Puppet MastersS


Handcuffs

UK police arrest journalists who exposed Govt. collusion in 1994 Loughinisland killings

Rory Carroll
The Guardian
Sat, 01 Sep 2018 22:52 UTC
Allegations against two men relate to materials allegedly used in film on 1994 massacre
The Heights bar in Loughinisland, County Down, Northern Ireland
© PAThe Heights bar in Loughinisland, County Down, the morning after six people were killed.
Two investigative journalists who worked on Alex Gibney's documentary about the Loughinisland massacre in Northern Ireland have been arrested over the alleged theft of confidential documents.

Officers from Durham constabulary detained Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey in Belfast on Friday over the use of material allegedly stolen from the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI).

Gibney said the arrests were outrageous and that police should instead have reopened the investigation into the 1994 massacre in which a loyalists murdered six Catholics.
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Sherlock

Best of the Web: After five years the death of investigative journalist Michael Hastings remains a mystery

Robert Bridge
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 25 Aug 2018 22:21 UTC
michael hastings memorial
© Lord Jim/FlickrMemorial at crash site of journalist Michael Hastings
Michael Hastings was one of America's most popular modern journalists, perhaps best known for his 2010 expose in Rolling Stone magazine, "The Runaway General", which led to the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

In the early hours of June 18, 2013, a vehicle purported to have been driven by Michael Hastings crashed in Los Angeles, thus snuffing out the life of an already prolific young talent whose best years were still ahead of him. And that is where the worst part of this tragedy begins: the death of Michael Hastings, despite him being an influential member of the journalistic community, was never given the thorough investigative approach it rightly deserved.

This article will not go into all of the details of Hastings' life, since much of that is already known. Suffice it to say that the author probably had just as many enemies - many of them high-ranking officials - as he had friends. Ruining the career of an Army general, while declaring on one occasion that the media should "declare war" on the government, has a tendency to do those things. On top of that, Wikileaks reported that Hastings had contacted them just hours before his death, saying he was under investigation by the FBI. The federal agency, however, denied the claim. Those bits of information were enough for many people to frame his premature and very violent death as some sort of premeditated murder.

Comment:

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Pumpkin 2

Rupert Murdoch: The cancer eating the heart of Australian democracy

Kevin Rudd
Sydney Morning Herald
Mon, 27 Aug 2018 21:46 UTC
rupert lachlan murdoch
Beneath the sound and light show that passed for Australian politics last week, there is a much deeper question of what underlying forces have been at work that have brought us this low. The uncomfortable truth is, since the coup of June 2010, Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?

There have been many factors at work. First, the histrionic politics of climate change dividing the nation for more than a decade - we have lacked the national political maturity to just get on with it, despite Australia being the driest continent on earth.
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Pistol

Donetsk People's Republic official: US 'directly involved' in Zakharchenko assassination


Sputnik
Fri, 31 Aug 2018 21:34 UTC
Deputy Defense Minister and defense spokesman of Donetsk People's Republic Eduard Basurin
© Sputnik
According to Deputy Defense Minister and defense spokesman of Donetsk People's Republic Eduard Basurin, the US could have taken part in the assassination of the Donetsk People's Republic head Zakharchenko.

According to Eduard Basurin, Zakharchenko's murder took place "under the regulation by the United States."

"The US was directly involved in it," Basurin said.

Comment: Failed state Ukraine is probably getting desperate, especially as Zakharchenko was looking to follow Crimea's example and reunify with Russia. It looks, however, like this may backfire like the rest of their plans:

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Jet3

Money down the drain: US eyeing F-22/F-35 hybrid to counter 'Russian & Chinese threats'


RT
Sat, 01 Sep 2018 20:18 UTC
Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II
© Steve Thorne / Getty ImagesFILE PHOTO. Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II.
The US is reportedly looking into a hybrid of two 5th generation fighter jets - the F-22 and F-35 - to help counter "Russian and Chinese threats." The two machines, both riddled with technical issues, might not mix well.

The hybrid was proposed to the US military by the arms giant Lockheed Martin, Defense One reported, citing sources "with direct knowledge of the plane." The plane is basically a modified F-22 Raptor with unspecified changes to its frame and featuring the modern avionics of the F-35 Lightning II.

Naturally, the plane is being sold as a powerful tool "to counter Russian and Chinese threats," according to the report. While the two are favorite scapegoats for the US military, especially when it pushes for more funding, it's unclear why exactly the US Air Force might need a new fifth-generation fighter jet to counter them. Moscow and Beijing have developed fifth-generation jets, yet both still lack any considerable fleets of such machines.

Comment: Considering the myopic wishful thinking that's endemic in the United States, a merger of two failed fighter jets will undoubtedly only produce something even worse than the two alone:

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Dig

Best of the Web: Irish co-producers of documentary about British state collusion in terrorism arrested by English police

Mark Edwards
Belfast Telegraph
Fri, 31 Aug 2018 20:29 UTC
McCaffrey Birney
© Liam McBurney/PAFrom left, solicitor John Finucane with his client, investigative journalist Barry McCaffrey, and Trevor Birney with his solicitor Niall Murphy leaving Musgrave police station in Belfast on Friday night.
A journalist arrested by police investigating the suspected theft of confidential documents linked to the Loughinisland massacre said it was "an attack on the press" as he and a colleague were released on bail on Friday night.

Families and supporters of those killed in the 1994 attack had staged a vigil in solidarity with award-winning reporters Barry McCaffrey (48) and Trevor Birney (51).

