REVEALED: U.S. Tested Carcinogenic Chemicals On Unknowing Canadian Civilians During The Cold War
By Aaron Kesel | Activist Post | October 6, 2017
The U.S. Army secretly tested carcinogenic chemicals on unknowing residents of Canada in Winnipeg and Alberta during the Cold War in testing linked to weaponry involving radioactive ingredients meant to attack the Soviet Union, according to classified documents revealed in a new book Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans by Lisa Martino-Taylor, an associate professor of sociology at St. Louis Community College.
The incidents occurred between July 9, 1953 and Aug 1, 1953 when they sprayed six kilograms of zinc cadmium sulfide onto unsuspecting citizens of Winnipeg from U.S. Army planes. The Army then returned 11 years later in 1964 and repeated the experiments in other parts of Canada including Suffield, Alta. and Medicine Hat, Alta., according to Martino-Taylor, National Post reported.
“In Winnipeg, they said they were testing what they characterized as a chemical fog to protect Winnipeg in the event of a Russian attack,” Martino-Taylor said. “They characterized it as a defensive study when it was actually an offensive study.”
Canada knowingly participated in this experiment as part of an agreement it held with the U.S. and England but was allegedly not told about what was being sprayed on its citizens, according to Martino-Taylor.
In 1964, a memo from Canadian officials expressed concern that an “American aircraft was emitting distinctly visible emissions,” Martino-Taylor said.
In Canadian and U.S. documents, the tests were referenced as biological and chemical when documents suggest they actually involved combining the two with radiological components to form a combined weapon.
The U.S. was working on producing a radioactive nerve agent that combined the dangerous phosphorus-32 and VX chemical compounds.
“The zinc cadmium sulfide acted as a fluorescent tracer which would help the U.S. Army determine how the radioactive fallout from a weapon used on the Soviets would travel through wind currents,” Martino-Taylor said.
An additional 1964 memo from Suffield mentions that the U.S. Army wanted to travel Suffield to “discuss the use of radioactive tracer techniques in chemical weapons trials.” While preparing for other tests involving BG, a bacteria, the U.S. Army drafted the number of hospitals and hospital beds available in the area, showing a potential further connection to the CIA’s human experimentation MK-Ultra project.
It’s a known fact the Allan Memorial Institute in Royal Victoria Hospital is seen as the cradle of modern torture, and that Scottish-born Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron was heavily involved in subproject 68. Cameron also had partial funding funneled by the CIA (approx. $62,000) and the Canadian government for its brainwashing experiments and torture, according to The McGill Daily.
So was the U.S. planning on expanding its torture experiments into Suffield?
For decades the massive Suffield Base in Alberta was one of the largest chemical and biological weapons research centers in the world. A 1989 Peace Magazine article explained, “For almost 50 years, scientists from the Department of National Defence have been as busy as beavers expanding their knowledge of, and testing agents for, chemical and biological warfare (CBW) in southern Alberta,” Global Research reported.
“The U.S. was very aggressive,” Martino-Taylor said. “Canada seemed less on board as I read through the documentation.”
Until now it was thought the U.S. only experimented on its own people, but it’s now known that they also experimented on their neighbors in Canada and tried to expand that experimentation to the levels it did in the U.S.
The CIA did several unethical human experiments in the United States. In one instance they injected radioactive material into hospital patients without their consent at all. While other experiments were performed on pregnant women in Nashville who were given a radioactive iron cocktail to ingest so that researchers could determine if cancer could be passed on to their offspring. Even children were fed radioactive oatmeal as part of a “science club,” Martino-Taylor said.
Yes, this is your secret history of previous deep state experiments. Another by the U.S. Army inside the continental United States revealed by Martino-Taylor also involved spraying the same zinc cadmium sulfide particles over much of the U.S. across several cities including St. Louis and Texas; that project was known as Operation LAC (Large Area Coverage.)
The public was tricked and told the experiment was to set up smokescreens that the Army could deploy to shield the U.S. from any nuclear assault by Russia at the time. In reality, they were testing biological agents on the population harming their health.
“The study was secretive for a reason. They didn’t have volunteers stepping up and saying yeah, I’ll breathe zinc cadmium sulfide with radioactive particles,” St Louis Professor, Martino-Taylor told KSDK. “This was a violation of all medical ethics, all international codes, and the military’s own policy at that time.”
