Trump As Netanyahu's Ventriloquist Dummy

Trump posted online this morning: "We [sic] now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran." A gloat over Israel's latest aggression against Iran. Presumably it's been Israel and Israel alone that has been bombing Iran and murdering top officials and nuclear scientists for almost a week now. Trump also says he wants a "total end" to Iran's nuclear program. (It's not a bomb program, it's a uranium enrichment program which creates fuel for nuclear power reactors. That's not an opinion, that's a fact according to U.S. intelligence and Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence/assassination agency.) Trump went on to boast about how great U.S. military weaponry and technology is. (Yes, with it, Israel and the U.S. can murder and destroy with impunity. Terrific. Lord Acton had a famous aphorism: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The corruption is both political and moral. The consequences are terrible for humanity.)

Trump has gone from resisting Netanyahu's demand that the U.S. join in a war on Iran, to threatening to murder the Ayatollah, Iran's Supreme Leader, and seems ready to bomb Iran's main uranium enrichment side under a mountain. Trump already sent B-2 bombers to the area for the purpose. 

Israel has been waging undeclared war on Iran for five days as of today. This has included murdering top Iranian government and military officials, with threats to murder the top ruler, the Ayatollah. 

A reporter asked Netanyahu if murdering the Ayatollah would escalate the "conflict." Netanyahu bellowed that "It would END the conflict!" How he figures that, I have no idea. It's typical Netanyahu supremacist bluster.

Israel has been drunk on its regional military supremacy for decades now. 

People seem to automatically, unconsciously even, have a simplistic attitude of Good Guys/Bad Guys, and one side has to be one, the other side the other, and whatever the "Good Guys" do to the "Bad Guys" is a good thing, including murdering them, because after all, they're "terrorists" and terrorists aren't humans, so it's a good thing to just kill them.

Of course this is mindless. Both Iran and Israel are loathsome political entities. I'm talking about their governments. But Israel is far worse because Israel has been committing the worst crime under international law and in terms of normal human morality, namely genocide, for over a year and a half now. (However, since 1948, Israel has been committing a lower grade genocidal campaign against the Palestinian Arabs, namely an attempt to deny and erase their identity as a people, which does constitute genocide under the international legal definition of genocide. Just as the Chinese regime is doing to the Uyghurs under its rule, brainwashing them in forced labor/torture camps and physically forcing them to renounce their culture, beliefs, dress, and family ties to make them into imitation Han Chinese. The Israelis of course have never sought to twist the Palestinian Arabs into Jews, but to banish them and kill large numbers of them, starting in 1948.

Trump cheaply and cynically evokes World War II, demanding "unconditional surrender" from Iran, and implicitly and not very subtly threatening the life of the Ayatollah by saying "we know where you are." 

Western propaganda ("news coverage") consistently omits the key fact that Iran does NOT have a nuclear bomb or warhead program, allowing people to be duped into believing it does.

Also NEVER pointed out, the key fact that if Iran HAD nuclear weapons, it wouldn't dare USE them against Israel, since Israel has hundreds of deliverable nuclear weapons, and the U.S. has thousands, some of which it would use on Iran if Israel for some reason didn't totally annihilate Iran itself if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

The whole thing about the imaginary Iranian nuclear weapons is to make sure there is never even a possible challenge to Israeli regional military supremacy. 

                                                                 A cruel demagogue, and also a sad, pathetic man.

 

 

Pompeo's Hitlerian Demands On Iran

In the wake of the brazen U.S. assassination of Iran's leading general, Qassem Soleimani, a hero of the Iraq-Iran war and head of the so-called Qods Force, by a missile strike from a drone attack on an international airport located in a sovereign nation and putative U.S. ally (the client state of Iraq, conquered and subjugated on the orders of U.S. emperor George W. Bush in 2003), now is a good time to review the outstanding U.S. demands against Iran. [U.S. media are spelling it Qassem, the BBC and Wikipedia, have Qasem.]

Trump's handpicked Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has a list of 12 outstanding demands against Iran. These are preconditions to the U.S. deigning to even TALK to Iran about the U.S. ceasing its relentless economic warfare against that country. This warfare is euphemistically called "economic sanctions." In fact they are total warfare, barring Iran from the international banking system (a system controlled by the U.S.- with the rest of the world's nations supinely acceding to this financial hegemony by the U.S.), and including the publicly stated goal of preventing Iran from selling ANY oil whatsoever outside its borders. Again, the other 200 or so allegedly sovereign nations of the world, including large, powerful ones like China, have all knuckled under to U.S. diktat and ceased buying oil from Iran, at least openly. If this isn't global domination, I don't know what is.

Under the "principle" that it is criminal to go against U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. government ordered Canada to arrest a top executive of China's premiere high tech company, Huawei, for violating U.S. anti-Iran sanctions- i.e. not participating in the U.S. economic war on Iran.  Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer and the daughter of the company boss, was tracked by the U.S. global secret police surveillance system as she flew to Canada, where she was held at the airport, her luggage "searched" for 3 hours without explanation, and then was arrested on a U.S. extradition "request." (Really an order. Canada is a virtual satrapy of the U.S.) Her alleged "crime" is violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. You see, if the U.S. decides to wage economic warfare against another country, it demands that all the other nations in the world participate in that war. In other words, the U.S. dictates foreign policy for all other nations. And lacking political or moral integrity, those nations make themselves U.S. lackeys and obey. Because they refuse to resist U.S. power, even though collectively they obviously could do so. (Even in some cases individually, as China could.)

Oh, and the U.S. applies its laws not just within its own borders, but over the entire planet earth. That's how Meng Wanzhou could be "guilty" of breaking U.S. law while OUTSIDE the U.S.

Meng has been held in Canada for over a year as Canada is the rope in a tug of war between China and the U.S. Canada allowed her out of jail but confined to Canada after China retaliated against Canada by jailing a couple of Canadian citizens. (Labeled "hostages" by the U.S. propaganda system.)

I should mention so as not to be misunderstood: I am NOT a supporter of the Iranian theocracy. As a lifelong atheist, democrat, and pro-human rights person, I have no truck with that regime. But contrary to its self-deluding propaganda, the U.S. is the opposite of a paragon of virtue. It is one of history's most aggressive empires which has committed innumerable atrocities and crimes against humanity through its history, starting with its foundational principles, genocide and slavery.  Moreover this is not about taking sides. As always, I strive for the objectivity that is sorely lacking in most public commentary, most people's minds, and certainly in propaganda.

I call these demands "Hitlerian" because of their extremism, and because the target of the demands would find them virtually impossible to accept. Hitler made such demands with a deliberate goal of having an excuse for war when his demands were rejected. Trump claims not to want war with Iran, but he has surrounded himself with a coterie of imperialist fanatics who DO want war with Iran, such as the recently-cashiered John Bolton. It's been reported that Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani

Here now are the Trump-Pompeo Demands On Iran. To call them "sweeping" is a gross understatement. Notice that eleven of the twelve begin with the words "Iran must." "Must" is a demand word.

In perpetuity! I guess that means until the end of time.

I'll just note in passing that the U.S. has thousands of nuclear weapons, and Israel has hundreds. Also even the CIA concluded that Iran was NOT trying to build nuclear weapons. However I believe they wanted to have the option to create them if they felt it necessary at some future point. Otherwise it makes no sense to incur the huge expense of money and energy to building underground facilities deep under mountains to prevent Israel from blowing them up (as Israel blew up atomic reactors in Iraq and Syria) with thousands of centrifuges, just to enrich uranium which it could easily purchase from Russia, for example.

