Puppet MastersS


Snakes in Suits

Evaluate Hillary Clinton by her results, not her words

hillary clinton crazy face
BOLO: presidential candidate, armed and considered extremely dangerous, known to cackle with creepy laughter at inappropriate times.
Hillary Clinton's major result was produced while she was the U.S. Secretary of State, her refusing at that time to call the coup in Honduras on 28 June 2009, a "coup." By her refusing to call it a coup, the U.S. Government, under Barack Obama, was enabled to continue financial aid to the Honduran Government, and this financial aid, in turn, enabled the coup-installed regime to become stabilized and to remain in place, despite the rest of the world's government's having condemned it.

Here is one recent result of her action regarding Honduras:
Drugs, Dams, and Power: The Murder of Honduran Activist Berta Cáceres

This is how she did it — how she (with follow-through by the U.S. President) produced it:
Hillary Clinton's Six Foreign-Policy Catastrophes

And this is what she says about it, in retrospect:
Hillary Clinton is lying about the criminal U.S.-backed coup in Honduras. It should be as scandalous as Libya

In other words: She's not apologetic about what she did and what its disastrous consequences were — she ignores them.

Snakes in Suits

Wishful thinking: Saakashvili plots return to Georgia after Ukraine fiasco

Mikheil Saakashvili
© Sputnik/ Iliya Pitalev
Disgraced former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, currently the governor of Ukraine's Odessa region, appears to be homesick. The former president, who had his Georgian citizenship revoked and faces criminal charges including embezzlement and abuse of power, told Georgian television channel Rustavi 2 that he has plans to return home.

Saakashvili explained that he would return to the country following parliamentary elections scheduled for October, saying that he expects the United National Movement, a center-right opposition party which he formally leads, to win a majority and form the government.

"It's necessary to hold the elections, to win, and to come and help the people who have won," the politician noted.

Light Sabers

Obama snubbed by Saudi king at airport

Obama Saudi Arabia
© Kevin Lamarque / ReutersU.S. President Barack Obama is greeted upon his arrival at King Khalid International Airport for a summit meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia April 20, 2016.
Obama, who has visited Saudi Arabia more times than any US president before him, was not greeted by the Saudi king at the airport. Saudi state television broadcast no live pictures of the US president's arrival. It was the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a local governor who met the American leader off the plane.

President Obama came to Saudi Arabia to take part in a summit of Persian Gulf leaders and discuss Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Yemen with King Salman. This comes in stark contrast to the reception of other high-profile guests, whom the 80-year-old King Salman greeted personally on the airfield.

Obama did have a two-and-a-half hour conversation with King Salman later, a talk that reportedly "really cleared the air," the US administration officials assured the American media. Barack Obama's visit has been downplayed by the Middle Eastern newspapers, too, generally saying that as a "lame duck" Obama hardly has time to mend strained relations, the BBC reports.

The usually extremely close relations between Washington and Riyadh have been fraying recently over a number of issues Saudi Arabia regards as matters of life and death.

Comment: For more behind-the-scenes action on the Saudi/American drama, you won't want to miss: Pepe Escobar: US nixed OPEC oil deal by threatening to reveal Saudi role in 9/11


X

Turkey failing to meet half of conditions needed for visa-free travel to EU

Turkey EU
© Stringer / Reuters
Turkey has met less than half of the conditions required for its citizens to be granted visa-free travel to the European Union, according to an EU official. The country has until the end of the month to reach the benchmarks laid out by Brussels. The chance at visa-free entry into Europe for Turkish citizens is being offered in return for Ankara's vow to take back all illegal immigrants who cross into Greece from Turkey. Marta Cygan, a director in the European Commission's Migration and Home Affairs unit, told the European Parliament on Thursday that Turkey has now satisfied 35 of the 72 conditions entirely or almost entirely.

"The Turkish authorities have definitely been accelerating the implementation of administrative and legal reforms allowing them to fulfill the requirements," she told lawmakers, as quoted by Reuters.

The country has until April 30 to meet the necessary requirements, which include sharing more information on fraudulent documents used to travel to the EU, issuing biometric passports, and granting access to its labor market and other services to non-Syrian refugees seeking shelter in the country.

