Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

CIA's John Brennan-US misjudged appeal of Western democracy for Middle East during Arab Spring

A protester stands in front of a burning barricade during a demonstration in Cairo
© Goran Tomasevic / ReutersA protester stands in front of a burning barricade during a demonstration in Cairo January 28, 2011.
The administration of US President Barack Obama made a mistake when it hoped to impose Western values and Western-style democracy in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, according to outgoing CIA Director John Brennan.

"I think there were very, very unrealistic expectations in Washington, including in some parts of the administration, that the Arab Spring was going to push out these authoritarian regimes and democracy is going to flourish because that's what people want,"Brennan said in an interview with CNN.

Earlier this year Brennan, who spent years stationed in the Middle East, already admitted that the Arab Spring uprisings that began in late 2010 created fertile ground for terrorists. But in his latest comments, he said the focus should not be solely on the "symptoms of the problems" like terrorism and violence, but rather on the underlying factors such as governance.


Comment: Washington and its allies had their grubby hands all up in the Arab Spring. Further reading:

  • How the "Arab Spring" went from spontaneous uprising to orchestrated slaughter



Eye 1

'Russia hacking': US Intel agencies try to strong-arm Trump into War with Russia

Central Intelligence Agency
Powerful elites are using the credibility of the US Intelligence agencies to demonize Russia and prepare the country for war. This is the real meaning of the "Russia hacking" story which, as yet, has not produced any hard evidence of Russian complicity.

Last week's 25-page report, that was released by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, illustrates to what extent intelligence is being "fixed around the policy". Just as the CIA generated false information related to Weapons of Mass Destruction to soften public resistance to war with Iraq, so too, the spurious allegations in the DNI's politically-motivated report are designed to depict Russia as a growing threat to US national security. The timing of the report has less to do with the election of Donald Trump as President than it does with critical developments in Syria where the Russian military has defeated US-proxies in Syria's industrial hub, Aleppo, rolling back Washington's 15-year War of Terror and derailing the imperialist plan to control vital resources and pipeline corridors across the Middle East and Central Asia. Russia has become the main obstacle to Washington achieving its strategic vision of pivoting to Asia and maintaining its dominant role into the next century. The Intelligence Community has been coerced into compromising its credibility to incite fear of Russia and to advance the geopolitical ambitions of deep state powerbrokers.

Propaganda

Peskov: Russia has no compromising info on Trump or Clinton, report is 'total bluff'

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
© Mike Segar, Carlos Barria / ReutersU.S. President-elect Donald Trump and U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
Moscow says documents alleging that Russia has compromising information on Donald Trump are a fabrication and a "total bluff." Russia has never gathered information of this kind on either the US president-elect, or his former rival, Hillary Clinton.

"The Kremlin has no compromising information on Trump. This report does not correspond to reality and is nothing but an absolute fiction," the deputy head of the Russian presidential administration, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on Wednesday.

"This is a total bluff, an absolute fabrication, complete nonsense," he said.

Comment: See also:


Bizarro Earth

What a pity! - Obama's legacy

Barack Obama
Eight years ago the world was on the brink of a grand celebration: the inauguration of a brilliant and charismatic black president of the United States of America. Today we are on the edge of an abyss: the installation of a mendacious and cathartic white president who will replace him.

This is a depressing decline in the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time? Does America even have the capacity to be honest about itself and come to terms with its self-destructive addiction to money-worship and cowardly xenophobia?

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville - the two great public intellectuals of 19th-century America - wrestled with similar questions and reached the same conclusion as Heraclitus: character is destiny ("sow a character and you reap a destiny").

The age of Barack Obama may have been our last chance to break from our neoliberal soulcraft. We are rooted in market-driven brands that shun integrity and profit-driven policies that trump public goods. Our "post-integrity" and "post-truth" world is suffocated by entertaining brands and money-making activities that have little or nothing to do with truth, integrity or the long-term survival of the planet. We are witnessing the postmodern version of the full-scale gangsterization of the world.

The reign of Obama did not produce the nightmare of Donald Trump - but it did contribute to it. And those Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility.

Smiley

Best of the Web: CIA, Obama and major media outlets trolled by 4chan fanfiction asserting Donald Trump was being blackmailed by Russian spies

cia troll
Defying all reason and journalistic duty, BuzzFeed may have now topped the Washington Post in the quickly burgeoning Fake News market, publishing accusations President-elect Donald Trump has "deep ties to Russia" — but the astoundingly baseless claim seems to have unraveled in the most hilarious way possible.

