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Former US Assistant Secretary of State confuses compliance with journalism

RT | December 11, 2016

A former State Department official claimed this week that RT’s staff are not legitimate news reporters. This is ostensibly because “real journalists” only work for compliant US media and not disruptive foreign competitors.

Around this time of year, there are a few constants. Leaves will fall, turkeys will be carved, and David J. Kramer will launch some kind of attack on RT.

A former George W. Bush apparatchik, Kramer now works for John McCain’s eponymous Institute for International Leadership. His trademark is anti-Russia vitriol. In fact, it often seems like he’s trying to outdo his boss, who can rarely complete a full week without condemning Moscow for something or other.

Last winter, the activist was campaigning for the US government to seize RT’s assets in America as compensation for Yukos, a former Russian oil company. This year, Kramer has decided that the network’s staff are not “real journalists.”

This is apparently because “real journalists” work for outlets like “Voice of America, Radio Liberty, the New York Times or the Washington Post.” That’s right, reporters at US state-funded media, whose publicly stated mission is to tell the news in a way that is “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States,” are just swell, but RT staff and contributors can’t be mentioned in the same breath.

Presumably this is because RT doesn’t take the pronouncements of the State Department at face value, unlike virtually every other organization operating in the US media space. And this clearly unnerves a lot of people in the American elite who have managed to control media narratives for decades – such as back in 2003, when popular newspapers and broadcasters helped drum up support for the invasion of Iraq.

Furthermore, it’s rather astonishing how anybody could regard New York Times and Washington Post journalists as any more ‘real’ than those at RT, given both newspapers’ propensity for bending facts, often with terrible consequences. Indeed, mention of Iraq reminds us of the NYT’s insistence that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”. Of course, WaPo also joined in the campaign, running more than 140 stories on its front page promoting the conflict.

As it happens, WaPo’s propensity for publishing “fake news” has been under the microscope in the past couple of weeks, due to the infamous “PropOrNot” splash over the Thanksgiving holiday. In this very dubious story, the paper helped to smear dozens of respected news organizations as agents of the Kremlin. And the backlash has been overwhelming. So much so that the original article currently has more corrections than a seven-year-old’s school homework.

That trail of corrections betrays the total absence of minimal journalistic standards, at least as applied to this article, the publication is ostensibly out to defend. Libeled outlets were not contacted for comment (by WaPo’s own admission). Information that is a matter of public record was not fact-checked (ditto). Absurd claims that RT originated and promoted fake news stories about the US election weren’t substantiated by a single example, even after RT’s insistence (spoiler alert: WaPo could not provide any examples because there are none).

Now the article opens with what essentially amounts to a soft retraction, and a rather hilarious admission that the Post “does not vouch for the validity” of the findings it nevertheless deemed fit to print.

The venerable New York Times isn’t blameless in the “fake news” myth-building either. Taking some of WaPo’s verbiage almost word for work, the Gray Lady also printed that “Many of those false reports originated from RT News.” To substantiate this libel, did it provide even a single example out of the “many” that are supposedly available? No, of course not. We’ve been in touch with the Times, and yes, they’re still looking. This is not a joke.

Yes, it is apparently entirely acceptable to publish fake news as long as they concern Russia or RT. Not just acceptable – this earns you a commendation from a former Assistant Secretary of State as being a “real journalist.”

Kramer’s essential thesis is that RT is attempting to undermine the credibility of the US government. This is done by “trying to become part of the dialogue, which usually occurs between journalists and press secretaries of the US government agencies.” And “trying to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the people that the government is not telling the truth.” So, in other words, this former official is upset because RT’s reporters ask the tough questions, which their convivial American colleagues – with some notable exceptions – mostly seem to be unwilling to broach.

One can almost imagine Kramer’s inner mantra: “A good journalist must always believe – and report – that the US government is always telling the truth! We have never ever had even a single example to the contrary!”

Instead, it can be assumed that he’d prefer a situation where Washington’s talking points are accepted at face value and left uncontested. And never mind the fact that this practice allowed the Bush administration to hoodwink the American people into a disastrous war in Iraq, not to mention dozens of other infamous international misadventures. That said, the fact that Kramer worked as an Assistant Secretary of State for that government probably makes him nostalgic for a time when the White House could easily dictate the agenda.

While Kramer’s logic is truly astounding, it does give an insight into the mindset of the American establishment when it comes to the media. In their worldview, “real journalists” don’t ask difficult questions, and do help officials spin the US-driven narrative of the day. However, reporters who try to hold them to account are not legitimate because they refuse to play the game.

But in this day and age, the audiences, in the US and elsewhere, have a different view.

December 11, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Has the US and Its Allies Used Covert Airdrops, Drones to Supply the Islamic State?

By Ulson Gunnar – New Eastern Outlook – 10.12.2016

Is there a way the United States or one of the Islamic State’s admitted state sponsors could be airdropping supplies without triggering suspicion? How has modern airdrop technology and techniques evolved that might make this possible?

When asking these questions, they must first be understood in the context that:

(A.) According to Wikileaks, within the e-mails of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton it was acknowledged that the governments of two of America’s closest allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were providing material support to the Islamic State (IS);

(B.) That according to the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) (PDF), the US and its allies sought to use a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria as a strategic asset against the Syrian government, precisely where the Islamic (Salafist) State (principality) eventually manifested itself and;

(C.) That the fighting capacity of the Islamic State is on such a large and sustained level, it can only be the result of immense and continuous state sponsorship, including a constant torrent of supplies by either ground or air (or both).

