Russia Has Proof of Turkey's ISIS/L Oil Trade (Turkey Tries To Lure NATO Into War With Russia) Democracy Sold Out to Greed: Western Civilization Over? (Why Would Any Other Nations Want To Emulate U.S.?)

Russia Presents Proof of Turkey’s Role in ISIS Oil Trade

December 02, 2015

Turkey’s leadership, including President Erdogan and his family, is involved in illegal oil trade with Islamic State militants, says the Russian Defense Ministry, stressing that Turkey is the final destination for oil smuggled from Syria and Iraq.

The Russian Defense Ministry held a major briefing on new findings concerning IS funding in Moscow on Wednesday.
According to Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov, Russia is aware of three main oil smuggling routes to Turkey.

Click the title link above to view the maps and video.


I admire Eric Zuesse's dedication to his research on the largely hidden from public view world-turning events on which he reports. It's not only elucidating. It's almost shocking.

But as we learn more and more about what's been transpiring in world politics, these events become quite shocking, revolting (and undoubtedly criminal).

Turkey Tries to Lure NATO Into War Against Russia

Eric Zuesse | 03.12.2015

When Turkey shot down a Russian bomber in Syria on November 24th, Turkish officials did so with the confidence that America’s anti-Russian military alliance, NATO, would protect Turkey against any possible military retaliation by Russia. And, so, Russia restricted its retaliation to merely economic measures.

Sunni Turkey is the increasingly fundamentalist and anti-Shiite NATO member-nation; and, as such, it’s doing what it can to draw the rest of America’s anti-Russian alliance, NATO, into a war by all of them to defeat Russia, because Russia is allied with the Shiite-led nations of Iran and Syria — nations that the Sunni aristocracies (especially the Sauds of Saudi Arabia, and the Thanis of Qatar) want to control, so as to have complete dominance over the Islamic world. Once they achieve that, they can then overtly and publicly support their jihadists to take over Western nations, as well, so as to establish the intended global “Caliphate.” 

Turkey’s government is doing all it can to bring down the non-sectarian Shiite leader of its neighboring nation of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

America’s war to take over Russia (first taking down Russia-ally Saddam Hussein in 2003, then Russia-ally Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, then Russia-ally Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and now trying to take down Russia-ally Bashar al-Assad) is therefore being tugged at by NATO’s lone Sunni member Turkey. Turkey wants America and ‘the West’ to join their (and their Sunni friends, Saudi Arabia’s and Qatar’s) anti-Shiite war, so as to unify the Islamic powers as being all-Sunni, and thus enable them together to crush the other religions and beliefs.

Back in the year 1744, the gang-leader Muhammad Ibn Saud and the rabidly anti-Shiite cleric Muhammad Ibn Wahhab swore an oath to each other in which Wahhab’s clerics would approve the Sauds’ right to rule, if the Sauds adhered to Wahhab’s teachings and waged war against Shiites, and spread the Wahhabist Sunni faith so as to create a Wahhabist Caliphate. This created what became Saudi Arabia. (Outside Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism is called Salafism.)

The United States allied with the Sunnis (Saudi Islam) in 1945, when the British were losing control of Arabia. Sauds had the oil America needed; America had the weapons Sauds needed. During recent decades, Sunni oil aristocracies (especially the Saud family, such as via “Bandar Bush”) have increasingly come to control the U.S. aristocracy, which controls NATO, CENTCOM, and the European Union.

However, recently, the (previously illegal in Turkey) Islamic political party of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took over Turkey in 2003 with him as Prime Minister, and in 2014 with him as President. Turkey has been rising within the Sunni alliance, because Turkey now carries the Sunni banner straight into the Western military alliance itself: NATO. For the first family of global Sunni Islam, the Sauds, this is now a likelier path to victory than is enabling Sunni Pakistan to stockpile nuclear weapons. Even with nuclear weapons, Pakistan has remained absent world power — those nuclear weapons terrify only the neighboring Hindu nation, India.

