Trump official to The Grayzone: CIA’s Ratcliffe acts as ‘Mossad stenographer’ on Iran

The Gray Zone | Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil

A Trump official tells The Grayzone that Israel’s Mossad is using CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM’s Gen. Michael Kurilla to influence Trump with cooked intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program. Inside the White House, dissenters have been isolated, setting the stage for a regime change war that could cost American lives.

An official in the administration of President Donald Trump has told The Grayzone that CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla have become vehicles for Israel’s Mossad and military as they seek to manipulate the US into attacking Iran. The Trump official referred to Ratcliffe as “Mossad’s stenographer.”

According to the official, Ratcliffe and Kurilla have pressured Trump to join Israel’s war more directly by regurgitating overblown briefings they received from the Israeli military and Mossad director David Barnea – but without informing the president that the intelligence was derived from a foreign third party.

During the Trump administration’s meetings with Israeli intelligence officials including Barnea, the official said the Israelis have demonstrated a single-minded focus on regime change, clamoring for authorization to assassinate Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Israeli officials have emphasized that the moment to take out Khamenei is now.

The issue of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity is of secondary concern in the Israelis’ presentations, which the official characterized as tactless, hyper-aggressive exercises in fear-mongering. At one point, the Trump official recalled, an Israeli intelligence briefer declared that Iran could transfer a nuclear weapon to Yemen’s Houthi militia in less than a week.

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Trump Team’s Peter Navarro Drops Third Major Report on Historic Election Fraud — Confirms “Trump Won”

Joe Hoft

Gateway Pundit

The Populist Press just reported that Peter Navarro from the Trump Team has released a report showing President Trump won the 2020 Election.

Volume 3 of the Navarro Report is designed to serve as a capstone to what has been a comprehensive analysis of the question: Was the 2020 presidential election stolen from Donald J. Trump? In this report, we provide the most up-to-date statistical "receipts" with respect to the potential number of illegal votes in each battleground state.

In the report it begins by discussing the first and second reports and then shares this:

The broader goal of this final installment of the Navarro Report is to provide investigators with a well-documented tally of potentially illegal votes on a state-by-state and category-by-category basis. This tally is presented in Figure One on the next page of this report. Note that each number in this figure has a corresponding endnote identifying the source of the number. Note further that we have taken a conservative approach to the count of potentially illegal ballots.

The report continues:

In considering these truths, let us never forget two things: (1) The Democrat Party and its operatives stole the 1960 Presidential Election - it happened then and it can happen again; and (2) it took decades for historians to finally acknowledge the 1960 version of the Immaculate Deception in the face of the same kind of virtue-signaling and cancel culture pressures we are witnessing today.

Despite a similar quest to silence Republican and conservative voices today, 74 million Americans who voted for President Donald J. Trump have the right to a full investigation and bipartisan search for truth. If, however, the Democrat Party, RINO elements of the Republican Party, the anti-Trump mainstream media, and the out-of-control censoring social media oligarchs do not cease and desist from their efforts to suppress the search for truth about the 2020 election, history will judge all of these people, corporations, and institutions in the harshest possible manner.

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As Not Reported in The Media: Trump Gives 50-minute Address to The Nation on Election Fraud

Comment: Regardless of what you think of Trump, there was undoubtedly massive election fraud. This speech wasn't reported on the mainstream media and this is the President of the United States for God's sake. No greater example of how corrupt and ideologically compromised the mainstream media truly is. 

If you love democracy you'll separate yourself from right and left and begin to SEE.

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Reasons Why The 2020 Presidential Election is Deeply Puzzling

Deplorables: Trump, Brexit and the Demonised Masses

Venezuela: Another Coup Attempt – and Why it Failed

How come we’re not at war with Venezuela? They have all that oil”.

-- Donald Trump

Keith Brooks
Off Guardian

was in Caracas Venezuela on April 30th, the day of the failed coup. There were eight of us, five from NYC, one Vermonter and one Canadian, along with the leader of our group, a Venezuelan with whom I had traveled to Venezuela once before, in 2012 when Hugo Chavez was still alive.

Chavez was elected to power in 1999 leading what is known as the Bolivarian Revolution. Less than three years later, a 2002 U.S. backed coup failed to overthrow him.