Within this context, we can already partially answer these questions with confirmed statements made by another of America’s closest allies in the region, and a long-time NATO member, Turkey.

It was a May 2016 Washington Times article titled, “Turkey offers joint ops with U.S. forces in Syria, wants Kurds cut out,” that quoted none other than the Turkish Foreign Minister himself admitting (emphasis added):

Joint operations between Washington and Ankara in Manbji, a well-known waypoint for Islamic State fighters, weapons and equipment coming from Turkey bound for Raqqa, would effectively open “a second front” in the ongoing fight to drive the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from Syria’s borders, [Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu] said.

And clearly, by simply looking at maps of the Syrian conflict over the past 5 years, the supply corridors used by the Islamic State, via Turkey, to resupply its region-wide warfare were significant until Kurdish fighters reduced them to one, now the epicenter of a questionable Turkish military incursion into northern Syria.

With the Islamic State’s ground routes hindered, is there another way the US or at the very least, admittedly its Islamic State-sponsoring allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar could deliver food, ammunition, weapons and even small vehicles to the militant group, still held up in Syria’s eastern city of Al Raqqa?

The answer is yes.

Modern American Airdrop Capabilities 

A system developed years ago for the United States military called Joint Precision Airdrop System (JPADS) allows cargo aircraft to release airdrops of supplies from as high as 25,000 feet and as far from a drop zone as 25-30 kilometers. A Global Positioning System (GPS) and an airborne guidance unit automate the drop’s trajectory to land within 100 meters of a predetermined drop zone. The system also makes it possible to release several drops at once and have them directed toward different drop zones.

The US military has already received this system and it has been in use for years. At least one Persian Gulf state has taken delivery of the system as well, the United Arab Emirates.

Defense Industry Daily would report that in 2013, the UAE would order the system for use with its C-130H and C-17 aircraft. The same report would note that the system is used by several other NATO allies.

The US has admittedly used this system to drop supplies to both Kurdish fighters and anti-government militants in Syria, including at least one instance where supply pallets ended up “accidentally” with the Islamic State.

In addition to airdrops made by large, manned cargo aircraft, the US has admittedly used drones to drop supplies across the region, the Guardian would admit.

The US Already Makes Airdrops to the Islamic State

The Washington Post in a 2014 article titled, “U.S. accidentally delivered weapons to the Islamic State by airdrop, militants say,” claims:

The Islamic State has released a new video in which it brags that it recovered weapons and supplies that the U.S. military intended to deliver to Kurdish fighters, who are locked in a fight with the militants over control of the Syrian border town of Kobane.

The Washington Post also admits (emphasis added):

The incident highlights the difficulty in making sure all airdrops are accurate, even with GPS-guided parachutes that the Air Force commonly uses. Airdrops of food and water to religious minorities trapped on mountain cliffs in northern Iraq in August hit the mark about 80 percent of the time, Pentagon officials said at the time.

This (and similar incidents) may represent an accident in which JPADS performed poorly. Or it could represent an intentional airdrop meant to resupply Islamic State terrorists with the Washington Post article attempting to explain away how GPS-guided airdrops could “accidentally” end up in enemy territory.

Reports from Qatari-based Al Jazeera claim the US has also dropped weapons to militants other than Kurdish fighters. In an article titled, “US drops weapons to rebels battling ISIL in Syria,” Al Jazeera claims:

The US has reportedly dropped weapons to rebel fighters in Syria as the UN Security Council considers dropping food and medicine by air to civilians.

It also claims that:

The weapons supplies were airdropped to rebels in Marea, a town in the northern province of Aleppo, on Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

“Coalition airplanes dropped … ammunitions, light weapons and anti-tank weapons to rebels in Marea,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the SOHR head, said.

The Guardian would also admit to the US carrying out similar airdrops in Syria.

Knowingly Dropping Supplies into Terrorist-Held Territory 

And more recently, there has been a push to drop supplies into eastern Aleppo in an attempt to prolong the fighting and prevent the complete collapse of a militant presence there, specifically using JPADS, according to the Guardian.

Another Guardian article reveals that US drones have previously been used to make airdrops in the region and might be used again to create an “air bridge” to militant-held areas of Syria.

However, even most US and European sources have admitted to a heavy presence of Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise in the city, Jabhat Al Nusra, a designated foreign terrorist organization even according to the US State Department.

If the US would seriously consider airdropping supplies to Al Qaeda to prolong fighting and to continue confounding Syrian forces, why wouldn’t they also airdrop supplies to the Islamic State to do the same?

With the ability to drop supplies from as high as 25,000 feet and from as far away as 25-30 kilometers (and possibly even further as was envisioned by future designs), the US or its allies could appear to be resupplying what it calls “moderate rebels” on one part of the battlefield, while diverting a percentage of its drops into Al Qaeda or Islamic State territory. Drones could also be utilized to create “air bridges” harder to detect than those created using larger cargo aircraft.

