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US lawmakers introduce resolution for re-entry into Iran nuclear deal

Press TV – July 16, 2019

Lawmakers in the Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives are introducing a resolution to for Washington’s re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal, which President Donald Trump quit.

Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA), David Price (D-NC), and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced the resolution Tuesday, urging the administration to re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

“Trump’s Iran policy is responsible for this self-inflicted crisis,” said Lee (pictured below). “As someone who played a key role in building Congressional support for the JCPOA, it is disappointing to find ourselves dangerously close to a military confrontation with Iran because of the administration’s disastrous decision to unilaterally withdraw from the Iran deal on May 8, 2018. “

She further called on the administration to avoid military confrontation with Iran.

“We need serious and sustained diplomatic engagement to remove us from the path to war and on to a path of peace and diplomacy, and that’s what this critical resolution calls for,” she asserted.

Price, meanwhile, noted that the US unilateral pressure has failed to bring Iran to the negotiating table, an idea formerly reiterated by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, calling on Americans to “try respect” rather than anti-Iran threats.

“If we look at current events, we see that President Trump’s rash decision to pull the US out of the Iran nuclear agreement has brought us no closer to bringing Iran to the negotiating table – it’s only emboldened Iranian hardliners, incentivized Iran to return to previously prohibited nuclear activity, and threatened our own credibility and leadership,” said the North Carolina congressman (pictured above).“This resolution sends a strong message from Congress to the administration: we must return to the JCPOA, and we must return to meaningful diplomatic engagement—peace, security, and United States leadership is at stake.”

Schakowsky, on the other hand, asserted that Trump has no Iran strategy or “vision in the Middle East.”

“With no strategy in Iran and no vision in the Middle East, President Trump’s reckless decision to pull out of the JCPOA has increased tensions around the world, pushed the United States closer to armed conflict with Iran, and severely diminished US leadership and leverage,” Schakowsky (pictured above) said. “We have been isolated from allies, have opened the door for Iran to become non-compliant, and have dissuaded other nations from negotiating agreements with the United States. It is time to bring Iran back into compliance, rejoin the JCPOA, and work with allies and partners on a diplomatic track to eliminate the threat of a nuclear Iran.”

The United States has quit the internationally backed nuclear deal and re-imposed illegal sanctions on Iran, which has responded by reducing its commitments under the agreement.

The UK, Germany, Russia, China and France are also signatories to the deal, inked after years of tough negotiations in 2015.

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 2 Comments

Bikini Atoll has 1,000x radiation of Chernobyl decades after nuclear testing – study

RT | July 16, 2019

Radiation levels in the Marshall Islands, where the US government tested its nuclear arsenal during the Cold War, are even higher than those found in Fukushima and Chernobyl, according to a newly released peer-reviewed study.

The research, published by scientists at Columbia University in New York, found that tests of soil samples taken from four of the islands contain radiation levels that are “significantly” higher than those found at the sites of the two worst nuclear power plant disasters in history, in Japan and Ukraine. On one of the islands, the concentrations of radioactive particles were found to be higher by a magnitude of 1,000.

One particularly disturbing find was the presence of plutonium-238 on Naen, an island in the Rongelap Atoll, some 100 miles away from the test sites on Bikini, Enjebi and Runit. That isotope is not a product of fallout, but is generally associated with nuclear waste, raising the possibility that Naen was used as a dumping ground.

“We can’t say for sure that is what happened,” said Ivana Nikolic Hughes, a chemistry professor at Columbia and one of the study’s authors. “But people should not be living on Rongelap until this is addressed.”

Another study also tested fruit from several of the islands and found that contamination levels were above safety levels established in countries affected by nuclear fallout – including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Japan.

The US government performed 67 nuclear tests in the South Pacific islands between 1946 and 1958, during its early arms race with the Soviet Union. The exercises left a trail of contamination throughout 21 islands roughly halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Although representing just 6 percent of the total US nuclear bomb testing activity, the denotations were responsible for over half of the total energy expended.

The most famous of them took place on Bikini Atoll, where Operation Crossroads and Operation Castle were launched in 1946 and 1954 respectively. The former has been described as “the world’s first nuclear disaster” while the latter resulted in an explosion (Castle Bravo) 1,000 times more powerful than the blasts caused by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
Also on rt.com David v Goliath: Marshall Islands take on nuclear powers at UN court

Bikini Atoll’s inhabitants were cleared from the island to make way for the tests and resettled on the barren neighboring atoll of Rongerik. Struggling to survive, the Bikinians have tried to leave the island twice since. The US government had promised them that they would be able to return to Bikini once it was safe to do so.

