Puppet MastersS


Propaganda

The Democrats anti-Russia campaign falls apart

b
Moon of Alabama
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:56 UTC
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on January 28th, 2017 with Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon
© Drew Angerer/Getty President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on January 28th, 2017 with Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon.
A while ago Matt Tabbi in Rolling Stone warned: Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media:
If we engage in Times-style gilding of every lily the leakers throw our way, and in doing so build up a fever of expectations for a bombshell reveal, but there turns out to be no conspiracy - Trump will be pre-inoculated against all criticism for the foreseeable future.
Sanity is finally winning over. After raising all kinds of shambolic rumors about "Russian interference" the "western" intelligence agencies are walking back their previous outrageous claims:
  • Former DNI James Clapper admits (vid) that he has zero evidence for any Trump-Russia collusion;
  • The British Foreign Secretary now says there is "no evidence" of any Russian interference with British democracy;
  • The German secret services have no proof (in German) for any Russian disinformation campaign.
There is no evidence for any Russian interference in the U.S., or any other, election. No evidence has been show, despite many claims, that Russia or its proxies hacked John Podesta's emails or the DNC or collaborated with Wikileaks.
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Snakes in Suits

Western chicken hawks are going cold on Turkey

Neil Clark
RT
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 16:38 UTC
Demonstrators wave Turkish flags
© Murad Sezer / Reuters Demonstrators wave Turkish flags during a protest in front of the Dutch Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, March 12, 2017.
Where is the increasingly vituperative spat between Turkey and The Netherlands (and other EU countries) going to lead? Why is this political fall-out between fellow NATO members happening at this precise moment?

First, a quick recap of the events.

At the weekend, two high-ranking Turkish officials were prevented from speaking at political rallies in The Netherlands. The Dutch authorities barred Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu from landing in Rotterdam, while Family Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya was prevented from entering the Turkish consulate, and was then deported.

Ankara's reaction has been furious, with Turkish President Erdogan giving a stern warning to the Dutch while likening their actions to Nazism.

Comment: For more analysis on the Netherlands and Turkey spat, read the SOTT Focus: The Bigger Picture: What's Behind the Souring Relationship Between Turkey and The Netherlands

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Eye 1

American presstitutes hide from the truth of Vault 7

Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 16:36 UTC
wikileaks vault 7 cia
The CIA created and accumulated from other sources a huge array of malware and cyber attack capability capable of stealing information from any individual, any government, any corporation, any intelligence agency and either leaving no trace or leaving a "fingerprint" of an innocent party. The CIA, being arrogant and incompetent, lost control over its monster which escaped and now is in the hands of we know not who. Floating around the Internet, it was sent to WikiLeaks. Listen to Julian Assange's explanation of the capability of the CIA's spyware, which includes end runs around encryption.

The presstitute media's response was not outrage over the CIA's criminal behavior, compounded by its incompetence in failing to keep the package from escaping. Rather, the whores who comprise the US media turned on Julian Assange for making known what we need to know. Brian Ross, the chief presstitute at ABC, wanted to know if WikiLeaks took money from Russia. Presstitute Andrea Mitchell, faithful to the CIA, quickly got former CIA director Michael Hayden on TV to agree with her that "Wikileaks has struck again" and revealed information damaging to the US about the CIA's foreign intelligence operations. You can see what a great lie Andrea and Hayden have conspired to tell by listening to Assange explain the information delivered into his hands.
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Blackbox

How likely is an OPEC deal extension? Russia's Rosneft not optimistic

Rakesh Upadhyay
Oilprice.com
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 16:18 UTC
oil field worker
Damned if they do and damned if they don't. This is OPEC's precarious position after the recent fall in oil to below $50 per barrel. Oil prices will tank if OPEC says that they are not open to extending their production cuts for another six months. On the other hand, if prices remain low, OPEC only stands to lose market share to its competitors by continuing the production cuts.

So what will they do?

