Puppet MastersS


Dollars

Journalists throw buckets of money at the Clinton campaign

Dave Levinthal & Michael Beckel
Center for Public Integrity
Mon, 17 Oct 2016 11:32 UTC
clinton and reporters
© Andrew Harnik/APKillary speaks to her adoring fans.
New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum, a newly minted Pulitzer Prize winner, spent the Republican National Convention pen-pricking presidential nominee Donald Trump as a misogynist shyster running an "ugly and xenophobic campaign."

What Nussbaum didn't disclose in her dispatches: she contributed $250 to Democrat Hillary Clinton in April.

On the nation's left coast, Les Waldron, an Emmy Award-winning assignment editor at television station KFMB, the CBS affiliate in San Diego, swung right in July, shooting $28 to Trump.

And Carole Simpson, a former ABC "World News Tonight" anchor who in 1992 became the first African-American woman to moderate a presidential debate, is not moderate about her personal politics: the current Emerson College distinguished journalist-in-residence and regular TV news guest has given Clinton $2,800.

Comment: The amount of media slant in favor of Clinton is unprecedented. These hacks even allow the Clinton campaign to act as editors so as not to offend her delicate sensibilities, while hammering the hell out of her opponent. Though neither Trump nor Clinton will be good for America, watching the one-sided reporting of the mainstream media, who are as far out of touch with public sentiment as can be possible, is certainly interesting.

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Jet5

Aleppo, much? US admits fighting ISIS in Mosul risks killing civilians


RT
Wed, 19 Oct 2016 02:54 UTC
Isis
The US says its anti-ISIS operation in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq has been a success, despite the "inevitable" suffering it brings to civilians. However, Washington has a contradictory perception of the anti-terrorist efforts by the Syrian and Russian forces in Aleppo.

"What we have seen [in Aleppo] is the regime carry out continued fighting against moderate Syrian opposition forces and really not target in meaningful way Daesh or [Al-] Nusra," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, using an acronym for Islamic State's original name in Arabic.

As the battle for Mosul raged for a second day, Toner was asked about differences between the US-led fight and similar anti-terrorist efforts in Aleppo.

"First of all, we are working in a supportive capacity, it's the Iraqi government, Iraqi forces that are carrying out operation in Mosul and that is to go after and destroy Daesh, drive it out of Mosul," he said. "It has been very successful in doing so throughout other cities and regions in the country."

Comment: See also: The US-led assault on Mosul as imperialist hypocrisy

This Mosul operation is probably meant to secure a few things:

1.) A safe corridor for ISIS to be redeployed across the border in Syria
2.) Secure US military presence in Kurdish northern Iraq
3.) Secure a 'positive legacy' for Obama, and thus 'usher in business as usual' under Killary

It remains to be seen if it will achieve any of these objectives.

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Dollars

Public face vs private face: Killary knew all along that Qatar and Saudi Arabia are funding ISIS

Patrick Cockburn
The Independent
Fri, 14 Oct 2016 11:02 UTC
Hillary Clinton with ISIS
It is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furore over the sexual antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being given to the latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton. Most fascinating of these is what reads like a US State Department memo, dated 17 August 2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance of Isis forces, which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

At the time, the US government was not admitting that Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies were supporting Isis and al-Qaeda-type movements. But in the leaked memo, which says that it draws on "western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region" there is no ambivalence about who is backing Isis, which at the time of writing was butchering and raping Yazidi villagers and slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.

The memo says: "We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region." This was evidently received wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted because to it was held that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine US power in the Middle East and South Asia.

Comment: Funding terror: The financial sources of ISIS

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Question

What will be the fate of Julian Assange?

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Tue, 18 Oct 2016 10:29 UTC
Julian Assange
© Neil Hall / Reuters
The following tweets posted by WikiLeaks yesterday set off a massive bout of speculation over the fate of Julian Assange who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for nearly 4 years. There has been much speculation that the sudden change in support for Assange from the Ecuadorian government was prompted by political leverage being asserted by the Obama administration to thwart the release of emails that are proving to be very damaging to the Hillary presidential campaign.



Comment: The Ecuardorian government is clinging to the principle of non-intervention, stating that it opposes the meddling in the US presidential election while at the same time not yielding to pressure from other states. This is obviously untrue. They've been compromised.

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Arrow Down

Syrian people fall victim to Western double standards, claims head of Russia's Security Council


RT
Tue, 18 Oct 2016 16:12 UTC
Syrian people
© Abdalrhman Ismail / Reuters
The head of Russia's Security Council has said that the biased and selfish approach demonstrated by Western nations is the main cause of the dire situation in which the Syrian people currently find themselves.

"Syria has fallen victim to the double standards in fighting terrorism that are being applied by the West and certain players who are pursuing their own interests in this conflict. The Syrian people remain the losing party in this game," Nikolai Patrushev said in an interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily.

He added that it was Russia that had prioritized the humanitarian aspects of the operation from the very beginning and that the Russian military and Emergencies Ministry have never ceased delivering humanitarian aid to Syrian civilians.

Comment: It is more than enough, however, to expose the moral high ground upon which the US and its allies have occupied over Syria as a dung heap of hypocrisy and double standards.See also: Hypocrisy at large: Aleppo the worst humanitarian disaster since WWII? Not so fast, Mr. Kerry

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Vader

The US-led assault on Mosul as imperialist hypocrisy

James Cogan
World Socialist Web Site
Wed, 19 Oct 2016 03:35 UTC
battle Mosul iraq
© Bram Janssen/Associated Press

A Peshmerga convoy drives toward a frontline on Monday in Khazer, about 19 miles east of Mosul, Iraq.
The long-planned, US-directed offensive to recapture the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has begun. On Monday morning, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared on national television: "Today, I declare the start of these victorious operations."