In 1968, US President Lyndon Johnson allowed several hundred to return. Soon afterward, researchers found that nuclear contamination had entered the food chain. Bikini was abandoned again, and no residents have returned to the island since 1978.

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The New York Times Can’t Even Talk About Publicly Funded Drug Research

By Dean Baker | CEPR | July 16, 2019

Austin Frakt had a peculiar piece in the NYT Upshot section, which told readers, “there is no single, best policy for drug prices.” The piece is peculiar because for some reason Frakt opts not to even consider the policy of direct public funding for research, which would then allow all new drugs to be sold at generic prices.

While there are problems with any system, direct funding, which could be done through various mechanisms, would permanently end the problem of high-priced drugs. With the research costs paid upfront, the price of the drugs would simply cover the manufacturing cost with normal profits. In nearly all cases, this would mean prices would be low, generally less than 10 percent of current prices for patent-protected drugs and in some cases less than 1 percent.

This is also not a far-out idea. It has long been pushed by several prominent economists, most notably Joe Stiglitz. The idea of delinking drug prices from research costs has also been pushed in international forums by China, India, and many other developing countries. In fact, if Trump were pursuing his trade war with China in the interest of working people, instead of the rich, such a shift in funding for drug research could well be an outcome.

In any case, it is bizarre that a piece that purports to be an overview of ways to lower drug prices would not even mention this issue.

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Economics | , , | 1 Comment

Newspeak at the Media Freedom Conference

Joint UK-Canada Event Littered With Insidious Undertones

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian  | July 16, 2019

OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article Hypocrisy Taints UK’s Media Freedom Conference, was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually… creepy.

Let’s just look back at one of the four “main themes” of this conference:

building trust in media and countering disinformation

“Countering disinformation”? Well,that’s just another word for censorship.

This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT accreditation. They claim RT “spreads disinformation” and they “countered” that by barring them from attending.

“Building trust”? In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, “building trust” is just another way of saying “making people believe us” (the word usage is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust).

The whole conference is shot through with this language that just feels… off.

Here is CNN’s Christiane Amanpour:

Our job is to be truthful, not neutral… we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence.”

Being “truthful not neutral” is one of Amanpour’s personal sayings, she obviously thinks it’s clever.

Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for “bias”.

Refusing to cover evidence of The White Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally claim to only publish “the truth”, to get around impartiality… and then set about making up whatever “truth” is convenient.

Oh, and if you don’t know what “creating a false moral equivalence is”, here I’ll demonstrate:

MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical media.
OffG: But you’re supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down.
BBC: No. That’s not the same.
OffG: It seems the same.
BBC: It’s not. You’re creating a false moral equivalence.

Understand now? You “create a false moral equivalence” by pointing out mainstream media’s double standards.

Other ways you could mistakenly create a “false moral equivalence”:

  • Bringing up Gaza when the media talk about racism.
  • Mentioning Saudi Arabia when the media preach about gay rights.
  • Referencing the US coup in Venezuela when the media work themselves into a froth over Russia’s “interference in our democracy”
  • Talking about the invasion of Iraq. Ever.
  • OR Pointing out that the BBC is state funded, just like RT.

These are all no-longer flagrant examples of the media’s double standards, and if you say they are, you’re “creating a false moral equivalence”… and the media won’t have to allow you (or anyone who agrees with you) air time or column inches to disagree.

Because they don’t have a duty to be neutral or show both sides, they only have a duty to tell “the truth”… as soon as the government has told them what that is.

Prepare to see both those phrases – or variations there of – littering editorials in the Guardian and the Huffington Post in the coming months. Along with people bemoaning how “fake news outlets abuse the notion of impartiality” by “being even handed between liars the truth tellers”. (I’ve been doing this site so long now, I have a Guardian-English dictionary in my head).

Equally dodgy-sounding buzz-phrases litter topics on the agenda.

“Eastern Europe and Central Asia: building an integrated support system for journalists facing hostile environments”, this means pumping money into NGOs to fund media that will criticize our “enemies” in areas of strategic importance. It means flooding money into the anti-government press in Hungary, or Iran or (of course), Russia. That is ALL it means.

I said in my earlier article I don’t know what “media sustainability” even means, but I feel I can take a guess. It means “save the government mouthpieces”.

