syria

#WWIII? A “Hybrid Geo-Financial War” Between #NATO and Russia Is Dangerously Escalating

May 20, 2016 by mac slavo

Russia is preparing for war against the West.

Putin is being urged to do so because the U.S. and NATO have been preparing for war themselves.

Syria and Ukraine have just been warm ups. The real thing could be around the corner, and other proxy flashpoints are ready to line up.

The rising tensions for military conflict are sharply complicated by the stealthier financial war that is nonetheless taking a serious toll across the globe, in particular as collapsing oil prices put incredible pressure on those regimes who have cast a big social benefits net financed primarily by $100/barrel oil.

As SHTF previously reported, that made Venezuela the most vulnerable, and it is plain today that the oil rich nation is collapsing. However, the manipulation of these prices was also meant to put pressure on Russia (as well as other countries)… while the attempt to undercut Russian natural gas by taking over Ukraine and have NATO supply gas to Europe instead of Russia has so far failed.

It is a sophisticated geopolitical gamble that perhaps no one is winning, apart from who manages not to topple over.

A detailed, but nonetheless alarming article by Alastair Crooke reports that there is significant pressure on Putin from other Russian leaders to take a hard line in the days ahead.

via the Huffington Post:

Putin carries, at one end of his balancing pole, the various elites more oriented toward the West and the “Washington Consensus“ and, at the pole’s other end, those concerned that Russia faces both a real military threat from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a hybrid geo-financial war as well. He is being pressed to come down on the side of the latter, and to pry the grip of the former from the levers of economic power that they still tightly hold.

In short, the issue coming to a head in the Kremlin is whether Russia is sufficiently prepared for further Western efforts to ensure it does not impede or rival American hegemony. Can Russia sustain a geo-financial assault, if one were to be launched? And is such a threat real or mere Western posturing for other ends?

What is so important is that if these events are misread in the West, which is already primed to see any Russian defensive act as offensive and aggressive, the ground will already have been laid for escalation. We already had the first war to push back against NATO in Georgia. The second pushback war is ongoing in Ukraine. What might be the consequences to a third?

In mid-April, General Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee (a sort of super attorney general, as Cohen describes it), wrote that Russia — its role in Syria notwithstanding — is militarily ill prepared to face a new war either at home or abroad, and that the economy is in a bad way, too. Russia, furthermore, is equally ill prepared to withstand a geo-financial war. He goes on to say that the West is preparing for war against Russia and that Russia’s leadership does not appear to be aware of or alert to the danger the country faces.

[…] A retired Russian general entered the fray to confirm that the West is indeed preparing for war — he pointed to NATO deployments in the Baltics, the Black Sea and Poland, among other places — and underlines again the unpreparedness of the Russian military to face this threat. “This is a heavy indictment of Putin,” Cohen says of the revelations from this analysis. “It is now out in the open.”

[…]

The government’s economic policy is being criticized. The opposing faction wants to see an immediate mobilization of the military and the economy for war, conventional or hybrid. This is not about wanting Putin ousted; it is about pushing him to wield the knife — and to cut deeply.

There is every reason to think that the clashing interests of NATO and Russia can and will spark more flashpoints across the map and around the arc that generally surrounds the former Soviet empire, which the United States hopes to contain in order to maintain its own crumbling empire.

While President Obama, now officially the president to oversee the longest period of war (albeit somewhat contracted), may be reluctant to pursue in form of open conflict with Russia, a president like Hillary Clinton may be all-too willing to do so. She has already called in recent days for an escalated ‘war against ISIS,’ which handily also gives an open ended pretext to challenge NATO-Russian conflict points wherever they might appear.

Donald Trump’s positions here are as yet unclear, but he is beginning to surround himself with the same type of advisers – including Henry Kissinger – that have brought us to this point.

With economic decline and a definite fatigue for war, Americans face an end of the dollar as the world currency standard and an era where the BRICS nations, and in particular the militaries of Russia and China, pose an existential threat to the world that the U.S. and Britain carved out in the WWII era and which they essentially won away from the Soviets by the end of the Cold War.

These waxing and waning empires are dangerous as their vulnerabilities and short-comings become exposed, and their territories challenged.

