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Israel sets up fake Eurovision boycott page to counter BDS campaign

Data gathering?

RT | May 10, 2019

Sporting the URL boycotteurovision.net Israel’s PR website masquerades as part of a campaign to boycott the Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv, but actually features pro-Israel narrative.

For most people who follow the issue, the acronym ‘BDS’ refers to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to financially pressure Israel into improving treatment of Palestinians. However, according to a new website promoted via ads on Google, it now stands for how Israel is “beautiful, diverse, sensational.”

Despite the deceptive URL and the fact that the page doesn’t identify itself as run by the Israeli government, Tel Aviv’s PR ministry confirmed to Reuters that they were behind the campaign.

Meanwhile, with less than a week to go before the Eurovision takes place in Tel Aviv, the actual Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has been ramping up its efforts to encourage people to snub the competition. They were none too pleased with the Israeli government’s latest counter-measure.

“After its theft of Palestinian land and culture, Israel is now trying to appropriate a symbol of our nonviolent resistance,” said Alia Malak, of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

This desperate and crude propaganda is straight out of apartheid South Africa’s playbook.

Although the competition is intended to bring countries around the world together, the contest has been politicized a number of times.

Last year’s winner, Israel’s Netta Barzilai, yelled out “Next time in Jerusalem!” after receiving the trophy for her spirited chicken-themed song ‘Toy’. The statement was seen as controversial given that not even the US had yet recognized Jerusalem as the country’s capital.

Although Israel has pulled out all the stops to assure the event will go smoothly, it comes shortly after cross-border shelling between Israel and Palestine in Gaza earlier this week. Four Israelis were killed and at least 10 injured as a result of rockets fired from Gaza, while the IDF carried out some 320 air-raids which killed 25 people and injured dozens.

May 10, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

US-Iran Conflict – Europe Indulges Washington’s Aggression

Strategic Culture Foundation | May 10, 2019

Iran’s announcement this week that it is suspending participation in the international nuclear accord is regrettable. But it is hardly unexpected, given the unrelenting provocations by the United States towards the Islamic Republic.

The latest provocation by Washington was the purported dispatch of a naval carrier strike group and B-52 nuclear-capable heavy bombers to the Persian Gulf. That US move was claimed to be based on “security concerns”, which in their vapidity and vagueness should prompt contempt from other observers. Especially, too, because the US concerns of alleged Iranian “aggression” were delivered by none other than John Bolton, the national security advisor to President Trump, who has a long and sordid personal history of telling lies in order to justify American wars in the Middle East.

Iran’s warning that it will walk away completely from the 2015 nuclear accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as it is formally known, marks a reprehensible unwinding of international diplomacy. The JCPOA was signed by Iran, Russia, China, the US and European Union (France, Germany and Britain) after several years of rigorous negotiations. The deal finally signed in July 2015 was ratified by the UN Security Council. The accord is thus mandated by the highest authority of international law. It is the American side under the Trump administration which has done everything imaginable to trash the treaty, primarily by abrogating its signature one year ago.

Furthermore, the Trump administration has ratcheted up economic sanctions on Iran, in particular on the country’s vital oil trade. Recently, Trump announced the US was cancelling waivers on eight nations which had continued to import Iranian crude, including China, India and Japan, thereby indicating that Washington was intent on imposing a global stranglehold on Iran’s economy. The US moves are a total repudiation of the nuclear accord. Indeed, arguably, they constitute an act of war.

Tehran originally signed the deal with the unprecedented commitment to curb its nuclear enrichment activities. It was a generous concession by Iran – an unprecedented self-imposed restriction and forfeiture of its legal right to enrich uranium as a long-time signatory to the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran did that to assuage American claims it was secretly trying to build nuclear weapons, something which Tehran has consistently denied, saying that its nuclear industry is dedicated to civilian purposes, as the NPT permits.

Despite over a dozen on-site inspections of Iranian facilities by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which have all verified Iran’s full compliance with the terms of the nuclear accord, Washington has done everything to impede Iran from benefiting from sanctions relief, which Iran is legally entitled to from implementation of the JCPOA.

Iran’s economy has suffered greatly from the ongoing de facto blockade that the US has imposed, an abuse of power owing to the latter’s influence on global banking and the dominance of the American dollar in oil trade. Washington’s provocations have risen to new heights with the recent US designation of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist organization”. Claims by Washington that Iran is engaged in covertly sponsoring regional terrorism are groundless, and indeed bitterly ironic given American complicity in sponsoring state and non-state terrorism.

In any case, the alarming stand-off that has emerged between the US and Iran is indisputably the consequence of Washington’s bad faith and irrational aggression towards Tehran. Iran is responding by notifying its cancellation of the JCPOA, and also if it is attacked military by the US it will block the vital oil trade route known as the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf outlet through which a quarter of the world’s daily shipped oil passes. If the stand-off goes that way, then the world will witness an economic meltdown, if not a military conflagration.

This week when Iran announced its intention to suspend participation in the nuclear accord, the European powers reacted by remonstrating with Tehran for not upholding the JCPOA. China and Russia called on all sides to comply with the treaty. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov went further and said that Washington must take responsibility for the dire state of affairs. The European powers have hardly implemented the JCPOA beyond paying lip service over the past four years. They have pathetically ceded to Washington’s outrageous intimidation of “secondary sanctions” hitting legitimate European investment and trade with Iran. How’s that for monstrous arrogance? Washington is no longer a signatory to the JCPOA – a deplorable violation in itself – but in addition it wants to tear up the signatures of others who intend to abide by the treaty.

Rather than admonishing Iran for its intended suspension of the JCPOA, the European Union should be siding with Russia, China and the UN in fully backing the JCPOA and, what’s more, expressing its full condemnation of the US for making a mockery of international diplomacy and law. By not doing so, the Europeans are only indulging Washington’s worst instincts for aggression. And the rest of the world may pay a severe price for this indulgence and lack of European integrity and independence.

May 10, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

The Real Muellergate Scandal

By Craig Murray | May 9, 2019

Robert Mueller is either a fool, or deeply corrupt. I do not think he is a fool.

