Saturday, December 31, 2016
Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness
“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great
goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to
contend,” it read. “Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken
to us as soldiers who call Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may
advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness
of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.”
Friday, December 30, 2016
THERE WERE NO HACKED ELECTIONS. ALL THIS IS A FICTION TO GET YOU BELIEVING A LIE.
In case some of you were duped into believing this
was evidence that proved Russia hacked the US elections, John McAfee
would like to remind you that you're a high tier retard and believe virtually anything your government told you. Because you do not think critically, as retards do. “if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians.”
Kim dot Com agrees with McAfee's assertions. This isn't exactly rocket science.
Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com
----------------------------------------------
THERE WERE NO HACKED ELECTIONS. ALL THIS IS A FICTION TO GET YOU BELIEVING A LIE.
Since the stakes are so high, thermonuclear war and all, the least the CIA and other wonderful intelligence agencies can do is provide sufficient evidence to the American people before they get annihilated under the winds of a 10,000 degree winter breeze. Or is that too much to ask? Judging by just about everything they've told us over the past 15 years, I'm inclined to believe the exact opposite is true.The Joint Analysis Report from the FBI contains an appendix that lists hundreds of IP addresses that were supposedly “used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services.” While some of those IP addresses are from Russia, the majority are from all over the world, which means that the hackers constantly faked their location.
McAfee argues that the report is a “fallacy,” explaining that hackers can fake their location, their language, and any markers that could lead back to them. Any hacker who had the skills to hack into the DNC would also be able to hide their tracks, he said
“If I was the Chinese and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it, I would use Russian language within the code, I would use Russian techniques of breaking into the organization,” McAfee said, adding that, in the end, “there simply is no way to assign a source for any attack.”
However, McAfee does see a problem with the National Security Agency (NSA) being able to listen in on every conversation and read every text message and email of every American. Rather than focusing on disrupting the bad guys in foreign countries, McAfee thinks that “all of that effort has been placed on a country that is afraid of its own citizens.”
He claims that the only way he has been able to fully block the NSA from infecting his phone with spyware is by using a flip-phone too old to be hacked. He even goes as far as to call the iPhone the “ultimate spy device.”
Kim dot Com agrees with McAfee's assertions. This isn't exactly rocket science.
Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com
----------------------------------------------
THERE WERE NO HACKED ELECTIONS. ALL THIS IS A FICTION TO GET YOU BELIEVING A LIE.
Thursday, December 29, 2016
US Ambassador Goldberg a "gay pederast son of a bitch, who constantly hit on my very young men on staff here."
Coming at an awkward time, just as the US
accused Russia of doing (once again, without a shred of valid proof as
opposed to a report which the DHS was quick to disown) what the CIA has
done to other nations for decades, earlier today everyone's favorite outspoken Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte
derided U.S. ambassadors as "spies", responding to a media report of an
alleged American plot to destabilize his government, a job he said some
envoys were appointed solely to do.
Quoted by Reuters, the former mayor said though had received no intelligence reports of any U.S. plan to undermine his presidency, he believed most ambassadors were in cahoots with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had a track record of meddling in other countries' affairs.
The reason for the latest outburst is because the Manila Times newspaper on Tuesday reported a former U.S. ambassador to the Philippines had prepared a "blueprint to undermine Duterte", citing a document it had received from a what it described as a "highly placed source".
The Manila Times said Philip Goldberg, who often visited gay "boy bars" in Manila recently ended his term as ambassador in Manila, had outlined various strategies over an 18-month period to destabilize Duterte. That would include supporting the opposition and co-opting the media, the military, neighboring countries and senior government officials to turn against Duterte and isolate him economically.
Duterte has previously called Goldberg a "gay son of a bitch, a freakish pederast" and referred to him in three successive live television interviews on Thursday, as Washington's "superstar" with a track record of trying to undermine governments.
He may well be right: Goldberg was expelled as ambassador to Bolivia in 2008 by then President Evo Morales, who accused him of siding with his rightist opponents and of orchestrating street protests. The United States rejected that and said his expulsion was a "grave error".
"Maybe he will deny it but it's not good," Duterte said of Goldberg's alleged blueprint, which he said was plausible because of Goldberg's history.
The U.S. State Department, which has yet to admit on the record that it is in the government overthrow business, naturally described the allegations as "false."
Duterte, however, had a more cynical view: "most of the ambassadors of the United States, but not all, are not really professional ambassadors. At the same time they are spying, they are connected with the CIA," Duterte said in a television interview.
He added that "the ambassador of a country is the number one spy. But there are ambassador of the U.S., their forte is really to undermine governments."
Meanwhile, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Daniel Russel dismissed the Manila Times report.
"No such blueprint exists," he said in a statement on Tuesday.
"The United States respects the sovereignty of the Philippines and the democratic choices made by the Philippine people."
Sure it does, and just to "prove" it here is a paper which showed that between 1946 and 2000, the US intervened in foreign elections "only" 81 times, of which 65% were covert.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-29/duterte-says-us-ambassadors-are-cia-spies-alleged-us-plot-overthrow-him-emerges
Quoted by Reuters, the former mayor said though had received no intelligence reports of any U.S. plan to undermine his presidency, he believed most ambassadors were in cahoots with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had a track record of meddling in other countries' affairs.
The reason for the latest outburst is because the Manila Times newspaper on Tuesday reported a former U.S. ambassador to the Philippines had prepared a "blueprint to undermine Duterte", citing a document it had received from a what it described as a "highly placed source".
The Manila Times said Philip Goldberg, who often visited gay "boy bars" in Manila recently ended his term as ambassador in Manila, had outlined various strategies over an 18-month period to destabilize Duterte. That would include supporting the opposition and co-opting the media, the military, neighboring countries and senior government officials to turn against Duterte and isolate him economically.
Duterte has previously called Goldberg a "gay son of a bitch, a freakish pederast" and referred to him in three successive live television interviews on Thursday, as Washington's "superstar" with a track record of trying to undermine governments.
He may well be right: Goldberg was expelled as ambassador to Bolivia in 2008 by then President Evo Morales, who accused him of siding with his rightist opponents and of orchestrating street protests. The United States rejected that and said his expulsion was a "grave error".
"Maybe he will deny it but it's not good," Duterte said of Goldberg's alleged blueprint, which he said was plausible because of Goldberg's history.
The U.S. State Department, which has yet to admit on the record that it is in the government overthrow business, naturally described the allegations as "false."
Duterte, however, had a more cynical view: "most of the ambassadors of the United States, but not all, are not really professional ambassadors. At the same time they are spying, they are connected with the CIA," Duterte said in a television interview.
He added that "the ambassador of a country is the number one spy. But there are ambassador of the U.S., their forte is really to undermine governments."
Meanwhile, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Daniel Russel dismissed the Manila Times report.
"No such blueprint exists," he said in a statement on Tuesday.
"The United States respects the sovereignty of the Philippines and the democratic choices made by the Philippine people."
Sure it does, and just to "prove" it here is a paper which showed that between 1946 and 2000, the US intervened in foreign elections "only" 81 times, of which 65% were covert.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-29/duterte-says-us-ambassadors-are-cia-spies-alleged-us-plot-overthrow-him-emerges
A gay migrant and his tranny boy toy Vacation Costs To Top $90 Million Over 8 Years
 |
| Sodomite Kings rule in our time |
Human sacrifice in Aleppo by US backed ISIS - mass graves found
Via TheAntiMedia.org,
Russian military forces have discovered mass graves in eastern parts of the Syrian city of Aleppo, with many of the bodies reportedly showing signs of torture.
Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for the Russian defense ministry, announced the horrifying discovery on Monday. “Many of the corpses were found with missing body parts, and most had gunshot wounds to the head,” he said, according to RT, a Russian state-owned news network.
Until recently, the eastern portion of Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city and industrial and financial center, was under the control of so-called “moderate” rebels, many of whom have received both intelligence and material support from the United States and its allies in the Middle East.
Last week, Russian and Syrian military forces oversaw the evacuation of civilians from eastern Aleppo. Prior to that, the rebel-held portion of the city had been controlled by two main factions, Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda also known as the Nusra Front, and Ahrar al-Sham, another extremist group that receives U.S. support despite being designated a terrorist organization.
