Puppet MastersS


USA

Obama's West Point commencement speech: Refuting the lies, omissions and distortions

Obama West Point Speech
© Susan Walsh, APU.S. President Barack Obama arrives to deliver the commencement address to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point's Class of 2014 on May 28, 2014, in West Point, N.Y.
An Open Letter to the Graduates of West Point
On May 2014 President Obama delivered the commencement address to the graduates of United States Military Academy at West Point. Beyond the easy banter and eulogy to past and present war heroes, Obama outlined a vision of past military successes and present policies, based on a profoundly misleading diagnosis of the current global position of the United States.

His presentation is marked by systematic lies about past wars and current military interventions. The speech's glaring failure to acknowledge the millions of civilians killed by US military interventions stands out. He glosses over the growth of NSA, the global police state apparatus. He presents a grossly inflated account of the US role in the world economy. Worst of all he outlines an extremely dangerous policy of confrontation with rising military and economic powers, in particular Russia and China.
Distorting the Past: Defeats and Retreats Converted into Victories

One of the most disturbing aspects of President Obama's speech is his delusional account of US military engagements over the past decade. Obama's claim that, "by most measures America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world", defies belief. After 13 years of war and occupation in Afghanistan, the US has failed to conquer the Taliban and is leaving behind a fragile puppet regime on the verge of collapse. The US was forced to withdraw from Iraq after causing the deaths of hundreds of thousand of civilians, the displacement and wounding of millions and the ignition of a sectarian war, which has propelled a pro-Iranian regime to power in Baghdad. In Libya, the Obama pushed NATO to destroy the entire country in order to overthrow the secular Gadhafi government, thus undermining any possibility of reconciliation among opponents. He has brought bands of Islamist terrorists to power who are profoundly hostile to the United States.

Star of David

Pressures increasing against Israeli crimes in Palestine as US dominance declines, says analyst

palestinian prisoners
© Presstv.ir
The international pressures against Israel's crimes in Palestine are escalating as the US global dominance is gradually fading away, a political analyst tells Press TV.

In a Saturday interview with Press TV, Richard Herman, with Orange County Friends of Palestine, pointed to marginalization of anti-Israel movements by the US in the past years and noted, "Those days are changing and today there are more and more actions against Israel, against the crimes that Israel commits and those are building and over time...they will mount up to the point where the UN will finally vote against Israel...."

"As the United States declines in its world domination, the UN and all the countries of the world will act against Israel," he pointed out.

The analyst noted that at present the UN is unable to take any action against Israel's crimes as the organization is extensively under the US sway.

Red Flag

Flashback Erdogan: Color revolutions are being foisted on Turkey and Brazil

Erdogan
© APTurkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses his lawmakers at the parliament in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, June 18, 2013. After weeks of confrontation with police, sometimes violent, Turkish protesters are using a new form of resistance: standing silently. The development started late Monday when a solitary man, Etrdem Gunduz, began standing in passive defiance against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's authority at Istanbul's central Taksim Square
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has blamed a wave of anti-government protests in Turkey on a foreign-led plot to destabilize his government, suggested Saturday that protest-hit Brazil was the victim of the same alleged conspiracy.

Erdogan was addressing tens of thousands of his supporters in the Black Sea coastal city of Samsun, the latest stop in a series of rallies he has called to shore up his political support.

The protests in Turkey erupted three weeks ago after riot police brutally cracked down on peaceful environmental activists who opposed plans to develop a park next to Istanbul's Taksim Square. The demonstrations have turned into expressions of discontent with what critics say is Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian bent since taking power a decade ago.

Thousands of protesters returned to Taksim Square on Saturday for a memorial for at least four people - three demonstrators and one police officer - killed during the protests. Some chanted "Dictator Tayyip!"

Erdogan denies he is authoritarian and points to elections in 2011 that returned him to a third term in office with 50 percent of the vote.

Comment: Considering that the USA via its CIA agents has been busy fomenting worldwide rebellion, it's not a stretch to assume that Turkey and Brazil may also be in the cross-hairs.
Michael Parenti: U.S. Empire successful in stopping the betterment of the world's people
Venezuela accuses U.S. of fomenting color revolution unrest


Attention

The slippery slope of the NDAA

NDAA and Guantanamo Protest
© World Can't WaitNDAA and Guantanamo Protest
President Obama has made it clear that it is okay to kill Americans without a judge or jury and congress passed a law, NDAA, which allows people to be arrested and imprisoned indefinitely without legal representation.