I did not comment instantly on the Mueller Report as I was so shocked by it, I have been waiting to see if any other facts come to light in justification. Nothing has. I limit myself here to that area of which I have personal knowledge – the leak of DNC and Podesta emails to Wikileaks. On the wider question of the corrupt Russian 1% having business dealings with the corrupt Western 1%, all I have to say is that if you believe that is limited in the USA by party political boundaries, you are a fool.

On the DNC leak, Mueller started with the prejudice that it was “the Russians” and he deliberately and systematically excluded from evidence anything that contradicted that view.

Mueller, as a matter of determined policy, omitted key steps which any honest investigator would undertake. He did not commission any forensic examination of the DNC servers. He did not interview Bill Binney. He did not interview Julian Assange. His failure to do any of those obvious things renders his report worthless.

There has never been, by any US law enforcement or security service body, a forensic examination of the DNC servers, despite the fact that the claim those servers were hacked is the very heart of the entire investigation. Instead, the security services simply accepted the “evidence” provided by the DNC’s own IT security consultants, Crowdstrike, a company which is politically aligned to the Clintons.

That is precisely the equivalent of the police receiving a phone call saying:

“Hello? My husband has just been murdered. He had a knife in his back with the initials of the Russian man who lives next door engraved on it in Cyrillic script. I have employed a private detective who will send you photos of the body and the knife. No, you don’t need to see either of them.”

There is no honest policeman in the world who would agree to that proposition, and neither would Mueller were he remotely an honest man.

Two facts compound this failure.

The first is the absolutely key word of Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, the USA’s $14 billion a year surveillance organisation. Bill Binney is an acknowledged world leader in cyber surveillance, and is infinitely more qualified than Crowdstrike. Bill states that the download rates for the “hack” given by Crowdstrike are at a speed – 41 Megabytes per second – that could not even nearly be attained remotely at the location: thus the information must have been downloaded to a local device, eg a memory stick. Binney has further evidence regarding formatting which supports this.

Mueller’s identification of “DC Leaks” and “Guccifer 2.0” as Russian security services is something Mueller attempts to carry off by simple assertion. Mueller shows DNC Leaks to have been the source of other, unclassified emails sent to Wikileaks that had been obtained under a Freedom of Information request and then Mueller simply assumes, with no proof, the same route was used again for the leaked DNC material. His identification of the Guccifer 2.0 persona with Russian agents is so flimsy as to be laughable. Nor is there any evidence of the specific transfer of the leaked DNC emails from Guccifer 2.0 to Wikileaks. Binney asserts that had this happened, the packets would have been instantly identifiable to the NSA.

Bill Binney is not a “deplorable”. He is the former Technical Director of the NSA. Mike Pompeo met him to hear his expertise on precisely this matter. Binney offered to give evidence to Mueller. Yet did Mueller call him as a witness? No. Binney’s voice is entirely unheard in the report.

Mueller’s refusal to call Binney and consider his evidence was not the action of an honest man.

The second vital piece of evidence we have is from Wikileaks Vault 7 release of CIA material, in which the CIA themselves outline their capacity to “false flag” hacks, leaving behind misdirecting clues including scraps of foreign script and language. This is precisely what Crowdstrike claim to have found in the “Russian hacking” operation.

So here we have Mueller omitting the key steps of independent forensic examination of the DNC servers and hearing Bill Binney’s evidence. Yet this was not for lack of time. While deliberately omitting to take any steps to obtain evidence that might disprove the “Russian hacking” story, Mueller had boundless time and energy to waste in wild goose chases after totally non-existent links between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign, including the fiasco of interviewing Roger Stone and Randy Credico.

It is worth remembering that none of the charges against Americans arising from the Mueller inquiry have anything to do with Russian collusion or Trump-Wikileaks collusion, which simply do not exist. The charges all relate to entirely extraneous matters dug up, under the extraordinary US system of “Justice”, to try to blackmail those charged with unrelated crimes turned up by the investigation, into fabricating evidence of Russian collusion. The official term for this process of blackmail is of course “plea-bargaining.”

Mueller has indicted 12 Russians he alleges are the GRU agents responsible for the “hack”. The majority of these turn out to be real people who, ostensibly, have jobs and lives which are nothing to do with the GRU. Mueller was taken aback when, rather than simply being in absentia, a number of them had representation in court to fight the charges. Mueller had to back down and ask for an immediate adjournment as soon as the case opened, while he fought to limit disclosure. His entire energies since on this case have been absorbed in submitting motions to limit disclosure, individual by individual, with the object of ensuring that the accused Russians can be convicted without ever seeing, or being able to reply to, the evidence against them. Which is precisely the same as his attitude to contrary evidence in his Report.

Mueller’s failure to examine the servers or take Binney’s evidence pales into insignificance compared to his attack on Julian Assange. Based on no conclusive evidence, Mueller accuses Assange of receiving the emails from Russia. Most crucially, he did not give Assange any opportunity to answer his accusations. For somebody with Mueller’s background in law enforcement, declaring somebody in effect guilty, without giving them any opportunity to tell their side of the story, is plain evidence of malice.

Inexplicably, for example, the Mueller Report quotes a media report of Assange stating he had “physical proof” the material did not come from Russia, but Mueller simply dismisses this without having made any attempt at all to ask Assange himself.

It is also particularly cowardly as Julian was and is held incommunicado with no opportunity to defend himself. Assange has repeatedly declared the material did not come from the Russian state or from any other state. He was very willing to give evidence to Mueller, which could have been done by video-link, by interview in the Embassy or by written communication. But as with Binney and as with the DNC servers, the entirely corrupt Mueller was unwilling to accept any evidence which might contradict his predetermined narrative.

Mueller’s section headed “The GRU’s Transfer of Stolen Material to Wikileaks” is a ludicrous farrago of internet contacts between Wikileaks and persons not proven to be Russian, transferring material not proven to be the DNC leaks. It too is destroyed by Binney and so pathetic that, having pretended he had proven the case of internet transfer, Mueller then gives the game away by adding “The office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred by intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016”. He names Mr Andrew Muller-Maguhn as a possible courier. Yet again, he did not ask Mr Muller-Maguhn to give evidence. Nor did he ask me, and I might have been able to help him on a few of these points.

To run an “investigation” with a pre-determined idea as to who are the guilty parties, and then to name and condemn those parties in a report, without hearing the testimony of those you are accusing, is a method of proceeding that puts the cowardly and corrupt Mr Mueller beneath contempt.