By the way, Iran only ever enriched to 20%. allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). For bomb-making purposes, uranium has to be enriched to 90% or more. Under the agreement Iran on one side and the Obama regime, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and China on the other, Iran turned over virtually all its enriched uranium, mothballed its centrifuges used for enrichment, and agreed to intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Trump tore up the agreement and reimposed sanctions, with the avowed aimed of strangling the Iranian economy to force Iran to make a new deal with Trump. (Imperialist thugs like John Bolton and perhaps Michael Pompeo also wanted the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime in response to this foreign attack on their country and their lives. It's a strategy the U.S. is also using against Venezuela, making people's lives miserable to destabilize an unwanted government, has used against Cuba since 1959, that Nixon used against Chile from 1970-73 when he ordered CIA director Richard Helms to "make the economy scream," and in other places at other times.)

Even though Iran is entitled under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation 

                                       Treaty to enrich uranium to the 20% level, as I mentioned.

Meaning U.S. spies will gain access to every single military base, command and control center, etc. 

Just as they did during the UN inspection regime inside Iraq after the first Gulf War of 1991. 

We know this from a leading member of that team, former U.S. Marine Major Scott Ritter.

Iran isn't allowed to have missiles. Just its enemies can: Israel, Saudi Arabia, 

and the U.S.A. That's reasonable. Why wouldn't Iran agree to THAT?

Including all enemy spies. Because some of those prisoners certainly are. Meanwhile the U.S. will continue to imprison

 Iranians for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, "espionage," and whatever, and keep those now in prison locked up.

Because anyone who resists Israeli oppression is a "terrorist." Iran must surrender the region to Israeli hegemony. And of course the U.S. is free to continue aiding Israel in every possible way, as an accomplice to the oppression of the Palestinians and the periodic destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure. And the U.S. can support any actual terrorists it likes, such as the anti-Iranian MEK. And Israel can keep assassinating Iran's nuclear scientists, if it so chooses.

That actually would be a good thing. Those militias have in the past few months slaughtered hundreds of protesters against the corrupt and venal Iraqi "government," and wounded thousands. They have also "disappeared" some, U.S.-death-squad style.
Now if only the U.S. would respect Iraq's sovereignty. After murdering Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and eight others right in the Baghdad, Iraq, airport, the Iraqi legislature voted to kick out the thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, and Trump himself responded with contempt. There's also a couple of hundred other nations whose sovereignty the U.S. regularly tramples.

The Houthi tribesmen overthrew the very weak "government" of Yemen starting in 2014. The Saudis decided this internal Yemeni power struggle was their business, and picked the overthrown president as their choice to rule Yemen. So for years, to place their chosen puppet back in his seat,w the U.S. and Saudi Arabia (and the UAE until very recently) have waged a relentless war against Yemen, committing war crimes on a daily basis, bombing mosques, hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, and so on, instituting a naval blockade, causing a massive cholera epidemic, and a famine. The Obama regime participated in this criminal enterprise, not only selling all the bombs and missiles used to attack Yemen- the Saudis and Emiratis already owned the U.S.-made warplanes they needed, and the U.S. trains their pilots- but even providing targeting information and having U.S. Air Force aerial tankers refuel the Saudis planes on their attack missions. Obama sold tens of billions of arms to the Saudis, and Trump tried to outdo Obama in evil with more arms sales. "Great" Britain, with a hunger for blood money, has also sold significant quantities of weapons to the Saudi "royals" for their war on Yemen.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. Thus we see the ubiquitous pattern of the U.S. waging class warfare on a global scale against the world's poor.

 Yemeni enemy of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia gets what he has coming.

The UN has determined that a Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes from hunger or disease 

caused by the Saudi-U.S.-UK-UAE war on Yemen. They probably deserve it.
They might grow up to be "terrorists."

By bombing this schoolbus, the valiant Saudi allies of the U.S. took out 40 terrorist school children, along with eleven adults (who by definition were terrorists because U.S. bombs killed them). The Saudis couldn't have done it without the U.S. Thank you, Obama Trump U.S. Congress!

Multiply this by one million or so, and you have the history of the U.S. Now do you understand why it is undeniable that the U.S. Government is a criminal enterprise? It is only because your mind is marinated in a sea of propaganda that you don't see it, feel it, know it.

Now let's return to those oh-so-reasonable and justified demands that Pompeo-Trump have pending against Iran:

This demand is actually morally sound. Iran is helping the vile Assad dictatorship crush the rebellion of the Syrian people by wholesale slaughter, systematic bombing of medical facilities, torture and atrocities on a massive scale. Of course it isn't morality that motivates this demand, nor concern for the Syrian people, but motives needn't be pure for an action or demand to be a good thing.

This one sure is ironic. When the Taliban fanatics ruled Afghanistan, they murdered a group of Iranian diplomats. The Taliban were only in power at all thanks to the U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi buildup of the most medieval, reactionary forces in Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets. The Soviets were lured into invading by President Jimmy Carter's sinister righthand man, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Pole with a tremendous lifelong hatred of Russians. Years later Brzezinski made a slip and boasted to a French newspaper about how he suckered the Soviets into invading. Just a few months before the 1979 invasion, Brzezinski, the head of the U.S. National Security Council, which coordinates the operations of the U.S. military, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the CIA and other "intelligence agencies," had nothing more important to do than to fly into Afghanistan, a desolate backwater. Hmmm!  [1]

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Iran actually helped the U.S. cause. Then emperor George W. Bush fabricated an "Axis of Evil" in an infamous speech, pretending that Iran, Iraq (then still ruled by Saddam Hussein, who invaded Iran with U.S. connivance, used chemical weapons against Iranian troops, caused hundreds of thousands of Iranian casualties and war invalids, and hated by Iran), and North Korea (sic!) were in a World War II-style alliance like the fascist Axis powers Nazi Germany, Italy, and Imperial Japan. Crude and mendacious propaganda, it put Iran on notice that it was an Official Enemy of the U.S.

Now that the U.S. has embedded itself in Afghanistan, and wages constant attacks on Iran, it wouldn't surprise me if Iran's attitude towards the Taliban has changed. But if the U.S. wants to look for nations to blame for propping up the Taliban, I'd suggest they start with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

But the U.S., under whatever president, is apparently too dishonest, too greedy, and  too morally cowardly, to do that.

 Presumably including domestic ops inside Iran. Hey, I have a suggestion: end the operations of U.S. "Special Forces" inside the scores of countries they currently operate in!

This one reeks to high heaven with the stench of hypocrisy. 

Israel regularly bombs Iranian targets inside Syria with impunity. It has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists inside Iran. Saudi Arabia treats Iran as the Devil Incarnate. The U.S. of course has been effectively at war with Iran since the 1979 overthrow of the U.S.-imposed dictator the "Shah" (King). The Iranian "threat" consists of its growing influence in the region, which the U.S. and its partners find objectionable.

