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Abolish the FBI, America’s KGB

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | April 18, 2018

In his ongoing fight with President Trump, former FBI Director James Comey is now speculating that the reason that President Trump hasn’t adopted the fierce anti-Russia mindset of the U.S. national-security establishment is because the Russians might have secret dirt on the president and are blackmailing him into establishing normal relations between the United States and Russia.

There is another possibility — one also involving blackmail of the president — that unfortunately Comey doesn’t seem to consider: that the U.S. national-security establishment, including the FBI, has acquired secret dirt on the president and has blackmailed him into embracing and supporting their forever wars and their permanent control over the U.S. government and the American people.

Before one cries “Conspiracy theory, Jacob!” let us keep in mind two things:

First, if the Russian Deep State is capable of blackmail, as Comey suggests, so is the U.S. Deep State. I haven’t seen anyone in the establishment press say, “Conspiracy theory, James!” in response to Comey’s assertion. That’s because the establishment press believes that blackmail by the Russian Deep State is a reasonable possibility. It’s only when it comes to the U.S. Deep State that they react with horror and exclaim, “My Deep State would never do such a nefarious thing. It’s only the Russian Deep State that would do such thing.”

Second, the FBI was founded on dirt and blackmail. That’s what J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime FBI director specialized in — spying on people with the intent of discovering their dark secrets and then blackmailing them with it, with the intent of maintaining Hoover’s and the FBI’s ever-expanding power within the U.S. government and ever-growing control over American society.

Don’t forget COINTELPRO, the infamous FBI program that involved illegal surveillance of the American people, just like the KGB did to the Russian people. In fact, President Truman even compared the FBI to the Gestapo, the national police force of the Nazi regime, writing “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. F.B.I. is tending in that direction.”

For an excellent example of the use of secret dirt and blackmail on the part of the FBI, just recall what these people did to Martin Luther King (who they now conveniently extol as a great American). They illegally spied on him because they were convinced that he was part of a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over America and the world. In the process of doing that, they learned that King had apparently engaged in extra-marital relations. They then used that illegally acquired dirt to blackmail King into hopefully committing suicide. It was all done under the supervision and with the full support of none other than the FBI director himself, J. Edgar Hoover.

The crimes that the FBI enforces, like kidnapping or transporting underaged girls across state lines for nefarious reasons, were always just a veneer to justify the existence of a national police force that specialized in illegal surveillance, dirt, and blackmail. They wanted to make it look like law enforcement was what the FBI was all about. In reality, the FBI was about secret surveillance, acquiring dirt on people, and then blackmailing them to maintain Hoover’s and the FBI’s grip on power.

Ancient history? Come on! They have named their building after their icon. It’s called the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Any normal person would be ashamed of having had a scoundrel and blackmailer in charge of his agency. Not the FBI. They glorify Hoover. They revere him. They honor him by having their building named after him.

In his presidential campaign, Trump made it clear that he was opposed to the forever wars in which the U.S. national-security establishment has embroiled America. Trump was going to put a stop to them. He was going to bring the troops home. He was questioning America’s roll in NATO, the Cold War dinosaur that should have gone out of existence with the end of the Cold War.

But once he got into office, Trump flipped completely. He became one of them. His presidency, insofar as foreign policy is concerned, is nothing more than a continuation of Bush-Obama.

Was it because Trump suddenly became a believer in the Pentagon’s and CIA’s forever wars and interventionist, imperialist foreign policy? Or could it be because the FBI, the NSA, or the CIA is blackmailing Trump into supporting their forever wars with secretly acquired dirt regarding either Trump’s business practices or his personal life or both?

Or consider the JFK-assassination related records, which the CIA and other federal agencies have succeeded in keeping secret from the American people for more than 50 years. The law required the National Archives to release them to the public last October. President Trump made two public announcements all the way up to the release date stating that he intended to follow the law and release the records.

At the last minute, Trump changed his mind and ordered that the records could be kept secret, at least for another six months. Was that change of heart because he suddenly became convinced that “national security” would be gravely threatened by the release of 50-year-old records? Or could it be that the Deep State blackmailed him into changing his mind by threatening the release of long-secret dirt that they had discovered about him and his personal or business life?

Our American ancestors had it right: A free society and a national police force are not reconcilable. The same holds true with a national-security state. That’s why the United States had no FBI, Pentagon, military-industrial complex, CIA, and NSA for more than a century.

It’s time to restore a limited-government republic to our land. It’s time to restore liberty to America. It’s time to abolish the FBI and dismantle America’s Deep State. It’s time to return to founding principles.

For more information, see:

Yes, The FBI Is America’s Secret Police by James Bovard

Has the FBI “Become America’s Secret Police, Like the KBG? by Louis Jacobson

April 19, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hasbara memo: “When Israelis murder Palestinians, it’s a tragedy — for Israelis.”

© Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters
By Richard Hugus | April 19, 2018

Since the start of the latest massacre in Gaza — the killing with live fire of almost 40 and wounding of almost 3,000 unarmed Palestinian protestors during the March of Return — propaganda in service of Israel has been mobilized to cover up the blatant crime. Three days after the March began, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston issued an unbelievably twisted statement on the attacks. What follows is their statement, with comments inserted in italics:

Jewish Community Relations Council Statement on Events Along Gaza Border

April 2, 2018

“We see the events along the Gaza-Israel border this weekend as the continuation of one of the great tragedies of our time.”
— This implies that Gaza is a sovereign country bordering Israel, not the prison for Palestinian refugees that Israel established decades ago in the south of Palestine.

“This is a situation where many are at fault, leaving individuals in impossible situations with impossible choices.”
— When someone is morally at fault, the situation is always “complicated.” As we shall see, the “many at fault” are always Palestinians, not Israelis.

“It is a tragedy for the people of Gaza that, 12 years after the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip, they live under such difficult conditions.”
— “Tragedy” in Greek theater held that events are written by our fate and could not have been otherwise. If Zionism had not chosen Palestine in the late 1800’s and then proceeded to steal land from Palestinians from then on, it could very much have been otherwise. There was an actor here; there was a cause, and an effect. The cause of the “tragedy” was Zionism. Ask the settlers to return to their own countries, and the “tragedy” would end.
The sentence also implies that Israel made a noble gesture when it withdrew from Gaza, and that it is the fault of the Palestinians that they did not make the best of this generous gift. In fact, Israel left Gaza because it was more expedient for Israel to administer Gaza as a prison than to occupy it. The “difficult conditions” faced by the people of Gaza are the result of Israeli control over everything and everyone that goes into and out of it. The “difficult conditions” are the result of repeated Israeli bombings of critical infrastructure, and Israel’s clear plan for the complete immiseration of Gaza’s two million people.