Mueller gives no evidence whatsoever to back up his simple statement that Seth Rich was not the source of the DNC leak. He accuses Julian Assange of “dissembling” by referring to Seth Rich’s murder. It is an interesting fact that the US security services have shown precisely the same level of interest in examining Seth Rich’s computers that they have shown in examining the DNC servers. It is also interesting that this murder features in a report of historic consequences like that of Mueller, yet has had virtually no serious resource put into finding the killer.

Mueller’s condemnation of Julian Assange for allegedly exploiting the death of Seth Rich, would be infinitely more convincing if the official answer to the question “who murdered Seth Rich?” was not “who cares?”.

May 9, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Trump and Putin Hold a 90-Minute Telephone Call, US Liberals Go Ballistic

By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 8, 2019

Like a pit bull with its favorite chew toy, the Democrats refuse to abandon the debunked ‘Russian collusion’ script, to the point where a simple phone call between Moscow and Washington triggers rabid media hysterics.

When tasked to cover last week’s telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the left-leaning mainstream media had a golden opportunity to prove it had moved beyond partisan politics, above intrigue, and above subjective bias. Predictably, it failed the test miserably. What the media did prove, however, came as no surprise: it is totally incapable of casting a gaze beyond the debris-strewn battlefield field known as Russiagate and report on US-Russia relations in a dispassionate and honest manner.

Instead, it obsessed over petty details, like the duration of the phone call and the fact that it was initiated by Donald Trump instead of the Russians. “Trump Initiated Putin Call, And It Was 90 Minutes, Not 60,” a snooty headline in the Huffington Post screamed, much like dozens of other unhinged outlets as if the world’s myriad problems can be sorted out in an afternoon over Twitter.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told the journalists that Trump and Putin discussed a number of global flash points, predominantly Venezuela, where the US, Russia and even China are jockeying for position as a showdown continues between Washington’s man in Caracas, Juan Guaido and the embattled but duly elected President Nicolás Maduro. Given that the US has long considered Latin America its private hunting grounds makes it all the more unacceptable for Washington policymakers and the media that Moscow and Beijing are nosing around in their backyard.

With no loss of irony, which we’ll come to in a moment, the US pundit class assailed Trump for taking Vladimir Putin’s word at face value when he said that Russia, as quoted by Trump, “is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela.”

In one uniformed and very agitated voice, the media bloodhounds demanded to know how it was possible that Trump placed faith in Putin, when just days earlier his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that Maduro was preparing to flee to Cuba – but was discouraged by Russia.

“He had an airplane on the tarmac, he was ready to leave this morning as we understand it and the Russians indicated he should stay,” Pompeo told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer with a remarkably straight face. “He was headed for Havana.”

Trump himself probably didn’t know exactly who or what to believe since just last month Pompeo the pompous practically fell out of his chair laughing as he told an audience from Texas A&M University about his heyday as CIA chief.

“I was the CIA director,” he began with a smile. “We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

When glory moments involve the lowest examples of human behavior it is painful to imagine what a bad day looks like. But I digress.

Regrettably, the young and impressionable students and faculty welcomed the creepy confession as some kind of a big joke, chortling as Pompeo resembled a frat boy discussing last night’s drunken endeavors. It may speak volumes about the American state of mind that no audience member thought to inquire as to what use Mr. Secretary of State was putting those “entire training courses” especially as the United States continues to employ psychological warfare against Maduro. Those methods include suggesting that top officials in his inner circle have secretly betrayed him, while disseminating the ‘news’ that he is about to flee. Such tricks from the regime change handbook may be giving the Venezuelan leader many a sleepless nights, but thus far it has failed to dislodge him from power.

May 8, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

CIA Intervention in Venezuela

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | May 6, 2019

As far as I know, no evidence has yet surfaced that definitively establishes direct CIA involvement in the U.S. regime-change operation in Venezuela. But it is a virtual certainty that the CIA is directly embroiled in the operation.

How do we know that? Because that’s what the CIA does. It’s what it has always done. Regime-change has always been one of the core missions of the CIA. If there is a U.S. regime-change operation, you can bet your bottom dollar that the CIA is at the center of it.

You can also be certain of something else: secrecy. The long-established modus of the CIA is to keep its role in regime-change operations secret, even if it has to lie or commit perjury to maintain that secrecy.

For example, think back to the Chilean coup in the 1970s.

When the Chilean people elected Salvador Allende president, the CIA immediately went into action. It began offering bribes to Chilean congressmen to get them to vote against Allende’s confirmation. (Allende had received only a plurality of the votes and, therefore, under the Chilean constitution the Chilean congress determined who was going to be president.)

It also orchestrated the kidnapping and assassination of Gen. Rene Schneider, who was the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. He was standing in the way of a CIA-inspired military coup, which the CIA was secretly inciting within the Chilean national-security establishment.

In the months leading up to the coup, the CIA was doing its best to maximize the economic suffering of the Chilean people. GOP President Richard Nixon called it “making the economy scream” and it was intended to aggravate the economic crisis that had been brought on by Allende’s socialist policies. The CIA even tried to starve the Chilean people to death by bribing truckers who delivered food across the country to go on strike.

All of this CIA mayhem was kept top-secret. In fact, CIA and U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup was considered so secret that the CIA may well have played a role in the Chilean execution of American Charles Horman during the coup. He had inadvertently discovered strong circumstantial evidence of the U.S. role in the coup and, therefore, posed a grave threat to the secrecy of CIA involvement in the coup.

When CIA Director Richard Helms was summoned before Congress and asked about CIA involvement in the circumstances surrounding the coup, he committed perjury in order to keep the CIA’s role in the coup secret. When he was later convicted of lying to Congress, his CIA counterparts glorified him for having lied to Congress for the sake of “national security.”

It was no different with respect to the CIA’s regime-change operations against Cuba.

Although the CIA was planning and orchestrating the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs through the use of Cuban exiles, the CIA was doing everything it could to hide its own role in the invasion.

Later, the secrecy was expanded to include the CIA’s partnership with the Mafia to achieve regime-change in Cuba through the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

In 1954, the CIA successfully planned and orchestrated the regime-change operation against Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz. Secrecy, once again, was the policy. It wasn’t until years later that the American people discovered the CIA’s role in the operation.