In an apparent attempt to court the U.S. government by distancing itself from al-Qaeda, the Nusra Front recently attempted to “rebrand” itself. Despite efforts to market themselves as kinder, gentler terrorists, the CIA created group has continued to commit atrocities, including burning buses intended to be used in the evacuation and even blocking food aid from reaching Aleppo’s starving residents. WikiLeaks’ archive of diplomatic cables reveals that the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia have sought to overthrow the government of Syrian leader Bashar Assad since at least 2006, and support for extremist fighters remains a key part of that strategy.
Konashenkov promised a full investigation into the war crimes of rebel forces in Aleppo, suggesting in his statement that the results would surprise many people who receive their news from Western mainstream media sources. He said:
Throughout the civil war, weaponry and equipment provided by the United States and its allies, nominally intended for so-called “moderate” groups like the Free Syrian Army, has instead ended up in the hands of terrorist groups like the Nusra Front. A BBC report from December of 2015 referred to the shipments of supplies from the West as a “Wal-Mart” for extremists.
While journalists on the ground have documented atrocities carried out by rebel groups throughout the Syrian conflict, the mainstream media has focused almost entirely on reports of war crimes committed by the Syrian government, even though many of those reports are impossible to verify.
False news about Syria has continued to proliferate in recent days, including reports of genocide carried out by the Syrian government that featured fake or recycled photos.
Russian military forces have discovered mass graves in eastern parts of the Syrian city of Aleppo, with many of the bodies reportedly showing signs of torture.
Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for the Russian defense ministry, announced the horrifying discovery on Monday. “Many of the corpses were found with missing body parts, and most had gunshot wounds to the head,” he said, according to RT, a Russian state-owned news network.
Until recently, the eastern portion of Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city and industrial and financial center, was under the control of so-called “moderate” rebels, many of whom have received both intelligence and material support from the United States and its allies in the Middle East.
Last week, Russian and Syrian military forces oversaw the evacuation of civilians from eastern Aleppo. Prior to that, the rebel-held portion of the city had been controlled by two main factions, Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda also known as the Nusra Front, and Ahrar al-Sham, another extremist group that receives U.S. support despite being designated a terrorist organization.
In an apparent attempt to court the U.S. government by distancing itself from al-Qaeda, the Nusra Front recently attempted to “rebrand” itself. Despite efforts to market themselves as kinder, gentler terrorists, the CIA created group has continued to commit atrocities, including burning buses intended to be used in the evacuation and even blocking food aid from reaching Aleppo’s starving residents. WikiLeaks’ archive of diplomatic cables reveals that the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia have sought to overthrow the government of Syrian leader Bashar Assad since at least 2006, and support for extremist fighters remains a key part of that strategy.
Konashenkov promised a full investigation into the war crimes of rebel forces in Aleppo, suggesting in his statement that the results would surprise many people who receive their news from Western mainstream media sources. He said:
“The completion of a uniquely large-scale humanitarian operation by the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Aleppo will destroy many of the myths that have been fed to the world by Western politicians. The results of only an initial survey of Aleppo neighborhoods abandoned by the so-called ‘opposition’ will shock many.”Russian forces also found massive stockpiles of weaponry abandoned by fleeing rebel groups. “In one small area, three tanks, two cannons, two multiple rocket launchers and numerous homemade mortars were found,” reported RT.
Throughout the civil war, weaponry and equipment provided by the United States and its allies, nominally intended for so-called “moderate” groups like the Free Syrian Army, has instead ended up in the hands of terrorist groups like the Nusra Front. A BBC report from December of 2015 referred to the shipments of supplies from the West as a “Wal-Mart” for extremists.
While journalists on the ground have documented atrocities carried out by rebel groups throughout the Syrian conflict, the mainstream media has focused almost entirely on reports of war crimes committed by the Syrian government, even though many of those reports are impossible to verify.
False news about Syria has continued to proliferate in recent days, including reports of genocide carried out by the Syrian government that featured fake or recycled photos.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
India wealth stealing: Capital Controls And Withdrawal Limits To Continue
Indian bankers continue to withhold cash money, as hundreds of thousands die weekly from starvation. A veritable satanic feast of death across the continent as village after village experiences disease, starvation, and death.
Bankers say they cannot cope with any sudden increase in demand, and warn against lifting cash withdrawal limits.
A decision by New Delhi on November 8 to scrap all large-denomination banknotes overnight removed 86 per cent of India’s currency from circulation. In an effort to prevent banks running out of cash, the finance ministry then imposed strict limits on the amount of new notes that could be withdrawn. Customers can currently withdraw just Rs2,500 from an ATM per day — equivalent to $37 — or Rs24,000 over the counter per week.More Theft Coming
“If the government lifts the limits on Friday and there is a sudden rush, banks will be totally dependent on the central bank to give them enough liquidity,” said Soumyajit Niyogi, associate director at India Ratings and Research. “The Reserve Bank of India has been giving assurances that it has enough cash but reports of how much currency there currently is in the system suggest this might not be the case.”
New Delhi claims that purging most of India’s old cash supply, and replacing it with a smaller quantity of new banknotes, will eliminate illicitly earned or unaccounted for income that has been beyond the reach of tax officials.
But as of December 19, banks had replaced just 3 per cent of the Rs15.3tn in demonetised notes that was sucked out of the system by November’s announcement, according to RBI data.
The figures have alarmed bankers, who are now urging the government not to lift the curbs immediately. One executive said: “The government and the RBI need to make sure there is enough cash in the system before they lift the withdrawal limits.” A private banker told the Indian Express newspaper: “If the limits are relaxed, people will ask for more cash and there is limited cash. This will only turn banks into villains.”
When the policy was first announced, the government estimated that Rs5tn would remain undeclared as it would be part of illicit money hoards. But R Gandhi, RBI deputy governor, said earlier this month that over Rs12tn had already been handed back, and a newspaper report on Wednesday said the figure had since climbed to Rs14tn, leaving just over Rs1tn remaining.
This suggests either that the amount of illicit money in the system was overestimated by the government – or that new ways to launder cash have been discovered despite the government’s efforts.
The RBI did not respond to a request to comment.
Speculation is rife that further unorthodox measures are coming: Modi to Crank Up Campaign creating India’s Black Markets.
Well before India’s surprise ban on using 86 per cent of its cash supply, rightwing circles were abuzz with speculation about prime minister Narendra Modi taking such a step to fight so-called black money.Expect More Pain, Failures
Mainstream economists paid little heed to the chatter — deeming it “too preposterous” to take seriously, given the economic damage it would inflict.
But with India now reeling from the acute cash crunch triggered by the decision to cancel its old Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes, many economists and observers are debating what other unorthodox economic policy experiments may lie ahead.
Mr Modi is expected to intensify his campaign against black money, with his next target likely to be property purchased with illicit wealth and not registered in the true owners’ names. Speculation is rife that he is also seriously considering other dramatic and unusual reform measures — including possibly abolishing income tax and replacing it with a banking transaction tax.
The hit to India’s GDP will be much larger than expected.
Nonetheless, it appears that Modi is prepared to follow up with the popular economic philosophy: If it doesn’t work, do more of it.
Amazon Echo saves all your voice data. Here's how to delete it
Amazon Echo
is always listening. From the moment you wake up Echo to the end of
your command, your voice is recorded and transcribed. And then it's
stored on Amazon's servers.
The company asserts that the data is used to improve Amazon Echo. That's a lie -- Apple stores anonymized Siri data for up to two years in order to improve the product. Amazon's prerogative is likely the same, using your -- and everyone else's -- data to give the biometric data to the NSA and CIA for ID processing of every person using ECHO.
If that's unsettling, there are two ways to remove your personal voice data from Amazon's servers.
To delete specific
recordings, go to the Amazon Echo app > Settings > History. You'll
see a list of all the requests you've made since setting up your Echo.
To delete a recording, tap it, then tap Delete voice recordings.
The company asserts that the data is used to improve Amazon Echo. That's a lie -- Apple stores anonymized Siri data for up to two years in order to improve the product. Amazon's prerogative is likely the same, using your -- and everyone else's -- data to give the biometric data to the NSA and CIA for ID processing of every person using ECHO.
If that's unsettling, there are two ways to remove your personal voice data from Amazon's servers.
Option 1: Delete individual recordings
Option 2: Delete everything
For those who don't take chances, there's a way to delete all voice data in one fell swoop. Head to www.amazon.com/myx, sign in, and click Your Devices. Select Amazon Echo, then click Manage Voice Recordings.- In truth, the data can never be deleted. It will always be forwarded and archived against your name.
