US-NATO

"[US National Security Advisor] John Bolton is a kind of bureaucratic tape-worm. Try as you might, you can't expel him. He seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agency, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering - but critically, somehow, never suffering himself. His life really is Washington in a nutshell: Blunder into obvious catastrophes again and again, refuse to admit blame, and then demand more of the same. That's the John Bolton life-cycle. In between administration jobs, there are always cushy think-tank posts, paid speaking gigs, cable news contracts. War may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it is always good business." (Tucker Carlson in Tucker Carlson Tonight 22 June 2019.) Read more in the partial transcript inside or watch the video. This session was remarkable in its forthright criticism of war, its assessment of Iraq, and its rundown, with several interviewees on the Washington war-culture and war-media. Some readers may find Carlson's praise of Trump's stated rationale for leaving Iran overly fulsome, but world peace is at stake. For those of you who loath this show because of its frequent support for Right to Life views and religion, keep in mind that that is probably the price Carlson has to pay in order to speak out against the war machine.

TUCKER CARLSON: "Neocons still wield enormous power in Washington. They don't care what the cost of war with Iran is. They certainly don't care what the effect on Trump's political fortunes might be. They despise Donald Trump. Now, one of their key allies is the National Security Advisor of the United States. John Bolton's an old friend of Bill Crystal's. Together they helped plan the Iraq war. When Bolton made it to the Whitehouse, the neocons cheered. Left-wing New York Times columnist, Brett Stevens, took a break from attacking Donald Trump, to celebrate his hiring. [...]

Hilary Clinton's toppling of Libya was not a disaster, says John Bolton. Keep in mind there are literally slave markets operating in the streets of Tripoli right now. No problem, Bolton's fine with that. He's fine with the outcome in Iraq too. That wasn't a disaster either. According to John Bolton, that was a raging success. We killed hundreds of thousands of people, lost thousands of our own troops, spent more than a trillion dollars - all to eliminate a WMD threat that, despite John Bolton's assurances, never existed in the first place.

Bolton is glad we did all that. Really happy about it. That's demented. Normal people don't talk like that. There's nothing normal about John Bolton. Check out this piece of tape we've recently uncovered in which Bolton promises we're going to overthrow the government of Iran. Keep in mind that this was filmed long before the Iranians shot down a single drone. [Film excerpt shows Bolton in front of a huge audience predicting a celebration in Iran of a successful regime change by America before 2019.]

In other words, last night has been in the works for years. John Bolton is a kind of bureaucratic tape-worm. Try as you might, you can't expell him. He seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agency, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering - but critically, somehow, never suffering himself. His life really is Washington in a nutshell: Blunder into obvious catastrophes again and again, refuse to admit blame, and then demand more of the same. That's the John Bolton life-cycle. In between administration jobs, there are always cushy think-tank posts, paid speaking gigs, cable news contracts. War may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it is always good business."

Carlson then interviews Glen Greenwald of The Intercept.

TUCKER CARLSON: "Glenn Greenwald co-founded The Intercept. He joins us tonight. So, Glen, the reaction to the President not going to war tonight has been really striking. Very little celebration about it. In certain quarters, outright attacks [gives example of CNN's national security analyst and of a congresswoman, Lis Cheney] What about Washington makes war the first resort for both parties, every time?

GREENWALD: "It's exciting, so it drives media ratings. It makes people buy newspapers. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) wrote about how, when a country becomes an empire, the people in the capital never get any risk from wars. So, Liz Cheney and Bill Crystal, David From and the people who cheer war, are never put at risk, but they get excitement and purpose from it. They get kind of a feeling of power. Ben Shapiro on Twitter today said, "Let's show Iran that we can match them!" That's something that people say when they go through life feeling inadequate and without any kind of purpose or strength. So it gives people strength. And there's also this much deeper issue that after the Iraq war, almost nobody other than Judy Miller, the single scapegoat, - There was no accountability, no accountability for the people who lied the country into the war. So you get somebody like Geoffrey Godberg you look at someone like Jeffrey Goldberg who for The New Yorker was writing award-winning articles claiming that Sadam Hussein was in an alliance with al-qaeda making people believe that Iraq did 9/11.
Is he out of journalism because of that? No he's been promoted! He's the editor in chief of the Atlantic. You turn on MSNBC, there's Bill Kristol! You open up the New York Times, there's Brett Stephen, Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post. They're all embedded in Washington culture, the think tanks especially. And they only become important and enlivened when the US is at war. They get all kinds of psychological economic and political benefits from it at everybody else's expense. If you claim that there was a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al-qaeda, 9/11 and Saddam, it's clearly untrue. How in the world could you stay in journalism? I mean do you know? How could Jeff Goldberg go on to run one of the most famous magazines in English? The thing is, Tucker, the more you promote war - even if you get it wrong - the more you're going to prosper.

That is the sickness, the pathology of the DC media and political class. Jeffrey Goldberg's articles won a national magazine award for creating a grotesque conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Not only should he not be in journalism, he should be out of decent society. And yet, when it came time to compete for whether he was going to stay at the New Yorker or go to the Atlantic the owner of the Atlantic gave him and his children rare exotic horses to lure him away from the New Yorker and he now runs one of the most important magazines in the world. You see that all throughout the media; the same people who not just lied about Iraq, but who cheered all kinds of wars in Muslim countries get prosper from it. They get promoted. They continually get treated as the voices of authority, and that's why this continuously goes on. It is so mind-bogglingly corrupt it's hard to believe. It happens in our city in our business."

Pontius Pilate, of course, was the judge who condemned Jesus Christ to death, according to the bible. The crime Jesus was punished for was that of leading a religion critical of the values of the Roman state. Modern authorities try to defend their right to have criminal secrets in order to justify pursecuting Assange, who has led a world-wide movement for transparent and just government. If UK or Swedish judges deliver Assange to authorities who then deliver him to the United States, they may claim that they are only doing their duty under the law, just like Judge Pontius Pilate. I am not religious, but I think this is a valuable parable for our time.

I first became aware of Julian Assange through Wikileak's publication of the "Collateral Murder" material. [Collateral murder comes from the expression 'collateral damage', a euphemism coined by the US war machine to describe civilian deaths and material damage in war.] I was filled with admiration and relief that someone was exposing the continuing illegal role of the US Army in Iraq and its vicious conduct. I could not understand why the United States had not been universally condemned for the lies it used to illegally invade Iraq and then why a range of US-NATO allies failed to condemn its continuing brutal occupation of that country. I next became aware of the US-NATO horror caused in Libya and then in Syria. As my awareness grew, so did the effrontery of the United States. Soon it was accusing Russia of aggression, as the US itself surrounded Russia with US bases. See the map.[1]

Criminal state

Now, in the ultimate criminal state absurdity, Britain, a major partner to US in weapons sales and war crimes in the Middle East, is aiding and abetting the United States to punish the one man who was able and courageous enough to expose the United States for its war crimes within war crimes. Obscenely, but revealingly, a small-time London magistrate, Judge Deborah Taylor, showed the clay that British "justice" is based on, as she 'diagnosed' [SIC] Assange a "narcissist" [an upstart] and thereby sentenced him to 58 weeks in high security prison, presumably for crimes of personality and class. She completely ignored what ordinary people can see and what she must have seen; that he was correctly in fear of his life from the criminal government of the United States and its vassal, the British government. She had to know that extradition was in the wings, but she pretended that it was not.

It is hard to find out anything about this woman, but, contrary to her supposed impartiality, she seems to me to be either the servant or the dupe of the British upper class. That ruling class considers that it has the right to engage in murder and mayhem all over the world by supplying weapons for cash, but woe-betide any commoner who might expose its crimes for public judgement. Should the US elites succeed in their plans to exact their cruel revenge on Julian Assange, I think that Judge Deborah Taylor may go down in history as the woman who helped send modern civilisation down its final corridor to total enslavement and war.

Julian Assange unlike Jesus won't rise again, so we must protect him

For Julian Assange, unlike Jesus - another 'upstart' - probably won't arise again. You may or may not believe in Jesus, but the crucifixion story is a valid parable nonetheless and it is all about justice and democracy: After Judas identified him, Jesus was convicted by a magistrate, Pontius Pilate, of the crime of trying to lead the jews against the Romans in a revolutionary religion, which preached love instead of war, slavery and pillage.[2] Later the Romans adopted Christianity and when the Roman empire fell, the Holy Roman Empire continued. In the 16th Century Henry VIII took over as head of religion in England and called it the Church of England. The Church of England still claims to believe that Jesus Christ died to save the rest of us from oppression. The queen is supposed to believe that. British magistrates are supposed to act within that paradigm, but we can see that they do not.

In Jesus' case, at the site of crucifixion, the attending crowd was asked who they would prefer to save: Jesus or another revolutionary, Barrabas. The crowd chose Barrabas.[2] We, however, do not have another revolutionary of Assange's extraordinary global profile, but neither is anyone asking us if we want to save Julian Assange.

It is up to us to save ourselves and Julian Assange and the right to shine a light on the crimes that the power elite carry out all the time.

We live in a world, sadly, where electronic technology has reached a point at which people with money can do almost anything. They can launch wars for profit, carry out torture, influence the courts and the media, and then they can secretly try and imprison anyone who attempts to expose what they have done. That's why they are persecuting Julian Assange. They are out to prove that they can silence any protest.

These rich power-elites are networked and they back each other up. Julian Assange, as part of the alternative media, exposed this network - and he did not take sides. Even the cowardly mainstream media that pretends he is not a journalist republished the information he provided. If Julian is extradited to the United States, judged guilty in a secret court (for it will be secret) publishing in the western world will suffer the same fate as publishing in Muslim countries. Remember Charlie Hebdo and "We are all Charlie."

We are all Julian Assange now. Jesus of Nazareth was a local phenomena that went viral. Julian is a global phenomena in a global world - but he may be our last because, after him, what individual will ever achieve such a political profile, if the power-elite get their wish for utter media control and total secrecy?

US-NATO Military Industrial Media Congressional Complex

Humans who live in modern techno civilisations are only apparently better than their ancestors; they are essentially the same, in different clothes, with different technologies. Without those materials and technologies, we are our ancestors. And so are our masters. They can be just as vicious as Attila, just as grasping as the Roman Emperors, and just as cowardly as modern generals who order drone executions without trial on people far away. America's 'Exceptionalism' seems to be no different from Hitler's belief in the 'master race' doctrine. The United States openly uses its Exceptionalist doctrine to justify the invasion, occupation and genocide involved in its multiple regime change projects, which seem to have two aims: to get control of fossil fuel resources and to make money out of weapons in continuous rolling wars. Weapons sales seem to be the most profitable industry in the world. That is what Julian Assange is up against.

Julian Assange's plight shows how little worth Australian citizenship has and how worthless our US subservient politicians

Of course, none of this persecution of one inspired giant of a man could have been achieved if the client vassal state to America, Australia, had not remained collusively silent. Successive Australian governments have pretended that they have provided Assange with 'appropriate' consular support. That is why I say that Assange's plight shows how little worth Australian citizens have in the eyes of the Australian Government. As Assange himself once said something like that it is right for Australians to look at what happens in Washington, because that is where the real government of Australia is. As an Australian, I am ashamed of my government and I cannot understand why my countrymen remain so cowed and confused about what this all means.

NOTES

[1]
The US has 800 to 1000 military bases world wide. Russia has only eight, and these are located close to its own borders. France has nine. The United Kingdom has the most next to the US.
These bases are themselves occupations by the United States of sovereign powers: Here is a list of military bases by country. Australia also has a US base. Citizens in Australia and most or all countries that the US occupies with armed forces have protested again and again, yet their governments have acquiesced to the US, not to the democratic demands of their citizens.