The report didn’t note whether the experiments in Canada were connected to Operation LAC, though it has several similarities to the project, or whether this was a bigger part of Project 112. However, for years the Canadian government has denied that it tested any bioweapons in Alaska and Alberta as well as spraying “simulated bio-weaponry across North American cities, including Winnipeg.”
Pathogens for War, by University of Western Ontario historian Donald Avery, notes that Canadian scientists were intimately involved in U.S. bioweapons research until 1969, when then-president Richard Nixon unilaterally ended the program. Significant quantities of toxins, including sarin and the nerve agent VX, were stockpiled at Suffield until at least 1989, The Star reported.
The U.S. government has a longstanding policy for human experimentation, experimenting on its civilian population for decades since the 1950s (Cold War) doing a total of 239 “germ-warfare” tests over populated areas.
The United States scrapped its biological weapons program in the late 1960s and agreed in a 1997 treaty, the “Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons” to destroy all its chemical weapons.
The goal “was to deter the use of biological weapons against the United States and its allies and to retaliate if deterrence failed,” the government explained. “Fundamental to the development of a deterrent strategy was the need for a thorough study and analysis of our vulnerability to overt and covert attack.”
A 1997 report from the National Research Council concluded that the Army’s secret tests “did not expose residents of the United States and Canada to chemical levels considered harmful.” However, the same report admitted that there was little research on the chemical used and mostly based on very limited animal studies.
Three House Democrats who represent areas where testing occurred — William Lacy Clay of Missouri, Brad Sherman of California and Jim Cooper of Tennessee — have expressed outrage by the revelations, NY Post reported.
Cooper’s office plans to seek more information from the Army Legislative Liaison, spokesman Chris Carroll said.
“We are asking for details on the Pentagon’s role, along with any cooperation by research institutions and other organizations,” Carroll said. “These revelations are shocking, disturbing and painful.”
“I join with my colleagues to demand the whole truth about this testing and I will reach out to my Missouri Delegation friends on the House Armed Services Committee for their help as well,” Clay said in a statement.
Yet the government today still denies spraying death dumps of chemicals across the sky and calls the belief a conspiracy theory, ridiculing those who accuse such practice as a “conspiracy theorist,” despite the fact that they did unethical human experimentation through the spraying of chemicals 50 years ago.
Follow Aaron Kesel at Twitter and Steemit.
Image Credit: Natural Blaze
Facebook Reportedly Removes Russia References From Report on Election Influence
Sputnik – 06.10.2017
Despite its recently released report claiming that Russia-linked entities allegedly bought $100,000 worth of political ads before and after the US presidential election, Facebook has decided to omit Russia references from its April 2017 white paper covering the influence on the public opinion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Facebook staff were debating on whether to include references to Russia in a public report on “false news” spread via the social network and eventually decided against it, so the white paper issued in April makes no mention of it, according to the Wall Street Journal newspaper.
Some people working in the company insisted that Russia should not be mentioned in the report on the attempt to influence the US presidential campaign in 2016 as Facebook had no proof of subversive activities, the WSJ reported on Thursday, citing sources familiar with the situation.
The April report said that “malicious actors” were involved in an attempt to compromise certain political targets and to push certain narratives, but stressed that it could not say with any certainty who was sponsoring these activities. Facebook said in April that it would add new technologies to weed out fake accounts and improve security.
The media report comes after Facebook said in early September that supposedly Russia-linked entities bought $100,000 worth of political ads linked to inauthentic pages in a two-year period up to May of this year. According to the company, these pages were found to be linked and were “likely operated” out of Russia. Most of the ads did not reference the US presidential election, but focused on amplifying divisive social and political messages.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow was not behind the ads or even aware of them.
According to media reports, the US Senate Intelligence Committee has asked senior managers from Facebook, Google and Twitter to testify in front of the US Congress at a public hearing scheduled for October as part of the probe into Russia’s alleged attempts to use social media to influence the election. Russia has faced persistent allegations of having interfered in the 2016 US election, many of them suggesting that an information campaign took place on social media. Russian officials have denied meddling in other states’ domestic affairs.
Russian election meddling probe will show media ran untrue stories – head of US investigation
RT | October 6, 2017
The investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election will ultimately show that “quite a few” news outlets ran stories that were not factual, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told Politico.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said that although his committee will not be investigating news organizations, it does plan on providing the public with the information needed to hold them responsible for what they reported.