“It is a tragedy for the Palestinians that Gaza was taken over by Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist organization that rules in a brutal dictatorship.”
— Hamas was democratically elected by its people because it distinguished itself from the collaborationist leadership of the Palestinian Authority. Israel defines Hamas as terrorist because Hamas is determined to resist the Zionist entity. Israel’s minions in legislative bodies in other countries have been used to create the “designated terrorist” label.
“Brutal dictatorship” is a buzzword applied to all political movements asserting independence from imperialist control.

“It is a tragedy that Hamas has chosen to direct its resources to the building of tunnels and rockets, rather than building hospitals, schools, housing, and factories that would create prosperity and opportunity for the Palestinian people.”
— Are these the same hospitals, schools, housing and factories that Israel has been bombing since 2006? Are these the same tunnels that Gazans used to bring in vital humanitarian goods not allowed through Israeli checkpoints? Doesn’t Hamas have the right to its primitive rockets when Gazans are being periodically bombarded by Israel and its highly sophisticated fighter jets?

“It is a tragedy that, by squandering the opportunity to build a better future for the Palestinian people, Hamas has forced Israel and Egypt to secure their own borders with a blockade to prevent the further weaponization of Gaza.”
— For choosing resistance against the Zionist occupier, the Palestinian people were punished by the Zionist occupier and his servants in Egypt. The blockade is not just against weapons, it’s against any freedom of movement, and any importation of needed goods. Even people in need of urgent medical care are refused. The main purpose of the Israeli blockade is to starve Gaza, to “put them on a diet”, as one Israeli official said. To its everlasting shame, the West-installed political class in Egypt – not the Egyptian people – has chosen to collaborate.

“It is a tragedy that the Palestinian people of Gaza have no recourse against their leaders, living without elections or even the ability to protest those in power openly on pain of death.”
— Again, Hamas was democratically elected in 2006. One would think “the only democracy in the Middle East” would appreciate this. Stories of Hamas killing protesters have appeared only in the Israeli press – e.g., the Jerusalem Post, the Times of Israel. However, there are stories every day in the worldwide press of Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian protestors all over the West Bank. Let’s also remember that the March of Return in Gaza is made up of protestors, and that Israel sent snipers there for the explicit purpose of killing and wounding them. This is not to mention the “recourse against” Hamas leaders employed over the years by Israel – namely, open assassination.

“It is a tragedy that they are deceived by their own leaders with the unrealistic promise of a destructive victory over the State of Israel – a victory that will never come. It is a tragedy that their own government chooses to use them as human shields, perpetuating their suffering for nefarious self-interest.”
— As the Borg said, “Resistance is futile.” Isn’t the promotion of the idea of an unconquerable Israel the worst kind of war propaganda? The “human shields” argument has been used by Israel as an excuse for intentionally killing hundreds of civilians during its repeated bombing campaigns. What is the “nefarious self-interest” of Gaza’s leadership? — liberation from Israeli torture.

“It is a tragedy that the Israeli people look at Gaza and see the end of a dream; to live in peace with their neighbors.”
— The “dream” of the majority of the Israeli people today is to remove Palestinians from all of historic Palestine, and completely erase Palestinian history. Israelis do not “live in peace with their neighbors.” They have repeatedly attacked Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria and they are the main instigators today of conflict and war with Iran.

“It is a tragedy that Israelis living near the border are terrorized by threats coming from tunnels under their homes and rockets over their schools.”
–The main tactic of this propaganda piece is to blame the victim. Thus, nothing was done through the agency of the Jewish state and its obvious goals; everything was done as a reaction to injustices committed by Palestinians. It also turns reality on its head. Homes and schools have indeed been destroyed, but by Israel.

“It is a tragedy that when Israelis do what any other nation in the world would do – protect their border from being overrun – that they endure a condemnation that no other nation would receive.”
— This is the “why pick on us?” argument. Why? Because Israel has the ugliest, most long-standing system of open colonization and oppression visible in the world today. The vast majority of the people of the world are disgusted. What Israel claims as its “borders” is stolen land.

“It is a tragedy that Israelis experience this singling out as a further example of an isolation, their status as “the Jew amongst the nations,” with only themselves to protect their inalienable rights to live in security.”
— This is the “Jew as victim” argument, made possible by unrelenting Holocaust instruction since World War II, which provides a guaranteed pass for any and all crimes committed by Jews. Since 2001, Israel, the poor victim nation, has gotten the United States to attack a long list of countries in the Middle East which Israel feels threatened by, now including Russia because Russia has thrown a wrench into Israeli plans to destroy Syria. Israel also receives massive direct funding and political cover from the United Sates.
If Israel resents its status as “the Jew amongst the nations” why does it call itself “the Jewish state”? Why does it display the Star of David on all its national symbols and armaments? This is an identity which Israelis promote – how can they now turn around and blame us for it?

“It is a tragedy because this weekend, young men and women of the Israel Defense Forces stared down the sights of their rifles and learned violence at a time when they should have been at home with their families celebrating freedom at the Passover table.”
— The idea that it is the Israeli Occupation Forces who have suffered because they have had to kill and maim defenseless Palestinians is a perfect example of what Zionist supremacy and racism is. It is a form of self-worship and psychopathy in which one is never responsible for committing any wrong — it is always the fault of the other. This sentence is reminiscent of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir saying: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” In other words, the real crime has been committed against Jews, whose purity has been sullied by having to kill innocent people (as they were invading their land and homes).
This belief of Jewish superiority above others is at the bottom of everything Palestinians have suffered for the past 70 years.

“It is a tragedy because Palestinians need some way to express their frustrations – at Israel and at their own government after years of wasted opportunities to build a better life for the people of Gaza. Instead they experienced more manipulation, and more loss.”
–No, the ” frustration” Palestinians feel is from being consistently and sadistically blocked from life and liberty by the Israeli prison-keeper. The real manipulators are those who would have us believe the oppressive tactics of Israel are of the Palestinians’ own making, as this sentence implies.

