Puppet MastersS


Propaganda

The NY Times' propaganda on how moral America was before Trump took office

Donald Johnson
Mondoweiss
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC
Trump NYT
© Getty Images/CNN MoneyMr. President, RT knows how you feel!
How can the New York Times print a piece about Russia Today as propaganda on March 9 — RT is unquestionably a case study in the complexity of modern propaganda — and two days later publish a piece like this and keep a straight face? Allies Fear Trump Is Eroding America's Moral Authority.

The only foreigners actually cited re America's "moral authority" say things which are all very disputable, to say the least. Like how good George Bush was for Muslims:
"Even in the days of George W. Bush, there was no feeling that Bush was against Muslims," said Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister of Jordan and now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Or there are the German leaders who are dismayed by Trump's blunt defense of Vladimir Putin to Bill O'Reilly: "There are a lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country's so innocent?"
The comment alarmed many because it underscored an approach by Mr. Trump, like the rejection of migrants from certain predominantly Muslim countries, that has stripped much of the moral component from American foreign relations and left him being lectured by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and others about his duties under international law.

Her foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, has gone one step further, reminding America of its moral duty as the most powerful Western country and one founded by Christian refugees...
Other voices pushing this "moral authority" claim in the article are not allies, but American establishment figures. They include Joseph Nye, a former senior State Department official now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government - "The Berlin Wall didn't come down because people were responding to American howitzers" — and Michèle Flournoy, the liberal-interventionist who was seen as Hillary Clinton's choice to be secretary of defense. "The most burning question overseas is, 'Can we rely on the United States to keep its commitments, can we rely on you to lead in the way we expect,'" she reports.

Comment: A 'bad wind' blowing: MSM, lead by The New York Times, have been 'hoisted by their own petards.'

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MIB

Foreign secret services stepping up efforts to destabilize Russia


RT
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:08 UTC
Nikolai Patrushev
© Grigoriy Sisoev / Sputnik Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev
The head of Russia's top consultative security body has said that foreign secret services have intensified their efforts to destabilize Russia, noting that Ukrainian authorities had openly confessed to planning sabotage operations.

"The destructive activities of foreign special services that set their goal as destabilizing the Russian social and political situation has intensified," Security Council chair Nikolai Patrushev told participants at a conference of the heads of security agencies of the Southern Federal District.

"Ukrainian authorities openly declare that they are organizing acts of sabotage," he said.
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Red Flag

Merkel, Rutte agreed on the refugee quota deal with Turkey; telling other EU leaders slipped their minds


RT
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 19:59 UTC
Merkel Davutoglu Rutte
© Hakan Goktepe / AFPAngela Merkel, Ahmet Davutoglu, Mark Rutte
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte secretly agreed to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees from Turkey each year as part of an EU-Turkey deal but did not inform other EU leaders, a book by a German journalist says.

The two European leaders met with then Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to discuss the details of the EU-Turkey refugee deal in private the night before the EU-Turkey summit in March 2016. The details of the secret trilateral meet where the deal was struck, has been revealed in a new book, Driven by Events: Merkel's Refugee Policy, by Robin Alexander, a journalist with Die Welt.

During the meeting, Merkel, and Rutte, who held the rotating EU presidency at that time as the Dutch PM, agreed on all the major provisions of the future EU-Turkey agreement which was later presented at the summit as a spontaneous Turkish initiative.

In particular, they gave consent to the idea of Europe taking between 150,000 and 250,000 Syrian refugees from Turkey each year even after the massive inflow of asylum seekers and migrants to Europe would have subsided and the principle, under which the EU should accept one Syrian refugee for each asylum seeker returned from Greece to Turkey, would not work anymore.

However, this particular 'deal' never made into the official text of the agreement and remains a "gentleman's agreement" between Merkel, Rutte and Turkish authorities, Alexander writes in his report, citing unnamed officials that "were directly involved in the negotiations" between the three leaders on the night before the summit.

Comment: In other words, Merkel and Rutte pulled a fast one then did massive impression management.

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Monkey Wrench

Iran combats drones with jamming tool


Sputnik
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:20 UTC
US Drone
© US Air Force / Staff Sgt. Brian FergusonUS MQ-9 Reaper Drone
Iran may find itself at the forefront of drone warfare, after deploying a jamming device that not only seizes control of a remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), but can use the compromised aircraft against its operator.

As the US continues to launch launch spy drones over Syria, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf, Iran and other countries have been factoring UAVs more heavily into efforts to counteract Washington's tactics.

In response to US ships targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' navy, Tehran has been testing and deploying suicide drones that they claim can go toe-to-toe with American vessels.

"The way they affect us is they provide Iran with a layered capability where they can use their fast boats, they can use cruise missiles, they can use radars, they can use UAVs to potentially dominate specific areas," said Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the US Central Command and overseer of US operations in the Persian Gulf.

Comment: Just when the US thought it had thought of everything...Iran comes up with a nifty, killer drone idea. A technological touché.

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Padlock

Israeli defense exec admits guilt to defrauding US aid program


Sputnik
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 23:05 UTC
OCTAL HALE
© haleproducts.comTwo companies doing business with Yuval Marshak
A former executive of an Israel-based defense contractor has pleaded guilty for his role in schemes to defraud a multi-billion dollar US program to finance foreign military purchases, the US Department of Justice announced in a press release on Monday.

Yuval Marshak entered his plea to one count of mail fraud, two counts of wire fraud and one count of major fraud against the United States in US District Court in the state of Connecticut, the release explained. "This conviction is the result of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's (DCIS) ongoing effort to identify and investigate fraudulent activity targeting the Department of Defense and its programs that support America's national security and foreign policy objectives," DCIS Northeast Field Office acting special agent in charge Leigh-Alistair Barzey stated in the release.