[2] According to biblical history, Pontius Pilate served as the prefect of Judaea from 26 to 36 A.D. He convicted Jesus of treason and declared that Jesus thought himself King of the Jews, and had Jesus crucified. In the Gospel according to Mark, Pilate’s main question to Jesus was whether he considered himself to be the King of the Jews, and thus a political threat (Mark 15:2). In the Gospel according to Luke, Temple authorities had decided that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy, but brought him to Pilate to accuse him further of sedition against Rome. The Gospel of Luke says that Pilate handed Jesus over to the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas for judgment on the grounds that Jesus was a Galilean and thus under Antipas' jurisdiction. Jesus was publicly flogged and then executed by crucifixion as a traitor to Rome. All Gospels say that it had been a tradition of the Romans to release a Jewish prisoner at the time of the Passover. Pilate offered the crowd at the execution site the choice of releasing either Jesus or another revolutionary named Barabbas. The crowd stated that it wished to save Barabbas. Accordingly, Pilate condemned Jesus to crucifixion.

Not so long ago the middle classes were marching enthusiastically all over the western world to defend freedom of the press, after the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo. "We are all Charlie!" they cried. Now there is hardly a peep about Julian Assange's cruel and unusual punishment for telling the world of war-crimes. Certainly no mass marches in the street. What's the difference? The mainstream press is singing a different song. It suited them to have people marching in the streets about Charlie Hebdo. Now, for some reason, it doesn't.

“Imagine that in 1946 the general-secretary of the United Nations had submitted a resolution to the General Assembly stating that Nazi crimes were so horrendous and despicable that the countries of the world needed to impose a blanket censorship on any public reference to or discussion of Hitler or his henchmen. Only the names of victims were to be mentioned or discussed. And the U.N. member countries, then, unanimously passed this resolution. If such a resolution had been proposed, passed, and fully enforced, what would we know today about the Nazi regime, the German history of that period, or the origins, premises, logic, and implied conclusions of national-socialist ideology and policies, both domestic and foreign? Without open and public discussion and debate through mention of Hitler’s name and unrestricted access to and use of his papers, speeches, and all other related documents, from whom would the world know why and what the Nazi system had done?” (Extract from article by Professor Richard M. Ebeling).

Justice and crime reporting must be open

Professor Ebeling's points are very well made in the full article. One thing Ebeling does not mention is that the police and justice system are supposed to serve us and we are supposed to keep track of them. Perhaps he does not mention this because it would take him into the personally dangerous realms of questioning his own state. However, the questions remain: If access to documents involving evidence, suspects' identities and trials, is removed from public examination, how can we be sure that justice is being served? How do we know that our courts serve our interests, rather than the interests of criminals and the military? An explosive case in point: If we do not have the material to examine, how can we assess what the New Zealand justice system is doing about the massacre in Christchurch? The arrested terrorist's face was pixelated in video of his being brought to be charged in court. The video record he apparently made of his mass murder, does not match up with what he is reported to have done. It seems to show him going round to two mosques, apparently for a second time, and shooting a mostly immobile piles of bodies. Ambulances did not arrive for over half an hour. It does not make sense. Perhaps there is an explanation, but how can doubts be satisfied if there is to be no discussion and no access to documents?

Many would call such doubts extreme: who could question Western governments?

Egregious abuse of censorship has led to international hounding of an extraordinary individual

Another thing that Professor Ebeling does not mention, is the fact that censorship has clearly been used to protect western evil in recent times.

I refer to the 'classification' of war footage taken in Iraq, leaked by Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks, which published it as Collateral Murder. This war footage was a 2007 recording made by US soldiers in Iraq (a country illegally invaded on an invented pretext and repeatedly pulverised). It records the shooting of unarmed civilians, including ambulance attendants and children, with the authority of the United States military, on the mistaken pretext that one of them may be carrying a machine gun. The video is taken from a powerful helicopter, which shoots hails of bullets into the civilians, a grotesque act of brutality and overkill. They shoot the ambulance attendants when those people are attempting to remove the wounded from the scene. They even shoot an obviously severely wounded man who is dragging himself on his belly towards a door. First they hope he will go for a gun to justify this shooting, but he doesn't, so they shoot him anyway. Twelve Iraqis die, including, among them, two Reuters journalists. This footage was censored by the US Government, but Wikileaks made it public. It is for this reason that the US wants to capture, imprison, and possibly execute past Wikileaks editor, Julian Assange, an Australian who has committed no crime - quite the opposite. The crime is all on the United States side. It is part of an unjustifiable series of brutal events associated with their illegal invasion of Iraq.

If you watch Wikileaks' Collateral Murder, you can assess that crime, and it has been discussed and reported all over the world. You can also assess Julian Assange's subsquent hounding by the United States government. His persecution and false painting as a criminal shows the price of revealing what elites consider their prerogative: mass murder and management of the mass media. Ironically, again, Collateral Murder has been republished many many times, by media outlets which have not been persecuted and which, like cowardly collaborators, have failed to stand up for Julian Assange. Fortunately it has not been recensored. The video embedded in this article is commented on by Julian Assange and Ivan Eland (US Defense analyst and ex-Cato institute director), and compered by a mainstream Al-Jazeera corporate news interviewer. The Al-Jazeera presentation and interview took place in 2010. It is worth looking at as well to see Julian Assange before his demonisation, to remember why saving him from the United States is so important.

And remembering why it is so important to stop censorship - that it is our responsibility to know what is going on, not to accept what we are told is going on as if we were children. Indeed, terrorism by private citizens does not begin to compare on the scale of terrorism by US-NATO.

The Syrian army discovered a highly-equipped hospital which had been built with the support of the western states and Israel for the terrorists and their family members in Quneitra province.

The Arabic-language service of RT reported on Wednesday that the Syrian police forces entered the town of al-Bariqeh in Quneitra and took control of a hospital with modern equipment and medication.

It added that the hospital is equipped with different types of x-ray systems, an advanced central heating system, well-equipped beds and a surgery section and a vast storage drugs, including new and advanced medications needed for surgical operations.

A medical source said that a large number of Israeli, US and French equipment and drugs have been found in the hospital, saying that some of the medicines and equipment are not at all available to Syrian citizens.

Quneitra province in Southwestern Syria came under government control around two months ago, when terrorists, mostly from the al-Nusra Front, were forced to withdraw to Idlib. Others agreed to the government peace offer, ended the war of insurgency and received government amnesty.

The hospital is one of the last placed that had remained unknown to the government forces ever since they came in control of the province that neighbors the occupied Golan Heights, but it is not the only instance of the US and Israeli support for the terrorists.

In another instance on Tuesday, the Damascus army launched two separate ambush operations against ISIL in Palmyra (Tadmur) region in Eastern Syria, and discovered a large volume of arms, including American weapons.

The army soldiers ambushed a group of ISIL that tried to move from al-Tanf in Southern Homs towards al-Bayarat al-Qarbi in Palmyra to further move towards Raqqa via al-Taweinan and Wadi Abyaz Dam region.

The army men killed two terrorists and capturd two more, forcing the remaining pockets of the terrorist to flee the battlefield.

The army soldiers also seized a large volume of military equipment and six motorcycles.

In the meantime, other units of the army ambushed another group of ISIL terrorists in al-Forou’a region 70 km Southeast of Palmyra, and captured five terrorists.

The army units seized two military vehicles with communication devices on board and a large volume of the US-made machineguns and M16 rifles and several boxes of munitions.

FARS First published on September 19, 2018 at https://en.muraselon.com/2018/09/damascus-terrorists-hospital-israel-us-france-quneitra/

Over 2,600 corpses of civilians killed in the US air raids and victims of the ISIL terrorist group have been found in Raqqa province so far, local sources said.

The sources in Raqqa reported on Wednesday that 9 more bodies of civilians killed in the US-led coalition attacks were found in al-Jamili district in Raqqa city on Tuesday.

Meantime, the Kurdish-language Hawar news quoted an official source in Raqqa civil council team as saying that the corpses of over 2,600 people, mostly women and children, have been unearthed in al-Rashid stadium, the city zoo, al-Qadim great mosque and al-Badou district since the liberation of Raqqa last October who were mostly buried by the ISIL in mass-graves.

The bodies of civilians killed in the US airstrikes and the ISIL assaults are every day discovered in mass-graves and under the ruins of buildings in different parts of Raqqa.

Last Sunday, a sum of 13 bodies of civilians killed in the US-led coalition’s airstrikes on Raqqa city were found.

Raqqa Civil Council Team discovered bodies of four civilians killed in the air raid in al-Tamovin Garden in al-Kahroba neighborhood in Raqqa city.

In the meantime, three more bodies were found in the yard of al-Atiq mosque and six more were unearthed from the debris of ruined buildings in al-Badou neighborhood in Raqqa city.

FARS First published on 20 September 2018 at https://en.muraselon.com/2018/09/bodies-isil-us-raqqa/

US protests that Syria's retaking of Idlib from terrorists risks being the greatest humanitarian crisis of all time permeate the press. Cliched staged footage of 'White Helmets' rushing down dusty streets in Syria, purportedly to warn, direct and save civilians, insults the intellect. You wonder how the news announcers can bear to sit there pretending this is real news. Aren't they afraid of war-crimes prosecution when the dust settles? In fact, Idlib is the last province in Syria and in a region that remains occupied illegally by both the United States and other western forces [1] and terrorists, in a bizarre gothic partnership.

The United States pretends that Idlib is the last province still in 'rebellion' against Syria's President Assad. This is false. Idlib is the last province occupied by US military. What the US calls 'rebels' are takfiri militants and mercenaries who have taken the local population hostage, apparently under US protection. Furthermore, Idlib has become the refuge of takfiri routed from other parts of Syria.

In the other terrorist occupied provinces where takfiri fighters had dug in and taken civilians hostage, like East Aleppo, Gouta and Daraa, the Syrian Government bused civilians to safety and allowed terrorists to leave in buses for Idlib if they chose, or be rehabilitated to serve in the Syrian Arab Army, before they bombed those who were trying to maintain a stronghold. See https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-last-bus-to-idlib-terrorist-safe-haven-in-syria-faces-a-cleaning-out/246956/. Many terrorists took the Idlib option and Idlib is now where the worst die-hard terrorists have gone to ground.

The Idlib terrorists are relying on the protection of the United States, and the US is flooding the world with propaganda as though it might be prepared to fight Syria and Russia to save this hellish toehold they have illegally established in Syria's second most important province. Turkey's President Erdogan, despite his recent posturing against the United States over a failed coup in 2016, has taken a stance which comforts the interests of the US, claiming that Turkey cannot accommodate more refugees if Idlib is bombed. See https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/after-rejecting-turkey-plea-russia-and-iran-back-offensive-in-idlib-20180908-p502l0.html. It is widely thought that Erdogan not only wants to prevent the formation of any Kurdish state, but hopes to establish this area as Turkish, which it was before the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which carved up the Ottoman Empire and created the tensions in the area which have since been fanned by US-European interests, notably NATO. The Kurds have been used as pawns by US-NATO, which was considering using them as its toehold, however this caused conflict with its ally, Turkey, since the separatist Kurds want the same land that Erdogan wants for Turkey.

"The Turkish position is not different from that of the US, apart from the change of language, interests and objectives. Instead of ensuring the security of Israel through the US in the Southwest region, there are Kurdish forces hostile to Turkey which has been striving for decades to curtail, dissolve and prevent Turkish Kurds from separating themselves and establishing their Kurdish state.

Some details of the scene are different. The pro-Turkish national movement and calls to protect Sunnis in the city of Idlib are coming from the Muslim Brotherhood Group which supports every plan of Ankara in Syria even if it comes to cut a piece of its land to become the borderline, similar to what Israel did in Lebanon in 1982." (Source: Syria Sykes Picot in Idlib, http://www.arabtimesonline.com/news/syria-sykes-picot-in-idlib/.)

Syria's strategy against the terrorists.