This is the tip of a spear. It has opened a wound in the constitutional protections of Americans that will deepen, become infected and will continue to expand its manifestation through local police and in other nations.

We don't know; Killing

We don't know how many Americans have been killed based on Obama's orders. We don't know if Obama has delegated the authority to kill independently to other people or organizations. Are there people in the CIA who are now authorized to kill? Are there private organizations, like the company that used to be called Blackwater, which have been authorized to kill?

Bad Guys

Are we 'growing' ourselves into the next economic collapse?

For all those analysts (including this one) who thought the debt binge of the previous decade marked end of the Age of Leverage, well, not so fast. It turns out that memories are short and government printing presses are powerful, and this combination has turned the "Great Deleveraging" into a minor speed bump on the road to something even more extreme. As the following chart illustrates, the growth in total US debt flattened in 2009 and 2010, with government borrowing more-or-less offsetting a decrease in consumer and business loans. But now the trend is once again onward and upward across the board.
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Comment: Also posted at John Rubino's website is a recent talk given by Chris Martenson in which he highlights some significant trends likely to bring us to a serious crossroads in the near future. Taken together, these observations suggest that planning/preparation for economic disaster should be high on everyone's priority list.




Attention

Why should anyone trust a government that kills, maims, tortures, lies, spies, cheats, and treats its citizens like criminals?

"Why should anyone trust a government that has condoned torture, spied on at least 35 world leaders, supports indefinite detention, places bugs in thousands of computers all over the world, kills innocent people with drone attacks, promotes the post office to log mail for law enforcement agencies and arbitrarily authorizes targeted assassinations? Or, for that matter, a president that instituted the Insider Threat Program, which was designed to get government employees to spy on each other and 'turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches,' which includes 'any unauthorized disclosure of anything, not just classified materials.'" - Professor Henry Giroux
US Capitol
© Wikimedia Commons

Why should anyone trust a government that kills, maims, tortures, lies, spies, cheats, and treats its own citizens like criminals? For that matter, why should anyone trust a government utterly lacking in transparency, whose actions give rise to more troubling questions than satisfactory answers, and whose domestic policies are dictated more by paranoia than need?

Unfortunately, "we the people" have become so trusting, so gullible, so easily distracted, so out-of-touch, so compliant and so indoctrinated on the idea that our government will always do the right thing by us that we have ignored the warning signs all around us, or at least failed to recognize them as potential red flags.

As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the consequences of this failure on both our parts - the citizenry's and the government's - to do our due diligence in asking the right questions, demanding satisfactory answers, and holding our government officials accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law has pushed us to the brink of a nearly intolerable state of affairs. Intolerable, at least, to those who remember what it was like to live in a place where freedom, due process and representative government actually meant something. (Remember that the people of Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany also failed to ask questions, demand answers, and hold their government officials accountable until it was too late, and we know how that turned out.)

There's certainly no shortage of issues about which we should be asking questions of our government representatives, demanding truthful answers, and subsequently insisting on changes within our government. Keep in mind, however, that the government has mastered the art of evasion. Thus, it's not enough to ask the questions. We need to demand answers, and when those answers aren't forthcoming - either because a government official claims to not "know" or because it's outside his or her jurisdiction - we need to demand that they find out.

To get the ball rolling, here are just a few dozen of the questions that require honest answers by those individuals and agencies that are supposed to be answering to us. For my part, I'm going to send this exact list of questions to my government representatives and see how responsive they are. I'd suggest you do the same.

USA

Benghazi, the CIA, and the War in Libya

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Benghazi 'consulate' attack: Self-inflicted wound? Or blowback? Either way, civil war is raging in Libya.
The unfolding violence and chaos in Libya's second city of Benghazi should be understood as a power struggle between competing factions, each struggling to assert its own authority over the critical commercial center. However, what is purposely omitted from the Western media narrative is the fact that both groups - one a military command led by Libyan General Hifter, the other an Islamist terror group called Ansar al-Sharia - are proxies of the United States, each having received US support through a variety of channels in recent years. Seen in this way, the unrest in Libya must be understood as a continuation of the war waged against that country by the US-NATO forces.

As firefights, explosions, and air strikes become the norm in Benghazi and the surrounding areas, the nature of the conflict remains somewhat murky. On the one hand is Army General Khalifa Belqasim Haftar (also spelled Hifter), a longtime military commander under Gaddafi who fled Libya for the United States where he became a principal asset for the CIA until his return to Libya at the height of the US-NATO assault on that country. On the other hand is the Islamist Ansar al-Sharia organization, led by Ahmed Abu Khattala, which has been implicated in the September 11, 2012 attack on the US-CIA compound in Benghazi which killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens. In examining both the conflict and connections between these two individuals and the factions they lead, the fingerprints of US intelligence could not be more apparent.