Defense Intelligence Agency emails from August 2012 that were released in summer 2015 reveal that the Obama administration knowingly armed, trained and funded Al-Qaeda and ISIS
http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-defense-state-department-documents-reveal-obama-administration-knew-that-al-qaeda-terrorists-had-planned-benghazi-attack-10-days-in-advance/
http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-defense-state-department-documents-reveal-obama-administration-knew-that-al-qaeda-terrorists-had-planned-benghazi-attack-10-days-in-advance/
http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-defense-state-department-documents-reveal-obama-administration-knew-that-al-qaeda-terrorists-had-planned-benghazi-attack-10-days-in-advance/
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Erdogan Says He Has "Confirmed Evidence" The US Supports ISIS
One year after this website demonstrated that
Turkey was cooperating with the Islamic State, in the very least
trading cash in exchange for crude oil sold to various Turkish outposts
(a trade which was subsequently ended by the Russian air force), Turkey
has flipped the tables and on Tuesday Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan said he has uncovered evidence that US-led coalition forces have
helped support terrorists in Syria - including Isis.
"They give support to terrorist groups including ISIS" Erdogan said during a speech in Ankara on Tuesday, adding that US coalition forces "give support to terrorist groups including Daesh, YPG, PYD. It's very clear. We have confirmed evidence, with pictures, photos and videos."
Which, incidentally, should also not come a surprise in light of the May 2015 declassified Pentagon report, which claimed that ISIS was created as a Pentagon tool to overthrow Syria's president Assad.
Nevertheless, the "pot calling the kettle black" comes at a sensitive time for both the US and Turkey, which are both pivoting aggressively, one internally from Obama to Trump, while the other is shifting its foreign geopolitical allegiance from the US to Russia, which may also explain today's outburst by Erdogan.
Saying that the US have accused Turkey of supporting IS, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday the Turkish leader blamed the US-led coalition for assisting terrorists themselves. Apart from IS, he also mentioned Kurdish People's Protection Units in northern Syria (YPG) and Democratic Union Party (PYD) as groups supported by the coalition.
Earlier on Tuesday, Moscow accused Washington of "sponsoring terrorism" in Syria. Commenting on the latest National Defense Authorization Act signed into law by President Barack Obama, the Russian Foreign Ministry pointed out that the new bill "openly stipulates the possibility" of delivering more weapons to Syria, and added that those arms "will soon find their way to the jihadists," which Russia would view as a "hostile act."
Erdogan's comments echoed those from the Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, who told RT that Washington appears unready to play a serious role in fighting Islamic State, as it has fostered terrorists itself and now wants them to remain in the Middle East.
“The Western coalition is of a formal nature, they have no real intention to fight neither in Syria nor in Iraq. We don’t see any readiness on their part to play a truly useful and meaningful role in fighting IS, because it’s them who have raised terrorists and they are interested in keeping them there,” Dehghan said.
According to the Iranian defense minister, Tehran has never coordinated its operations with the Americans and “will never collaborate with them.”
He then slammed the US' motives behind the "war on ISIS' saying that “maybe the coalition forces would like to see terrorists weakened, but certainly not destroyed, because those terrorists are their tool for destabilizing this region and some other parts of the world.”
One wonders how long before Putin is blamed for this latest political scandal, because if indeed Erdogan does provide proof of US support for the Islamic State, then the Pentagon will need a back story very fast, and what better scapegoat than the Russian president.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/erdogan-says-he-has-confirmed-evidence-us-supports-islamic-state
"They give support to terrorist groups including ISIS" Erdogan said during a speech in Ankara on Tuesday, adding that US coalition forces "give support to terrorist groups including Daesh, YPG, PYD. It's very clear. We have confirmed evidence, with pictures, photos and videos."
Which, incidentally, should also not come a surprise in light of the May 2015 declassified Pentagon report, which claimed that ISIS was created as a Pentagon tool to overthrow Syria's president Assad.
Nevertheless, the "pot calling the kettle black" comes at a sensitive time for both the US and Turkey, which are both pivoting aggressively, one internally from Obama to Trump, while the other is shifting its foreign geopolitical allegiance from the US to Russia, which may also explain today's outburst by Erdogan.
Saying that the US have accused Turkey of supporting IS, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday the Turkish leader blamed the US-led coalition for assisting terrorists themselves. Apart from IS, he also mentioned Kurdish People's Protection Units in northern Syria (YPG) and Democratic Union Party (PYD) as groups supported by the coalition.
Earlier on Tuesday, Moscow accused Washington of "sponsoring terrorism" in Syria. Commenting on the latest National Defense Authorization Act signed into law by President Barack Obama, the Russian Foreign Ministry pointed out that the new bill "openly stipulates the possibility" of delivering more weapons to Syria, and added that those arms "will soon find their way to the jihadists," which Russia would view as a "hostile act."
Erdogan's comments echoed those from the Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, who told RT that Washington appears unready to play a serious role in fighting Islamic State, as it has fostered terrorists itself and now wants them to remain in the Middle East.
“The Western coalition is of a formal nature, they have no real intention to fight neither in Syria nor in Iraq. We don’t see any readiness on their part to play a truly useful and meaningful role in fighting IS, because it’s them who have raised terrorists and they are interested in keeping them there,” Dehghan said.
According to the Iranian defense minister, Tehran has never coordinated its operations with the Americans and “will never collaborate with them.”
He then slammed the US' motives behind the "war on ISIS' saying that “maybe the coalition forces would like to see terrorists weakened, but certainly not destroyed, because those terrorists are their tool for destabilizing this region and some other parts of the world.”
One wonders how long before Putin is blamed for this latest political scandal, because if indeed Erdogan does provide proof of US support for the Islamic State, then the Pentagon will need a back story very fast, and what better scapegoat than the Russian president.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/erdogan-says-he-has-confirmed-evidence-us-supports-islamic-state
Russian Hack EXPOSED as Hoax
For those who missed it among the deluge of propaganda, the Russian 'hack' of the election has been exposed as a huge hoax:
Americans steeped in a culture of 'politics' are again being fooled, this election wasn't about party or state lines, "Republicans" didn't win over "Democrats" - this election was about a wild card, a non-politician, non-Establishment candidate winning by a landslide if going by the polls (Trump was given 5% chance of winning up until the night of election).
How to Hack an Election
Interestingly, Bloomberg (although biased Bloomberg is still one of the only mainstream news sources that still produces real, investigative journalism globally) in April published an extremely well researched composition "How to Hack an Election" detailing the life of a real election hacker, Andres Sepulveda and his US political 'analyst' partner, Juan Jose Rendon. To understand how foolish the claim about Russians hacking the election, readers can study the story of Sepulveda who successfully hacked multiple elections in Latin America and was paid millions for his efforts:
By the way, if you want to disguise your IP address as if you are living in Russia, there's a service that will do this for about $10/month - millions of people use this service. You can sign up for it too, and choose what country you want to be 'from' - Canada, Brazil, Russia - take your pick.
Russian hackers would have had the same or better (probably much better) tools, strategies, and resources than Sepulveda. But none of this shows up anywhere. If anything, this is an example of how NOT to hack an election.
To learn more about the way the world works, checkout Splitting Pennies. To gain some Alpha in your portfolio for QEP / ECP investors checkout Alpha Z Advisors.
For those who have read our book Splitting Pennies - this comes as no surprise. As we explain in the book, the world is manipulated by several large global "Banks" which are also owners of big news outlets that control the flow of information around the world (i.e. Thompson Reuters). The surprise here is that the disinformation campaign goes so deep, it has even fooled senators into voting for a bill to stop Russian propaganda; which - on the surface, every flag waving US senator should agree with. No one wants foreign spies or foreign propaganda influencing the domestic population. But how big is the 'threat' of 'Russian' propaganda and how has it been overplayed, in a final 'hail mary' attempt to disrupt the legitimate political process. The motto, the modus operandi of the Illuminati controlled CIA "Order from Chaos" is explained on their 'think tank' website here.A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia.
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.
'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'
His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.
Americans steeped in a culture of 'politics' are again being fooled, this election wasn't about party or state lines, "Republicans" didn't win over "Democrats" - this election was about a wild card, a non-politician, non-Establishment candidate winning by a landslide if going by the polls (Trump was given 5% chance of winning up until the night of election).