The year before, 1953, the CIA had done the same in Iran. In a coup in which the CIA’s role was kept secret at the time, the CIA successfully ousted the country’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and replaced him with the Shah. The CIA then proceeded to train the Shah’s secret police force, the SAVAK, in the dark-side arts of torture, indefinite detention, and assassination in order to help him maintain his grip on power. Again, secrecy was the order of the day.

There is something else to keep in mind as the Venezuela regime-change operation continues to unfold — the short term vs. the long term.

In the short term, the CIA secretly celebrated its regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. Medals were secretly passed out to CIA participants. The long-term results of those interventions, however, proved to be disastrous. Relations between Iran and the U.S. continue to suffer. Guatemala was ruled by a succession of brutal military dictatorships that threw the county into a 30-year-long civil war that killed more than a million people. Chile was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship for more than 15 years, one that rounded up, incarcerated, tortured, raped, or killed some 50,000 innocent people. Moreover, don’t forget the disastrous long-term results of the U.S. regime-change operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Of course, the solution to all this mayhem is not to require the CIA to provide real-time transparency in its regime-change operations. It wouldn’t comply with such a law anyway, based on concerns for “national security.” The only solution is to abolish the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex, restore America’s founding foreign-policy principle of non-interventionism, and restore a limited-government republic to our land.

May 7, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

IPCC Clone Predicts Doom

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | May 6, 2019

Here we ago again. For some time, I’ve warned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a template, that the United Nations is up to the same tricks elsewhere.

Today, in Paris, an IPCC clone known as the IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services – will announce the completion of an 1,800-page report.

Jonathan Watts, the UK Guardian‘s global environment editor, has already told us everything we need to know about this ‘IPCC for Nature.’

Under the headline Biodiversity crisis is about to put humanity at risk, UN scientists to warn, he insists this report was written by “The world’s leading scientists.” Funny, that’s how compliant, gullible journalists described IPCC personnel. For years and years. Until I began to notice that some of those involved were graduate students in their 20s.

Watts further tells us that:

The final wording of the summary for policymakers is being finalised in Paris by a gathering of experts and government representatives before the launch on Monday, but the overall message is already clear… [bold added by me]

In other words, as happens at the IPCC, scientists are recruited to write a report. Afterward, they draft a summary known as the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). Then politicians and bureaucrats representing national governments attend a plenary meeting where the summary gets examined line-by-line and rewritten.

Fairy tales tell of turning straw into gold. The UN takes scientific summaries and transforms them into politically acceptable straw. The resulting document, which will be solemnly released today, is what a roomful of political operatives have all agreed to say out loud.

But it gets worse. Over the next few weeks, the text being summarized – the underlying, ostensibly scientific document – will also get changed.

That’s not how things normally work, of course. Summaries are supposed to be accurate reflections of longer documents. At the UN, they represent an opportunity to alter those documents, to make them fall into line.

No need to take my word for it. This is standard IPCC operating procedure, and is openly admitted in a 56-page guide to how the IPBES operates.

see page 39 of this guide to the IPBES’ internal workings

Imagine, for a moment, executives at a television station examining the script of an investigative news show line-by-line. Imagine them re-writing that text at the behest of major advertisers, and in accordance with various political sensitivities. Would the end result be trustworthy?

Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, now leads the IPBES. His online biography, over at the University of East Anglia, tell us he is a ‘UN Champion of the World for Science and Innovation.’

When the IPBES was established in 2010, we were informed point blank that its purpose was “to spearhead the battle against the destruction of the natural world.”

In other words, there’s all sorts of deception here. This is no sober scientific body, which examines multiple perspectives, and considers alternative hypotheses. The job of the IPBES is to muster only one kind of evidence, the kind that promotes UN environmental treaties.

That’s how the United Nations works, folks. Machinations in the shadows. Camouflaging its political aspirations by dressing them up in 1,800 pages of scientific clothing.

May 6, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Israel’s Terrorists: The White Helmets Receive an Award

By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | May 5, 2019

Increasingly, groups and even foreign governments have pandered to Israel and its supporters in the United States because they have come to understand that success in dealing with Washington can be dependent on Jewish support. Last week, Raed Saleh, the leader of the so-called White Helmets, also referred to as the Syrian Civil Defense, a terrorist-affiliated group operating in Syria, was in the United States to “… receive the Elie Wiesel Award from the Holocaust Memorial Museum for his organization’s work in Syria.” He was also dropping by to pick up a check for $5 million courtesy of the U.S. government that “… helps us with acquiring ambulances and helps us with search and rescue operations.”

During his visit, Saleh was treated to a nauseatingly obsequious interview courtesy of National Public Radio, which, inter alia, described how the Helmets “were the subjects of an Oscar-winning documentary two years ago, which captured images of them carrying broken and bloody Syrians from dust and rubble.”

Saleh claimed that the alleged victory of the Syrian regime in the yet to be completed war is an illusion as President Bashar al-Assad presides over a broken country, yet reports from inside Syria indicate that the return of the government to areas formerly controlled by terrorists has been welcomed and refugees from the fighting are now eager to return home. Saleh also claimed, falsely, that his organization has been “providing services to all Syrians and to providing support to all Syrians. Now after six years of war, we have saved more than 116,000 people from under the rubble. We have not asked any of these 116,000 people who did they belong to? Is he a Kurd? Is he a Christian? Is he a Muslim? Is he with Assad? Is he against Assad? Is he with the Kurds? Is he against the Kurds? We have never asked anyone these questions.”

Saleh, whose group has only operated in terrorist-controlled areas, could not, however, maintain his approved narrative. He fairly quickly abandoned his non-partisan quasi-humanitarian rhetoric when asked about how he sees the Syrian conflict developing, saying “We do not call this a civil war, but we rather call it a revolution against a dictatorship… the revolution still goes on. We have not lost.”

Those who are unfamiliar with the White Helmets should understand that the group has been praised by those who hate the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and want to see it removed, which includes the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The White Helmets have played a leading role in the propaganda campaign that seeks to instigate violence or use fabricated information to depict the Damascus government as guilty of slaughtering its own citizens. The propaganda is intended to terrorize the civilian population, which is part of the definition of terrorism.