“We’re not going to investigate news organizations, but we will use the findings of our report to let the American people hold every news organization accountable for what they portrayed as fact, in many cases without sources — at least, no sources that would admit to it,” Burr told Politico on Thursday.
“And I think, when we finish our report, we will find that quite a few news organizations ran stories that were not factual,” he added.
He went on to state that some incorrect news stories had also emerged since Wednesday’s news conference held by himself and Senator Mark Warner, which was aimed at providing an update on the status of the investigation into alleged Russian meddling.
Burr’s comments come after US President Donald Trump questioned why the Senate Intelligence Committee fails to investigate so-called “fake news.”
Trump has often criticized the mainstream media for its reporting of alleged Russian meddling in the presidential election, and has referred to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the matter as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.”
Russia, for its part, has consistently denied any interference in the election.
KPFA’s Antiwar Voice
By Daniel Borgström | Dissident Voice | October 5, 2017
When people ask me why I joined the Marine Corps (at age 18, back in 1959), I tell them, “Because where I grew up there was no KPFA or Pacifica Radio affiliate.” There was just the constant corporate drumbeat of anti-Communism which took many forms, often pretending to advocate world peace, but always in one way or another campaigning against China and Russia.
I’m told that KPFA bravely exposed Cold War propaganda during the McCarthy era. But in recent years our station has been backsliding, subtly but increasingly echoing the corporate media’s calls for “humanitarian” interventions around the world. Some KPFA hosts feature guests from NGOs aligned with the U.S. State Department, giving them airtime, presenting them as though they were doing good work abroad, and not asking them hard questions or revealing where they get their funding.
Since Trump’s election, KPFA has taken a sharp turn for the worse, presenting itself as a voice of “resistance” — a resistance that does not resist war. While vigorously bashing Trump (who does deserve bashing), the station often functions as a pseudo-progressive voice of the Deep State, echoing the mainstream media and the neoliberals and neocons.
Children and impressionable teenage listeners (potential future military recruits such as I once was) could get the perception from some KPFA programs that America’s proper mission in today’s world should be to sally forth to find and slay monsters.
Once upon a time it was KPFA’s mission to expose such propaganda, and that’s what KPFA needs to get back to doing, to find its soul and once again become an antiwar voice.
Daniel Borgström is an ex-Marine against the war, a veteran occupier. He can be reached at: danielfortyone@gmail.com.
The Mystery of the Russia-gate Puppies
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | October 4, 2017
What is perhaps most unprofessional, unethical and even immoral about the U.S. mainstream media’s coverage of Russia-gate is how all the stories start with the conclusion – “Russia bad” – and then make whatever shards of information exist fit the preordained narrative.
For instance, we’re told that Facebook executives, who were sent back three times by Democratic lawmakers to find something to pin on Russia, finally detected $100,000 worth of ads spread out over three years from accounts “suspected of links to Russia” or similar hazy wording.
These Facebook ads and 201 related Twitter accounts, we’re told, represent the long-missing proof about Russian “meddling” in the U.S. presidential election after earlier claims faltered or fell apart under even minimal scrutiny.
In the old days, journalists might have expressed some concern that Facebook “found” the ads only under extraordinary pressure from powerful politicians, such as Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading legislator on the tech industry. But today’s mainstream reporters took Warner’s side and made it look like Facebook had been dragging its heels and that there must be much more out there.
However, it doesn’t really seem to matter how little evidence there is. Anything will do.
Even the paltry $100,000 is not put in any perspective (Facebook has annual revenue of $27 billion), nor the 201 Twitter accounts (compared to Twitter’s 328 million monthly users). Nor are the hazy allegations of “suspected … links to Russia” subjected to serious inspection. Although Russia is a nation of 144 million people and many divergent interests, it’s assumed that everything must be personally ordered by President Vladimir Putin.
Yet, if you look at some of the details about these $100,000 in ads, you learn the case is even flimsier than you might have thought. The sum was spread out over 2015, 2016 and 2017 – and thus represented a very tiny pebble in a very large lake of Facebook activity.
But more recently we learned that only 44 percent of the ads appeared before Americans went to the polls last November, according to Facebook; that would mean that 56 percent appeared afterwards.
Facebook added that “roughly 25% of the ads were never shown to anyone. … For 50% of the ads, less than $3 was spent; for 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent.”
So, as miniscule as the $100,000 in ad buys over three years may have seemed, the tiny pebble turns out really to be only a fraction of a tiny pebble if the Russians indeed did toss it into the 2016 campaign.