The Guardian is struggling for money, all print media are, TV news is getting lower viewing figures all the time. “Building media sustainability” is code for “pumping public money into traditional media that props up the government” or maybe “getting people to like our propaganda”.

But the worst offender on the list is, without a doubt…

“Navigating Disinformation”

“Navigating Disinformation” was a 1 hour panel from the second day of the conference. You can watch it embedded above if you really feel the need. I already did, so you don’t have to.

The panel was chaired by Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister. The members included the Latvian Foreign Minister, a representative of the US NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Information

Have you guessed what “disinformation” they’re going to be talking about?

I’ll give you a clue: It begins with R.

Freeland, chairing the panel, kicks it off by claiming that “disinformation isn’t for any particular aim”.

This is a very common thing for establishment voices to repeat these days, which makes it all the more galling she seems to be pretending its is her original thought.

The reason they have to claim that “disinformation” doesn’t have a “specific aim” is very simple: They don’t know what they’re going to call “disinformation” yet.

They can’t afford to take a firm position, they need to keep their options open. They need to give themselves the ability to describe any single piece of information or political opinion as “disinformation.” Left or right. Foreign or domestic. “Disinformation” is a weaponised term that is only as potent as it is vague.

So, we’re one minute in, and all “navigating disinformation” has done is hand the State an excuse to ignore, or even criminalise, practically anything it wants to. Good start.

Interestingly, no one has actually said the word “Russia” at this point. They have talked about “malign actors” and “threats to democracy”, but not specifically Russia. It is SO ingrained in these people that “propaganda”= “Russian propaganda” that they don’t need to say it.

The idea that NATO as an entity, or the individual members thereof, could also use “disinformation” has not just been dismissed… it was literally never even contemplated.

Next Freeland turns to Edgars Rinkēvičs, her Latvian colleague, and jokes about always meeting at NATO functions. The Latvians know “more than most” about disinformation, she says.

Rinkēvičs says disinformation is nothing new, but that the methods of spreading it are changing… then immediately calls for regulation of social media.

Nobody disagrees.

Then he talks about the “illegal annexation of Crimea”, and claims the West should outlaw “paid propaganda” like RT and Sputnik.

Nobody disagrees.

Then he says that Latvia “protected” their elections from “interference” by “close cooperation between government agencies and social media companies”.

Everyone nods along.

If you don’t find this terrifying, you’re not paying attention. They don’t say it, they probably don’t even realise they mean it, but when they talk about “close cooperation with social media networks”, they mean government censorship of social media. When they say “protecting” their elections… they’re talking about rigging them.

It only gets worse.

The next step in the Latvian master plan is to bolster “traditional media”. The problems with traditional media, he says, are that journalists aren’t paid enough, and don’t keep up to date with all the “new tricks”.

His solution is to “promote financing” for traditional media, and to open more schools like the “Baltic Centre of Media Excellence”, which is apparently a totally real thing. It’s a training centre which teaches young journalists about “media literacy” and “critical thinking”.

You can read their depressingly predictable list of “donors” here.

I truly wish I was joking.

Next up is Courtney Radsch from CPJ – a US-backed NGO, who notionally “protect journalists”, but more accurately spread pro-US propaganda. (Their token effort to “defend” RT and Sputnik when they were barred from the conference was contemptible). She talks for a long time… without saying much at all. Her revolutionary idea is that disinformation could be countered if everyone told the truth. Inspiring.

Beata Balogova, Journalist and Editor from Slovakia, gets the ship back on course – immediately suggesting politicians should not endorse “propaganda” platforms. She shares an anecdote about “a prominent Slovakian politician” who gave exclusive interviews to a site that is “dubiously financed, we assume from Russia”.

They assume from Russia. Everyone nods. It’s like they don’t even hear themselves.

Then she moves on to Hungary.

Apparently, Orban has “created a propaganda machine” and produced “antisemitic George Soros posters”. No evidence is produced to back-up either of these claims. She thinks advertisers should be pressured into not giving money to “fake news sites”. She calls for “international pressure”, but never explains exactly what that means.

The stand-out maniac on this panel is Emine Dzhaparova, the Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Information Policy. (She works for the Ministry of Information – nicknamed the Ministry of Truth, which was formed in 2014 to “counter lies about Ukraine”. Even The Guardian thought that sounded dodgy.)

She talks very fast and, without any sense of irony, spills out a story that shoots straight through “disinformation” and becomes “incoherent rambling”. She claims that Russian citizens are so brainwashed you’ll never be able to talk to them, and that Russian “cognitive influence” is “toxic… like radiation.”