The assault on Mosul starkly raises the boundless hypocrisy of US and European resolutions in the United Nations, and incessant media coverage, accusing Russian-backed Syrian forces of "war crimes" against civilians as they attempt to retake the eastern sectors of Aleppo from Islamist militias. In Iraq, the US, its allies and its puppet government in Baghdad have begun a savage onslaught against a far larger city, in which as many 1.5 million civilians, including 600,000 children, are trapped.

Lise Grande, the United Nations' humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, told the New York Times on the weekend: "The United Nations is deeply concerned that in a worst-case scenario, the operation in Mosul could be the most complex and largest in the world in 2016, and we fear as many as one million civilians may be forced to flee their homes."
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Blackbox

Riding in Cars With Huma: Killary ignored security protocols to stay near aide

Andrew Stiles
Heat Street
Mon, 17 Oct 2016 03:23 UTC
Huma Abedin Clinton
Huma Abedin and HillaryClinton
Hillary Clinton "blatantly" disregarded security and diplomatic protocols as Secretary of State and frequently insulted U.S. ambassadors by refusing to ride with them to diplomatic events abroad, a former U.S. diplomatic security officer told FBI agents investigating Clinton's private email server.

According to FBI interview notes released Monday, the former security officer described the "stark difference" between Hillary Clinton's conduct as secretary of state and the conduct of her predecessor Condoleezza Rice, who closely adhered to the appropriate protocols. Hillary's "abundant" protocol breaches, on the other hand, were widely known in the diplomatic security community.

One area of particular concern was Hillary's refusal to follow "standard security and diplomatic" protocol by riding with local U.S. ambassadors in an armored limousine to diplomatic events abroad. It was standard procedure for the secretary of state and the ambassador to arrive together at these events, but Hillary refused, and insisted on riding with her top aide Huma Abedin.

Comment: All of a piece with Killary's handling of security matters.

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Ark

Google reveals FBI demanded customer data after being freed from gag order

Jenna McLaughlin
the Intercept
Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:03 UTC
google
Google revealed Wednesday it had been released from an FBI gag order that came with a secret demand for its customers' personal information.

The FBI secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, does not require a court approval. Investigators simply need to clear a low internal bar demonstrating that the information is "relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

The national security letter issued to Google was mentioned without fanfare in Google's latest bi-annual transparency report, which includes information on government requests for data the company received from around the world in the first half of 2016.

Google received the secret subpoena in first half of 2015, according to the report.
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V

The Time for a Sovereign Philippine Nation has Come

Stephen Kinzer
Boston Globe
Tue, 18 Oct 2016 00:57 UTC
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte
© AP/Bullit MarquezPhilippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
Sometimes Americans think we have won a war, only to realize years or decades later that our victory was incomplete. Now we are facing an eruption of anger over a war we waged more than a century ago. Rarely has blowback from an overseas intervention come back to haunt us so long after the shooting stopped.

This unexpected challenge has emerged from the Philippines. The new president, Rodrigo Duterte, recently announced plans to pull his country out of America's orbit and adopt an "independent" foreign policy. "I am anti-West," he explained. "I do not like the Americans. It's simply a matter of principle for me."

Duterte's grievance is rooted in history. Americans, he asserted, unjustly seized the Philippines in 1899, waged a horrific military campaign to suppress native resistance, and "have not even apologized to the Filipino nation." He waved photographs showing bodies of Filipinos killed in that war.

Soon after Duterte made that startling speech, his foreign minister, Perfecto Yasay, went even further. In 1899, Yasay asserted, the United States "arrogated our victory in the struggle for freedom" and then used "invisible chains" to bind Filipinos into "shackling dependency." Americans, he said, treat Filipinos as "little brown brothers not capable of true independence or freedom." To escape from that humiliation, he concluded, the Philippines must end its "subservience to United States interests."

Comment: The 1906 American massacre at Jolo wasn't just an event in Philippine history that left a deep scar. It's representative of US control and brutality that has reigned throughout Southeast Asia. The demonizing of Duterte has little to do with human rights and everything to do with the emergence of a political leader who is working to free his country from the choke-hold of US hegemony.

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Document

FBI releases more Clinton probe documents to justify 'no charges' stance


RT
Mon, 17 Oct 2016 18:31 UTC
clinton
© Lucy Nicholson / Reuters
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has published another set of documents from their probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while heading the US Department of State.

The 100-page collection of documents can be read here. The disclosure is part of the FBI's effort to explain the recommendation not to press any charges against Clinton, made in July by Director James Comey.

The first document appears to be a summary of the interview - called the "FD-302" - with someone at Platte River Networks (PRN), the contractor that maintained Clinton's private email server.

PRN referred to Clinton contract as "CESC," short for Clinton Executive Services Corporation. The first PRN executive interviewed "didn't believe there was a successful intrusion attempt" against the Clinton server, the FBI said.

The second PRN executive interviewed by the FBI pointed to the possibility that CESC emails that were destroyed by Bleachbit software "still existed in the live email accounts."

Comment: The 100 pages include 4500 redactions. Here's one of the worst examples (more on The American Mirror):
fbi clinton


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