Syria has crawled out alive from under a monster foreign-backed terrorist intervention, to everyone's amazement. And now she is trying to banish the monster. Not so long ago, people were shaking their heads and wondering how any country could survive the foreign-backed assault, how any government could survive the continuous psychopathic propaganda against it, but now they have hope. Meanwhile the United States can hardly believe that it is losing this war. It seemed like such a slam-dunk, another Iraq, another Libya - but not another Vietnam. How has Syria done it?

They have used the same process for each enemy territory. To foil the insincere accusations that the government was persecuting civilians, Syria has sent buses to take civilian hostages out, and, at the same time, it has offered two solutions to the terrorists: either they can be rehabilitated in the Syrian Army and fight for Syria, or they could take buses to Idlib. So Syria has squeezed the terrorists towards its northern borders, city by city, whilst greatly limiting civilian casualties.

The United States, which accuses the Syrian Government of purposely bombing civilians, has itself bombed civilians and terrorists alike in Raqqa, Iraq, along the north-east Syrian border. As Raqqa was reduced to ashes and stones, there were no buses to evacuate civilians or to allow press-ganged takfiri soldiers to escape.

There never was a civil war in Syria and most of the remaining bad guys are now all holed up in Idlib, surrounded by human shields. And America says it's worried about civilians. But we all can see that America wants to keep its takfiri mercenaries in Idlib, like a mad sorcerer deploying his orcs from some terrible dark tower.

NOTES

[1] Source: Their presence is unofficial. http://freenations.net/200-british-and-us-troops-trapped-in-idlib/ US troops are overtly present in a region touching Idlib. See the map below from the New York Times.

The U.S. asked the Merkel administration to participate in "retaliatory" regime change strikes on the Syrian government forces when, likely soon, another faked 'chemical' incident will be blamed on it. Several high ranking members of Chancellor Merkel's party want to follow that call. But now the Scientific Services of the German Bundestag, the equivalent of the U.S. Congressional Research Service, released an authoritative legal opinion (pdf, in German) on the issue. Such an attack would be illegal under international law and it would also violate the German constitution. There will be no official German support for such a wider attack on Syria. (In an earlier opinion the Scientific Service found that the continued U.S. presence in Syria is illegal.)

Fitting to the anniversary of a remarkable incident that took place in New York, Maram Susli, aka SyrianGirl, released this video with quotes from Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, and from the U.S. ambassador to the UN Nicky Halley.

 

Source: Moon of Alabama.

Read more here: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/09/a-few-items-related-to-syria.html#more

German military strikes on Syria would be ‘absurd & irresponsible’ – Left Party chair

See also article at RT here: https://www.rt.com/news/438198-german-airstrikes-syria-wagenknecht/

The leader of Germany’s Left Party hit out at the government for mulling potential military strikes against Damascus, just one day after Berlin said it was in talks with allies about possible German military deployment in Syria.

Published time: 11 Sep, 2018 11:25 Edited time: 11 Sep, 2018 17:34
FILE PHOTO. Aftermath of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Eastern Ghouta in April 2018. © White Helmets / Reuters

There is in fact a Middle Eastern nation that is in fact in control of a vast, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons. This nation does have the capability of deploying those weapons anywhere in the region. It is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and its arsenal has never been inspected by any international agency. But this nation is not Iran. It's Israel. (James Corbett)

The Transcript below has been republished from https://www.corbettreport.com/israelinukes/
TRANSCRIPT

DONALD TRUMP: I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. In a few moments I will sign a presidential memorandum to begin reinstating US nuclear sanctions on the Iranian regime. We will be instituting the highest level of economic sanction.

SOURCE: President Trump Gives Remarks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action

When President Trump announced that the US was going to de-certify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and reinstitute sanctions on that country, one of the reasons he cited for that move was the presentation of “new” evidence from Israeli intelligence showing that the Iranians had lied about its nuclear program during the negotiation of that deal.

TRUMP: Last week Israel published intelligence documents long concealed by Iran conclusively showing the Iranians regime and its history of pursuing nuclear weapons.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: A few weeks ago, in a great intelligence achievement, Israel obtained half a ton of the material inside these vaults. And here’s what we got; 55,000 pages. Another 55,000 files on 183 CDs. Everything you’re about to see is an exact copy of the original Iranian material

SOURCE: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives statement on Iran Nuclear Deal

Theatrical props and dramatic rhetoric aside, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent presentation on the “Iranian nuclear deal” in fact contained no new information.

That Iran had explored a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 has been known and admitted for years. That they have an archive of this information is not a violation of the Iranian nuclear deal completed in 2015. In fact, if anything, Netanyahu’s presentation actually proved the exact opposite of what was intended: Namely, that Iran is abiding by the terms of that treaty and is not covertly pursuing any nuclear weapons activity. That’s why they had to go back to 15 year old information and present it as if it was something new and revelatory.

But here’s the real head-scratcher in this new round of propaganda over the Iranian nuclear non-threat: There is in fact a Middle Eastern nation that is in fact in control of a vast, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons. This nation does have the capability of deploying those weapons anywhere in the region. It is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and its arsenal has never been inspected by any international agency. But this nation is not Iran. It’s Israel.

This is the story of the real Middle East Nuclear Threat. You’re watching The Corbett Report.

Hand-wringing over Iran’s nuclear program is nothing new. It became a mainstay of western political discourse after an Iranian dissident revealed the Iranian government’s plans for a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz in August 2002. But the surprising fact for Americans and others around the world who get their information from the corporate mainstream media, is that Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear weapons program has long been known and admitted. Since 2003, when the program was scrapped, not a single piece of evidence has been presented (not even by Netanyahu or the Israeli government) that the Iranian government ever pursued anything other than what it said it was pursuing: a nuclear energy program.

Not that that fact has ever stopped Netanyahu from using any opportunity to use cartoon-level propaganda tactics to convince the world otherwise:

NETANYAHU: In the case of Iran’s nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages.

The first stage: they have to enrich enough of low enriched uranium. The second stage: they have to enrich enough medium enriched uranium. And the third stage and final stage: they have to enrich enough high enriched uranium for the first bomb.

Where’s Iran? Iran’s completed the first stage. It took them many years, but they completed it and they’re 70% of the way there.

Now they are well into the second stage. By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.

Ladies and gentlemen, what I told you now is not based on secret information. It’s not based on military intelligence. It’s based on public reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Anybody can read them. They’re online.

So if these are the facts, and they are, where should the red line be drawn?

The red line should be drawn right here. Before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb. Before Iran gets to a point where it’s a few months away or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

Each day, that point is getting closer. That’s why I speak today with such a sense of urgency. And that’s why everyone should have a sense of urgency.

SOURCE: Israel PM Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu Address to United Nations Sept 27, 2012

Of course, Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons and Netanyahu’s Wile E. Coyote bomb and red line warnings bore no greater semblance to reality than the cartoon propaganda surrounding Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction.” Not only did the IAEA repeatedly confirm that Iran never diverted any nuclear material into any military program, but even the US intelligence community itself conceded that Iran was not trying to build a nuclear bomb. Most remarkable of all was Mossad’s own assessment that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.”

As I detailed earlier this year in “We Need to Talk About the Iran Protests,” fearmongering over Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program was the basis for an extraordinary series of measures against the country in recent decades. These measures included “NITRO ZEUS,” a full-scale military cyberattack against Iran the best-known element of which was Stuxnet, the military-grade cyberweapon co-developed by the United States and Israel that specifically targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz.

Iran’s non-existent nuclear program also provided the pretext for sanctions aimed at crippling the country’s economy, including the de-listing of Iranian banks from the Swift Network connecting the world’s financial institutions.

The fearmongers even went so far as to plant evidence of nuclear weapons involvement on Iran to further justify these attacks.

But the great irony is that there really is a nuclear armed nation in the Middle East. It is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It does not allow inspections of its arsenal. It does not even officially acknowledge its stockpile of nuclear weapons. It has even resisted the push for an international treaty recognizing a nuclear-free zone in the middle east. And that country is Israel.

Sometimes ranked as the world’s sixth largest nuclear superpower, Israel actively pursued a nuclear program from the time of its inception as a state in 1948. By the late 1950s, they had begun building a reactor and reprocessing plant at Dimona with British and French aid. And by 1967, a classified CIA report estimated that Israel would be capable of producing a nuclear warhead in “six to eight weeks.” Shortly thereafter, it is believed, Israel began producing and stockpiling a nuclear arsenal.

OLENKA FRENKIEL: It was the young Shimon Peres, back in the fifties who negotiated a secret deal with the French to buy a nuclear weapons reactor like theirs. But while Dimona was going up, intelligence reports reached Washington that Israel was building an atom bomb.

Despite claims that Dimona was for peaceful purposes only, Israel’s leader Ben Gurion was summoned to Washington. President Kennedy feared an arms race in the Middle East and demanded inspections. But when inspectors finally entered the plant in May 1961 they were tricked. They were shown a fake control room on the ground floor. They were unaware of the six floors below where the plutonium was made.

PETER HOUNAM, Freelance journalist: Well this was something of great pride and almost a legendary story in Dimona, according to Vanunu. When the Americans came they were completely hoodwinked. All the entrances including the lift shafts were bricked up and plastered over so it was impossible for anyone to find their way down to the lower floors.

FRENKIEL: After Kennedy’s assassination the pressure on Israel was off. His successor Lyndon Johnson turned a blind eye. Then In 1969 Israel’s Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon struck a deal, renewed by every President to this day. Israel’s nuclear programme could continue as long as it was never made public. It’s called “nuclear ambiguity.”

The term “nuclear ambiguity,” in some ways it sounds very grand. But isn’t just a euphemism for deception?

SHIMON PERES, Former Prime Minister of Israel: If somebody wants to kill you, and you use a deception to save your life it is not immoral. If we wouldn’t have enemies we wouldn’t need deceptions. We wouldn’t need deterrent.

FRENKIEL: Was this the justification for concealing the floors of the plutonium reprocessing areas from the Americans, the inspectors, when they came?

PERES: You are having a dialogue with yourself, not with me.

FRENKIEL: But that’s been documented in a number of books.

PERES: Ask the question to yourself, not to me.

FRENKIEL: I mean, is it not true?

PERES: I don’t have to answer your questions, even. I don’t see any reason why.

FRENKIEL: Ambiguity is a luxury unique to Israel. Today the country’s an inspection-free zone, protected from scrutiny by America and her allies.

SOURCE: Israel’s Secret Weapon

Although estimates vary, it is now believed that Israel has somewhere between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads, and that it possesses the capability to deliver these warheads to Iran.

The existence of this stockpile, while known to governments around the world for decades, was only revealed to the public in 1986, when The Sunday Times published photographic proof and a detailed account of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. That story was provided by Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona facility, who spent decades behind bars for his part in revealing this truth to the world.

NARRATOR: On October 5th, 1986, The Sunday Times announced they had evidence to prove that Israel had become the world’s sixth biggest nuclear power, having developed their arsenal beneath the Negev desert at Dimona. Photographs like this were given to the Sunday Times by a former technician at Dimona, Mordechai Vanunu.

[…]

Mordechai Vanunu’s family, Moroccan Jews, settled in the Negev in the early 60s, inspired by the idea of being a part of Israel. Vanunu did national service in the army. Then, while he worked at Dimona he began studying philosophy. He became active in student politics. He opposed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Vanunu came to believe that Israel’s nuclear development program was immoral. He left Damona and, eventually, Israel itself.

Vanunu arrived in Sydney armed with photographs he’d taken inside Dimona. Here, he turned his back on Judaism and became a Christian. He met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian journalist who urged him to sell his secrets to The Sunday Times. His evidence was processed at a local photo shop. Vanunu talked openly about what he’d done.