That fact that Putin is being prodded from within Russia to be less diplomatic and more aggressive in posturing for war is downright unsettling. Many of our most dangerous American leaders are all-too willing to poke the bear and evoke a reaction.

Ukraine and Syria, as well as the Georgian conflict before it in 2008, prove that the U.S. will continue waging war and posturing for global domination in spite of the lack of a coherent narrative (but there’s ISIS), or any convincing pretext for sending troops and sponsoring proxy armies.

The American people are sick of war, but the misleaders in Washington are eager enough to reinvigorate their sense of power and entitlement to control the affairs here and abroad. After all, war – in a sick kind of way – is good for the economy, and a big one means a mandate of emergency powers and a period of unquestioning obedience from the domestic population.

The threat is all-too real, and a serious provocation, like the false flag attacks that have sparked most of the wars in the past, could be on the horizon.

That all basically points to WWIII… or at least a full second Cold War. It could be a long way off, but the sense is that the scent is in the air.

What do you think will happen next?

Falling Oil Prices Could Cripple ‘Vulnerable’ Russia, Trigger World War III

Putin “Prepared to Use Tactical Nuclear Weapons” If Turkey/Saudi Invade Syria

Sudden Death In Putin’s Inner Circle: “These Two Guys Just ‘Die’ With Barely A Ripple In the Media”

Putin Targets US Monetary System: “Aims to Eliminate the US Dollar and the Euro From Trade”

SHTFplan and Mac Slavo www.shtfplan.com

#Obama Admin Denies Saying “No Boots on the Ground” in #Syria After Saying It 16 Times | #TRUMP

April 29, 2016 by claire bernish

Claire Bernish
April 29, 2016

(ANTIMEDIA) United States — What does a government do when it’s caught in a flagrant lie? If you are the U.S. government, you simply tell another lie — and laugh at anyone who tries to call out your hypocrisy.

Setting aside his oft-parroted no-boots-on-the-ground imperative, President Obama announced Monday the U.S. would be quintupling the number of special forces troops deployed to Syria to fight Daesh (the so-called Islamic State). In fact, the announcement was made later on the same day Obama claimed to have “ruled out” the deployment of ground troops.

Though this reneging on stated foreign policy has become somewhat par for the course, State Department spokesman John Kirby not only missed the hypocritical move, he flatly and bafflingly denied the Obama administration’s repeated claim there would be “no boots on the ground.”

In fact, instead of taking responsibility for initiating military maneuvers the public might find displeasing, the Obama administration has developed an apparent affinity for nitpicking semantics.

In a press conference, this farcical denial of reality reached stupefying proportions when Kirby was asked by an Associated Press reporter about this stark reversal of policy. All emphasis has been added to highlight the absurdities.

[embedded content]

“I’m just curious if this is, like, part of some kind of devious grand strategy to say one thing and then do the complete opposite of it,” the reporter queried.

“I just — I don’t see it that way,” Kirby responded. “There was never this ‘no boots on the ground.’ I don’t know where this keeps coming from.”

Pressing the point, the reporter expounded, “For months and months and months, the mantra — from the President and … everyone else in the Administration — has been ‘no boots on the ground,’ and now —”

“That is not true,” Kirby interrupted.

“What?!” the reporter exclaimed — apparently as baffled as the rest of the press, heard murmuring in similar disbelief around the room.

“It’s just not true,” Kirby persisted, appearing almost smug, leaning on the podium. “It’s just not true.”

[embedded content]

Of course, it is true — and Kirby’s semantic gymnastics to justify such a brazen lie added an Orwellian twist to the already Kafkaesque press conference. And that truth is written in black and white — even on the White House website, at least as far back as August 2013, when Obama stated:

“[I]n no event are we considering any kind of military action that would involve boots on the ground; that would involve a long-term campaign.”

On August 31, 2013, Obama asserted from the Rose Garden:

“After careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets … We would not put boots on the ground.”

Then, on September 10, 2013 — once again, as found in print on the White House site — he reiterated:

“First, many of you have asked, won’t this put us on a slippery slope to another war?

“My answer is simple: I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.”

