Puppet MastersS


Footprints

History repeats with MH17 - U.S. justification for war and anti-Russian propaganda

Robert Parry
Consortium News
Fri, 17 Jul 2015 20:15 UTC
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Russian-made Buk anti-missile battery
In 1964, the Tonkin Gulf incident was used to justify the Vietnam War although U.S. intelligence quickly knew the facts were not what the U.S. government claimed. Now, the MH-17 case is being exploited to justify a new Cold War as U.S. intelligence again is silent about what it knows, writes Robert Parry.

One year ago, the world experienced what could become the Tonkin Gulf incident of World War III, the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. As with the dubious naval clash off the coast of North Vietnam in 1964, which helped launch the Vietnam War, U.S. officials quickly seized on the MH-17 crash for its emotional and propaganda appeal - and used it to ratchet up tensions against Russia.

Shocked at the thought of 298 innocent people plunging to their deaths from 33,000 feet last July 17, the world recoiled in horror, a fury that was then focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin. With Putin's face emblazoned on magazine covers, the European Union got in line behind the U.S.-backed coup regime in Ukraine and endorsed economic sanctions to punish Russia.

In the year that has followed, the U.S. government has continued to escalate tensions with Russia, supporting the Ukrainian regime in its brutal "anti-terrorism operation" that has slaughtered thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. The authorities in Kiev have even dispatched neo-Nazi and ultranationalist militias, supported by jihadists called "brothers" of the Islamic State, to act as the tip of the spear. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists."]
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Gold Seal

Iran nuke deal: A red herring that is less about nuclear energy and more about the West's geopolitical strategy against Russia

Mike Whitney
Counterpunch
Fri, 17 Jul 2015 19:13 UTC
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"The European Union is quietly increasing the urgency of a plan to import natural gas from Iran as relations with Tehran thaw (and) those with top gas supplier Russia grow colder."

"EU turns to Iran as alternative to Russian gas," EA.
The Iran nuclear agreement has less to do with proliferation than it does with geopolitics. The reason Obama wants to ease sanctions on Iran is because he wants to push down oil prices while creating an alternate source of natural gas for Europe. In other words, the real objective here is to hurt Russia which is currently at the top of Washington's Enemies List. Keith Jones at the World Socialist Web Site explains what's going on in an article titled "Obama promotes historic nuclear deal with Iran". Here's an excerpt:
"If Obama made haste to promote the deal with Tehran, it is because it represents a major tactical shift on the part of US imperialism—one that is being opposed by significant sections of the US political and military-intelligence establishments, as well as by longstanding US client states in the Middle East, first and foremost Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Behind this shift lies a series of strategic calculations, bound up with the aggressive actions of the Obama administration around the world to assert US global hegemony.

The most important of these calculations are, (1) that US imperialism's conflict with Tehran must be subordinated to its drive to strategically isolate Russia and China and prepare for war against one or both states, which the US ruling elite views as the main obstacles to its global domination, and (2) that Iran's crisis-ridden bourgeois regime can be harnessed to serve US strategic interests."

("Obama promotes "historic" nuclear deal with Iran", Keith Jones, World Socialist Web Site)
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Hourglass

Who's next in line to face Berlin's financial blitzkrieg?

Finian Cunningham
Sputnik
Thu, 16 Jul 2015 18:59 UTC
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© Sputnik/ Igor Zarembo
Seventy-five years ago, when Europe succumbed to Nazi Germany it was the sound of trundling panzer tanks rolling into capitals that heralded defeat.

Now it is German "panzer banks" that appear conquering all in front of them. The financial terms dictated to Athens over the latest so-called bailout is nothing less than the subjugation of a sovereign country to the dictate of German banks. The troubling question for several European states is: who's next?

Even the Western media could not disguise the shocking humiliation meted out to Greece by Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and her intransigent Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaüble. The Washington Post described Greece's acquiescence to "punishing ultimatum", while Reuters said Athens had "surrendered".