It’s said that by the time Vanunu arrived in London on September the 12th, 1986, Australian intelligence had already alerted MI6 and the CIA, and Mossad—Israeli intelligence—had already begun questioning his family in Israel. The Sunday Times disguised their informant and moved him from place to place for protection. But in Leicester Square one day, Vanunu met a blonde who called herself “Cindy,” a beautician from Florida. Meanwhile, Oscar Guerrero, eager to profit from what he knew, turned to The Sunday Mirror. Vanunu’s photograph appeared on page one. Vanunu began to despair. At this point, Cindy was able to lure him to Rome to sp end the weekend with her at her sister’s apartment. Not once did Vanunu suspect that Cindy was a Mossad agent and that this was the beginning of a plot to kidnap him.

In Rome, the tactics of the Mossad agents changed dramatically.

MEIR VANUNU: In the apartment, two Israeli agents attacked him and bit him and strangled him really hard. And then chained him, injected drugs [in]to his body. And later on he woke up in a small cell on a boat. The boat went to Israel for a few days and he arrived to Israel on the 7th of October, 1986.

Vanunu was assumed dead until he turned up weeks later in Tel Aviv. Vanunu himself, on his way to court, gave the first clue of what had happened to him. Scrawled on his hand was the message “Vanunu was hijacked from Rome, Italy. 30.9.86. BA 504.”

SOURCE: Vanunu’s exposure of Israels nuclear program

But a key element of the story is missing from the handful of documentaries that acknowledge Israel’s nuclear stockpile. Namely, that these weapons were not merely developed by Israeli scientists working in isolation, but with the aid of a nuclear smuggling ring that helped develop and advance Israel’s arsenal by stealing important nuclear technologies from their “ally,” the United States. These rings and their activities have been known about and even investigated by the FBI for decades, but largely kept secret from the public.

It has fallen to researchers like Grant F. Smith of IRMEP.org, author of Divert!: NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the diversion of US weapons grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program, to piece together the story from the documents that have been released. On The Corbett Report in 2012, Smith revealed the name of one of the high-powered Israeli officials who was at the heart of a plot in the 1970s to smuggle 800 nuclear triggers from the United States.

GRANT F. SMITH: In terms of the FBI uncovering a multi-node network, this one happened to be centered in California. MILCO was a company that was incorporated in 1972 by a man named Richard Kelly Smyth. He was discovered sending 800 krytrons, which are dual-use items that could be used to trigger nuclear weapons. When he was discovered doing that, he skipped bail in the mid-1980s and disappeared until he was picked up by Interpol in the early part of 2000.

And so the story is interesting and explosive, because after multiple attempts and denials we had a document release in which the key contact, or one of the key contacts that Smyth was meeting with to set up sales in Israel was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu. And so the document—which I’m kind of holding up right here for the people who are on video—actually names Benjamin Netanyahu as being an employee of Heli Trading Company, which was the node in Israel that would receive Ministry of Defense requisitions that they would pass on to MILCO.

And so the interesting thing about this, of course, is the high-profile nature of Benjamin Netanyahu, [and] the fact that the smuggling ring ring leader has been identified as Arnon Milchan, a person any American knows for his movie productions such as Pretty Woman and other favorites, who is running this and who a recent book has named as being a top economic espionage fly a spy for LAKAM, who worked under Benjamin Bloomberg and Rafi Eitan. But the FBI documents that we published on July 4th related to an antiwar.com story which was really short and direct. And its core focus was on the fact that in a period when Netanyahu was building himself up as a leader in the terrorism industry—hosting major conferences, having just returned from his studies in the United States, hosting major conferences in the Jonathan Netanyahu Terrorism Institute, named after his brother who was killed on the Raid on Entebbe.

Here’s a person who was supposed to be working as a furniture company executive, and yet these documents which are very credible because of what they were—which is testimony from Richard Kelly Smith after he was returned his exile overseas and finally forced serve a prison sentence. These were the statements he made to an FBI agent in a district attorney office when they debriefed and wanted to know what the extent of the nuclear technology smuggling network was and—boom!—there’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

SOURCE: Corbett Report Radio 214 – Israel’s Nuclear Smuggling with Grant F. Smith

Benjamin Netanyahu. And now this unindicted nuclear smuggler is lecturing Iran about a 15 year old, long-acknowledged nuclear weapons program that never produced a single nuclear weapon.

Even more worryingly, Israel’s nuclear knowledge has not only helped to arm its own nation, but actually helped to proliferate nuclear weapons to Pakistan through the so-called Khan network. One of the men who helped to transfer the nuclear triggers used in the construction of the Pakistani bomb was Asher Karni, an orthodox Jew living in South Africa who had been a major in the Israeli army prior to emigrating to Cape Town. Upon his arrival there in 1985, he began teaching Torah at the local synagogue and educating Jewish youth, encouraging them to relocate to Israel.

In 2004, U.S. authorities arrested Karni for his role in supplying the nuclear triggers and in 2005 he was sentenced to three years in prison. It has never been officially explained why this Israeli citizen and former Israeli military officer was interested in helping proliferate nuclear technologies to Pakistan.

But perhaps the greatest irony of all is that it is Iran who has been arguing for decades that the Middle East should be a nuclear-free zone. The idea was first floated by the Shah in 1969, and was first formally proposed by Iran in a joint UN General Assembly resolution, but the idea failed to garner any support. The idea was again raised by then-Iranian President Ahmedinejad in 2006 and yet again by then-Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki in 2008, but these calls to banish nuclear weapons from the Middle East have not even been acknowledged by the west, let alone seriously considered.

Now more than ever, the prospect of a nuclear-free Middle East seems the only way to prevent a nuclear conflagration that threatens to draw in the world’s superpowers, and yet the idea is being ignored by Israel and its staunchest ally, the United States.

Why does Israel refuse to declare its nuclear weapons stockpile? Why do they refuse to sign on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty?

Why do they refuse IAEA inspections of their nuclear facility?

Why did they kidnap and imprison Mordechai Vanunu for 18 years for providing the proof of this nuclear program?

And perhaps most importantly, why does the United States, the only country who could single-handedly force NPT compliance from Israel, still refuse to even admit the openly-acknowledged status of Israel as a nuclear power?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for these questions to be answered by the teleprompter readers on the nightly news.

Still, as even many in the mainstream are now admitting, Netanyahu’s presentation on Iran’s nuclear non-secrets are a cheap display of political theatrics. The only thing he ended up doing is underlining the point that Iran, unlike Israel, fully cooperated with the IAEA, lived up to its obligations as a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and pointedly has not violated the 2015 nuclear deal.

And now that the United States has allowed the Israeli tail to wag the American dog once again by de-certifying that Iranian deal without valid cause, negotiators in North Korea and elsewhere will be watching, reminded yet again that a promise from the American empire isn’t worth the signed agreement it’s written on.

During a Barcelona concert on April 13, Roger Waters denounced the Syrian White Helmets as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for jihadists and terrorists.” Warning that the groups’ unverified claims about chemical weapons attacks across insurgent-held territory were aimed at triggering Western military intervention, Waters cautioned his audience, “If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions for us as human beings.”

In fact, Waters had first hand experience with the powerful pro-war PR operation behind the White Helmets. Back in October 2016, a public relations firm representing the White Helmets called The Syria Campaign attempted to recruit Waters by inviting him to a lavish dinner organized by a Saudi-British billionaire, Hani Farsi. The rock legend and renowned activist was told that by signing on to the organization’s mission, he could help “elevate the voices of Syria’s peaceful heroes”

[This article, by Max Blumenthal, is republished in part from Gray Zone.]

Just days before his recent concert in Barcelona, Waters was lobbied again to support the White Helmets, this time by an eccentric French photojournalist affiliated with what he described as a “very powerfull [sic] syrian network.” The activist demanded to join Waters on stage and deliver a message for the “children of syria.”

Waters did not respond to either request.

These emailed solicitations from White Helmets representatives and activists were provided by Waters to the Grayzone Project, and are published in full at the bottom of this article. The documents demonstrate how the organization’s well-funded public relations apparatus has targeted celebrities as the key to the hearts and minds of the broader Western public.

Unlike many other A-listers, however, Waters took time to research the White Helmets and investigate its ulterior agenda. 

“I was quite suspicious after I was invited to that [White Helmets] dinner,” Waters told the Grayzone Project. “And now my worst suspicions have been confirmed.”

The Syria Campaign’s initial approach

The October 2016 dinner invite was delivered to Waters by a representative for the Corniche Group, an international holding company belonging to the family of the London-based Saudi billionaire Hani Farsi. Farsi was seeking Waters’ presence at a fundraising dinner he had organized on behalf of The Syria Campaign.

The Syria Campaign is a well-funded public relations front established to promote The White Helmets as a group of heroic rescuers who require the protection of Western militaries. Through series of petitions and public demonstrations, The Syria Campaign has unsuccessfully pushed for a No Fly Zone in Syria that would have likely resulted in the kind of Western military intervention that toppled Libyan President Moammar Qaddafi and destabilized Libya.

The slick PR firm has also resorted to astroturfed public stunts like a pro-White Helmets flash mob and orchestral performance at New York City’s Grand Central Station where participants were paid up to $600 each.

Farsi’s relationship to the The Syria Campaign had been kept private until now. A Syrian-British oil tycoon named Ayman Asfari has taken a much more vocal role with the PR group, providing it with seed money to advance his mission to stimulate US and UK support for regime change in Syria. Waters was informed that Asfari’s wife, Sawsan, would be on hand for the 2016 White Helmets fundraising dinner.

Read more and see the emails at https://grayzoneproject.com/

This video will make you feel better about thinking, in a world where being programmed seems easier.

Filmed by Dima Aboud in Spain. Roger Waters exposes NATO-member-state White Helmets as a multi million dollar funded propaganda construct for terrorist factions inside Syria.

Video & translation: "Today your announcements show that your project is not humanitarian, but strictly political, since you no longer even hide the fact that your more or less single intention is to overturn the Syrian government. You are taking us back to dark days, where one of your predecssors, arguing humanitarian reasons, announced that he wanted to overturn Gaddaffi's government. We know where that took us. The nations of the world did not give us a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council in order for us to follow servilely the way and the law of the strongest."

Translation (by Sheila Newman)

Marie Le Pen addresses Emmanuel Macron:

Mr President of the Republic,

If I have decided to address you directly here, this is because, on the pretext of chemical weapons use, (denied by the Syrian Government), the American president, Donald Trump, decided to attack Syria immediately.

This situation is all the more distressing because you yourself seem to want to associate our country with this new warlike adventure, before any independent investigation, without any consideration of international law, of our national interests, of our soldiers' lives, and of France's historic mission.

Yet, as France's attack on Iraq under President Chirac was vigorously condemned in the United Nations by his minister for foreign affairs, our country itself is called upon to make the voice of justice heard for world peace.

Already at that time, in 2003, do you remember, Mr President, some had already tried to get us to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction.

Today we know that unjustifyable gunboat policy of former times was based on a State's lie. A lie promoted in the theatre of mass media and all the way to the security council seats. That intervention, which France was unable to prevent, threw the whole Middle East into chaos and encouraged and armed Islamism.

The attacks we have experienced on our soil are almost the direct consequence, with the development of Daech, [...unintelligible] . The same scenario was repeated with the calamitous destabilisation of Syria and Libya, to which we owe today the immigration submerging Europe and the extension of jihadism in the Sahel and West Africa.

You are not ignorant of the fact that such political errors are never without consequence for us. Today your announcements show that your project is not humanitarian, but strictly political, since you no longer even hide the fact that your more or less single intention is to overturn the Syrian government.

You are taking us back to dark days, where one of your predecssors, arguing humanitarian reasons, announced that he wanted to overturn Gaddaffi's government. We know where that took us. The nations of the world did not give us a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council in order for us to follow servilely the way and the law of the strongest.

Who could believe that in these circumstances of exceptional gravity, France, which is an old country, a country that knows better than most the cost of war, should let itself be dragged into such war madness and lightly accept the roles of political pig [unknown metaphore] and military support.

