Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

How does ISIS earn $3 million a day? NATO helps them smuggle oil

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© AFP 2015 / Tauseef Mustafa
The terrorist network Islamic State (ISIL) is financed through illegal oil sales and makes a profit of about three million dollars a day. NATO members, including Turkey, the US and the United Kingdom tolerate the terrorists' oil smuggling activities, DWN reported.

Close allies of the United States and the UK secretly finance the terrorist group Islamic State (ISIL). The Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq and the Turkish military intelligence have supported ISIL's oil smuggling activities and supplied the terrorist group with weapons and equipment, DWN reported.

Oil smuggling is one of the main financial resources for ISIL. The terrorist group controls about 60 percent of Syria's oil production and seven major oil fields in Iraq.

Comment: Turkey tolerates this business, but their elite's long-term goal of a "Neo-Ottoman empire" does not closely coincide with Washington's and Israel's. But, in the short-term, all the psychopaths are eager to make a "killing".

Also see: Guns and oil: Britain's secret ties to governments and firms behind ISIS oil sales


Bad Guys

Ferguson police 'brutally target' journalists

Ferguson National Guard
© Reuters / Jim YoungProtesters run from a cloud of tear gas after a grand jury returned no indictment in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, November 24, 2014

Last August after protests followed Michael Brown's murder, 19 journalists were arrested, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Others were harassed, threatened, tear gassed, pepper sprayed and abused by other brutal police tactics.


Authorities wanted journalists confined to a restricted area away from protests - to prevent their reporting on police brutality. Homeland Security operatives were involved. In a news conference, Obama lied saying:
Let me be clear that our constitutional rights to speak freely, to assemble, and to report in the press must be vigilantly safeguarded, especially in moments like these.
He prosecuted more whistleblowers of government wrongdoing than all his predecessors combined. He targets journalists for doing their job.

Comment: Obviously the police don't want the public to become aware of their blatantly criminal actions:

Ferguson protesters report police opening fire on wall of protesters


Eye 1

Geopolitics of chaos and the "New Thirty Years War" in the Middle East

iraq irak
© Reuters / Goran Tomasevic

The Middle East has been in a state of chaos for years now, with each passing year bringing a new wave of instability, carnage and human suffering to the people of the region. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, Western foreign policy has directly caused or exacerbated much of the chaos we see in the region today and has contributed to a growing trend of instability.


A pertinent question of our time however is whether this instability and destabilization is a result of inept strategy by Western nations, or a calculated strategy by the West to intentionally create chaos, balkanize nations and increase sectarian tensions in the region?

The "New Thirty Years War"

Certain individuals within the US establishment have been drawing the comparison between the Middle East today and the Thirty Years War in Europe in the 17th century, with Prof. Larry Goodson of the US Army War College being one of the latest individuals to make the comparison. Even though the parallels between Europe and the Middle East are by no means exact, it has become somewhat of a talking point within Western geostrategic circles.

Comment: If a Westphalian peace would mean that national sovereignty would once again be respected, don't expect such a peace to come from the West. Putin's the one who put it back on the table, and that's precisely why the Western 'elites' hate him, and have most of the West hating him too.

Here's an excerpt from the speech Putin gave on Victory Day in May. In the speech he honors those who sacrificed everything in order to bring a fascist pathocracy to its knees, and reminds the world of the painful lessons that it has neglected to learn from its, even more recent, history:
Hitler's reckless adventure became a tough lesson for the entire world community. At that time, in the 1930s, the enlightened Europe failed to see the deadly threat in the Nazi ideology.

Today, seventy years later, the history calls again to our wisdom and vigilance. We must not forget that the ideas of racial supremacy and exclusiveness had provoked the bloodiest war ever. The war affected almost 80 percent of the world population. Many European nations were enslaved and occupied.

... in the last decades, the basic principles of international cooperation have come to be increasingly ignored. These are the principles that have been hard won by mankind as a result of the ordeal of the war.

We saw attempts to establish a unipolar world. We see the strong-arm block thinking gaining momentum. All that undermines sustainable global development.

The creation of a system of equal security for all states should become our common task. Such system should be an adequate match to modern threats, and it should rest on a regional and global non-block basis. Only then will we be able to ensure peace and tranquillity on the planet.

Civilized world attends Moscow for Victory Day - media highlights



Eye 1

SOTT Exclusive: MH17: Anti-Russian propaganda, secrecy, and Western crocodile tears

mh17
On Tuesday August 11th, the Dutch Public Prosecutor announced that the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) had investigated several parts, possibly originating from a Buk surface-to-air missile system, that had been found during a previous recovery mission in eastern Ukraine.

Chief investigator with the Dutch National Prosecutors' Office, Fred Westerbeke, remarked on the announcement:
"We found seven parts. Parts that from the first investigation were shown to not originate from the plane. Further investigation showed that these parts probably originate from a missile system - and most likely even a BUK missile system. They were found during the various recovery operations that took place a month or two ago and you can imagine that we are talking here about a complete aircraft - or a big part of an aircraft - with all kinds of pieces that have been brought here and researched and where reconstruction takes place. So it's not something to be viewed as: well, here are a few pieces, do some research on it, and that's it. This concerns a gigantic research of which these pieces are a part."
Westerbeke stresses that he is involved in an ongoing and serious investigation that takes time, yet talks freely to the press about the possibility that the non-Boeing pieces might be from a Buk missile launcher! Along with this blatant attempt to influence the investigation, the Public Prosecutor stated in the same announcement that "at present the conclusion cannot be drawn that there is a causal connection between the discovered parts and the crash of flight MH17." Are these people schizophrenic? Or are we expected to believe that a Buk missile launcher just happened to be found among the wreckage but wasn't used to shoot down MH17 as Western governments and their media lackey's have been touting for over a year? The Dutch investigation team are clearly talking out of both sides of their mouths and this investigation is already a consummate farce with a conclusion established long before the final report is delivered.