What About the Puppies?
We further have learned that most ads weren’t for or against a specific candidate, but rather addressed supposedly controversial issues that the mainstream media insists were meant to divide the United States and thus somehow undermine American democracy.
Except, it turns out that one of the issues was puppies.
As Mike Isaac and Scott Shane of The New York Times reported in Tuesday’s editions, “The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. … There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”
Now, there are a lot of controversial issues in America, but I don’t think any of us would put puppies near the top of the list. Isaac and Shane reported that there were also supposedly Russia-linked groups advocating gay rights, gun rights and black civil rights, although precisely how these divergent groups were “linked” to Russia or the Kremlin was never fully explained. (Facebook declined to offer details.)
At this point, a professional journalist might begin to pose some very hard questions to the sources, who presumably include many partisan Democrats and their political allies hyping the evil-Russia narrative. It would be time for some lectures to the sources about the consequences for taking reporters on a wild ride in conspiracy land.
Yet, instead of starting to question the overall premise of this “scandal,” journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. keep making excuses for the nuttiness. The explanation for the puppy ads was that the nefarious Russians might be probing to discover Americans who might later be susceptible to propaganda.
“The goal of the dog lovers’ page was more obscure,” Isaac and Shane acknowledged. “But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.”
The Joe McCarthy of Russia-gate
The Times then turned to Clinton Watts, a former FBI agent and a top promoter of the New McCarthyism that has swept Official Washington. Watts has testified before Congress that almost anything that appears on social media these days criticizing a politician may well be traceable to the Russians.
For instance, last March, Watts testified in conspiratorial terms before the Senate Intelligence Committee about “social media accounts discrediting U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.” At the time, Ryan was under criticism for his ham-handed handling of a plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, but Watts saw possible Russian fingerprints.
Watts also claimed that Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential bid “anecdotally suffered” from an online Russian campaign against him, though many of you may have thought Rubio flamed out because he was a wet-behind-the-ears candidate who performed robotically in the debates and received the devastating nickname “Little Marco” from Donald Trump.
Watts explained that these nefarious Russian schemes left no discernible earmarks or detectable predictability. Russians attack “people on both sides of the aisle … solely based on what they [the Russians] want to achieve in their own landscape, whatever the Russian foreign policy objectives are,” Watts complained.
Watts’s vague allegations appear to have been the impetus behind Sen. Warner’s repeated demands that Facebook find some evidence to support the suspicions. After Facebook came up empty twice, Warner flew to Silicon Valley to personally confront Facebook executives who then found what Warner wanted them to find, the $100,000 in suspected Russia-linked ad buys.
So, it perhaps made sense that the Times would turn to Watts to explain the rather inexplicable Russian exploitation of puppies. According to Isaac and Shane, Watts “said Russia had been entrepreneurial in trying to develop diverse channels of influence. Some, like the dogs page, may have been created without a specific goal and held in reserve for future use. ‘They were creating many audiences on social media to try to influence around,’ said Mr. Watts, who has traced suspected Russian accounts since 2015.”
In other words, if you start with the need to prove Russian guilt, there are no alternative explanations besides Russian guilt. If some fact, like the puppies page, doesn’t seem to fit the sinister conspiracy theory, you simply pound it into place until it does.
Yes, of course, Russian intelligence operatives must be so sneaky that they are spending money (but not much) on Facebook puppy ads so they might sometime in the future slip in a few other ideological messages. It can’t be that perhaps the ads were not part of some Russian government intelligence operation.
The Russ-kie Plot
But even if we want to believe that these ads are a Russ-kie plot and were somehow intended to sow dissension in the U.S., the totals are insignificant, a subset of a subset of a subset of $100,000 in ad buys over three years that, as far as anyone can tell, had no real impact on the 2016 election – and surely much, much, much less than the political influence from, say, Israel.
If we apply Facebook’s 44 percent figure, that would suggest the total spending in the two years before the election was around $44,000 and much of that focused on a diverse set of issues, not specific candidates. So, if some Russians did spend money to promote gay rights and to push gun rights, any negligible impact on the 2016 election would more or less have been canceled out between Clinton and Trump.
Yet, over these still unproven and speculative allegations of Russian “links” to these Facebook ads, the national Democrats and their mainstream media allies are stoking a dangerous and expensive New Cold War with nuclear-armed Russia.