The country's backlog of around 140,000 asylum applications must also be reduced, and Ankara must establish an independent body to monitor rights abuses by law enforcement and government authorities.

Comment: In other words, Turkey and the EU are playing games with each other while they burn the world to the ground. It's not difficult to see that these 'plans' and 'deals' are all for naught.


Stock Up

IMF not welcome! Syria and Russia consider joint bank for trade and redevelopment

Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader Halqi
© AP Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader Halqi
Syria and Russia are considering the possibility of setting up joint banks to carry out transactions between the two countries, Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader Halqi told Sputnik.

"The Russian-Syrian business council has expressed a wish to open a joint Russian-Syrian bank with an equity participation of 50 percent by each side. The Syrian participation will be provided by Syrian businessmen with sufficient banking experience. This bank would be controlled by the countries' central banks," Halqi said.

"At the moment, there is a discussion at the Central Bank of Syria on the most appropriate form for the creation of a Russian bank in Syria, in order to ease the financing of banking transactions between the two countries, which serves mutual interests and will simplify trade," he added.

Syria and Russia are holding consultations on the possibility of transactions in their national currencies Wael Nader Halqi said.

"Back in 2013, the Central Bank of Syria prepared a detailed bank mechanism on the exchange [of goods] in national currencies and presented it to the Russian side to a representative of the Russian Central Bank's head. Several rounds of negotiations were held on this mechanism. We were told that consultations with Russian banks were ongoing. Work on examining this issue, as well as the issue of cooperation with Syrian banks in this is still ongoing. Soon we will be told the names of these banks," Halqi said in an interview.

Comment: A Russian-Syrian joint bank created for the redevelopment of Syria is a wonderful alternative to the country being continually plundered by the IMF and the Western banking elite. We know this would have been reality had the Americans been allowed free reign in Syrian's destruction. As it stands, Syria is free from IMF debt and thus free from Western influences, pressures and exploitation. Another score for Russia!


USA

The absurdity of being a citizen in the American Police State

"You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."—George Orwell, 1984
police state america
In past ages, those who dared to speak out against tyranny—viewed as an act of treason—were blinded, castrated, disfigured, mutilated, rendered mute by having their tongues cut out of their heads, and ultimately crucified.

In the American police state, the price to be paid for speaking truth to power (also increasingly viewed as an act of treason) is surveillance, censorship, jail and ultimately death.

It's a diabolically ingenious tactic for muzzling, disarming and ultimately eliminating one's critics or potential adversaries.

However, where many Americans go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government's authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

In fact, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all you really need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged "words," and "suspicious" activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

It's the American police state's take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crimeand pre-thought crime package.

What's more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don't even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks—all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government's choosing.

While this may sound like a riff on a bad joke, it's a bad joke with "we the people" as the punchline. Yet it is no laughing matter that Americans are being jailed for growing orchids, feeding whales, collecting rainwater, and praying in their backyards. There is nothing humorous about Americans having their families terrorized by SWAT teams, their pets killed, their children shot, their homes trashed and their privacy shredded. And there's really not much comic relief to be found when the citizenry is forced to pay their own government to jail, spy on, censor, terrorize and kill them.

The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

Laugh at your own peril.

Attention

President Hillary? You ain't seen nothing yet

Killary
© Mike Segar/ReutersU.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Sections of the American establishment believe the Kremlin supports Donald Trump. It doesn't. However, many Russians are concerned a future President Hillary will further worsen, already appalling, relations between Moscow and Washington.

Bachman Turner Overdrive was a bunch of Canadian rockers who hit it big in the mid 1970's. The band's success was curious. In an era of glam rock and punk, their brand of three-chord guitar was a few years out of date. Nevertheless, despite their old-fashioned sound, they sold millions of records.

Hillary Clinton is the Bachman Turner Overdrive of US politics. Today, American youth, in common with their global counterparts, are searching for new ideas. Witness the appeal of anti-establishment figures like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Beppe Grillo among young voters. Even Donald Trump has galvanized the disaffected American working class behind his campaign.

Hillary offers a position from the 90's and 00's when her husband, Bill, and his successor, George W. Bush, ran the Washington show. In fact, she's something of an amalgam of both. Liberal, at least in public, on social matters and slightly-left leaning on economics like Bill, but a Bush-like hardcore neocon on matters of national security and foreign affairs. Because of this, she's attracted support across the establishment, even if she remains unloved by the general public. Alarmingly, her popularity ratings are stuck in the mid 30's.