Over and above this business in Syrian, we can only worry about the temptation of the western leaders to rebuild a new Berlin Wall, as if they were unable to see the world as it is today. Since 1989 the world has changed. The threats don't come from a secular state in the Middle East [Le Pen is referring to Syria, which is secular, as was Libya], nor from European powers which are potential allies in the battle against terrorism, but from groups or states that aspire to impose on the world, in the middle east, in Africa, or even in Europe, the theocratic dictatorship of a political Islam.

Our battle does not oppose western nations against Muslims, but Islamic totalitarianism against free countries, whether they are Muslim or not. The free world will come to the end of this criminal ideology and its hegemonic projects. All our efforts must be directed to eradicate Daech and jihadist groups, even when they call themselves 'freedom fighters' in order to spread Islamist ideology.

We are the inheritors of a nation which can only be herself in a state of dignity, to quote De Gaulle. The situation demands that France be herself worthy of her history, her rank, worthy of the role that free nations have conferred on her through her glorious history.

Mr President, if you

Bombing not the answer for peace in Syria, rather a dangerous mistake - Independent and Peaceful Australia Network. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s reckless support for a military strike by the US in Syria demonstrates Australia’s lack of independence in its foreign policy.

IPAN spokesperson Mr Stephen Darley said, “Surely it is clear that any military exchange between Russian and US forces threatens a dangerous widening of the conflict and the lives of millions.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has accepted an invitation from the Syrian government to inspect the region where an alleged chemical weapon attack occurred demonstrating a willingness to support its claim they had not conducted such an attack.

The video showing children being hosed down allegedly from a chemical weapons attack needs to be investigated. Any chemical attack is an inhumane and illegal act, requiring the strongest condemnation.

If there is proof that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, regardless of who was behind it, then there needs to be serious consequences in the international court of justice where crimes against humanity are legitimately dealt with.

What is clear is that a bombing assault on sites in Syria is neither legal, effective nor acceptable. The risks of even more innocent people suffering death, injury and destruction of homes and the risk that a major powers war could ensue is being recognised internationally.

Mr Darley is calling on the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister to clearly reject the proposed missile attack and instead be a voice of reason in calling for all non-military means possible to be adopted to resolve the conflict.

This press release was issued two days before Mr Trumps attack of today.

"US President Trump, French President Macron, and British Prime Minister May accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons in Douma on the basis of evidence and staged videos of the so-called “White Helmets”, who are the medical wing of the fascist Al-Nusra terrorists in Syria. The countries mentioned above have called meetings of the UN Security Council in order to propose resolutions to strike at the legitimate government of Syria, which is heavily engaged in the fight against terrorism, and despite the assertion of a member state in the Security Council, Russia, that the (Douma) location was free of any chemical traces after the Russian experts entered Damascus, refuting their claims. The Syrian government has asked the experts of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to enter and verify the incident, but Trump and his lackies from European and Gulf Arab countries blocked their ears and decided to proceed with their lies and threats." (General Confederation of Trade Unions of Syria.)

First published by the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War·Friday, April 13, 2018 at https://www.facebook.com/notes/hamilton-coalition-to-stop-the-war/statement-by-general-confederation-of-trade-unions-of-syria-regarding-us-and-eur/2408602269165730/.

Dear comrades, brothers, and sisters,

The United States and its followers in European countries, such as France and Britain, and their proxies in the region such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others, have been provoking Syria since they began their terrorist war against Syria eight years ago, in order to carry out their agendas on Syrian territory. We are witnessing these days the manufacture of alleged evidence, the latest of which is the fabricated story of Eastern Ghouta hit by chemical weapons by the Syrian Arab Army.

These colonial powers have always used the UN Security Council and its instruments to strike sovereign states by using illusory and fake pretexts to achieve their goals, such as the infamous presentation of Colin Powell in 2003 at the UN Security Council to strike Iraq.

The chemical incident was staged in Douma because the terrorists suffered defeat at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army that liberated Eastern Ghouta, which defeat contributed to the safety and tranquility of the people of Damascus after they suffered a lot because of the terrorists who were raining down hundreds of missiles and rockets upon the capital. The more the Syrian Arab Army achieves victories on the ground, the more the terrorists urge their employers to save them, as happened when they concocted the chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun (in April 2017).

This time, US President Trump, French President Macron, and British Prime Minister May accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons in Douma on the basis of evidence and staged videos of the so-called “White Helmets”, who are the medical wing of the fascist Al-Nusra terrorists in Syria. The countries mentioned above have called meetings of the UN Security Council in order to propose resolutions to strike at the legitimate government of Syria, which is heavily engaged in the fight against terrorism, and despite the assertion of a member state in the Security Council, Russia, that the (Douma) location was free of any chemical traces after the Russian experts entered Damascus, refuting their claims. The Syrian government has asked the experts of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to enter and verify the incident, but Trump and his lackies from European and Gulf Arab countries blocked their ears and decided to proceed with their lies and threats.

We, at the General Union of Trade Unions in Syria, declare our stand with our Syrian government and army under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad, with whom we have faced terrorism and its sponsors for eight years. We affirm that we are confident of victory and that these US and European threats constitute a flagrant violation of the UN Charter.

We call upon all honourable people from the World Federation of Trade Unions, the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions, and all Arab and international organizations to expedite the campaign of defending Syria by sending messages of solidarity and support to Syria and by organizing marches and sit-ins in front of US embassies and consulates everywhere in the world, condemning this blatant US aggression and to save the world from Trump's ruthlessness. We ask you also to send letters to officials of the United Nations and of the United States of America, stressing that the threatened actions of the US president against Syria will lead to a global war that will drag the whole world into further chaos, destruction, and poverty and will increase the number of refugees generated by the wars already being waged by the United States against sovereign states in the world.

Long live the Syrian people in their war against terrorism! Long live international solidarity with Syria!

Executive Bureau
General Union of Trade Unions
Syrian Arab Republic

Video inside: Jimmy Dore, the comedian from the very intelligent and acid Jimmy Dore Show does a superbly simple analysis of US form for lying to start wars, plus the fact that the corporate media go along with this. And us on the brink of World War Three - "for nothing," as Dore sums up.

Video inside: This video records a really shameful action on behalf of the US regime, on a par with Hitler's arrogant exceptionalism and dishonesty. We have begun the video where the benighted Syrian ambassador begins to respond to a series of utterly unfounded accusations by Niki Haley, the US Ambassador. That she walks out with her following, without listening to him, shows the contempt in which the United States regime holds the people of Syria and its government. Many lives are at stake and the welfare of many generations, but the United States military-industrial complex do not even give them a hearing. Although we have begun the video at the point of the Syrian ambassador's speech, you can roll it back to hear Haley, and then the Russian Ambassador.

"The Russian federation demanded for this meeting to be held on the agenda items, threats to international peace and security, insofar as we are deeply alarmed at the fact that in a number of capitals, above all Washington and those blindly following it, London and Paris, a deliberate policy was undertaken to stoke international tensions. The leadership of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, without any justification and without considering the consequences, have engaged in a confrontational policy against Russia and Syria and they are prompting others to follow suit. A broad arsenal of methods is being leveraged to slander and insult: hawkish rhetoric, blackmail, sanctions and threats to use force against a sovereign state." (Russian ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia addressing the Security Council on April 9, 2018, in regard to an alleged chemical attack in the suburban Damascus city of Douma.) See the whole address transcribed below, or listen to the English translator video.

Thank you. If you believe it is a great pleasure for me to speak about the issue we will talk about now, and to make a statement, then you are mistaken. Unfortunately, the situation is such that I will have to say a great deal today, and it will be incumbent upon you to listen to what I have to say. We are grateful to Mr. De Mistura [Special Envoy of the Secretary-General on Syria] for his briefing as well as to Mr. [Thomas] Markran [Director and Deputy to the High Representative for Disarmament Affairs].

The Russian federation demanded for this meeting to be held on the agenda items, threats to international peace and security, insofar as we are deeply alarmed at the fact that in a number of capitals, above all Washington and those blindly following it, London and Paris, a deliberate policy was undertaken to stoke international tensions. The leadership of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, without any justification and without considering the consequences, have engaged in a confrontational policy against Russia and Syria and they are prompting others to follow suit. A broad arsenal of methods is being leveraged to slander and insult: hawkish rhetoric, blackmail, sanctions and threats to use force against a sovereign state.

Russia is being unpardonably threatened. The tone with which this is being done has gone beyond the threshold of what is acceptable, even during the Cold war. Such boorishness against my country is something your predecessors did not take the liberty to undertake. What is next? We remind a rhetorical question which our President put forward in 2015 from the UN General Assembly to our Western partners, above all the United States, concerning the reckless of their geopolitical experiments in the Middle East. “Do you understand now what you have done?” And the response at that time hung in the air.

But there is a response: no, you do not understand. Just as you fail to understand what you are doing now. The lack of a clear strategy on any issue is appalling not just to us, it confounds not only us, but it confounds the majority of those sitting here. But they have decided not to openly put this forward to you, following you everywhere you go, regardless of the fact that with everything you touch, chaos is left behind in the brackish waters from which you try to take out fish, something, but only mutant fish are being taken out. I will put forward another rhetorical question. Do you understand the dangerous threshold towards which you are bringing the world?

One of the areas where the hostility is most stark is Syria. The terrorists and extremists supported by external sponsors are enduring a defeat there. Let us recall that we are talking about those terrorists and extremists whom you supplied, financed, and deployed in a country to oust a legitimate government. Now it is clear why this is causing hysteria among those who invested political capital in these dark forces.

Recently, thanks to the efforts undertaken by Russia in line with the Security Council resolutions, a large-scale operation has been undertaken to lift the siege of Eastern Ghouta. Its residents, for a number of years, were forced to endure the mockery and torture of fighters. More than 150,000 civilians were evacuated from that Damascus suburb, completely voluntarily, with the requisite security conditions being provided. Tens of thousands of them have already been able to return to the liberated areas and many met with their relatives. There has been no change [or replacement of population]: this composition being shouted about by supporters of the Syrian opposition has not occurred. These are lies.

With the leaders of these armed groups, difficult negotiations took place. As a result, many of them left the areas they had occupied, with full respect for guarantees for their safety. Incidentally, during the transportation operations, several attempts were undertaken to stage terrorist attacks when the militants attempted to reach the buses with suicide belts. Others preferred to settle their status with the Syrian authorities. Thanks to Presidential amnesties, they will be able to return to civilian life, and subsequently, they may even enter the Syrian security forces. We are talking about implementation of a UN principle: demobilization, disarmament and reintegration.

However, this positive dynamic is not to the liking of some foreign sponsors through Western countries who are willing to take up any straw just to maintain a hotbed of terrorist resistance at a striking distance from the Syrian capital, so that the fighters can continue to terrorize ordinary civilians, to seize their food and to request from the international community that humanitarian assistance be delivered. Incidentally, they were not prepared to share medicine with ordinary civilians – as was shown in the inspection of the stronghold left behind by the fighters. It was already the case in the past in Eastern Aleppo: improvised hospital facilities in basements were full of medicine which, as a result of sanctions – Western sanctions –, were not provided to Damascus and other government-controlled areas.

Also, large storage of [indistinct] were found as were the bodies and corpses of people who had been subjected to torture. We are stunned at the scale of the tunnels that were used by Jihadis. In some of them, small trucks were able to freely move about. These surprising underground facilities brought together the positions of groups who are viewed by some as moderate, and they were linked to the stronghold of the Al-Nosra Front.

