Critical Observer

MAKE NO MISTAKE, US SPY SATELLITES SEE EVERYTHING

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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">There is something fishy going on in the way the US is talking about civilian plane crashes that are in some way linked, or said to be linked to Russia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In the case of the latest tragic mid-air break-up of Russian Metrojet Flight 9268, which killed all 224 people aboard on a flight from Egypt back to Russia a few days ago, CNN is reporting US that intelligence sources say US spy satellite showed a “heat signature” that could indicate an explosion aboard the plane.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Here’s the CNN report:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A U.S. military satellite detected a midair heat flash from the Russian airliner before the plane crashed Saturday, a U.S. official told CNN.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Intelligence analysis has ruled out that the Russian commercial airplane was struck by a missile, but the new information suggests that there was a catastrophic in-flight event — including possibly a bomb, though experts are considering other explanations, according to U.S. officials.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Analysts say heat flashes could be tied to a range of possibilities, including a bomb blast, a malfunctioning engine exploding or a structural problem causing a fire on the plane.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Now note that this information about a spy satellite image comes just days after the crash.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Meanwhile, it’s been over a year and a half since the 2014 crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine — an incident that also saw a civilian airliner destroyed in midair. In this case, the US insists the crash was caused by a Russian-built BUK anti-aircraft missile provided to, and launched by pro-Russian separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The US has made this claim ad nauseum, but has never provided a shred of evidence to support its charge. Meanwhile, as a number of critics have pointed out, with Ukraine in a hot civil war in which one side — the post-coup Ukrainian government forces — were getting NATO backing, and the other, the two breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, were receiving Russian backing, it is a certainty that the US had moved not one but multiple spy satellites into position to monitor the region around the clock by the time of the Flight 17 shoot-down.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">So where are the satellite images to support a claim that a BUK missile fired from rebel-held territory and by rebel forces downed that plane, killing all 298 people aboard?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As critics like award-winning journalist Robert Parry and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern have pointed out, if the US had satellite imagery showing a BUK missile contrail — and this large, fast-moving rocket leaves a dramatic contrail all the way from its launch site to its high-altitude target (see below), making assessing of blame quite easy — it would long since have been released or leaked to a US corporate media that have been quick to rub with anti-Russian assertions and propaganda put out by the US government.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This leaves us with two possibilities to ponder:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Either there simply are no satellite photos showing a BUK launched by ethnic Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine at Flight 17, or those photos that exist show something quite different, like a BUK being launched by Ukrainian government forces, or else, perhaps the current claim that satellite images show a heat signature around the Russian plane in Egypt are false (no image has been provided to back up the assertion of a heat signature).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Of course, there may eventually be evidence pointing to a bomb – the Russians are now looking for signs of explosive residue on the wreckage. But until such evidence is found, why, one might ask, would the US jump to make a false claim of a bomb being responsible for the Russian plane crash over the Sinai Desert, when it could as easily have been a fuel tank or engine explosion that wrecked the plane?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Well, consider that at the moment, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been trumping the US in a number of conflict regions, stymying US plans to bring Ukraine into NATO, blocking a US plan to establish a no-fly zone over Syria by openly sending fighter-bombers and cruise-missile-equipped ships to Syria to attack President Bashar al-Assad’s Islamic State and Al Nusra enemies at Assad’s invitation, and backing Iran in its support of both Assad and the embattled Iraqi government. All the while, Putin’s popularity at home has been soaring into the high 80-90percent range <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/22/europe/russia-putin-poll/" style="color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">according to polls</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Perhaps the thinking at the White House is that by suggesting it was a bomb, and not a structural defect that brought down a Russian civilian aircraft, killing hundreds of Russian citizens, the Russian people might logically link that purported bombing to Putin’s actions in Syria and his antagonism of IS and Al Nusra, and might then turn against him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">On one NPR program last week, the reporter was fishing for exactly that idea in an interview with a Washington analyst, saying, “Isn’t it likely that if it turns out to have been a bomb by ISIS that took down the plane Russians would get upset about Putin’s backing of Assad in Syria?” A listener couldn’t miss the unseemly enthusiasm the interviewer had for this gruesome notion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Whatever the investigation of Flight 9268’s flight recorders and wreckage concludes, one thing is clear: If the US has satellites monitoring the Sinai, where there is no war going on, it most certainly had satellites monitoring Ukraine at the time of the downing of Flight 17, and if it’s willing to announce that its satellite caught the moment of the explosion of Flight 9268 and is willing to talk about that, it should also be willing to show what its satellites saw when Flight 17 was downed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The American people, and the people of the world, should demand this of the US government.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1e1e; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.872px;"><b>Article by: </b></span><span class="post_author" style="color: #1e1e1e; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 25.872px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; word-wrap: break-word;"><b>DAVE LINDORFF</b> of counterpunch.org</span></span></div>
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MAKE NO MISTAKE, US SPY SATELLITES SEE EVERYTHING

There is something fishy going on in the way the US is talking about civilian plane crashes that are in some way linked, or said to be ...