When Turkey was admitted into NATO in 1952, it entered as being the only Islamic-majority nation that had a non-religious, a secular, government, which had been established in 1922 by the non-sectarian military leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Consequently, until 2014, when Erdoğan took over Turkey and re-established the fundamentalist-Sunni, Salafist, Turkish nation, there was no direct representative of Islamic war-aims inside NATO.

These are specifically war-aims against Shiite rulers — the present leaders of Iran and of Syria, in particular. The Sunni-fundamentalist agenda is therefore entirely in accord with Washington’s agenda against the Shiite-allied nation of Russia. Until Erdoğan took full control of Turkey in 2014, the Sauds and the Thanis shared leadership of the anti-Russian powers along with the United States. Turkey had no oil, nor anything else that was of strategic significance to the West. Turkey’s international power was thus inferior to that of the oil-sheikhdoms.

However, now that there is a fundamentalist Sunni nation, the new Turkey, inside NATO, Turkey joins those two fundamentalist-Sunni nations, alongside the U.S., as one of the Big Four nations in the ongoing war against Russia: U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and now Turkey. What Turkey has access to, which the Sauds and Thanis don’t, is the military resources of the entire 28-nation bloc, NATO.

Consequently, with more fervor than ever before, the United States, and its European followers, are currently trying not only to crush Russia but to crush Shiite-led Islamic-majority nations, especially Iran and Syria. This is the consequence of Turkey’s not merely Islamicization but Sunni Islamicization. Turkey now has a decidedly religious motive for bringing NATO to war. ‘God’ and war go great together.

NATO could actually now become the non-religious dog that might be wagged by its fundamentalist Sunni-religious tail. Even the royal families of Saudi Arabia and of Qatar didn’t possess access to such power. They were never able to get into NATO. They had oil, and America had weapons, and that was the only deal. But now, Turkey is the Salafist member of NATO — as if the Sauds were now in NATO (something the Sauds’ longstanding jihadism — and their funding of Al Qaeda — prohibited).

If NATO is to be anti-jihadist, Turkey will have to be expelled from NATO. Turkey as a jihadist nation violates NATO’s charter. If Turkey remains within NATO, then NATO violates its own charter. Today’s NATO is a threat to the peace even of the 27 non-Salafist member-nations of NATO.

The danger that the U.S. (and its European allies) will be dragged into a World War III against Russia, because of the West’s bonds that had been established with Turkey prior to Turkey’s recent Islamicization — these bonds ignited by the machinations (such as the recent shoot-down of the Russian bomber) from Erdoğan — is recognized in official Washington. 

Christina Lin, a long-time Western scholarly observer of Turkey’s strategic moves, is becoming alarmed that the increasingly overtly Islamic NATO member Turkey is trying to drag NATO towards war against Russia on behalf of Turkey and other Sunni Islamic powers, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar. She is disturbed that together, the three Sunni Islamic nations of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, are trying to bring down the non-religious Shiite leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, for reasons that actually have nothing to do with NATO’s official purposes.

Lin has served at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, the Department of State, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses. 

On November 24th, she wrote:

“As NATO member Turkey is transforming from a secular, democratic system to one
of an increasingly Islamist and autocratic presidential system under Erdogan, it appears the alliance is also transforming from a value-based alliance of human right, democracy, and rule of law to one that is increasingly interest-based.” 

In other words: she is coming to think that these Sunni Islamic powers are having success using their sole NATO representative, Turkey, as their wedge to provoke a Third World War, against Russia and its allies. She opens her commentary by mentioning, though only in passing, Turkey’s recent shoot-down of a Russian bomber.

She continues:

“As [Turkey’s Islamic President] Erdogan embarks on expanding Turkey’s sovereignty through Islamist proxies in the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g., via Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Gaza, Salafi Army of Conquest in Syria), continues occupation of EU member Cyprus, and violates EU member Greece’s territorial airspace and waters, his personal ambition is posing a risk for the NATO alliance.”