“We see this weekend as the continuation of a tragedy that has not brought the people of Israel and Gaza any closer to a future of peace and hope for all of their children. As the Boston Jewish community continues to celebrate the Passover holiday this week, we are mindful of the lessons learned at our seders, that we do not rejoice over the tragedy of others and we are ever hopeful for peace and stability for all people.”
— Again, no recognition that this “tragedy” might be in any way the fault of Israel. Israel is supported, not by “the Boston Jewish community” but by a cynically propagandistic Washington-based lobby for Israel, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which provides the political line for 125 supposedly local Jewish Community Relations Councils in the US. In other words, a political lobby for a country 6,000 miles away says they speak for all Jews in Boston.
In 2016 the Jewish Community Relations Council of Boston sponsored a deceptive anti-boycott bill in the Massachusetts legislature. They were successfully opposed by a large number of Jewish activists in the state, and many others. The Council now claims to represent the Jewish community of Boston in mobilizing opposition to a motion in the Cambridge city council to boycott Hewlett-Packard. When was the vote in which “the Boston Jewish community” elected this Council? Who is the real manipulator in this scenario? Doesn’t the Jewish Community Relations Council actually represent a foreign political movement — not Cambridge, not Boston, not Massachusetts?
Israel, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t repeatedly murder people in Gaza in broad daylight and then piously claim you’re for “ peace and stability for all people.”

April 19, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Neocons Are Selling Koolaid Again!

By W. Patrick Lang • Unz Review • April 19, 2018

In 2004 I published an article in the journal, Middle East Policy that was entitled “Drinking the Koolaid.” The article reviewed the process by which the neocon element in the Bush Administration seized control of the process of policy formation and drove the United States in the direction of invasion of Iraq and the destruction of the apparatus of the Iraqi state. They did this through manipulation of the collective mental image Americans had of Iraq and the supposed menace posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Not all the people who participated in this process were neocon in their allegiance but there were enough of them in the Bush Administration to dominate the process. Neoconism as it has evolved in American politics is a close approximation of the imperialist political faction that existed in the time of President William McKinley and the Spanish-American War. Barbara Tuchman described this faction well in “The Proud Tower.”

Such people, then and now, fervently believe in the Manifest Destiny of the United States as mankind’s best hope of a utopian future and concomitantly in the responsibility of the United States to lead mankind toward that future. Neocons believe that inside every Iraqi, Filipino or Syrian there is an American waiting to be freed from the bonds of tradition, local culture and general backwardness. For people with this mindset the explanation for the continuance of old ways lies in the oppressive and exploitative nature of rulers who block the “progress” that is needed. The solution for the imperialists and neocons is simple. Local rulers must be removed as the principal obstacle to popular emulation of Western and especially American culture and political forms. In the run up to the invasion of Iraq I was often told by leading neocon figures that the Muslims and particularly the Iraqis had no culture worth keeping and that once we had created new facts, (a Karl Rove quote) these people would quickly abandon their old ways and beliefs as they sought to become something like Americans. This notion has one major flaw. It is not necessarily correct. Often the natives are willing to fight you long and hard to retain their own ways. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War the US acquired the Philippine Islands and sought to make the islands American in all things. The result was a terrible war against Filipino nationalists who did not want to follow the example of the “shining city on a hill.” No, the “poor fools” wanted to go their own way in their own way. The same thing happened in Iraq after 2003. The Iraqis rejected occupation and American “reform” of their country and a long and bloody war ensued.

The neocons believe so strongly that America must lead the world and mankind forward that they accept the idea that the achievement of human progress justifies any means needed to advance that goal. In the case of the Iraq invasion the American people were lectured endlessly about the bestialities of Saddam’s government. The bestialities were impressive but the constant media display of these horrors was not enough to persuade the American people to accept war. From the bestialities meme the neocons moved on to the WMD meme. The Iraqi government had a nuclear weapons program before the First Gulf War but that program had been thoroughly destroyed in the inspection regime that followed Iraq’s defeat and surrender. This was widely known in the US government because US intelligence agencies had cooperated fully with the international inspectors in Iraq and in fact had sent the inspectors to a long list of locations at which the inspectors destroyed the program. I was instrumental in that process.

After 9/11 the US government knew without any doubt that the Iraqi government did not have a nuclear weapons program, but that mattered not at all to the neocons. As Paul Wolfowitz infamously told the US Senate “we chose to use the fear of nuclear weapons because we knew that would sell.” Once that decision was made an endless parade of administration shills appeared on television hyping the supposed menace of Iraqi nuclear weapons. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were merely the most elevated in position of the many vendors of the image of the “mushroom shaped cloud.”

And now we have the case of Syria and its supposed chemical weapons and attacks. After the putative East Gouta chemical attack of 2013, an OPCW program removed all the chemical weapons to be found in Syria and stated its belief that there were no more in the country. In April of 2017 the US-Russian de-confliction process was used to reach agreement on a Syrian Air Force strike in the area of Khan Sheikoon in southern Idlib Province. This was a conventional weapons attack and the USAF had an unarmed reconnaissance drone in the area to watch the strike go in against a storage area. The rebel run media in the area then claimed the government had attacked with the nerve gas Sarin, but no proof was ever offered except film clips broadcast on social media. Some of the film clips from the scene were ludicrous. Municipal public health people were filmed at the supposed scene standing around what was said to be a bomb crater from the “sarin attack.” Two public health men were filmed sitting on the lip of the crater with their feet in the hole. If there had been sarin residue in the hole they would have quickly succumbed to the gas. No impartial inspection of the site was ever done, but the Khan Sheikoon “gas attack” has become through endless repetition a “given” in the lore of the “constant Syrian government gas attacks against their own civilians.”

On the 4th of April it is claimed that the Syrian Government, then in the process of capturing the town of Douma caused chlorine gas to be dropped on the town killing and wounding many. Chlorine is not much of a war gas. It is usually thought of as an industrial chemical, so evidently to make the story more potent it is now suggested that perhaps sarin was also used.

No proof that such an attack occurred has been made public. None! The Syrian and Russian governments state that they want the site inspected. On the 15th of April US Senator Angus King (I) of Maine told Jake Tapper on SOTU that as of that date the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had not been given any proof by the IC or Trump Administration that such an attack had occurred. “They have asserted that it did” he said.

The US, France and the UK struck Syria with over a hundred cruise missiles in retaliation for this supposed attack but the Administration has not yet provided any proof that the Syrian attack took place.

I am told that the old neocon crew argued as hard as possible for a disabling massive air and missile campaign intended to destroy the Syrian government’s ability to fight the mostly jihadi rebels. John Bolton, General (ret.) Jack Keane and many other neocons argued strongly for this campaign as a way to reverse the outcome of the civil war. James Mattis managed to obtain President Trump’s approval for a much more limited and largely symbolic strike but Trump was clearly inclined to the neocon side of the argument. What will happen next time?

Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many years

April 19, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Out of 26 Major Editorials on Trump’s Syria Strikes, Zero Opposed

By Adam Johnson | FAIR | April 18, 2018

A survey by FAIR of the top 100 papers in the US by circulation found not a single editorial board opposed to Trump’s April 13 airstrikes on Syria. Twenty supported the strikes, while six were ambiguous as to whether or not the bombing was advisable. The remaining 74 issued no opinion about Trump’s latest escalation of the Syrian war.

This is fairly consistent with editorial support for Trump’s April 2017 airstrikes against the Syrian government, which saw only one editorial out of 47 oppose the bombing (FAIR.org, 4/11/17). The single paper of dissent from last year, the Houston Chronicle, didn’t publish an editorial on last week’s bombing.

Seven of the top 10 newspapers by circulation—USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsday and Washington Post—supported the airstrikes. The New York Daily News and San Jose Mercury News offered no opinion, while the New York Times (4/13/18) was ambiguous—mostly lamenting the lack of congressional approval, but not saying that this meant the strikes were illegal or unwise. “Legislation should…set limits on a president’s ability to wage war against states like Syria,” is the Times’ conclusion. A complete list of editorials on the airstrikes can be viewed here.

Almost every editorial spoke in the same Official, Serious tone that demanded “action” be taken and “international norms” be “enforced.” Some, such as the Wall Street Journal (4/16/18), went further, insisting on a wider war against the Syrian regime, Iran and/or Russia in vague but menacing terms.

“Barack Obama dealt Mr. Trump a bad hand by letting Russia, Iran and China believe they could advance their goals of regional domination without US resistance,” the Journal insisted. “In Syria as elsewhere, Mr. Trump has to decide if he wants to ratify that American retreat or develop a strategy to stop it.”

The mid-market Toledo Blade (4/15/18) punched above its weight class and delivered the most bellicose and jingoistic editorial of them all with “The West Stands Up”:

Make no mistake, this was a warning to Vladimir Putin as well as Bashar al-Assad.

The United States and its two longtime allies redrew the red line that had been obliterated by a failure of nerve by the US and the West generally: There will be cost for your barbarities….

But in the larger sense, the West did what it should have done a long time ago. It stood up for decency and international law. It stood up for those who are defenseless. It stood up for itself, and for simple humanity, and redeemed some self-respect.

If Assad regime officials find themselves catching up on news from the greater Northwest Ohio region, they will surely take heed.

None of the top 100 newspapers questioned the US’s legal or moral right to bomb Syria, and all accepted US government claims to be neutral arbiters of “international law.” Many editorials handwrung about  a “lack of strategy” or absence of congressional approval, but none so much that they opposed the bombing. Strategy and legal sanction are add-on features—nice but, by all accounts, not essential.

The total lack of editorial board dissent is consistent with major papers’ tradition of uniform acceptance of US military action. The most influential paper in the country, the New York Times, has not opposed a single US war—from the Persian Gulf to Bosnia, to Kosovo to Iraq to Libya to the forever war on ISIS—in the past 30 years.

The scope of debate among major editorial boards is not if Trump should bomb the Syrian regime, but how much bombing he should undertake—and when, roughly speaking, he should maybe get around to letting Congress know.

April 19, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

London systematically destroying evidence in Skripal case – Russia’s UN envoy

RT | April 19, 2018

The UK continues to conceal and destroy evidence relating to the Salisbury incident and have crossed all boundaries in their rhetoric by alleging President Putin’s personal involvement, Russia’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia has said.

“The British authorities are engaged in the systematic destruction of evidence,” Nebenzia told the United Nations Security Council, which held a session, called by UK on Wednesday, to discuss the OPCW report and other developments in the Skripal case.

“Skripal’s pets were killed. No samples were obviously taken. The places attended by the Skripals – a bar, a restaurant, a bench, park ground, etc – are all being cleared,” the diplomat said, pointing out that, despite some loud statements about the alleged contamination of the area, “people continue to live in Salisbury as if nothing happened.”

The envoy also reminded the council members that Sergei and Yulia Skripal, who, according to London, are now both recovering from the poisoning by a deadly military grade nerve agent A-234 (‘Novichok’), are kept hidden from the public eye ever since the March 4 incident. In the meantime, London categorically refuses to provide Russia any access to the investigation, and so far has left 45 out of 47 questions addressed to British authorities about the case unanswered.

In a summary of its report, the OPCW didn’t not independently identify the nerve agent used in the Salisbury case nor its origin, but instead only confirmed “the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury.”

The conclusions made by OPCW were based on samples provided by the UK investigators and do not prove London’s claim of Russia’s involvement in the poisoning, Nebenzia noted. “The main thing that the report lacks, and what the British side was so eager to see, is the conclusion that the substance used in Salisbury was produced in Russia,” he said.

The UK Ambassador to the United Nations, Karen Pierce, however, downplayed the lack of technical evidence and urged the council members to look at “the wider picture which has led the United Kingdom to assess that there’s no plausible alternative explanation than Russian State responsibility for what happened in Salisbury.”

Extensively using the ‘highly likely’ argument, the UK envoy once again claimed in her address to the UNSC that only Russia had the “technical means, operational experience and the motive to target the Skripals.” At one point she even claimed that “President Putin himself was closely involved in the Russian chemical weapons programme.”

“London apparently thinks the Russian President has a hobby of running chemical weapons programs in his free time. I don’t know whether you appreciate that you’ve crossed all possible boundaries,” Nebenzia replied.

While the UK is yet to produce clear evidence of Russian involvement in the alleged poisoning of the former double agent and his daughter, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley once again attacked Moscow during the council meeting, parroting its ally’s narrative.

“As we have stated previously, the United States agrees with the UK’s assessment that Russia is responsible for the chemical weapons in Salisbury,” Haley said. “Whether that is in their direct act, or irresponsibly losing control of the agent, which could be worse, our support for our British friends and colleagues is unwavering.”

Read more:

Russia’s OPCW envoy exposes ‘eight UK lies’ in Skripal case

April 19, 2018 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , | Leave a comment

Lebanese Journalist Names Washington’s Goal Number One in Syria

Sputnik – April 19, 2018

Sputnik spoke to Lebanese journalist and commentator Sharmine Narwani to find out more about situation in Syria and Washington’s goals and actions there.

It has been revealed that US Secretary of Defence, James Mattis, tried to urge US President Donald Trump to obtain congressional approval before launching airstrikes on targets in Syria last weekend. According to reports, President Trump was however set on the use of military force, and overruled the Pentagon chief’s advice. In other developments, Saudi Arabia is reportedly holding talks with the United States and Egypt about sending an Arab coalition force into Syria.