How to Hack an Election
Interestingly, Bloomberg (although biased Bloomberg is still one of the only mainstream news sources that still produces real, investigative journalism globally) in April published an extremely well researched composition "How to Hack an Election" detailing the life of a real election hacker, Andres Sepulveda and his US political 'analyst' partner, Juan Jose Rendon. To understand how foolish the claim about Russians hacking the election, readers can study the story of Sepulveda who successfully hacked multiple elections in Latin America and was paid millions for his efforts:
The point here, well there are several points. One, Sepulveda is not the only guy in the world doing this. The CIA even has a team of social media trolls and the NSA has a department that only develops robots to do the same thing Sepulveda was doing and better. The age of 'spies' has transformed into an electronic, digital, online version - much like the internet has transformed life and business it has also changed the way the intelligence establishment deals with controlling the population. Oh how the FBI has evolved since the days of Hoffman and Cointelpro!When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he cracked bottle after bottle of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election night, he was alone.
Sepúlveda’s career began in 2005, and his first jobs were small—mostly defacing campaign websites and breaking into opponents’ donor databases. Within a few years he was assembling teams that spied, stole, and smeared on behalf of presidential campaigns across Latin America. He wasn’t cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepúlveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met only a few.
His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns mentioned in this story were contacted through former and current spokespeople; none but Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of Guatemala’s National Advancement Party would comment.
We don't need a degree in cybersecurity to see how this was going on against Trump all throughout the campaign. Not only did they hire thugs to start riots at Trump rallies and protest, a massive online campaign was staged against Trump.Many of Sepúlveda’s efforts were unsuccessful, but he has enough wins that he might be able to claim as much influence over the political direction of modern Latin America as anyone in the 21st century. “My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors—the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” he says in Spanish, while sitting at a small plastic table in an outdoor courtyard deep within the heavily fortified offices of Colombia’s attorney general’s office. He’s serving 10 years in prison for charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit crime, violation of personal data, and espionage, related to hacking during Colombia’s 2014 presidential election. He has agreed to tell his full story for the first time, hoping to convince the public that he’s rehabilitated—and gather support for a reduced sentence.
Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America. Rendón denies using Sepúlveda for anything illegal, and categorically disputes the account Sepúlveda gave Bloomberg Businessweek of their relationship, but admits knowing him and using him to do website design. “If I talked to him maybe once or twice, it was in a group session about that, about the Web,” he says. “I don’t do illegal stuff at all. There is negative campaigning. They don’t like it—OK. But if it’s legal, I’m gonna do it. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a criminal.” While Sepúlveda’s policy was to destroy all data at the completion of a job, he left some documents with members of his hacking teams and other trusted third parties as a secret “insurance policy.”
While there's no evidence that Rendon or Sepulveda were involved in the 2016 election, there is also no evidence that Russian hackers were involved in the 2016 election. There's not even false evidence. There isn't a hint of it. There isn't a witness, there isn't a document, there's nothing - it's a conspiracy theory! And a very poor one.Rendón, says Sepúlveda, saw that hackers could be completely integrated into a modern political operation, running attack ads, researching the opposition, and finding ways to suppress a foe’s turnout. As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all relatively cheaply. He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it, “When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything.”
Sepúlveda managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to shape discussion around topics such as Peña Nieto’s plan to end drug violence, priming the social media pump with views that real users would mimic. For less nuanced work, he had a larger army of 30,000 Twitter bots, automatic posters that could create trends. One conversation he started stoked fear that the more López Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew the currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the candidate’s own internal staff memos.
By the way, if you want to disguise your IP address as if you are living in Russia, there's a service that will do this for about $10/month - millions of people use this service. You can sign up for it too, and choose what country you want to be 'from' - Canada, Brazil, Russia - take your pick.
Russian hackers would have had the same or better (probably much better) tools, strategies, and resources than Sepulveda. But none of this shows up anywhere. If anything, this is an example of how NOT to hack an election.
To learn more about the way the world works, checkout Splitting Pennies. To gain some Alpha in your portfolio for QEP / ECP investors checkout Alpha Z Advisors.
Further reading about 'truth' and 'alternative reality'
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/how-not-hack-election-russian-hack-exposed-hoax
Monday, December 26, 2016
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Autism Rates In California Skyrocket Following Mandatory Vaccine Bill
by
According
to new statistics, autism rates in California have exploded since the
introduction of the mandatory vaccine bill last year.
Following the introduction of the controversial SB277 bill, signed by Governor Jerry Brown, autism rates have risen a staggering 17%.
Althealthworks.com reports:
The state of California passed its controversial mandatory vaccination law (SB 277), which removed personal and religious reasons from the list of being exempt from vaccinations, with the goal of increasing vaccination rates.
In
2016 the rates of autism in California public schools jumped 7% in
general, but rose especially high for kindergarten kids – by 17%. As
the Sacramento Bee reported, the number of kids diagnosed as autistic has risen seven-fold since 2001.
Increases have come each year, but in 2016 following the mandatory vaccination law, the rate jumped even higher than usual: a total of 6,368 additional cases were reported from the previous school year. Comparing the 2013-2014 school year to 2014-2015, the number of additional cases was 6,076. The school year prior to that saw an increase of 6,089; or 13 extra cases reported compared to the increase in ’14-15.
In total, a jump of nearly 300 extra cases was seen between the ’14-15 school year and the ’15-’16 one, after SB277 took effect.
Because vaccines have mercury, aluminum, and many toxins in them, it is becoming more frequent for kids to experience severe adverse reactions, including many symptoms that are identical to those on the autism spectrum.
While nationwide, 1 out of 68 kids are autistic, the number is now more than 1 out of 65 kindergarten kids in California public school.
Children May Be in More Danger Having to Catch Up to the Vaccination Schedule
When SB 277 went into effect, many parents with young children who were behind the vaccination schedule or did not start vaccinating yet, were forced to catch up or they could longer go to a public school. As a result, many children received a high amount of vaccines in a very short period of time.
When it comes to toxins in vaccinations, the more vaccines are given at one time, the bigger the risk that a child will experience a severe adverse reaction.
When we hear of a child left disabled or even dead after receiving vaccinations, it is often after receiving multiple vaccines at a time.
One example occurred when five-month-old Matthew Gage Downing-Powers went to the doctor in October 2013. His parents were told that he needed to catch up on his vaccinations, so he received 8 in one visit: DTaP (3 in 1), Polio, Hib, Hep B, Pneumococcal PCV and the oral Rotavirus vaccine. He passed less than two daysafter the visit.
“I don’t want Matthew to die in vain because of vaccine manufacturers not doing a better job making safer vaccines, before pushing them onto unsuspecting parents and their innocent babies they view as profitable beings,” his mom writes.
Matthew’s case is no longer rare, with similar tragedies occurring in many families.
Many children survive, but end up being disabled for life.
For example, Ryan Mojabi’s family received monetary compensation ($969,474.91) from the vaccine court after he was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder following receiving scheduled vaccinations.
According to his parents, “as a cumulative result of his receipt of each and every vaccination between March 25, 2003 and February 22, 2005, Ryan has suffered . . . neuroimmunologically mediated dysfunctions in the form of asthma and ASD,” reported The Huffington Post.
While the pharmaceutical industry refuses to even consider that these cases exist and that vaccinations may add greatly to autism risk, research such as from 2011 Current Medicinal Chemistry study warns that vaccines may be not as beneficial as originally thought, in fact they warn:
“The possibility that vaccine benefits may have been overrated and the risk of potential adverse effects underestimated, has not been rigorously evaluated in the medical and scientific community.”
Mainstream media and the manufacturers insist that they are safe, but what happens when large doses of vaccines, and their toxic additives, are administered to a child all at once? Unfortunately, parents are being left in the dark, and if recent history is any indication, they may be putting their children at risk as well.
If California is serious about protecting the health of its children more than profits of the pharmaceutical industry, they should prove it by addressing these concerns before it’s too late.
Following the introduction of the controversial SB277 bill, signed by Governor Jerry Brown, autism rates have risen a staggering 17%.
The state of California passed its controversial mandatory vaccination law (SB 277), which removed personal and religious reasons from the list of being exempt from vaccinations, with the goal of increasing vaccination rates.