For the whole of last year, OPEC had been supporting prices on speculation of an impending production cut. In January of this year, the production cuts became a reality, and the oil cartel achieved an exemplary compliance rate of above 90 percent for both January and February on its agreed plan.
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Network

WikiLeaks destroys BuzzFeed claim about Apple vulnerabilities in one tweet

Jack Burns
The Free Thought Project
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 16:18 UTC
Apple DOJ seal, FBI unlock iphone
Last week, Wikileaks dumped what seems to be authentic CIA documents which revealed, among other things, that the spy agency has a way of hacking into smart TV's in order to spy on targeted persons of interest. The data dump, known as the Vault 7 release, also showed the CIA has the ability to hack into Apple phones as well. While the conjugation of the verb is apparently incorrect, when Buzzfeed News recently posted a tweet with an attached story which stated Apple had patched its IOS vulnerabilities described in Vault 7, Wikileaks responded with a tweet of its own.


The agency, committed to forcing governments to operate with transparency, called Buzzfeed "fakenews" and stated Apple had not been able to patch those weaknesses in its operating system.

In Buzzfeed's own article Apple states: "...our initial analysis indicates that many of the issues leaked today were already patched in the latest iOS..." — not all the issues, as Buzzfeed implied.
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Propaganda

The NY Times' propaganda on how moral America was before Trump took office

Donald Johnson
Mondoweiss
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC
Trump NYT
© Getty Images/CNN MoneyMr. President, RT knows how you feel!
How can the New York Times print a piece about Russia Today as propaganda on March 9 — RT is unquestionably a case study in the complexity of modern propaganda — and two days later publish a piece like this and keep a straight face? Allies Fear Trump Is Eroding America's Moral Authority.

The only foreigners actually cited re America's "moral authority" say things which are all very disputable, to say the least. Like how good George Bush was for Muslims:
"Even in the days of George W. Bush, there was no feeling that Bush was against Muslims," said Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister of Jordan and now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Or there are the German leaders who are dismayed by Trump's blunt defense of Vladimir Putin to Bill O'Reilly: "There are a lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country's so innocent?"
The comment alarmed many because it underscored an approach by Mr. Trump, like the rejection of migrants from certain predominantly Muslim countries, that has stripped much of the moral component from American foreign relations and left him being lectured by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and others about his duties under international law.

Her foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, has gone one step further, reminding America of its moral duty as the most powerful Western country and one founded by Christian refugees...
Other voices pushing this "moral authority" claim in the article are not allies, but American establishment figures. They include Joseph Nye, a former senior State Department official now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government - "The Berlin Wall didn't come down because people were responding to American howitzers" — and Michèle Flournoy, the liberal-interventionist who was seen as Hillary Clinton's choice to be secretary of defense. "The most burning question overseas is, 'Can we rely on the United States to keep its commitments, can we rely on you to lead in the way we expect,'" she reports.

Comment: A 'bad wind' blowing: MSM, lead by The New York Times, have been 'hoisted by their own petards.'

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MIB

Foreign secret services stepping up efforts to destabilize Russia


RT
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:08 UTC
Nikolai Patrushev
© Grigoriy Sisoev / Sputnik Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev
The head of Russia's top consultative security body has said that foreign secret services have intensified their efforts to destabilize Russia, noting that Ukrainian authorities had openly confessed to planning sabotage operations.

"The destructive activities of foreign special services that set their goal as destabilizing the Russian social and political situation has intensified," Security Council chair Nikolai Patrushev told participants at a conference of the heads of security agencies of the Southern Federal District.

"Ukrainian authorities openly declare that they are organizing acts of sabotage," he said.
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Red Flag

Merkel, Rutte agreed on the refugee quota deal with Turkey; telling other EU leaders slipped their minds


RT
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 19:59 UTC
Merkel Davutoglu Rutte
© Hakan Goktepe / AFPAngela Merkel, Ahmet Davutoglu, Mark Rutte
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte secretly agreed to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees from Turkey each year as part of an EU-Turkey deal but did not inform other EU leaders, a book by a German journalist says.