On September 3, 2013, he again said:

“[The U.S. involvement in Syria] does not involve boots on the ground.”

September 9, 2013, brought the same statement from the president, in an interview with PBS Newshour:

“Tomorrow, I’ll speak to the American people. I’ll explain this is not Iraq; this is not Afghanistan; this is not even Libya. We’re talking about — not boots on the ground.”

Again, Obama repeated on September 7, 2014, as the Intercept noted:

“In Syria, the boots on the ground have to be Syrian.”

Though after the last statement, Obama’s characterization of ‘no boots on the ground’ began a subtle shift in language — evidencing mission creep — he sustained the narrative troops would not be deployed on the ground.

At the White House on February 11, 2015, reported USA Today, Obama remarked:

“The resolution we’ve submitted today does not call for the deployment of U.S. ground combat forces to Iraq or Syria.”

It’s arguable the United States populace could handle an honest statement outlining policy many may not agree with — such as the deployment of boots on the ground — if the plan were forthrightly presented.

But for Obama and other officials to repeatedly claim as much, and to then have the State Department act as if the people, themselves, have collectively lost their minds when pointing out the mendacious gaffe, is downright laughable — if not profoundly insulting.

It has become clear the United States mission to fight Daesh — with the secondary goal to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — will involve boots on the ground. But it’s questionable whether the Obama administration with ever manage to admit to as much.

This article (Obama Admin Denies Saying “No Boots on the Ground” in Syria After Saying It 16 Times) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: Afghanistan Matters. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

From theantimedia.org Team

Did #Bernie #Sanders Just Go Full Establishment? #feelthebern

April 27, 2016 by michaela whitton

Michaela Whitton
April 27th, 2016

(ANTIMEDIA) Comments made by Bernie Sanders this week may just have blindsided and disillusioned swathes of his support base. Some of those with higher expectations of the ‘peacenik’ candidate breathed a collective sigh of disappointment after he endorsed Obama’s extrajudicial drone assassination program.

At the same time, the Democratic candidate backed the recent deployment of 250 U.S. troops to further death and destruction in Syria. During the town hall meeting at Philadelphia’s National Constitution centre, he told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that the people of the United States have a right to defend themselves. The warmongering endorsement, which could have easily slid under the radar, was slotted into a much wider discussion that included vote-winners like Planned Parenthood, violence against women, marijuana, and gun control.

Despite acknowledging he would do everything to avoid perpetual war in the Middle East, when asked if he would he keep the government’s secret “kill list” if he were to become President, the “progressive” candidate was unhesitant: “Look. Terrorism is a very serious issue. There are people out there who want to kill Americans, who want to attack this country, and I think we have a lot of right to defend ourselves,” he said.

Asked if he thinks the current method in which the White House decides which suspected terrorists are added to the ‘kill list’ is constitutional and legal, he added:

“In general I do, yes.”

While some Bernie supporters came to the slow and painful realisation that there are no saviours, others took to Twitter and accused him of being a quasi-socialist warmonger and brutal imperialist. It appears that soon, the only ones ‘feeling the Bern’ will be the families killed by the drone programme that he fully supports.

This article (Did Bernie Sanders Just Go Full Establishment?) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Michaela Whitton and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

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From theantimedia.org Team

Surprised? #Belgium Knew Terror Attack Was Coming: “Advance and Precise Intelligence Warnings”

March 24, 2016 by contributing author

This article was written by Joshua Krause and originally published at The Daily Sheeple.

Editor’s Comment: If the true facts were to come out, they would so totally contradict the official narrative that the entire paradigm of NATO and the whole of the conflicts in the Middle East would look completely different. If people only understood how manufactured and targeted the terrorism was – in serving as a cattle prod to action – the population would revolt over night.