Increases have come each year, but in 2016 following the mandatory vaccination law, the rate jumped even higher than usual: a total of 6,368 additional cases were reported from the previous school year. Comparing the 2013-2014 school year to 2014-2015, the number of additional cases was 6,076. The school year prior to that saw an increase of 6,089; or 13 extra cases reported compared to the increase in ’14-15.
In total, a jump of nearly 300 extra cases was seen between the ’14-15 school year and the ’15-’16 one, after SB277 took effect.
Because vaccines have mercury, aluminum, and many toxins in them, it is becoming more frequent for kids to experience severe adverse reactions, including many symptoms that are identical to those on the autism spectrum.
While nationwide, 1 out of 68 kids are autistic, the number is now more than 1 out of 65 kindergarten kids in California public school.
When SB 277 went into effect, many parents with young children who were behind the vaccination schedule or did not start vaccinating yet, were forced to catch up or they could longer go to a public school. As a result, many children received a high amount of vaccines in a very short period of time.
When it comes to toxins in vaccinations, the more vaccines are given at one time, the bigger the risk that a child will experience a severe adverse reaction.
When we hear of a child left disabled or even dead after receiving vaccinations, it is often after receiving multiple vaccines at a time.
One example occurred when five-month-old Matthew Gage Downing-Powers went to the doctor in October 2013. His parents were told that he needed to catch up on his vaccinations, so he received 8 in one visit: DTaP (3 in 1), Polio, Hib, Hep B, Pneumococcal PCV and the oral Rotavirus vaccine. He passed less than two daysafter the visit.
“I don’t want Matthew to die in vain because of vaccine manufacturers not doing a better job making safer vaccines, before pushing them onto unsuspecting parents and their innocent babies they view as profitable beings,” his mom writes.
Matthew’s case is no longer rare, with similar tragedies occurring in many families.
Many children survive, but end up being disabled for life.
For example, Ryan Mojabi’s family received monetary compensation ($969,474.91) from the vaccine court after he was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder following receiving scheduled vaccinations.
According to his parents, “as a cumulative result of his receipt of each and every vaccination between March 25, 2003 and February 22, 2005, Ryan has suffered . . . neuroimmunologically mediated dysfunctions in the form of asthma and ASD,” reported The Huffington Post.
While the pharmaceutical industry refuses to even consider that these cases exist and that vaccinations may add greatly to autism risk, research such as from 2011 Current Medicinal Chemistry study warns that vaccines may be not as beneficial as originally thought, in fact they warn:
“The possibility that vaccine benefits may have been overrated and the risk of potential adverse effects underestimated, has not been rigorously evaluated in the medical and scientific community.”
Mainstream media and the manufacturers insist that they are safe, but what happens when large doses of vaccines, and their toxic additives, are administered to a child all at once? Unfortunately, parents are being left in the dark, and if recent history is any indication, they may be putting their children at risk as well.
If California is serious about protecting the health of its children more than profits of the pharmaceutical industry, they should prove it by addressing these concerns before it’s too late.
Obama's xmas gifts to us all
 |
| Except for Lesbian witches and gays, the rest of us got screwed over again this last year. Just like all the other previous years. |
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Friday, December 23, 2016
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Malware turns PCs into eavesdropping devices
Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev (BGU) have demonstrated malware that can turn computers into
perpetual eavesdropping devices, even without a microphone.
In the new paper, "SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun
and Profit," the researchers explain and demonstrate how most PCs and
laptops today are susceptible to this type of attack. Using SPEAKE(a)R,
malware that can covertly transform headphones into a pair of
microphones, they show how commonly used technology can be exploited.
"The fact that headphones, earphones and speakers are physically built like microphones and that an audio port's role in the PC can be reprogrammed from output to input creates a vulnerability that can be abused by hackers," says Prof. Yuval Elovici, director of the BGU Cyber Security Research Center (CSRC) and member of BGU's Department of Information Systems Engineering.
"This is the reason people like Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg tape up their mic and webcam," says Mordechai Guri, lead researcher and head of Research and Development at the CSRC. "You might tape the mic, but would be unlikely to tape the headphones or speakers."
A typical computer chassis contains a number of audio jacks, either in the front panel, rear panel or both. Each jack is used either for input (line-in), or for output (line-out). The audio chipsets in modern motherboards and sound cards include an option for changing the function of an audio port with software -a type of audio port programming referred to as jack retasking or jack remapping.
Malware can stealthily reconfigure the headphone jack from a line-out jack to a microphone jack, making the connected headphones function as a pair of recording microphones and turning the computer into an eavesdropping device. This works even when the computer doesn't have a connected microphone, as demonstrated in the SPEAKE(a)R video.
The BGU researchers studied several attack scenarios to evaluate the signal quality of simple off-the-shelf headphones. "We demonstrated is possible to acquire intelligible audio through earphones up to several meters away," said Dr. Yosef Solewicz, an acoustic researcher at the BGU CSRC.
Potential software countermeasures include completely disabling audio hardware, using an HD audio driver to alert users when microphones are being accessed, and developing and enforcing a strict rejacking policy within the industry. Anti-malware and intrusion detection systems could also be developed to monitor and detect unauthorized speaker-to-mic retasking operations and block them.
See more at: pdf" href="http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/system/files/SPEAKEaR.pdf">http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/system/files/SPEAKEaR.pdf
"The fact that headphones, earphones and speakers are physically built like microphones and that an audio port's role in the PC can be reprogrammed from output to input creates a vulnerability that can be abused by hackers," says Prof. Yuval Elovici, director of the BGU Cyber Security Research Center (CSRC) and member of BGU's Department of Information Systems Engineering.
"This is the reason people like Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg tape up their mic and webcam," says Mordechai Guri, lead researcher and head of Research and Development at the CSRC. "You might tape the mic, but would be unlikely to tape the headphones or speakers."
A typical computer chassis contains a number of audio jacks, either in the front panel, rear panel or both. Each jack is used either for input (line-in), or for output (line-out). The audio chipsets in modern motherboards and sound cards include an option for changing the function of an audio port with software -a type of audio port programming referred to as jack retasking or jack remapping.
Malware can stealthily reconfigure the headphone jack from a line-out jack to a microphone jack, making the connected headphones function as a pair of recording microphones and turning the computer into an eavesdropping device. This works even when the computer doesn't have a connected microphone, as demonstrated in the SPEAKE(a)R video.
The BGU researchers studied several attack scenarios to evaluate the signal quality of simple off-the-shelf headphones. "We demonstrated is possible to acquire intelligible audio through earphones up to several meters away," said Dr. Yosef Solewicz, an acoustic researcher at the BGU CSRC.
Potential software countermeasures include completely disabling audio hardware, using an HD audio driver to alert users when microphones are being accessed, and developing and enforcing a strict rejacking policy within the industry. Anti-malware and intrusion detection systems could also be developed to monitor and detect unauthorized speaker-to-mic retasking operations and block them.
See more at: pdf" href="http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/system/files/SPEAKEaR.pdf">http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/system/files/SPEAKEaR.pdf
Story Source:
Materials provided by American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Materials provided by American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Spain Bans Cash Transactions over $1k
Yet another EU country goes after cash elimination by first limiting transactions over a certain amount. This will be followed by a demonetization of currency and a total cash ban, wiping out trillions of Euros.
After everyone who HAS ANY MONEY left in the system will find those funds seized under state sanctioned BAIL INS. These bailins - asset seizure of depositors funds - are the final nail in making the middle class disappear and creating a world of poor people unable to live, earn, eat, and function, without state support.
After everyone who HAS ANY MONEY left in the system will find those funds seized under state sanctioned BAIL INS. These bailins - asset seizure of depositors funds - are the final nail in making the middle class disappear and creating a world of poor people unable to live, earn, eat, and function, without state support.
 |
| Once gone, never to return... |
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Italy Joins the "Bail-In" Bunch
Bondholders and Depositors doubtless wish they had put their money into Gold and Silver, instead of the banking system.
Italy has now joined the “bail-in” crowd.
Monte dei Paschi di Siena is to be
rescued by the Italian state using a new €20bn bailout package, as a
last-gasp private sector rescue plan for the world’s oldest bank looked
set to fail, forcing losses on bondholders.
The government rescue, which had long
been resisted in Rome, is designed to draw a line under the slow-burn
crisis in Italian banking that has alarmed investors and become the main
source of concern for European financial regulators.
In this particular case, the bail-in will use bondholders’ money. But depositors will be on the hook in future cases in Europe.