On April 6, the new head of Jaysh al-Islam, following instructions of sponsors, derailed the evacuation of a party of fighters from Douma and resumed the rocket and mortar fire against residential areas in Damascus. The firing targeted [indistinct name of four areas]. According to official information, eight people died. 37 civilians were wounded. Unfortunately, we failed to see statements from Western capitals condemning the shelling of a historical district of Damascus. The following day, April 7, fighters accused the Syrian authorities of dropping barrel bombs with toxic substances. At the same time, diversions were being mixed up. It was either called sarin, chlorine, or a mix of toxic gases. Based on a well-known scheme, these rumors were immediately taken out by those who are financed by western capitalists; I am referring to NGOs and the White Helmets who are mendaciously acting under the cloak of health professionals. And these reports were also taken up and transferred to media outlets.

It behooves us once again to state that many of these dubious structures have a clear list of the email addresses of representatives of Security Council members, which shows that some of our colleagues, with a reckless approach towards their status, are leaking sensitive information to their protégés. Incidentally, all should recall the way that accidentally, the White Helmets put on the internet a video which showed preparations for staging a so-called victim of an alleged attack perpetrated by the Syrian army.

In 2011, the chemical serial began, and it continues to be shown to us with the calculation for each new episode to be more resonant than the one prior to it. In Washington, London, and Paris, immediate conclusions were drawn, pinning blame on the Syrian authorities, or as they call it, the Syrian regime. Has nobody wondered why would Damascus need this? There were insults against the Syrian leadership. However, the main burden of responsibility was pinned on Russia and Iran. And I think this is hardly surprising to anybody at this point, but this was done immediately based on current trends, without any investigation being conducted.

On April 8, the Syrian troops sweeping through {Al-Shimona} near Douma found a homemade Jaysh al-Islam manufacturing area to manufacture chemical substances artisanally. Chlorine agents of German manufacture and special equipment were also discovered. In Istanbul, an opposition journalist, [indistinct name], put on his Twitter page a video allegedly from the area of the incident, probably from the White Helmets. An unknown individual is next to a handmade bomb with a chemical that allegedly struck the bedroom of a building in Douma. All of this was accompanied by comments about another attack by the regime against civilians. The staged nature of this action is something of which there is no doubt. The trajectory of the alleged bomb is unnatural. This bomb supposedly entered, piercing through a roof, and naturally, calmly, fell into a bed, without even damaging this bed. Can a bomb fall on a wooden bed without even damaging the wooden bed?! Clearly, it was placed there prior to preparation for the staging.

There’s an interesting sequence of events. The chemical provocation in Douma on Saturday, April 7, occurred immediately after the US delegation at the Security Council received instructions to convene for today, Monday, April 9, to convene expert level consultations on their draft resolution on the mechanism to investigate incidents with chemical weapons. The initial text today has far-reaching changes and revisions.

Under these obscure circumstances, we need of course to get to the bottom of what is taking place. However, we need to do so in an honest, objective, impartial way, without disregarding the principle of presumption of innocence, and by no means prejudging the outcome of the investigation. Despite provocations, Russian specialists continue their efforts to resolve the situation in Eastern Ghouta.

On the afternoon of Sunday, April 8, following a new agreement that was reached, the evacuation of Jaysh al-Islam fighters resumed. Following the liberation of Douma from fighters, Russian specialists on radiological, chemical and biological protection were sent there to collect evidence and information. They took soil samples which show the lack of any nerve agent or chlorine substances.

Locals were interviewed about the cessation of resistance to the fighters. Not a single local resident confirmed the chemical attack having taken place. In local hospitals, there were no reports about symptoms from a toxic substance such as chlorine. Other medical facilities are not located in Douma. The bodies of the dead as a result of contamination were not found. Medical personnel and residents have no information about their potential burial areas. Thereby, the use of sarin and chlorine is not confirmed. Incidentally, the representatives of the Syrian Red Crescent refuted the statement allegedly made on their behalf about a delivery of assistance to victims of toxic gas. I call upon those who will speak against me and slander the regime to proceed from the premise that there was no chemical weapons attack.

Sweden prepared a draft resolution to investigate the incident. In principle, in order to conduct an investigation, the OPCW needs no resolution. However, we are willing to consider this resolution. Today, we propose that what you envisage in your draft be done. Let the OPCW, who through the Director-general of the Technical Secretariat Mr. Üzümcü stated a willingness to get to the bottom of what took place, let it immediately tomorrow fly to Damascus. There, the Syrian authorities and Russian troops will provide conditions to travel to the area of the alleged incident for them to familiarize themselves with the situation. Incidentally, this is what President Trump and other Western leaders called on us to undertake.

As for the possibility of a chemical attack, this was repeatedly warned about by the Syrians at the Russian Center for the reconciliation of opposing sides. It was stated that in order to record on film a chemical attack, and I put this in quotes, “the necessary equipment has already been brought in.” We too made the relevant statements at the Security Council. You heard these warnings. You have heard them but deliberately ignore them insofar as they do not align with the doctrinal views of those who seek the elimination of a legitimate government in another Arabic country.

Still, what is not being looked into is the fact that a significant number of chemical weapons were discovered on November-December 2017 in Syrian territory that had been liberated from terrorists. On the storage sites in al-Zakhariya and al-Afafir in Hama province, twenty 1-ton containers were discovered. More than 50 munitions were found which contain toxic chemicals. In Tal-Adli, Idleb province, 24 tons of toxic chemicals were discovered and this is believed to be chlorine. At the storage site Adhamiya, 30 kilometers northeast of Damascus, 240 and 160 millimeter caliber munitions were found. Plastic canisters were found with phosphorus substances and compounds. In the area of Al-Servita, Idlib province, an industrial complex was found for the synthesis of various toxic substances. 54 chemical munitions were found with a 44 chemical containers and these could be used for the manufacture of toxic substances.

From the beginning of this year alone, four instances were reported of fighters using toxic chemicals against positions where government troops are located in Shuja and Al-Mesharif. More than 100 Syrian troops were hospitalized. On March 3rd, when Hazrama and Al-Tars were liberated in Eastern Goutha, fighters from government troops discovered in a tunnel an underground artisanal manufacturing site to produce chemical munitions of a handmade nature. And this is far from a full list. It points to the wrongdoings and abuses by the irreconcilable opposition. However, the OPCW’s experts being sent there to identify evidence is not something which we see people eager to do. We demand that OPCW verify all of those areas. Access can be provided.

Also, information is surfacing that at the Al-Tanf camp, American instructors have trained a number of groups of fighters to stage provocations with chemical weapons used to create a pretext for a strike. It was clear to us that attempts to shelter terrorists and at the same time punish the regime so hated by some Western capitals would sooner or later be undertaken. Speaking heads on television screens sought to repeat last year's strike against Syria. This morning, there were strikes against the T4 Air Field in Homs province.

We are deeply troubled by such actions. Provocations in Douma echo last year's incident in Khan Sheikhoun. The unifying aspect is the fact that there's a planned nature of these attacks. An analysis of the USS operations prior to and after the incident in Khan Sheikhoun in April 2007 shows that Washington, ahead of time, prepared for its operation. The USS Porter naval destroyer, from 4 to 7 April last year – that is when the toxic substance was used in Khan Sheikhoun, before the strike against the Shayrat airbase –, were already present in the Mediterranean waters where they were engaged in planned operations. They did not enter the ports where an exchange of munitions could have happened in order to increase the number of cruise missiles.

Incidentally, 4 to 5 April, the USS Porter destroyer was located southeast of Sicily, and the USS Ross naval destroyer was in a passage from the Rota naval base in the area south of Sardinia. Later, 6 April, an expedited movement of both naval destroyers was reported towards the firing positions more southwest of Cyprus. From there, on April 7, they conducted a mass strike against the Shayrat airfield. At the same time, the number of Tomahawk missiles that were launched (59) surpassed the overall munitions on both naval destroyers if they had actually been engaged in the anti-missile defense operations that had been assigned to them. For that purpose, only 48 units were necessary. Thereby, US naval vessels, even prior to the chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun, entered military service with extra strike equipment that is an increase of cruise missiles that were not necessary for the anti-missile defense. And this could attest to prior planning by Washington of an act of strike against Damascus.

The fake news on Saturday from Douma are geared entirely towards drawing attention of society away from the Skripal case which was muddled up by London, and throwing on Russia completely unconfirmed accusations with the aim of pulling solidarity to build an anti-Russian alliance. Now the British are stepping away from a transparent investigation and putting forward specific responses for the questions and at the same time they are sweeping up their tracks. During the Security Council meeting on April 5 on the Skripal case, we cautioned that an attempt to unjustifiably blame us of having had a hand in the Salisbury incident was linked to the Syrian chemical dossier. Yesterday, this issue saw new interesting developments. For the moment, Foreign minister Boris Johnson continues to disclose things against Russia and attempt to be witty, and here's the following pearl: experts of an RAF listening post south of Cyprus intercepted on the day of Skripal’s poisoning reports sent from Damascus suburbs to Moscow. And this is what Times is reporting. It contains the following sentence, the phrase “The package has been delivered” and “ the two individuals made a successful egress.” This turns out to be part of the intelligence information provided by London two hours prior to the expulsion of Russian diplomats. However is it not clear that there's an irrefutable link here? Is that not clear to all? Syria-Russia-Salisbury?

I will give a hint to the British intelligence services and I will do so free of charge. Here is another great idea to cover-up their tracks: they could suggest that 'Novichok', which is so liked now, reached Salisbury directly from Syria by package. This is a complete mockery here.

Ambassador Haley has recently said that Russia will never be a friend of the United States. And I wish to respond to that. Friendship is something which is both reciprocal and voluntary. One cannot force a friendship. And we are not particularly keen to be friends with you. Nor are we begging to be friends with you. What we want from you is really nothing. It's something that is normal civilized relations which you arrogantly refuse, disregarding basic courtesies.

And you are misguided if you think that you have friends. So-called friends of yours are only those who cannot say no to you. And this is the sole criterion for friendship in your understanding. Russia has friends and unlike yourselves, we do not have adversaries. We do not view the world through that prism. And yes, international terrorism, that is our enemy. However, we continue to propose cooperation. This needs to be respectful and mutual cooperation, it needs to go towards resolving real and not imagined problems. And you should be just as interested as we are in such a cooperation.

Ultimately, as permanent members of the Security Council, we bear the main responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Through the relevant channels, we already conveyed to the US that armed force under mendacious pretexts against Syria, where, at the request of the legitimate government of the country, Russian troops have been deployed, could lead to grave repercussions.

We call upon Western politicians to scale down their hawkish rhetoric, to meaningfully consider possible repercussions and to cease the reckless spill over of threats to global security. What military misadventures of the West brought about is well known to us if we consider the examples of Yougoslavia, Iraq and Libya. And nobody has vested you with the power to act as policemen of the world and as investigators, procurators, judges and executioners all at the same time.

We call for your return to the legal fold to comply with the UN Charter and to jointly tackle problems that arise, rather than attempting at each step to advance your egotistical geopolitical game. All of the energy needs to be focused on support for the political process in Syria, to which it is necessary to constructively pull the efforts of all influential players. Russia always stands ready to engage in such cooperation.

To conclude, Mr. President, I wish to take this opportunity to request an open briefing of the Security Council on the outcomes of the UN assessment mission in Raqqa and the situation in the Rahman camp. We see the way of members of the Commission attempting to create a smoke screen around this issue, which is a result of their actions in Syria, including the operation to raze Raqqa to the ground through bombings. No chemical provocations will divert attention from this, from what you've done. Thank you.

Carlson is a real performer, but he also asks real questions. About the so-called chemical weapons purportedly used in Syria. He seems to be alone in the United States mass media - and the Australian mass media - to ask crucial questions about the gung-ho attitudes of US-NATO members, who treat war like a video game and believe they have the right to assassinate and murder whom they wish. In this video Carlson interviews Roger Wicker, Mississipi senator, on the subject, affording us an intriguing view of a psychopathic politician sleepwalking it through the questions, believing that everyone in the audience is too stupid and brainwashed to care. After that interview he talks to Theo Padnos, a journalist who was held hostage for two years by takfiri terrorists in Syria. And after that, he interviews Douglas MacGregor, retired army colonel and author. Each interview affords a different perspective and I didn't agree entirely with any of them, but I sure admire Tucker for asking those questions. Right at the end he also interviews a lawyer who is running for political office in San Francisco, on the issue of illegal immigrants and the flight of the middle classes from California.