Instead, the weight of tragedy, of tears and loss and the psychological impact of fear and shock take over logical thinking and, of course, all the world’s headlines. Instead, the reality of these attacks are deceptively spun as an enemy instead of as a deliberate catalyst. Then again, no one is buying the red pill, and they just can’t seem to keep enough blue in stock to keep everybody going. The will of the people seems to be to keep riding along with their abusers and captors, even when escape is possible and even likely. The people have learned helplessness, and become conditioned to action only through fear…

Surprised? Belgian Government Knew Terror Attack Was Coming

by Joshua Krause

On the surface, there really isn’t anything mysterious about Tuesday’s terrorist attack in Brussels. Belgium carried out a small bombing campaign against ISIS last year, and roughly 100 of their military personnel remain in the Middle East in advisory roles. Couple that with the fact that Belgium has a sizeable migrant population from the Middle East, and many of their urban neighborhoods have become no go zones for the authorities, and it becomes shocking that an attack like this didn’t happen sooner.

The country is so out of control, that it has become a breeding ground for Islamic terror groups who use the country as a staging area for future attacks against Europe. In fact, the assailants who committed the brutal terrorist attack in Paris last November were originally based in Belgium.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a terrorist attack was attempted in this country, and it isn’t first time this has happened. The only thing that’s unique about it this time around, is the scale of the devastation. What is surprising however, is the fact that the Belgian government couldn’t prevent this attack. According to some sources like Haaretz, Belgian authorities should have known this was coming.

The Belgian security services, as well as other Western intelligence agencies, had advance and precise intelligence warnings regarding the terrorist attacks in Belgium on Tuesday, Haaretz has learned.

The security services knew, with a high degree of certainty, that attacks were planned in the very near future for the airport and, apparently, for the subway as well.

Despite the advance warning, the intelligence and security preparedness in Brussels, where most of the European Union agencies are located, was limited in its scope and insufficient for the severity and immediacy of the alert.

And that’s not all. Turkey’s President recently said something along similar lines.

Belgium had been notified of the terrorist links of one of the suicide bombers involved in the deadly Brussels attacks when he was deported from Turkey last year, according to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Belgian citizen was detained in Turkey’s southeastern Gaziantep province, which borders Syria, in July of 2015, and was subsequently deported, Erdogan said.

“One of the attackers in Brussels is an individual we detained in Gaziantep in June 2015 and deported. We reported the deportation to the Belgian Embassy in Ankara on July 14, 2015, but he was later set free,” Erdogan said, as cited by Reuters.

“Belgium ignored our warning that this person is a foreign fighter,” he added.

Similar accusations were hurled at the Belgian government following the Paris terror attack. They had all the intel they needed to foil the terrorists, but completely bungled their counter-terror efforts. For many of you reading this, I’m sure alarm bells are ringing in your head. You may be wondering if a conspiracy of some kind is afoot. It almost seems too convenient for Belgium to repeatedly drop the ball on these attacks.

However, it’s just as likely that Belgian authorities are simply incompetent. That’s certainly what many U.S. intelligence officials believe.

News of Tuesday’s attack was met in some parts of Washington with resigned frustration.

“There was only so much we could do to help,” one official explained to The Daily Beast.

“Belgium has been stepping up the amount of people they’re devoting to intelligence and law enforcement but they’re playing catch-up and we’re seeing the terrible results of that today,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on MSNBC.

Indeed, an official said there were warnings as recent as this weekend.

A frustrated U.S. intelligence official bemoaned the state of the counterterrorism apparatus in Belgium and across Europe.

“Even with the EU in general, there’s an infiltration of jihadists that’s been happening for two decades. And now they’re just starting to work on this. When we have to contact these people or send our guys over to talk to them, we’re essentially talking with people who are—I’m just going to put it bluntly—children. They are not pro-active, they don’t know what’s going on. They’re in such denial. It’s such a frightening thing to admit their country is being taken over.”

So what do you think is going on? Is the Belgian government completely incompetent, or are they letting these attacks happen? Honestly, neither would surprise me at this point.

SHTFplan and Mac Slavo www.shtfplan.com

Putin to Withdraw Russian Forces in Syria: “Objectives Achieved… Terrorists Have Been Forced Out”

March 15, 2016 by mac slavo

Now it is Putin’s “Mission Accomplished” moment in the Middle East.

Who can say what Putin’s long term objectives are, but regardless, he has won this round.

His decision to bring Russian troops into Syria has weakened ISIS, secured Assad’s regime (for now) and put American aggression into check.

Perhaps the ceasefire in Syria means that WWIII has also been averted, or at least delayed.