I realize that lots of Democrats were upset about Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat and don’t want to believe that she could have lost fairly to a buffoon like Donald Trump. So, they are looking for any excuses rather than looking in the mirror.
The major U.S. news outlets also have joined the anti-Trump Resistance, rather than upholding the journalistic principles of objectivity and fairness. The Post even came up with a new melodramatic slogan for the moment: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
But yellow journalism is not the way to shed light into darkness; it only blinds Democrats from seeing the real reasons behind Trump’s appeal to many working-class whites who feel disaffected from a Democratic Party that seems disinterested in their suffering.
Yes, I know that some Democrats are still hoping against hope that they can ride Russia-gate all the way to Trump’s impeachment and get him ridden out of Washington D.C. on a rail, but the political risk to Democrats is that they will harden the animosity that many in the white working class already feel toward the party.
That could do more to strengthen Trump’s appeal to these voters than to weaken him, while hollowing out Democratic support among millions of peace voters who may simply declare a plague on both parties.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
Trampling Core American Values US Cracks Down on RT
By Andrei AKULOV | Strategic Culture Foundation | 02.10.2017
RT America, the American arm of the state-owned Russia Today, has been notified by the Department of Justice (DOJ) that it must register as a foreign agent that is disseminating propaganda in the United States under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Otherwise, it might face restrictions that would make it unable to continue work in the country. Passed in 1938, FARA requires those who represent the interest of foreign powers to disclose their relationship along with information about related activities and finances. The DOJ is also investigating Sputnik, another Kremlin-controlled media organization, which could also be compelled to register under FARA.
The law normally applies to political consultants and those working in lobbying or public relations. The enforcement of FARA has been weak historically. There are 401 entities in the active FARA register that include tourist boards and lobbyists. Normally, media organizations have been exempted from the law. After all, RT and Sputnik are legitimate news outlets no different than the BBC or Germany’s Deutsche Welle, neither of which is subject to FARA. The legal pressure upon them has grave implications for freedom of speech.
RT America can continue to operate in the United States but it will have to regularly submit the information about its sources of foreign government-tied revenue and the contacts it made the US. Any news product must be labeled as being influenced or financed by the Russian government. The broadcaster might be asked to provide the list of all the employees, their salaries, home addresses and telephones.
Earlier this year, a Democratic senator and two congressmen from both parties introduced a bill called the Agents Registration Modernization and Enforcement Act, which would broaden the scope of FARA. They specifically named RT as a target of the legislation.
RT and Sputnik were identified in a US intelligence report in January as being arms of Russia’s “state-run propaganda machine” that served as a “platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.” The report states that the outlets played a role in Russia’s “influence campaign” to back Donald Trump and attack Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to it, RT “actively collaborated with WikiLeaks” during the presidential election. The paper asserts that Sputnik and RT “consistently cast President-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment.”
According to RT editor- in-chief Margarita Simonyan, the registration “may entail restrictions that will simply not allow us to work in” the United States. She pointed out that a campaign to “ruin the reputation” of RT was followed by “people being put under critical pressure so that they won’t appear on air and stopped giving us interviews.” On September 29, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a Security Council meeting that Russian media outlets abroad were facing increasing and “unacceptable” pressure. That statement followed an accusation the previous day by the Russian Foreign Ministry that the United States was placing “unwarranted pressure” on Russia’s RT television network by compelling it to register as a foreign agent. The Ministry said that every move in relation to a Russian media will have a relevant response.
The recent attack against RT and Sputnik is part of a broader picture. The US countermeasures aren’t limited to those stemming from Mueller’s probe. The Department of Homeland Security has said all government agencies must stop using Kaspersky Lab products within 90 days, fearing that the Moscow-based cybersecurity company might be susceptible to Kremlin influence.
It makes spring to mind the hysteria over the activities of former Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, who was accused of attempts to influence the presidential election and other wrongdoings just because he met some people, which is part of his job. The NATO-linked Atlantic Council went as far as Poland to include RT into the list of targets for cyberattacks!
35 Russian diplomats were expelled from the US in late 2016. In early September, three Russian diplomatic outposts – the consulate in San Francisco and trade offices in Washington and New York – were seized after it was confirmed that the Russian staff had complied with the administration’s order to get out within two days. It was done in open violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, Article 17 of which states that «the receiving State shall, even in case of armed conflict, respect and protect the consular premises, together with the property of the consular post and the consular archives». The same way the attacks against the media outlets violate the universally accepted norms of freedom of speech.