With the Islamic State’s fighting capacity still potent both in Iraq and Syria, and with Kurdish fighters sealing off ground routes along the Syrian border, unless Turkey within its “buffer zone” is passing weapons onward to the Islamic State, what other means could this terrorist organization be using to resupply its regional war effort, if not by air?

For those seriously committed to defeating the Islamic State and other armed groups operating within Syrian territory, answering this question will bring peace and security one step closer.

December 11, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The CIA’s Absence of Conviction

By Craig Murray | December 11, 2016

I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.

A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.

The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.

I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:

The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.

“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the KGB.

It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive.

In the UK, one single article sums up the total abnegation of all journalistic standards. The truly execrable Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian writes “Few credible sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump.” Does he produce any evidence at all for this assertion? No, none whatsoever. What does a journalist mean by a “credible source”? Well, any journalist worth their salt in considering the credibility of a source will first consider access. Do they credibly have access to the information they claim to have?

Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling.

Contrast this to the “credible sources” Freedland relies on. What access do they have to the whistleblower? Zero. They have not the faintest idea who the whistleblower is. Otherwise they would have arrested them. What reputation do they have for truthfulness? It’s the Clinton gang and the US government, for goodness sake.

In fact, the sources any serious journalist would view as “credible” give the opposite answer to the one Freedland wants. But in what passes for Freedland’s mind, “credible” is 100% synonymous with “establishment”. When he says “credible sources” he means “establishment sources”. That is the truth of the “fake news” meme. You are not to read anything unless it is officially approved by the elite and their disgusting, crawling whores of stenographers like Freedland.

The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting further conflict with Russia. This puts everyone in danger for the sake of more profits for the arms and security industries – including of course bigger budgets for the CIA. As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on.

December 11, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

LONDON CALLING: BBC bias during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum

London Calling documentary

Two organisations emerged losers after the Scottish 2014 independence referendum. YES Scotland won praise after narrowly failing to overturn a thirty point deficit. The other loser was the BBC. The British State broadcaster sacrificed its reputation in return for a narrow win for the No campaign. London Calling captures the descent of the BBC during Scotland’s historic referendum period. A two year orgy of spin, deceit, manipulation and corruption has been packaged into a powerful seventy minute documentary exposé. Thought you could trust the BBC? Prepare to be shocked.

DVD fundraiser link: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lo…

December 10, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Matt Ridley: My life as a climate change lukewarmer

By Matt Ridley | The Times | January 19, 2015

Excerpts:

I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future.

This view . . . is even more infuriating to most publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk.

I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public-sector appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.

I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing about the threat of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor of The Economist, I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat.

Gradually, however, I changed my mind. What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary history of the famous “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show that today’s temperatures were higher and changing faster than at any time in the past thousand years. I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.

What shocked me more was the scientific establishment’s reaction to this: it tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. And then a flood of emails was leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists apparently scheming to withhold data, prevent papers being published, get journal editors sacked and evade freedom-of-information requests, much as sceptics had been alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been told about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the prediction of rapid warming seemed.

The policies being proposed to combat climate change, far from being a modest insurance policy, are proving ineffective, expensive, harmful to poor people and actually bad for the environment: we are tearing down rainforests to grow biofuels and ripping up peat bogs to install windmills that still need fossil-fuel back-up. Some insurance policy.

To begin with, after I came out as a lukewarmer, I would get genuine critiques from scientists who disagreed with me and wanted to exchange views. They often resorted to meta-arguments, especially the argument from authority: if the Royal Society says it is alarmed, then you should be alarmed. If I want argument from authority, I replied, I will join the Catholic Church.

One by one, many of the most prominent people in the climate debate began to throw vitriolic playground abuse at me. I was “paranoid”, “specious”, “risible”, “self-defaming”, “daft”, “lying”, “irrational”, an “idiot”. Their letters to the editor or their blog responses asserted that I was “error-riddled” or had seriously misrepresented something, but then they not only failed to substantiate the charge but often roughly confirmed what I had written.

Talking of the committee on climate change, last year Lord Deben commissioned an entire report to criticise something I had said. Among other howlers, it included a quotation from the IPCC but the quote had a large chunk cut from the middle. When this cut was restored the line supported me, not Lord Deben. When I pointed this out politely to Lord Deben, he refused to restore the excision and left the document unchanged on the committee’s website.

I suppose all this fury means my arguments are hitting home.

I have never met a climate sceptic, let alone a lukewarmer, who wants his opponents silenced. I wish I could say the same of those who think climate change is an alarming prospect.

Full article with updates at Matt Ridley’s site.

December 10, 2016 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The Snowflake Nation and Trump on Immigration

By Renee Parsons | CounterPunch | December 9, 2016

There is no doubt that the 2016 Presidential election may ultimately be declared the most divisive and the most problematic election in American history, indeed the beginning of an unwelcome but perhaps necessary watershed event.

As the 2016 election approached, the importance of the Electoral College was never an unknown obscurity of American politics. Everyone knew the magic number of 270 electoral votes. Certainly that fact should have been of uppermost importance in the HRC and Trump campaigns. As should be completely obvious, a campaign based on reaching that Electoral College number is a very different campaign than one conducted simply to achieve the highest total of popular votes. That is Lesson #1 in Elementary Presidential Campaign Organizing 101 but HRC never grasped that she could not manipulate the final result, whatever the outcome.