Sputnik: We’re hearing news that the US is in talks with Saudi Arabia to build an Arab force and send it to Syria. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has said that he is in talks with US National Security Advisor John Bolton to plan building this force – what do you make of this, what do you think its purpose is?

Sharmine Narwani: Look Trump wants to clear exit the debacle in  Syria and eliminate the need to spend billions of dollars a year in maintaining US forces there and participating in the war. The recent chemical weapons allegations came shortly after Trump vocalised this desire; but the likelihood of an Arab force to physically base themselves in Syria on the Syrian-Iraqi border is virtually nil. We must view this new tactic with some suspicion. The US has always trumpeted ISIS as its main goal in Syria or the elimination of ISIS. If ISIS is gone, then what’s the need to have foreign forces based on that border? It seemed clear all along that containing Iran’s access from Iran to the borders of Palestine has always been the goal. It’s not as though Saudi Arabia and Egypt have stellar or significant nation-building expertise anyway. And they have many differences – the Saudis and the UEA for instance are heavily involved militarily in Yemen and are overextended there. Egypt has shown reluctance to participate in that Arab conflict, let alone another one with a government that it has actually sort of ideologically supported in the Syrian conflict. So it’s not likely to become a reality.

Sputnik: Of course in the lead up to the Western bombing campaign on Syria the US was saying that President Bashar al-Assad had used sarin gas, but we’ve now found out that they did not have sufficient evidence of this at the time. Also, the New York Times has revealed that Defence Secretary Jim Mattis urged Trump to get congressional approval for the strikes, but the president overruled him on that – what does this all tell you about the lead up to the events of last weekend?

Sharmine Narwani: If we look at the recent events leading up to the alleged chemical weapons incident, it took place under cover of two important developments: one was Trump’s declaration of exiting Syria, and removing US troops from there soon. The second would be the Syrian army’s very rapid defeat of terrorists in Eastern Ghouta and the reclamation of that strategically vital territory around Damascus. I think the sort of bringing up Sarin, the nerve gas sarin, it’s always kind of utilised as an emotional trigger, as is the mention of chemical weapons by itself and the general assumption if we’re talking about sarin would be that only states would have access to that particular substance, and not terrorist groups and non-state actors, unlike say with a substance like chlorine that is readily available. So I think it was very deliberately invoked, meaning sarin, to create an emotional response globally.

But Sarin has been used in Iraq by insurgents since at least 2004, in the form of IEDs. Turkey for instance, in May 2013, way later during the Syrian conflict, captured 12 Nusra members, Nusra is the Al-Qaida arm in Syria, they captured 12 Nusra members with significant amounts of Sarin and that was believed to be heading toward Syria. And major US-UK risk analysis firm IHS Conflict Monitor, in 2016, told us in a report that ISIS has used chemical weapons more than 52 times in both Syria and Iraq.

Sputnik: We’ve heard today that US senators are increasingly becoming concerned at the absence of a coherent US strategy in Syria, where do you see things from here?

Sharmine Narwani: Even during Obama’s term, we talked about there being a lack of coherent strategy. I would say that there is maybe a lack of a coherent verbalised strategy, one that was disseminated to the American public and an international one. There was certainly a strategy behind the scenes, one that was not vocalised and actions speak louder than words, so when we look at the arming, training and financing of terrorists when it was clear that there wasn’t enough Syrian support to topple Assad in the way leaders had been toppled in Tunisia and Egypt. We had the arming, training & financing but there was a very clear strategy, and the goal was number one, regime change, and two, to weaken the most important Iranian Arab state ally. So that was the strategy. When people say there wasn’t a coherent one they probably mean there wasn’t a coherent vocalised one. US actions have certainly shown us that regime change and weakening Iran were in fact the strategy in Syria and this is apparent today because the escalation still continues.

April 19, 2018 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Each US President Ends Up As Ruthless Interventionist These Days

By Philip M. GIRALDI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 19.04.2018

In the wake of last week’s cruise missile attack on Syria, there was a joke going around the internet saying that it doesn’t matter who Americans vote for, they always wind up getting John McCain as President of the United States. The humor derives from the fact that the past three presidents all ran for office committed to reducing America’s interventionism overseas but once in office they reversed course and expanded US military commitments worldwide, turning them into facsimiles of John McCain, who has never seen a war he didn’t like.

President Donald Trump’s explicit pledges to avoid expanded engagement in Asia and the Middle East while also fixing the relationship with Russia are by now lost down the memory hole as he has increased troop levels in Afghanistan while, by his own admission, the relationship with Moscow is now even worse than it was during the Cold War. And regarding Syria, his Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Halley has confirmed that the US military will not be going anywhere because certain goals have to be met first. One objective, monitoring developments relating to Iran, is open-ended, implying that it will be impossible to leave for the foreseeable future and suggesting that another Afghanistan-style quagmire is in the making.

Pundits see the process whereby all new presidents turn into hawks as evidence of the pervasiveness of the Deep State in US foreign policy, but as the Deep State operates largely in the open in the United States, it might also be referred to as the Establishment consensus. The persistence of the Establishment view in what has become increasingly a national security state is largely due to the fact that there is little pushback against it. The media is fully on board and Congress, which should be serving as a brake on presumed presidential prerogatives to go to war, benefits substantially from the bloated budgets and other emoluments that derive from American imperialism. Defense and related budgets grow in spite of the lack of any real threat and the public is fed a steady diet of fear by the media and government regarding fabricated threats to US national security.

The combination of government and media lies renders most Americans completely ignorant about what is going in in Syria. First of all, the United States and its allies, who are occupying nearly one quarter of the country, are in Syria illegally. Under international law, attacking and occupying a country that is not directly threatening you without any justifying United Nations Security Council resolution is illegal. It is also a war crime as defined by the Nuremberg Trials that followed after the Second World War, which ruled that a war of aggression is the “ultimate war crime” as it inevitably leads to many other crimes. So the United States is undeniably an unindicted war criminal.

That the United States has not been indicted or brought to justice for its crimes is largely due to its political and military power, which few nations choose to challenge, but also because it is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and is able to veto resolutions criticizing it. There have been numerous motions condemning American behavior, but none of them have made it out of the Security Council. This is not a confirmation of US innocence but rather a result of the politics that operate at the United Nations.

The United States is also in violation of international law because it remains in Syria without the permission of the recognized and legitimate Syrian government. Iranian forces and those of Russia are present on the invitation of Damascus. The United States is not. The US has also been illegally working to overthrow the legitimate Syrian government, acting in collusion with groups of so-called rebels, some of whom are actually drawn from internationally recognized terrorist groups, violating its own laws regarding providing material assistance to terrorism.

