Puppet MastersS

Megaphone

Serbian president: If Russia didn't intervene, Syria would be under ISIS control

Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic
© Lintao Zhang / ReutersSerbian President Tomislav Nikolic
Serbia's president has praised Russian efforts in fighting terrorists in Syria, saying that if Moscow hadn't intervened, the Middle Eastern country would have ceased to exist as a sovereign state. The statement comes in stark contrast to NATO's assessment of the situation.

Tomislav Nikolic emphasized the need for Russian military involvement in Syria, stating that "If it [Russia] didn't intervene, Syria would be a country of the so-called Islamic State [IS, ISIS/ISIL]," in an interview with TASS on Tuesday.

The Serbian leader was quoted as saying that the Russian military is essential to protecting peace in Syria and countering the jihadist threat, which might spread globally and affect other countries, including Russia, if not contained at this stage.

"Russia should be in the military aspect involved in the protection of Syria at the request from Syria, as it would mean protection from terrorism, and it is much better to be protected from it in Syria than in Russia," he added, pointing out that the strategy employed by the Russian government is in fact akin to that of the US, which on numerous occasions has used its forces to fight terror overseas.

Laptop

Clinton emails are a record of imperialist crimes

Hillary Clinton
© Reuters / David Becker
Last Monday, the US State Department published the last batch of declassified emails from a private, unsecured server used by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. This latest release draws to a close a year-long review by US intelligence agencies of 52,000 pages of Clinton emails, ostensibly motivated by concerns over possible leaks of classified material.

To date, more than 30,000 emails dating from Clinton's four-year tenure as secretary of state have been released to the public. Clinton played a central role in the prosecution of aggressive wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Libya as well as the carrying out of drone assassinations and other illegal actions in a number of additional countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Yet in its extensive reporting of the email scandal, the American media has virtually ignored the actual content of these emails, which contain a wealth of information about the day-to-day functioning of the Clinton State Department.

A review of even a small sampling of the emails, which are available on the State Department's web site, reveals the reason why: the emails are a damning indictment of the criminal activities of not only Hillary Clinton herself, but the entire imperialist state apparatus, with the corporate-controlled media in tow. The emails could easily serve as evidence in future war crimes trials of Clinton and other top US officials.

Comment: See also:


Megaphone

Turkish police disperse women's protest with rubber bullets

Turkish female protestors
© Osman Orsal / Reuters Turkish riot police use rubber pellets to disperse demonstrators during a protest ahead of the International Women's Day, in Istanbul, Turkey March 6, 2016.
Turkish police clashed with female protesters to disperse hundreds of people, rallying for women's rights in Istanbul ahead of International Women's Day. They fired rubber bullets and arrested at least one female activist.

The protest on Sunday gathered in response to an order from the governor of Istanbul, who banned the annual March 8 rally citing security concerns. Hundreds of women filled the square in the Kadikoy district on the Asian side of Istanbul chanting slogans and carrying banners.


Comment: See also:


Eye 1

Joe Wilson to Hillary Clinton in 2010: "What hell we have wrought in Iraq"

Hillary Clinton
© Reuters / David Becker
The latest release of Hillary Clinton emails includes a sobering, confidential 2010 letter (excerpt below) from ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson in which the former diplomat reflects on a trip he had recently made to Iraq, the devastation caused by the war, and how waste and racism are obstructing the rebuilding process.

Wilson was an early critic of the Bush-Cheney administration's lies in the run-up to the war in 2003. His wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, was outed by White House staffers as part of an effort to discredit him.

The opening paragraph of his letter describes the society-wide destruction he witnessed upon traveling to the country:
My trip to Baghdad (September 6-11) has left me slack jawed. I have struggled to find the correct historical analogy to describe a vibrant, historically important Middle Eastern city being slowly bled to death. Berlin and Dresden in World War II were devastated but they and their populations were not subjected to seven years of occupation that included ethnic cleansing, segregation of people by religious identity, and untold violence perpetrated upon them by both military and private security services. I have not been to Gaza but suspect that the dehumanizing effects are somewhat similar. ... The occupation and especially the walling off of neighborhoods have destroyed the very fabric of the urban society.