Favorable media coverage of the group has largely derived from the documentary The White Helmets, which was produced by the group itself and tells a very convincing tale promoted as “the story of real-life heroes and impossible hope.” It is a very impressive piece of propaganda, so much so that it has won numerous awards including the Oscar for Best Documentary Short two years ago and the White Helmets themselves were even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. More to the point, however, is the undeniable fact that the documentary has helped shape the public understanding of what is going on in Syria, describing the government in Damascus in purely negative terms.

Nine months ago, with the Syrian Army closing in on the last White Helmet affiliates still operating in the country, the Israeli government, assisted by the United States, staged an emergency “humanitarian” evacuation of the group’s members and their families to Israel and then on to Jordan. It was described in a BBC article that included “The IDF said they had ‘completed a humanitarian effort to rescue members of a Syrian civil organization and their families’, saying there was an ‘immediate threat to their lives.’ The transfer of the displaced Syrians through Israel was an exceptional humanitarian gesture. Although Israel is not directly involved in the Syria conflict, the two countries have been in a state of war for decades. Despite the intervention, the IDF said that ‘Israel continues to maintain a non-intervention policy regarding the Syrian conflict.’”

All of the Israeli assertions are nonsense, including its claimed “humanitarianism” and “non-intervention” in the Syrian war, where it has been bombing almost daily. The carefully edited scenes of heroism under fire that have been filmed and released worldwide conceal the White Helmets’ relationship with the al-Qaeda affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra and its participation in the torture and execution of “rebel” opponents. Indeed, the White Helmets only operate in terrorist-held territory, which enables them to shape the narrative both regarding who they are and what is occurring on the ground.

The White Helmets were accustomed to traveling to bombing sites with their film crews trailing behind them. Once at the sites, with no independent observers, they are able to arrange or even stage what is filmed to conform to their selected narrative. Exploiting their access to the western media, the White Helmets thereby de facto became a major source of “eyewitness” news regarding what was going on in those many parts of Syria where European and American journalists were quite rightly afraid to go, all part of a broader largely successful “rebel” effort to manufacture fake news that depicts the Damascus government as engaging in war crimes directed against civilians, an effort that has led to several attacks on government forces and facilities by the U.S. military. This is precisely the propaganda that has been supported both by Tel Aviv and Washington.

Perhaps the most serious charge against the White Helmets consists of the evidence that they actively participated in the atrocities, to include torture and murder, carried out by their al-Nusra hosts. There have been numerous photos of the White Helmets operating directly with armed terrorists and also celebrating over the bodies of execution victims and murdered Iraqi soldiers. The group’s jihadi associates regard the White Helmets as fellow “mujahideen” and “soldiers of the revolution.”

For those interested in further details, White Helmet activities have been thoroughly exposed by Maxim Grigoriev of the Russian NGO Foundation for the Study of Democracy. Grigoriev presented his findings at a special meeting of the United Nations just before Christmas 2018. A video prepared based on the U.N. meeting includes interviews with actual witnesses of White Helmet atrocities and participants in the staged chemical attacks that were blamed on the government.

So Raed Saleh was in Washington to pick up his award and his multi-million dollar check on top of the tens of millions that his organization has already received from Congress and the White House. He also met with a number of Congressmen who support his initiatives and was praised by New Jersey’s own seriously corrupt Israel-firster Senator Robert Menendez of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who observed “that Saleh’s group of about 3,000 volunteers has ‘saved almost 100,000 lives’ doing ‘courageous work on the ground in Syria, while being targeted by Russia.’” Yes, Russiagate is alive and well.

There is considerable irony in the fact that the National Holocaust Museum, which is taxpayer funded, has given an apparently prestigious award to a terrorist group, something which could have been discerned with even a little fact checking. And the museum also might have been sensitive to how the White Helmets have been used in support of Israeli propaganda vis-à-vis Syria. Perhaps, while they are at it, the museum’s board just might also want to check out Elie Wiesel, for whom the award is named. Wiesel, who was a chronicler of Jewish victimhood while persistently refusing to acknowledge what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, notoriously mixed fact and fiction in his best-selling Holocaust memoir Night. Ironically, the award and recipient are well matched in this case as mixing fact and fiction is what both Elie Wiesel and the White Helmets are all about.

May 5, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

“This Was Not Spying, It Was Entrapment”: Bongino Spits Fire As Nunes Demands Mifsud Docs

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | May 4, 2019

For over two years, anyone who suggested that the Russia investigation was a sham was harshly ridiculed by establishment mouthpieces as a conspiracy theorist. The notion that the Obama Justice Department (led by Eric “wingman” Holder and then Loretta “tarmac” Lynch) could have conspired with other US intel agencies and foreigners to paint Donald Trump as a Russian stooge was considered beyond the pale.

Then we found out that virtually the entire FBI’s top brass absolutely hate Donald Trump and supported Hillary Clinton; the former of whom the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation against, while giving Hillary a pass despite the fact that she destroyed evidence from her homebrew basement server while under subpoena. We were asked to believe that the FBI’s extreme biases played no role in their investigations, while the left insisted that special counsel Robert Mueller was going to confirm fairy tales of Russian collusion peddled by a Clinton-funded dossier.

And then the Mueller report came out – blowing the Russian collusion narrative out of the water, while painting a damning picture that suggests the entire genesis of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, was a setup.

Dan Bongino

One of those brave enough to risk his reputation laying out what was going on before the Mueller report dropped is conservative commentator and former US Secret Service agent Dan Bongino – who has repeatedly mentioned the suspicious role of self-described Clinton Foundation member Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who seeded the rumor that Russia had ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos on April 26, 2016 – shortly after returning from Moscow, according to the Mueller report.

Two weeks later, Papadopoulos would be bilked for information by Australian diplomat (another Clinton ally) Alexander Downer at a London bar, who relayed the Kremlin ‘dirt’ rumor to Australian authorities, which alerted the FBI (as the story goes), and operation Crossfire Hurricane was thus hatched.

Back to Mifsud… 

As Bongino lays out, there are two working theories about Mifsud. The first is that he’s a Russian asset who tried to bait the Trump campaign. The second is that Mifsud was working for US intelligence services and seeded Papadopoulos with the ‘dirt’ rumor in order to kick off the FBI’s counterintelligence operation.