Establishment politics has meant that the United States is now a rogue nation defined by its propensity to go to war. America’s bombing of Syria is illegal, immoral, ineffective and dishonest. It is past time for the United States to pull out its troops and leave the Syrians alone. Americans killing Syrians while hypocritically claiming that it is done to stop Syrians from killing each other is a recipe for disaster.

April 19, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia exposes British lies on Skripal, but trail leads to US

By M.K. Bhadrakumar | Asia Times | April 19, 2018

The sensational case of the poisoning of the ex-MI6 agent and former Russian military intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal on March 4 in Salisbury, in the UK, is becoming more and more curious. Under a blinding spotlight from Moscow, the British allegation regarding a Russian hand in the poisoning of Skripal is getting exposed. An engrossing plot in big-power politics is also unfolding. There is stuff here for a Le Carre novel.

Are we witnessing a replay of the false flag Gulf of Tonkin attack of August 1964, the imaginary “incident” concocted by the US military to provide legal and political justification for deploying American forces in South Vietnam and for commencing open warfare against North Vietnam?

To recap, Britain alleged without any empirical evidence that a military grade nerve agent of a type known as Novichok was used in Salisbury, saying it was originally developed in the former Soviet Union, and therefore, Moscow’s hand – possibly, even President Vladimir Putin’s hand – was “highly likely”.

Moscow has maintained, on the other hand, that it had destroyed all its chemical weapons and an Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation verified and testified to that.

The British allegation quickly morphed into a large-scale expulsion of Russian diplomats (over 100 of them) by western capitals, under heavy pressure from Washington and London. The US alone expelled 60 Russian diplomats, while Britain expelled 23.

Egg on May’s face

Britain is studiously ignoring the Russian requests for samples of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack and for consular access to be granted to the former spy’s daughter Yulia. Meanwhile, Britain instead approached the OPCW to investigate.

The OPCW has now responded that it cannot identify the country of origin of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack.

There is egg on PM Theresa May’s face.

However, Russians managed to get their hands on the report prepared for the OPCW by its reputed laboratory in Spiez, the Swiss Center for Radiology and Bacteriological Analysis. According to the Swiss lab’s report, the chemical formula used in the Salisbury attack has been in service in the US, the UK and other NATO countries. Furthermore, neither the Soviet Union nor Russia “ever developed or stockpiled similar chemical weapons.”

That’s more egg on May’s face.

Now comes the bombshell. On April 18, Moscow disclosed that it has formally handed over to the OPCW proof to the effect that the Novichok agent purportedly used in the Salisbury attack actually happens to be patented as a chemical weapon in 2015 in the US and produced in that country. (By the way, unlike Russia, the US is yet to destroy its chemical weapon stockpiles, as required under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997.)

Now, not only the British government but Washington too has some explaining to do.

Was Skripal attack a covert op by the West?

Simply put, the Salisbury attack might even have been an Anglo-American joint covert operation undertaken with the ulterior motive to ratchet up tensions between the West and Russia. (The Washington Post reported on Monday that the former National Security Advisor HR McMaster might have hoodwinked President Donald Trump into approving the expulsion under the wrong notion that similar numbers of expulsions by European allies was in the pipeline. In the event though, the Europeans made only token expulsions.)

Britain is steadily edging away from the Skripal case, hoping, perhaps, that the matter will die down. But will Moscow let Britain off the hook?

On their part, the Russians seem to be holding back on some explosive information pointing toward the US’s direct complicity in this affair.

Indeed, if this was McMaster’s swan song, the indefatigable Russophobe probably hoped to kill two birds with one shot – push Russia’s relations with the West to a crisis point and second, scotch the prospects of an early US-Russia presidential summit (which Trump wanted.)

McMaster reportedly tried to stop Trump from congratulating Putin on his big victory in the Russian election on March 18 in a phone conversation where they discussed a possible summit meeting in a near future.

How far all this is linked to Trump’s decision on March 22, finally, to sack McMaster as his National Security Advisor is yet another template. By the standards of military people, McMaster probably has the reputation of being an “intellectual” but the man proved to be an unvarnished Cold Warrior fit for a museum.

From all accounts, Trump never trusted McMaster and the two had an acrimonious relationship. The one-star general who was overlooked for promotion by the Pentagon was Trump’s default choice following the abrupt departure of Michael Flynn.

Michael Wolff narrates a hilarious episode in his book ‘Fire and Fury’ that during the job interview for the NSA post, McMaster tried to impress Trump when he showed up in military uniform with his silver star and launched into a wide-ranging lecture on global strategy. After, Trump reportedly remarked, “That guy bores the shit out of me.”

April 19, 2018 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Autonomous Drones Will Soon Decide Who To Kill

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | April 18, 2018

The United States Army wants to develop a system that can be quickly integrated and deployed into its weaponized drone fleet to automatically Detect, Recognize, Classify, Identify (DRCI) and target enemy combatants and vehicles using artificial intelligence (AI). This is an impressive leap forward, whereas humans still operate current military drones, this technology could foster a new era of autonomous drones conducting operations in hybrid wars — without human oversight.

The project is called “Automatic Target Recognition of Personnel and Vehicles from an Unmanned Aerial System Using Learning Algorithms,” — a very original name, which the details were recently released on the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR)website. In other words, the Department of Defense (DoD) via the Army is requesting private and research institutions that have developed image targeting AI platforms to form partnerships with them for the eventual technology transfer.

Once the technology transfer is complete, these drones will use machine-learning algorithms, such as neural networks blended with artificial intelligence to create the ultimate militarization of AI. Currently, military drones have little onboard intelligence, besides sending a downlink of high definition video to a military analyst who manually decides whom to kill.

Here is the program’s objective:

“Develop a system that can be integrated and deployed in a class 1 or class 2 Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to automatically Detect, Recognize, Classify, Identify (DRCI) and target personnel and ground platforms or other targets of interest. The system should implement learning algorithms that provide operational flexibility by allowing the target set and DRCI taxonomy to be quickly adjusted and to operate in different environments.”