I witnessed back then Chavez’s wide base of support, and the reasons for it: a new constitution guaranteeing as human rights health, education, housing and social welfare, and the laws and projects designed to make those rights a reality. 

The results were impressive: one million new low-cost housing units, a dramatic drop in the poverty rate, infant mortality rate down from 19.1 per thousand in 1999 to 10 per thousand by 2012. 

Health Care was made free for all Venezuelans, reflected by an increase in life expectancy. Working hours were reduced to 6 hours a day and 36 hours per week, without loss of pay while the minimum wage became the highest minimum wage in Latin America. In December 2005, UNESCO said that Venezuela had eradicated illiteracy. The malnutrition rate fell from 21% in 1998 to less than 3% in 2012.

The national management of the oil industry in 2003 put Venezuela in control over its most valuable natural resource, and used it to fund many of the social reform programs. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves which the U.S. has coveted ever since and admittedly seeks to control as John Bolton made clear on Fox News:

It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela”

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Now that criticism is crushed in the West, Israel can revel in impunity

Jonathan Cook
Counterpunch

Recent events have shone a spotlight not only on how Israel is intensifying its abuse of Palestinians under its rule, but the utterly depraved complicity of western governments in its actions.

The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House two-and-a-half years ago has emboldened Israel as never before, leaving it free to unleash new waves of brutality in the occupied territories. Western states have not only turned a blind eye to these outrages, but are actively assisting in silencing anyone who dares to speak out.

It is rapidly creating a vicious spiral: the more Israel violates international law, the more the West represses criticism, the more Israel luxuriates in its impunity.

This shameless descent was starkly illustrated last week when hundreds of heavily armed Israeli soldiers, many of them masked, raided a neighbourhood of Sur Baher, on the edges of Jerusalem. Explosives and bulldozers destroyed dozens of homes, leaving many hundreds of Palestinians without a roof over their heads.

During the operation, extreme force was used against residents, as well as international volunteers there in the forlorn hope that their presence would deter violence. Videos showed the soldiers cheering and celebrating as they razed the neighbourhood.

House destructions have long been an ugly staple of Israel's belligerent occupation, but there were grounds for extra alarm on this occasion.

Traditionally, demolitions occur on the two-thirds of the West Bank placed by the Oslo accords temporarily under Israeli control. That is bad enough: Israel should have handed over what is called "Area C" to the Palestinian Authority 20 years ago. Instead, it has hounded Palestinians off these areas to free them up for illegal Jewish settlement.
But the Sur Baher demolitions took place in "Area A", land assigned by Oslo to the Palestinians' government-in-waiting - as a prelude to Palestinian statehood. Israel is supposed to have zero planning or security jurisdiction there.

Palestinians rightly fear that Israel has established a dangerous precedent, further reversing the Oslo Accords, which can one day be used to justify driving many thousands more Palestinians off land under PA control.

Most western governments barely raised their voices. Even the United Nations offered a mealy-mouthed expression of "sadness" at what took place. 

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Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era

Whitney Webb
Mint Press News

Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire who now sits in jail on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors, has continued to draw media scrutiny in the weeks after his arrest on July 6. Part of the reason for this continued media interest is related to Epstein’s alleged relationship to the intelligence services and new information about the true extent of the sexual blackmail operation Epstein is believed to have run for decades.
 
As MintPress reported last week, Epstein was able to run this sordid operation for so long precisely because his was only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive operation that began in the 1950s and perhaps even earlier. 

Starting first with mob-linked liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel and later with Roy Cohn, Rosenstiel’s protege and future mentor to Donald Trump, Epstein’s is just one of the many sexual blackmail operations involving children that are all tied to the same network, which includes elements of organized crime, powerful Washington politicians, lobbyists and “fixers,” and clear links to intelligence as well as the FBI. 

This report, Part II of this series titled “The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big To Fail,” will delve into Cohn’s close ties to the Reagan administration, which was also closely tied to the same organized crime network led by the infamous mob figure Meyer Lansky, which was discussed in Part I. Of particular importance is the “Iran Contra” network, a group of Reagan officials and associates who played key roles in the Iran Contra scandal. Though it has remained relatively unknown for years, many key figures in that same network, and several fronts for the CIA that were involved in funneling money to the Central American Contra paramilitaries, were also trafficking minors for their sexual exploitation and use in sexual blackmail rings.
 