"A dossier, compiled by a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official, alleges Russia has compromising information on Trump. The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors," the collaborative BuzzFeed article asserts.

Duly noting the dubious quality of the information presented, BuzzFeed chose to publish the threadbare 'dossier' sans any evidence of its legitimacy — and the rush to perhaps damn Trump before the upcoming inauguration has tentatively been discredited by one of the most unlikely sources: 4Chan.

First, ZeroHedge noted of the contents of the original dossier,

"For those pressed for time, here is the best - as in most laughable - part, discussing 'Trump's personal obsessions and sexual perversions', in which we learn that when staying at the Ritz Carlton Moscow hotel, in order to defile a bed in which Obama had stayed in previously, he employed 'a number of prostitutes to perform 'golden showers' show in front of him.' Good stuff."

Comment: For images of the 'evidence' surrounding these allegations: Trump Intelligence Allegations by zerohedge on Scribd

More details:
As a final point, the memos authored by the operative claim that the Trump campaign and the Kremlin had established an "exchange of information" of "mutual benefit," and that Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, met secretly with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016.

However, Cohen quickly denied that he has ever been to Prague, promptly demolishing the entire argument.

"I have never been to Prague in my life. #fakenews," he tweeted, attaching a photo of his passport.
The Russians respond:
Peskov told Intefax...
"The information is not true and is nothing other than a total fabrication."

"It's a complete fake, it's a complete fabrication, it's total nonsense."
Trump tweets:





And WikiLeaks:

Russia Insider's Dean Parker blasts the Atlantic for essentially saying that all the networks who knew about the allegations, but who kept them private because they knew they were lies, but who decided to report on the secret allegations as if they were real news, did a very bad thing:
In other words, the CNN knew how laughable the "dirt" on Trump was, but kept that from the viewers, while opting to pretend this was a serious story. Whereas at least BuzzFeed gave the readers enough data to allow them to judge for themselves.

So a passing grade for BuzzFeed and an F minus for CNN?

Not according to The Atlantic. No, Obama's favorite paper has just slammed BuzzFeed, and only BuzzFeed. Apparently it's perfectly OK to talk about a supposed explosive secret Russian dossier on Trump like CNN did, as long as you don't reveal how incredulous the contents of such an alleged dossier must be like BuzzFeed did.
...
The real problem for The Atlantic is that BuzzFeed inadvertently revealed just what lying shits and peddlers of fake news the mainstream media really are. It should have maintained the conspiracy of silence and sat on the document it had like CNN, Politico, Lawfare and many other according to The Atlantic did.

Instead it unintentionally helped kill a perfectly good Trump story the MSM could have kept on banging for days, or years.

The Atlantic hit piece ends with a lecture on why it is important for journalists to keep things away from the public.
The Daily Beast gave the soapbox to the man 4chan claims they trolled, and of course he denied their account:
Wilson dismissed all of r/The_Donald and 4chan's claims in a tweet Tuesday night. "You're wrong if you believe 1. What we had came from /pol 2. That I was Buzzfeed's source. Try again, boys," he wrote.

"The information was out there looooong before the 4chan posts," he replied to another user.

Reached by phone earlier in the evening, Wilson told The Daily Beast that the Russian allegations were "making the rounds before anyone talked about it publicly." He said that they were being discussed as early as a year and a half ago.

"Trump always knew it was out there," Wilson said. "He thought he could bullshit his way through it.

"This stuff is real and it's bad. It's going to be something that weighs on him," he added.
Real stuff? That right there says everything about Wilson you need to know.

Meanwhile ZeroHedge has published the chain of events that allegedly leads from 4chan's message boards all the way to McCain, CNN, and Buzzfeed. One priceless image includes:

4chan russian hacking Trump dossier evidence



Vader

CIA analyst says Iraq's Saddam Hussein's death warrant was signed 'on day one' after 9/11

hussein statue
© Jerome Delay/Associated PressU.S. soldiers cover the face of a statue of Saddam Hussein with an American flag before toppling the statue in downtown in Baghdad, Iraq, April 9, 2003
'We went to Iraq to do all of these things, to find the weapons of mass destruction, to help build a new Iraq, to establish rule of law, give the Iraqi people democracy, and one by one, all of those things just crumbled'

Last month, former CIA analyst John Nixon made headlines when he asserted that while he was interrogating Saddam Hussein after the 2003 invasion, the dictator warned him that the U.S. would fail in Iraq.