A full description of the program:

“The use of UASs in military applications is an area of increasing interest and growth. This coupled with the ongoing resurgence in the research, development, and implementation of different types of learning algorithms such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) provide the potential to develop small, rugged, low cost, and flexible systems capable of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and other DRCI capabilities that can be integrated in class 1 or class 2 UASs. Implementation of a solution is expected to potentially require independent development in the areas of sensors, communication systems, and algorithms for DRCI and data integration. Additional development in the areas of payload integration and Human-Machine Interface (HMI) may be required to develop a complete system solution. One of the desired characteristics of the system is to use the flexibility afforded by the learning algorithms to allow for the quick adjustment of the target set or the taxonomy of the target set DRCI categories or classes. This could allow for the expansion of the system into a Homeland Security environment. ”

Once the Army selects a private or research institution in the form of a joint venture, the partnership will allow both entities to further technological innovation in AI drone killing. Before the commercialization of this new dangerous weapon, these three phases must be completed first:

“PHASE I: “Conduct an assessment of the key components of a complete objective payload system constrained by the Size Weight and Power (SWAP) payload restrictions of a class 1 or class 2 UAS. Systems Engineering concepts and methodologies may be incorporated in this assessment. It is anticipated that this will require, at a minimum, an assessment of the sensor suite, learning algorithms, and communications system. The assessment should define requirements for the complete system and flow down those requirements to the sub-component level. Conduct a laboratory demonstration of the learning algorithms for the DRCI of the target set and the ability to quickly adjust to target set changes or to operator-selected DRCI taxonomy.”

“PHASE II: Demonstrate a complete payload system at a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5 or higher operating in real time. On-flight operation can be simulated. Complete a feasibility assessment addressing all engineering and integration issues related to the development of the objective system fully integrated in a UAS capable of detecting, recognizing, classifying, identifying and providing targeting data to lethality systems. Conduct a sensitivity analysis of the system capabilities against the payload SWAP restrictions to inform decisions on matching payloads to specific UAS platforms and missions.”

“PHASE III: Develop, integrate and demonstrate a payload operating in real time while on-flight in a number of different environmental conditions and providing functionality at tactically relevant ranges to a TRL 7. Demonstrate the ability to quickly adjust the target set and DRCI taxonomy as selected by the operator. Demonstrate a single operator interface to command-and-control the payload. Demonstrate the potential to use in military and homeland defense missions and environments.”

Interesting enough, The Conversation believes once these AI drones are commercialized, there will be “vast legal and ethical implications for wider society.” Nevertheless, the sphere of warfare could soon expand to include technology companies, engineers, and scientists, who would be labeled as valid military targets because of their involvement in building code for the machines.

The Conversation makes a stunning revelation about the legal implications of Silicon Valley technology firms who provide lines of code to autonomous drone weapon systems. Under the international humanitarian law, “dual-use” facilities – “those which develop products for both civilian and military application – can be attacked in the right circumstances.”

“The prospect of totally autonomous drones would radically alter the complex processes and decisions behind military killings. But legal and ethical responsibility does not somehow just disappear if you remove human oversight. Instead, responsibility will increasingly fall on other people, including artificial intelligence scientists.

The legal implications of these developments are already becoming evident. Under the current international humanitarian law, “dual-use” facilities – those which develop products for both civilian and military application – can be attacked in the right circumstances. For example, in the 1999 Kosovo War, the Pancevo oil refinery was attacked because it could fuel Yugoslav tanks as well as fuel civilian cars.

With an autonomous drone weapon system, certain lines of computer code would almost certainly be classed as dual-use. Companies like Google, its employees or its systems, could become liable to attack from an enemy state. For example, if Google’s Project Maven image recognition AI software is incorporated into an American military autonomous drone, Google could find itself implicated in the drone “killing” business, as might every other civilian contributor to such lethal autonomous systems.”

The Conversation reminds us of the recent events of autonomous AI in society “should serve as a warning.”

“Uber and Tesla’s fatal experiments with self-driving cars suggest it is pretty much guaranteed that there will be unintended autonomous drone deaths as computer bugs are ironed out.”

If militarized AI machines are left to the decision-making of who dies…  We ask one simple question: how many non-combatant deaths will count as acceptable to the Army as the AI drone technology is refined?

April 18, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Durham Becomes First US City to Ban Police Exchanges with Israel

Palestine Chronicle – April 18, 2018

On Monday, April 16, 2018, the Durham city council in the US, became the first US city council to ban police exchanges with the Israeli policy.

“After 3.5 hours and 50 powerful and inspiring testimonies, the Durham city council has just unanimously passed a resolution to end Durham police training in Israel,” said Eran Efrati, one of the organizers of the Demilitarize from Durham2Palestine campaign, which stood behind the vote, in a Facebook post.

“After years of hard work, Durham becomes the first city in the US to ban American police forces exchanges with the Israeli military and police,” he added.

The campaign has launched a petition which was signed by 1,394 people, calling on the council to ban police exchanges with Israel.

The petition read,

“The Israeli Defense Forces and the Israel Police have a long history of violence and harm against Palestinian people and Jews of Color. They persist in using tactics of extrajudicial killing, excessive force, racial profiling, and repression of social justice movements. Such tactics have been condemned by international human rights organizations for violating the human rights of Palestinians.”

The petition added,

“These tactics further militarize U.S. police forces that train in Israel, and this training helps the police terrorize Black and Brown communities here in the US. Additionally, such practices erode our constitutional rights to due process, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. Durham officials — including former Chief Lopez and current Chief Davis — have participated in these racist police exchange programs.”

The Palestine solidarity among minorities and marginalized communities has seen a growth in the last few years, with minorities and people of color joining the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel.

April 18, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , | Leave a comment

Iran rejects ‘baseless’ UK, US accusations on Yemen missiles

Press TV – April 18, 2018

Iran has firmly rejected fresh US and British allegations of Tehran sending missiles to Yemen, saying the two are seeking to whitewash their “shameful” complicity in the crisis gripping the war-torn country by leveling “false” charges against others.

“The US and UK complicity in Yemen crisis is shameful,” Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations said in a press release on Tuesday.

The Iranian mission was reacting to remarks by the American and British ambassadors to the UN, Nikki Haley and Karen Pierce during a Security Council meeting on Yemen earlier in the day.

Haley claimed that Iran was interfering in the Yemeni affairs and violating the arms embargo on the impoverished state. Pierce also accused Tehran of “non-compliance with Security Council Resolution 2216.”

The Iranian mission, however, said the American and British officials had “repeated their derogatory allegations about Iran to cover up their own role in the disastrous situation created in Yemen. Iran categorically rejects those allegations as baseless propaganda.”

“The fact is that the war of aggression of Saudi Arabia in Yemen is the main underlying reason for the escalation of the crisis. It is regrettable that Saudi Arabia and its warmonger supporters, as the main party responsible for such a catastrophic humanitarian situation, are trying to cover up their shameful crimes by introducing false charges against others or trying to spread the crisis beyond Yemen’s borders,” it added.