Several of these rings made headlines at one point or another over the years — from the “call boy ring” run by Washington lobbyist Craig Spence, to the Franklin child-sex and murder ring run by Republican operative Larry King, to the scandal that enveloped the Catholic charity Covenant House in the late 1980s. 

Yet, as this report will show, all of these rings — and more — were connected to the same network that involved key figures linked to the Reagan White House and linked to Roy Cohn — revealing the true scope of the sordid sexual blackmail operations and sex rings that involved the trafficking of children within the U.S. and even in Central America for their exploitation by dangerous and powerful pedophiles in the United States. 

Appalling for both the villainous abuse of children itself and the chilling implications of government by blackmail, this tangled web of unsavory alliances casts a lurid light on the political history of the United States from the Prohibition Era right up to the present day and the Age of Trump, a fact made increasingly clear as more and more information comes to light in relation to the Jeffrey Epstein case.

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What is the real ‘Orwellian nightmare’ now?

"In its near universal display of contempt for the masses, the liberal intelligentsia is exhibiting a particularly ‘Orwellian’ trait: uncritical political conformism"

Mick Hume
Spiked.com 

In the 70 years since George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, the word ‘Orwellian’ has become a form of lazy political shorthand. It is used to condemn anything deemed to smack of the sort of Big Brother system of authoritarian control Orwell described in his last and greatest novel. The irony is that many of those who use it today might also have a touch of the ‘Orwellian’ about their views.

As the Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey outlines in his widely acclaimed new book, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, published to mark the 70th anniversary, the meaning of Orwell’s masterwork has often been reinterpreted over the years to suit the prevailing fears of the age.

Thus in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, the focus was on the threat of Stalinist totalitarianism. In the 1980s, concerns were more likely to be expressed about the ‘Orwellian’ potential of hi-tech surveillance systems and CCTV cameras. When the actual year 1984 came around, many of us young radicals imagined plenty that was ‘Orwellian’ about the British state’s year-long war to defeat the striking miners.

When Lynskey comes to now, however, he does the same thing and reinterprets Nineteen Eighty-Four to fit the prejudices of the present. Almost predictably, he begins his book by linking the dystopian world described by Orwell with Donald Trump’s America. He quotes Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, who claimed – in the row over the true size of the crowd at his presidential inauguration – that she was using ‘alternative facts’. This is why, Lynskey tells BBC News, people are now turning to Orwell’s novel again, ‘for what it says about truth. And flagrant lies. And the nature of exerting power by distorting reality.’

Thus a discussion of the importance of a 70-year-old classic can become yet another exercise in blaming lies – and, implicitly, the stupidity/gullibility of voters – for Trump’s victory over the liberal establishment. Many try to claim that similar propaganda lies were behind the mass vote to leave the EU – effectively blaming Big Brother tactics for the Brexit revolt.

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The World Is Dedollarizing

Peter Koenig

Global Research

What if tomorrow nobody but the United States would use the US-dollar? Every country, or society would use their own currency for internal and international trade, their own economy-based, non-fiat currency. It could be traditional currencies or new government controlled crypto-currencies, but a country’s own sovereign money. No longer the US-dollar. No longer the dollar’s foster child, the Euro. No longer international monetary transactions controlled by US banks and – by the US-dollar controlled international transfer system, SWIFT, the system that allows and facilitates US financial and economic sanctions of all kinds – confiscation of foreign funds, stopping trades between countries, blackmailing ‘unwilling’ nations into submission. What would happen? – Well, the short answer is that we would certainly be a step close to world peace, away from US (financial) hegemony, towards nation states’ sovereignty, towards a world geopolitical structure of more equality.

We are not there yet. But graffities are all over the walls signaling that we are moving quite rapidly in that direction. And Trump knows it and his handlers know it – which is why the onslaught of financial crime – sanctions – trade wars – foreign assets and reserves confiscations, or outright theft – all in the name of “Make America Great Again”, is accelerating exponentially and with impunity. What is surprising is that the Anglo-Saxon hegemons do not seem to understand that all the threats, sanctions, trade barriers, are provoking the contrary to what should contribute to American Greatness. Economic sanctions, in whatever form, are effective only as long as the world uses the US dollar for trading and as reserve currency.