She concludes:

“As Erdogan continues to goad NATO to stand in solidarity with Turkey and its territorial expansions in the Levant, it appears the world is now entering a dangerous new phase of an increasingly post-western and illiberal world order.”

She quotes former Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, the retired German General Harald Kujat, as asserting, “Turkey wants to provoke [NATO Article 5 on mutual defence]… Turkey basically wants to drag NATO into this situation because the actual goal of Turkey is to neutralize [euphemism for overthrowing  the non-sectarian Shiite ruler of Syria, Bashar Al] Assad” — to replace Assad with an Islamist Sunni, allied with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, no longer allied with the secular nation of Russia, which stands for separation of church and state (something that’s anathema to all fundamentalist nations, because all fundamentalisms seek rule by God, not by the given nation’s citizenry).

A nation such as today’s Turkey being in NATO is absurd, at best.

America’s President, Barack Obama, is being torn by this. Either he will continue to support the Sunni jihadist powers, who want NATO to go to war against Russia and its allies; or else, he will decide that his desire to crush Russia will have to take a back seat now, to his desire to crush Sunni jihadists, even though he has been supporting the overthrow-Assad Sunni jihadists (such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and all of the other groups now fighting to overthrow Assad in Syria) ever since becoming President in 2009.

Here is how America’s allies against Russia operate, while Obama complains of Assad’s “barrel bombs” and of the sarin gas attack in Syria that Obama himself had actually sponsored (if not planned) in order to have a ‘pretext’ to bomb Syria’s infrastructure.

Now that NATO clearly violates NATO’s peace-sustaining charter, there is another reason to end NATO besides the fact that NATO’s very reason for being, the threat posed by the communist Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact, ended in 1991. The continued existence of NATO makes no decent sense at all. NATO now has jihadists in its midst.

But how can an organization such as NATO now is, be brought peacefully to an end? Or can  it even be done? And, if not, then why  not?

Turkey has been a NATO member since 1952. How can it be expelled? And, if it cannot, then how can NATO dissolve itself? Because one thing is for sure: NATO doesn’t preserve any peace (such as to which its charter is devoted). NATO instead poses the very real danger of precipitating and waging an entirely unnecessary nuclear war, World War III.

The European nations that are being torn apart by millions of refugees that fled wars the U.S. precipitated are insane to stay within NATO, especially if Turkey remains within NATO. All European leaders who accept that situation are traitors to the nation they supposedly represent. As for America’s leaders, they have long been on the warpath.

(Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.)

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Democracy Sold Out To Greed

December 1, 2015

Paul Craig Roberts

[While the “free Western media” cheers, the Western “democratic” governments sell out the peoples of the Western world to corporate tyranny]

John Massaria has turned my interview with Julian Charles into a video.

The video helps me to bring home that “Western democracy” is a sham, a total lie.

Every Western government and Washington’s Asian vassal states are totally under the control of private corporations and private interest groups. The corporations govern, and they are in the process of institutionalizing their governance with the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnerships. The purpose of these “partnerships” is to make global corporations higher than the laws of the “sovereign” countries in which they do business.

Anything, whether law, rule, regulation, or moral principle that interferes with corporate profits is outlawed as “a restraint on trade.”

Western civilization is over and done with. Nothing remains except historical achievements that are no longer understood or appreciated.

America’s Awesome Corruption — Especially in Military

Eric ZUESSE | 24.11.2015

On November 16^th, the great journalist on international strategic and military issues, F. William Engdahl, headlined at journal-neo,  «Do We Really Want a New World War With Russia?» and he documented that, with military expenditures one-tenth of America’s, Russia achieves at least parity with the U.S. in terms of war-fighting capability. It’s a remarkable article, even though it actually brings together into one place the recent disclosures in many media, regarding vital technologies where Russia far outpaces American capabilities. Of course, that’s what’s necessary to do in order to document the extent of Russia’s areas of clear military superiority.