“The US and UK are enjoying a blood business in Yemen now” by providing bombs to the Saudi warplanes that are targeting Yemeni civilians, the Iranian mission added.

Saudi Arabia and its allies launched the war in March 2015 in support of Yemen’s former Riyadh-friendly government and against the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which is currently running state affairs.

The military campaign has killed and injured over 600,000 civilians, according to the latest figures released by the Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights.

Several Western countries, the US and the UK in particular, are accused of being complicit in the aggression as they supply the Riyadh regime with advanced weapons and military equipment.

April 18, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Western media cover tracks of Trump, May and Macron’s war crime in Syria

By Finian Cunningham | RT | April 17, 2018

With astounding double-think, the US and Britain accuse Russia of “tampering” with the alleged chemical-weapon attack site in Syria’s Douma – just days after the US, UK and France barraged the county with over 100 missiles.

If anyone is guilty of tampering with the alleged crime scene, it is the NATO trio who rushed to bomb Syria just as inspectors belonging to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) arrived in Syria – invited there by the Syrian and Russian governments.

The frenzied Western media campaign to find Syria and Russia guilty of a war crime involving alleged chemical weapons is further highlighted by the reporting this week by award-winning British journalist Robert Fisk.

Fisk, who has been covering Middle East war zones for nearly 40 years, went to Douma city to file his report for The Independent. Credit goes to The Independent for publishing Fisk’s investigative work.

In the aftermath of the weekend’s airstrikes, what he found from interviewing local people and medics is arresting, if not shocking. From Fisk’s witness-gathering report, there was no gas attack carried out on April 7 – in stark contradiction to what the US, British and French governments have been declaring in hysterical tones for the past two weeks.

Those declarations culminated in the US-led bombing of Syria at the weekend. What’s more, the US, British and French leaders are reserving the right to carry out further strikes on Syria – if “the regime repeats its chemical-weapons attacks on civilians.”

What Robert Fisk reports from inside Douma corroborates what the Syrian government and its Russian ally have been saying consistently since the alleged incident on April 7. The incident, they say, was staged by the so-called “first responder” group known as the White Helmets, who work hand-in-glove with notorious terrorist outfits like Jaysh al-Islam and Al-Nusra Front. The White Helmets are also on the pay roll of the American CIA, as well as British and French intelligence agencies.

Similar to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s earlier claim, Fisk reports that on April 7, a panic scene was engendered in Douma’s hospital by White Helmets activists who shouted that “chemical weapons” were being deployed. These activists began dousing people with water hoses and conveniently had video cameras on hand to capture the chaotic scenes acted out by unwitting civilians. A doctor in the hospital confirmed this to Fisk.

As for the supposed dozens of dead that Western governments and media blamed on “animal Assad” and Russian complicity, there is no evidence of the alleged victims. Video footage of dead people in a war zone is hardly proof.

This means that US President Trump and his British and French counterparts, Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron, just launched a criminal aggression on Syria in grave violation of international law and the country’s sovereignty. This is exactly what many independent observers were decrying at the time of the missile barrage, warning that the presumed evidence for a chemical attack was far from substantiated.

Indeed, the suspicion is that Trump, May and Macron knew that their evidential ground for attacking Syria was impossibly thin, and that is why they rushed to bomb the country. It was a decision hastened by the arrival of the OPCW inspectors heading to Douma. The inspectors are due to start their investigative work on Wednesday – delayed apparently by security concerns.

In all probability, the Douma incident was a propaganda stunt orchestrated by Western-backed anti-government militants and their White Helmets media agents, precisely in order to provoke an external military attack on Syria by the US, Britain and France.

Several things stand out about Robert Fisk’s latest reporting. This is exactly the kind of critical journalism that other Western media outlets should have been engaged in following the alleged chemical weapon attack on April 7. Credit goes to Fisk and The Independent. But it is a shameful case of “too little, too late.”

Also, it is notable how Fisk’s reportage is being roundly ignored – at least so far – by other mainstream Western media outlets. That’s an impressive feat of self-censorship at a crucial time when the US, British and French governments should be open to accusations of committing a war crime on Syria over their latest blitzkrieg.

This is especially so, given their warnings of more to come, over “further” chemical-weapons use. The urgent concern is that these governments are giving themselves a license to act on more false flags. They should be held rigorously to account for their claims.

This disregard for international law is made possible because of the appalling willingness of Western mainstream media to regurgitate self-serving claims made by terrorist-affiliated groups in Syria and their propaganda outlets.

American, British and French mainstream media have given saturated coverage to the White Helmets and the Syrian American Medical Society, and the dodgy one-man-band operation in Coventry known as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. CNN, the BBC and France 24 cite these groups as if they are “authoritative” and impartial, when in fact they are all part of the regime-change campaign in Syria sponsored by the US and its British and French allies.

It is telling, too, how Robert Fisk is being assailed as a “Syrian, Russian stooge” on social media. The one Western mainstream journalist who has had the integrity to delve into Syria’s Douma to uncover a very different critical perspective – one that disproves the claims peddled by the US, British and French leaders and other mainstream media – is being vilified for principled journalism.

Western corporate media are a grotesque mockery of public information and critical, independent accounting of government power.

Apart from Robert Fisk, the few other Western journalists to have ventured into Syria to report on what is really happening are independent, “alternative” sources like Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley and Patrick Henningsen. They have exposed the “Oscar-winning” White Helmets group, which is actually complicit in staging atrocities against civilians living under a reign of terror imposed by their terrorist affiliates. It is understood the White Helmets activists behind the Douma provocation on April 7 have since fled the city along with the terrorist gangs under the cover of an evacuation deal with the liberating Syrian and Russian forces, who are now in control of most of the Eastern Ghouta suburbs near Damascus.

Western media journalists, if they were really committed to principles of accuracy and critical investigation, should be poring over the rubble in Douma, interviewing local people and finding out what really happened. But they are not.

That is why, one suspects, they are not there. That is why the US and Britain are now accusing Russia of “tampering” with the site in Douma – because there is no evidence of a chemical-weapons attack, as Robert Fisk reports.

That means the US, British and French governments just committed a brazen war crime.

This would also explain why Western mainstream media have now quickly moved their focus to allegations of “Russian cyberattacks” on American and British infrastructure. This is a classic case of “keeping ahead of the story.” Western governments and their dutiful media do not have a “story” – at least not the one they claim – in Syria, so the imperative is to change to another subject as quickly as possible.

April 18, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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