Of course, the mainstream media wasted no time in seizing on the statements and using them in the latest round of the game "Let's all defame Russia". To name a few examples of many: BBC's "MH17: 'Russian missile parts' at Ukraine crash site", The Independent's "MH17 crash: Fragments of Russian missile BUK launcher found at crash site", Yahoo News' "MH17 probe finds 'probable' Russian missile pieces at crash site".

Despite making these claims that they surely knew would end up making global headlines, the Joint Investigation Team spokesman Wim de Bruin cynically told RT: "it's too early to draw any conclusion at this moment."

Arrow Up

Former intelligence officials suggest Hillary Clinton should lose her security clearance

hillary clinton
© Reuters/Mike Blake
Hillary Clinton's campaign is running full-steam ahead, but the incessant questions about her use of a private email server for sensitive information continues to plague her bid for the presidency.

Clinton retained her government security clearance when she left her post as secretary of state, and it's been established that she did use a private email server to send classified information. However, the information was classified after she sent the emails, Media Matters for America reported.

Comment: It seems the heat is increasing on Hillary, but it remains to be seen if anything or anyone will actually counter her ambitions.


Dollars

US military uses IMF and World Bank to launder 85% its black budget money

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Though transparency was a cause he championed when campaigning for the presidency, President Obama has largely avoided making certain defense costs known to the public. However, when it comes to military appropriations for government spy agencies, we know from Freedom of Information Act requests that the so-called "black budget" is an increasingly massive expenditure subsidized by American taxpayers. The CIA and and NSA alone garnered
$52.6 billion in funding in 2013 while the Department of Defense black ops budget for secret military projects exceeds this number. It is estimated to be $58.7 billion for the fiscal year 2015.

What is the black budget? Officially, it is the military's appropriations for "spy satellites, stealth bombers, next-missile-spotting radars, next-gen drones, and ultra-powerful eavesdropping gear."

However, of greater interest to some may be the clandestine nature and full scope of the black budget, which, according to analyst Catherine Austin Fitts, goes far beyond classified appropriations. Based on her research, some of which can be found in her piece "What's Up With the Black Budget?," Fitts concludes that the during the last decade, global financial elites have configured an elaborate system that makes most of the military budget unauditable. This is because the real black budget includes money acquired by intelligence groups via narcotics trafficking, predatory lending, and various kinds of other financial fraud.

Comment: Imagine for a moment the vast amount of social services, research, new infrastructure, housing and education that could be funded with the sums of money being discussed here.


Airplane

Malaysian Transport Minister: Most Maldives debris not related to MH370 missing flight

hidden plane
© AP Photo/ Rob Griffith
The majority of debris found on the shores of the Maldives does not belong to the disappeared Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said Friday.

Earlier this month, media reported that large debris washed up on the Maldivian shores had been sent to Malaysia for analysis.
"My team has witnessed the debris and most of them are negative. They are not related to MH370 and not even plane material," the minister said as quoted by the Asia One portal.

Comment: See also:


Snakes in Suits

Linguistic analysis finds Donald Trump speaks like a 4th grader

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© Gage Skidmore/FlickrDonald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C.

Comment: Quite fitting. A dumbed-down leader for a dumbed-down population.


Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump talks like a 4th grader, according to a linguistic analysis performed by Politico's Jack Shafer. Shafer ran the text of Trumps' responses in the recent Republican debate through the Flesch-Kincaid test, designed to determine how difficult a given passage is to understand for English readers:
Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that's actually pretty advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score.
According to Shafer, Trump's remarks at an August 11 news conference in Birch Run, Michigan, put him at an even-lower 3rd grade level (in the United States, 3rd graders are typically eight or nine years old). Trump is 69 years old.


Source: Newsweek

Sherlock

Interview with General (Ret.) Amine Htaite of the Lebanese Armed Forces on Syria

General Htaite
(This interview was very kindly translated by Ghassan Kadi to whom I want to express my deepest gratitude. The Saker)

The Saker: Please introduce yourself to your readers, education, professional experience, military experience, political leanings, religion, etc.

General Htaite: My name is Amine Htaite, I am a retired general in the Lebanese Army, PhD in Law, a lecturer in the Lebanese University and Islamic University in Lebanon. I am the ex-chief of the Central College of Command in the Lebanese Army and I have been in charge of several Lebanese Army battalions, both combat and logistic. Nowadays I conducts strategic, military and legal studies dealing with pertinent issues in the Levant and their international ramifications. In this context, I write two journal articles per week and partake in meetings and discussions and analysis on television, radio discussion panels as well as strategic and technical conferences on a regular basis.

Comment: That last comment is a sobering picture of what is in store for Syria.


Eye 2

Jeb Bush won't rule out using supposedly 'effective' torture methods

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© Jim Young / ReutersU.S. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush told an audience in Iowa that he would not rule out resuming the use of torture by the US government under some circumstances. He said he believed it was effective in producing critical intelligence.

Bush was speaking before an audience of 250 Republican supporters at St. Ambrose University when asked if he would keep in place or repeal President Barack Obama's executive order banning torture.

"I don't want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement," Bush told the audience, according to the Associated Press. "When you are president your words matter."

Bush said he believed torture is inappropriate and that he was glad his brother, former President George W. Bush, largely ended the CIA's use of torture before leaving office. He did not address the fact that the use of torture also began under George W. Bush's presidency.

Comment: Torture is effective? Another Bushie who's living in bizarro world: Ex-CIA officer: Torture great way to get false confessions