As to the question of whether the areas where the U.S. surpasses Russia’s military technologies might be more or fewer than Russia’s, the key point to consider is, I think, that Russia has now (as Engdahl makes clear) so greatly exceeded U.S. capabilities in certain vitally important respects, so that, at the very most, the U.S., even with all of its alliances etc., would be merely equal to Russia — the Russian military’s areas of excellence are that crucial.

Engdahl quotes one high U.S. military official as saying that Russia’s technologies for disabling U.S. weapons are so shocking that it almost makes him cry. A recent article in Defense News went into even more depth about Russia’s superiority in that particular area — and this was published before the subsequent embarrassing U.S. military back-downs in Syria and elsewhere, which have more recently (especially since 30 September 2015) been necessitated by the uncompetitive U.S. position regarding those vitally important technologies.

Of course, all of this pertains only to America’s corruptness in the expenditures of ‘defense’ dollars (how ironic to use the word «defense» to refer to the military in the world’s most-aggressive nation. Globally, «The US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%)». Honesty would surely dictate a name-change to «The U.S. Department of Aggression». But in official U.S. Newspeak, Russia is, instead, by far, the most «aggressive» nation on the planet.)

Back in 2013, I headlined «How the U.S. Performs in Recent International Rankings», and reported that:

Corruption seems to be a rather pervasive problem in the U.S. On «Diversion of Public Funds [due to corruption]», the U.S. ranks #34. On «Irregular Payments and Bribes» (which is perhaps an even better measure of lack of corruption) we are #42. On «Public Trust in Politicians», we are #54. On «Judicial Independence», we are #38. On «Favoritism in Decisions of Government Officials» (otherwise known as governmental «cronyism»), we are #59. On «Organized Crime», we are #87. On «Ethical Behavior of Firms», we are #29. On «Reliability of Police Services», we are #30. On «Transparency of Governmental Policymaking», we are #56. On «Efficiency of Legal Framework in Challenging Regulations», we are #37. On «Efficiency of Legal Framework in Settling Disputes», we are #35. On «Burden of Government Regulation», we are #76. On «Wastefulness of Government Spending», we are also #76. On «Property Rights» protection (the basic law-and-order measure), we are #42.

However, as regards corruption in the expenditure of military dollars, the U.S. is simply gigantic. On 13 May 2014, 

Stars and Stripes bannered, «Decades Later, Military Still Unable to Account for Its Spending», and reported that:

The military is still running behind in its decades-long quest to audit its spending and rein in waste, Department of Defense comptrollers testified Tuesday to the Senate.

Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps financial managers will be unable to fully meet a midpoint deadline set by the secretary of defense this year for mandated accounting benchmarks. Meanwhile, «serious continuing deficiencies» remain in the accounting efforts, according to a Government Accountability Office report issued Tuesday.

Nearly three decades after U.S. taxpayers gasped over $640 toilet seats and other Cold War military waste, the Department of Defense remains the last federal department still unable to conduct a financial audit despite laws passed in the 1990s that require the accounting.

The Defense Department’s Comptroller admits, in the Department’s latest available financial report:  «The Department cannot produce auditable financial statements».

In other words: that’s a dark hole, down which trillions of federal taxpayer dollars have gone, without so much as a reliable financial record having been kept regarding where and to whom and how it went down into that darkness.

Basically, the U.S. government now has been largely contracted-out, to privately controlled corporations (which collectively spend billions lobbying the U.S. Congress and financing political campaigns); and this is especially true with the Pentagon. It’s the result, since 1981, of increasing application of ‘capitalism’(the dictatorial not the democratic version of that) such as existed in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany, when governmental functions and assets first began to become privatized and the arms-makers became vastly enriched by the resultant asset-sales and the pouring of that money into armaments — to extend the German and Italian aristocracies’ control by conquering countries. Fascist countries are incredibly corrupt; they expand by international theft; and the US DOD (Department of ‘Defense’) is legendarily corrupt.

