Puppet MastersS


Bizarro Earth

ISIS too hot to handle: American 'contractors' being evacuated from Iraqi air base?

ISIS militants
© AFPAmericans are allegedly fleeing Iraq as ISIS militants take power of key Iraqi regions.
Officials say three planeloads of Americans are being evacuated from a major Iraqi air base in Sunni territory north of Baghdad to escape potential threats from a fast-moving insurgency.

A current U.S. official and a former senior Obama administration official say that means the American training mission at the air field in Balad has been grounded indefinitely.

Twelve U.S. personnel who were stationed at Balad were the first to be evacuated. Several hundred American contractors are still waiting to leave.

They have been training Iraqi forces to use fighter jets and surveillance drones.

Other U.S. contractors at a tank training ground in the city of Taji are still continuing for now.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they refused to be named in discussing the sensitive situation.

Comment: After more than a decade of 'war' against Al-Qaeda (CIA brainchild), now an uncontrollable Al-Qaeda offshoot is finally scaring the U.S. out of Iraq. How's that for karma? Unfortunately, Iraq is in chaos, bearing the brunt of the West's myopic insanity and hubris.


Colosseum

Mission accomplished? VP Biden once called Iraq one of Obama's 'great achievements'

As Iraq falls apart, it's worth remembering Vice President Joe Biden hailing that country as one of President Obama's "great achievements" in a 2010 interview with then CNN host Larry King:

"I am very optimistic about -- about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government," said Biden.

"I spent -- I've been there 17 times now. I go about every two months -- three months. I know every one of the major players in all of the segments of that society. It's impressed me. I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences."


Comment: Biden couldn't have been more wrong. And the US (Obama included) has no one to blame but themselves for the chaos currently embroiling Iraq.


Stormtrooper

Isis a cruel goddess: Medieval Sharia law imposed on millions in Nineveh province

ISIS Iraq
© ReutersFighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) patrol on a vehicle in Tikrit, which the group overran.
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (Isis) has imposed a strict set of Sharia laws on the citizens of Nineveh province just days after capturing the provincial capital of Mosul.

In a document circulating on social media attributed to the group, Isis warned tribal leaders and sheikhs not to "work with [the Iraqi] government and be traitors" while proclaiming that women should only go outside if absolutely necessary.

"For women, dress decently and wear wide clothes. Only go out if needed," read the document as translated by Al Aan TV reporter Jenan Moussa.

Further rules included bans on drugs, alcohol and cigarettes while public gatherings, the possession of guns and the carrying of flags not of the Islamic state were outlawed.

Comment: As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently, "events that are taking place in Iraq are an illustration of a complete failure of the venture started by the US and the UK that allowed it to spiral out of control completely." We wouldn't necessarily call it a failure. After all, medieval Sharia law meshes quite well with the Western ideal of 'democracy': an empty word masking pathocracy.


Eye 1

Scottish independence campaigner claims MI5 is leading dirty tricks campaign



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Jim Sillars, former deputy leader of the SNP, believes MI5 are conducting a dirty tricks campaign against the Yes Scotland movement
A veteran campaigner for Scottish independence has accused so-called cybernats who subjected author JK Rowling to a tirade of internet abuse of "opening the door" to a possible MI5 dirty tricks campaign to scupper a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum.

Former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars claimed it was "naïve" to think that the security forces were not involved in seeking to influence the outcome of September's ballot which could see the break-up of the UK.

He told The Independent that he was personally aware of one secret agent having arrived in Glasgow.

Mr Sillars said that those who posted the abusive comments - including one sent from a hacked charity Twitter feed - viciously lambasting Ms Rowling for her £1m donation to pro-union Better Together this week had meant to harm the independence cause. "I don't know who did. Somebody did it that is inimical to the yes campaign," he said.

Comment: Mr. Sillars is most likely correct about the involvement of British intelligence in a 'dirty tricks' campaign to keep Scotland within the union. MI5 is an organisation that is populated, at the highest levels, by dyed-in-the-wool British Imperialists who, ideologically-speaking, are still living at the height of the British Empire some 200 years ago. The case of Northern Ireland, and the dirty tricks that the same imperialists used against the Irish Republican movement, including the same type of covert demonisation and discreditation of the opposition, supports the idea that the covert forces of the British empire are working against Scottish independence.


No Entry

U.S. Supreme Court sez Texas can keep supplier of death penalty drugs secret

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© Reuters/Handout
The US Supreme Court has denied an appeal from a Texas death row prisoner whose lawyers demanded that state officials reveal the source of drugs intended to execute him.

Robert James Campbell, 41, avoided execution on May 13 when his punishment was halted less than three hours before the procedure. His attorneys appealed, claiming that Campbell is mentally retarded and therefore ineligible for the death penalty. The decision on this is pending.

Campbell was sentenced to death for the 1991 abduction, rape and slaying of a 20-year-old Houston bank teller, Alexandra Rendon.

The drug appeal's refusal is largely based on the state's refusal to reveal the drug supplier for the lethal injection.

Top Secret

GCHQ operates secret spy hub in Oman - report

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© Reuters/Kieran Doherty
The location of secret British spy bases in Oman, tapping undersea cables in the Middle East, has up until now remained unpublished because of pressure from the government, according to a new article that reveals those details.