Lee Camp, of Redacted Tonight, speaks with Eva Bartlett, who explains everything about the so-called Syrian war that the US war machine and the Australian Government doesn’t want you to know. Camp is a comedian with his own show, but he has made a special video of this interview. (Video inside article)

This is a truly outstanding analysis, by James Corbett of the Corbett Report, of an unusual case of internet bullying. It is an unusual case because it involves adults bullying adults. Furthermore, it involves journalists bullying journalists. Additionally, the first journalist, Sibel Edmonds, who is being mean to another journalist, Vanessa Beeley, is an ex-FBI employee. It seems that the objective is for Budnews, which Sibel Edmonds owns, to undermine real alternative news. All the stranger since Sibel Edmonds has appeared on many sites she now implies are fake news and has endorsed their points of view on Syria. It is not as if she is coming out and saying that she has changed her mind; she appears to be in some form of denial. Her apparent confidence in carrying out a campaign of evident defamation, lacking logic, truth or moderation, is hard to understand, unless she has major financial backing. It is hard to see any other beneficiaries of her political campaign, which I would call severe disinformation, except the US-NATO military industrial and media complex. This complex already has the backing of the entire corporate media, but it seems that it has a program of encouraging fake alternative news-sites, because its ability to dominate middle-class and influential 'memes' is severely threatened by real alternative news reporting. By the way, candobetter.net has published articles by Vanessa Beeley, based on their logic, her reporting from the field, and our knowledge of the situation in Syria, which is based on geopolitical experience, history and geography, plus multiple sources and logic, unlike reports emanating from the corporate media.

The games have begun. The younger sister of North Korea’s ruler Kim Jong-un has captured the attention of the media, while US Vice President Mike Pence was mocked as a dud, even undiplomatic. The two Koreas are engaging each other. This makes the Washington foreign policy swamp fume. CrossTalking video with Brian Becker, Gregory Elich, and Myung-Koo Kang. This Crosstalk video pretty much covers the major bases in 30 minutes, with a stunningly well-informed cast.

The Democrats and Soros-backed groups are desperately looking to impeach Trump. The US activities in Syria offer the perfect opportunity, but of course Trump's enemies won't pursue it because they are right behind the US-NATO war crimes in Syria. It is ironic that, when Trump is really doing bad illegal stuff, he is also doing the will of the Democrats. This would be because the external policies of both political parties are driven by the Deep State. A further complication is that, if Trump could be impeached, then all those behind the illegal war on Syria would also be in danger of pursuit under criminal law. Automatic transcript provided.

Automatic transcript

Below is a cut and paste of Youtube's automatic transcript of the speech, which may contain errors, notably based on machine spellings of sounds. Emboldened emphases are by Editor of candobetter.net.