Now, Nixon has revealed yet another unsettling detail: the Bush administration knew they were going to take on Iraq on "day one" — before the 9/11 terror attacks even occurred. In fact, they viewed Iraq as "unfinished business," according to the former analyst.

"We never really understood at that point what unfinished business meant, but we knew that they wanted to do something," Nixon said in an interview with BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme this week.

"You know, they had their minds made up from day one. And then after 9/11, that's when the death warrant for Saddam Hussein was signed," he explained.

He added that Hussein's execution was "the final straw in terms of pulling out the justifications for the war in Iraq."

He described it as "a mob justice" and said "Saddam was the most dignified person in the room."

Comment: Not just Shrub's puerile reasoning led to Iraq's destruction:


Attention

Hungary plans to crackdown on all Soros-funded NGOs

George Soros
George Soros
Hungary plans to crack down on non-governmental organizations linked to billionaire George Soros now that Donald Trump will occupy the White House, according to the deputy head of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's party.

The European Union member will use "all the tools at its disposal" to "sweep out" NGOs funded by the Hungarian-born financier, which "serve global capitalists and back political correctness over national governments," Szilard Nemeth, a vice president of the ruling Fidesz party, told reporters on Tuesday. No one answered the phone at the Open Society Institute in Budapest when Bloomberg News called outside business hours.

"I feel that there is an opportunity for this, internationally," because of Trump's election, state news service MTI reported Nemeth as saying. Lawmakers will start debating a bill to let authorities audit NGO executives, according to parliament's legislative agenda.

Handcuffs

Holding her feet to the fire: House Oversight chair vows to continue investigation into Hillary's use of private server

Jason Chaffetz hillary investigation
© Gary Cameron / Reuters "Just because there was a political election doesn’t mean it goes away."
Hillary Clinton's problems aren't going away, according to House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz, who has vowed to continue the investigation into her use of a private email server.

The Republican congressman told CNN: "Just because there was a political election doesn't mean it goes away."

Chaffetz described Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state as "the largest breach of security in the history of the State Department."

"It cannot, and should not be repeated ever again," said Chaffetz, whose committee possesses subpoena power. After reopening the investigation weeks before the presidential election in November, FBI Director James Comey told Congress that they had failed to unearth any new information that would warrant bringing charges against Clinton.

Comment: As Americans freak out over Russian fake news, FBI quietly released new Clinton investigation docs


Chess

Beginning of the end of the US Deep State? Soft coup collapsing as CIA produces no evidence of Russian hacking

CIA wikileaks
© Reuters
CIA was bluffing, produced no evidence - Russians did not "hack" the election. Is this the beginning of the end of the Deep State in the USA? Can Trump clean house & wage peace?

Aided by enormous restraint on the part of Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, the soft coup in the USA has collapsed. Not only has the US Intelligence Community (US IC) lost all semblance of credibility with incoming President Donald Trump, but the blackmail by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham has been revealed by investigative journalist Wayne Madsen.

Credit for the defeat of the soft coup has been earned by two persons and one group. Donald Trump earns the most credit - bringing to the matter his deep business experience and common sense, he understood that the narrative against Russia was exaggerated, fabricated, and out of context. With that foundation he was willing to listen to the second person, Michael Flynn, whose deep personal experience in the nether world of black special operations and green clandestine and covert action operations informs him in a manner few can claim.

Comment:


Bad Guys

Monument to Polish WWII massacre victims blown up and desecrated with fascist symbols in Ukraine

Polish WWII memorial in Ukraine
© Stako / Wikipedia
Warsaw has sent a note of protest to Kiev after a monument to Poles killed in a massacre by a Ukrainian Nazi division during World War II was vandalized in western Ukraine.

A cross made of stone was blown up, while two tablets with the names of the Poles killed in the 1944 massacre were damaged. Investigators have been working at the site, Regnum news agency reported, saying that the authorities were trying to establish the type of explosives used to destroy the monument.

A video of the damaged historic site has emerged online.

Comment: This incident surely won't help with the Western Ukraine situation: Boiling point: Transcarpathia threatens Kiev with 'Donbass scenario'