Black Magic

War crimes! White phosphorus bombs used on public schools in Zaitsevo, Ukraine

White phosphorous bomb
© Fort RussUXB white phosphorus bomb. In the background are the classroom radiators.
In the town of Zaitsevo with a pre-war population of almost 4000 inhabitants, about 1 600 civilians cower under Ukaine's almost daily bombardments. Among them are about 500 children and nine veterans of the Second World War, very old with lots of elderly. Recently, a couple that we had visited in February got hurt, a grandmother of 80 years and her husband were hit in the arm and head.

Last week, the Ukrainian army used white phosphorus projectiles precisely in this area, yet these weapons are prohibited by Protocol III of the Geneva Convention in the war zones where civilians are concentrated, which certainly is the case of Zaïtsevo.

We rendezvoused with a company of Italian and Russian journalists to observe the situation of the large village of Zaïtsevo. Surrounded by the Ukrainian lines overlooking the town, its situation has been bad for many weeks, especially since the arrival of Nazi fanatics of Pravy Sektor who have at heart to terrorize the population.

These criminal weapons were invented by the Anglo-Saxons, Britons and Americans during World War II and were used at several levels, in so-called strategic bombing but in reality, terror on German cities, then in Korea, Vietnam and recently in Iraq and the Israelis in Gaza.

Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainians, who are supported by the US and many European countries, have not hesitated to use these terror weapons.Injuries caused by such weapons are horrific and the damage extensive, calling to mind the survivors of the great bombing of Dresden in February 1945 and other Japanese cities.

Vader

Turkey's embassy pressures Swedish media to censure documentary on Assyrian genocide

Assyrian genocide
© WikipediaA memorial dedicated to the victims of the Assyrian genocide of 1915 in Yerevan, Armenia
Turkey's embassy in Stockholm asked Sweden's TV4 television network to pull a documentary on the mass killings of Assyrians by the Ottoman Empire because the film "will fail to serve the principle of objectivity."

Ahead of Sunday evening's scheduled broadcast of a documentary titled Seyfo 1915 - The Assyrian Genocide, TV4 said it received an email from Turkish embassy press officer Arif Gulen, in which he opposes the film's use of the term "genocide," which is often used to describe the tragic death of as many as 275,000 Assyrians at the hands of Ottoman Turks during WWI.

The letter, which was subsequently published on TV4's official website, asks the station to "reconsider your decision on broadcasting of the... documentary film with a balanced and sensible attitude," while cautioning that "only a competent international tribunal can determine whether a particular event is genocide."

His statement provoked a sharp reaction from the broadcaster, which denounced Gulen's attempt to pressure the channel to cancel its broadcast, and aired the documentary.

"We can never accept this. We will protest against any attempt to exert pressure that threatens freedom of expression," said TV4's program director, Viveka Hansson, in a statement on the company's website.

Speaking to Expressen, Gulen said that he had "full respect for freedom of expression and for the channel," but refused to retract his plea to TV4 to withdraw the documentary piece.

Comment: For more on the Swedish housing minister story see: Swedish minister resigns after footage surfaces of him telling the truth about Israel


Yoda

Lavrov: Statements by Turkish leaders on Karabakh crisis unacceptable, like calls for war

weapons
© Karo Saakian / PAN Photo
According to the Russian Foreign Minister, the statements of the Turkish leadership on Nagorno-Karabakh crisis are absolutely unacceptable.

Statements by Turkey on the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh are not helping the situation and sound like calls to war, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday:

"I believe that the statements that were voiced from the mouths of the Turkish leadership are absolutely unacceptable for one simple reason: these were calls not for peace, but for war. These were calls to solving the conflict using military force. This contradicts the positions of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk group's position at the roots and at the roots of the global community."

Violence in Azerbaijan's breakaway region escalated early this month. Baku and Yerevan have accused each other of provoking hostilities. A ceasefire was achieved on April 5, following days of clashes that led to numerous casualties on both sides.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988, when the autonomous region with a predominantly Armenian population sought to secede from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The region proclaimed independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, triggering a war that lasted until a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994.