already an oversupply of natural gas in the region. This will likely push Europe to cut down on their imports of natural gas from the United States in the short term. According to some experts, this is potentially all part of a Russian plan to put the United States to the test.

This could be all part of a plan, however, to "test the resilience of U.S. exporters", according to multinational investment banking corporation Citigroup Inc. as reported by Bloomberg. In a report released earlier this month, Ed Morse and other bank analysts from Citigroup opined that Russia has kept pumping gas into Europe in lieu of letting gas prices return to a higher price point because Putin's administration is "testing the response of the global gas market in a low price environment, especially U.S. LNG export elasticity."

Comment: In the winter of 2018 winters the UK ran out of natural gas, Russia rescued them, but in the meantime prices rocketed 400%, and so one wonders whether this year, amidst the glut, European gas suppliers will pass on these savings to the citizens, many who struggle to heat their homes as it is. As for how it'll affect the US, well, they better get used to it because with the Nord Stream gas pipelines this scenario will be even easier to implement:

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Attention

"The bombing will be massive": US planning a 'tactical assault' in Iran - UN officials

Shlomo Shamir
Jerusalem Post
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 20:05 UTC
pompeo
The military action under consideration would be an aerial bombardment of an Iranian facility linked to its nuclear program, the officials further claimed.
Is the US going to attack Iran soon?

Diplomatic sources at the UN headquarters in New York revealed to Maariv that they are assessing the United States' plans to carry out a tactical assault on Iran in response to the tanker attack in the Persian Gulf on Thursday.

According to the officials, since Friday, the White House has been holding incessant discussions involving senior military commanders, Pentagon representatives and advisers to President Donald Trump.

The military action under consideration would be an aerial bombardment of an Iranian facility linked to its nuclear program, the officials further claimed.

"The bombing will be massive but will be limited to a specific target," said a Western diplomat.

Comment: See also:

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Gold Coins

Best of the Web: A month in the life of the world's richest man - Putin (at least according to his critics)

Patrick Armstrong
Strategic Culture Foundation
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 20:08 UTC
putin gold
Between one hundred billion and one hundred and sixty billion dollars. That's a lot of moolah. Taking the lower number, that's a line of thousand dollar bills half way to the Moon. Personal yacht? Buy the latest Princess cruise ship, staff it, have it all to yourself forever and still have 99 billion or so to fool around with. A brand new Italian super car every day for ten years wouldn't make much of a dent. You like to cruise? Reserve the Owner's suite on every Princess cruise ship and have a private plane standing by 24/7 just in case. Hotels? Buy a couple in your favourite part of the world; permanently rent the Emperor's Suite in a couple of dozen others. Put yourself into orbit on your private orbiter. Private planes? how about a double-decker Airbus? Only a billion for two. Private Caribbean island? Lots to choose from. Hire a bunch of healthy organ donors and a mobile hospital to follow you around. Anything. Build a new Great Pyramid, it's chump change out of $100 billion. Endow a university chair to study your life and works. Fill Easter Island with giant statues of yourself. It would be impossible to spend that much in a human lifetime.

This, we are told, is the extent of Putin's wealth.
In the book, "Russia's Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy," Aslund estimates that through the practice of "crony capitalism," Putin has amassed a net worth between $100 billion and $160 billion, which would make him richer than the officially wealthiest man in the world, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos.
(Love that "net" - sounds so precise.) Pfeh! says Browder: a measly one hundred - try two hundred billion! Nah! A trivial seventy billion says somebody else. Why not eleventy-seven squintillion? Net.
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