Once the world gets sick and tired of the grotesque dictate of Washington and the sanction schemes for those who do no longer want to go along with the oppressive rules of the US, they will be eager to jump on another boat, or boats – abandoning the dollar and valuing their own currencies. Meaning trading with each other in their own currencies – and that outside of the US banking system which so far even controls trading in local currencies, as long as funds have to be transferred from one nation to another via SWIFT.

Many countries have also realized that the dollar is increasingly  serving to manipulate the value of their economy. The US-dollar, a fiat currency, by its sheer money mass, may bend national economies up or down, depending in which direction the country is favored by the hegemon. Let’s put the absurdity of this phenomenon in perspective.

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La-La-Land: US Media Cites Fake News Disinfo Site to Prove 'Russia' Behind 'Theory' Clinton Hitmen Killed Seth Rich

Sott.net via RT

The man who first reported on the discredited Steele dossier has a brand new conspiracy theory about Russia. The idea that DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed on the order of Hillary Clinton was invented by - guess who?

Yahoo News Chief Investigator Michael Isikoff, who is also the co-author of hit Russiagate book 'Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,' has a new example of how the nefarious Russians supposedly subverted democracy in the US. According to him, it was Russian intelligence that started a conspiracy theory about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich on July 10, 2016 during an apparent botched robbery.

The supposed Russian disinformation showed up three days after Rich's death on a website called WhatDoesItMean.com. Befitting of the site's '90s design, it is, well, a badly written thriller fiction about Rich trying to expose the corruption of the Clinton campaign to the FBI, and instead being ambushed by her hit team. It is complete with a gun battle "just blocks from the White House" - all based on a 'report' by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). 

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Whistleblower Who Warned About False Flag Attacks to Justify U.S. Invasion of Iran Found Dead, YouTube Channel Removed

State of the Nation

Whistleblower David Goldberg, a resident of New York City, has reportedly died of unknown causes.

Yesterday, the governmentslaves.news site reported that the White House insider who was quoted — David Goldberg (59 years old) — has since been found dead in his New York apartment on June 8th. His death is being investigated and no cause of death has yet been disclosed.
Goldberg also said that a false flag attack would be used to escalate the situation, which appears to be what we’ve seen take place in the Gulf of Oman with the two attack of two oil tankers. (Source: False Flags, Cooked Intelligence and the ‘War on Terror’ Con)

In April of 2019, Goldberg warned the world of a false flag attack planned by the U.S. Military and Intelligence Community working in concert with Israel’s Mossad.

What follows is the original Alt Media news report that explains the entire black operation.

Since Goldberg first issued his warning to the world community of nations, there have been two sets of obvious false flag attacks: one in the Gulf of Hormuz and a second one in the Gulf of Oman. See: Gulf of Oman False Flag Bombing Obvious Pretext for US Attack on Iran.

Each of these attacks was immediately blamed on Iran without a shred of evidence or any type of meaningful investigation.  Both the Trump administration and Israel falsely accused Iran of attacks that were in fact orchestrated by US-Israeli operatives and/or proxies. See: NSA Bolton Conspires With Israel to Trigger War with Iran Based on False Flags

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‘Iran written all over it’: Trump accuses Tehran of carrying out tanker attacks

Comment: And here we have Trump falling for the Zio-Con false flag attack that was predicted last month:  Insider Says Israel Poised to Stage False Flag Attack Against U.S. Targets to Start War with Iran

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RT

“Iran did do it," says Pres Trump of the attack on 2 fuel tankers in the Gulf of Oman. He said the evidence "got Iran written all over it," citing pictures of Iranians retrieving unexploded mine from hull of one tanker.

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) June 14, 2019

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See also:  Seven Reasons To Be Highly Skeptical Of The Gulf Of Oman Incident

Trump orders simpler path for genetically engineered food

Candice Choi
The Seattle Times

President Trump wants to make it easier for genetically engineered plants and animals to enter the food supply, and he signed an executive order Tuesday directing federal agencies to simplify the "regulatory maze" for producers.