That’s more than half of U.S. discretionary federal spending — U.S. military expenditures: a dark hole, of corruption.

And here’s how corrupt are the aristocracies of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — the three main U.S. allies in America’s war to remove Syra’s secular, non-sectarian, and consistently anti-jihadist, Shiite leader Bashar al-Assad. To talk about an alliance like that, a pro-Sunni jihadist operation, as constituting ‘the free world,’ or ‘a fight for democracy,’ is to address the public as being not merely fools but stupid fools (suckers), because there is no real freedom in aristocratic-theocratic dictatorships; there is only mind-control, and aristocrats raking in billions from the public through taxes, so as for aristocrats to become enabled to use those public dollars in order to expand their personal empire by international conquest, in conjunction with the U.S. aristocracy — the master-aristocracy (Obama repeatedly refers to it as «the one indispensable nation»), which coordinates the entire fraudulent international business enterprise.

The Israeli government can be added to this list because it receives annually from U.S. taxpayers $3 billion in order to buy yet more weapons from U.S. armaments-makers, and is pushing in the U.S. Congress to increase that to $5B annually. That’s yet more money pouring into firms such as the profoundly corrupt Lockheed Martin. One of Lockheed’s top salesmen was the notorious Adnan Khashoggi, alias Adnan Kasogi. Further in that example, Lockheed is itself controlled by State Street Corporation, which is tagged in one major study as the #5 power-holder globally, and is itself controlled by Joseph L. Hooley, who meets occasionally with other ‘Wall Street’ executives and the U.S. President privately at the White House, to discuss such things as, perhaps, whether the U.S. annual donation to Israel should be increased. Is that, too, «corruption»? How can it not be?

Those people are obliged to their investors, not to the public. Because most of these operatives aren’t generally known to the public, major international business can easily be transacted amongst themselves, in private. And, normally, people such as Hooley are merely agents for a few of the three thousand or so billionaires who actually control international relations and decide whether the path will be war or no-war. Almost all of the soldiers and civilians who then bleed and die in those wars own nothing but their blood and guts. But maybe some of them vote in a democracy — the bane of all aristocrats, because democracy threatens to get in the way of aristocrats’ choices — their ‘free market,’ in which such blood and guts are valued hardly more than they are in a slaughterhouse. It’s just ‘business.’ But all international business is also very much politics, and governments.

The Russian system of military expenditures is diametrically opposite to America’s. Whereas the U.S. has privatized, Russia kept its military industries within the Federal Government. Any profits from weapons-sales go to the Russian government, not to mega-corporate CEOs, etc. The weapons-manufacturers are part of the government. Just like in the U.S., there are no published financial reports on its operations; but, there are financial reports every year that are reviewed by the Ministers of Defense, and, above that, by the President and the Prime Minister — these being people who are accountable to the voters, not merely to some aristocracy of corporate stockholders. In the U.S. there are no such financial reports at all. Instead, America’s politicians just see the dollars flowing into their ‘election’ (more like aristocratic selection) campaigns.

Russia is getting a far bigger bang for their military bucks. As the Obama Administration tries now increasingly to strangle Russia, not just economically but also militarily, this lesser-seen component of America’s vast corruption is coming more and more to light, even if the financial operations behind it are not.

And yet, the American public think that the ‘Defense’ Department and all its contractors, and the associated national-security operations such as CIA, Homeland Security, etc., exist primarily in order to protect the American people, rather than to protect and to expand the empire of, America’s aristocracy, who, via their investment funds and ‘nonprofits,’ own the press, the military firms, etc. It’s a network of power, which benefits the more, to the extent that the public are in fear and contempt, against ‘those aliens,’ or ‘those foreigners,’ not of their own nation’s aristocracy, who are actually pulling the strings and destroying everyone else’s security and lives.