Is this paranoid, quasi-xenophobic nonsense countered? No. Her fellow panelists nod and chuckle.

On top of that, she just lies. She lies over and over and over again.

She claims Russia is locking up Crimean Tartars “just for being muslims”, nobody questions her.

She says the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, but doesn’t mention that her side is responsible for over 80% of civilian deaths.

She says only 30% of Crimeans voted in the referendum, and that they were “forced”. A fact not supported by any polls done by either side in the last four years, and any referenda held on the peninsula any time in the last last 30 year. It’s simply a lie.

Nobody asks her about the journalists killed in Ukraine since their glorious Maidan Revolution.

Nobody questions the fact that she works for something called the “Ministry of Information”.

Nobody does anything but nod and smile as the “countering disinformation” panel becomes just a platform for spreading total lies.

When everyone on the panel has had their ten minutes on the soapbox, Freeland asks for recommendations for countering this “threat” – here’s the list:

  1. Work to distinguish “free speech” from “propaganda”, when you find propaganda there must be a “strong reaction”.
  2. Pressure advertisers to abandon platforms who spread misinformation.
  3. Regulate social media.
  4. Educate journalists at special schools.
  5. Start up a “Ministry of Information” and have state run media that isn’t controlled, like in Ukraine.

This is the Global Conference on Media Freedom… and all these six people want to talk about is how to control what can be said, and who can say it.

They single only four countries out for criticism: Hungary, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Russia…. and Russia takes up easily 90% of that.

They mention only two media outlets by name: RT and Sputnik.

This wasn’t a panel on disinformation, it was a public attack forum – a month’s worth of 2 minutes of hate.

These aren’t just shills on this stage, they are solid gold idiots, brainwashed to the point of total delusion. They are the dangerous glassy eyes of a Deep State that never questions itself, never examines itself, and will do anything it wants, to anyone it wants… whilst happily patting itself on the back for its superior morality.

They don’t know, they don’t care. They’re true believers. Terrifyingly dead inside. Talking about state censorship and re-education camps under a big sign that says “Freedom”.

And that’s just one talk. Just one panel in a 2 day itinerary filled to the brim with similarly soul-dead servants of authority.

Truly, perfectly Orwellian.

Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

By Way of DecEpstein

By Gilad Atzmon | July 16, 2019

Yesterday, prosecutors revealed that Jeffrey Epstein kept a fake Saudi passport in his home’s safe along with diamonds and piles of cash. It also emerged last week that Epstein invested millions in a deal with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak acknowledged to the Daily Beast that he, like other world leaders, visited Epstein’s Island and that he was first introduced to Epstein by Shimon Peres, former Israeli prime minister and president.

Barak’s high-tech company financed by the arch sex trafficker is called Carbyne. The Israeli enterprise develops “call-handling and identification capabilities for emergency response services,” essentially it seeks total access to your phone, its GPS system and its camera. This shouldn’t take us by surprise. By now we know that Epstein was very excited by cameras.

In a world with functioning media, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and every other Mainstream Media (MSM) outlet would compete mercilessly to dig out the dirt all the way from Epstein’s Island to Tel Aviv but, it seems our MSM is doing the opposite. It conceals the shame. It invests its energy into diverting attention from that which has become obvious to the wider public: Epstein wasn’t just a disgusting paedophile. It is likely that he was serving an intelligence agency and perhaps more than just one.

Four days ago one of the most courageous writers around, former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi, produced a detailed article dealing with the  obvious question: was Epstein an Israeli spy? Giraldi ends his piece: “it will be very interesting to see just how far and how deep the investigation into Epstein and his activities goes. One can expect that efforts will be made to protect top politicians like Clinton and Trump and to avoid any examination of a possible Israeli role. That is the normal practice, witness the 9/11 Report and the Mueller investigation, both of which eschewed any inquiry into what Israel might have been up to. But this time, if it was indeed an Israeli operation, it might prove difficult to cover up the story since the pedophile aspect of it has unleashed considerable public anger from all across the political spectrum.”

I admire Giraldi and would like to think that he is correct here. In Britain, however, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, pretty much collapsed when Lord Janner, became a centre of its focus. Lord Janner was a former chairman of the BOD, a Body that claims to represent British Jews. He was also the founder of the Holocaust Memorial Trust. Some people, so it seems, are either above the law or beyond scrutiny.      

