By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
We start with the top story today, which you won’t find anywhere. Meetings today at the Metropolitan Club in Washington DC and elsewhere “out of sight” are proceeding to work out a strategy to declare Donald Trump “disabled” and unable to continue in office.
“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.” Section 4, XXV Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Passed by Congress July 6, 1965. Ratified February 10, 1967 and effectively amending a portion of Article II, Section 1.
One “attendee” told one of our people in Washington that there was a concern that Vice President Pence was “burned” by the FBI during his interview over Mike Flynn’s Russian contacts, leaving Pence open for obstruction and conspiracy prosecution. Without this issue, Trump might already be “perp walked” out of the White House. Several cabinet appointees have turned on Trump thus far including, and imagine this, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Attorney General.
WikiLeaks
For those who follow Russia Today and Sputnik News and who take Wikileaks seriously, strap yourselves in. For others who pay attention, this is going to be a bumpy ride anyway. OK, listen up:
Over the past week, serious did or didn’t shoot down an Israeli F15E aircraft using a Russian BUK 2 missile system. Israel, after denial after denial, is now acting like this really happened.
Here is where this is getting out of hand. The Israeli paper, Haaretz, reported that Putin told Netanyahu to stop attacking Syria. You see, Israel periodically bombs Syria, sometimes actually attacking Hezbollah advanced weapons stockpiles or transport but more often simply aiding ISIS and al Qaeda against the Syrian Army.
Last weeks shoot down of an Israeli plane was the latter, an obvious attack on the Syrian Army on behalf of ISIS in an area where there are no Hezbollah in 250 miles.
After the Haaretz story, Netanyahu announced he was going to keep bombing Syria anyway and that meetings in Moscow between the Israeli ambassador there and the Russian foreign ministry, to discuss these air attacks, may have gone on in a way nobody guessed. Israel is trying to convince the world that they are blackmailing Putin and that he backed down.
Then Israel dealt their Wikileaks card and, combining that with a probable “fake news” leak through a questionable Kuwaiti paper, hit the world with the following conspiracy theories published in YNet News and the Jerusalem Post, the Israel version of the MSM.
- In this story: (http://ift.tt/2mQflUd) Israel claims Iran has accused Russia of selling them a disabled S300 system that could be turned off at any time and that Russia gave Israel the codes that would allow Iran to be bombed.
- It further goes on to say that Syria’s air defenses were sabotaged by Russia as well and that Israel had been bombing Syria all along with Russian help.
- Then it said that Iran fixed Syria’s missiles and they fired at (and shot down) an Israeli plane.
There is a good chance that every word of this is a total lie as it is taken from conspiracy theories spread around Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus by Israeli agents for years under a “well poisoning” program.
Then we get to Wikileaks and two stories from YNet News. Here’s the story: (http://ift.tt/zEUeRF)
According to the leaked document, Israel gave Russia the “data link codes” for unmanned aerial vehicles that the Jewish state sold to Georgia, and in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Tor-M1 missile defense systems that Russia sold Iran.
In a document by a Stratfor employee dated February 2009 she says that she had met with a “Mexican source/friend” who told her that Israel and Russia had contracted a deal several years ago as part of which Israel provided Russia with codes of UAVs it had sold to Georgia. In exchange Moscow provided the Israelis with the codes for Iran’s Tor-M1 aerial defense systems.
The document suggests that the deal was signed before the Russia-Georgia war of August 2008 during which Russian forces invaded Georgia. At the time it was reported that Georgia was using Israel-made weapons.
It can also be understood from the document that the Georgians had at one point realized that their UAVs were compromised and were looking for a replacement for the Israeli made drones.
The Mexican source also addressed the S-300 aerial defense systems which Israel and the West have spent years trying to dissuade Russia from handing over to Tehran. The source said that Israel and Turkey were collaborating very closely in regards to the system and that since Russia sold them to Greece – Turkey’s longtime rival – Ankara has been busy tryinh to crack their codes.
He added that Ankara shared intelligence with Israel to make sure it has an edge over Iran should it get the systems from Russia.
There are a number of issues here. First of all, Stratfor is by our estimation a “sockpuppet” organization which like Israel’s DEBKA, puts out fake news mixed with open source intelligence as a disinformation operation closely aligned with InfoWars, Breitbart and Fox News. We have just conjugated the world “fake.”
The Georgia UAV story is itself outlandish. Israel’s Elbit UAV’s at the time, and I got to play with these, were hobby shop material at best. The Georgia gambit by Israel in 2008 was made possible when George Tenet left the CIA in 2004. Tenet, whose background on the Middle East proved poor at best did have the top guy on Georgia and the region with him, Paul Joyal. I had a chance to review the war and its outcome with Tenet and Joyal, then private citizens, whose version of events is frightfully different than the one WikiLeaks refers to.
You see, and we are only guessing such as we do from time to time, when an outfit like Stratfor needs to get information or better expressed “disinformation” into the mainstream, and knowing Stratfor is not a “big deal,” the only way they could that is to get themselves “hacked” by Wikileaks, who can use the phony persecution narrative of Assange hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy to sell their otherwise shopworn wares.
What is amazing is that an petty outfit like Stratfor is able to reprocess crap disinformation from almost a decade ago into current events through WikiLeaks.