Actually, the US itself is involved in activities it tries to put the blame on Russia for. The government spends budget money on involvement in other states internal affairs and propaganda efforts. In 2008, the State Department created the Digital Outreach Team to engage on Internet sites, including on blogs, news sites and discussion forums. Formally, its mission is to “explain US foreign policy and to counter misinformation”.
It was the British Guardian, not a Russian newspaper, that published the story about the Pentagon’s Operation Earnest Voice (OEV) program. The aim of the initiative is to develop software that would allow to secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. The publication said the US military was developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets”. Each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries”.
The Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014 envisaged providing funds “to strengthen democratic institutions and political and civil society organizations in the Russian Federation.” As part of anti-Russian sanctions, the US State Department allocated $60 million to ‘Russian democratic and civil organizations for the support of media and free internet in Russia’ from 2016 to 2018. The State Department is to allocate $20 million annually for these purposes, acting both directly and via Soros’s National Endowment for Democracy.
The list can go on. The hunchback does not see his own hump. Looks like the US administration under pressure from Congress is doing its best to thwart any attempts to ease the tensions between the two countries. It does not hesitate to use any methods to achieve the goal, including trampling on the core America value such as freedom of speech.
What Did Washington Achieve in its Six Year War on Syria?
By Ron Paul | October 2, 2017
Now that the defeat of ISIS in Syria appears imminent, with the Syrian army clearing out some of the last ISIS strongholds in the east, Washington’s interventionists are searching for new excuses to maintain the illegal US military presence in the country. Their original rationale for intervention has long been exposed as another lie.
Remember that President Obama initially involved the US military in Iraq and Syria to “prevent genocide” of the Yazidis and promised the operation would not drift into US “boots on the ground.” That was three years ago and the US military became steadily more involved while Congress continued to dodge its Constitutional obligations. The US even built military bases in Syria despite having no permission to do so! Imagine if Syria started building military bases here in the US against our wishes.
After six years of war the Syrian government has nearly defeated ISIS and al-Qaeda and the US-backed “moderates” turned out to be either Islamist extremists or Kurdish soldiers for hire. According to a recent report, the US has shipped two billion dollars worth of weapons to fighters in Syria via eastern Europe. Much of these weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS directly, or indirectly through “moderates” taking their weapons with them while joining ISIS or al-Qaeda.
“Assad must go,” proclaimed President Obama back in 2011, as he claimed that the Syrian leader was committing genocide against his own people and that regime change was the only way to save Syrians. Then earlier this year, when eastern Aleppo was about to be liberated by the Syrian government, the neocons warned that Assad would move in and kill all the inhabitants. They warned that the population of eastern Aleppo would flee from the Syrian army. But something very different happened. According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, 600,000 refugees returned to Syria by August. Half of the returnees went back to Aleppo, where we were told Assad was waiting to kill them.
What happened? The neocons and “humanitarian interventionists” lied. Just as they lied about Libya, Iraq, and so on.
While it was mostly ignored by the mainstream media, just this week a Christian was elected speaker of the Syrian parliament. The new speaker is a 58-year-old Orthodox Christian law graduate and member of President Assad’s Baath party.
How many Christians does our “ally” Saudi Arabia have in its parliament? Oh I forgot, Saudi Arabia has no elected parliament.
Why does it seem that US policy in the Middle East always hurts Christians the most? In Iraq, Christians suffered disproportionately from the 2003 US invasion. In fact there are hardly any Christians left. Why aren’t more US Christian groups demanding that the US get out of the Middle East?
The US is not about to leave on its own. With ISIS all but defeated in Syria, many in Washington are calling for the US military to continue its illegal occupation of parts of the country to protect against Iranian influence! Of course before the US military actions in Iraq and Syria there was far less Iranian influence in the region! So US foreign interventionism is producing new problems that can only be solved by more US interventionism? The military industrial complex could not have dreamed of a better scheme to rob the American people while enriching themselves!
What have we achieved in Syria? Nothing good.
The problem with modern “journalism” summed up in one story
By Kit | OffGuardian | October 1, 2107
That a protest Facebook/twitter account focusing on the mistreatment of black people by American police was actually a fake account run by Russians to make the US look bad and spread division in the West… is one hell of a claim. If you were to make it, you’d probably be expected to supply evidence to back up your accusation. That’s only reasonable.
