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Mueller Finally Gives up His Two Year Search For a Non-Existent Needle — But the Hunt Continues

Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | March 23, 2019

Quelle surprise. After more than two years looking for a non-existent needle in an ever-expanding haystack, Chief Hunter of the Needle, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has finally declared that he hasn’t been able to find it. This ought to come as no surprise, because as we know non-existent needles don’t exist. Except, of course, in the minds of hundreds of foolish Democrat politicians and their dutiful stenographers in the mainstream media, or Global Pravda as it is known on this blog.

The fascinating thing about it all is that it wasn’t hard to grasp that the needle didn’t exist. It was obvious from the start. Here’s what I wrote back in November 2017, almost 18 months before Robert Mueller finally gave up his pointless hunt:

“Imagine a Convention of Village Idiots holding a never-ending hunt for a non-existent needle in an ever-expanding haystack. Every once in a while one of them finds a twig, or an old sock, or a marble, and with a look of sheer delight on their face they look up and squawk, ‘I’ve found it’. And all the other VIs gather round to marvel at the needle, and the news is published in the press across the country that they’ve got it, and there is much rejoicing. Until that is, someone points out that what they’ve found is not a needle at all, but a twig or an old sock or a marble, and before you know it they’ve quietly put it to one side, and resumed the hunt.

The Convention, which sometimes goes by the name Russiagate, has been going on for more than a year now, and despite its participants claiming on multiple occasions to have found the needle, sadly for them they’ve still to locate it. You might think that after still not finding it after this long, they’d be discouraged enough to give up, go home, and tend to their gardens, or some other such useful endeavour. But not a bit of it. The fact that they keep finding things in the haystack that aren’t needles only convinces them that there must be a needle in there somewhere. And so with a squawk of excitement and a cry of “On with the hunt”, off they go again looking for it with more enthusiasm than ever, ready to unearth yet more non-needles.

What have they actually found? Well, there was the indictment of Paul Manafort. Surely that was a needle, wasn’t it? Well, only in the same way that a needle resembles a brick, the charges against him being utterly unrelated to Russia, but instead about dealings he had in Ukraine years before Donald Trump ever announced he was standing for election. How about the indictment of George Papadopolous by the Mueller inquiry? Well, given that the charge against him is again nothing to do with collusion with Russia, but rather about lying to the FBI, that’s not very needle-like either, is it?”

Somehow though, supposedly serious and powerful people have believed in the non-existent needle with a zeal that might be commendable if it were ever used to do some actual good. As it is, their evidence-free fanaticism has simply shown them to be on the Dark Side of the Moon, many sandwiches short of a picnic, and certainly an indictment short of collusion. The question is why? Chiefly a couple of reasons:

Firstly, although I have zero time for the present incumbent of the White House, who I consider to be a man-child possessing stratospheric levels of folly, egotism and petty vindictiveness, the one commendable thing about him was that in his campaign, he seemed to be fairly keen on not starting a war with Russia. That seems to me be to be a Good Thing! True, his plan was never any more detailed than repeating the phrase,“I think we can get along” over and over, but for anyone who isn’t keen on nuclear war, it was still preferable to the sentiments of his opponent, Mrs Warmonger. Although she didn’t openly campaign on a promise to start a war with Russia, she might just as well have done so given some of the ideas she was espousing.

But apparently some folks got spooked by what Mr Trump was saying because — well because American exceptionalism and all that. And the only explanation they could come up with for his strange sounding words about dialling down tensions with a nuclear-armed country was that he must be in cahoots with the Kremlin. Obvs! Of course, some of them knew this to be baloney, but said it anyway because they foresaw Mr Trump as a huge threat to their neo-globalist project. Others were just “Useful Idiots”, probably truly believing it and being more than happy to peddle it night after night in the TV studios of Global Pravda. I do wonder that it never seems to occur to such people that if tensions with another nuclear-armed power are not dialled down, they stand as much chance of ending up in a cloud of radioactive ash as “the Deplorables” they seem to despise.

Secondly, those who have zealously hunted in the haystack have done so because they could never reconcile themselves to the fact that their beloved candidate did not attain to what she, and they, assumed to be her birthright. Like Gollum, her precious had been stolen from her, but unlike Gollum — a solitary and friendless creature — the Creature Clinton had a multitude of supporters ready to try to move heaven and earth to get back what was apparently rightfully hers. And so rather than facing up to the fact that she lost because she is perhaps the most odious politician in modern America, they instead justified her loss by concocting the most fantastical tale about how the ring was stolen from her by conniving thieves.

However, not only was the tale not true, but its murky origins actually begin with Mrs Clinton’s attempts to deprive her opponent of the Presidency. In other words, Russiagate is really Clintongate, as I now hope to explain.

It was abundantly clear very early on that the whole collusion claim started with a dossier put together by the (former?) MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Not only this, but it was also clear that the dossier itself was not impartial intelligence, but had been commissioned by the Clinton campaign, which paid Fusion GPS for dirt on Mr Trump. Fusion GPS then farmed it out to a private British intelligence company — Orbis Business Intelligence — which is owned by Christopher Steele. As an aside, Christopher is friends with Pablo, who was friends with Sergei, both of whom lived in Salisbury — but that’s another story for another time!

But it gets even murkier. Not only was the dossier put together at the behest of the Clinton gang, but when it was handed over to US Intelligence, its contents were never even verified by the FBI. Yet that didn’t stop its salacious contents being peddled around Washington to various reporters and politicians, prior to the 2016 election. And it was this that formed the beginnings of the whole idea that Mr Trump was in cahoots with Mr Putin.

The dossier itself, which was released into the public domain in January 2017 by Buzzfeed, is full of unverified gossip. And just recently we found out more about why that was. In one of those inconvenient moments when the truth seeps out — although unfortunately the entire Global Pravda press corps seem to have been out at the time — deposition transcripts from a federal court case, in which Mr Steele and Buzzfeed are being sued by Aleksej Gubarev, who is named in the dossier, reveal that Mr Steele took at least some of the information in the dossier straight from CNN iReports. Furthermore, it was also revealed in those transcripts that Mr Steele didn’t even know that the site he was taking the info from was not in any way verified, but rather included postings by members of the public. CNN themselves called it:

“a user-generated site. That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked, or screened before they post.”

When asked in court if he understood that CNN iReports were nothing more than any random individuals’ assertions on the Internet, Steele replied:

“No, I obviously presume that if it is on a CNN site that it has some kind of CNN status. Albeit that it may be an independent person posting on the site.”

The astonishing nature of this needs to be digested slowly, but let me try to summarise it for you.