It's interesting that the demand here is for Iran to end its "threats" against shipping, NOT attacks against shipping. Previously the U.S. made a big stink about the simultaneous attacks on both a Norwegian and a Japanese oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, which the U.S. government and corporate media parrots shrilly blamed on Iran. It has been definitively proven that Iran DIDN'T commit those attacks, which were probably U.S. operations. [2]
Finally cyber attacks. I have no idea what specifically Pompeo is referring to, if anything.  He and Trump- indeed U.S. apparatchiks and politicians generally- often spout baseless rhetoric. Certainly Iran's cyber capabilities are a tiny fraction of the U.S.' And it must be exasperatingly galling for the U.S. to make such a charge, given the relentless U.S. cyber attacks on Iran, including the unleashing of the Stuxnet malware (and others) which targeted Iran's nuclear centrifuges for destruction. (Obama was really proud of that one.)

Again, as usual in the demented world of U.S. political ideology, reality is stood on its head. This is not a defense of Iran. It is looking at the objective facts, nothing more.

Pompeo is a political creation of the greedy, thieving, reactionary billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David. (One of them just died. Hopefully the other one will follow him to the grave soon.) They got Pompeo elected to the U.S. Congress from Kansas, the Kochs' base. Pompeo is a former army officer and rabid, violent imperialist who went on television to call for the execution of Edward Snowden, whose "crime" was revealing the fact that the NSA conducts a program of total surveillance over the entire U.S. population. See "Pompeo wants to execute Snowden." 

1]  For Brzezinski's malign role in creating today's Afghanistan, see "The Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (1998)," in which he incriminates himself, English translation on the website of the University of Arizona. For the full article from which it was drawn from International Politics, see "Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect." Also see "Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Is Orlando’s Nightmare," June 17, 2016.

Ice water ran in the veins of the late "Dr." Brzezinski. He sneers that the fate of the Afghan people has no more weight than the death of a fly compared to the great benefit of weakening the Soviet Union. Of course the Afghans didn't get a vote on that. So much for U.S. devotion to "democracy" and "human rights."

2]  See "Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression" for the proof.  

Graphics used in this essay by RT network.

Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression

Last time it was Iraq. This time Iran.

We KNOW that Iran didn't attack a Japanese oil tanker and a Norwegian tanker in the Gulf of Oman, just south of the Strait of Hormuz, as the Trump regime is asserting and the U.S. media is echoing. (Also part of the propaganda echo chamber are the media of stooge lackey nations. For example, the British government's overt propaganda arm, the BBC, is pushing the same lie. And the rightwing British government headed by the loathsome Theresa May is parroting the U.S. false indictment of Iran. Also Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, put in her sycophantic two cents blaming Iran. These craven courtiers to U.S. power are deluding themselves if they think Trump won't screw them on trade deals and everything else if they suck up to him hard enough. Trump is an ingrate, which makes him the perfect U.S. president. U.S. ingratitude is a historical fact. But that's another essay.)


Here's the proof the U.S. condemnation of Iran is a lie: the U.S. asserts that Iran placed mines on the hulls of the ships, damaging them, and then retrieved an unexploded mine from the side of the Japanese vessel. But the president of the Japanese shipping company that owns the Japanese tanker reports that the crew of the tanker said there was no mine, but that two flying objects hit the ship.


And this: the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was in Tehran, Iran, at the very time the U.S. claims Iran attacked a Japanese ship by attaching limpet mines to the hull. (Magnetic mines.) This was a critical visit for Iran, which is trying to find ways to defeat the U.S. economic strangulation of the country. Previously the Iranian foreign minister went to Tokyo, Japan, and this visit by the Japanese prime minister was set up. The top ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Kamenei was meeting with Abe when the "attack" occurred.

Qatar TV station Al-Jazeera.

So if you accept the U.S. government and media version of reality, seconded by lackey stooges like the British government and media and others, Iran invited the prime minister of Japan to Tehran for a rare visit just to sabotage Iran's own diplomatic effort.

Yeah, right.

Who is more likely to want to sabotage Iranian diplomacy, Iran or the U.S.? The question answers itself. [1]

So of course the U.S. and allied propaganda media systems simply IGNORE the facts that Abe was IN TEHRAN during this "attack," that the owner of the tanker SAYS IT WAS FLYING OBJECTS that hit the ship, and instead keep repeating the lies of the Trump regime. [2]

Iran's foreign minister saw right through the U.S. false flag attack. But it's not designed to fool Iran. It's designed to fool YOU!

Tellingly, the Japanese government, which has been a supine lickspittle to the U.S. ever since the U.S. occupied it in 1945, hasn't fallen into line behind the U.S. The government has been very circumspect. The Japanese foreign minister, Taro Kono, even referred to the sabotage attack as an "accident." (!) And in a sign that the U.S. attempt to sabotage Iran's diplomacy has failed for now, Kono said that Japan will continue to engage in "dialogue" with Iran to reduce tension (which the U.S. is working overtime to ratchet up) and "seeking the peace in the region." Refusing to go along with the U.S. "proof" of Iran's guilt, he said Japan would continue to gather information to find out "what really happened." 

Wow! What really happened? Don't you believe Michael Pompeo, the egregious U.S. Secretary of State, who within hours of the attack summoned the media to hear him read a statement that it was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that Iran mined two ships. (You don't think this wasn't all arranged in advance?) (Pompeo took no questions. Gee, I wonder why.)

Also, Japan's defense minister said Japan wouldn't send troops to the region, as the U.S. war cabal must have hoped to goad them into doing.

Singapore station cna.

What about the other tanker that was attacked by the U.S. and blamed on Iran? It is Norwegian. Here's why I think that was a deliberate choice. Trump obviously is reluctant to start an actual war with Iran. He knows how bad that would be, and indeed the entire region would be thrown into even greater turmoil. The last thing he needs as he runs for reelection is another unpopular war. And he badly needs to get reelected to run out the clock on the statute of limitations for the various crimes he committed before becoming president. (Maybe the New York State Attorney General should get some indictments for state crimes NOW.) It has been reported that he's griped about his "National Security Advisor" John Bolton pushing him to war. And just today (June 20) Iran shot down a U.S. spy drone and Trump publicly soft-pedaled it as no big deal and opined that it was probably an accident by low level personnel as opposed to a state decision.

Trump also puts Norway on a pedestal. This was shown just recently when he was asked on TV if he'd accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign nation, and Trump said "Norway" as an example of such a nation.

And a few years ago, when he referred to African and other "non-white" nations as "shithole countries," he he mused why can't "we" get more immigrants from Norway. Also, for what it's worth, his first Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is Danish on her father's side. Most of all, Trump is a well-know white supremacist.

So I have a suspicion that attacking a Norwegian tanker was designed to provoke Trump's ire at Iran.

Bonus Plus: Norway is a NATO member. When the U.S. goes to war on Iran, that gives it an excuse to demand that NATO members contribute forces, as some have done for the U.S.' Excellent Never-Ending Adventure in Afghanistan, and the "Liberation" of Iraq. 

Trump has called in to Murdoch's propaganda minions on TV, Fox "News," to blame Iran categorically. So he is sinking into the quicksand trap laid for him. Of course, as president of the United States, he is way out of his depth. A sleazy grifter son of a cutthroat immoral and criminal real estate baron, he is experienced in pulling off scams and acting as a shill for himself on television, but he has no understanding of geopolitics or how to run an empire. And he picked the worst possible imperialist apparatchiks to help him do it. I guess he equates extremism with toughness.