Well, CNN don’t feel the need. Two days ago they reported this story verbatim, here. Under the headline:
Exclusive: Fake black activist accounts linked to Russian government
Now, the headline doesn’t say HOW these accounts were linked to Russia, or indeed who linked them. But that’s OK, because neither does the body of the text. There’s not a single link, source or piece of evidence cited at all. The only basis for the claim is:
two sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN
That’s it. In total. They never say who these two sources are (leaving the very real possibility they don’t even exist), they never say what their supposed “knowledge of the situation” is. They tell us nothing of any note, and have the gall to put “exclusive” in the headline.
“Some guy said so” is NOT an exclusive.
The Guardian then took this one step further down the path of insanity – they reported that CNN had reported, that 2 guys told them something. Their headline…
Did Russia fake black activism on Facebook to sow division in the US?
… at least has the decency to use a question-mark, although none of that implied doubt makes into the body of the article. They don’t mention that CNN never provided any evidence of this claim, or CNN’s anonymous sources. Instead they choose to focus on whether or not it sounds plausible. After providing soundbites from professors who study “Russian interference in elections”, and referencing the Soviet Union’s supposed support of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, they decide that it does sound plausible. And since it’s plausible… it’s probably true. Right?
No reference to the keystone questions of journalism – who, when, where, why, how. No reference to evidence or sources, or agendas. Just a vague analysis of the plausibility of a rumor started by CNN on the basis of two anonymous sources with “knowledge of the situation”. This is the modern method of spreading propaganda – through a concerted effort of repetition without evidence, you can turn a lie into a “fact”.
That is the cancerous absurdity of today’s “journalism” in a nutshell.
US Takes New Steps to Dismantle Open Skies Treaty
By Alex GORKA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.09.2017
The US is going to announce restrictions to Russian military flights over American territory under the Treaty on Open Skies. The restrictions reportedly applying to flights over Hawaii and Alaska would come into force on January 1, 2018. The United States will stop waiving certain Federal Aviation Administration flight restrictions for the Open Skies flights and no longer allow overnight accommodations at some airfields designated for Open Skies flights.
Signed in 1992 and in force since 2002, the treaty, a fundamental trust-building measure, permits its 34 ratified member-states to conduct observation flights over one another’s territory while capturing aerial imagery of military personnel and materiel. US officials assert that Russia violated the agreement by imposing restrictions on flights over the Kaliningrad Oblast, a non-contiguous section of Russian territory squeezed between Lithuania, Poland and the Baltic Sea.
Under the treaty, nations get a quota of flights they can fly over one another’s territory. Russia began restricting that flight distance to 500km for all flights over Kaliningrad since 2014. “US experts have determined that 500 kilometers is insufficient to enable the United States to observe Kaliningrad in its entirety in one flight,” warns the State Department’s 2016 adherence report.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on his reappointment on September, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US may scrap the treaty “if Russia is not in compliance.” According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the US military see a diminishing value of the treaty, which was negotiated in the early 1990s and came into force in 2002, due to advances of satellite imaging technology.
Russia restricted flights over the Kaliningrad region because some parties to the treaty crossed the length and breadth of the flight path, causing problems in the use of the region’s limited airspace and to the Kaliningrad international airport. The new regulation is in compliance with the treaty. The US, Canada, Turkey and Georgia have established restrictions within the treaty on flying over their territories.
The US claims that observation flights near Russia’s borders with South Ossetia and Abkhazia have been restricted in breach of the treaty. US media fail to present the Russian position on the issue. Moscow points out that that the two entities are sovereign states recognized as such by Russia. The Open Sky Treaty states that the flights must not violate a ten-kilometer corridor along the border of another state. As one can see, the refusal is in compliance with the treaty’s provisions.
Russia has some “no-fly zones” stipulated by national law. The treaty also allows for deviations under “force majeure,” or an event beyond a state’s control. Normally, it has not been a problem but it has become one as the bilateral relationship has deteriorated and anti-Russia hysteria has been whipped up in America.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia would take its own measures against the United States in response to any new US restrictions. Commenting on the expected announcement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said treaty members “should strictly follow its terms and raise any complaints through mechanisms of the treaty.”
Russia also has claims that a number of participating states, including Canada and the United States, are interfering with observation flights but it does not let it come into the open. “We have serious claims that a number of participating states are interfering with observation flights,” retired Maj. Gen. Alexander Peresypkin, a member of Russia’s Vienna delegation, told the Wall Street Journal.