My first indication that there would be an ultra-upset with the results was a very late election evening call from an east coast Dem-Lib friend who had supported Bernie – sobbing and wailing; at times it was difficult to understand her; Initially I thought she had tragically lost a member of her family, perhaps the family dog had been hit by a car. “What is happening to our country? I can’t believe it,” she cried. She was inconsolably distraught that the nation was about to be taken over by gangs of the indescribable ‘deplorable’ type running wild through the streets; setting cars on fire, blocking traffic, burning the American flag, breaking store windows and causing general mayhem while committing acts of civil unrest and even threatening Constitutional order.

Well, she was correct; some of that happened but it was not the deplorables who took to the streets, gloating in triumph or taunting the losers with defeat. To consider the anti Trump street protests as ‘resistance’ may be more about wishful thinking since they were clearly orchestrated by Soros-sponsored groups like MoveOn.org which will continue their ‘group think’ campaign to manipulate a public response to The Donald.

Like many of us during our voting years, there has been no candidate whom we truly believed would make a Great President. Many of us have spent a decade or two of disillusionment on election night and yet our inner Snowflakes never cried, spun off into hysterics nor did most of us ever have the luxury of having a tantrum or an emotional breakdown. Disappointment yes – like when Ralph lost the 2000 election and then again in 2004. What was wrong with the country? Why would anyone vote for a Democratic party that had dismantled welfare reform, throwing single moms and their kids off their monthly pittance and do nothing to initiate a modern day Reconstruction for the inner cities? Why would anyone vote for a Democrat who was, at best, an undercover Republicrat? Why couldn’t the rest of the country see through the partisan platitudes and lies?

If the response to Trump’s election had been spontaneous and independent uprisings as acts of defiance, the opposition would be validated as authentic and powerful glimmers of a true democratic movement. Unfortunately, they are more reminiscent of the coordinated Color campaigns that have taken place around the globe with one goal in mind – regime change.

It has been stunning to observe the outpouring of easily-led, well-meaning adolescents who continue to be betrayed by Bernie, the Senate’s new Outreach Chair as well as adult Dem-Libs convinced of their own superiority that they know best for every other American and who yet believe themselves to be tolerant and respectful of differences.

To understand that the street protests were coordinated, predetermined efforts rather than spontaneous, instinctive events is one thing (authentic taking-to-the-streets response are the backbone of democracy), but then to witness the emotional, cultural breakdown of a weeping, traumatized generation with an inability to cope with reality, their immediate environment or life’s vagaries is more than worrisome. The videos of students in need of play doh, arts and craft classes, group counseling, excused absence from class, coloring books and safe spaces are indicative of a coddled generation sheltered from the ‘real’ feelings of failure and pain and with little developed sense of self-reliance. Have we created a generation raised with an expectation that they earned a soccer trophy for losing and deserve the latest cd and the newest digital toy at their fingertips.

Will this be a generation with the fortitude, the intellect and the inner core of strength to some day take the reins of government or, in the meantime, to stand up in a powerful way against the established order or will they crumple when truly confronted with the brick-wall of opposition to their egalitarian ideals.

So far, from what we have seen, protest violence, albeit a minority, has been a response which begs the question of who is committing the violence? Is there an SDS off shoot on the horizon or is there an undercurrent of something more sinister?

To those who see Trump’s election as a dire misdirection for the country and that all he represents as objectionable (and yes, many of his Cabinet appointments are objectionable but then some of us elders felt the same about Obama’s cabinet), then man the barricades and dig in with some strategic thinking; preferably not at the knee of MoveOn or other oligarch funded ‘non-profits’ which have their own agenda to control a protest movement.

A Constitutional response is that this is what Election Day is all about and that, like it or not, Donald Trump is the democratically elected President and who can forget as HRC so eloquently put it that whoever does not accept election results is a “direct threat to our democracy.” Et tu, Hillary? As a refresher, we have an Electoral College process to protect the concept of “one person, one vote;” that is a vote in Los Angeles is no more important than a vote in Wood River, Illinois and the transparent efforts to delegitimize the Trump election with specious, frivolous claims of hacking represents a self-serving, inappropriate intrusion into our Constitutional democratic process. I don’t buy Stein’s assertions for a moment.

While ‘Deport Trump’ signs have been evident throughout the protests as a major objection to a Trump Presidency, my grasp of the President-elect’s immigration policy has been sketchy, encouraged some of my own research. Check this out:

“All Americans not only in the states most heavily affected by and in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large number of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefit to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the work place as recommended by the commission head by former Rep Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years and we must do more to stop it.”

Sounds like Trump right? Actually that was President Bill Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union Address to Congress for which he received a standing ovation. Needless to say, neither Obama who has deported two million illegals and Clinton were never accused of being racist but we now know that the Democrats have realized what a trove of potential registered Democrats the immigrant community represent.

And then there is the issue of Trump’s plan to register Muslims in a database from specific countries with a history of terrorism which has been criticized as further evidence of Trump’s racism. Trump’s proposal sounds similar to the Entry-Exit Registration System established by President GW Bush in 2001, the system later morphed into the Department of Homeland Security and was operational until 2011.