Bongino went into greater detail last month on Fox News – including that Mifsud’s lawyer says he’s connected to western, “friendly” intelligence:

We know that Papadopoulos met multiple times with Mifsud in the first half of 2016:

  • March 14 2016 – Papadopoulos first meets Mifsud in Italy – approximately one week after finding out he will be joining the Trump team.
  • March 24 2016 – Papadopoulos, Mifsud, Olga Polonskaya and unknown fourth party meet in a London cafe.
  • April 18 2016 – Mifsud introduces Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called Russian International Affairs Council.
  • April 26 2016  – Mifsud tells Papadopoulos he’s met with high-level Russian government officials who have “dirt” on Clinton. Papadopoulos will tell the FBI he learned of the emails prior to joining the Trump Campaign.
  • May 13 2016 – Mifsud emails Papadopoulos an update of “recent conversations”.

Note: Papadopoulos and Mifsud reportedly both worked at the London Centre of International Law Practice. –The Markets Work

In short – based on what we know, it appears that Joseph Mifsud was part of a setup by Western intelligence services on then-candidate Donald Trump. 

(it’s true)

Great claims require great evidence, however, which is why Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has requested a wide swath of documents about Mifsud from several federal agencies. 

As the Washington Examiner reports, Nunes – the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, “seeks information about who Mifsud was working for at the time and wrote in a letter that special counsel Robert Mueller “omits any mention of a wide range of contacts Mifsud had with Western political institutions and individuals” in his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

As part of Mueller’s Russia investigation, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Russians and served 12 days in prison late last year.

The special counsel’s sentencing memo to the District Court for the District of Columbia said Papadopoulos hindered the FBI’s ability to get to Mifsud. “The defendant’s lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then,” the memo said.

In his letter, Nunes says it is “still a mystery how the FBI knew to ask Papadopoulos specifically about Hillary Clinton’s emails” if the bureau had not spoken with Mifsud. –Washington Examiner

“If he is in fact a Russian agent, it would be one of the biggest intelligence scandals for not only the United States, but also our allies like the Italians and the Brits and others. Because if Mifsud is a Russian agent, he would know all kinds of our intelligence agents throughout the globe,” said Nunes during a recent interview with Fox News‘ Sean Hannity.

May 5, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

The New False Positive Being Planned Against Venezuela

Orinoco Tribune | May 5, 2019

The defeat of the military political operation of April 30, 2019 against the government of President Maduro, adds to the long list of failures that led to Ivan Duque accusing the Venezuelan government of protecting the ELN, in a desperate attempt to meet one of the two tasks that have been assigned to him within the uribista government: to close the roads to the one of peace in Colombia and to attack Venezuela.

Once again defrauded by the Venezuelan opposition, the United States continues giving more and more prominence to the Colombian right. The call of Ivan Duque to the Venezuelan military during that day, shows a clumsy despair before the incapacity of the Venezuelan right, which gave one more element to President Maduro to accuse the US government and Colombia of being behind the failed coup d’etat. But the Bolivarian triumph in this battle does not end with the war.

The new false positive, to link the Venezuelan government with the ELN, is still under construction.

ELN, A GUERRILLA ORGANIZATION THAT IS APPROACHING ITS 55TH ANNIVERSARY

The National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were born in 1964 while Raúl Leoni occupied the presidency of Venezuela. Not even the most tendentious versions of history mention any possibility that Leoni’s government was behind its founding, nor any political group of the Venezuelan left, since all the existing ones for that moment were less strong than those that existed. They gave rise to the Colombian guerrillas during the last half of the 20th century.

Since its inception, both guerrilla groups have operated throughout the country, which obviously includes the territories of the porous border with Venezuela.

After the FARC-EP secretariat signed the peace agreements, and with it the demobilization of most of its troops, the ELN became the largest and oldest guerrilla group on the continent. The Uribista government of Duque, decided to breach and tries to modify the agreements with the FARC-EP and got up from the dialogue table with the ELN, that is, closed any near possibility of achieving a negotiated political solution to the conflict. And at the same time, it has made repression and judicialization the only government response to popular demands, while paramilitaries and the Public Force execute a new genocide against leaders and social leaders.

The reality is obvious, in Colombia there is no peace , no post-conflict and is on the verge of a humanitarian crisis. In more than five decades of confrontation, the Colombian state has not had the true political will to solve the social conflict generated by the war and its Public Force, has not managed to defeat the ELN militarily, not even with the support of paramilitary forces or the contest of the US military institutions. They have more than 16 facilities of different types in the country. On the contrary, on more than one occasion, it has been forced to negotiate. So far, the ELN has held dialogues with five presidents and seven Colombian governments.

The first dialogues had the support of Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was in his second term as president of the then Republic of Venezuela and later with the support of the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, whose interest in the peace of Colombia has been evident.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION OF THE URIBE GOVERNMENT

The Colombian government refuses to assume that the entire state is in check because of the penetration of drug trafficking into its institutions. The production of cocaine and the planting of coca have a constant increase in Colombia and, according to Donald Trump himself, had never been as high as since Ivan Duque’s presidency. But the Uribe government insists on attributing to the Venezuelan government, the status of “narco-government” that actually belongs to him, and now he blames it for his own inability to win a war that has lasted more than half a century.

The caricature of President Maduro that has been built by media corporations and the voices of the Colombian government, as a fool without popular support that only remains in the presidency with the support of the FANB, is opposed to that of the man they accuse of being behind all the struggles of the Colombian people and now, even to sustain a guerrilla organization that was born when he was only one year old and since then has remained active uninterruptedly.

What looks like typical psychological projection, is actually a new attempt to generate a false positive – as denounced by the Venezuelan chancellor – but to succeed they need to erase history.

FROM IRAN TO VENEZUELA

A few days ago, Donald Trump announced that the United States would declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization,” as indeed it happened. Since this military force is the institution of an independent republic, recognized by the United Nations, this measure has no precedents and sows a very bad precedent as it is a violation of international law and the most elementary diplomatic norms.