We may have to admit that in a world where the Labour Party is terrorised, in the open, by a foreign lobby, in a world where Penguin press stops publishing  a book because it referred to the Rothschilds as an ‘influential Jewish family,’ in a world where the British national broadcaster is reduced into a Zionist propaganda unit, no one in proximity to power dares to look into the possibility that the intelligence agency of a close ally might have invested millions if not billions of dollars in the formation of a spectacular blackmail apparatus that abused underage children through sex trafficking.

If Epstein wasn’t a lone operator, it is time to ask what his senders had in mind when they formed such a sex trafficking operation. Did they think of the possible consequences if the network were exposed? Did Ehud Barak or Shimon Peres consider the possible implications of their association with a convicted sex offender? Did they care about the possible ramifications to world Jewry, or Israel’s reputation, or Israel’s political affairs and its relationships with the USA? Did they have a plan B? Or maybe you don’t need a plan B in a world where the political class is deeply compromised and the mainstream media as a whole does little but veil the truth.

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 8 Comments

The WORST Part of the Epstein Case

Corbett • 07/16/2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Watch this video on BitChute / DTube / YouTube

According to the dinosaur media, the worst part about the exposure of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking and high-level blackmail operation is that it bolsters conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking and elite corruption. Newsflash: they’re trying to gaslight you. Don’t fall for it for a second.

SHOW NOTES:
Norm MacDonald on Cosby

How the Epstein Case Explains the Rise of Conspiracy Theorists

Gaslight – FLNWO #08

In ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Stanley Kubrick Captured Horrors of Jeffrey Epstein Era

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Video | | 4 Comments

Congress investigating possible secret ‘bioweaponization’ of insects by the Pentagon

RT | July 16, 2019

The US Congress has backed an amendment to the 2020 US Defense budget which could force an investigation into allegations that the pentagon had weaponized insects, including ticks, in a secret program.

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-New Jersey), co-chair of the House Lyme Disease Caucus, asked a series of hard-hitting questions about the alleged ‘bioweaponization’ program and its potential side-effects, including the possible spread of a bacterial infection.

“Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true,” Smith said in a news release. “And have these experiments caused Lyme disease and other tick-borne disease to mutate and to spread? Who ordered it? Were any ticks released by design?”

Lawmakers are considering whether or not to include Smith’s amendment in the final version of the budget which will ultimately be presented to President Donald Trump.

The amendment to the House version of the Defense budget for 2020 would require the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General to explain whether the US military had indeed experimented with weaponizing ticks and other insects between 1950 and 1975.

If found to be true, the inspector general must present Congress with information regarding the full extent and scope of the research.

Rumors have persisted for years of researchers at New York’s Plum Island and Maryland’s Fort Detrick conducting experiments on insects to turn them into biological weapons though no conclusive evidence of such biowarfare programs has been found. Yet.

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | 2 Comments

Turkey undeterred by US sanctions threat

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | July 16, 2019

The loss of Istanbul to an opposition candidate in Turkey’s recent local elections was hyped up by many American commentators, especially pro-Israeli analysts, as marking the end of President Recep Erdogan’s 17-year long dominance in the country’s politics ever since his stunning victory in the 2002 general election.

The main agenda behind the doomsday predictions and the  ‘psywar’ was to rattle Erdogan, soften him up and force him to jettison his staunchly anti-Zionist policy and his open support for the Palestinian cause, his proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin — overall, his independent foreign policies. In particular, Washington targeted Erdogan’s decision to purchase the S-400 missile system from Russia.

However, Erdogan has sprang a surprise on the US by going ahead with the S-400 deal, openly defying the threat of sanctions. The delivery of the missile began five days ago and almost every day, Russian military transport aircraft are landing in Ankara ferrying consignments related to the S-400 ABM system.

Not only that, Erdogan is giving the Americans the middle finger by announcing that President Trump has told him in a private conversation in Osaka on the margins of the recent G20 summit that there isn’t going to be any sanctions, no matter what the US officials would be saying.

According to Bloomberg, Trump’s team has settled on a sanctions package and plans to announce it later this week once POTUS approves it. On the other hand, Erdogan said on Sunday that Trump has the authority to waive sanctions on Turkey and “since this is the case, it is Trump who needs to find the middle ground.”

But US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo firmly told the Washington Post in an interview published late on Sunday that “the law requires that there be sanctions and I’m confident that we will comply with the law and President Trump will comply with the law”.