Eye 1

Turkish border guards 'routinely' shoot Syrian refugees - Amnesty International

Turkish soldiers
© Bulent Kilic/Agence France-PresseTurkish soldiers
Turkish guards routinely shoot at Syrian refugees stranded at the border, a researcher at Amnesty International has told RT, adding that the number of people being shot has recently spiked. According to Andrew Gardner, these cases are far from being isolated.

"There have been many reports of incidents on the border. We collected information on this as early as 2014, when we received many reports of people being shot when they were trying to cross the border irregularly," Gardner said.

He added that the current situation in war-torn Syria has led to a spike in the number of migrants being assaulted by Turkish border guards.

Comment: The claim that Turkey's border guards shoot refugees because they are worried about 'militants' falls flat when considering the very friendly relations they have with the head-choppers across the border.

Further reading:


Snakes in Suits

The FBI looks silly now โ€” video shows how anyone can unlock an iPhone in 45 seconds

iphone
© en.wikipedia.org
Many security experts believe that the FBI and NSA can already hack into an iPhone without Apple's help, using a number of techniques such as "infrared laser glitching" or "de-capping." Edward Snowden backed this up last month in a virtual interview with Johns Hopkins University. These techniques, although risky to the chip, are already in use by the most advanced hackers and, very likely, the NSA.

Even John McAfee has spoken publicly and explained how unlocking the iPhone is 'trivial.' In an interview with Russia Today, McAfee detailed the brief process.
I am going to tell the world exactly how we do this. Now I'll probably lose my admission to the world hackers' community, however I want to tell you. You need a hardware engineer and a softer engineer. The hardware engineer takes the phone apart, and copies the instruction set, which are the iOS and applications and your memory. And then you run a program called a disassembler, which takes all the ones and zeros and gives you readable instructions. Then the coder sits down and he reads through. What he is looking for is the first access to the keypad, because that is the first thing you do, when you input your pad. It'll take half an hour. When you see that then he reads the instructions for where in memory this secret code is stored - it is that trivial - a half an hour.
If the government already has its own access to the iPhone, then the FBI's chosen "debate" with Apple is an exercise in wearing down public resistance to the surveillance state.

Bad Guys

Flashback Nazi's reborn: Israeli doctors experimented on children, geriatric and psychiatric patients

Harzfeld geriatric hospital
© afkmc.org
A leading Israeli doctor and medical ethicist has called for the prosecution of doctors responsible for thousands of unauthorised and often illegal experiments on small children and geriatric and psychiatric patients in Israeli hospitals.

An investigation by the government watchdog, the state comptroller, has revealed that researchers in 10 public hospitals administered drugs, carried out unauthorised genetic testing or undertook painful surgery on patients unable to give informed consent or without obtaining health ministry approval.

At one hospital, staff pierced children's eardrums to apply an experimental medication yet to be approved in any country. At another, patients with senile dementia had their thumbprints applied to consent forms for experimental drugs.

Israel's health minister, Dan Naveh, said he was "shocked" at what he described as a failure of his department and some of Israel's hospitals.

Dr Jacques Michel, the former director of Hadassah hos pital who triggered the comptroller's inquiry with a public warning about the abuses in 2001, yesterday called for the prosecution of the doctors.

"These doctors should be punished very severely because they really are criminals," said Dr Michel, who is head of the committee that approves medical experimentation at Hadassah, which is not among the accused hospitals.

"They should be stripped of their licences to practise and they should be prosecuted. If you don't show by example that the medical profession does not accept this kind of conduct the phenomenon will go on and on.

"It's not an isolated phenomenon. It spread through different institutions."