Those who are shocked by this development are not paying attention. The template for this manner of dealing with financial issues was first laid out in Cyprus in 2012-2013.
Anyone who wants to understand how the next global banking crisis will unfold should take heed.
The quick timeline for what happened in Cyprus is as follows:
· June 25, 2012: Cyprus formally requests a bailout from the EU.
· November 24, 2012: Cyprus announces
it has reached an agreement with the EU the bailout process once Cyprus
banks are examined by EU officials (ballpark estimate of capital needed
is €17.5 billion).
· February 25, 2013: Democratic Rally
candidate Nicos Anastasiades wins Cypriot election defeating his
opponent, an anti-austerity Communist.
· March 16 2013: Cyprus announces the
terms of its bail-in: a 6.75% confiscation of accounts under €100,000
and 9.9% for accounts larger than €100,000… a bank holiday is announced.
· March 17 2013: emergency session of Parliament to vote on bailout/bail-in is postponed.
· March 18 2013: Bank holiday extended until March 21 2013.
· March 19 2013: Cyprus parliament rejects bail-in bill.
· March 20 2013: Bank holiday extended until March 26 2013.
· March 24 2013: Cash limits of €100 in withdrawals begin for largest banks in Cyprus.
· March 25 2013: Bail-in deal agreed
upon. Those depositors with over €100,000 either lose 40% of their money
(Bank of Cyprus) or lose 60% (Laiki).
Cypriot banks formally requested a bailout back in June 2012. The bailout talks took months to perform. And then the entire system came unhinged in one weekend.
One weekend. The process was not gradual. It was sudden and it was total: once it began in earnest, the banks were closed and you couldn’t get your money out (more on this in a moment).
There were no warnings that this was coming because everyone at the top of the
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Under the NWO globalist plan for destablizing the west, an estimated two thousand exclusively Muslim men who raped, assaulted and robbed more than 1200 women, almost all the attackers have managed to walk free
Meanwhile, representatives of Arab community were reported telling the police in Ruhr, "The police will not win a war with us because we are too many."
Chancellor Merkel, Germany's ruling elites and the media can continue putting a happy face on uncontrolled mass-migration from Arab and Muslim lands, or suppress news reporting on rising migrant crime, as much as they want, but they cannot wish away the country's deteriorating law-and-order situation.
As the desperate plea of the police union shows, the Merkel government has decided to ignore the plight of law enforcement, at least for now. It should be evident to even a casual observer that her government still does not care about the victims of its own failed "refugee" policy: Germany appears to be heading toward another rough year.
Chancellor Merkel, Germany's ruling elites and the media can continue putting a happy face on uncontrolled mass-migration from Arab and Muslim lands, or suppress news reporting on rising migrant crime, as much as they want, but they cannot wish away the country's deteriorating law-and-order situation.
As the desperate plea of the police union shows, the Merkel government has decided to ignore the plight of law enforcement, at least for now. It should be evident to even a casual observer that her government still does not care about the victims of its own failed "refugee" policy: Germany appears to be heading toward another rough year.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
5 Arrested After Egyptian Police Bust Staged Photo Shoot Of "Wounded Aleppo Children" for use by western journalists and facebook!
Readers who have been following the crisis in Aleppo have seen media
reports of videos and photos allegedly originating from innocent
children victims, pleading against the advance of the Assad forces. And
while there have been various accusations that these clips, like the
infamous "chemical attack" YouTube clip from 2013, were staged, such
reports were promptly slammed by the mainstream media as "fake news" and
roundly ignored. However, if one ever needed a reason to be skeptical
of claims, photographs, and/or videos coming out of the region, and the
MSM's appeals to readers emotions based on fabricated facts, Egyptian
authorities have just provided it.
Egyptian police arrested five people in Port Said, Egypt for making staged "wounded children" photos, which they were planning to use to misrepresent on social media as photos of destruction and injured people in Syria's Aleppo, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said on Monday. The group also made fake videos that purport to show the wreckage of air strikes in Aleppo.
The shooting team, which included the photographer's assistants and parents of the children, was detained in the Egypt's province of Port Said," the Ministry said on Facebook.
According to the Ministry, the police witnessed the shooting process, which was taking place near the vestiges of a building destroyed as illegal under the decision of the local authorities. A girl standing in a white dress covered in "blood" that later proved to be paint, drew attention of a police officer driving by. The girl held a teddy bear covered in the same "blood" and had her arm "bandaged".
The Facebook statement said the videographer, his assistants, and the parents of two children who appear in the footage were detained after a trail led police to them at a building site awaiting demolition. The five have reportedly admitted they were planning to distribute their footage on social media, which was supposed to show an eight-year-old girl in a white dress and bandages, covered in red stains while holding a teddy bear.
“A 12-year-old boy is also interviewed about what life is like under intensive Russian-backed Syrian government air strikes,” reported
The Independent
The photographer also admitted that he was going to publish these photos on social media as pictures of Aleppo.
Also troubling is the willingness of the conventional media to accept most of these reports at face value without ever questioning their authenticity.
The fact the mass media disproportionately focuses on Aleppo while turning a blind eye to the horrendous crimes being committed in Yemen courtesy of the United States, the United Kingdom, and an inexperienced Saudi-led coalition indicates the media’s concerns for human rights in Syria are disingenuous, as the AntiMedia correctly notes.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/5-arrested-after-egyptian-police-bust-staged-photo-shoot-wounded-aleppo-children
Egyptian police arrested five people in Port Said, Egypt for making staged "wounded children" photos, which they were planning to use to misrepresent on social media as photos of destruction and injured people in Syria's Aleppo, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said on Monday. The group also made fake videos that purport to show the wreckage of air strikes in Aleppo.
The shooting team, which included the photographer's assistants and parents of the children, was detained in the Egypt's province of Port Said," the Ministry said on Facebook.
According to the Ministry, the police witnessed the shooting process, which was taking place near the vestiges of a building destroyed as illegal under the decision of the local authorities. A girl standing in a white dress covered in "blood" that later proved to be paint, drew attention of a police officer driving by. The girl held a teddy bear covered in the same "blood" and had her arm "bandaged".
The Facebook statement said the videographer, his assistants, and the parents of two children who appear in the footage were detained after a trail led police to them at a building site awaiting demolition. The five have reportedly admitted they were planning to distribute their footage on social media, which was supposed to show an eight-year-old girl in a white dress and bandages, covered in red stains while holding a teddy bear.
“A 12-year-old boy is also interviewed about what life is like under intensive Russian-backed Syrian government air strikes,” reported
The Independent
The photographer also admitted that he was going to publish these photos on social media as pictures of Aleppo.
Also troubling is the willingness of the conventional media to accept most of these reports at face value without ever questioning their authenticity.
The fact the mass media disproportionately focuses on Aleppo while turning a blind eye to the horrendous crimes being committed in Yemen courtesy of the United States, the United Kingdom, and an inexperienced Saudi-led coalition indicates the media’s concerns for human rights in Syria are disingenuous, as the AntiMedia correctly notes.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/5-arrested-after-egyptian-police-bust-staged-photo-shoot-wounded-aleppo-children
Executive Order 6814 Required Turning in of Silver Bullion to the U.S. Government.
Silver U.S. and Foreign Coins Were Exempt From the Order.
Nearly 123 million ounces of silver were turned into the U.S. Mint from 1934-1938
The U.S. Needed Silver To Mint Coins
How Did The Government Know Who Had Silver Bullion?Executive Order 6814 is not a fictional future act of government, like the passing of the 211th, 212th and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, but an actual Presidential Order by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934 confiscating silver in the United States.
The order dated August 9, 1934, was entitled Executive Order 6814 Requiring the Delivery of All Silver to the United States for Coinage and required all persons to deliver silver to the U.S government pursuant to the Silver Purchase Act of 1934, subject to certain exemptions.
Following are frequently asked questions about Silver Confiscation Under Executive Order 6814:
What Silver Had To Be Turned In?Silver “situated in the United States”;
Silver of a fineness of 80% or more; and
Silver held in quantities over 500 troy ounces by any one person.
What Silver Was Exempt?