It seems Erdogan is playing chicken. He disclosed over the weekend that the Russian system will be deployed and ready only by April next year. At the same time, he has also mentioned the possibility of ‘co-production’ of the Russian system in Turkey. In his words, “The S-400s are the strongest defence system against those who want to attack our country. God willing, we are doing this as a joint investment with Russia, and will continue to do so.”

Certainly, Erdogan doesn’t look as if he is cowed down by the defeat of his party’s candidate in the mayoral election in Istanbul. He is unperturbed by the propaganda against him by the US media and think tankers. Nor is his behaviour showing as if he is on the run.

All factors taken into account, it cannot be ruled out that Trump may waive or postpone the sanctions against Turkey, a country where the US president has significant business interests. What can be predicted with certainty is that Erdogan will react strongly to any US sanctions.

Erdogan has several options on the table — ranging from evicting the US military from its bases in Turkey (which of course will entail the removal of the 60 nuclear bombs as well) to the launch of the much talked about military operations against the Kurdish militia in northern Syria.

In the latter case, if Turkey decimates the Kurdish fighters, the US will be left with no proxies / allies in Syria and any form of continued American military presence in the Euphrates region will become difficult to maintain.   That of course will hit Israeli interests very badly. The Pentagon is already nervous. 

All the evidence suggests that Erdogan has made a strategic decision that Turkey’s future lies in Eurasian integration and the current sparring is a shadow play. His recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping soon after the G20 summit on Osaka —  and in Beijing — and his strong endorsement of Chinese policies on the Uighur problem can only be seen as a deliberate, well-calculated move to ensure that there are no contradictions in Turkey’s gravitation to the East.

In particular, Erdogan visualises that China’s Belt and Road presents just the alternative he needs to revive the Turkish economy and withstand western pressure. The Chinese Communist Party tabloid Global Times commented that Erdogan’s meeting with the Chinese leadership “marked political consensus between China and Turkey on a deeper level of understanding. China’s policies on Xinjiang are part of its internal affairs that no other country has a right to interfere with. Erdogan’s remarks on the Xinjiang question are the premise and guarantee for upgrade of bilateral cooperation.”

In an op-ed in the Global Times on the eve of his arrival in Beijing, Erdogan wrote, “Turkey shares China’s vision when it comes to serving world peace, preserving global security and stability, promoting multilateralism, and upholding the principle of free trade. The world seeks a new, multipolar balance today. The need for a new international order, which will serve the interests of all humanity, is crystal clear. Turkey and China, the world’s most ancient civilisations, have a responsibility to contribute to building this new system.”

Clearly, Erdogan couldn’t care less anymore about US sanctions. Read a commentary by Xinhua entitled Erdogan’s visit sign of aligned Turkish-Chinese interests: experts.

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | 1 Comment

Sic Transit Gloria Mueller

Making the Worst Case Appear the Better

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | July 16, 2019

Friday’s surprising report that Robert Mueller had successfully sought an extra week to prepare for his House testimony on Russiagate (now set for July 24) must have come as scary news to those of his fans who can put two and two together. Over the past few weeks, it has become clearer that each of the two frayed findings of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has now come apart at the seams.

Saturday’s New York Times reports that “the Democrats said they chose to delay at the request of Mr. Mueller” after a day of negotiations, “as both Democrats and Republicans were deep in preparations for his testimony” earlier scheduled for July 17. The Washington Post, on the other hand, chose not to say who asked for the delay. Rather, it explained the abrupt change in timing with a misleading article entitled, “Mueller, House panels strike deal to delay hearing until July 24, giving lawmakers more time to question him.”

How to Avoid Eating Crow

Friedrich: Told Mueller put up or shut up (Flickr)

As the truth seeps out, there will be plenty of crow to go around. To avoid eating it, the Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the stenographers who pass for journalists at the Times and Post, and the “Mueller team” will need all the time they can muster to come up with imaginative responses to two recent bombshell revelations from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

Perhaps the most damning of the two came last Monday, when it was disclosed that, on July 1, Judge Dabney Friedrich ordered Mueller to stop pretending he had proof that the Russian government was behind the Internet Research Agency’s supposed attempt to interfere via social media in the 2016 election. While the corporate media so far has largely ignored Judge Friedrich’s order, it may well have been enough to cause very cold feet for those attached to the strained Facebook fable. (The IRA social-media “interference” has always been ludicrous on its face, as journalist Gareth Porter established.)