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CIA LINKED CHECHEN TERRORISTS JOIN AL-NUSRA IN SYRIA

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<span style="line-height: 1.1;">Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, aka Muhajireen Brigade, has joined al-Nusra, the jihadi terror organization linked to the Islamic State.</span></h5>
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According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a one-man operation run by an anti-Assad activist from Britain, the Muhajireen Brigade made the pledge in a statement distributed by supporters online.</div>
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From Reuters:</div>
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<i>The pledge is a boost for Nusra Front against its rival Islamic State, an ultra hardline jihadist group which has seized territory in Syria and Iraq.</i></div>
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This is clearly not the case.</div>
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In August Infowars.com reported on the close alliance between ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.</div>
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In addition to pledging allegiance to the Islamic state, al-Nusra, according to to its leader, Abu Mussab al-Makdessi, considers ISIS fighters “brothers” and the “ideological bond between us is stronger than anything. We are ready to fight by their side … our blood is their blood.”</div>
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In November the last purportedly “moderate” Syrian rebel group, the Syrian Revolutionary Front, handed over bases and weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra in the Idlib province.</div>
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Additionally, thousands of fighters, many formerly aligned with the Free Syrian Army and other groups supported by the United States and its Gulf Emirate partners, have defected to ISIS and al-Nusra.</div>
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Muhajireen Brigade: An Element of the CIA’s War in Chechnya</h5>
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Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar is comprised primarily of Chechen and other Russian-speaking foreign fighters. It was led by an ethnic Chechen, Abu Omar al-Shishani, aka Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili.</div>
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Batirashvili and two other amirs assumed leading positions in the Syrian jihad and were backed by Chechen warlord Doku Umarov.</div>
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Umarov, described as “Russia’s Bin Laden,” at one time ran a propaganda clearinghouse, the Kavkaz Center, that was funded by the US State Department and various fronts including the National Endowment for Democracy-funded Russian-Chechen Friendship Society. “The former currently supports US efforts to overthrow the Syrian government,” writes <a href="http://www.infowars.com/global-blitzkrieg-wests-terror-battalions-eye-russia-next/" style="background: transparent; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #025ab4; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">Tony Cartalucci</a>.</div>
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Research shows the conflicts in Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan were engineered by NATO and the CIA to destabilize Russia.</div>
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“Ethnic Muslim populations in this region of Russia and of the former Soviet Union, including Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and into China’s Xinjiang Province, have been the target of various US and NATO intelligence operations since the Cold War era ended in 1990,” writes <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/salafism-and-the-cia-destabilizing-the-russian-federation/5304451" style="background: transparent; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #025ab4; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">F. William Engdahl</a>. “Washington sees manipulation of Muslim groups as the vehicle to bring uncontrollable chaos to Russia and Central Asia. It’s being carried out by some of the same organizations engaged in creating chaos and destruction inside Syria against the government of Bashar Al-Assad.”</div>
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Rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab, who vowed to establish a Wahhabist the Caucasian Emirate, were <a href="http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html" style="background: transparent; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #025ab4; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps</a> in Afghanistan and Pakistan.</div>
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Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army. The ISI also played a role in supporting the Afghan Mujahideen, a Muslim paramilitary force that would eventually mature into the Taliban and al-Qaeda.</div>
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The CIA also worked to destabilize the Balkans, a fact <a href="http://www.iacenter.org/bosnia/ciarole.htm" style="background: transparent; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #025ab4; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">documented by the media in Europe</a> but largely ignored in the United States. The effort to convert the Balkans into a “safe haven” for fanatical jihadists was aided by the CIA and the Pentagon. In 1993, CIA asset Osama bin Laden reportedly installed his number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to run the organization’s operations in the Balkans.</div>
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The CIA, British and Turkish intelligence, with ample funding from Wahhabist fanatics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, created the jihadist menace in Syria as part of an effort to overthrow al-Assad and establish a Sunni caliphate in Syria.</div>
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In May Judicial Watch <a href="http://www.infowars.com/dia-docs-west-wants-a-salafist-principality-in-eastern-syria/" style="background: transparent; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #025ab4; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">obtained DIA documents</a> showing the U.S. has supported the Islamic State from its inception as an al-Qaeda offshoot in Iraq and is working with the Wahhabists to establish an Islamic principality or princedom in Syria.</div>
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Original Article by Kurt Nimmo of InfoWars.com</div>

CIA LINKED CHECHEN TERRORISTS JOIN AL-NUSRA IN SYRIA

Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, aka Muhajireen Brigade, has joined al-Nusra, the jihadi terror organization linked to the Islamic State. ...

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