Let us briefly consider the "evidence" that supposedly proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran planted mines on the hulls of the two tankers. The first and main evidence is a grainy video purporting to show Iranians on a patrol boat removing a mine from one of the ships. Trouble is, no mine is visible in the video.

Qatar station Al-Jazeera.
 See the mine? It's right there! Are you blind?

Also, IF there was a mine on the hull, how do we know the U.S. didn't put it there for the Iranians to find when they sent out vessels to rescue the crews of the tankers? (No crew members were injured or killed in the U.S. attacks on the vessels. Apparently the U.S. deliberately fired relatively low-yield projectiles at the tankers designed to start fires but not sink the ships or cause loss of life.)

One last note on videos: this video may well be genuine, but on the day of the incident it was reported that a bogus video was posted I believe on Facebook seeming to show Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never actually said. Also I recently heard a program about the "danger" of technology allowing the creation of seemingly genuine videos that are fake, but the fakery is undetectable by technical means. It has been possible to create undetectable photographic forgeries for years with Photoshop. The point being, images are not the last word on anything. Even before digital photography, photos could be dramatically altered, as when under Stalin, officials who had been purged had to be airbrushed out of photos. So this kind of manipulation is nothing new, but with digital technology it has reached dramatic new levels of verisimilitude. (Go see a Hollywood "action" or Sci-Fi or comic book "hero" sometime and see!)

The grainy video the U.S. released seems genuine, as we would expect a surveillance video taken from far away to look like this. (But I think that is naive. The U.S. has space satellites that can resolve objects the size of car license plates. Surely their warships have camera lenses that can do better than this video.) Conveniently, you can't really make out what the Iranian crew is doing.

Over the following days, the U.S. dribbled out more "evidence," such as a photo of the Japanese ship with a black triangle smudge on the hull that it purported was the "unexploded mine," but could just as well have been (indeed looks like) a mark added with a simple photo editing program.

A ship mine makes such a TINY HOLE? How could it ever sink a ship? That's what ship mines are designed to do! And that little triangle- DEFINITELY a mine!

Pompeo has also claimed that the U.S. had mine fragments that were Iranian-like.

Last month four tankers were sabotaged in some vague way in a UAE port. Saudi Arabia rushed to blame Iran. But apparently the designed effect wasn't achieved.

To be sure, Iranian officials have publicly noted that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to ship traffic if it wished. This is played as an "Iranian threat" in Western media and by government officials.

I don't think they could. The U.S. Navy could wipe out Iran's fleet of tiny patrol boats, and minesweepers could clear sea lanes of any floating mines.

There are plenty of covert units in the U.S. government that specialize in false flag operations and such types of frame-ups. When Pompeo was CIA director, his first job for Trump, in addition to demonizing Julian Assange and increasing vicious sneaky attacks on Venezuela, he took the opportunity to form a CIA task force, the "Iran Mission Center," in 2017.

The U.S. has had it in for Iran ever which the Iranian people had the temerity to overthrow one of the U.S.' favorite dictators, a man president Jimmy Carter called a "great friend," "Shah" Reza Pahlavi, in 1979. (Pahlavi was installed in 1953 in a CIA coup ordered by president Dwight Eisenhower, which destroyed Iranian democracy and resulted in the deaths of a quarter million Iranians during the Shah's 25 year reign, many after hideous torture by the CIA-created and coached secret police, the SAVAK.)

Now, I don't like the current Iranian regime. it is a repressive theocracy. But that is NOT why the U.S. opposes it. Saudi Arabia is a FAR MORE repressive theocracy, and the U.S. is joined at the hip to it. The U.S. is in the business of destroying democracies and creating and backing dictatorships to allow economic exploitation of captive nations. But it won't admit that of course because it isn't inspirational. It needs to dupe people, especially the American people. So it pretends to be a spreader of freedom and democracy, when it does the exact opposite, over and over and over.

The war cabal in the U.S. government, led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, a political creature created by the Koch Brothers, a man who has publicly called for the execution of the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden [3], and John Bolton, a lifelong psychopathic war monger and fanatical imperialist, are maneuvering Trump into war against Iran. The U.S. is already waging economic warfare against that country- which of course primarily hurts the people of Iran. (People whom the sick imperialist dog Bolton says "deserve a better government," as if he or any U.S. imperialist gives a shit about the welfare of Iranians or of any other people, for that matter. Similar Bolton opined on television that having U.S. oil companies seize control of Venezuela's oil would benefit the American AND Venezuelan people. How the hell diverting that oil wealth into the coffers of large corporations would do that, he didn't bother explaining.)

If and when the war cabal succeeds in its goal, a goal enthusiastically supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, two darling nations of the U.S. government, the only thing most Americans will care about, unfortunately, is American casualties, not the far greater number of Iranian deaths and maimings, or the devastation to be wreaked upon Iran's infrastructure. And Iran's retaliation and self-defense will be branded "terrorism," and used as excuse and justification for the U.S. aggression.

Just as, during World War II, the Nazis branded the armed partisans who resisted them in various occupied nations "terrorists." Really, the same word. Oh, and "enhanced interrogation techniques," the euphemism the Bush regime and U.S. media adopted to pretend they didn't torture people, was lifted straight from the Gestapo interrogation manual, which the CIA carefully studied after the war. (Ray McGovern, the retired career CIA analyst who briefed presidents daily and who is fluent in German and Russian, revealed this.)

Anyway, here's hoping you won't drink the propaganda Kool-Aid being served up daily around the clock by "the" media.

Propaganda smoke gets in your eyes.

Enemies of humanity Pompeo and Bolton.

The primary target of the war cabal's psychological-political warfare: the Grifter-in-Chief as dupe.

1] Speaking of well-timed sabotage of diplomatic events, remember when special counsel Robert S. "Grand Inquisitor" Mueller III released an indictment of Russians RIGHT BEFORE Trump was to meet Putin? Quite a "coincidence."

Or how about the October Surprise, when Reagan's gang cut a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of U.S. embassy personnel until minutes after Jimmy Carter was out of office, thus insuring his defeat by Reagan in the 1980 election?

Or Nixon's sabotage of Lyndon Johnson's peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968? He told the "South" Vietnamese military regime to refuse to go along with a deal. FBI wiretaps alerted Johnson to this, but he didn't want to expose that spying so kept it quiet. Nixon beat the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, by about 1/2 of 1% of the "popular' vote.  (Oh, but Trump is paranoid and insulting to think a sitting president would wiretap a candidate!)

2] Not that the blackout was total. But it doesn't need to be to keep most people in the dark. For example, there was one article in the Washington Post about the Japanese tanker company's statement. Did YOU happen to read it? How about everyone you know? They've all heard the U.S. propaganda line, day after day after day.

Incessantly for a week now, "the" media has repeated the government line about Iran's guilt, while ignoring the facts that prove the U.S. assertions a lie, so most people will be unaware of these key facts. Bourgeois commentary now takes for granted the "fact" that Iran mined two tankers, just as it takes for granted the lie that Russia "hacked the DNC server." All that remains to be determined is what the U.S. should do to punish Iran. For that purpose, it gives a platform to, for example, Senator Tom Cotton. A first-term senator from the insignificant state of Arkansas, Cotton is a former military officer and rabidly aggressive militarist and imperialist. Why HE of all people should be all over television is a question properly put to the media czars and their henchmen, the executives and producers of television propaganda programs. ["Japanese ship owner contradicts U.S. account of how tanker was attacked," Washington Post, June 14, 2019.