The ELN, for its part, has been included in the list of foreign terrorist organizations designated by the US for many years , so it is not unreasonable to assume that, in addition to the argument to justify the involvement of Colombia in the first war between countries of the region of the 21st century, another dangerous objective of this attempt to link the Venezuelan government with the Colombian guerrilla organization, could be to declare the FANB as a foreign terrorist organization, given that they have not managed to co-opt, divide or defeat it.

If the internal consensus were achieved or if the pressure from the United States forced it, it would be expected that before August 2019 the Colombian state will add to its terrible history of wars, a costly and complicated military aggression against Venezuela.

Coincidentally, a few hours after the failed coup d’etat in Venezuela, Trump decided to change his ambassador in Bogotá, Kevin Whitaker, to post Philip Goldberg, whose record can give clues to the new strategies that will be directed from Colombia against Venezuela.

Goldberg was expelled from Bolivia in 2008 for allegations of conspiracy made by President Morales, he was recently in charge of business in Havana, he was also part of the diplomatic corps in Kosovo, he is an intelligence specialist and was the Coordinator in Bogotá of the terrible Plan Colombia.

Therefore, while it is important to disprove the false opinion matrices and investigate the non-governmental organizations that sustain these matrices with pseudo-investigations -even some linked to sectors that call themselves the left, Venezuela must continue preparing to respond in other areas because the lies will keep coming out of the laboratories without ceasing and will be as diverse as the tactics require; what has not changed much in the last two centuries are the strategic objectives of the United States on the region and the world.

Source: Mision Verdad

Translated by: JRE\EF

RELATED CONTENT: Venezuelan Military Deserters Removed From Hotel in Cúcuta for Late Payments

May 5, 2019 Posted by | Deception | , , , , | Leave a comment

Orwellian Cloud Hovers Over Russia-gate

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | May 4, 2019

George Orwell would have been in stitches Wednesday watching Attorney General William Barr and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee spar on Russia-gate.  The hearing had the hallmarks of the intentionally or naively blind leading the blind with political shamelessness.

From time to time the discussion turned to the absence of a legal “predicate” to investigate President Donald Trump for colluding with Russia.  That is, of course, important; and we can expect to hear a lot more about that in coming months.

More important: what remains unacknowledged is the absence of an evidence-based major premise that should have been in place to anchor the rhetoric and accusations about Russia-gate over the past three years.  With a lack of evidence sufficient to support a major premise, any syllogism falls of its own weight.

The major premise that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee and gave WikiLeaks highly embarrassing emails cannot bear close scrutiny. Yes, former CIA Director John Brennan has told Congress he does not “do evidence.” In the same odd vein, Brennan’s former FBI counterpart James Comey chose not to “do evidence” when he failed to seize and inspect the DNC computers that a contractor-of-ill-repute working for the DNC claimed were hacked by Russia.

Call us old fashioned, but we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) still “do evidence” — and, in the case at hand, forensic investigation.  For those who “can handle the truth,” the two former NSA technical directors in VIPS can readily explain how the DNC emails were not hacked — by Russia or anyone else — but rather were copied and leaked by someone with physical access to the DNC computers.

We first reported hard forensic evidence to support that judgment in a July 2017 memorandum for the president. Substantial evidence that has accumulated since then strengthens our confidence in that and in related conclusions.  Our conclusions are not based on squishy “assessments,” but rather on empirical, forensic investigations — evidence based on fundamental principles of science and the scientific method.

Bizarre, Medieval

All “serious” members of the establishment, including Barr, his Senate interrogators, and the “mainstream media” feel required to accept as dogma the evidence-free conventional wisdom that Russia hacked into the DNC.  If you question it, you are, ipso facto, a heretic — and a “conspiracy theorist,” to boot.

Again, shades of Orwell and his famous “two plus two equals five.”  Orwell’s protagonist in “1984,” Winston Smith, imagines that the State might proclaim that “two plus two equals five” is fact.  Smith wonders whether, if everybody believes it, does that make it true?

Actually, the end goal is not to get you to parrot that two plus two equals five. The end goal is to make it so you’d never even consider that two plus two could equal anything other than five.

During the entire Barr testimony Wednesday, no one departed from the safe, conventional wisdom about Russian hacking.  We in VIPS, at least, resist the notion that this makes it true.  We shall continue to insist that two and two is four, and point out the flaws in any squishy “Intelligence Community Assessment” that concludes, even “with high confidence,” that the required answer is “five.”

Doubtful Dogma

Wednesday’s Senate hearing brought a painful flashback to a similarly widely-held, but evidence-free dogma — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. attacked that country. It gets worse: Many of the same people who promoted the spurious claims about WMD are responsible for developing and proclaiming the dogma about Russian hacking into the DNC.  The Oscar for his performance in the role of misleader goes, once again, to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, whose “credits” go back to the WMD fiasco in which he played a central role.

Before the war on Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Clapper in charge of analysis of satellite imagery, the most definitive collection system for information on WMD.  In his memoir, Clapper admits, with stomach-churning nonchalance, that “intelligence officers, including me, were so eager to help [spread the Cheney/Bush claim that Iraq had a ‘rogue WMD program’] that we found what wasn’t really there.” [Emphasis added]

John Brenna, left, and James Clapper. (LBJ Library via Flickr)

John Brennan, left, and James Clapper. (LBJ Library via Flickr)

Last November as Clapper was hawking his memoir at the Carnegie Endowment I had a chance during the Q and A to pursue him on that and on Russia-gate.  I began:

“You confess [in Clapper’s book] to having been shocked that no weapons of mass destruction were found. And then, to your credit, you admit, as you say here [quoting from the book], ‘the blame is due to intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help [the administration make war on Iraq] that we found what wasn’t really there.’”

“Now fast forward to two years ago. Your superiors were hell bent on finding ways to blame Trump’s victory on the Russians. Do you think that your efforts were guilty of the same sin here? Do you think that you found a lot of things that weren’t really there? Because that’s what our conclusion is, especially from the technical end. There was no hacking of the DNC; it was leaked, and you know that because you talked to NSA.”

Evidence

Back to the Senate hearing on Wednesday: Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), during a line of questioning about evidence of obstruction of justice, asked the attorney general if he personally reviewed the underlying evidence in the Mueller report.

“No,” said Barr, “We accepted the statements in the report as factual record. We did not go underneath it to see whether or not they were accurate. We accepted it as accurate.”