Like in the case of INF Treaty, the US makes controversial issues come into the public domain before officials and experts are engaged in serious discussions to address the differences. It should be noted that the Trump administration has not yet formed a good team capable of negotiating with Russia on arms control related issues.
Mikhail Ulyanov, the head of the Russian foreign ministry’s department on arms control, “As for the claims against us, we do not consider them grounded. In fact, the agreement is very complex; its provisions cannot always be straightforwardly interpreted, so it is necessary to look for compromises and solutions.” Steve Rademaker, former Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Arms Control and the Bureau of International Security and Non-proliferation, told Congress that Russia complies with the Open Skies Treaty.
The United States launched the arms control erosion process by withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. It still has not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) 20 years after it was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996. In 2016, Russia suspended the bilateral Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PDMA) because of Washington’s failure to observe the terms of the deal. Now the US Congress is moving decisively to start dismantling the Open Skies Treaty along with other major arms control agreements currently in place.
There are only the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty still left in force. The future of both is in doubt. President Trump has already decried the New Start Treaty. The INF Treaty has become a controversial issue with both sides accusing each other of violations. The US has already taken practical steps leading to the withdrawal from it. Now Washington is on the way to tear up the treaty, which has enormous importance for confidence building.
The Vienna Document on confidence- and security-building measures is limited in its ability to garner information on the ongoing military activities. The Vienna Document and the Open Skies Treaty complement each other. Tearing up the Open Skies Treaty means killing the confidence-building regime between Russia and NATO. With the treaty in force, transparency is enhanced and the risk of war and miscalculation is reduced. It’s important to keep it in place and settle the disputes at the round table.
US Defense Department ‘Estimates’ of War Costs Look Like More Lies
Sputnik – September 30, 2017
The US Department of Defense has published data demonstrating that America’s “endless wars” abroad, from Yemen and Somalia to Afghanistan and Pakistan, have cost each US taxpayer just $7,500 since the fateful day the World Trade Centers were leveled in New York 16 years ago.
DoD estimates just $1.5 trillion has been spent on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, Defense One reports. The figure is strikingly lower than independent estimates conducted by American economists in Ivy League institutions.
The Watson Institute at Brown University published data in September 2016 showing “total US spending on national security related to the post-9/11 war on terror has reached $3.6 trillion, and interest on funds borrowed to pay those bills could climb to $7.9 trillion by 2053.”
According a paper by Columbia University economist and former chief economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University’s Linda Blimes, former US President George W. Bush’s economic adviser Larry Lindsey touted that war costs would be capped near $200 billion when pitching the Iraq War, which he thought would be “good for the economy.”
“It now appears that Lindsey was indeed wrong – by grossly underestimating the costs,” the economists wrote. Indeed, they determined that $750 billion to $1.2 trillion had been spent on the Iraq invasion alone, three years after the conflict started (2006). Now, 11 years after their paper, the Pentagon actually says that the Iraq, Afghan, and Syrian conflicts combined have summed just $1.5 trillion.
In May 2017, Blimes penned an article stating that funds sunk into the foreign wars had not only reached four times what the Pentagon now says – but that “the US $6 trillion bill for America’s longest war is unpaid.”
The Pentagon is putting out estimates entirely inconsistent with the academic literature – in other words, what some people might call blatantly lying – and has been swiping the metaphorical national credit card to pay for it all.
“I’m against endless war for principles that the US Army once articulated, which was that war is so unpredictable and expensive that you do everything to avoid it,” retired Maj. Todd E. Pierce, retired US Army Judge Advocate General, told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines.
Fault Lines host Lee Stranahan asked the retired major what exactly is meant by the term “endless war,” as it is constantly used as a buzzword to describe US foreign policy.
Tracing the idea’s origins to former US Vice President Dick Cheney, who sparked and disseminated the notion of “perpetual war,” military commanders, policymakers and think tank researchers have become convinced “that we’re in this world that’s different than anything that’s existed before, surrounded by enemies,” Pierce said.
As for who is pushing America endlessly toward conflict, one need not look further than the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute, Peirce says. “They’ve all been advocating [for] wars since the 1990s.”
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Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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Aletho News- No, New York Times, California’s Climate Has Always Been a Land of Flood, Drought, and Fire
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- No Tricks Zone
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