The two men, who produced the documentary No Stone Unturned about the UVF gun attack at the Heights Bar, were detained at 7am on Friday.

They walked out of Musgrave police station in Belfast at 8.55pm, with a tearful Mr McCaffrey saying: "There are families here [who] lost loved ones who didn't get justice today.

"This man [Mr Birney] was taken away from his wife and his children this morning. My neighbours had to see me getting taken away. It's not fair. It's not fair.

"And it's an attack on the press, everybody should realise. It's us today. Tomorrow it could be you."

Comment: These documents were obviously leaked to them, not 'stolen by them'. For the full story about this, it's best to watch this eye-opening documentary:



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Pirates

UAE government used Israel-based agency to hack phones of a prince, emir and other rivals


RT
Sat, 01 Sep 2018 17:00 UTC
apps mobile phone
© Oli Scarff / AFPThe UAE stands accused of illegally hacking the phones of their enemies.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) asked an Israel-based surveillance company to spy on a prince, a Qatari emir, and other rivals by hacking their phones, according to leaked emails obtained by the New York Times.

The emails cited in the Times report, which was published on Friday, were submitted in lawsuits against Israel-based NSO Group. The correspondence suggests that the surveillance company may have been involved in illegal spying for clients, with evidence indicating that the UAE signed a contract to license the spyware from "as early as August 2013."

The UAE sought to intercept the calls of some major rivals with the spyware - including Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Ali Thani in 2014, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and Saudi Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, who was seen as a contender for the throne at the time.

Comment: One could expect that the software could also spy on the customer. Well maybe that wasn't a concern considering the already curious relationship between the UAE and Israel:

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Russian Flag

Russia's grand strategy: Fight for 20 years of peace

Andrei Martyanov
The Unz Review
Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC
Russian stamp
© shutterstockPyotr Stolypin
We live in the world of models, all kinds of them. Some models are simple, others-very complex. The main task of those models is to predict how things, those models describe, will behave depending on the circumstances. Some of those models work brilliantly, others fail miserably. Worst models in terms of reliability are those dealing with geopolitics. A record of dismal failures of Western in general, and American in particular, geopolitical models to predict anything right is widely available for everyone to see. Time after time those models and predictions turned out to be wrong. In terms of "predicting" anything in regards to Russia, those predictions were not only wrong, they were downright dangerous.

No better demonstration exists of a complete breakdown in the process of predicting anything than the evolution of Russian military and economic power. As late as 2016, claims that Russia remained nothing more than, in the words of John McCain, a gas station masquerading as a country, continued to pour in by all kinds of "experts", who, despite a huge collection of facts to the contrary, continued to believe only Russia's nuclear forces keep Russia as some secondary factor in international relations. There are even some Russian experts who share this point of view. Their models and predictions turned out to be wrong. They lacked the most important predictor of them all.
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Russian Flag

When sources go quiet in Moscow

Philip M. Giraldi
Strategic Culture Foundation
Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC
Military intel?
© Unknown
The CIA admits that it knows nothing.

A quite astonishing article recently appeared in the New York Times, astonishing even by the standards of that newspaper, which featured Judith Miller and Michael Gordon in the Pentagon-sponsored lie machine that led up to the catastrophic war against Iraq. The article, entitled "Kremlin Sources Go Quiet, Leaving CIA in the Dark about Putin's Plans for Midterms," claims that the United States has had a number of spies close to the Russian president "who have provided crucial details" that have now stopped reporting at a critical time with midterm elections coming up. The reporting is sourced to "...American officials familiar with the intelligence" who "...spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal classified information."

After reading the piece, my first reaction was that Judith Miller was back but the byline clearly read Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg. Noms de plume, perhaps? The article is so astonishingly bad on so many levels that it could have been featured in Marvel Comics instead of the Gray Lady. First of all, if American intelligence truly has in the Kremlin high level human agents, referred to as Humint, it would not be publicizing the fact for fear that Moscow would intensify its search for the traitors and discover who they were. No intelligence officer speaking either openly or anonymously would make that kind of fatal mistake by leaking such information to a journalist.

Comment: Combining supportive secret CIA admissions with a creative 'fact'ory of accusations, Moscow must be exceedingly entertained.

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Vader

CNN, citing intelligence gods, declares US has list of targets in Syria


RT
Fri, 31 Aug 2018 21:07 UTC
Flag/Missile
© Ford Williams/US Navy/Global Look Press
The US military and intelligence have already compiled a list of preliminary targets they would strike in response to another chemical weapons incident in Syria, CNN reported, citing the US administration officials.

The military are ready to "respond very quickly" at any moment if the US President Donald Trump decides to launch another strike against the Syrian government, one such official told CNN, adding that no decision to "take action" has been made yet. However, the intelligence experts already "assembled" targeting data of what they described as "chemical weapons facilities," the media outlet reported.

It comes as the Pentagon is seemingly engaged in an all-out information war, as it vehemently denies all statements referring to a potential false-flag chemical-weapons attack, which Russia says is being prepared by terrorists in Syria's Idlib. The US military has accused Moscow of spreading "lies" by revealing this information and suggesting that the attack could be used to justify a new US strike on Syria.

"Russia has recently launched a concentrated disinformation campaign to discredit the United States and international partners and allies... Specifically, Russia has suggested that as a pretext for United States strikes against the Assad regime, humanitarian organizations in Syria were planning a chemical weapon attack. This is absurd," a Pentagon spokesperson, Commander Sean Robertson said on Friday.

Comment: The US has become a one-trick pony for creating both cause and response. Will Russia's investigative efforts succeed and this go-around be different?

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