During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980, President Jimmy Carter adopted a ban of Shiite Muslim immigrants from Iran entering into the US in an effort to ‘protect the country.” He ultimately deported 15,000 Iranian students. Carter’s ban “invalidated all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States.”

So if we accept that there is common ground amongst Presidents Clinton, GW Bush, Carter and President elect Trump that the impact of illegal immigration on our public school system and other social institutions is a legitimate concern for the nation, why the double standard? It is not just because Trump does not fit into the image of a sleek, urbane President; he is not a smooth, sugar coated talker like Obama while a rough-around-the-edges Trump may actually act on immigration reform.

On the campaign trail, the President-elect has been hyperbolic and straightforward, sometimes crude and discourteous and yet Trump has questioned the globalized economy and trade deals, the existence of NATO and the Fed Banks, a desire to get along with Russia and in his Cincinnati speech, establish a “new foreign policy that will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. Our goal is stability; not chaos” and more recently in North Carolina to “reestablish the Rule of Law and defend the Constitution of the US.”

When was the last time a Democrat talked like that or are those peace-niks among us being conned? Who does that kind of language threaten?

Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

December 9, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

US trying to hinder Syria advances in Aleppo: Kevin Barrett

Press TV – December 9, 2016

Russia says Moscow and Washington are close to reaching an understanding over the crisis in Aleppo. The Western side is pushing for a ceasefire in eastern Aleppo just as Syrian troops are coming close to liberating the city.

Kevin Barrett, author and Middle East expert from Madison, told Press TV on Thursday night that the US-led front and media are waging a propaganda campaign to force Syria to stop retaking eastern Aleppo.

Barrett said since the United States needs to continue its proxy war in Syria, Washington resorts to any kind of tactics to impede the annihilation of the foreign-backed terrorists who are besieged in eastern Aleppo.

“These folks (the US and allies) who are dedicated to keeping this war going as long as possible and destroying Syria as long as possible find that very convenient to call for a ceasefire right at the moment that the [Syrian] government is taking the city,” he said.

Barrett said Syria’s “legitimate government has been targeted for overthrowing and regime change by a group of countries that created this horrific extremist ISIS-style mercenaries.”

“The US empire with its Zionist controllers are destroying Syria in an act of aggression,” he said, adding “the biggest winner of all of this destabilization of course is the expansionist [regime] in Tel Aviv.”

“This is an intentional destruction and destabilization of Syria along a kind of US imperial and Zionist doctrine that calls for the actual destruction and Balkanization of the Middle Eastern countries to make them more penetrable by the empire and to make them less of a potential long- and immediate-term threat to Israel,” Barrett added.

The analyst said the Syrian government is justified in its war on terrorists despite the “horrific destruction in Aleppo and all over Syria,” while it has also offered an amnesty for all Syrians.

“Any country in the world is going to use counter-insurgency warfare to preserve its territorial integrity if there is this kind of foreign-sponsored rebellion going on.”

According to Barrett, “a lot of people in the region and a few people outside the region like Russian President Vladimir Putin” have got in the way of the US-led coalition which tried to turn Syria into a failed state.

Brent Budowsky, a columnist with US newspaper The Hill from Washington, called on Syria and Russia to halt military operations in the eastern Aleppo.

“We need a ceasefire today. We should have had it a year ago or two years ago,” he said.

The Syrian army troops and their allied forces are now in control of about 85 percent of militant-held eastern part of Aleppo as they press ahead with an all-out offensive to fully dislodge foreign-backed terrorists from the northwestern city.

December 9, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

NYT, WaPo Fake News Still Bringing Real Guns to Iraq, Killing Thousands

By Robert Barsocchini | Blacklisted News | December 8, 2016

Fake news propagated by the US government and collaborating organizations such as the New York Times and Washington Post helped create an environment in which the US was able to illegally invade Iraq in 2003, killing at least one million and possibly upwards of two million people, including the deaths of some 4,500 US soldiers, according to a meta-study by Nobel-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Just this November, nearly 6,000 people were killed in Iraq thanks to the conflicts that are still raging due to the invasion (which is ongoing), and it was not an atypical month – even more were killed in October.

Regarding the fake news that laid the groundwork for the US war of aggression, award-winning journalist Robert Parry notes that, for example, Judith Miller of NYT and Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt “repeatedly stated the ‘fact’ of Iraq’s hidden WMD as flat fact and mocked anyone who doubted the ‘group think.’”

Parry also traces the use of fake news by these outlets and the government to the present, raising interesting legal questions about whether and how the individuals who perpetrate fake news should be punished, and to what extent they are protected by the US first amendment.

Trevor Timm of The Atlantic cites a Supreme Court decision which ruled that speech is protected unless it “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”.

According to the highest UN officials and many others (including most of the world), the invasion of Iraq was a lawless action, which would make statements directed to precipitating it ineligible for protection under US law.

The next question that arises would be how to punish the offenders of the illegal speech.  Sticking to US legal precedent, we may note that the US, at Nuremberg, executed Germans who it determined had issued fake news in service of creating the conditions for Germany to invade other nations.  And though the death penalty has since been eradicated in most of the world, it has not been in the US.

Parry notes that none of the fake-news peddlers have yet faced any legal recourse for their apparent crimes.  Hiatt, for example, “remains the Post’s editorial-page editor continuing to enforce ‘conventional wisdoms’ and to disparage those who deviate.”  Miller and others maintain similar positions.