  1. The Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS for dirt on Donald Trump.
  2. Fusion GPS farmed this out to a private British Intelligence organisation, run by Christopher Steele, who used to lead the Russia desk for MI6.
  3. Mr Steele based at least some of his dossier on “intelligence” taken from a website where anyone can post information.
  4. This dossier then became the basis for the entire two years of absurd accusations against the President of the United States, that he and his campaign actively colluded with a foreign power to steal the presidency.

Seems unbelievable, doesn’t it? And yet it’s absolutely true.

There is of course another element of all this, which is the claim that the Russian State hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Whilst these were not claims that Robert Mueller was specifically investigating, they do of course play a part in the general theory of Russian meddling and collusion with the Trump campaign to rob Mrs Clinton of her birthright. Yet there is no more truth in these claims than in the collusion claims. As I noted here:

“The claims of Russian state involvement in the hacking of the DNC’s and John Podesta’s computers originated from the DNC itself, and from the company they themselves paid to investigate, making the alleged victim — the DNC — the counsel for the prosecution for its own claims. There is the fact that the firm the DNC paid to undertake the investigation —  Crowdstrike — is owned by one Dmitri Alperovitch, a Senior Fellow at the rabidly anti-Russian think tank, Atlantic Council, which makes them not exactly what you would call “impartial”. There is the fact that the FBI have never even examined the DNC’s or Mr Podesta’s computers to verify the claims they have made, but have instead relied wholly on the findings of Crowdstrike — the company paid for by the DNC. There is the fact that the FBI has never interviewed the two key witnesses in the whole affair, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange — both of whom have stated that they know the identity of the individual(s) who leaked (not hacked) the emails.”

But what about the “fact” that all 17 US intelligence agencies signed off on the January 6th document claiming that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta computers? Problem with this claim is that it’s not true (I wrote about this here at the time). Quite apart from the fact that that report contained no evidence to back up the claim of hacking (most if it bizarrely focuses on RT), it was signed off by four, not 17 agencies, with the NSA — the all-seeing eye that can track all incoming or outgoing server activity — only being willing to express “moderate confidence” in the claims being made. The disclaimer to that document in Annex B is unintentionally hilarious, stating without a trace of irony:

“Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

In other words, they don’t have the proof, which of course the NSA would have if there had actually been a hack and not a leak. Draw your own conclusions.

And so the Mueller Inquiry has now followed the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee in being unable to find evidence of collusion. There’s a reason for that. Just as you’re never going to find a non-existent needle in a haystack, no matter how hard you look and no matter how many searches you launch, you’re not going to find non-existent collusion either.

What has shown up, however, is this: A junk dossier, cobbled together by a British spy at the behest of the Clinton Gang who wanted dirt to discredit her opponent, was circulated to journalists prior to the 2016 election, even though its contents were unverified by the FBI, and it was this that then kickstarted a frenzy of folly and lies that have poisoned the atmosphere in the US for over two years, polluted the airwaves, led to impeachment calls based on falsehoods, and made the international situation far more dangerous than it has been than at anytime since 1962.

Heads ought to roll. Those involved in creating these lies (including in the FBI and Department of Justice) ought to face investigation. Prosecutions should follow. But of course none of these things will happen. Instead, the non-existent needle hunters will do one of two things: They’ll either move on, pretend it never happened and continue to be feted as experts on Global Pravda. Or they’ll double down on their claims, perhaps saying that Mueller has been compromised (maybe Putin has videos of him as well?). Perhaps they’ll even find another haystack in which to hunt their non-existent needle.

March 24, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Mueller Report: ‘US Forced EU to Follow Through on Sanctions Without Proof’

Sputnik – March 23, 2019

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has submitted his report on suspected collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to the attorney general, with the report not recommending any further indictments. Eurasia Centre senior researcher Earl Rasmussen spoke to Sputnik about the report’s implications for Trump and his opponents.

Sputnik: What do we know? What can we expect? It looks like Donald Trump won’t receive any political damage to his image, because of course the report doesn’t recommend any further indictments. What’s your stance?

Earl Rasmussen: Obviously there are certain elements, mostly in the mainstream media that’s been stoking this, and certain members on the Hill, in Congress, that were hoping for something, because we heard over and over again that the next bombshell was coming.

But you’re correct, there’s nothing explosive, and with no new indictments coming out, and really if you look at the indictments that were there, there’s nothing related at all to any type of conspiracy or collusion as far as the six people indicted who are US citizens. And the Russians that are indicted are questionable. Let’s face it, Concord Management tried to file discovery, and now [prosecutors are] trying to block information, saying it’s ‘classified’.

There’s really no evidence, and for Mr. Trump, although he will suffer some political damage, I think for the most part the objective of this whole hoax is not coming to fruition.

Sputnik: For now of course, no one really knows what’s in the report, how long it is, how much it actually deals with the president’s own actions. However, a lot of political and perhaps emotional capital was invested in this Mueller probe. Is this a bit of an anticlimax?

Earl Rasmussen: I think for many it is an anticlimax, absolutely. There’s so much invested here. Two plus years, millions of dollars, political capital on both sides, and you’ve got people who have lost their livelihoods. A lot of the people that were brought in, their names exposed, their reputations were damaged. We’ve got the six people that have been charged [for] things that happened ten years ago; some are financially ruined now; some will spend time in jail for lying to Congress or lying to the FBI over minor financial things that may have gone unnoticed without this.

You look at the other side too, and we’ve got damage to international relations, not just with Russia, where what has occurred is just outrageous, but also Europe. I mean we forced Europe to follow through on sanctions that there’s no evidence for. They’ve lost business as a result of that, so I’m sure the Europeans will be quite interested in seeing more and learning more about what’s coming out of this as well.

The country is divided. Talk about political discord – the media here has done a great job doing that. In a lot of ways we’ve done a lot of damage to ourselves chasing after something that’s not there.

Sputnik: US Attorney General William Barr is going to now summarise the report and decide on how much to share with Congress. What can we expect? 

Earl Rasmussen: Personally I think the whole report should be released to the public at some point in time. He’ll release it to Congress, I think most of it will probably be provided to Congress. There should be nothing there that they don’t already know. They’ve been doing their own investigations, have called in their own witnesses, so there really should be no surprises there. Obviously the parties will probably try to manipulate the report [against the other party] in order to potentially posture for the 2020 presidential elections.

Listen to Earl Rasmussen’s complete interview with Sputnik here:

Earl Rasmussen is the executive vice president of the Eurasia Centre, an independent, non-profit Washington-based think tank specialising in European and Asian political and economic issues.

March 23, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Greedy Boeing’s Avoidable Design and Software Time Bombs

By Ralph Nader | March 21, 2019

As internal and external pressures mount to hold Boeing responsible for its criminal negligence, the giant company is exerting its immense influence to limit both its past and future accountability. Boeing whistleblowers and outside aviation safety experts are coming forward to reveal the serial, criminal negligence of Boeing’s handling of its dangerous Boeing 737 Max airplanes, grounded in the aftermath of two deadly crashes that took 346 lives. Boeing, is used to having its way in Washington, D.C. For decades, Boeing and some of its airline allies have greased the wheels for chronic inaction related to the additional protection and comfort of airline passengers and airline workers.

Most notoriously, the airlines, after the hijacks to Cuba in the late Sixties and early Seventies, made sure that Congress and the FAA did not require hardened cockpit doors and stronger latches on all aircraft, costing a modest $3000 per plane. Then the 9/11 massacre happened, a grisly consequence of non-regulation, pushed by right wing corporatist advocacy centers.

Year after year, Flyers Rights – the airline passenger consumer group –proposed a real passengers bill of rights. Year after year the industry’s toadies in Congress said no. A slim version passed last year — requiring regulations creating minimum seat standards, regulations regarding prompt refunds for ancillary services not provided or on a flight not taken, and a variety of small improvements for consumers.

Boeing is all over Capitol Hill. They have 100 full time lobbyists in Washington, D.C. Over 300 members of Congress regularly take campaign cash from Boeing. The airlines lather the politicians with complimentary ticket upgrades, amenities, waivers of fees for reservation changes, priority boarding, and VIP escorts. Twice, we sent surveys about these special freebies to every member of Congress with not a single response. (See my letter and survey.)

That is the corrupt backdrop that at least two Congressional Committees have to overcome in holding public hearings into the causes of the Indonesian’s Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airline crash on March 10, 2019.

Will the Senate and House Committee invite the technical dissenters to testify against Boeing’s sequential corner cutting on its single sensor software that miscued and took control of the 737 Max 8 from its pilots, pulling down on the plane’s nose? Boeing’s sales-driven avoidance of producing effective manuals with upgraded pilot training was courting disaster as was outrageously leaving many of the pilots in the dark.

The Congressional Committees must issue subpoenas to critics of Boeing and the FAA in order to protect them from corporate and agency retaliation.

Moreover, the Committees must get rid of the grotesque self-regulation that allows Boeing to control the aircraft certification process for the FAA. This dangerous delegation has worsened in recent years because Trump and Republicans in Congress have cut the FAA’s budget.

Brace yourself. Here is how the Washington Post described this abandonment of regulation by FAA, endorsed by Boeing’s Congress:

“In practice, one Boeing engineer would conduct a test of a particular system on the Max 8, while another Boeing engineer would act as the FAA’s representative, signing on behalf of the U.S. government that the technology complied with federal safety regulations…”

“Hundreds of Boeing engineers would have played out this scenario thousands of times as the company sought to verify the performance of mechanical systems, hardware installation and massive amounts of computer code…”

So, citizens, watch out for bloviating Congressional Committee members castigating Boeing executives at the witness table before the television cameras and then doing nothing once the television broadcasts fade away.

Boeing’s 737 series started in 1967 and has had a good engineering safety record in this country. But Boeing was in a rush with its Boeing 737 Max 8. They had to catch up with the growing orders for a similar-sized passenger jet built by Airbus. Being in a rush meant a modification that added more seats (a key motivation), that led to larger engines that affected the aerodynamics of the plane that led to the inadequate, mostly uncommunicated software fix to the pilots. Step by step, top management pushed the engineers in ways that compromised their professional expertise and each slide set the stage for a deeper slide. Now, the press is reporting a criminal probe by the Justice Department. The Inspector General of the Department of Transportation is also investigating the FAA’s certification of 737 Max 8.

Years ago, aviation experts say, Boeing should have developed a brand new aircraft design for such intermediate distances. But Boeing dug in and compliant FAA officials dropped the ball. And President Trump has failed to fill three top slots at the FAA since January 2017.

That is why, after flight 302 crashed outside Addis Ababa, both Boeing and the FAA kept issuing statements filled with gibberish saying that the 737 Max 8 was safe, safe, safe—the malfunction-prone software time bomb to the contrary. A brand new plane, crashing twice and taking hundreds of lives, can’t be blamed on pilot error.

Caution: the grounding of the planes may receive a whitewash unless the media keeps light and heat on this corporate-government collusion.

Installing artificial intelligence replacing or overpowering human intelligence in ever more complex machines, such as modern aircraft or weapons systems or medical technology is the harbinger of what’s to come. In a 2014 BBC interview Stephen Hawking, the famed theoretical physicist, said: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” And in 2018 Elon Musk said: “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it. No hard feelings.”

At the wreckage near Bishoftu in a small pastoral farm field and in the Java Sea off Indonesia lie the remains of the early victims of arrogant, algorithm-driven corner cutting, by reckless corporate executives and their captive government regulators.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 

March 23, 2019 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Suppressing Discussion Doesn’t Solve the Problem. It is the Problem.

By Thomas L. Knapp | The Garrison Center | March 22, 2019

Everywhere one looks these days, the world seems to be moving away from debate on contentious subjects and toward demands that those who have unpopular opinions — or even just ask impertinent questions — be forcibly silenced.

“You will never hear me mention his name,”  prime minister Jacinda Ardern said of Brenton Tarrant, the sole suspect in two deadly attacks on mosques in Christchurch. “He may have sought notoriety but here in New Zealand we will give him nothing — not even his name.”

That’s fine as a personal decision, I guess, but not as a top-down decision for her fellow New Zealanders. Even as Ardern spoke,  police working for her government  were arresting at least two people for sharing the shooter’s live-streamed video of the attacks on social media.

Across the Tasman Sea, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison is calling on the governments of G20 countries to implement measures “including appropriate filtering, detecting and removing of content by actors who encourage, normalise, recruit, facilitate or commit terrorist and violent atrocities.”

Let’s be clear about what Morrison, other “world leaders,” and significant segments of activist communities and even the general public, are demanding (and to a frightful degree already implementing): Internet censorship.

This isn’t really a new development. The mosque attacks are merely the latest incident weaponized by politicians and activists in service to a long-running campaign against public discussion and debate that requires them to make arguments and persuade instead of just bark orders and compel.

The fictional “memory hole” of the IngSoc regime in George Orwell’s 1984 stood for more than half a century as an oft-cited and wisely acknowledged warning. Now that hole is opening up beneath us for real and threatening to suck us down into a new Dark Age of “thoughtcrime” and “unpersons.”

The threat is content-independent. Renaming climate change skeptics “deniers” and demanding “investigations” of them, or pressuring media to ban discussions of policy on vaccines, is just as evil as suing Alex Jones for promulgating bizarre theories about the Sandy Hook massacre.

The only appropriate response to “bad” speech — that is, speech one disagrees with — is “better” speech.

Attempting to shut down your opponents’ ability to participate in an argument isn’t itself a winning argument. Forbidding your opponents to speak to a problem doesn’t solve that problem.

In fact, those tactics are tantamount to admitting that your arguments are less persuasive and that your solutions can’t withstand scrutiny.

Freedom of thought and expression are primary, foundational rights. They make it possible for us to hash out issues and solve problems peaceably instead of by force. Any attempt to suppress them is itself a call for totalitarianism and the alternative to those liberties is social and political death.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

March 22, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Human Rights as Seen by the White House: Concessions to Israel Are Notable

By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | March 22, 2019

The State Department’s just issued annual Human Rights Report for 2018 is a disgrace, a document so heavily politicized by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his crew of hardliners that it might be regarded as a model in how to make something that is black appear to be white. Which is not to say that it is not cleverly composed, quite the contrary, but it uses its choice of words and expressions to mitigate or even dismiss some actual human rights abuses while regarding as more grave other lesser offenses to make political points. And then there is what it does not say, deliberate omissions intended to frame situations in terms favorable to America and its dwindling number of friends in the world.

Not surprisingly, the region that has received the most massaging by the authors of the report is the Middle East, where an effort has been made to depict Israel in a positive light while also denigrating the Palestinians and Iranians. The language used regarding Israel’s occupation of much of the West Bank and the Golan Heights has been particularly welcomed by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and also by the Israeli media. The word “occupation” or “occupied” to describe the status quo of those areas administered by the Israeli military has been dropped in favor of “Israeli controlled.” The difference is important as occupation has specific legal implications defined by the Geneva Conventions in terms of what the occupying power can and cannot do. To starve and dispossess the Arab inhabitants of the occupied area, as the Israelis are doing to build their settlements, is a war crime. Also, an occupation must have a terminus ante quem date whereby the occupation itself must end. It cannot be permanent.

The new language is a gift to Israel on the eve of its April 9th election and it allows incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu to claim that he is the candidate best able to obtain concessions from Washington. America’s so-called Ambassador to Israel is a former Trump bankruptcy lawyer named David Friedman who is more involved in serving up Israeli propaganda than in supporting the actual interests of the United States. He probably believes that what is good for Israelis is good for Americans.

Friedman personally supports the view that the illegal Jewish settlements are legitimately part of Israel, choosing to ignore their expansion even though it has long been U.S. policy to oppose them. He has also long sought to change the State Department’s language on the Israeli control of the West Bank and Golan Heights, being particularly concerned about the expression “occupied” which has previously appeared in U.S. government texts describing the situation in the Israel-Palestine region. Friedman now appears to have won the fight over language, to the delight of the Netanyahu government.

And the elimination of “occupied” will apparently be only the first of several gifts intended to bolster Netanyahu’s chances. Senator Lindsey Graham, who also boasts of his close ties to the Israeli Prime Minister, recently stated his intention to initiate legislative action to go one step further and compel the United States to actually recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the Syrian territory that was annexed after fighting in 1967, but which has not been recognized as part of Israel by any other country or international body.

Last Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that the Senate vote promoted by Graham would not be necessary, that he would order the State Department to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the area.  This will hugely benefit Bibi and further damage America’s standing in the Middle East and beyond. Some sources are already predicting that recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights will soon lead to U.S. government recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over much of the West Bank, both ending forever any prospect for a Palestinian state and making it clear that the United States is running a foreign policy to benefit Israel.

There is, of course, much more in the Human Rights Report. The executive summary and first section on Israel and Palestine include text that could easily have come from an Israeli government press release or been featured as an editorial in the New York Post, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal: “Human rights issues included reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, including Palestinian killings of Israeli civilians and soldiers…From March 30 to December 5, Palestinian militant groups launched more than 1,150 rockets and mortars from the Gaza Strip toward arbitrary or civilian targets in Israel. Gaza-based militants shot and killed one Israeli soldier, and a rocket launched by Gaza-based militants killed one Palestinian laborer in Ashkelon. More than 200 Israelis required treatment from these attacks, mostly for shock. Beginning on March 30, Israeli forces engaged in conflict with Palestinians at the Gaza fence, including armed terrorists, militants who launched incendiary devices into Israel, and unarmed protesters. This occurred during mass protests co-opted by terrorist organization Hamas and dubbed a ‘March of Return.’ The government stated that since March 30 it had been ‘contending with violent attempts led by Hamas to sabotage and destroy Israel’s defensive security infrastructure separating Israel from the Gaza Strip, penetrate Israel’s territory, harm Israeli security forces, overrun Israeli civilian areas, and murder Israeli civilians.’”

A separate report section on Gaza adds “On March 30, Palestinians in Gaza launched the ‘March of Return,’ a series of weekly protests along the fence between Gaza and Israel. The protests, some of which drew tens of thousands of people, and included armed terrorists, militants who launched incendiary devices into Israel, and unarmed protesters, continued throughout the year. Hamas took control of the weekly protests, and many of the protests were violent as encouraged by Hamas.”

Interestingly, the Report does not even have a dedicated section on Iran, only providing a link to a separate document: “Read the State Department’s new report detailing the magnitude of the Iranian regime’s destructive behavior at home and abroad. The report covers Iran’s support for terrorism, its missile program, illicit financial activities, threats to maritime security and cybersecurity, human rights abuses, as well as environmental exploitation.” A second link is to a speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo given before the neocon group United Against Nuclear Iran: “The Iranian regime’s track record over the past 40 years has revealed it as among the worst violators of the UN Charter and UN Security Council resolutions – perhaps, indeed, the worst violator. It is truly an outlaw regime.”

Exonerating perpetual victim Israel of all its misdeeds and blaming the Israel-Palestine problem on the Palestinians while also labeling them as “terrorists” is both delusional and propaganda, not responsible analysis. Nor is damning Iran when speaking before a partisan group and falsely calling it a “worst violator of the U.N. Charter and U.N. Security Council resolutions” exactly informative. It is actually Israel that is the worst violator of U.N. Security Council resolutions, a fact that is not mentioned in the Human Rights Report.

One might well question why to write a Human Rights Report at all, but that is something that can be blamed on Congress, which ordered the State Department to prepare it. And one should note the key omission in the document: there is no admission of causality. The United States foreign and national security policies over the past twenty years have created a “human rights” disaster mostly in Asia but also elsewhere, a virtual tsunami rolling over ruined countries that has killed millions of people while also displacing millions more. In reckoning the terrible circumstances being endured by many in so many places there is no mention of the American role. And, unfortunately, there is no section in the Human Rights Report for “United States of America.

March 22, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

White Helmets Under Black Banners

By Yuriy Zinin – New Eastern Outlook – 22.03.2019

During the recent Third Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria, in Brussels, the USA decided to allocate $5 million to the White Helmets, a decision which has once more turned the spotlight onto that organization.

It first emerged in 2013, under a banner of political neutrality: a non-partisan NPO formed of volunteers who carried out humanitarian missions, and its members were promptly branded as heroes by the media. They were represented as people who rushed to rescue their fellow citizens in the face of savage bombing raids by government forces: saving lives, providing first aid etc.

According to the White Helmets, its volunteers have “saved” some 115 thousand people in the years since the organization was founded. This figure was taken at face value by Western officials and media, and has been endlessly repeated.

In addition to their humanitarian mission the “rescuers” prepared various materials from the front lines of the conflict in Syria. They posted photographs and videos of bombed hospitals, schools and mosques on their social media accounts as evidence of the “evil” of the Damascus regime. They focused on producing content that would touch viewers in the West on a raw nerve. So they emphasized, above all, the suffering of Syrian children: the victims of shooting, bombing and other horrors of war.

All these materials were directed at a mass audience, and their creators were highly praised and awarded a number of international prizes.  In 2015, for example, the White Helmets were awarded the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize – worth approximately € 50,000. The film The White Helmets won an Oscar in 2018 for the Best Short Subject Documentary.

Nevertheless, all this tub-thumping is unable to hide certain inconvenient facts. Particularly, the fact that, ever since the organization’s brigades first appeared on the scene they have operated exclusively in areas outside the control of the Syrian government and controlled by armed opposition groups, including DAESH and the Al-Nusra Front.

These groups punished the slightest insubordination in the areas they controlled. The White Helmets’ claims that they remained politically independent when active in these areas are therefore rather unconvincing. Their members accepted the new status quo and were loyal to the militants, which naturally played into the militants’ hands.

According to experts from a number of different countries, members of the White Helmets were drawn into the conflict In March 2017 on the side of the armed opposition groups, and provided them with various kinds of support. In March 2017, Abu Jaber, one of the leaders of the Al-Nusra Front expressed his sincere thanks to the White Helmets, calling them the “unseen warriors of the revolution”. It is not for nothing that a number of Arabic media have described the organization as “White Helmets under a black flag”.

That did not prevent their sponsors from the West and the Middle East from generously financing their activities. The organization’s director admits that it has received money from government and private donors in the USA, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and a number of other European countries as well as Turkey, Qatar and other Persian Gulf states.

The largest donor has been the United States Agency for International development (USAID), which paid the White Helmets at least $23 million between 2013 and 2016.

The special services also lent a helping hand. One of the movement’s founders and inspirers is James Le Mesurier, a former British intelligence officer and soldier who has fought in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Lebanon. He is the head of the Mayday Rescue Foundation which supported the White Helmets using funds it received from donors, including $4.5 million from NGOs in the Netherlands and the same amount from donors in Germany.

The activists did their best to earn the funding and donations they were given.The organizations posted false reports on its social network accounts. It actively took part in a public relations campaign accusing the Syrian authorities and their allies of using chemical weapons.

The USA and its allies cited the materials fabricated by the White Helmets. These materials were used in meetings of the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to prepare the ground for resolutions and other measures, including military intervention, against the Syrian government.

The White Helmets played a very underhand role as agents provocateurs, by fabricating chemical weapons attacks in the town of Khan Shaykhun, in Idlib Province on 7 April 2017, and in East Douma in April 2018. There was no proof of responsibility, but that did not prevent the USA from attacking the Syrian air base of Shayrat in response to the first of these incidents, after which the USA, the UK and France launched missile attacks against a number of targets in Syria which were allegedly connected with the manufacture of chemical weapons.

As the rebels have lost territory in Syria, the areas in which the White Helmets operate has been reduced. The situation has changed dramatically, and in 2018 the organization went through a “very difficult time”, as Raed Saleh, the head of the group has acknowledged.

In June 2018 the Israeli army helped with an urgent evacuation of several hundred so-called rescuers belonging to the White Helmets from Syria, along with their families. Many of the countries that supported the organization declared that they were ready to accept these refugees and provide them with support.

The story of the White Helmets is an example of a new kind of media project: one with a strong humanitarian element, which unfolds in front of the public’s eyes. This project was launched following the failure to topple the Syrian government, as had been done in Libya. When it became clear that Bashar Assad’s presidency was not about to collapse, then his opponents initiated a long-drawn-out siege. And one of their main weapons was the White Helmets, with foreign support.

The White Helmets now resemble a terminally ill patient who is confined to bed and scarcely breathing. Now that the terrorists have been defeated in most parts of Syria, the organization has exited the stage – the only region where its members are still partially active is Idlib Province, which is not yet under government control.

But will the latest grant of funds, which the US lobbied for in the Brussels conference on Syria, be able to help save this chronic invalid? It seems unlikely. On the contrary, it will merely go to prove, once again, who the White Helmets are supported by, and whose interests they really represent.

Yury Zinin, Leading Research Fellow at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

March 22, 2019 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Iraq War Lies: My Letter to Rob Reiner on “Shock and Awe”

By Sam Husseini | March 21, 2019

Here’s a letter that was sent to Rob Reiner in April 2016. At the time, he was directing the film “Shock and Awe” which would be released the following year. 

Dear Rob Reiner —

I’ve of course enjoyed your work over the years.

I recently tweeted “Finally saw ‘The Big Short’. Good. Sure they’ll produce a film about folks who were right about Iraq wmds any decade now.”

Immediately, a couple of McClatchy reporters I know responded, tweeting that you are working on “Shock and Awe.”

At the Institute for Public Accuracy, we got a lot of critical information out scrutinizing claims regarding alleged Iraq WMDs from 2002-03 and I thought you’d be interested in learning of it.

A sample: in October, 2002, John R. MacArthur, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, noted on one of our news releases: “Recently, Bush cited an IAEA report that Iraq was ‘six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.’ The IAEA responded that not only was there no new report, ‘there’s never been a report’ asserting that Iraq was six months away from constructing a nuclear weapon.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what was knowable at the time. See other such news releases we put out from before the invasion: “White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit” and “Bush’s War Case: Fiction vs. Facts at Accuracy.org/bush” and “U.S. Credibility Problems” and “Tough Questions for Bush on Iraq Tonight.”

Something of a mythology developed after the invasion that “now we know” that Bush lied. That itself was false. It was knowable before the invasion that the Bush administration was putting forward falsehoods.

Like “The Big Short,” different people were reaching the same conclusion — the Iraq war case was based on lies — from different angles before the war. Knight-Ridder was doing their work and we were doing ours. They had internal anonymous sources, we dealt with things in the public record, but made the effort to seriously scrutinize the claims.

We also got delegations to Iraq lead by our executive director, Norman Solomon: One with the actor Sean Penn, another with former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, yet another with former Sen. James Abourezk and Rep. Nick Rahall (Iraq allowed the inspectors — which had been withdrawn during the Clinton administration — back in Iraq just after that delegation urged them to do so.)

One trip we’d planned, that would have done the most to address the WMD issue, was with former WMD inspector Scott Ritter. However, just before the trip, news leaked that he was accused of interacting online with sexual content with under aged girls. So that trip never happened.

Many critical aspects of the Iraq war lies have never seriously been dealt with. For example, lots of people who voted against authorizing war still claimed that Iraq had WMDs, effectively helping the case for war while voting against it. One was Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. I questioned her about that after the invasion. Virtually the entire upper echelon of Obama’s foreign policy team backed the Iraq invasion, the 23 senators who voted against it were effectively iced out. Here’s a news release we did in 2013 on Kerry claiming he was opposed to the Iraq war.

Some who went the last mile to expose the war lies were never meaningfully acknowledged. Katharine Gun, who worked with British intelligence, leaked a memo from the NSA ordering a surge of spying at the UN to help obtain a second UN resolution authorizing the invasion — presumably by attempting to get info to blackmail or bully other Security Council members. U.S. officials had said there would be a second UN resolution, but this leak helped block that. After the war, we organized an effort to prevent the British government from prosecuting Gun under their official secrets act. I wrote a piece looking back on this case in 2014.

Another aspect that’s still poorly understood is the role of torture in producing the case for war. It’s a liberal mantra that “torture doesn’t work” but that’s not really true. It does work — to produce false but useful (dis)information. For example, Ibn Shaykh al-Libi was tortured by the Mubarak regime into falsely “confessing” that Iraq was tied to Al-Qaeda and was helping it to obtain chemical and biological weapons. That claim ended up in Colin Powell’s UN speech before the Iraq invasion. Powell’s chief of staff Larry Wilkerson has since written about this fairly forthrightly. I questioned Powell about this in 2009, but he was still refusing to admit meaningful wrongdoing. See a piece of mine: “‘Both Sides’ Are Wrong: Torture Did Work — to Produce Lies for War.”

There’s obviously a lot more I could go into — I’d been tracking Iraq fairly closely through out the 1990s, including Clinton administration deceits around its strikes and the perpetual sanctions policy Bill Clinton tragically adopted from the first Bush administration as he came into office.

Here’s a Washington Post op-ed I wrote in 1999: “Twisted Policy on Iraq.” Unfortunately, such media were incredibly closed after 9/11 — here’s video of Bill O’Reilly cutting my microphone two days after 9/11.

Certainly, I don’t doubt that one could do a 20-hour documentary and not get at all the deceit around the Iraq invasion. There was a staggering amount of fabrication from the Bush administration and so many foibles from the antiwar movement and other quarters. But I’d be very happy to help in making your effort as meaningful and compelling as possible.

Best regards,
Sam Husseini

March 21, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Polar Bear Numbers Could Have Quadrupled

Researcher says attempts to silence her have failed

Climate Depot | March 20, 2019

Polar bear numbers could easily exceed 40,000, up from a low point of 10,000 or fewer in the 1960s.

In The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened, a book published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Dr Susan Crockford uses the latest data as well as revisiting some of the absurd values used in official estimates, and concludes that polar bears are actually thriving:

“My scientific estimates make perfect sense and they tally with what the Inuit and other Arctic residents are seeing on the ground. Almost everywhere polar bears come into contact with people, they are much more common than they used to be. It’s a wonderful conservation success story.”

Crockford also describes how, despite the good news, polar bear specialists have consistently tried to low-ball polar bear population figures.

They have also engaged in a relentless smear campaign in an attempt to silence her in order to protect the story of a polar bear catastrophe, and the funding that comes with it.

“A few unscrupulous people have been trying to destroy my reputation”, she says. “But the facts are against them, and they have failed”.

The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened — published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation

Available in paperback

or Kindle ebook

About the book

The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened explains why the catastrophic decline in polar bear numbers we were promised in 2007 failed to materialize. It’s the story of how and why the polar bear came to be considered ‘Threatened’ with extinction, and tracks its rise and fall as an icon of the global warming movement. The book also tells the story of Crockford’s role in bringing that failure to public attention and the backlash against her that ensued – and why, among all others who have attempted to do so previously, she was uniquely positioned to do so. In general, this is a cautionary tale of scientific hubris and of scientific failure, of researchers staking their careers on untested computer simulations and later obfuscating inconvenient facts.For the first time, you’ll see a frank and detailed account of attempts by scientists to conceal population growth as numbers rose from an historical low in the 1960s to the astonishing highs that surely must exist after almost 50 years of protection from overhunting. There is also a blunt account of what truly abundant populations of bears mean for the millions of people who live and work in areas of the Arctic inhabited by polar bears.

About the author 

Dr Susan Crockford is an evolutionary biologist and has been working for 35 years in archaeozoology, paleozoology and forensic zoology. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, but works full time for a private consulting company she co-owns (Pacific Identifications Inc). Susan Crockford blogs at www.polarbearscience.com

The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened is now for sale

March 20, 2019 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Water Shortage? Blame Climate Change!

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | March 19, 2019

Water shortage? Why not blame it on global warming!

Within 25 years England will not have enough water to meet demand, the head of the Environment Agency is warning.

The impact of climate change, combined with population growth, means the country is facing an “existential threat”, Sir James Bevan told the Waterwise Conference in London.

He wants to see wasting water become “as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in the face of a baby”.

“We all need to use less water and use it more efficiently,” he said.

Sir James Bevan was appointed chief executive of the Environment Agency – the public body responsible for protecting the environment and wildlife in England – in 2015 after a career as a diplomat.

He told his audience that, in around 20 to 25 years, England would reach the “jaws of death – the point at which, unless we take action to change things, we will not have enough water to supply our needs”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47620228

Only one slight snag with Sir James’ little theory, there has been no reduction in rainfall levels in England, and droughts used to be much more severe and prevalent in the past:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly

 

Even commonly made claims that summers are getting drier do not stand up to scrutiny:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly

And just for good measure, the area of the country which is most vulnerable to water stress is also not becoming drier:

 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets

And finally, summers in England are not getting hotter. The hottest summer still remains that of 1976. Indeed, last summer was the only one other than 1976 which was actually hotter than 1911!

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly

There may be many reasons for water shortages, such as increased demand and leaks, but “climate change” certainly is not one of them.

But it is much easier for Sir James Bevan to blame global warming and ask us all to take less baths, than have to provide solutions to problems he can address.

March 20, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Truth, Freedom and Peace Will Prevail in Rwanda

By Robin Philpot* | CounterPunch | March 19, 2019

I would first like to thank the International Women’s Network for Democracy and Peace honouring me with this Award that bears the name of a great patriot and fighter for freedom, peace and democracy, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. But I would also like to congratulate the Network for its extraordinary work. Like Victoire, you and your work inspire us to keep the faith in this struggle. You are contagious and I thank very much for being so.

In less than a month we will be commemorating the 25th anniversary of what was the worst terrorist attack of the 1990s, and what has become the biggest political and media scandal of the last quarter of a century. It is a scandal that gets worse every day that goes by.

You know what I’m talking about: the shooting down on April 6, 1994 of the plane carrying two African heads of State and their entourage. If that plane had not been shot down, we would not be here; Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza would never have been jailed; and very likely Rwanda could have hoped to live in peace over the past 25 years, Rwanda and its neighbours, and particularly the Congo and Burundi.

The crime committed was threefold. 1) the shooting down of the plane; 2) the cover-up and the lies about that crime; and 3) the unspeakably devastating consequences.

When they killed Presidents Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994, the assassins killed all hopes of peace and a democratic resolution of the conflict that had paralysed the country since it was invaded on October 1, 1990. Peace that had been negotiated and signed supposedly with the guidance and goodwill for big powers. Peace that could have prevented so many deaths, so much suffering, peace that could have enabled a sharing of power in Rwanda.

In law, hiding a crime is also a crime. Covering up the truth, lying about that first crime is as devastating as the crime itself, because it allows the criminals to continue with their murderous scheme. Those guilty of the crime of covering up the truth include many individuals, institutions, countries and media.

Immediately after the presidential plane was shot down, the New York Times, the so-called “journal of record,” established the line. Allow me to quote it: “the credible suspicion is that they were killed by Hutu hard-liners in Rwanda who oppose reconciliation with the Tutsi people.”

Believe it or not, 25 years on, we continue to wade through the same muddy lies about the shooting down of the plane on April 6. Yet all the necessary evidence is there to prove that it was the Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame that shot down the presidential plane. Suffice it to mention the evidence gathered by “National Team” under Michael Hourigan for the International Tribunal for Rwanda; the Bruguière investigation; documents revealed by Judy Rever; Carla Del Ponte’s declarations and removal; even the ICTR abandoned that theory shortly after it received its mandate—it simply had no evidence to bring to bear.

The evidence in fact leaves no doubt that the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, and his army shot the plane down. Their goal and that of their sponsors was, whatever the cost, to put an end to the Arusha Peace Accord, to eliminate any power sharing plan, and to establish a military powerhouse capable of dominating the entire region. Not for the well-being of the Rwandans, Burundians or Congolese, but of the well-being – or should I say wealth – of their sponsors and their agents in Rwanda. And who are those sponsors? The best indication came directly from the former Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali who told me in an interview: “The Rwandan genocide is 100 percent American responsibility,” adding that it was with the help of the United Kingdom.

The third crime is the consequences, but the time does not allow me even to summarize them properly. In short, the consequences include all the deaths in Rwanda; the exodus of millions of Rwandans, mainly towards the Democratic Republic of Congo; the killings by the current Rwandan regime in the Congo, including selective extraterritorial executions elsewhere; the regime’s unending and inhuman hunt and harassment of Rwandans who dare to doubt or challenge the regime’s version of the Rwandan tragedy. The regime in Kigali does this domestically in Rwanda but also throughout the world, and particularly in Belgium, France, Sweden, Canada and the United States (to mention only these countries), and they do it with the help of the legal systems in each of these countries. Their pretext is always the same: fighting impunity.

IMPUNTY: That is a word that has been in all the media and on everybody’s lips since the shooting down of the plane. Peace and reconciliation is impossible, they say, unless those responsible for the tragedy are punished.

To my knowledge never has a word been turned upside and emptied of its meaning like this one.

How have the political authorities in Rwanda their big power sponsors reacted to this triple crime? In short, total impunity has been granted to the real criminals and the wrong people have been criminalized.

+ They have criminalized and imprisoned in penal colonies those who after the shooting down of the presidential plane tried to pick up the pieces and restore peace so as to end the killings and anarchy that prevailed after April 6.

+ They have criminalized the women and men who, like the great leader whose name is on this award, wish to mourn all of the people killed in the wake of the shooting down of the plane.

+ They have criminalized ICTR defense investigators and witnesses

+ They have criminalized women who, like Victoire Ingabire Umuhoze or Diane Rwigara, decided courageously and in the name of democracy to run in presidential elections against the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame.

+ They are trying to criminalize and they harass the men and women who investigate and search for the truth about the shooting down of the plane and its consequences and who speak out about it. Our friend Judi Rever is a perfect example.

+ They even try to criminalize the very basic act of saying: “Just a minute, that is not what happened in Kigali (Ça ne s’est pas passé comme ça à Kigali).

Now speaking about ‘impunity.’  On the Twitter account of the International Criminal Court, the ICC, for Feb. 18, 2019, this is what you can read: “Productive meeting between ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and His Excellency Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda in the margins of Munich Security Conference.” Under the text is an all-smiles photo of the dictator Kagame shaking hands with Fatou Bensouda, the very person appointed to put an end to impunity.

But the world is changing rapidly; there are grounds for hope. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was freed. Diane Rwigara was freed. Elsewhere in Africa and in other parts of the world, the signs are positive. The times that allowed criminals like Kagame and his masters in Washington to call the shots in Africa and elsewhere are coming to an end.

There is a proverb that says: “He or she who combats the truth will be defeated.” The opposite is just as true. “He or she who defends the truth will be victorious.” Despite powerful forces, more and more people are searching for the truth, finding it and revealing it.

Armed with this truth, and with the courage, confidence and determination of people like Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, we will be capable of victory. And that victory will mean freedom, peace, and democracy for Rwanda and its neighbours.

Thank you

*Acceptance speech by Robin Philpot of the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Prize made in Brussels on March 9, 2019.

March 19, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Jason Greenblatt should abandon his one-eyed approach towards the Palestinians

By Motasem A Dalloul | MEMO | March 19, 2019

Last week, the US Special Envoy to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt, took to Twitter to attack the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas, the de facto government of the Gaza Strip — for dispersing violent protesters in Deir Al-Balah and Jabalia. The protesters — some of whom were rioters — claimed that they were demonstrating against high taxes imposed by the government which, they alleged, had led to price hikes.

“Hamas continues to exploit the Palestinians of Gaza and to rule by brute force,” claimed Greenblatt. “Hamas abuses the money belonging to the people of Gaza, using these funds for terrorism & other illicit activities to devastating effect, instead of rebuilding Gaza and helping its people.” His words could have been written by the Israeli Ministry of Propaganda.

The less than objective or neutral Greenblatt then tweeted: “Hamas violently suppresses its own people demonstrating against Hamas’ rule & failures today and NOW fires rockets at cities in Israel. OUTRAGEOUS! This is what prevents the world from helping the people of Gaza! We strongly support Israel in defence of its citizens. Always!”

In a third tweet, he wrote: “My words now: So true. So sad. So awful. So scary. Hamas, PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] etc. is this what you want for your people? You’re the cause of this misery. You choose violence. You’re ruining lives day after day after day. No one else. Time to choose something else!”

Without making any apparent effort to check the facts about the disturbances in Gaza, Greenblatt took aim indiscriminately at the Palestinian factions in the besieged territory. The Israeli-led siege and occupation did not figure in his calculations, of course. Not only did he criticise Hamas, but he also targeted Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, even though both factions are themselves critical of the movement. This suggests very strongly that the “Special Envoy” — for which read “there to advance Israel’s interests only” — was not concerned about the Palestinians or the alleged “violence” inflicted upon them by Hamas; that his sole aim was to demonise the Palestinian resistance factions, including Hamas, because they oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The demonstrations in Gaza are not actually against price hikes or high taxes, as was also claimed by Fatah spokesman Usama Al-Qawasmi in the occupied West Bank. The people on the streets are rioters ordered and paid to be there by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his intelligence chief Majed Faraj, who could find no other excuse for their action against Hamas. Israel’s support for the violent protests was obvious, with Ofir Gendelman, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson for the Arab media, involved openly on social media backing the riots. Israel’s ambassador to the UK Mark Regev, who is well-known for trying to justify the unjustifiable, was also involved.

The clearest proof that these riots were intended to destabilise Gaza in order to topple the de facto government is that Hamas has actually reduced more than 50 per cent of the taxes imposed by the PA, and prices, when compared with the West Bank, are much lower. The price of one falafel sandwich in the West Bank, for example, is around $2, while in Gaza it is just 25 cents. If you have your hair cut in the West Bank, it will cost you $15, but in Gaza, you pay only $1.50. The rioters were calling for their salaries to be restored and for the siege to be lifted; given that it is the PA which has cut the salaries of civil servants in Gaza, their anger should have been directed at Abbas and the administration in the occupied West Bank as well as the Israeli occupation, not Hamas which has been fighting to lift the siege and get their salaries back to normal levels.

As far as Greenblatt’s accusation that Hamas “exploits” the Palestinians and rules “by brute force” is concerned, as a senior US official he should not forget that the movement won an overwhelming majority on the last occasion — in 2006 — when Palestinians were allowed a “free and fair” election. The result was not accepted by Washington, Israel and the PA in Ramallah, and the siege was imposed. Why? Because Hamas sticks to the struggle for legitimate Palestinian rights and principles, whereas Abbas and Fatah, which controls the PA in Ramallah, is more easily bought.

Greenblatt’s claim that Hamas uses Palestinian money to fund terrorism and other illegal activities instead of rebuilding Gaza and helping the people is pathetic. Resistance to a military occupation is a right guaranteed by international laws and conventions. Instead of asking why Hamas does not rebuild Gaza, he should ask himself who destroyed Gaza in the first place, and who replenished its stocks of arms and ammunition to do so. If he is honest — a big if — he would tell the world that it was Israel and Washington, using US taxpayers’ money, not Hamas.

Even though reports in the Palestinian media run by opposition factions, as well as the Israeli and Arab media, claimed that Hamas used violence to suppress “its own people”, there were actually some incidents where the Palestinian police, not Hamas, dealt harshly with the rioters, very few of whom required hospital treatment. It is alleged that images from Iraq and old videos were used to depict the “beatings by Hamas” in Gaza.

Even Haaretz reported that one of the videos which went viral on social media was not related to the riots. “Viral video of Palestinian man setting himself on fire not connected to current protest, human rights activists say,” the Israeli newspaper pointed out. Not all of the videos were fake, but the depiction of the way that the rioters were treated was not as claimed on social and other media.

My advice to Mr Greenblatt, therefore, is to abandon his one-eyed approach towards the Palestinians; he should not turn a blind eye to Israeli atrocities or the injustices of the US-backed Abbas and PA. “For every Palestinian rocket, Israel commits thousands of crimes,” wrote Amira Hass, Haaretz correspondent in the occupied territories, on Sunday. She pointed an accusatory finger at the Israeli officials who demolish the houses of the Palestinians, who demolish water networks and who prevent Palestinians from having water.

The reality of the situation in Israel-Palestine requires a far more nuanced discourse than posts on Twitter can ever convey. US Special Envoy Jason Greenblatt should open both eyes if he wants to have any credibility whatsoever in his role.

March 19, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

More from New Zealand

Greencrow As the Crow Flies | March 17, 2019

Robin Westenra [Seemorerocks] who blogs from New Zealand has done an excellent job of keeping us up-to-date with the latest newz and links regarding the Christchurch False Flag over the past few days.  This is what is really working for truthers. We seem to have developed a network of fellows all over the world with fingers on the pulse of the truth who are able to report what’s going on locally–behind all the official story bullshit.

Robin introduced me to a YouTube truther from Copenhagen, Ole Dammegard, who I’d never heard of before.  This individual seems to have “cracked the code” of the False Flaggers and is even able to predict where they’ll strike next!  Listen to the video in the first link above and about half way through the very long broadcast Ole starts to talk about what he has learned after investigating dozens of False Flags all over the world over the past decade or more.  Here are some of the points he made:

1.  The False Flags are created systematically by globalist-one-world government types who want to create an international military-style police force all over the world in preparation for a globalist tyranny.

2.  They want to disarm the population [note:  the Prime Minister of New Zealand has already indicated she will bring in gun control legislation]

3.  The false flags are run like a “touring rock show” [Ole’s words] and leave clues behind in each crime scene as to where they’ll strike next.  They are almost always accompanied by DRILLS.  That is mainly how Ole can predict them.  He asks everyone to let him know if they find out that there’s going to be a DRILL in their neighbourhood.

4.  The operators of the false flags carefully gauge public reaction [i.e., amount of terror/fear generated] to the false flag and if it’s not high enough…they will strike again shortly thereafter. [NOTE: there was a second mosque attacked during the Christchurch false flag]…in order to “up” the terror level.  They videotape the DRILL and then work in the fake drill scenes and photos with the “live” terror event.  Researchers can tell the difference between the two by looking at the backgrounds in the videos.  Computer games are also used [like in the Christchurch operation].

5.  They mainly strike NATO countries and/or countries that have military agreements with NATO.  They strike them again, and again, and again.

Full post with update

March 19, 2019 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

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