3]  See "Pompeo wants to execute Snowden."

Trump Opens Door to Revived Iranian Nuclear Program, Europe Confirms It's America's Bitch, and Israel and Saudi Arabia are Kvelling

Kvelling is Yiddish. It means "to be extraordinarily pleased; especially, to be bursting with pride." Certainly the Israelis and Saudis have reason to be. Both nations are eager for the U.S. to go to war with Iran, and have been pushing the U.S. in that direction for years.

Trump finally carried out his threat to kill the hard-won nuclear agreement with Iran. Two years of negotiations by the U.S., France, Germany, Britain, China, and Russia, all arrayed against Iran, with U.S.-imposed sanctions choking the Iranian economy, produced the best deal that could be squeezed from the theocrats ruling that nation. Iran surrendered ALL its enriched uranium, agreed to permanently shut down a reactor capable of producing plutonium, mothballed its centrifuges, and accepted extremely stringent oversight by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency).  All this to last for 15 years.

If Trump wanted a better deal, he had plenty of time to negotiate one. But he has demagogically insisted for several years that the agreement was the "worst deal ever." A preposterous assertion.

The European "partners" (in reality, they're nothing more than junior lackeys to U.S. Imperialism) pleaded with and cajoled Trump to try to make him see reason, to no avail. French President Emmanuel Macron came all the way to Washington and endured demeaning treatment by Trump (Trump ostentatiously pretending to pick something off Macron's suit in front of the world press and announcing it was "dandruff," forcing Macron to submit to the insult) for absolutely nothing. Britain dispatched their foreign minister, the buffoon Boris Johnson, to Washington to pointlessly lobby various Trump regime apparatchiks on the matter.

Macron addressed the U.S. Congress, delivering a relatively honest speech which no doubt annoyed most of that body.

The Europeans are already caving in, reaffirming their status as the U.S.' bitch. This proves that the European Union is a bust. It was supposed to allow Europe to swing its proper weight. Instead it is a bad joke. The European bourgeoisie just cannot or will not free themselves from their position of slavish subordination to the U.S.

Trump has made clear that, as usual, foreign corporations must abide by U.S. "law" and conform to U.S. foreign policy. Just a day after Trump wrecked the agreement with Iran, which the U.S. got Russia, China, Germany, Britain, France, and the EU to sign on to against Iran, his Ambassador to Germany is already ordering German companies to shut down their Iranian business operations "immediately." Well, when you're the Boss of the World, you can issue such orders.

Unless companies want to quit the U.S. market, which is many times the size of the Iranian one, AND subject themselves to ruinous U.S. "fines," AND risk criminal indictments of the company and its executives, effectively confining those executives to their home countries or risk arrest and extradition to the U.S. to "face American justice" (decades in prison) for refusing to be agents of U.S. Imperialist foreign policy, these non-U.S. businesses have to knuckle under to U.S. diktat.

Some U.S. media "commentators" are fatuously saying canceling the agreement of the U.S. government was Trump "making good on a campaign pledge." As if Trump feels an obligation to keep his word on anything. And he made numerous pledges to snooker people into voting for him- all the good ones he has reneged on, only keeping the venal ones. (As I expected.)

Here are some choice excerpts that the bombastic  blustering bullyboy Trump spewed in making his announcement on May 8th:

Trump- "this deal is catastrophic for America, for Israel, and for the whole Middle East."

He sneered at "the decaying and rotten structure of the current deal." (Reminds me of Adolf Hitler "freeing" Germany from the "shackles" of the rotten Versailles Treaty.)

Trump says the new deal he pretends he'll force on Iran "will benefit all of Iran and the Iranian people." (I'm sure he cares so much about the Iranian people! This is a guy who's trying to ban all Muslims from the U.S.) He wants to throw in "terrorism" and Iranian "meddling" in Syria and Yemen as part of new demands on Iran.

Trump threatens "any nation" that aids "Iran in its [non-existent] quest for a nuclear weapon" will also get slammed with U.S. sanctions.

Of course, Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons, it was developing the capability to develop such weapons. And right now, iran isn't even doing THAT!

But the lying jackass demagogue who is president of the U.S. Empire could care less about facts, as he has shown throughout his entire adult life. Nor did the U.S. media bother informing the millions who are forced to rely on it for information that what Trump said was false. For all their bleatings about his "lies," they reinforce some of his lies.

Iran now has to decide whether to accept being completely ripped off, having surrendered its nuclear program (mainly consisting of uranium enrichment) for nothing, or restart it. Trump is making gangster threats implying violence. Many imperialists in the U.S. and Israel, and the evil, medieval rulers of Saudi Arabia, have long been urging the U.S. to bomb Iran. (Dying U.S. Senator John McCain would love to see that.)

Iran's major commodity is, of course, oil. And since oil is traded on the international market in U.S. dollars, and the U.S. Treasury Department controls dollar transactions, that makes it extremely difficult for Iran to sell its oil without U.S. permission. So the U.S. has Iran over a barrel, so to speak. (One of Saddam Hussein's fatal mistakes was floating the idea of using a medium of exchange other than the U.S. dollar for oil transactions. The U.S. tends to react violently to impingements on its power.)

The Israelis and Saudis are eager for the U.S. to wage war on Iran, especially a bombing campaign. Terrorism ("covert action") would also be part of the war. The U.S. under Obama infiltrated Special Forces teams into Iran to plant surveillance devices, including radiation monitors disguised as bricks in walls, and spy gadgets to monitor truck traffic disguised as rocks. The Israelis of course were busily assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, creating terror to discourage Iranian scientists from participating in nuclear research. And Obama infiltrated the Stuxnet malware into Iran's nuclear program computer system, destroying centrifuges.

Understand that it is official U.S. policy to overthrow the Iranian government. (This would be the second time they did that, the first being in 1953, which destroyed Iranian democracy.)  The U.S. is still bitter that the client dictator it installed in 1953, the Shah, was overthrown in 1979. And while the quarter million Iranians who died under the brutal reign of the Shah are never, ever mentioned in U.S. media, they still reference the so-called "hostage crisis," when the apparatchiks in the U.S. embassy in Tehran were  seized and held for 444 days, and the U.S. media engaged in a daily drumbeat of hysterical propaganda about it. ABC "News" even started an entire evening program devoted to the "crisis," which became "Nightline," hosted by Kissinger maven Ted Koppel. What's never said, what has been consigned to the memory hole, is why Iran seized the U.S. apparatchiks. Obviously a key part of the story. But not in the U.S. propaganda version of it.

Iran warned the Jimmy Carter regime not to give sanctuary to the fleeing. Shah. Then Henry Kissinger called the president of the U.S. and transmitted an order from David Rockefeller, a man at the apex of the U.S. ruling class, that Carter must allow the Shah in. Carter protested that there would be bad consequences, but obeyed his master. (Carter was chosen to be president in 1976 by the Rockefeller-created Trilateral Commission, which assigned Zbigniew Brzezinski as Carter's "national security advisor." Brzezinski went on the engineer the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, something he has boasted about. Time magazine, an organ run by Trilateral Commission members, presented Carter to the American public as the second coming of JFK.)