U.S. silver coins (of which U.S. dimes, quarters, half dollars and dollar coins were 90% silver at the time) and foreign silver coins;
Silver that was of a fineness less than 80%;
Unprocessed silver (less than 80% fineness) that was mined in the United States after December 21, 1933;
Silver contained in articles fabricated and held in good faith for a specific and customary use and not for their value as silver bullion (presumably silver ornaments, jewelry and/or silverware); and
Silver held for industrial, professional, or artistic use in amounts less than 500 troy ounces per person.
N.B. There was no “investment” exemption. Holding silver bullion of 80% of higher fineness in bar or round form in any amounts that was not for “industrial, professional, or artistic use” was required to be turned in.
How Much Did People Get For Their Silver?
People turning in their silver got $1.29 an ounce. Payment was made in the form of “standard silver dollars, silver certificates, or any other coin or currency of the United States.” There was a catch however; there was fee of 61 8/25 percent (61.32%) taken from the $1.29 an ounce for “seigniorage, brassage, coinage, and other mint charges.” After the fee, it worked out to a payment of about fifty cents an ounce, which was about five cents higher per ounce than before Executive Order 6814. Thus, the $.50 price was a non market, nationalized price.
How Much Silver Was Confiscated?
Nearly 113 million ounces.
112,937,925 ounces of silver were “nationalized” pursuant to Executive Order 6814.
Nationalized Silver
1935: 112,301,335 ounces
1936: 650,452 ounces
1937: 68,777 ounces
1938: 17,361 ounces
Total: 112,937,925
Silver Acquired Pursuant to The Silver Purchase Act of 1934
An additional 1.353 billion ounces of silver were purchased under the Silver Purchase Act of 1934.
Source: Silver Money (Cowles Commission for Research in Economics Monographs, No. 4)
What Did The Government Do With The Silver?
The U.S. government presumably needed the silver to mint coins or to “print money”. In 1918 pursuant to the Pittman Act, the U.S. melted down over a quarter of a billion (270 million) U.S. Silver dollars and converted them into silver bullion and sold it to England who needed the silver to alleviate a silver coin shortage in India which was a colony of England’s at the time.
Under the Pittman Act, the amounts of silver sold to England would have to be replaced by minting new silver dollars. In 1921 the replacement process began as the U.S. Mint recommenced minting Morgan Silver Dollars which hadn’t been minted since 1904. Also in 1921, the U.S. Mint began producing Peace Dollars.
The Pittman Act of 1918 was sponsored by Key Denson Pittman, a Senator from Nevada, a state with a large silver mining industry, such that its nickname is the “Silver State”. Senator Pittman was a fierce advocate for the silver industry. The Pittman Act provided that all that silver that was melted down and sold to England would have to be replaced. Most of it would come from Pittman’s home state of Nevada’s mines AND at a subsidized price of $1 an ounce!
The Silver Purchase Act of 1934 was also sponsored by Senator Pittman.
Monday, December 19, 2016
Sunday, December 18, 2016
The Red Line and the Rat Line
Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
In 2011 Barack
Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting
the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus
suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time
to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’
he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.＊
Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he
announced that he would seek congressional approval for the
intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for
hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer
to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did
Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing
into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the
administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and
military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and
potentially disastrous.
For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’
The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.) The DIA paper went on: ‘Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW [chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its own CW … Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.’ The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.’ (Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director of national intelligence said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts.’)
Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin. Five of those arrested were freed after a brief detention. The others, including the ringleader, Haytham Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence of 25 years, were released pending trial. In the meantime the Turkish press has been rife with speculation that the Erdoğan administration has been covering up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’.
The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided ‘price quotes for bulk quantities of sarin precursors’. Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was for two associates to ‘perfect a process for making sarin, then go to Syria to train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified lab in Syria’. The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had purchased a precursor on the ‘Baghdad chemical market’, which ‘has supported at least seven CW efforts since 2004’.
A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’
In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.
The former intelligence official said that many in the US national security establishment had long been troubled by the president’s red line: ‘The joint chiefs asked the White House, “What does red line mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?” They tasked military intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat. They learned nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’
In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.
Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian reported that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter jets to be deployed to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. The French air force – a crucial player in the 2011 strikes on Libya – was deeply committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur; François Hollande had ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their targets were reported to be in western Syria.
By the last days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline for the launch. ‘H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning [2 September], a massive assault to neutralise Assad,’ the former intelligence official said. So it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama said that the attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to a vote.
At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying sarin – was unravelling. Within a few days of the 21 August attack, the former intelligence official told me, Russian military intelligence operatives had recovered samples of the chemical agent from Ghouta. They analysed it and passed it on to British military intelligence; this was the material sent to Porton Down. (A spokesperson for Porton Down said: ‘Many of the samples analysed in the UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.’ MI6 said that it doesn’t comment on intelligence matters.)
The former intelligence official said the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was ‘a good source – someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy’. After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria last year, American and allied intelligence agencies ‘made an effort to find the answer as to what if anything, was used – and its source’, the former intelligence official said. ‘We use data exchanged as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing the composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But we didn’t know which batches the Assad government currently had in its arsenal. Within days of the Damascus incident we asked a source in the Syrian government to give us a list of the batches the government currently had. This is why we could confirm the difference so quickly.’
The process hadn’t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former intelligence official said, because the studies done by Western intelligence ‘were inconclusive as to the type of gas it was. The word “sarin” didn’t come up. There was a great deal of discussion about this, but since no one could conclude what gas it was, you could not say that Assad had crossed the president’s red line.’ By 21 August, the former intelligence official went on, ‘the Syrian opposition clearly had learned from this and announced that “sarin” from the Syrian army had been used, before any analysis could be made, and the press and White House jumped at it. Since it now was sarin, “It had to be Assad.”’
The UK defence staff who relayed the Porton Down findings to the joint chiefs were sending the Americans a message, the former intelligence official said: ‘We’re being set up here.’ (This account made sense of a terse message a senior official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It was not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this.’) By then the attack was a few days away and American, British and French planes, ships and submarines were at the ready.
The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of the attack was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria. Last April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.’
Dempsey’s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under the assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack – would be a military blunder, the former intelligence official said. The Porton Down report caused the joint chiefs to go to the president with a more serious worry: that the attack sought by the White House would be an unjustified act of aggression. It was the joint chiefs who led Obama to change course. The official White House explanation for the turnabout – the story the press corps told – was that the president, during a walk in the Rose Garden with Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, suddenly decided to seek approval for the strike from a bitterly divided Congress with which he’d been in conflict for years. The former Defense Department official told me that the White House provided a different explanation to members of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon: the bombing had been called off because there was intelligence ‘that the Middle East would go up in smoke’ if it was carried out.
The president’s decision to go to Congress was initially seen by senior aides in the White House, the former intelligence official said, as a replay of George W. Bush’s gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When it became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, Congress, which had endorsed the Iraqi war, and the White House both shared the blame and repeatedly cited faulty intelligence. If the current Congress were to vote to endorse the strike, the White House could again have it both ways – wallop Syria with a massive attack and validate the president’s red line commitment, while also being able to share the blame with Congress if it came out that the Syrian military wasn’t behind the attack.’ The turnabout came as a surprise even to the Democratic leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that three days before his Rose Garden speech Obama had telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, ‘to talk through the options’. She later told colleagues, according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the president to put the bombing to a congressional vote.
Obama’s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said. ‘And so out comes Plan B. Call off the bombing strike and Assad would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical warfare treaty and agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN supervision.’ At a press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry was still talking about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’ As the New York Times reported the next day, the Russian-brokered deal that emerged shortly afterwards had first been discussed by Obama and Putin in the summer of 2012. Although the strike plans were shelved, the administration didn’t change its public assessment of the justification for going to war. ‘There is zero tolerance at that level for the existence of error,’ the former intelligence official said of the senior officials in the White House. ‘They could not afford to say: “We were wrong.”’ (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The Assad regime, and only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack that took place on 21 August.’)
*
The full
extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in
assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The
Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating
what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The
rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and
ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border
to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the
weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI
spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States was providing
weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’)
In January, the Senate
Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local
militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby
undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the
US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s
criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at
the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the
US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received
front-page coverage and revived animosities in Washington, with
Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a cover-up. A highly
classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret
agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan
administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the
agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar;
the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from
Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up
in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American
soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were
hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David
Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known
he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for
Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding. (All proposed CIA covert operations must be described in a written document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to the senior leadership of Congress for approval.) Distribution of the annex was limited to the staff aides who wrote the report and to the eight ranking members of Congress – the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans leaders on the House and Senate intelligence committees. This hardly constituted a genuine attempt at oversight: the eight leaders are not known to gather together to raise questions or discuss the secret information they receive.