The move comes as companies are turning to newer genetic engineering techniques that make it easier to tinker with the traits of plants and animals.

Greg Jaffe, biotechnology director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the impact of the executive order will depend on the details of how it's carried out by federal agencies. Simply deregulating could make people lose confidence in genetically engineered foods, he said.

"There needs to be an assurance of safety for those products," said Jaffe, who was among those briefed by government officials on a call before the order was announced.

The order also noted the government's policies should urge trading partners to adopt similar regulatory approaches. Even if the U.S. loosens regulations on genetically engineered foods, Jaffe noted companies could be hampered by regulations overseas.

How genetically engineered plants and animals are currently regulated in the U.S. varies depending on the exact methods used to produce them, and federal agencies have already been working to clarify policies as new technologies have emerged. But already, some aspects of the administration's approach have worried consumer advocacy groups.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed changing its regulations in a way that would mean much of the genetically modified corn and soy grown in the U.S. today would not necessarily have been subject to special oversight.

Crops produced with newer gene-editing technologies also wouldn't automatically be subject to special oversight under the proposed rule, unless they posed a risk as plant pests. Companies have said that gene-editing allows them to more precisely alter plants and animals, and that what they're doing could theoretically be achieved through conventional breeding. 

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How NeoCon Billionaire Paul Singer Is Driving the Outsourcing of US Tech Jobs to Israel

Whitney Webb
Mint Press news

WASHINGTON — With nearly 6 million Americans unemployed and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel — a trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even “America first” politicians. The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump.

To make matters worse, many of these top tech companies shifting investment and jobs to Israel at record rates continue to collect sizable U.S. government subsidies for their operations while they move critical aspects of their business abroad, continue to layoff thousands of American workers, and struggle to house their growing company branches in Israel. This is particularly troubling in light of the importance of the tech sector to the overall U.S. economy, as it accounts for 7.1 percent of total GDP and 11.6 percent of total private-sector payroll.

Furthermore, many of these companies are hiring members of controversial Israeli companies — known to have spied on Americans, American companies, and U.S. federal agencies — as well as numerous members of Israeli military intelligence as top managers and executives. 

This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one leading Republican donor — billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who also funds the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Islamophobic and hawkish think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), and also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).

Singer’s project to bolster Israel’s tech economy at the U.S.’ expense is known as Start-Up Nation Central, which he founded in response to the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law in relation to its treatment of Palestinians.

This project is directly linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in recent years has publicly mentioned that it has been his “deliberate policy” to have former members of Israel’s “military and intelligence units … merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners” in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and foreign governments to boycott Israel.

In this report, MintPress identifies dozens of former members of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit who now hold top positions at Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

Singer’s nonprofit organization has acted as the vehicle through which Netanyahu’s policy has been realized, via the group’s close connections to the Israeli PM and Singer’s long-time support for Netanyahu and the Likud Party. With deep ties to Netanyahu, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and controversial tech companies — like Amdocs — that spied on the American government, this Singer-funded organization has formed a nexus of connections between the public and private sectors of both the American and Israeli economies with the single goal of making Israel the new technology superpower, largely at the expense of the American economy and government, which currently gives $3.2 billion in aid to Israel annually.

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Bipartisan Support for Trump’s Aggressive Iran Policy Reveals the Hollowness of Russiagate

Whitney Webb
Mint Press News

In early May, MSNBC news host Rachel Maddow — known as one of the top promoters of the new Cold War and Russiagate in American media — emphatically endorsed regime change in Venezuela after she claimed that President Donald Trump’s hawkishness towards the South American country had changed, all because of a single phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. 
 
Though Maddow’s claims were arguably the most extreme in suggesting that Trump was “taking orders” from Putin on Venezuela, she wasn’t alone in making them. For instance, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks also made the claim that the Trump-Putin phone call on Venezuela was “direct evidence that he is literally taking orders from Putin.” In addition, several corporate media outlets supported this narrative by suggesting that Trump “echoed” Putin’s Venezuela stance after the phone call and directly contradicted his top staffers and even himself in doing so.

Yet now, strangely, those same corporate media voices remain silent on the Trump administration’s other regime-change project — in Iran — despite the fact that the Putin-led Russian government is set to be the biggest winner as tensions between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic boil over and threaten to send the Middle East into a fresh bout of destruction and chaos.  