Well, the "hostage-taking" duly followed the Shah's entry into the U.S., the resulting media-generated "crisis" ultimately cost Carter re-election. And the racist neo-fascist Ronald Reagan, running against Carter in the 1980 election, made a sub rosa deal with the Khomeini regime to only free the U.S. personnel minutes after Carter was no longer president.

Now back to the present. What of the non-U.S. lackey nations that are a party to the nuclear agreement with Iran, China and Russia? They too operate under the oppressive umbrella of the U.S.-controlled global financial system. [1]

And the U.S. has a veritable galaxy of laws, rules, and regulations that give it infinite power over the financial transactions of others. No bank that wishes to do transactions outside its home country's boundaries can defy the U.S. People and companies that have never set foot in the U.S. or done any action inside the U.S. are routinely indicted by the U.S. and either extradited or kidnapped to "face justice" inside the U.S. and ultimately be subjected to often draconian sentences imprisoned in the vast U.S. gulag. (The U.S., with about 4.7% of the world's population, holds 25% of the entire planet's prisoners. The U.S. imprisoners a higher percentage of its adult population- close to 1%- than any nation on earth. China, a country with four times the population of the U.S., has slightly fewer prisoners.)

The U.S. considers its laws binding on everyone on earth- and indeed enforces them. The railroading of the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was set up in Thailand by U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents pretending to be arms buyers for  the Colombian rebel group FARC, and who now sits in a U.S. prison, is one of many examples. (What the hell is an alleged drug agency doing setting up fake arms deals to entrap foreign citizens? Good questions.) Britain has shipped hapless citizens to the U.S. to face bogus charges, to the outrage of its own media and public.

So what does Europe do when its arms are twisted by the U.S.? It says "Uncle!" Europe is paying the economic price for U.S.-imposed sanctions on Russia to punish Russia for "meddling" in Ukraine. The U.S. has fined Europe's banks billions of dollars in a shakedown racket for violating sanctions on countries the U.S. doesn't like. (Other nation's banks have been hit too. See chart.)

But the cowardly bourgeois rulers of Europe are good at one thing: punching down. They sure know how to oppress their own people, as the corrupt Spanish government of the Francoist Mariano Rajoy is doing in Catalonia, or as the remorseless British Prime Minister Theresa May is doing, deporting tens of thousands of Commonwealth citizens who came to Britain legally decades ago and are now being reclassified as "illegal" because the British government failed to issue them documents when they arrived. Theresa May, the architect of the Grenfell Towers Fire massacre who slashed funding for fire and police protection starting in her previous job as Interior Secretary. (A job in which she began the targeting of immigrants.)

Anyway, sit back and enjoy the coming war between Iran and the U.S./Israel/Saudi Arabia. Iran is not completely alone. It is fighting side by side with Russia in Syria to prop up the murderous Assad regime. It also has the loyal support of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and militia. (The Israelis have been busily bombing Iranian weapons shipments in Syria they claim are destined for Hezbollah.) Every time Iran counterattacks, except the propagandists and governments of the U.S. side to shriek "IRANIAN TERRORISM!"

Israel has wasted no time lighting the fuse. Today they bombed fifty Iranian targets inside Syria, using as justification an alleged Iranian missile fired into the Golan Heights (former Syrian territory that Israel conquered in the 1967 war). No mention in U.S. (and other "Western") media that this follows months of Israeli bombing raids on Iranian targets inside Syria, with no response from Iran at all until now, with the alleged missile. (Or 20 missiles, as CBS later asserted. CBS is virtually a propaganda arm of the Israeli government in the U.S.) Israel threatened more to come if the Iranians don't take it lying down. Russia has expressed alarm over the Israeli pummeling.

This war, if it comes, will go on for years. Like some other wars the U.S. started in the region, eh?


1]  The U.S. isn't even satisfied with controlling the world's financial system. It even has to spy on everybody and hack into bank computers. Even SWIFT, the system for international bank transactions, was hacked by the NSA. (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication- SWIFT. SWIFT has cut off Iran's banks from the rest of the world, on U.S. orders.)

Payment Extracted From Russian Government for Liquidation of Aleppo

As the murderous Assad regime snuffs out the last pockets of resistance to its evil reign in the city of Aleppo, Syria, a 22-year-old Turkish policeman took it upon himself to impose a small price on Russia for its aerial bombardment of the city, including all of the hospitals. Shouting " Don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria!" the off-duty cop shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, at "a posh art gallery" in the Turkish capital of Ankara. [1]

A video of the incident aired on Turkish media showed the man, a riot policeman named Mevlut Mert Altintas proclaiming in Arabic  "We are the descendants of those who supported the Prophet Muhammad, for jihad." We see once again that it often takes a zealot or fanatic to have the courage (and indifference to his personal fate) to sacrifice oneself and attack into the teeth of Power. (Some reports say Altintas was killed. If not, he's in for some savage torture. For one thing, the Erdogan regime will want him to “confess” to “the conspiracy” that Erdogan and Putin have already posited led to this killing.)

Edward Snowden in a way fits the description of a self-sacrificing zealot, but of course his action was non-violent and very beneficial, if ultimately as futile as the assassination of the ambassador. But in both cases, at least some cost is imposed on the oppressors of humanity. That is worthwhile.

The day before the assassination, the Russian, Turkish, and Iranian foreign and war ministers met in Moscow to conspire on the ongoing crushing of the rebellion of the Syrian people against the despotic and ultra-cruel regime of Bashar al-Assad, an absolute dictator who inherited the dictatorship from his mass murderer father Hafez. (No slouch in the killing department himself. Like father, like son, apparently.)

With utter predictability, the state terrorist Russian president Vladimir Putin, Karlov's boss, immediately branded the killing terrorism, and vowed revenge. “The only answer to the murder of the Russian ambassador to Turkey must be the intensification of the struggle against terrorism,” Putin said darkly on Russian national television. “And the bandits will feel it,” he added menacingly. (No doubt to the approval of Donald Trump, who admires "strength." That makes Trump an authoritarian, of course, since fetishizing power is a key aspect of authoritarianism. But then Trump's authoritarianism has been on display for years, in his role as a Business Boss.) the Kremlin foreign ministry also weighed in with the"T" word, calling it “a terrorist attack,” I'd call it retribution for Russian crimes against humanity.

Showing he understands nothing, Putin also misunderstood the avenging gunman's motive entirely, even though the assassin said quite clearly what his motive was. Putin framed the killing in conspiratorial terms, seeing a “provocation aimed at rupturing ties between Russia and Turkey” in the act. "The crime that has been committed is undoubtedly a provocation aimed at derailing the ties between Russia and Turkey, as well as the peace process in Syria," Oh, undoubtedly. and I just love your "peace process" in Syria! Nothing like bombing people into submission to achieve "peace."

Yes yes I know, there are jihadists in Syria. But the 80% of the Syrian population that oppose Assad are not "jihadists" and "terrorists." This uprising began with street protests inspired by the Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia. The Assad regime responded by murdering protesters in the streets, and kidnapping and torturing people. THEN people took up arms, when they had no choice to defend themselves. Obama and his minions intoned "Assad Must Go," but Obama didn't want to support the rebellion with the necessary arms, especially anti-aircraft small arms, in part out of fear they'd end up in jihadists' hands. After a year or two, jihadists did appear in Syria, so Obama could rationalize, See? I was right.

The mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, hopped on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, opining that the killer's intent was to disrupt Turkish-Russian relations. Why not take the gunman at his word? He said, shouted why he did it!

