Puppet MastersS


Cowboy Hat

Vice President Cheney criticized for saying falsely China is drilling for oil off Florida

Washington - Vice President Dick Cheney's office acknowledged on Thursday that he was mistaken when he asserted that China, at Cuba's behest, is drilling for oil in waters 60 miles from the Florida coast.

In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney said on Wednesday that waters in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, long off limits to oil companies, should be opened to drilling because China is already there pumping oil.

Bell

Threats Against Iran Escalate

The threat of military attack against Iran has continued to escalate as the European Union this week conceded to pressure from the US to implement stricter sanctions against Iran for refusing to cease from enriching uranium for its nuclear program.

Earlier this week, Israeli transport minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, "If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective. Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable."

Light Saber

9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics



Prof. Peter Dale Scott
©Unknown
Prof. Peter Dale Scott

The Deep State and 9/11

The unthinkable - that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians - has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle's plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools. Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who was subsequently murdered in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB).

Magnify

SOTT Focus: Target Chavez: Framing and demonisation



chavezworld
©worldproutassembly
Evidence that Chavez is planning a world communist revolution and corrupting the minds of the youth in Venezuela.

Not content with their preparations for war against Iran, a war that is worryingly looking like it will involve the use of a nuclear weapon by Israel and the US while blaming the detonation on Iran, it seems that Venezuela and particularly Hugo Chavez are in the cross-hairs of the imperial war machine.

The most recent chapter of the story starts with a Columbian air raid against a camp in Ecuador on March 1st. The camp was the location of a group from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who were negotiating the release of some 700 prisoners. The raid killed FARC's second in command and top negotiator, Raul Reyes, and 23 other people, including 5 Mexican students. The air raid, followed up by a raid by special forces, was an armed incursion into Ecuador's sovereign territory and therefore an act of war against Ecuador (consider how the US would react if such an act were carried out by Iran into Iraq, let alone by Canada into the US) but this has conveniently been forgotten in the excitement that eight perfectly intact pieces of computer hardware were found at the scene of devastation.

Comment: For additional context to the ongoing vilification of Chavez, see the following:

James Petras' Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism and Venezuela: A Dictionary of Euphemisms of the Liberal Opposition

John Pilger's Latin America: the attack on democracy

Nikolas Kozloff's Controversy Over Guajira -- U.S. Military Bases in South America

Naomi Klein's Venezuela's Media Coup

Eva Golinger's Chronology of the 4th Generation War Against Venezuela

Troy Turner's Propaganda alert : A portrait of Hugo Chavez and his influence on American lives


Eagle

Flashback Latin America: the attack on democracy

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world's dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent - Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America's impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

Light Sabers

IAEA chief hits out at Israel again over Syria attack

The head of the United Nation's atomic watchdog again hit out at Israel's willingness to take unilateral action against countries such as Syria, in comments published in a magazine interview Monday.

Vader

Best of the Web: "A Legacy of Greatness": the Morality of a Psychopath



bush legacy
©Unknown

Andrew Sullivan, writing about McClellan's new book is most taken with the fact that McClellan claims that Bush intentionally ignored the WMD evidence, saying "if the president intentionally ignored data refuting the existence of Saddam's WMDs, he should be impeached."

Frankly, the fact that Bush did this is old news; and impeachment is the least of the appropriate responses -- a war crimes trial would be called for. (I sort of thought Sullivan was farther along than this, actually.)

Bulb

Financial Times writes editorial on 9-11 Truth Movement

The truth is out there

When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound through the church with some of King's cadence. "A time comes," declares the former US congresswoman from Georgia, "when silence is betrayal." The congregation answers with whoops and calls of "That's right!" King was talking about America's war in Vietnam. More than 40 years later, before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American government's war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict, we had been told earlier, began on September 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through.

According to a show of hands that February afternoon, several hundred people in the immaculate church believe this to be true. Some came in T-shirts bearing the words "9/11 was an inside job". One wore a badge demanding that you "Examine your assumptions". Quite a few bought the DVDs on sale in the foyer, most of which bore photographs of the Twin Towers spewing smoke. They had all come to hear the message of Architects, Engineers & Scientists for 9/11 Truth, one of the dozens of groups across the US which campaign to persuade us that everything we think we know about 9/11 is wrong.

Comment: The fact is that the events of 11th of September, 2001, were full of anomalies in many senses - including physical anomalies. There were enough to reasonably conclude that it was an inside job of which neocons and Zionists benefited the most. While the details of what exactly happened and how it happened may be open to debate, the fact remains that these anomalies scandalously contradict the ridiculous official story.

It is this official story that is challenged, and focusing on the debates and contradictions among the different factions of 'truthers' in order to discredit them is missing the essential point that we were lied to as never before, and that these lies have led the world into two wars and soon to a third, which may well turn out to be catastrophic.

And again, who benefits if the essential point is missed?


Chess

Russian Medvedev blames US for global financial troubles

Russian Medvedev
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday blamed the United States for the global financial downturn and said Russia had the energy and food resources to come to the world's help.

"It is precisely the gap between the United States' formal role in the world economy and its real capabilities that was one of the key reasons for the current crisis," Medvedev told a business forum in Saint Petersburg.

"Russia is a global player and understands its responsibility for the fate of the world," he said.

"We want to participate in setting out the new rules of the game, not out of imperial ambitions... but because of our energy resources."

Gear

Flashback Mossad and CIA fingerprints all over: Mystery of a killer elite fuels unrest in Turkey

Arrest of 47 people over alleged coup plot sparks fears of hidden ultra-right network.

It has the elements of a thriller: a shadowy group of right-wing former soldiers, a mafia don, extremist lawyers and politicians; hand-grenades in a rucksack; plots to kill the Prime Minister and a Nobel-prize winning writer; allegedly planted evidence and falsified wire taps.

Even the name of the villains - the Ergenekon network - has an airport paperback flavour, and the stakes involved are high: the stability of one of the world's most strategically important countries. This highly charged political reality is splitting Turkey.

In the coming days the Ergenekon investigation will reach its climax. According to newspaper reports, a long-awaited indictment will be issued by the state prosecutor. After successive waves of arrests, 47 people are in custody. They include senior figures in the ultra-right-wing Workers' Party, a dozen retired senior army officers, journalists and a lawyer accused of launching legal attacks that drove Nobel award-winning writer Orhan Pamuk from his homeland.

Image
©Carsten Koall/AFP/Getty Images
Supporters wave flags for Devlet Bahceli in Istanbul, Turkey.