The Western media haven't quite yet specified who the new financial dictators of Europe are. Reports refer blandly to "EU hardliners" and "tough EU leaders", but reading between the lines it is clear that the paymaster calling the tune now for the rest of Europe is Berlin. And the tune is not melodious.
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Snakes in Suits

Profiles in psychopathy: The horrors of John McCain

Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn
Counterpunch
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00 UTC
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© Unknown
The race-baiting panjandrum of Manhattan, Donald Trump, is currently taking flak from the media and politicians for deprecating John McCain's status as a "war hero". Trump's rhetoric is typically bombastic, but this time he may have struck a nerve. Here is a piece that Cockburn and I wrote in 1999 about a psychiatric evaluation of McCain underwent while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The psychological portrait drawn by Spanish psychiatrist Fernando Barral is that of a deeply narcissistic personality, cold, hardened and largely devoid of human empathy, a man who seemed to view the bombing of civilian populations as a kind of sport. These aggressive personality traits have also characterized his nasty political career. - JSC

The top war-monger in Congress has been Senator John McCain, Republican from Arizona, seeker of the Republican presidential nomination. In one rhetorical bombing run after another, McCain has bellowed for "lights out in Belgrade" and for NATO to "cream" the Serbs. At the start of May he began declaiming in the US senate for the NATO forces to use "any means necessary" to destroy Serbia.

McCain is often called a "war hero", a title adorning an unlovely resume starting with a father who was an admiral and graduation fifth from the bottom at the US Naval Academy, where he earned the nickname "McNasty". McCain flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam, each averaging about half an hour, total time ten hours and thirty minutes. For these brief excursions the admiral's son was awared two Silver Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Stars, the Vietnamese Legion of Honor and three Purple Hearts. US Veteran Dispatch calculates our hero earned a medal an hour, which is pretty good going. McCain was shot down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967 and parachuted into Truc Boch Lake, whence he was hauled by Vietnamese, and put in prison.

Comment: With the top echelons of Western mainstream media fawning over psychopathic individuals like John McCain and Hillary Clinton for so long, is it any wonder that the U.S. is in the catastrophic mess that it is in?



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Magnify

Queen Elizabeth Nazi salute controversy a fitting sign of the times as West descends into fascism

Finian Cunningham
Strategic Culture Foundation
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 17:06 UTC
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Nazi salute: A grainy photograph has emerged of the Queen performing a Nazi salute with her family in the gardens at Balmoral
The British royal family is up in arms - excuse the pun - over old video footage that shows the young Queen Elizabeth giving a Heil Hitler salute. A photograph published on its front page by British tabloid newspaper The Sun has caused a storm of controversy, with the British monarchy denouncing it as an invasion of privacy. But the real significance is that the image shows how Western so-called democracies were - and still are - so close to embracing fascism.

The video in question is believed to be dated around 1933, when the present British head of state was then a six-year-old princess. She is seen apparently playing with her family in the monarchy's Balmoral estate, Scotland. With her right arm outstretched, the young Elizabeth is pictured giving the infamous Heil Hitler salute. At that time, Adolf Hitler had just ascended to power to become Chancellor of Germany and was already implementing his repressive regime. The Nazi Reich would in a few short years annex neighbouring European countries and ignite the Second World War. In 1933, the Nazi Reich was also embarking on its genocidal programme of mass extermination of peoples designated as «untermenschen» (sub-human).

Defenders of the British monarch have dismissed the grainy images of the young queen giving a Nazi salute as «horseplay». They point out that the princess and her mother and sister are smiling while performing the salute, and therefore the image could be understood as a parody of Herr Hitler.
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Cult

Hollande wants Eurozone members to transfer their sovereignty to a United States of Europe

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse
Sun, 19 Jul 2015 00:00 UTC
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The President of France has come up with a very creative way of solving the European debt crisis. On Sunday, a piece authored by French President Francois Hollande suggested that the ultimate solution to the problems currently plaguing Europe would be for every member of the eurozone to transfer all of their sovereignty to a newly created federal government. In other words, it would essentially be a "United States of Europe". This federal government would have a prime minister, a parliament, a federal budget and a federal treasury. Presumably, the current national governments in Europe would continue to function much like state governments in the U.S. do. In the end, there may be some benefits to such a union - particularly for the weaker members of the eurozone. But at what cost would those benefits come?