As tensions between the U.S. and Iran have grown in recent months, analysts in both corporate and independent media have speculated about what country is set to benefit the most from the U.S.’ campaign of “maximum pressure” and regime change against the Islamic Republic. Of the many analyses, two countries have stood out as likely beneficiaries: Russia and China.

The cases for China and Russia’s benefit are somewhat similar given that the Trump administration’s focus on Iran results in less pressure on both Russia and China. This is despite the fact that, officially, the U.S.’ current National Defense Strategy explicitly calls for focusing attention on preparing for a “long war” against Russia and China to prevent either from superseding the U.S. as a global superpower. Yet, with the U.S. focused on regime change in Iran and Venezuela, Russia and China can avoid bearing the brunt of U.S. military adventurism, either directly or by proxy, while the U.S. wears itself thin by trying to do it all at once.

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Putin’s Choice: Risk Starting a War – or Give In to US’s Greater Israel Plan

Strategic Culture Foundation
via Blogfactory

Secretary of State Pompeo was in Sochi on 14 May for talks with his counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. And in his opening address, Lavrov observed: “I believe it’s time to start building a new, more responsible and constructive matrix of how we see each other. We are ready to do so, of course, if our US partners are interested in doing so as well … The fact that we are meeting for the second time in the past two weeks inspires certain optimism. Let’s give it a try and see what happens”. 

President Putin subsequently hosted Pompeo for a short discussion, noting: “I got the impression that the President [Trump] is in favour of restoring Russia-US ties and contacts – and of resolving issues of mutual interest. For our part, we have said many times, that we would also like to restore relations on a full scale”.

It is clear that Mr Putin’s impression of a US possible apertura arose from Trump’s call to him on 3 May, in which co-operation on assuring ‘strategic stability’ was discussed. The remarks by both Lavrov and Putin indicate both a readiness and a generosity (i.e. calling the US Administration “our US partners”) that is a mite surprising, given the extent to which Washington has been inserting its spanners into all, and everything, Moscow recently has tried to do.

Why this Trump initiative – managed by two foremost US war hawks – precisely now? Ok, the Mueller investigation is closed, but Moscow will not be naïve enough to imagine that this draws a line under the Russian malign intervention narrative. Mueller has simply gifted the claim to Congress.

In one sense, Moscow’s warmth may be a surprise, but in another, it is not. America has viewed Russia as a ‘forever’ adversary, ever since Britain and America facilitated the return of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin to the Bolshevik Revolutionaries, in order to disrupt Russia. And even as Trump was calling Putin, the Rand Corporation was releasing its paper, ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia’ which outlines specific “geo-political cost-imposing” policy options. Any shift by America from this belligerency, of course would be significant, and would warrant exploration. President Putin repeatedly has warned of the unthinkable consequences for humanity, should these two states decisively enter into conflict. This is the existential threat par excellence.

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How You Can be 100% Certain That QAnon is Bullshit

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium

President Trump has yet again advanced an evil longstanding agenda of America's depraved intelligence and defense agencies, so as usual the QAnon cult is out in force telling everyone not to worry because this is all part of the plan. Ever since WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was slammed by Trump's Justice Department with a mountain of espionage charges carrying a possible sentence of 175 years in prison, QAnon acolytes have been showing up in my social media mentions with screenshots of a new post from the mysterious 8chan anon assuring us all that Assange is actually being protected by Trump. The post reads in the typical QAnon cryptic word salad style that its adherents often annoyingly imitate when normal people try to engage them in an adult conversation:

"Under protection.
Threat is real.
Key to DNC 'source' 'hack' '187'.
Q"

I find this subject very tedious, and my regular readers aren't generally the types to fall for this sort of toxic propaganda construct, but I'm putting this information out there anyway as a public service since many people are being deluded by it.

If you're one of those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the QAnon phenomenon, in October of 2017 odd posts began appearing on the anonymous message board 4chan, which is wildly popular with trolls, incels and racists. Those posts ceased appearing on 4chan and moved to a related site, 8chan, where they continue appearing to this day. The poster purports to have insider knowledge of a secret, silent and invisible war that President Trump has been waging against the Deep State with the help of the US military and various "white hats" within the US government, and shares snippets about this war with 8chan users in extremely vague and garbled posts.

Here are three reasons you can be absolutely, 100 percent certain that it's bullshit: 

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Trump Targets UK, Australia And Ukraine Over 'Greatest Hoax In The History Of Our Country'

Zero Hedge

President Trump on Friday said that he wants Attorney General William Barr to investigate the UK, Australia and Ukraine for their roles in the 'greatest hoax in the history of our country.'

Speaking with reporters at the White House on Friday before his trip to Japan, Trump discussed his decision this week to issue a sweeping declassification order - leaving it in the hands of Barr to determine exactly what happened to Trump and his campaign before and after the 2016 US election. 

"For over a year, people have asked me to declassify. What I've done is declassified everything," said Trump, adding "He can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine." 

"It's the greatest hoax probably in the history of our country and somebody has to get to the bottom of it. We'll see. For a long period of time, they wanted me to declassify and I did."

"This is about finding out what happened," said Trump. "What happened and when did it happen, because this was an attempted takedown of the president of the United States, and we have to find out why."

"We're exposing everything. We're being a word that you like, transparent. We're being, ultimately we're being transparent. That's what it's about. Again, this should never ever happen in our country again."

After the Mueller report made clear that Trump and his campaign had in no way conspired with Russia during hte 2016 election, Democrats immediately pivoted to whether Trump obstructed the investigation. Trump and his supporters, however, immediately pivoted to the conduct of the US intelligence community, including the involvement of foreign actors and possibly their governments. 

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Trump Attacks Military Industrial Complex and Calls for Infrastructure Investments in the Middle East

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture

For the first time in over half a century, an American President has actually come out attacking the Military Industrial Complex. Of course, everyone knows of President Dwight D. Eisenhauer’s famous outgoing 1961 speech warning the world (and the incoming President Kennedy) what sort of monster had arisen at the heart of America’s defense institutions. Very little on the matter was said on the frightening topic by decades of political leaders who rose to prominence in the shadow of JFK’s corpse. Instead, the beast grew like a malignant cancer over the ensuing years as a major branch of the British-run deep state that carried out a coup with Sir Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in 1946 and the MI6-directed re-organization of American intelligence with the creation of the CIA in 1947.

After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, networks of neoconservative contaminated all branches of government in both parties bringing the USA into a frenzied military doctrine centered on regime change wars, oil-centered geopolitics and unipolarism totally uncharacteristic with the better constitutional traditions of the nation. This geopolitical doctrine nearly drove the west into a full military confrontation with Russia and China in recent years.

The Tide Begins to Turn

On May 20 speaking to Fox News, President Trump echoed Eisenhauer’s warnings. Under a coterie of Trump’s war-mongering advisors such as John Bolton, Gina Haspel, Terrence O’Shaughnessy and Mike Pompeo, America has recently been brought to the brink of war with Iran. While Trump has too often accommodated this hive of neocons, his recent statements and repeated calls for cooperation with Russia and China demonstrate a sound push back which should be taken very seriously. In that Fox interview Trump said:

“With all of everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes—you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go in to war, because war hurts economies, war kills people, most importantly—by far most importantly.”
You know, in Syria, with the caliphate, so I wipe out 100 percent of the caliphate. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have these crazy people who run around blowing up stores and blowing up things—these are seriously ill people. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, they’re wiped,’ you know, ISIS. But, I wiped out 100 percent of the caliphate. I say, ‘I want to bring our troops back home.’ The place went crazy. You have people here in Washington, they never want to leave.”
‘You know what I’ll do, I’ll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind,’ but if it was up to them, they’d bring thousands of soldiers in. Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex. They never want to leave. They always want to fight.”

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That Time John Bolton Said It’s Good to Lie About War

Caitline Johnstone
Activist Post

Journalist Whitney Webb recently tweeted a 2010 video clip I’d never seen before featuring US National Security Advisor John Bolton defending the use of deception in advancing military agendas, which highlights something we should all be paying attention to as Trump administration foreign policy becomes increasingly Boltonized. 

On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.

“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”

“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.

“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.

“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?”

“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.

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