Stormtrooper

Getting desperate: Saudis, Turks sanction Hezbollah in bid to open Lebanon front

hezbollah flag
Hezbollah fighters
With a series of blatant measures, Saudi Arabia and its regional allies are evidently trying to destabilize Lebanon. The development is apiece with how Saudi Arabia and Turkey have both sought to undermine the ceasefire in Syria and to escalate that conflict to a region-wide level.

A New York Times report this week poses a rather naive conundrum: "Diplomats and analysts have spent several weeks trying to understand why the Saudis would precipitously start penalizing Lebanon - and perhaps their own Lebanese allies - over the powerful influence of Hezbollah, which is nothing new".

Well, here's a quick answer: Russia's very effective squelching of the covert war for regime-change in Syria. That has sent Saudi Arabia and Turkey into a paroxysm of rage.

Russia's military intervention in Syria to defend the Arab state from a foreign-backed covert war involving myriad terrorist proxy groups, has dealt a severe blow to the machinations of Washington, its NATO allies and regional client states.

While Washington and its Western partners seem resigned to pursue regime change by an alternative political track, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are stuck in the covert-war groove. They are betting that the terrorist proxy armies they have weaponized can somehow be salvaged from withering losses inflicted by Russian airpower in combination with the ground forces of the Syrian Arab Army, Iranian military advisors and the Lebanese Hezbollah militia.

Comment: More information:


Vader

How EU & NATO exploited Ukraine to serve their own geopolitical goals

Ukrainian Puppet Petro Poroshenko
© Vasily Fedosenko / ReutersUkrainian Puppet Petro Poroshenko
"Ukraine will definitely not be able to become a member of the EU in the next 20-to-25 years, and not of NATO either." Let's play a guessing game. Who made this statement last week?

Was it:

(a) Vladimir Putin
(b) Sergey Lavrov
(c) Viktor Yanukovich
(d) Jean Claude-Juncker

If the correct answer were (a) or (b), western journalists and pro-Kiev regime activists - which are frequently indistinguishable - would be lining up to dismiss the quote as "Russian propaganda." Or "Hybrid War." Or whatever this month's agreed catchphrase/Twitter hashtag is.

Chess

Russia and China went along with anti-DRPK sanctions...why?

China votes
© foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.comChina's and Russian Federation's reluctant votes for sanctions, a calculated risk.
Recently the UN Security Council adopted a resolution that expanded the list of sanctions against North Korea. Members of the Council banned the export of coal, iron ore, gold, titanium, vanadium and rare earth minerals (which provide the DPRK its main source of revenue), along with prohibiting the import of aviation fuel in North Korea. The list of banned luxury goods was expanded to include snowmobiles and watches, while an arms embargo now includes small arms which haven't been banned previously.

"In order to ensure that no items are going to be smuggled in violation of the resolution" the Security Council allowed the inspection of any cargo being transported from the DPRK without any preconditions or time limits. What's even worse for the DPRK, all funds and other financial assets outside of North Korea owned by the Korean Workers' Party are going to be seized or frozen. This condition also applies to the foreign branches of North Korean banks.

If we are to compare this UN version of new sanctions with those that had been adopted by the US previously, it becomes clear that they largely remain unchanged. The most delusional things, such as ban on the supply of energy resources to the North, or prohibition of labor exports were condemned by China, then Russia forced the Council to change a number of details.

However, even with the way these new sanctions have been adopted, it's getting much closer to a full scale blockade than the actions designed to prevent the development of North Korea's nuclear weapons. The discussion of the resolution usually comes down to two questions: "why have Russia and China shown solidarity with the US position?" and "what is going to happen next?"

Comment: Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said that "by shutting down, as much as possible, the financing of DPRK's nuclear-ballistic programs, the idea is to ensure the return to the table of negotiations all the interested parties." Will that bring Kim Jong Un to the negotiation table or the detonation table?

A tenfold increase in "North Korean provocations - incidents of unknown origin" does not bode well. It means a puppet master has a pawn's agenda for North Korea and the covert means to pull it off.