Harris: You accepted the report as evidence? You did not question or look at the underlying evidence?

Barr: We accepted the statements in the report and the characterization of the evidence as true.”

Harris: “You have made it clear that you did not look at the evidence.”

It was crystal clear on Wednesday that Barr had bigger fish to fry, as well as protective nets to deflect incoming shells. He is likely to be preoccupied for weeks answering endless questions about his handling of the Mueller report. It is altogether possible, though, that in due course he plans to look into the origins of Russia-gate and the role of Clapper, Brennan and Comey in creating and promoting the evidence-free dogma that Russia hacked into the DNC — and, more broadly, that, absent Russia’s support, Trump would not be president.

For the moment, however, we shall have to live with “The Russians Still Did It, Whether Trump Colluded or Not.” There remains an outside chance, however, that the truth will emerge, perhaps even before November 2020, and that, this time, the Democrats will be shown to have shot themselves in both feet.

For further background, please see:

VIPS Fault Mueller Probe, Criticize Refusal to Interview Assange

VIPS: Mueller’s Forensics-Free Findings

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, with special expertise on Russia, and prepared The President’s Daily Brieffor Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan.  He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

May 4, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Anti-War Voices on Both Sides Warn of Coming CIA Provocation to Kill Guaidó, Blame Maduro

By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | May 3, 2019

Prominent American anti-war figures from across the ideological spectrum are warning that the Trump administration may soon turn on Juan Guaidó — the man they recognize as Venezuela’s interim president — in order to justify military intervention in Venezuela.

These warnings followed Guaidó’s failed attempt to lead a military uprising on Tuesday, which analysts characterized as a desperate move, with Guaidó’s parallel government having failed to gain any significant traction in Venezuela since late January. With Guaidó now quickly losing legitimacy and momentum since Tuesday’s failed coup, it has become increasingly probable that his political patrons — the United States — may soon turn on him, as any harm done to him could be blamed on Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, which would allow the U.S. government to justify aggressive action against the Maduro-led government.

One of the first prominent anti-war voices to raise concern that the U.S. government, particularly the CIA, may now see Guaidó as more valuable dead than alive was Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, with the former congressman, presidential candidate and well-known libertarian. During Tuesday’s edition of the Liberty Report, Paul raised concern that a provocation could be used to push for foreign (i.e., U.S.) military intervention in Venezuela:

The big danger is a hard war breaking out. I’d still bet it won’t be too bad, with thousands of troops moving. But it could be a guerrilla war or something like that. If there is a false flag or some important official on either side gets killed, you can’t tell what might happen.”

McAdams responded, pointing out that Guaidó himself could soon become such a target for a provocation:

He [Guaidó] has been a kind of a hapless figure so far. He calls for mass protests and no one shows up. I don’t think he realizes right now that he is actually now worth more dead than alive not only to the CIA, but also to his own opposition people. A shot in the crowd or something like that to take Guaidó out. It might shock you, Dr. Paul, but the CIA is pretty good at this kind of things.”

May 4, 2019 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , | Leave a comment

After Venezuela coup failure, officials & mainstream media desperately spinning explanations

RT | May 4, 2019

Months of insistence in Washington that the people of Venezuela stood by the US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido basically went up in smoke when his ‘Operation Liberty’ fizzled. The question now is whom to blame.

Senior US officials like National Security Advisor John Bolton and special envoy for Venezuela Elliott Abrams expressed confidence in “regime change” in Caracas on Tuesday, named top Venezuelan officials ready to defect, and even spoke of signed documents to that effect.

Yet literally none of this happened, and by the early evening on Tuesday, the handful of Guaido’s armed supporters were seeking sanctuary in foreign embassies.

Then came the spin. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went on CNN and Fox News to claim that Maduro was getting ready to flee to Cuba, but “the Russians” talked him out of it. Bolton claimed Maduro was “hiding in a bunker” even as video evidence from Caracas showed him addressing supporters numbering in the thousands on May Day. The truth was inescapable, though: Guaido had failed.

“The opposition took a step backward with the military,” Rocio San Miguel, president of the Colombian NGO Control Ciudadano, told Bloomberg on Thursday. “Guaido appearing with [his mentor Leopoldo] Lopez at a single point in the city with a few dozen soldiers and no major firepower showed their weakness.”

So what happened? Several US media outlets have since sought to explain, citing anonymous sources allegedly privy to US government plots. These sources told Bloomberg they believe Maduro got wind of the coup on April 29, and Guaido rushed it ahead of schedule “or it would all collapse.”

Lopez was released from house arrest because the head of the Venezuelan intelligence agency SEBIN, General Manuel Christopher Figuera, had defected to Guaido, the anonymous and entirely unverifiable sources claimed, adding that it was Lopez resurfacing that might have spooked other senior officials – defense minister Vladimir Padrino, Supreme Court Chief Justice Maikel Moreno, and military intelligence and presidential guard head General Ivan Hernandez.

According to these sources, Figuera’s wife left Venezuela on Sunday for the safety of the US, and the general left the country as well after he was sacked on Tuesday night, though his whereabouts are unknown.

Meanwhile, AP published a long speculative piece about missed opportunities to turn senior Venezuelan officials, from Hernandez being denied a visa in 2017 for his 3-year-old son’s brain surgery, to Padrino reaching out to the US government in early 2016, after a troubled Venezuelan election.

Padrino in particular has been seen as “a potential white knight,” being a graduate of the School of the Americas. Apparently, very little US influence in the Venezuelan army had survived what the AP described as “thorough scrubbing” by Former President Hugo Chavez.

“There’s a theory that’s gaining ground, and I think there’s some credence to it, that it was all part of a big ‘rope-a-dope’ operation, whereby the Maduro officials pretended to go along with this coup to smoke out the opposition,” Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, told RT.

“That’s one possibility, the other is that Pompeo’s lying” about Maduro’s attempted flight to Cuba, McAdams said, adding that neither reflects well on the US.

Whatever the truth, there is no escaping the fact that Washington has pushing for regime change in Caracas for months with sanctions and other forms of pressure, and openly since “recognizing” Guaido in January, to absolutely no avail. All the hot air coming from Bolton, Pompeo, Abrams and other high officials pushing the regime change narrative has had far more effect in the US than in Venezuela.

May 4, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment