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“Preplanned Murder”: Turkey Says 15-Member Saudi Hit Team Murdered Journalist Inside Consulate

In a shocking twist to an already mysterious and bizarre saga, Turkish investigators say they believe that prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul after he entered on routine business four days ago.

Khashoggi’s fiance, who was waiting outside at the time of his disappearance on Tuesday, said he simply never came out. Since that time there’s been an international outcry and search for the missing journalist — a Washington Post columnist and former editor of a couple major Saudi newspapers who had a reputation as an outspoken critic of Saudi Arabia’s rulers. He was initially widely reported“detained” inside the consul premises by Saudi authorities.

Saudi officials have vehemently denied having ever detained Khashoggi and have repeatedly said he freely left the embassy not long after he entered. The Saudi crown prince (MBS) himself on Friday invited Turkish authorities to enter the building to conduct an investigation, telling Bloomberg: “We are ready to welcome the Turkish government to go and search our premises,” he said of the consulate which is Saudi sovereign territory. “We will allow them to enter and search and do whatever they want to do…We have nothing to hide,” MBS added.

Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, via the AP

But Turkish police, after initiating their search of the Saudi diplomatic compound on Saturday, unexpectedly reached the following shocking conclusion, according toThe Washington Post:

Turkey has concluded that Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent journalist from Saudi Arabia, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this week by a Saudi team sent “specifically for the murder,” two people with knowledge of the probe said Saturday.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fake News is Unbelievable – When is Enough going to be Enough

A TV reporter is caught acting pretending the wind is so strong in Florence while two people in the background are casually walking by. Besides that, the wind is coming from behind him and he is acting as if he is fighting against the wind from from the opposite direction. Hurricane Florence was downgraded to Category 1 before it made landfall. Instead of reporting the truth, the media seems desperate for attention and viewership that they are exaggerating and outright reporting propaganda. The media is so intent upon handing the country back to Democrats, there is not a single piece of news that they are now turning it against Trump claiming Global Warming is the reason for Florence. We can’t even just get honest weather reports without a political slant and manipulation.

The Washington Post has used the Hurricane Florence as an excuse to turn it against Trump reporting he is “complicit” on climate change and this storm is basically all his fault. Surely if we just taxes every house $1,000 a year as in Canada for the Global Warming Tax storms like this would NEVER happen again is the implication.  The Post wrote:

YET AGAIN, a massive hurricane feeding off unusually warm ocean water has the potential to stall over heavily populated areas, menacing millions of people. Last year Hurricane Harvey battered Houston. Now, Hurricane Florence threatens to drench already waterlogged swaths of the East Coast, including the nation’s capital. If the Category 4 hurricane does, indeed, hit the Carolinas this week, it will be the strongest storm on record to land so far north.

President Trump issued several warnings on his Twitter feed Monday, counseling those in Florence’s projected path to prepare and listen to local officials. That was good advice.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion

New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion

undefinedThe New York Times continues to outdo itself in the production of fake news. There is no more reliable source of fake news than the intelligence services, which regularly provide their pet outlets (NYT and WaPo) with sensational stories that are as unverifiable as their sources are anonymous. A prize example was the August 24 report that US intelligence agencies don’t know anything about Russia’s plans to mess up our November elections because “informants close to … Putin and in the Kremlin” aren’t saying anything. Not knowing anything about something for which there is no evidence is a rare scoop.

A story like that is not designed to “inform the public” since there is no information in it. It has other purposes: to keep the “Russia is undermining our democracy” story on front pages, with the extra twist in this case of trying to make Putin distrustful of his entourage. The Russian president is supposed to wonder, who are those informants in my entourage?

But that was nothing compared to the whopper produced by the “newpaper of record” on September 5. (By the way, the “record” is stuck in the same groove: Trump bad, Putin bad – bad bad bad.) This was the sensational oped headlined “I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, signed by nobody.

The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception.

The fictional author presents itself as a right-wing conservative shocked by Trump’s “amorality” – a category that outside the Washington swamp might include betraying the trust of one’s superior.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump Minus Narrative Equals Bushbama

Trump Minus Narrative Equals Bushbama

Barack Obama is making headlines today. In a speech at the University of Illinois, Obama called out the “politics of fear” which are used by his successor and criticized an insufficient denunciation of “Nazi sympathizers” by the current administration.

“How hard can that be?” asked the former president. “Saying Nazis are bad?”

Also in the news, getting far less attention than the sparkly spectacle of Fauxgressive Jesus wagging his finger at Orange Hitler for being too nice to Nazis, is a report from the Washington Post (open it in a private browser to get around the paywall) that the Trump administration has done a complete 180 degree reversal of its prior position on Syria. And before you jump on me about believing anonymously sourced reports from an establishment outlet that is fully owned by a CIA contractor, this isn’t one of those: the sources are senior State Department officials who are named in the article.

According to the State Department’s James Jeffrey and Joel Rayburn, the Trump administration has now abandoned its previous goal of pulling out of Syria as soon as possible. The conditions for ending the US military’s illegal occupation of a sovereign nation now reportedly include “the exit of all Iranian military and proxy forces from Syria, and establishment of a stable, nonthreatening government acceptable to all Syrians and the international community,” which is another way of saying that the occupation will continue indefinitely and regime change is back on the table.


Trump agrees to an indefinite military effort and new diplomatic push in Syria, U.S. officials say https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-a-shift-trump-approves-an-indefinite-military-and-diplomatic-effort-in-syria-us-officials-say/2018/09/06/0351ab54-b20f-11e8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html?utm_term=.a1f0e9e79154  by @karendeyoung1

Trump agrees to an indefinite military effort and new diplomatic push in Syria, U.S. officials say

The shift stems from concerns about Russia and a desire to eject Iranian military and proxy forces.

washingtonpost.com


…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook’s Secret “User-Reputation Score” Exposed

In a hideous reflection of China’s already-prevalent ‘Social Credit’ systemwhich is a rating assigned to each citizen based on government data regarding their economic and social statusThe Washington Post reports that Facebook has begun to assign its users a reputation score, predicting their trustworthiness on a scale from zero to one.

Under the guise of its effort to combat ‘fake news’, WaPo notes (citing an interview with Tessa Lyons, the product manager who is in charge of fighting misinformation) that the previously unreported ratings system, which Facebook has developed over the last year, has evolved to include measuring the credibility of users to help identify malicious actors.

Users’ trustworthiness score between zero and one isn’t meant to be an absolute indicator of a person’s credibility, Lyons told the publication, nor is there is a single unified reputation score that users are assigned.

“One of the signals we use is how people interact with articles,” Lyons said in a follow-up email.

“For example, if someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact-checker, then we might weight that person’s future false news feedback more than someone who indiscriminately provides false news feedback on lots of articles, including ones that end up being rated as true.”

The score is one measurement among thousands of behavioral clues that Facebook now takes into account as it seeks to understand risk.

“I like to make the joke that, if people only reported things that were [actually] false, this job would be so easy!” said Lyons in the interview. “People often report things that they just disagree with.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The CIA Owns the US and European Media

The CIA Owns the US and European Media

William Blum shares with us his correspondence with Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum’s replies, he comes across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.

When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post’s takedown of President Richard Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China. Watching President Nixon’s peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon inherited and did not want.

The CIA knew that Nixon’s problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical “Domino Theory.” I have always wondered if the CIA concocted the “Domino Theory,” as it so well served them. Unable to get rid of the war “with honor,” Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America’s “honor” and losing his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn’t bend, but the US Congress did, and so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon’s war management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Corporate Media’s About-Face on Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis

Corporate Media’s About-Face on Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis

U.S. corporate media spent years dismissing the role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s 2014 coup but it is suddenly going through a conversion, as Daniel Lazare reports.


Last month a freelance journalist named Joshua Cohen published an article in The Washington Post about the Ukraine’s growing neo-Nazi threat.  Despite a gratuitous swipe at Russia for allegedly exaggerating the problem (which it hasn’t), the piece was fairly accurate.

Entitled “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the government to a showdown,” it said that fascists have gone on a rampage while the ruling clique in Kiev closes its eyes for the most part and prays that the problem somehow goes away on its own.

Thus, a group calling itself C14 (for the fourteen-word ultra-right motto, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) not only beat up a socialist politician and celebrated Hitler’s birthday by stabbing an antiwar activist, but bragged about it on its website.  Other ultra-nationalists, Cohen says, have stormed the Lvov and Kiev city councils and “assaulted or disrupted” art exhibits, anti-fascist demos, peace and gay-rights events, and a Victory Day parade commemorating the victory over Hitler in 1945.

Yet nothing has happened to stop this.  President Petro Poroshenko could order a crackdown, but hasn’t for reasons that should be obvious.  The U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” uprising not only drove out former president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified election, but tore the country in two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the lead.

When resistance to the U.S.-backed coup broke out in Crimea and parts of the country’s largely Russian-speaking east, the base of Yanukovych voters, civil war ensued.  But because the Ukrainian army had all but collapsed, the new, coup government had no one to rely on other than the neo-fascists who had helped propel it to power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Two Superpowers: Who Really Controls the Two Countries?

The Two Superpowers: Who Really Controls the Two Countries?

Among the ruling interests in the US, one interest even more powerful than the Israel Lobby—the Deep State of the military/security complex— there is enormous fear that an uncontrollable President Trump at the upcoming Putin/Trump summit will make an agreement that will bring to an end the demonizing of Russia that serves to protect the enormous budget and power of the military-security complex.

You can see the Deep State’s fear in the editorials that the Deep State handed to the Washington Post (June 29) and New York Times (June 29), two of the Deep State’s megaphones, but no longer believed by the vast majority of the American people.  The two editorials share the same points and phrases.  They repeat the disproven lies about Russia as if blatant, obvious lies are hard facts.

Both accuse President Trump of “kowtowing to the Kremlin.”  Kowtowing, of course, is not a Donald Trump characteristic.  But once again fact doesn’t get in the way of the propaganda spewed by the WaPo and NYT, two megaphones of Deep State lies.

The Deep State editorial handed to the WaPo reads: “THE REASONS for the tension between the United States and Russia are well-established. Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, instigated a war in eastern Ukraine, intervened to save the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, interfered in the U.S. presidential election campaign to harm Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, poisoned a former intelligence officer on British soil and continues to meddle in the elections of other democracies.”

The WaPo’s opening paragraph is a collection of all the blatant lies assembled by the Deep State for its Propaganda Ministry.  There have been many books written about the CIA’s infiltration of the US media.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why the April 14th Missiles-Invasion of Syria Was a Historic Turning-Point

Why the April 14th Missiles-Invasion of Syria Was a Historic Turning-Point

Why the April 14th Missiles-Invasion of Syria Was a Historic Turning-Point

The April 14th invasion was the apogee, the turning-point downward, for American hegemony, the end of the mono-polar world or U.S. dictatorship that ever since 24 February 1990 the U.S. Government has imposed on all of its foreign allies for them to join the U.S in imposing against Russia — the only other nuclear super-power and thereby the only effective counter-weight to America’s global dictatorship. The strategy, ever since that time, has been to pick off, one-by-one, Russia’s allies, and bring them into NATO, so as to place missiles right on and near Russia borders, and, effectively, compel Russia to surrender to the will of America’s leaders.

The embarrassing ineffectiveness of the April 14th invasion — it didn’t even get the OPCW, Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, to cancel its planned investigation of the evidence in Douma Syria regarding whether it was Assad and Putin who have been lying, or instead Trump and his foreign allies who were lying — caps what is actually the U.S. Government’s defeat in its decades-long plan for global hegemony, global dictatorship.

The Washington Post reported, on April 16th, that Trump is angry at his “aides” for their falsehoods, misrepresentations to him about what the result would be if he were to select a particular policy-option — their false advice and predictions on the basis of which he had made the decisions that he had decided, on the basis of their advice, to make, and which results did not happen as they had predicted. It reported that:

Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the expulsions [of Russian diplomats]. “There were curse words,” the official said, “a lot of curse words.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Neocons’ Real Plan for Syria Emerges from the Lack of Rubble

The Neocons’ Real Plan for Syria Emerges from the Lack of Rubble

I told you over the weekend that Trump’s presidency was over.  As a practical matter it is.  His yielding to his ‘advisors’ on every foreign policy issue makes it clear that he can’t or won’t stand up to the relentless pressure to do what his instincts tell him.

This morning’s article at the Deep State Washington Post paints a very clear picture of what the situation is.  The advisors whose loyalties are dubious run the show.  Their thinking has not evolved one whit from previous administrations.

Remember what Russian President Vladimir Putin always says, “Presidents change. Policies do not.”

Case in point they manipulated Trump into over-reacting to the Skripal poisoning by ousting 60 Russian diplomats, even though Trump clearly wanted to match Germany and France.

The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of Russians as its European allies — part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.

“We’ll match their numbers,” Trump instructed, according to a senior administration official. “We’re not taking the lead. We’re matching.”

The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials — far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.

You can almost see the evil glee on the part of the WaPo writer and Trump’s staffers who misled him into signing an order they knew he disagreed with.

And this is why Trump is not president currently.  This is not the first time he’s been backed into a bad decision by the nest of vipers in his administration.

And he won’t be until he removes the worst people from his cabinet.  Unfortunately, the trend on that front is definitely not our friend.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Racing Towards a Low-Yield Armageddon

Racing Towards a Low-Yield Armageddon

Photo by James Stencilowsky | CC BY 2.0

On February 3 the Washington Post observed that “the United States can deliver a [nuclear] strike anywhere in the world in 30 minutes with astounding accuracy” and questioned the need for “a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons,” quoting the commander of the strategic force, General John Hyten, as saying “I’m very comfortable today with the flexibility of our response options.”  But it appears that no matter the quantity and world-destroying capability of the US nuclear arsenal, there is always room for more — and more devastating — weapons of mass annihilation.

General James Mattis, the US Secretary of Defence, discussed Washington’s recently composed Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) with the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives on February 6.  He was attempting to justify the upgrading and huge expansion of the US nuclear arsenal which the Congressional Budget Office has estimated  will cost some 1.2 trillion dollars over the next 30 years, and described in detail some of the projects that have been planned. The entire exercise does not fit well with the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in which it is agreed by almost every country in the world that the nuclear arms race should be halted and that all possible measures should be taken towards achievement of nuclear disarmament.

But Washington’s notions of global nuclear disarmament are curiously ambivalent, as there is unconditional support for Israel’s highly developed nuclear weapons’ capabilities, yet obsessive criticism of North Korea’s program to arm itself with nuclear missiles.  Nobody can defend or approve of North Korea’s wild nuclear fandangos which are beggaring an already downtrodden and poverty-stricken population on the verge of starvation, but Pyongyang’s rationale is that its policy “is the best way to respond with powerful nuclear deterrent to the US imperialists who are violent toward the weak and subservient to the strong.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s Official! The Risk Of Nuclear Annihilation Is At An All-Time High

Don’t Panic. It’s only the end of the world…

On Thursday, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists raised the likelihood of an apocalyptic nuclear catastrophe to its highest level in the clock’s 70+-year history, the Washington Post reported.

The clock was moved from two-and-a-half minutes to midnight to two minutes to midnight – like the classic Iron Maiden song…

During a press conference announcing the escalation, the group of scientists comprising the Bulletin offered a “grim assessment” of the factors that preceded the increase: These factors included North Korea’s nuclear program, tensions between India and Pakistan  and Russia’s and China’s incorporation of nuclear drills into its military exercise.

President Donald Trump’s mercurial tweets were also cited in the report.

The group which includes 15 Nobel Laureates said the risk of nuclear annihilation in the present day has surpassed previous highs witnessed during World War II, and during the most intense periods of the Cold War.

The organization – which has 15 Nobel Laureates on its board – now believes “the world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II,” Bulletin officials Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote in an op-ed published Thursday by The Washington Post.

“In fact, the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels.”

The last time the clock advanced so far, the United States had just tested its first thermonuclear device, and the Soviet Union had tested a hydrogen bomb.

Today, Bronson said, “to call the world’s nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger and its immediacy.”

With President Trump’s now infamous “Fire and Fury” remark reverberating in their ears, the committee said it also “considered at length” the unpredictability of US nuclear policy, which one member said “an unpredictability that is embodied in statements and tweets, by the US.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Became the US Military-Industrial Complex’s Chief Propagandist

How Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Became the US Military-Industrial Complex’s Chief Propagandist

How Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Became the US Military-Industrial Complex’s Chief Propagandist

It used to be that the New York Times and the Washington Post competed against each other to be the chief propagandist for the hundred or so top firms who sell to the US federal government — the 100 top “federal contractors,” almost all of which are Pentagon contractors — mainly these are weapons-manufacturing firms, such as the biggest, Lockheed Martin. The federal government is a large part of these firms’ essential market; so, invasions by the US against other countries require lots of their goods and services; and, also, America’s foreign allies additionally buy these weapons; and, right now, US President Trump is demanding that they increase their ‘defense’ budgets to buy more of them. Wars produce corporate profits if (like in the United States) the military suppliers are private corporations instead of government-owned (socialized). Selling wars is crucial to such firms’ bottom lines. And, since there is no law against owning a ‘defense’ contractor and owning or donating to newsmedia (especially newsmedia such as the Times and Post, which publish lots of international news and so can encourage lots of invasions), a sensible business strategy for investors in ‘defense’ stocks is to also own or donate to some international-‘news’ media, in order to generate additional business for the arms-maker or other ‘defense’ firm. Not only does this business-plan relate to such newspapers as the NYT and WP, but they’ll be the focus here, because they are the most important of America’s international-news media.

Serious periodicals, such as The New RepublicThe Atlantic, and Mother Jones, have also been steady propagandists for ‘defense’ companies, but magazines don’t reverberate through the rest of the mass-media to the extent that the serious national (NYC & DC) newspapers do.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine

Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine

S. Mangal’s social media profile and author photo.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Is this what online journalism looks like in the era of Russiagate fever? A fake writer (read Alice Donovan) catfishes CounterPunch and a dozen other online websites. A handful of her articles are published over a two-year period. The FBI is tracking her and believes this writer, whoever is behind the moniker, has some ties to Russia. What kind of ties and how deep do they go? We aren’t sure. No evidence is presented, perhaps because there isn’t much, or perhaps because the NSA and the FBI are also spying on actual journalists and editors right along with the alleged imposters. The Washington Post calls for a quote on the FBI’s allegation and runs an article a month later on Kremlin operatives “burning across the internet”.

More panic ensues.

But only one troll was named in the Washington Post piece, Alice Donovan — our suspected interloper. Prior to the Post’s article, we found out Donovan likely was not who she claimed to be and was a plagiarist to boot. We apologized for our screw-up and issued a lengthy investigation into the whole Donovan ordeal and the challenges of vetting writers in the fast-paced world of cyber-journalism. The story ends there, or does it?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Washington Post Also Misreported CNN’s False WikiLeaks Story

The Washington Post Also Misreported CNN’s False WikiLeaks Story

I left on holiday just as the news was breaking about multiple mainstream media outlets independently reporting a spectacularly false story about WikiLeaks, Donald Trump and Russiagate, and I was pleased to return to find they’d received their much-deserved beatdown for it. One fact that doesn’t seem to have received any attention however is the fact that the Washington Post, who broke the story about CNN’s journalistic scandal, itself grossly distorted the truth to slander WikiLeaks in its own coverage.

In what The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald called “one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time,” a breaking story which was sent into immediate virality by CNN and was then independently (and falsely) corroborated by MSNBC and CBS, reporting that someone had emailed Donald Trump Jr with a decryption key allowing him to preview an impending leak drop from WikiLeaks. By the time all the facts were in it turned out that the real story, in its entirety, was that some random guy had emailed Trump notifying him of a Guccifer 2.0 release (not even WikiLeaks) that had already been published.


678.4 MB of new “DNC documents” from @Guccifer_2https://uploadfiles.io/7dc58 
use 7zip to unpack
password: GuCCif3r_2.0

Uploadfiles.io @UploadFilesFree

NGP VAN.7z @UploadFilesFree

uploadfiles.io


Obviously Donald Trump Jr receiving an innocuous email about a publication already in existence is not a news story by any stretch of the imagination. It was exactly as newsworthy as it would have been if you, dear reader, had once sent an email to Don Jr informing him of Hillary Clinton’s leaked remarksabout Palestinian election rigging.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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