RT reports:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to start the withdrawal of forces from Syria starting Tuesday. Russia will however keep a military presence at the port of Tartus and at the Khmeimim airbase to observe ceasefire agreements.

“I consider the objectives that have been set for the Defense Ministry to be generally accomplished. That is why I order to start withdrawal of the main part of our military group from the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic starting from tomorrow,” Putin said on Monday during a meeting with Shoigu and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“In a short period of time Russia has created a small but very effective military group [in Syria]… the effective work of our military allowed the peace process to begin,” Putin said, adding that with the assistance of the Russian Air Force “Syrian government troops and patriotic forces have changed the situation in the fight with international terrorism and have ceased the initiative.”

The global chess game is hardly over, but President Putin managed to time his moves with the precision of a master. For all its heightened rhetoric, the other side blinked on the supposed “red line” in Syria.

After Vladimir Putin spent considerable effort politely calling out the hoax behind the ISIS crisis in Iraq and Syria – which has been covertly supported by the U.S. and 40 other countries, many of whom belong to NATO – the White House eventually seemed reticent to even go on pretending that it has a case against Assad, or a moral position in the rise of ISIS.

Seemingly, the entire broiling situation has been defused… for the moment anyway.

Erdogan, not Putin, has been caught engaging in a charade, pretending to fight against ISIS while in actuality funding and fueling their rise in the Middle East. It was Turkey who lost all legitimacy as a result of shooting down Russian planes, not the other way around.

The double game was revealed, and Assad is clearly relieved at the “save” on Putin’s part. For Assad, it can’t take much imagination to watch Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi go down, and know that they had plans for him next.

[During a] phone conversation between Vladimir Putin and Syria’s President Bashar Assad … [t]he two leaders agreed that the actions of Russia’s Air Force in Syria have allowed them to “profoundly reverse the situation” in connection to fighting terrorists in the region, having “disorganized militants’ infrastructure and inflicted fundamental damage upon them.”

[…]

Moscow launched its anti-terror campaign in Syria on September 30 last year. Russia’s participation in the operation, according to a previous statement by Putin, has its basis in international law and has been conducted “in accordance with an official request from the president of the Syrian Arab Republic [Bashar Assad].”

The Russian Air Force has been carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) and other terrorist targets in the region, eliminating military equipment, communication centers, vehicles, arms and fuel depots.

As many recall, Putin’s war on terrorism quickly made a mockery out of Obama and Bush’s War on Terror, which has raged on for 15 years only to face setbacks and blowback that has created many fold more terrorists than the region started with.

As RT reported, Putin’s air forces have essentially liberated Syria from terrorist domination, destroyed ISIS petroleum routes to Turkey and ousted them from 400 populated areas… while the U.S. hyped up the threat of ISIS but did little to nothing to stop them:

“Backed by our aviation, Syrian forces have freed 400 populated areas and over 10,000 square kilometers [3,860 square miles] of territories,” Shoigu said during a Kremlin meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Monday.

Terrorists have been forced out from Latakia and Aleppo, and Palmyra has been “blocked,” the military official reported to Putin, saying that military actions to free the UNESCO heritage site from militants continue. Hama and Homs Provinces in central Syria have been largely mopped up, and Kuweires airbase that had been besieged by terrorists for over three years was retaken.

Saying that Russia’s Air Force in Syria has conducted more than 9,000 sorties starting from September 30, 2015 […] “As a result of airstrikes, terrorists’ resources’ provision has been largely cut,” Shoigu told Putin, saying that petroleum trade routes with Turkey, as well as main routes of weapons provisions to terrorists have been blocked.

Nevertheless, the world is hardly peaceful, and with so much angst over the sour deal with Iran and the rise of Trump-lican politics, people would be best to stay on watch for nasty tricks and devilish surprises.

US Complains As Putin Bombs its Terrorists: “ISIS Is An Intentional Creation of U.S.”

Watch Putin Hammer Obama: “Not Grounded In The Real World… Absolutely Unprofessional Politics”

New Patch for U.S. Troops Fighting ISIS… Looks Like ISIS Logo

SHTFplan and Mac Slavo www.shtfplan.com