However, the situation in Benghazi, and the Cyrenaica region more generally, is far more complex than simply these two factions. There are other important militias which have played a significant role in bringing the region to the brink of total war. From blockading Benghazi and Cyrenaica's oil ports to internecine conflicts within the militia movements/coalitions, these militias have made the possibility of reconciliation almost unthinkable. And so, despite the fact that the combat phase of the US-NATO war in Libya ended nearly three years ago, the country is still undeniably a war zone.

Attention

The militarization of US police continues...Machine guns, grenade launchers, silencers and more

Militarization of Police
© Liberty Blitzkrieg
The militarization of police forces across the U.S. has been a key theme here at Liberty Blitzkrieg for a long time.

Despite the fact that crime rates have declined sharply across the nation since the early 1990′s, domestic police departments are arming as if they are about to confront battalions of Taliban at any given moment. It's absurd, dangerous and ultimately very divisive as police act more like soldiers than protectors of the community.

The most egregious recent example of "warrior cops" causing serious damage occurred in Georgia late last month and was covered in my post: 19-Month-Old Toddler in Critical Condition After Cops Throw Flash Bang Grenade into Playpen.

Quenelle

Best of the Web: The Normandy landing and World War II: The lies grow more audacious

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D-Day was arguably the first 'TV war', with hundreds of reporters and cameramen sent in with US and British troops landing on France's northern beaches.
If there were any doubts that Western "leaders" live in a fantasy make-believe world constructed out of their own lies, the G-7 meeting and 70th anniversary celebration of the Normandy landing dispelled the doubts.

The howlers issuing from these occasions are enough to split your sides. Obama and his lap dog Cameron described the Normandy landing on June 6, 1944, as "the greatest liberation force that the world has ever known" and took all the credit for the US and Britain for the defeat of Hitler. No mention was made of the Soviet Union and the Red Army, which for three years prior to the Normandy landing had been fighting and defeating the Wehrmacht.

The Germans lost World War II at the Battle of Stalingrad, which was fought from August 23, 1942 until February 2, 1943, when most of the remnants of the powerful German Sixth Army surrendered, including 22 generals.

Airplane

Flashback Get Osama! Now! Or else...

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American commandos likely to descend on Pakistan's tribal areas may not be too keen on acquiring the supreme fashion accessory of 2001 in the region, the Osama bin Laden T-shirt, boasting such inscriptions as "World Hero" and "The Great Mujahid of Jihad". They're selling briskly in Peshawar's Saddar bazaar for less than US$2 a pop.

The US special forces guys could also take back home a few examples of Osama rappin', available on cassette tapes. They could collect Osama mug shots with lovely psychedelic overtones, and even an Osama video - where the No 1 on the FBI's most wanted list on charges of international terrorism preaches from a mosque and talks to his faithful jihadis in the field. Osama says, "You gotta leave all these places run by 'allies of Jews and Christians' and come to me to do the jihad." He calls for "blood, blood and destruction, destruction" - referring to an array of Muslim victims from Palestine to Chechnya, from Lebanon to Kashmir.

Osama bin Laden - also the No 1 target of the CIA's counter-terrorism center - is now a superstar playing the bad guy in some sort of planetary Hollywood fiction. Yet inside Afghanistan today, where the Saudi Arabian lives in exile, Osama is a minor character. He is ill and always in hiding - usually "somewhere near Kabul". Once in a while he travels incognito to Peshawar. His organization, the Al Qa'Ida, is split, and in tatters. The Taliban owe him a lot for his past deeds towards the movement and in putting them in power in Afghanistan - contributing with a stack of his own personal fortune of millions of dollars. But no longer an asset, he has become a liability.

Comment: Well, well, well. It was common knowledge in Pakistan two weeks before 9/11 that the US government was about to intervene in the region, and under the pretext of 'getting OBL'. We bet that once Musharraf saw those towers go down, he realized he'd in all probability lose power (and maybe his life) if he didn't cooperate with the NeoCons in turning the region in to a complete train-wreck.

Listen to the knowledgeable Pepe Escobar talk on pre- 9/11 US motivations of resource grab in pipelineistan, among many other topics, on SOTT talk radio:

Dissecting Globalistan: Interview with Pepe Escobar