I guess politicians, being cold, callous beings, cannot imagine that there are people motivated by the suffering of others. That is just beyond their ken. So they must fabricate imaginary conspiracies and convoluted political conjectures. (The U.S. media and other elite sectors do that all the time too. For example, J. Edgar Hoover, the now-deceased longtime FBI secret police chief, thought that the movement for black civil rights was a "communist conspiracy." And president Lyndon Johnson thought that the massive popular movement against his war on Vietnam was being created in Moscow! He ordered the CIA to uncover this "plot" that somehow turned millions of Americans into zombie puppets of the Kremlin. I kid you not. That is how blind our rulers are to their own criminality- that they have to deny any possibility of fault by themselves that is provoking opposition from normal humans. Positing malign conspiracies is one way rulers evade facing up to their own responsibility for the reactions provoked by their crimes and oppression.)

The destruction of Aleppo, which has included the systematic bombardment of every hospital in the city and targeting of schools, among other atrocities, is characterized as a "liberation" from "terrorists" by the cynical Russian and Syrian governments, rhetoric adopted by knee-jerk anti-Americans in Western countries whose human rights principles are apparently lower in priority than their need to assume that whatever side the U.S. opposes are Good Guys. This stems from their simple-minded, lazy habit of seeing the world in binary terms. (Readers of this blog will have no trouble discerning that I am unsparing in my criticism of the U.S. for its crimes. Those who cannot see other sources of evil in the world have a most peculiar blind spot) Even though the U.S. has been largely AWOL in Syria, these ideologues blame the U.S. for the Syrian tragedy. They also consider Hillary Clinton a "warmonger" for wanting to intervene. Had the U.S. supported the rebellion in the first year, the Syrian people would have had a fighting chance to free themselves of the gothically cruel Assad regime. A bombing campaign to destroy Assad's air force would have stopped the dropping of barrel bombs and chemical agents, for example. Russia only sent in its air force to assist Assad in his slaughter a year ago. (The uprising is now five years old.)

The Washington Post claims that "Russian authorities vowed to reveal a larger plot — and some [UNNAMED] in Moscow suggested that the West was to blame for its support of moderate rebel factions in Syria." Unlike how it treats with ridicule discussion of actual conspiracies by the U.S. Deep State, this fanciful conspiracy theorizing is reported respectfully by U.S. media like the Post.

"Putin stopped short of that, [i.e. of blaming the West] saying only, 'We need to know who guided the hand of the murderer.” That is, who to take out our rage on. [3]

There he goes again, with a conspiracy theory. As if passionate (or obsessive, if you want to put a negative spin on it) individuals need to be someone else's puppet to act. Not everyone on earth is a puppet or a puppet-master, Putin.

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, already "knew" it was a conspiracy, and what it was about: “We know [sic] that this is a provocation aiming to destroy the normalization process of Turkey-Russia relations,” Erdogan said immediately in a speech he rushed to give. “But the Russian government and the Turkish republic have the will to not fall into that provocation.” It must be nice to be able to "know" things without having to investigate or discover actual facts. Makes life so much easier to just assume that whatever you want to believe is true. [4] 

Note Erdogan's repeated use of the word "provocation," a favorite word of Russian conspiracy-mongers that traces back to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and probably earlier. Do I detect pandering to the Russians?

Erdogan called Putin to offer condolences, and the two reportedly pledged cooperation against "terrorism." "Terrorism" being code for opposition to state power, including non-violent opposition or even just protest. That's also the U.S. function definition, by the way, as the FBI, DHS, et al routinely brand protesters considered "left wing," such as the Occupy Movement, "terrrorists." So see? Even enemies can agree on something!

Here's a bet, Turkish autocrat Erdogan will blame Gulen for the assassination, or else the Kurds.

One more thing. A single man, motivated by conviction, has imposed more of a cost on Russia for its crimes in Syria than the Mighty Superpower Tough Talking U.S. The U.S. has only jawboned and condemned Russia over Syria. It hasn't even imposed economic sanctions, as it did to punish Russia for interfering with the U.S. takeover of Ukraine. That speaks volumes about actual U.S. "values" and goals. It doesn't care one whit about human rights, self-determination, or freedom.

Unwanted politics intrudes at "a posh art gallery."

A minion of autocracy bites the dust. He won't be dining on caviar tonight.

1]  "Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov shot dead in Ankara," Aljazeera, December 20, 2016. Aljazeera quotes the gunman thusly:

"'Don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria,' the attacker said in Turkish after gunning down the ambassador, as seen on a video shared by Turkish media from the scene.

"'Whoever took part in this cruelty will pay the price, one by one... Only death will take me from here,' the man said while holding a pistol.

"He then continued in Arabic, saying: 'We are the descendants of those who supported the Prophet Muhammad, for jihad.'"

2] "Turkish police officer, invoking Aleppo, guns down Russian ambassador in Ankara," Washington Post, December 19, 2016. The New York Times quoted Putin in almost the same words,  but claims he made the remarks "in an emergency meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and other top officials." The Times version of the quote is  “There can be only one answer to this — stepping up the fight against terrorism, and the bandits will feel this.” "Russian Ambassador to Turkey Is Assassinated in Ankara," NY Times, December 19. The Times quoted the gunman as declaiming,  “God is great! Those who pledged allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!” The Post has him yelling, “We are those who pledged jihad to Muhammad!” Referring to Syria, he added, “Every single person who has a share in this atrocity will pay for it!”

3]  Washington Post, ibid.

4] New York Times, op cit. Funny thing, the guy who messed up Turkish-Russian relations was Erdogan himself. About a year ago, he had his jets shoot down a Russian fighter-bomber over Syria next to the Turkish border (the Turks and U.S. media falsely claimed or implied it was shot down overflying Turkey- it had strayed for a few seconds over the border but was shot down over Syria) because Erdogan was unhappy that the Russians were bombing ethnic Turkmen Syrian rebels. The Russians responded by cutting off the lucrative traffic of Russian vacationers to Turkey. This changed Erdogan's attitude, so he mended fences with Russia. 

Turkey's role in Syria is a mass of contradictions, and shows what a treacherous sea of boiling cross-currents "the conflict" there is. Turkey mainly wants to destroy the Kurds, which the U.S. supports in the Kurds resistance to Assad. But the U.S. makes distinctions between "terrorist" Kurds and "moderate" (i.e. "Good Guy") Kurds, which the Turks don't. Turkey for a long time supported jihadists in an underhanded fashion, allowing them to cross the Turkish border and obtain supplies through Turkey. Jihadists are U.S. enemy Number 1, or maybe Number 2, after Russia, these days, depending on which American ideologue/polemicist/apparatchik/or general you ask, and the day of the week.

Assad has shelled and bombed Turkish border villages several times, and Turkey semi-wants to see Assad gone. Russia is backing Assad in a major way, along with Iran, which has sent troops to help Assad crush the Syrian people, and the Lebanese "terrorist" (to the West) militia Hezbollah is also fighting on Assad's behalf. (Or rather it's the militia arm of Hezbollah, which is a religious/political organization and movement.) So U.S. ally Turkey, where the U.S. has air bases, is bombing U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria, and Assad foe Turkey is getting friendly and cooperative with main Assad backer Russia, whose air force is pulverizing rebel-held cities and towns. 