People at these outlets have recently begun to express that there should be limits on fake news.  However, they have only made such statements in reference to others, not themselves, perhaps illustrating the level of regard they have for the thousands of US soldiers and million-plus Iraqis that have died and are dying thanks in part to the fake news they disseminate.

Robert J. Barsocchini is an independent researcher and reporter who focuses on global force dynamics and has served as a cross-cultural intermediary for the film and Television industry. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists. Updates on Twitter.

December 8, 2016 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter Become the Gatekeepers

By Phil Butler – New Eastern Outlook – 08.12.2016

News that Google, Microsoft, and Facebook will collaborate to censor their definition of terrorism on their collective networks signals Orwellian times to come. New EU legislation, hints at McCarthyism in America and Europe, and the proven collusion in between Silicon Valley and governments should signal a counter-revolution. Here’s a look at why.

A couple of years ago my colleagues and I helped uncovered a Ukraine “kill list” supported by NATO, the British Embassy in Ukraine, and by neo-Nazis bent on condemning pro-Russians in the Ukraine civil war. The so-called “Peacekeeper” movement was traced to NATO servers in 2015. Since that time we have all witnessed a dizzying barrage of lies, propaganda, and a controlled message of unprecedented scale. WikiLeaks revelations from the Clinton and Podesta files showed the world the depth of collusion, graft, and draconian measures on behalf of the elites in control of western society. Google and the others as tools of the security machine cannot be controverted. And now the same people who tried to buy the presidency of the United States, who fueled the Arab Spring, ISIL, the refugee crisis, the economic crisis, and endless war, they’re out to close the gates on a billion free people. Twitter’s blog post from yesterday gives us the underpublicized announcement.

“Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube are coming together to help curb the spread of terrorist content online. There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services. When alerted, we take swift action against this kind of content in accordance with our respective policies.”

For those users of these networks who are not so aware, this disguised censoring apparatus probably seems as harmless and positively idealistic as Google’s “Do no evil” dogma from bygone years. Disguised as an anti-terror collaboration, this latest Orwellian move by the establishment is nothing of the kind. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange explains the extraordinary role of Google, Google Ideas, and other contravening evidence here, on the WikiLeaks site. For those who may remain unconvinced, Assange laid out how Google’s Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen, helped plan for just such collaborations as we see today:

“Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies. . . . They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world.”

Normally I would lay out all the evidence and analysis on these points here, but there is no necessity for this now. All the reader needs to understand is the underlying warning, some main characters in this power play, and the immediacy with which we should address this situation. Now I shall enumerate.

US President Barack Obama and German Chanellor Angela Merkel’s last meeting in Berlin opened several dark corridors. Advising President-elect Donald Trump to “adhere” was one provocative note, the forthcoming “Fake News” business another. But the most telling rhetoric came in the form of Obama revealing the ultimate misinformation and strategy. This segment tells us Merkel and Obama were in war mode with Russia all along:

“We work very closely together on the issue of annexation of Crimea and Russia’s attempt to actually conquer Ukraine.  And actually they did so — conquered part of the territory.  We tried to come to a peaceful settlement here on this.” (WH)

Some days after the Berlin meetup, the European Parliament passed two controversial pieces of legislation. First, the MEPs in Strassbourg paved the way for creating an EU Army. Second, the same parliamentarians voted in a so-called collective anti-propaganda legislation that would essentially allow these same leaders to track down and silence anyone with a view outside their definitions of normal. The fast forwarded strategy to control news and messaging is in fever pitch now, as Germany’s chancellor and America’s president warning of “Fake News”, and CNN along with other owned media repeat the propaganda. CBS Interactive chimed in to bolster the mainstream’s sagging credibility, and to foster the social media corporation cooperation we see today.

The danger is clear. The players are known. Ignorance of the facts will end in dire repressions of freedom and heightened crisis. I contribute to a dozen or more of the independent media sites already targeted. Sputnik, RT, NEO, Global Research, and some others feature my analysis or reports, and I am not nearly alone. Those of us with some prowess on Facebook and the other social media networks will also become targets, I have no doubt. For my part, I am not so concerned. I helped in a meaningful way to evangelize and to develop much of the social and tech landscape you see. I am horrified for the greater implications of these moves though. Facebook’s stockholders, Microsoft’s, Twitter’s, should weigh carefully the audience here. I want to end this report on a meaningful note. So here is my best plea for you to understand the lie before you.

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube  are pretending, and here is the perfect evidence. While these social corporations contend the coming moves against “extremism” are based in altruism and correctness, the truth is revealed in their past actions. The best example I can give is the case of one Nedā Āghā-Soltān. Some will recall the outrage over a YouTube video showing a young Iranian woman dying in front of the camera. Shot by a sniper, the beautiful young philosophy student bled to death before our eyes. The video depicted death in its horrific finality, injustice in its banal cruelty, and more importantly the indecency the Internet has come to represent. For my part the nightmarish and soul darkening vision of life draining from this woman troubled my sleep. Make no mistake, I have seen death many times before, but never catalogued so intrusively. In the end, despite a fairly vast outcry to remove the video, Google refused. The political aspects of Neda’s death took over, the viral nature of the death on Twitter and YouTube was actually promoted, for many robbing her of her last moments was a sin. Now few raise a voice at even the most horrific scenes, and this was by design.