Even more amazing isn’t that Stratfor is being burned by Israel again as an asset but that Israel is also burning WikiLeaks as an asset too.
Attempt II
The next story from YNet is even odder: (http://ift.tt/zEUeRF) Please note that this story is from 2012 and predates the 5+1 agreement of 2015.
In the email, an Israeli intelligence source was asked about Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s comment “the more the merrier” following the mysterious explosion that killed at least 17 people at an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps base near Tehran in November 2011.
At the time, Iran claimed the blast was an accident, but US blogger Richard Silverstein said that Israel was the mastermind.
“I think this is a diversion. The Israelis already destroyed all the Iranian nuclear infrastructure on the ground weeks ago,” said the Israeli source. “The current ‘let’s bomb Iran’ campaign was ordered by the EU leaders to divert the public attention from their at home financial problems.”
48 hours
According to the email, Russia is one of Israel‘s largest military partners and India is Israel’s largest client.
It also claimed that in case of a direct conflict between Israel and Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia would benefit from an oil price hike. On the other hand, China and Europe would suffer if such an event were to occur.
Explosion that killed 17 at Iranian facility (Photo: Reuters)
According to Israel’s plans, claimed the intelligence source, an attack on Iran would last 48 hours but would be so detrimental to the Islamic Republic that it would lead to the collapse of the Tehran government.
The emails, snatched by hackers, could unmask sensitive sources and throw light on the murky world of intelligence-gathering by the company known as Stratfor, which counts Fortune 500 companies among its subscribers.
Some of the emails being published “may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic,” the company statement said.
Hackers linked to the loosely organized Anonymous hackers group said at the beginning of the year they had stolen the email correspondence of some 100 of the firm’s employees. The group said it planned to publish the data so the public would know the “truth” about Stratfor operations.
WikiLeaks and Anonymous maintain the emails will expose dark secrets about the company. Stratfor said in its statement it had worked hard to build “good sources” in many countries, “as any publisher of global geopolitical analysis would do.”
Reuters contributed to this report
Now for a reality check, from The Atlantic:
“The corporate research firm has branded itself as a CIA-like “global intelligence” firm, but only Julian Assange and some over-paying clients are fooled.
The group’s reputation among foreign policy writers, analysts, and practitioners is poor; they are considered a punchline more often than a source of valuable information or insight. As a former recipient of their “INTEL REPORTS” (I assume someone at Stratfor signed me up for a trial subscription, which appeared in my inbox unsolicited), what I found was typically some combination of publicly available information and bland “analysis” that had already appeared in the previous day’s New York Times. A friend who works in intelligence once joked that Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive. As of 2001, a Stratfor subscription could cost up to $40,000 per year.
It’s true that Stratfor employs on-the-ground researchers. They are not spies. On today’s Wikileaks release, one Middle East-based NGO worker noted on Twitter that when she met Stratfor’s man in Cairo, he spoke no Arabic, had never been to Egypt before, and had to ask her for directions to Tahrir Square.
So why do Wikileaks and their hacker source Anonymous seem to consider Stratfor, which appears to do little more than combine banal corporate research with media-style freelance researcher arrangements, to be a cross between CIA and Illuminati?”
The question hanging out there deserves an answer. When Wikileaks seemed to be a hammer helping Russia get a candidate elected who was going to look after their interests, Russia Today and Sputnik News couldn’t say enough about Assange. Now that Israel is digging up Wikileaks crap,coordinated with what to us looks to be a fabricated or “Trumped up” story from Kuwait, one that sets Syria and Iran against Russia, pure Netanyahu masturbation material, perhaps Russia might want to think again before investing in WikiLeaks counterfeit currency.
With Israel peddling air defense systems to China and India are using these conspiracy theories about Russia they created to sell their crap. Then again, when it comes down to real UAV technology, let’s see where Israel get’s theirs:
From DefenseTech:
“Secret U.S. missile and electro-optics technology was transferred to China recently by Israel, prompting anger from the U.S. and causing a senior Israeli defense official to resign.
The head of defense exports for the Israeli Defense Ministry resigned after a U.S. investigation concluded that technology, including a miniature refrigeration system manufactured by Ricor and used for missiles and in electro-optic equipment, was sent to China, according to the Israeli newspaper Maariv.
Another Israeli news site, Aretz Sheva, reports the U.S. is concerned the technology could ultimately find its way to Iran, which last year sought to buy military equipment from China for its nuclear program.
Ricor, on its company website, identifies a number of defense programs using its miniature cryo-coolers, including UAVs, airborne enhanced vision systems, missile warning systems, hand-held thermal imagers and thermal weapons sights.
The Maariv report identified the Israeli defense official as Meir Shalit, and said he apologized to U.S. officials on a recent visit.
Israel has a long record of getting U.S. military technology to China.
In the early 1990s then-CIA Director James Woolsey told a Senate Government Affairs Committee that Israel had been selling U.S. secrets to China for about a decade. More than 12 years ago the U.S. demanded Israel cancel a contract to supply China with Python III missiles, which included technology developed by the U.S. for its Sidewinder missiles, The Associated Press reported in 2002.”
How soon we forget.