Ten days is not a lot of time to conjure up ways to confront and explain Judge Friedrich’s injection of some unwelcome reality. Since the Democrats, the media, and Mueller himself all have strong incentive to “make the worst case appear the better” (one of the twin charges against Socrates), they need time to regroup and circle the wagons. The more so, since Mueller’s other twin charge — Russian hacking of the DNC — also has been shown, in a separate Court case, to be bereft of credible evidence.

No, the incomplete, redacted, second-hand “forensics” draft that former FBI Director James Comey decided to settle for from the Democratic National Committee-hired CrowdStrike firm does not qualify as credible evidence. Both new developments are likely to pose a strong challenge to Mueller. On the forensics, Mueller decided to settle for what his former colleague Comey decided to settle for from CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC despite it’s deeply flawed reputation and well known bias against Russia. In fact, the new facts — emerging, oddly, from the U.S. District Court, pose such a fundamental challenge to Mueller’s findings that no one should be surprised if Mueller’s testimony is postponed again.

Requiem for ‘Interference’

Daniel Lazare’s July 12 Consortium News piece shatters one of the twin prongs in Mueller’s case that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” It was the prong dripping with incessant drivel about the Kremlin using social media to help Trump win in 2016.

Mueller led off his Russiagate report, a redacted version of which was published on April 18, with the dubious claim that his investigation had

“… established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign, and then released stolen documents.”

Judge to Mueller: Put Up or Shut Up

Mueller: Needs more time. (Flickr)

Regarding the social-media accusation, Judge Friederich has now told Mueller, in effect, to put up or shut up. What happened was this: On February 16, 2018 a typically credulous grand jury — the usual kind that cynics say can be persuaded to indict the proverbial ham sandwich — was convinced by Mueller to return 16 indictments of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and associates in St. Petersburg, giving his all-deliberate-speed investigation some momentum and a much-needed, if short-lived, “big win” in “proving” interference by Russia in the 2016 election. It apparently never occurred to Mueller and the super-smart lawyers around him that the Russians would outsmart them by hiring their own lawyers to show up in U.S. court and seek discovery. Oops.

The Feb. 2018 indictment referred repeatedly to the IRA simply as a “Russian organization.” But in Mueller’s report 14 months later, the “Russian organization” had somehow morphed into “Russia.” The IRA’s lawyers argued, in effect, that Mueller’s ipse-dixit “Russia did it” does not suffice as proof of Russian government involvement. Federal Judge Friedrich agreed and ordered Mueller to cease promoting his evidence-less charge against the IRA; she added that “any future violations of her order will trigger a range of potential sanctions.”

More specifically, at the conclusion of a hearing held under seal on May 28, Judge Friedrich ordered the government “to refrain from making or authorizing any public statement that links the alleged conspiracy in the indictment to the Russian government or its agencies.” The judge ordered further that “any public statement about the allegations in the indictment . . . must make clear that, one, the government is summarizing the allegations in the indictment which remain unproven, and, two, the government does not express an opinion on the defendant’s guilt or innocence or the strength of the evidence in this case.”

Reporting Thursday on Judge Friedrich’s ruling, former CIA and State Department official Larry C. Johnson described it as a “potential game changer,” observing that Mueller “has not offered one piece of solid evidence that the defendants were involved in any way with the government of Russia.” After including a lot of useful background material, Johnson ends by noting:

“Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth–if you cannot produce evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers.”

IRA Story a ‘Stretch’

Last fall, investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissected and debunked The New York Times’ far-fetched claim that 80,000 Facebook posts by the Internet Research Agency helped swing the election to Donald Trump. What the Times story neglected to say is that the relatively paltry 80,000 posts were engulfed in literally trillions of posts on Facebook over the two-year period in question — before and after the 2016 election.

In testimony to Congress in October 2017, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch had cautioned earlier that from 2015 to 2017, “Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or ‘served,’ a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds.” Shamefully misleading “analysis” by Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in a 10,000-word article on September 20, 2018 made the case that the IRA’s 80,000 posts helped deliver the presidency to Trump.

Shane and Mazzetti neglected to report the 33 trillion number for needed context, even though the Times’ own coverage of Stretch’s 2017 testimony stated outright: “Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users’ News Feeds everyday.”

The chances that Americans saw any of these IRA ads—let alone were influenced by them—are infinitismal. Porter and others did the math and found that over the two-year period, the 80,000 Russian-origin Facebook posts represented just 0.0000000024 of total Facebook content in that time. Porter commented that this particular Times contribution to the Russiagate story “should vie in the annals of journalism as one of the most spectacularly misleading uses of statistics of all time.”