When I first learned that French President Francois Hollande had proposed that the members of the eurozone should create their own version of a federal government, I was quite stunned. But I shouldn't have been surprised. For the global elite, the answer to just about any problem is more centralization. The following comes from a Bloomberg article that was posted on Sunday...
French President Francois Hollande said that the 19 countries using the euro need their own government complete with a budget and parliament to cooperate better and overcome the Greek crisis.

"Circumstances are leading us to accelerate," Hollande said in an opinion piece published by the Journal du Dimanche on Sunday. "What threatens us is not too much Europe, but a lack of it."

Comment: Looks like a Eurozone version of 'good cop/bad cop'. Not too hard to figure out that Hollande's France is now playing the role of good cop to Germany's bad one.

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Eye 2

Flashback The CIA's psychopathic queen of torture

Jane Mayer
The New Yorker
Thu, 18 Dec 2014 16:36 UTC
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For the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in thedevastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.'s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why.

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman whom he does not name—appears to have been a source of years' worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Comment: Over CIA objections, investigative website The Intercept identified the anonymous woman as Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.

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TV

South Front military updates: Novorossia, Afghanistan, Yemen


South Front
Tue, 21 Jul 2015 15:45 UTC
afghanistan
The Taliban is taking the Faryab province, it has also started an offensive in the Baghlan-e-Jadid district of the Baghlan province, and has nearly seized the Helmand province. The actions are part of the Taliban's Azm offensive, which began earlier this year. Most of the Taliban's gains are a result of the Afghan central government's unwieldiness, and inability provide assistance to local pro-government forces in the besieged provinces.

Comment: See Afghanistan Map of War, July 13-16, 2015 for additional information about the developments in Afghanistan.

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Star of David

Former Israeli spy admits in book Israel encourages anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

Asa Winstanley
Middle East Monitor
Sat, 11 Jul 2015 15:28 UTC
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Books by former intelligence, military and political leaders are frequently tedious and self-serving. Obsessed with securing their own legacy, and proving how right they were about some long-standing grudge or another, such volumes rarely make for much of an enlightening read.

One such book I probably will subject myself to, however, is titled Periphery by the former Israeli spy Yossi Alpher. For all the tediousness one has to wade through in such propagandising dross, there are sometimes a few nuggets of insight - usually given away unintentionally.

Alpher is a former military intelligence officer.Periphery, released earlier this year, is his account of years of desperate Israeli efforts for allies in a region it is inherently alienated from, due to its long record of military aggression against neighbouring countries, the 67-year-long military occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

The Periphery strategy sought out allies in states and minority groups considered outside of the Arab or Muslim mainstream of the region. Israeli spies sought to forge alliances with the Kurds of northern Iraq; Turkey, during the height of the military's political power there; and Iran, under the dictatorship of the Shah.
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Bad Guys

Right Sector to hold public meeting on 'future of Ukrainian revolution'


Sputnik News
Tue, 21 Jul 2015 14:19 UTC
Ukraine revolution
© Sputnik / Andrei Stenin
The future of the Ukrainian revolution will be discussed during a popular meeting which will be held by the Right Sector on Tuesday in Kiev, Dmitry Yarosh, leader of the movement, announced. He also said the Ukrainian government is incapable of carrying out real reforms.

A popular meeting which will be held in Kiev by the Ukrainian nationalist Right Sector movement on Tuesday should bring Ukrainians the prospect of further changes in their country, Dmitry Yarosh, leader of the organization, said.

Earlier, the Right Sector announced it would organize a meeting at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in central Kiev on July 21.

Comment: Anyone who takes Yarosh's desire for "social reforms" seriously is exhibiting one of the first criterion for ponerogenesis:
One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in a fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic ways. The opinions, ideas, and judgments of people carrying various psychological deficits are endowed with an importance at least equal to that of outstanding individuals among normal people.

The atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic. Let us call this the first criterion of ponerogenesis.

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)


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