British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has three "above-top-secret" spy bases located in Oman, "where it taps in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian/Arabian Gulf," Duncan Campbell reported for the Register, citing leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The bases, codenamed "CIRCUIT" reportedly focus on Iraqi and Yemeni communications.

GCHQ spends tens of million pounds annually to employ two telecom companies, BT (codename "REMEDY") and Vodafone Cable (codename "GERONTIC"), to "run secret teams which install hidden connections which copy customers' data and messages to the spooks' processing centres" and "install optical fibre taps or 'probes' into equipment belonging to other companies without their knowledge or consent." GCHQ calls in engineers from BT whenever it wants to tap into a new international fiber optic cable, Campbell wrote.

Brick Wall

Cold war insanity: Regional official suggests Ukraine to build 2,000-km wall against Russia

Apartheid fence
© UnknownIsrael currently has the record for the biggest outdoor prison. Is the Kiev junta going to outdo them?
Dnepropetrovsk regional state administration deputy head Hennadiy Korban has presented to the Ukrainian presidential administration an engineering project and a feasibility study of a 1,920-kilometers-long wall along the Russian border with an approximate value of 100 mln euro.

"This project is proposed by Dnepropetrovsk regional state administration head Ihor Kolomoyskyi. It can be fulfilled within six months," Dnepropetrovsk regional state administration deputy head Svyatoslav Oleynik told Interfax.

The project stipulates the construction of a 1,920-kilometers-long blind metal fence along the Russian border; the electric fence will be made of high strength steel and have a barbed wire on top.

It is proposed to build the fence in the Donetsk, Kharkov and Lugansk regions.

The project says the approaches to the wall will be blocked by deep and wide ditches and barbed wire, which will keep off civilians, animals, cars and armored vehicles.

The space between ditches and the fence will be protected with signal and antipersonnel mines. The Ukrainian army, border guards and National Guard will be deployed along the wall.

"Charities will finance this project. Everything the project needs is made in Ukraine; from this point of view, this is a good infrastructural project based on Ukrainian industries," Oleynik said.

In his opinion, a number of enterprises of the Dnepropetrovsk region can contribute to the project.

It will cost about 50 million euro to install a metal fence along 1,920 kilometers of the state border. The overall value of engineering works will not exceed 100 million euro, Oleynyk said. He did not rule out financial contributions of the government either.

Comment: They will soon discover if they build such a wall, that they would need a wall to the south, west and north as well to stop people from fleeing in their millions. Ukraine is rapidly turning into an asylum run by mentally deranged people or should we say pathological deviants.

Kolomoisky is also the oligarch who was in charge of the Odessa massacre:


Stormtrooper

NATO's terror hordes in Iraq to be a pretext for Syria invasion

ISIS truck convoy in anbar province
© UnknownISIS has convoys of brand new matching Toyota's the same vehicles seen among admittedly NATO-armed terrorists operating everywhere from Libya to Syria, and now Iraq. It is a synthetic, state-sponsored regional mercenary expeditionary force.
All roads lead to Baghdad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is following them all, north from Syria and Turkey to south. Reading Western headlines, two fact-deficient narratives have begun gaining traction. The first is that this constitutes a "failure" of US policy in the Middle East, an alibi as to how the US and its NATO partners should in no way be seen as complicit in the current coordinated, massive, immensely funded and heavily armed terror blitzkrieg toward Baghdad. The second is how ISIS appears to have "sprung" from the sand dunes and date trees as a nearly professional military traveling in convoys of matching Toyota trucks without explanation.

In actuality, ISIS is the product of a joint NATO-GCC conspiracy stretching back as far as 2007 where US-Saudi policymakers sought to ignite a region-wide sectarian war to purge the Middle East of Iran's arch of influence stretching from its borders, across Syria and Iraq, and as far west as Lebanon and the coast of the Mediterranean. ISIS has been harbored, trained, armed, and extensively funded by a coalition of NATO and Persian Gulf states within Turkey's (NATO territory) borders and has launched invasions into northern Syria with, at times, both Turkish artillery and air cover. The most recent example of this was the cross-border invasion by Al Qaeda into Kasab village, Latikia province in northwest Syria.

Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

The Pentagon
© Jason Reed/ReutersThe Pentagon is funding social science research to model risks of "social contagions" that could damage US strategic interests.
Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 - the year of the global banking crisis - the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

2 + 2 = 4

Best of the Web: Lavrov tells it like it is: Iraq developments show total failure of American-British 'adventure'

lavrov
© Reuters/Leonhard FoegerRussian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, not afraid to tell the truth, proves that not all politicians are lying dirtbags.
The events in Iraq are a result of the actions carried out by the US and the UK, and the situation has spiraled out of control, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalists.

"It has been reported that the UK foreign minister declared that the events in Iraq are, according to him, an illustration that terrorism is rampant in the region due to the absence of reconciliation in Syria," Lavrov said.

"We've known that our English colleagues have a unique ability to twist everything. But I didn't expect such cynicism, because the events that are taking place in Iraq are an illustration of a complete failure of the venture started by the US and the UK that allowed it to spiral out of control completely."

"We express our solidarity with the Iraqi authorities, the Iraqi people who should restore peace and security in their country, but the actions of our Western partners raise a lot of questions," Lavrov marked.