And now we know, courtesy of Judge Friederich, that Mueller has never produced proof, beyond his say-so, that the Russian government was responsible for the activities of the IRA — feckless as they were. That they swung the election is clearly a stretch.

The Other Prong: Hacking the DNC

The second of Mueller’s two major accusations of Russian interference, as noted above, charged that “a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign, and then released stolen documents.” Sadly for Russiagate aficionados, the evidence behind that charge doesn’t hold water either.

CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department admitted.

The revelation came in a court filing by the government in the pre-trial phase of Roger Stone, a long-time Republican operative who had an unofficial role in the campaign of candidate Donald Trump. Stone has been charged with misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a witness.

The filing was in response to a motion by Stone’s lawyers asking for “unredacted reports” from CrowdStrike challenging the government to prove that Russia hacked the DNC server. “The government … does not possess the information the defendant seeks,” the DOJ filing says.

Small wonder that Mueller had hoped to escape further questioning. If he does testify on July 24, the committee hearings will be well worth watching.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and a presidential briefer. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His colleagues and he have been following closely the ins and outs of Russiagate.

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | 2 Comments

How Assange & RT meddled in 2016, according to CNN’s ‘possibilities’, innuendo & lies

RT | July 16, 2019

CNN has released a new ‘exclusive’ report, accusing Julian Assange of conspiring with ‘the Russians’ (including RT) to meddle in the 2016 US election – again.

Citing a report compiled by a private Spanish security company – but not providing any of it – the network basically re-hashed the entirety of the Russiagate conspiracy on Monday, painting a sinister portrait of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, RT and “Russians and world-class hackers” that supposedly made the revelations of Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Podesta emails happen during the 2016 election. It includes speculation, insinuation, selective quoting of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and even an easily and repeatedly disproven lie about RT.

Let’s dispense with the last point first. Per CNN: “On at least two occasions, RT even published articles detailing the new batches of emails before WikiLeaks officially released them, suggesting that they were coordinating behind the scenes, which they deny.”

In reality, RT journalists simply noticed a pattern to the WikiLeaks’ releases and kept a close eye on its website in expectation of every new batch. As RT’s Dublin bureau editor-on-duty at the time Ivor Crotty put it, “We merely watched a trend and performed journalism.” It was Clinton’s aides that suggested“coordinating behind the scenes,” which CNN here uncritically endorses.

The rest of CNN’s sensationally-titled “scoop” openly admits the Spanish papers merely “build on the possibility” raised by Mueller’s report about how WikiLeaks received the emails. Safe words for “unprovable speculation” begin a few lines below the headline, and keep multiplying from there on.

CNN quotes the Mueller report as having named German hacker Andrew Müller-Maguhn as someone who “may have assisted” WikiLeaks in obtaining the files – something page 55 of the report “cannot rule out” happened, based on “public reporting”, not actual evidence.

Throughout the story, the CNN authors seem almost incredulous that Ecuador allowed Assange, a political refugee, to have basic facilities like high-speed Internet or the absence of 24/7 snooping – all of which he is portrayed as having exploited to undermine American democracy.

Assange also had visitors – including a “Russian national named Yana Maximova” (who the authors never tracked down, but appear to assume her an insidious figure by the sole merit of her being Russian) and with “senior staffers from RT” such as London bureau chief Nikolay Bogachikhin, who even “gave him a USB drive on one occasion.”

Bogachikhin, one of the very few people who actually responded to CNN’s requests for comment, was open about RT’s cooperation with Assange. RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan joined in by tweeting about her own visits to Assange and listing quite a few more things RT staff brought to him: “Cassettes, floppy disks, flash drives, pieces of paper, technical equipment, candy…”

That’s because RT hosted a show with Assange, and widely advertised it both on air and online. “It’s hard to host a show without equipment, you know. It was an awesome show. Can you google it up yourself?” Simonyan tweeted.

CNN, meanwhile, repeats the literal smear – not substantiated by a single photo or video clip since Assange’s arrest in April – that the journalist “smeared feces” on the embassy walls.

Wrapping up the piece, CNN finds it sinister that the Russian government denounced the arrest as a violation of Assange’s human rights and dignity – the ultimate proof Assange “still has allies in Russia.”

Also on rt.com:

Another nail in Russiagate coffin? Federal judge destroys key Mueller report claim

July 16, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | 1 Comment