According to court documents, Marshak carried out three separate schemes between 2009 and 2013, in which he falsely certified that all items sent to Israel had been made in the United States, as required by law, the release noted. Marshak also falsely claimed that no commissions had been paid, when a company in Connecticut that was controlled by a relative received undisclosed payments, according to the release.

Two US companies have already settled charges with the Justice Department in connection with the FMF contracts. Earlier this year, the New Jersey-based defense contractor Octal Group agreed to pay $460,000 in fines and restitution for covering up an agreement with Marshak. A second company, Hale Products, Inc. paid more than $60,000 and agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department investigation.

In addition to fines, Marshak faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years for wire and mail fraud charges, ten years for major fraud against the US government and 20 years for international money laundering.
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Briefcase

California joins multi-state lawsuit against Trump's travel ban


RT
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 15:13 UTC
CA AG Xavier Becerra
© Orange County RegisterCalifornia Attorney General Xavier Becerra
Attorneys for eight US states with Democratic majorities are pushing to prevent President Donald Trump's new travel ban from taking effect. California's attorney general has announced he will join the lawsuit, calling the measure unconstitutional. California will be joining Washington, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, New York, and Massachusetts in challenging the travel ban before a federal judge, Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Monday.

"Last month, our courts put a lid on the unconstitutional and un-American Trump Muslim travel ban because Americans stood up and demanded it," Becerra said in a statement, quoted by the Los Angeles Times.

"The victory for lawful permanent residents and current visa holders was welcome news for everyone, especially the victims' families. But the fight for fair and lawful treatment of all who would seek permission to enter our country is not over," he added.

Though the new ban includes numerous exemptions, including for lawful permanent residents and visa holders, Becerra said this was not good enough.

"The Trump Administration may have changed the text of the now-discredited Muslim travel ban, but they didn't change its unconstitutional intent and effect," he said. "It is still an attack on people — women and children, professors and business colleagues, seniors and civic leaders — based on their religion and national origin."

Comment: Temporary travel bans are not exclusive to Trump's administration. The Immigration and Nationality Act clearly gives the president the authority to use his discretion to restrict or "suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants." It is legal for President Trump to issue the ban. In fact, the past six presidents have issued executive orders banning certain categories of immigrants from entering the country for a period of time.

According to the Congressional Research Service, Obama invoked his immigration authority on 19 occasions. President George W. Bush invoked it six times. Bill Clinton used it 12 times. George H.W. Bush used it once, and Ronald Reagan used it five times.

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USA

The Crumbling American Superpower

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:42 UTC
Crumbling US infrastructure
The catastrophic events around the California Oroville Dam in recent weeks underscores a far more urgent problem. The American Society of Civil Engineers has just released their quadrennial assessment of United States essential infrastructure - roads, clean water supplies, levees, ports, dams, bridges, electric grid. The report gives the nation a near-failing D+ grade. America is coming to resemble the economic infrastructure in the Soviet Union domestically at the collapse of communism during the late 1980's. The recently-announced Donald Trump proposal to invest $1 trillion over ten years to address the problem, mainly building high-speed trains (to date the USA has not one) doesn't even come close to the scope of the problem.

A Wall Street-driven agenda of globalization of US manufacturing and out-sourcing of production has left America a hollowed-out, crumbling Superpower. Since the 1980's the United States has significantly under-invested in both new infrastructure and in renewing old. As US multinational corporations moved their factories overseas to cheap labor production in Mexico, then in Asia, especially China, and elsewhere, they found tax loopholes that allowed them to walk away from supporting the country that as recently as the 1960's was the world industrial economic leading nation. Today US corporations hold $2.4 trillion in overseas profits that they keep abroad to avoid US taxes.

The result of all this neglect is that over the past three decades since the end of the 1980s, federal funding of major infrastructure projects such as dams has dropped by half, from 1 percent to 0.5 percent of GDP.
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Clock

DOJ needs more time to provide evidence of Trump's wiretap claims


RT
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:27 UTC
US Justice Department logo
© Carlo Allegri / Reuters
The US Justice Department isn't yet ready to comply with a House Intelligence Committee inquiry asking for evidence of President Donald Trump's wiretapping allegations against former President Barack Obama.

The House Intelligence Community originally set a Monday deadline for the DOJ. They expected the department to provide any evidence to support Trump's claims that Obama had Trump Tower surveilled during the 2016 election.

As the deadline loomed, DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores released a statement on Monday, asking the committee for "additional time."

Comment: DOJ having trouble finding the evidence?

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Telephone

'Not now, not in the future': Recording of Paul Ryan's anti-Trump pledge emerges


RT
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:20 UTC
Paul Ryan
© Joshua Roberts / Reuters
A recording of a conference call prior to last year's US presidential election has emerged with Paul Ryan heard vouching to Republicans that he would never defend Donald Trump. The call took place in the wake of the leaked 'Access Hollywood' tapes.

"I am not going to defend Donald Trump — not now, not in the future," House Speaker Ryan can be heard saying in the audio released by Breitbart, adding that he would not be campaigning with the candidate over the next 30 days, instead concentrating his effort on winning a Republican Congress.
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Attention

French presidential candidate Fillon placed under formal investigation over fraud accusations


RT
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:11 UTC
Francois Fillon
© Christian Hartmann / Reuters
Francois Fillon was placed under formal investigation on Tuesday over allegations he misappropriated government funds, Reuters reports.

The news was reported by Le Canard Enchaine and RTL, which claimed the charges were related to suspicious activity that would have benefited his wife Penelope.
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