We are desensitized to nearly everything now. Few even know what to believe, so most believe whatever is shown them, at least on some passive level. The life draining from a young student, a man holding his child, the baby’s skull blown apart – it’s just one more dead child – heaped onto a mountain of dead children in far off places. Gaza running red with blood, the Donbass children riddled with shrapnel, dethroned leaders hung, make believe villains with bayonets stabbed into their rectums in Libya, laughing hyena presidential candidates bragging about murdering – and right now the Silicon Valley stock market is going to protect us? No, my friends, the gatekeepers are shutting down democracy, or at least trying to. When the purpose serves them, the next step will finally stun the world into recognition. I only hope we can stop them before.

December 8, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Steve McIntyre’s comment to Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, on climate “experts”

By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | December 6, 2016

Dilbert creator, Scott Adams wrote a post on his blog yesterday that is well worth reading in entirety: The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science

Adams notes:

It seems to me that a majority of experts could be wrong whenever you have a pattern that looks like this:

1. A theory has been “adjusted” in the past to maintain the conclusion even though the data has changed. For example, “Global warming” evolved to “climate change” because the models didn’t show universal warming.

2. Prediction models are complicated. When things are complicated you have more room for error. Climate science models are complicated.

3. The models require human judgement to decide how variables should be treated. This allows humans to “tune” the output to a desired end. This is the case with climate science models.

4. There is a severe social or economic penalty for having the “wrong” opinion in the field. As I already said, I agree with the consensus of climate scientists because saying otherwise in public would be social and career suicide for me even as a cartoonist. Imagine how much worse the pressure would be if science was my career.

5. There are so many variables that can be measured – and so many that can be ignored – that you can produce any result you want by choosing what to measure and what to ignore. Our measurement sensors do not cover all locations on earth, from the upper atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, so we have the option to use the measurements that fit our predictions while discounting the rest.

6. The argument from the other side looks disturbingly credible.

One of the things that always fascinated me about jury trials is that attorneys from both sides can sound so convincing even though the evidence points in only one direction. A defendant is either guilty or innocent, but good lawyers can make you see it either way. Climate science is similar. I’ve seen airtight arguments that say climate science is solid and true, and I’ve seen equally credible-looking arguments that say it is bunk. From my non-scientist perspective, I can’t tell the difference. Both sides look convincing to me.

Again, read the entire essay: The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science

Steve McIntyre writes in comments:

I write the Climate Audit blog. I first began serious study of paleoclimate when I asked Michael Mann for the FTP location data of his data (for the Hockey Stick) and he said that he had “forgotten” the location, but that one of his associates would find it for me. The associate said that the data was not in any one location, but volunteered to find it for me. I was astonished that a result could have been so widely disseminated without any sort of formal audit – not realizing at the time that “peer review” for a journal was a limited form of due diligence.

Scot [sic] writes: “You probably are not a scientist, and that means you can’t independently evaluate any of the climate science claims.” I had mathematical knowledge and skill and decided that it would be an interesting task to actually try to verify Mann’s results. It turned out that he had made a grotesque error in his attempt to calculate principal components, had withheld adverse verification statistics and had weighted his reconstruction on stripbark tree rings that were inappropriate.

When I examined other attempts to estimate temperature in the past 1000 years, I encountered problems with every one of them, incurring, in the process, severe antagonism on the part of university academics.

However, after being involved in the controversy for many years, I think that far too little attention (none) is paid to a very fundamental difference between “skeptics” and warmists on their respective perceptions on whether human emissions of CO2 thus far have caused “serious negative damage” to the world or not. Skeptics universally think not. Many do not dispute the idea that we are carrying on an “uncontrolled experiment”, but have nonetheless concluded that, through good luck rather than good management, the consequences have been inconsequential or even beneficial. On the other hand, warmists are thoroughly convinced we have already incurred “serious negative damage” though what they view as “serious negative damage” may well be viewed by a skeptic as relatively trivial, or, at worst, an ordinary cost and outweighed by other benefits. When I challenge warmists to enumerate the most serious of the damages experienced so far, I do not get answers.

Of the potential damages, sea level rise seems one of the most serious to me, but even there, some, if not much, of the potential problem arises from very long-term (Holocene scale) events that are not materially impacted by CO2 emissions.

While I have made numerous technical criticisms of work by climate scientists, I have mostly avoided commenting on policy, other than urging far better data archiving practices – a policy which many of my adversaries opposed. Needless to say, this has not prevented demonization from climate activists – a practice that obviously does not enable them to “persuade” their opponents and critics. Quite the opposite. In my experience, more “skeptics” are born from poor conduct by climate scientists than from the eloquence of earlier skeptics.

December 7, 2016 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

US Policymakers Propose Working Closer with ISIS’ Sponsors

By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 07.12.2016

US-based corporate-financier funded policy think tank, the Brookings Institution, published a particularly incoherent piece titled, “Should we work with the devil we know against the Islamic State?” The piece’s author, a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, Daniel Byman, claims (emphasis added):

Saudi Arabia has proven a major source of terrorist recruits and financing, while the Syria-Turkey border was a major crossing point for Islamic State recruits. Both countries [Saudi Arabia and Turkey] still have much to do, but that’s the point—if the Trump administration alienates them, the Islamic State problem will get much worse. With the United States on the other side in Syria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia might send anti-aircraft weapons to Syrian rebels and otherwise escalate the fighting in ways dangerous for international terrorism—actions that, so far, the United States has helped reduce.