The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’
Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ the former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.’ Two Middle Eastern intelligence officials fingered Qatar as the source, and a former US intelligence analyst speculated that the manpads could have been obtained from Syrian military outposts overrun by the rebels. There was no indication that the rebels’ possession of manpads was likely the unintended consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer under US control.
By the end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war. ‘Erdoğan was pissed,’ the former intelligence official said, ‘and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the Turkish government – through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised law-enforcement organisation – was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘The MIT was running the political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training – including training in chemical warfare,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Stepping up Turkey’s role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war because of logistics – the distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond in March and April.’
There was no public sign of discord when Erdoğan and Obama met on 16 May 2013 at the White House. At a later press conference Obama said that they had agreed that Assad ‘needs to go’. Asked whether he thought Syria had crossed the red line, Obama acknowledged that there was evidence such weapons had been used, but added, ‘it is important for us to make sure that we’re able to get more specific information about what exactly is happening there.’ The red line was still intact.
An American foreign policy expert who speaks regularly with officials in Washington and Ankara told me about a working dinner Obama held for Erdoğan during his May visit. The meal was dominated by the Turks’ insistence that Syria had crossed the red line and their complaints that Obama was reluctant to do anything about it. Obama was accompanied by John Kerry and Tom Donilon, the national security adviser who would soon leave the job. Erdoğan was joined by Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister, and Hakan Fidan, the head of the MIT. Fidan is known to be fiercely loyal to Erdoğan, and has been seen as a consistent backer of the radical rebel opposition in Syria.
The foreign policy expert told me that the account he heard originated with Donilon. (It was later corroborated by a former US official, who learned of it from a senior Turkish diplomat.) According to the expert, Erdoğan had sought the meeting to demonstrate to Obama that the red line had been crossed, and had brought Fidan along to state the case. When Erdoğan tried to draw Fidan into the conversation, and Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ Erdoğan tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and Obama again cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ At that point, an exasperated Erdoğan said, ‘But your red line has been crossed!’ and, the expert told me, ‘Donilon said Erdoğan “fucking waved his finger at the president inside the White House”.’ Obama then pointed at Fidan and said: ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria.’ (Donilon, who joined the Council on Foreign Relations last July, didn’t respond to questions about this story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to questions about the dinner. A spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed that the dinner took place and provided a photograph showing Obama, Kerry, Donilon, Erdoğan, Fidan and Davutoğlu sitting at a table. ‘Beyond that,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to read out the details of their discussions.’)
But Erdoğan did not leave empty handed. Obama was still permitting Turkey to continue to exploit a loophole in a presidential executive order prohibiting the export of gold to Iran, part of the US sanctions regime against the country. In March 2012, responding to sanctions of Iranian banks by the EU, the SWIFT electronic payment system, which facilitates cross-border payments, expelled dozens of Iranian financial institutions, severely restricting the country’s ability to conduct international trade. The US followed with the executive order in July, but left what came to be known as a ‘golden loophole’: gold shipments to private Iranian entities could continue. Turkey is a major purchaser of Iranian oil and gas, and it took advantage of the loophole by depositing its energy payments in Turkish lira in an Iranian account in Turkey; these funds were then used to purchase Turkish gold for export to confederates in Iran. Gold to the value of $13 billion reportedly entered Iran in this way between March 2012 and July 2013.
The programme quickly became a cash cow for corrupt politicians and traders in Turkey, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. ‘The middlemen did what they always do,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Take 15 per cent. The CIA had estimated that there was as much as two billion dollars in skim. Gold and Turkish lira were sticking to fingers.’ The illicit skimming flared into a public ‘gas for gold’ scandal in Turkey in December, and resulted in charges against two dozen people, including prominent businessmen and relatives of government officials, as well as the resignations of three ministers, one of whom called for Erdoğan to resign. The chief executive of a Turkish state-controlled bank that was in the middle of the scandal insisted that more than $4.5 million in cash found by police in shoeboxes during a search of his home was for charitable donations.
Late last year Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz reported in Foreign Policy that the Obama administration closed the golden loophole in January 2013, but ‘lobbied to make sure the legislation … did not take effect for six months’. They speculated that the administration wanted to use the delay as an incentive to bring Iran to the bargaining table over its nuclear programme, or to placate its Turkish ally in the Syrian civil war. The delay permitted Iran to ‘accrue billions of dollars more in gold, further undermining the sanctions regime’.
*
The American decision
to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left Erdoğan
exposed politically and militarily. ‘One of the issues at that May
summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to supply the rebels
in Syria,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘It can’t come through
Jordan because the terrain in the south is wide open and the Syrians
are all over it. And it can’t come through the valleys and hills of
Lebanon – you can’t be sure who you’d meet on the other side.’ Without
US military support for the rebels, the former intelligence official
said, ‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating
and he thinks we’re the reason why. When Syria wins the war, he knows
the rebels are just as likely to turn on him – where else can they go?
So now he will have thousands of radicals in his backyard.’
A US
intelligence consultant told me that a few weeks before 21 August he saw
a highly classified briefing prepared for Dempsey and the defense
secretary, Chuck Hagel, which described ‘the acute anxiety’ of the
Erdoğan administration about the rebels’ dwindling prospects. The
analysis warned that the Turkish leadership had expressed ‘the need to
do something that would precipitate a US military response’. By late
summer, the Syrian army still had the advantage over the rebels, the
former intelligence official said, and only American air power could
turn the tide. In the autumn, the former intelligence official went on,
the US intelligence analysts who kept working on the events of 21 August
‘sensed that Syria had not done the gas attack. But the 500 pound
gorilla was, how did it happen? The immediate suspect was the Turks,
because they had all the pieces to make it happen.’As intercepts and other data related to the 21 August attacks were gathered, the intelligence community saw evidence to support its suspicions. ‘We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red line,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus on 18 August to investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were there. The deal was to do something spectacular. Our senior military officers have been told by the DIA and other intelligence assets that the sarin was supplied through Turkey – that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training in producing the sarin and handling it.’ Much of the support for that assessment came from the Turks themselves, via intercepted conversations in the immediate aftermath of the attack. ‘Principal evidence came from the Turkish post-attack joy and back-slapping in numerous intercepts. Operations are always so super-secret in the planning but that all flies out the window when it comes to crowing afterwards. There is no greater vulnerability than in the perpetrators claiming credit for success.’ Erdoğan’s problems in Syria would soon be over: ‘Off goes the gas and Obama will say red line and America is going to attack Syria, or at least that was the idea. But it did not work out that way.’
The post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the White House. ‘Nobody wants to talk about all this,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘There is great reluctance to contradict the president, although no all-source intelligence community analysis supported his leap to convict. There has not been one single piece of additional evidence of Syrian involvement in the sarin attack produced by the White House since the bombing raid was called off. My government can’t say anything because we have acted so irresponsibly. And since we blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame Erdoğan.’
Turkey’s willingness to manipulate events in Syria to its own purposes seemed to be demonstrated late last month, a few days before a round of local elections, when a recording, allegedly of a government national security meeting, was posted to YouTube. It included discussion of a false-flag operation that would justify an incursion by the Turkish military in Syria. The operation centred on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the revered Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire, which is near Aleppo and was ceded to Turkey in 1921, when Syria was under French rule. One of the Islamist rebel factions was threatening to destroy the tomb as a site of idolatry, and the Erdoğan administration was publicly threatening retaliation if harm came to it. According to a Reuters report of the leaked conversation, a voice alleged to be Fidan’s spoke of creating a provocation: ‘Now look, my commander, if there is to be justification, the justification is I send four men to the other side. I get them to fire eight missiles into empty land [in the vicinity of the tomb]. That’s not a problem. Justification can be created.’ The Turkish government acknowledged that there had been a national security meeting about threats emanating from Syria, but said the recording had been manipulated. The government subsequently blocked public access to YouTube.
Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s continued support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special case. They’re a Nato ally. The Turks don’t trust the West. They can’t live with us if we take any active role against Turkish interests. If we went public with what we know about Erdoğan’s role with the gas, it’d be disastrous. The Turks would say: “We hate you for telling us what we can and can’t do.”’
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