To make things more interesting, various Arabian peninsula Sunni autocracies- and the U.S. is good buddies with all those repressive monarchies, and supplies them with weapons and munitions and training- are funneling weapons and supplies to the jihadists in Syria-  the jihadists the U.S. wants to exterminate.. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are known to be doing this. 

But no hard feelings: the U.S. is currently helping the Saudis and other associated oil monarchies wage an aerial bombardment campaign of terror against Yemen. They've bombed 58 hospitals so far, with the jets the U.S. sold them, dropping the bombs the U.S. sold them, and flying to and from their targets with the aid of U.S. tanker planes refueling the jets dropping the bombs. And U.S. officers are in the Saudi command posts helping pick targets.

Is that all clear now?

Remembering Investigative Journalist Danny Casolaro, A Martyr For Truth

While writing the previous blogpost this morning (below) about the Obama regime's newly-declared policy of murdering/torturing/imprisoning-without-trial journalists it doesn't like, I was trying to remember the name of the journalist who was murdered by having his wrists slit in a bathtub.

So I did an Internet search (using duckduckgo.com, which claims not to record your searches, unlike Google) for "journalist slit wrists suicide," since the murder was falsely called suicide by "the authorities." Got his name- Danny Casolaro- right on the first page. Then I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory some more, and- Damn!- Karmic coincidence. He was murdered on this date in 1991. Only a 1-in-365 chance of that.

So I guess that means it's my task to commemorate the man and remind people he lived, what he did, and why he was murdered by the regime of Bush the Elder 24 years ago today.

Danny was a genuine investigative journalist. That is, he actually investigated things that those in power wanted to keep hidden, and he was a journalist in that he thought journalism meant reporting truthfully to the public about matters that properly concerned them. Danny was sufficiently intrepid- or reckless and stupid, his murderers would say- to investigate the so-called "October Surprise." This was the secret deal Reagan's gang made with the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini (aka Evil Demon in U.S. propaganda) of Iran back in 1980 to not free the U.S. embassy "hostages" until James Earl "Jimmy" Carter was no longer president. He was also investigating a number of other secret U.S. Deep State scandals, some of which were CIA criminal operations. (These were Iran-Contra terrorist-financing scheme under Reagan featuring the fascist Colonel Oliver North, an American version of Otto Skorzeny; the BCCI CIA terrorist bank; and the Inslaw theft scandal.)

George H.W. Bush is the prime suspect in the murder conspiracy. He was president at the time, he was Reagan's Vice President for the entirety of Reagan's term (January 1981-January 1989), and he was vice presidential candidate in 1988 when the secret treasonous deal with Iran was arranged. (There's a sinister pattern in U.S. history. The Republicans always accuse the Democrats of treason, the Democrats defensively move to the right to try and prove it ain't so, and the Republicans commit treason, which the Democrats remain silent about. Just as the Republicans undercut the efforts of the Carter regime to free the "hostages," in 1968 Nixon sabotaged the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War by secretly instructing the "South" Vietnamese fascist regime to boycott those talks. LBJ knew this through FBI surveillance of the "South" Vietnamese embassy, and warrantless wiretaps of Nixon and others, which he was afraid would be revealed. So Nixon got away with it.)

Bush the Elder was Director of the CIA in 1976. He formed close bonds with fascist cutthroats in that agency, some of whom tried to get him elected president in 1980. (That didn't pan out, but he did get to be Reagan's vice president instead.) During his tenure as CIA boss, the CIA helped smuggle the terrorist bombmaker Michael Vernon Townley into the U.S. from Chile. Townley made and planted the bomb that was used to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C. that same year. A week after the murder, the CIA planted an attributed item in Newsweek, on their "Periscope" page, saying the CIA has determined that the Pinochet regime secret police, DINA, didn't do it. How the CIA could "know" that in just a week wasn't explained. Of course, that was a big fat evil lie, as was subsequently proven. So Bush was a conspirator in an act of international terrorism, a double homicide, and aiding and abetting after the fact. Bush has been tight with the CIA ever since.

The Bush family's ties to terrorism, fascist cutthroats, and criminals are numerous and of long standing, and are no secret except in the U.S. establishment media, which prefers to portray the Bushes in glowing terms. (So much for the "liberal" media.) But if you go to, say, foreign media, or "alternative" media, there is voluminous documentation, as well as in books. See for example "The Bush dynasty and the Cuban criminals," the Guardian, (UK), December 1, 2002. 

A classic fake-out dirty trick was run to discredit the "October Surprise" story. A fake story was generated about Bush himself flying in an SR-71 Blackbird supersonic spyplane to a secret meeting in Spain to cut the deal with the Iranians. This absurd tale was then easily refuted, thus "disproving" the October Surprise "rumor."

A similar style operation was later run on Dan Rather, on behalf of Bush the Younger, regarding that spoiled creep's being AWOL from the cushy slot in the Texas Air National Guard that was arranged by Daddy Bush to keep Bush the Younger out of harm's way during the Vietnam War, yet allowing him to pose as a "veteran" who had "served his country." The real documents were removed from the archives, and forgeries were slipped to Rather's team at CBS, who fell for the bait. When the forgeries were duly exposed, CBS threw Rather overboard. (For some odd reason, American reactionaries have always despised Dan Rather. As Rather is no more "liberal" than the other corporate media talking heads, I never got what their beef was. But highly irrational people are often hard to figure out, especially since their "explanations" for things are equal parts falsehoods and incoherencies.)

These types of covert, nasty operations are one of the hallmarks of both the CIA and the GOP. Both are fascistic, vicious, ruthless, and devious. Both also have a history of murdering people who threaten to expose their crimes. (Scores were murdered just to eliminate witnesses after the assassination of JFK.)

Danny Casolaro had to work as a freelancer. Typically, U.S. media had no use for a genuine journalist who was interested in pursuing critical stories that would shine a light on the criminal nature of the U.S. power structure and expose some of its leading personages as the thugs they are. The U.S. media likes to misappropriate the slogan "speaking truth to power," as if they are brave Davids and not oppressive Goliaths. But those who really do try to speak truth to power are subject to severe retaliation. It could be a broken arm, dislocated shoulder, and torn ligaments, as happened to Medea Benjamin for daring to confront Emperor Obama during one of his speechifyings, it could be imprisonment, or it could be death, as happened to Casolaro.

 Casolaro was only 44 when he died. The beneficiaries of his silencing, Reagan and Bush the Elder, got to live to ripe old ages. (Bush of course is still haunting the earth and arranging who knows what evil schemes with his Saudi partners.) If the U.S. had had a genuine news industry at that time, his murder would have raised an uproar, demands for a real investigation, and followups on the leads he was pursuing.

Wikipedia has some information and links that are useful, although it inexplicably avers that " no evidence of murder was ever found." I beg to differ. His DEAD BODY is rather strong evidence of murder, as well as the totality of the circumstances around his death. Give no credence to that irritating falsehood.

It shouldn't fall to me alone to remind people of this crime, its coverup, and what it reveals about the gangster nature of the U.S. system of power. Really, people who consider themselves progressive or left-wing or opponents of the system of U.S. power, should not let such martyrs- and such crimes- be forgotten. Others have far more resources and support than I do. I think it's irresponsible and even feckless to unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases!) aid and abet a gangster government and ruling class in making sure its crimes stay forgotten.

Danny Casolaro, 1947-1991.