The two European leaders met with then Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to discuss the details of the EU-Turkey refugee deal in private the night before the EU-Turkey summit in March 2016. The details of the secret trilateral meet where the deal was struck, has been revealed in a new book, Driven by Events: Merkel's Refugee Policy, by Robin Alexander, a journalist with Die Welt.

During the meeting, Merkel, and Rutte, who held the rotating EU presidency at that time as the Dutch PM, agreed on all the major provisions of the future EU-Turkey agreement which was later presented at the summit as a spontaneous Turkish initiative.

In particular, they gave consent to the idea of Europe taking between 150,000 and 250,000 Syrian refugees from Turkey each year even after the massive inflow of asylum seekers and migrants to Europe would have subsided and the principle, under which the EU should accept one Syrian refugee for each asylum seeker returned from Greece to Turkey, would not work anymore.

However, this particular 'deal' never made into the official text of the agreement and remains a "gentleman's agreement" between Merkel, Rutte and Turkish authorities, Alexander writes in his report, citing unnamed officials that "were directly involved in the negotiations" between the three leaders on the night before the summit.

Comment: In other words, Merkel and Rutte pulled a fast one then did massive impression management.

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Monkey Wrench

Iran combats drones with jamming tool


Sputnik
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:20 UTC
US Drone
© US Air Force / Staff Sgt. Brian FergusonUS MQ-9 Reaper Drone
Iran may find itself at the forefront of drone warfare, after deploying a jamming device that not only seizes control of a remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), but can use the compromised aircraft against its operator.

As the US continues to launch launch spy drones over Syria, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf, Iran and other countries have been factoring UAVs more heavily into efforts to counteract Washington's tactics.

In response to US ships targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' navy, Tehran has been testing and deploying suicide drones that they claim can go toe-to-toe with American vessels.

"The way they affect us is they provide Iran with a layered capability where they can use their fast boats, they can use cruise missiles, they can use radars, they can use UAVs to potentially dominate specific areas," said Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the US Central Command and overseer of US operations in the Persian Gulf.

Comment: Just when the US thought it had thought of everything...Iran comes up with a nifty, killer drone idea. A technological touché.

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Padlock

Israeli defense exec admits guilt to defrauding US aid program


Sputnik
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 23:05 UTC
OCTAL HALE
© haleproducts.comTwo companies doing business with Yuval Marshak
A former executive of an Israel-based defense contractor has pleaded guilty for his role in schemes to defraud a multi-billion dollar US program to finance foreign military purchases, the US Department of Justice announced in a press release on Monday.

Yuval Marshak entered his plea to one count of mail fraud, two counts of wire fraud and one count of major fraud against the United States in US District Court in the state of Connecticut, the release explained. "This conviction is the result of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's (DCIS) ongoing effort to identify and investigate fraudulent activity targeting the Department of Defense and its programs that support America's national security and foreign policy objectives," DCIS Northeast Field Office acting special agent in charge Leigh-Alistair Barzey stated in the release.

According to court documents, Marshak carried out three separate schemes between 2009 and 2013, in which he falsely certified that all items sent to Israel had been made in the United States, as required by law, the release noted. Marshak also falsely claimed that no commissions had been paid, when a company in Connecticut that was controlled by a relative received undisclosed payments, according to the release.

Two US companies have already settled charges with the Justice Department in connection with the FMF contracts. Earlier this year, the New Jersey-based defense contractor Octal Group agreed to pay $460,000 in fines and restitution for covering up an agreement with Marshak. A second company, Hale Products, Inc. paid more than $60,000 and agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department investigation.

In addition to fines, Marshak faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years for wire and mail fraud charges, ten years for major fraud against the US government and 20 years for international money laundering.
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