In essence, Byman is admitting what the rest of the world already long ago concluded – the vast fighting capacity the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) possesses is not only a result of immense state sponsorship, it is sponsored by two of America’s closest allies in the region – Saudi Arabia and NATO-member Turkey.

It was Turkey’s own foreign minister who inadvertently admitted while trying to make a case for the Turkish invasion and occupation of northern Syria that Turkey itself served as the primary staging point for ISIS and supplied the summation of its weapons and reinforcements required in Syria and beyond.

A May 2016 Washington Times article titled, “Turkey offers joint ops with U.S. forces in Syria, wants Kurds cut out,” would quote the Turkish Foreign Minister admitting (emphasis added):

Joint operations between Washington and Ankara in Manbji, a well-known waypoint for Islamic State fighters, weapons and equipment coming from Turkey bound for Raqqa, would effectively open “a second front” in the ongoing fight to drive the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from Syria’s borders, [Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu] said.

Byman confirms this with his appeal for the United States to remain aligned and committed to Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Retroactively Blaming Syria for a War the US Engineered 

Byman continues by claiming:

Assad facilitated the flow of fighters to Iraq to kill American soldiers there after the 2003 U.S. invasion. He has supported terrorism against Israel and otherwise opposed U.S. interests. And an Assad victory would be widely, and correctly, seen as a triumph for its biggest friend—the clerical regime in Iran.

However, according to the US Army’s West Point Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) in a 2008 report titled, “Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq,” it is admitted that not only did Syria play a significant role in fighting Al Qaeda and its affiliates since their inception, but that underground networks were involved in trafficking terrorists into Iraq during the US occupation, not the Syrian government itself.

It would state:

Syria can almost certainly do more to disrupt the traffic across the border. However, it is unrealistic to expect the regime to expend more energy, given the economic and internal political importance of the underground cross border trade to Syrian social and political leaders, and the inherent limits of the regime’s ability to enforce a crackdown indefinitely.

Byman’s other ‘moral metrics’ for opposing Syria include “supporting terrorism against Israel” and being otherwise opposed to “U.S. interests,” but neither accusation is qualified. In reality, Byman is admitting that the US is aligned with two of the largest regional sponsors of terrorism, including sponsors aiding and abetting ISIS itself, and seeks to depose the Syrian government because it otherwise opposes US interests.

Byman then claims:

Assad’s regime is the primary culprit in a war that has killed roughly half a million Syrians and driven millions more into long-term exile.

Byman also laments that an Assad victory would create more refugees still – apparently oblivious to the “successful” regime change the US carried out in Libya in 2011, leaving the nation a failed state and the epicenter of the current and still ongoing regional refugee crisis.

In his eagerness to blame the Syrian government for the ongoing war, Byman strategically omits his own direct role and those of other US policymakers who, for years before the war began, advocated and plotted for its fruition.

From the Beginning, an Alliance with Terrorism, An Alliance of Convenience

As early as 2007, US journalists like Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh warned of US policymakers plotting with Saudi Arabia to use militants aligned with Al Qaeda to overthrow the governments of both Syria and Iran. In his article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?,” Hersh prophetically reported (emphasis added):

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Byman himself, in 2009, would sign his name to a Brookings policy paper titled, “Which Path to Persia?: Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF), in which he and other US policymakers would advocate the use of terrorism, color revolutions, staged provocations, sanctions and a vast array of other methods to provoke war with and overthrow the government of Iran. As a prerequisite for war with Iran, the paper noted that Syria would need to be dealt with.

In 2011, it became clear that many of the methods described in minute detail in the Brookings policy paper were put into practice, targeting the government in Damascus, not Tehran.

In essence, the Brookings Institution and their gallery of desk-bound warmongers have not only advocated a destructive war they themselves calculate has cost nearly half a million lives, but have advocated both before and during the war, the state sponsorship of terrorist organizations to fuel this war.

Byman’s latest piece promoted by Brookings all but admits the US maintains an alliance of convenience with the state sponsors of ISIS – not to defend any sort of value, principle, or moral imperative, but instead to achieve a self-serving geopolitical objective at the cost of such values, principles, and moral imperatives.

Byman concludes by claiming the Syrian government is too weak to consolidate control over Syria, omitting that there exists no alternative more unified or capable than the Syrian government. He then claims that the US should continue backing the “Syrian opposition,” either oblivious of or indifferent to the fact that no such thing exists aside from ISIS and other foreign sponsored terrorist organizations. Aside from Raqqa and Idlib run by ISIS and Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise – Al Nusra respectively, the Syrian government has already indeed consolidated control over the country’s main urban centers, including Aleppo.

For Byman and other policymakers like him, they find themselves moving imaginary armies across the battlefield that simply do not exist. In the end, the US will have to either abandon its enterprise in Syria, or pledge increasingly open support for ISIS and Al Nusra.

December 7, 2016 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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