[Music]
0:01 welcome to talk nation radio a half-hour
0:04 discussion of politics as if the people
0:07 mattered
0:08 I'm David Swanson it is my great
0:10 pleasure to welcome to talk nation radio
0:13 this week Francis Boyle Francis Boyle is
0:15 a professor of international law at the
0:17 University of Illinois College of Law he
0:20 has served as counsel to Bosnia and
0:22 Herzegovina and to the provisional
0:24 government of the Palestinian Authority
0:25 he has represented the Blackfoot nation
0:28 the nation of Hawaii the Lakota Nation
0:30 he drafted the US domestic implementing
0:33 legislation for the biological weapons
0:36 convention known as the biological
0:37 weapons anti-terrorism Act of 1989 and
0:41 he has been a strong advocate over the
0:43 years for the proper use of the power of
0:45 impeachment Francis Boyle welcome to
0:49 talk nation radio well thank you very
0:52 much for having me on David my best to
0:54 your listening audience very glad to
0:56 have you on should Donald Trump be
0:59 impeached well I've taken the position
1:05 certainly that his attacks on Syria
1:09 clearly violate the War Powers Clause of
1:14 the United States Constitution the War
1:17 Powers Resolution of 1973 and the United
1:22 Nations Charter they would constitute
1:26 crimes against peace as recognized by US
1:31 Army Field Manual 27:10 so certainly in
1:35 my opinion those are impeachable
1:38 offenses for sure is there a reason you
1:41 named Syria in particular as opposed to
1:44 Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or you know
1:47 other places where Donald Trump has
1:50 dropped bombs no I just think that you
1:54 know that clear the serious situation is
1:57 is a clear-cut case for impeachment I
2:01 guess the rest weed we have to talk
2:04 about that the press release we put out
2:08 was prompted by Trump
2:13 to latest attacks on Syria yoga it seems
2:19 that there's a view that if the latest
2:22 attack was on Syrian forces as opposed
2:25 to some other forces in Syria then that
2:28 makes a difference but it seems to me
2:31 the the list of violations you went
2:34 through the UN Charter etc covers
2:37 killing anybody in Syria or for that
2:39 matter Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere
2:42 else that the United States is illegally
2:44 killing people well David I you know I'm
2:49 a law professor I just have to be
2:52 precise in my analysis when we're
2:54 dealing with each of one of these
2:55 countries but certainly when it comes to
2:59 Syria the United States government has
3:02 no right to be in Syria at all and as
3:05 you know we have military forces up
3:08 there and Raqqa we're bombing up there
3:11 we also have military forces in Syria
3:15 itself near the border with Jordan those
3:19 are the ones who are fired
3:21 this time arm so our whole presence in
3:25 Syria is is completely illegal unlawful
3:30 unconstitutional it's never been
3:32 approved by our Congress and so
3:34 definitely that's that's impeachable for
3:37 sure from my perspective we you know we
3:42 can talk about other countries if you
3:43 want to but you know I I have to be
3:47 precise I just can't lump everything
3:50 together in you know in one bucket
3:54 absolutely well I would be delighted to
3:57 simply impeach Trump for Syria I was
3:59 just trying to grasp what the
4:00 distinction is between Syria and say
4:03 Afghanistan because it seems that
4:05 Congress allows both to go on provides
4:08 the funding that is used for both the UN
4:11 Charter covers neither etc so I am just
4:15 you know looking for what's the what's
4:17 the legal distinction between the two
4:20 well again right now I just you know I
4:22 want to talk about Syria if you want to
4:24 talk about other countries we can
4:27 and in in terms a you know I've seen
4:32 also references to the fact that Donald
4:36 Trump apparently owned stock in hidden
4:38 raytheon you know in the missiles that
4: sends into Syria is that sort of
4:43 corruption make it make it any worse or
4:45 any more of an impeachable offense or is
4:47 it is the attack on Syria enough well
4:52 that's why I'm arguing the attack on
4:54 Syria's enough I I think you know if you
4:57 look at other potential articles of
5:00 impeachment and I've been this through
5:03 this before I was counsel to the late
5:07 great Henry B Gonzales on his bill of
5:11 impeachment against Bush senior for the
5:14 Gulf War and Ramsey Clark and Gonzales
5:17 and I set up a national campaign to
5:19 impeach bush senior for that war on and
5:22 when when the war started congressman
5:25 Gonzales introduced his bill of
5:27 impeachment and in his memoirs Bush
5:30 senior did state that the reason he
5:33 stopped at Basra and did not go all the
5:36 way to Baghdad was that he feared
5:37 impeachment so we did have have an
5:40 impact there unfortunately couldn't stop
5:44 that war but right now uh you know I'm
5:49 certainly prepared to say that the
5:51 Trump's attacks on Syria are impeachable
5:54 offenses for sure it's it's a slam-dunk
5:57 to use that phrase a type of situation
6:02 yeah right there I could I could draw
6:04 those that article of impeachment now if
6:07 a member of Congress wanted to see it as
6:11 I recall a you and Ramsey Clark also
6:14 presented a case for the impeachment of
6:17 Bush jr. to the Democrats in Congress
6:20 just a week or so before the the attack
6:25 on Baghdad you know which could
6:27 conceivably have saved over a million
6:30 lives and the Congress members there as
6:33 I recall from your account of it
6:37 accepted the the logic of the of the
6:40 case but decided it would be better for
6:42 the Democrats to wait until the next
6:45 election and be able to campaign against
6:48 the war is that what happened basically
6:52 yes David what happened is just before
6:57 the start of go for two by Bush jr.
7:00 Congressman John Conyers the ranking
7:05 member of the House Judiciary Committee
7:06 that had jurisdiction over bills of
7:09 impeachment invited me and Ramsey Clark
7:13 to come in and argue the case for
7:15 impeachment
7:16 uh before 40 or so of the top lawyers
7:22 affiliated with the Democratic Party and
7:26 he had a draft bill of impeachment there
7:30 uh by me drafted by me you can find it
7:33 on the internet if you want to look for
7:35 arm and Ramsey had one too that was was
7:39 similar to mine so Ramsey and I it was a
7:43 two hour debate
7:44 almost everyone there were were lawyers
7:46 of Ramsey and I both both argued the
7:50 case for impeachment and what happened
7:55 the the decisive factor was that John
7:59 Podesta appeared and no Podesta is
8:03 Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign
8:06 director or was and he said that he was
8:12 appearing there on behalf of the
8:15 Democratic National Committee and the
8:18 Democratic National Committee did not
8:22 want a bill of impeachment put in
8:24 against Bush I also had one for Cheney
8:27 and Ashcroft so you know what can I say
8:33 it's clear the Democrats uh were in on
8:38 this war I mean that debt really put the
8:40 kibosh on on the whole thing whatever
8:43 they say in in public
8:45 I'm not criticizing congressman not
8:47 Conyers of course if you you know if he
8:49 he
8:50 had booked the will of the DNC probably
8:53 would have been stripped of his
8:55 seniority and everything else I know his
8:58 heart was in the right place uh you know
9:01 but he's a team player and so we never
9:05 put put put the bill of impeachment in I
9:08 regret to say it was one of the great
9:10 disappointments of my life certainly uh
9:13 and all those people you know the the
9:16 estimate is maybe 1.5 million Iraqis
9:20 were exterminated in what could only be
9:23 called a war of outright genocide
9:25 against the Iraqis and it still
9:28 continues today but what your listeners
9:30 have to understand is that the
9:33 Democratic Party fully supported that
9:37 you know in fact congressman Danza
9:41 Podesta who was Clinton's campaign
9:45 manager was the one who personally put
9:48 the kibosh on it arm so you know what
9:52 can I say I'm not a political
9:55 independent so I you know wasn't for me
9:59 to tell Democrats what to do although
10:02 Ramsey you know as a lifelong Democrat
10:05 and he you know he tried to make that
10:07 argument from from the perspective of a
10:10 lifelong Democrat I said it I made the
10:13 best legal argument I could actually
10:16 yeah sure you did you did and I recall
10:18 what it looked like congressman Conyers
10:21 also discouraged his colleagues from
10:23 introducing any legislation for
10:26 impeachment implying that once he was
10:29 once the Democrats had the majority then
10:31 he would handle it but of course when
10:34 they had the majority in January 2007
10:39 rahm emanuel openly told the washington
10:42 post we're going to keep the war going
10:43 keep Bush and Cheney in place and
10:46 campaign against them again in 2008
10:49 that'll be better and you know for
10:52 whatever
10:53 strategic reasons John Conyers and the
10:56 rest of them went along with that again
10:59 and that's exactly what obama did he you
11:03 know obama was behind me at harvard law
11:06 school we had the same jurisprudence
11:09 teacher Roberto Unger who publicly would
11:12 later call Obama quote a disaster
11:15 unquote on and Obama used that strategy
11:19 to get elected president in 2008 uh but
11:25 he you know he lied tricked and deceived
11:27 all of us as did the as did the
11:30 Democrats and I you know I'm a political
11:34 independent I bet I did not vote for
11:37 Obama either time between you and me
11:39 because I knew all about his career
11:41 behind me at Harvard Law School he is a
11:44 total opportunist you know from here in
11:47 Chicago while I'm not in Chicago but I
11:50 he you know he lived up there in Hyde
11:53 Park and South Side of Chicago where I'm
11:56 from and I contacted people up there
11:58 about him and they said he was a total
11:59 opportunist so I never supported him
12:04 twice voting for for president I voted
12:08 for other candidates right what can I
12:10 say we're speaking with Francis Boyle
12:13 who is a professor of international law
12:15 at the University of Illinois College of
12:17 Law Francis I've got a list of other
12:22 articles of impeachment people are
12:23 proposing for Donald Trump let me let me
12:26 run a few by you and tell me if you
12:28 think they are impeachable offenses are
12:30 not domestic and foreign emoluments
12:33 clauses domestic clause the president
12:36 shall not receive any other emolument
12:38 from the United States or any of them
12:40 any of the states the the foreign Clause
12:43 no person holding any office of profit
12:46 or trust under the US government shall
12:48 without the consent of the Congress
12:50 accept any present emolument office or
12:52 title of any kind whatever from any King
12:55 prince or foreign state Trump seems in
12:58 clear violation of both from day one
13:02 well you know I'm not here to criticize
13:07 anyone else who wants to impeach Trump
13:11 one way or the other
13:12 but let me point out the sociology
13:16 behind this one when Clinton was
13:19 Secretary of State and was involved in
13:24 all the slush funds there with the
13:27 Clinton Foundation none of the lawyers
13:31 pushing this argument on the emoluments
13:34 clause who are all affiliated with the
13:37 Democratic Party talked about impeaching
13:40 Clinton on the basis of the emoluments
13:42 clause not one of them every every
13:46 lawyer behind this campaign on the
13:49 emoluments clause is affiliated with the
13:51 Democratic Party and they did not push
13:55 any of this at all with respect to mrs.
13:57 Clinton the Secretary of State and the
13:59 Clinton Foundation slush fund so I I
14:03 myself um you know if these Democratic
14:06 Party lawyers want to push this they
14:08 can't the only Republican they have on
14:12 there is this fellow Richard painter who
14:16 who used to teach here they use him as a
14:19 frontman claiming that well he's
14:22 authoritative uh because he served as
14:26 the in the White House counsel's office
14:30 as ethics adviser to President Bush jr.
14:35 well you know that makes me laugh that
14:38 that here a painter and Bush jr. are
14:44 covered in blood from head to toe and
14:49 he's there lecturing us painter on on
14:53 ethics this would be like serving as the
14:57 legal adviser on ethics to Genghis Khan
15:01 or something like that yeah only arm you
15:04 know where I you know I'm not I'm not
15:06 discounting the emoluments clause but
15:09 you know you have to look at who's
15:11 making it yet all the lawyers making
15:14 this argument the lawyers who have filed
15:16 the lawsuit they're all uh legal hatchet
15:20 men for the Democratic Party so you know
15:23 if you want to get involved in that uh I
15:26 guess you can't
15:27 and that all the domestic respects the
15:30 domestic laws Francis is specifically
15:33 about the president not a Secretary of
15:34 State but the foreign one could
15:37 certainly be applied to either so I
15:39 guess my question is it granted the part
15:41 of the did the gross blatant
15:43 partisanship it's there were such people
15:47 wrong not to bring such charges against
15:50 Hillary Clinton or are they wrong to
15:53 bring them against Donald Trump what I'm
15:56 saying now is that it's total hypocrisy
15:58 under these circumstances and I'm not
16:01 getting involved with my personally for
16:04 me I'm not getting involved with a gang
16:07 of legal hatchet men for the Democratic
16:11 Party uh who supported Clinton and
16:15 supported Obama for all these years
16:19 but others want to get involved in them
16:21 that you know that's fine that's your
16:23 business but Obama but I'm not getting
16:25 involved in it Obama dropped a lot more
16:28 bombs on Syria then Donald Trump has yet
16:31 to drop on Syria and I don't think any
16:33 of these individuals brought up
16:34 impeaching Obama for bombing Syria
16:3 7either yet we are better Ryan to say
16:40 it's a legitimate charge against Trump
16:43 so that why you know there's there s a
16:47 piracy but it's still an important
16:49 charge to bring is it not well and not
16:52 only did AMA drop bombs on John Syria he
16:56 was the one who started the so-called a
17:00 color revolution that we're seeing in
17:04 Syria now none of these democratic
17:07 lawyers did anything about Obama they
17:09 were fully supporting Obama I tried
17:12 myself to get a Bill's of impeachment or
17:17 bill of impeachment in there against
17:19 Obama and I failed I you know I couldn't
17:21 get anyone to impeach obama for anyone
17:25 for anything or put a bill of
17:27 impeachment in there and you know i
17:29 talked to some members of congress
17:31 republicans and they weren't willing to
17:33 do it so well i could neither veterans
17:37 for peace was the only organization
17:39 as I recall right Willington to say yes
17:43 envy job and i i signed their a petition
17:48 in support of impeaching obama that's
17:51 correct
17:52 yeah but almost no one uh did it so you
17:56 know as I see it this emoluments clause
17:58 you know this is just a partisan effort
18:00 being used by the Democratic Party arm
18:04 which you know uh I'm you know when I
18:09 was a kid
18:09 the Democrats are waging war in Vietnam
18:12s o I not going to be affiliated myself
18:16 with anything that the Democratic Party
18:20 is running here one way or the other
18:22 well let me let me ask you about some
18:24 other charges that I would bring that as
18:26 far as I know no Democrats or
18:28 Republicans are proposing Oh
18:30 one would be banning Muslims from the
18:33 country and having it thrown out by a
18:36 court and doing it again is that not a
18:40 high crime in ms I think you are correct
18:43 on that of David clearly um I think a an
18:50 argument could be made here that it
18:52 violates the First Amendment of the
18:54 United States Constitution and that's
18:57 what these courts have found I have I
18:59 have read I guess the opinion out in
19:03 Hawaii and another opinion out on out in
19:06 the Ninth Circuit there you know in San
19:09 Francisco so clearly um I think an
19:13 argument could be made that if someone
19:17 wanted to pull a put a bill of
19:19 impeachment in there for violating the
19:22 First Amendment I I would support that
19:25 yes but I'm certainly not going to work
19:27 with a gang of you know Democratic
19:29 lawyers who have an agenda here uh to
19:35 basically reverse of the November 8th
19:41 2016 election where Clinton lost and
19:45 that I think is really what's going on
19:48 here with some of these efforts
19:51 I personally putting a
19:53 side the you know the merits of the
19:56 emoluments clause argument um but I
19:59 think that's the agenda there to reverse
20:01 that election and certainly to use it
20:06 against against Trump but I want to make
20:08 clear I didn't vote for Trump and I
20:10 certainly didn't vote for Clinton that's
20:12 for sure
20:13 yes well you and me both the the
20:17 defending Hillary and arguing that
20:20 Hillary would have won if not for
20:22 foreign interference and corruption just
20:24 ignore all the domestic interference and
20:26 corruption seems to be part where you
20:29 agree right that anybody about that I
20:32 agree with what you said yeah yes so so
20:34 I wonder both what you make of the
20:37 business Russia madness and what you
20:39 make of the argument well let's get him
20:42 for obstruction of justice even if there
20:44 wasn't anything there to be found by an
20:47 investigation is that is that a
20:50 legitimate church well the anti-russian
20:56 history is pure war mongering as as you
20:59 know Clinton decided to use that against
21:03 Trump in the campaign uh once once Trump
21:08 was nominated and the Democrats and
21:12 Clinton and the mainstream news media
21:15 all of whom supported Clinton are
21:18 continuing this anti-russian war
21:22 mongering and hysteria there's no other
21:24 word for it and it is extremely
21:28 dangerous under the circumstances and
21:31 certainly but I think if Clinton has
21:33 been elected president we'd be we'd be
21:35 at war with Russia now on the wrestling
21:39 so there there we are I don't know what
21:42 to say about it but there's no I haven't
21:45 seen any evidence that you know Putin
21:48 corrupted our election or anything like
21:51 that I you know I think this is all
21:53 boulder dash you know and I follow these
21:56 things quite carefully no it's it's
22:00 amazing that it goes on and on without
22:02 any evidence but then I have people that
22:04I respect who say well even if there's
22:06 nothing
22:07 there he still obstructed justice and
22:10 the cover-up is worse than the crime and
22:12 you can go after him for obstruction of
22:14 justice for firing Comey what what do
22:17 you make of that argument uh I don't
22:21 think you know well you do have to
22:23 distinguish between uh the crime of
22:26 obstruction of justice I I was
22:28 originally hired here to teach criminal
22:32 law for several years and right now I
22:35 don't I don't see that crime that he he
22:38 committed was different when you know
22:40 you had Archibald Cox who was a special
22:44 prosecutor and a grand jury and
22:48 everything else like that that's correct
22:50 um but and with Clinton too even though
22:54 you know the Clinton impeachment was
22:56 ridiculous but there to you had Ken star
23:00 and a grand jury and things of that
23:02 nature but right now it's just you know
23:05 the director of the FBI he was talking
23:07 with the director the FBI we're not
23:10 exactly sure what they said or why they
23:12 said it what with reasons behind it that
23:14 statute clearly says corruptly but let
23:17 me put it this way certainly if you know
23:19 they want to make a case of impeaching
23:21 him for obstruction of justice of course
23:23 they can do that if they want to but
23:25 right now I don't see the evidence to
23:27 convict them for a crime but we have to
23:30 understand one thing here um David there
23:34 are no good guys on either side of this
23:36 at all call me director of the FBI
23:42 Wesley Swearengen a retired and
23:45 decorated FBI agent in his book FBI
23:49 secrets called the FBI quote an American
23:53 Gestapo uncle you know commies no hero
23:56 here at all he director the American
23:58 Gestapo he worked for President Bush jr.
24:02 and Ashcroft at the Department of
24:04 Justice he's up to his eyeballs in
24:08 torture and forced disappearances and
24:10 all the other hideous atrocities that
24:13 horse jr. inflicted against
24:16 international human rights the United
24:18 States Constitution
24:20 as for Muller this new special
24:23 prosecutor he's just a legal and
24:26 political hatchet man for the Bush
24:28 family of the CIA FBI and everyone else
24:33 he's a political operative Muller was
24:36 the one who was personally in charge of
24:40 manufacturing the case that framed
24:43 Muammar Qaddafi over the Lockerbie
24:46 bombing and everyone knows that was a
24:48 joke that the Qaddafi had nothing to do
24:51 with it
24:52 Libya had nothing to do with it up and
24:55 yet the order was given by Bush senior
24:58 CIA are to deflect attention from Iran
25:03 in Syria for because they supported Bush
25:06 senior on his war against Iraq the first
25:09 time and uh frame Gaddafi in Libya yeah
25:14 personally handled that at the
25:16 Department of Justice he was in charge
25:19 the whole thing and it's always under my
25:21 leadership that the anthrax
25:23 investigation went so badly as he also
25:27 did the cover up on the anthrax there's
25:30 no question all about it up and blaming
25:34 this poor Bruce Ivins guy who committed
25:36 suicide and Muller has his death on his
25:41 hands as well we had all a couple
25:43 minutes left Francis Boyle I think that
25:47 the biggest obstacle we may have to
25:50 impeachment in Washington may be exactly
25:54 as you say there are no good guys and
25:56 there's this this horror of pence
25:59 becoming president you know it would
26:02 make somebody worse president to which I
26:05 say well if we had a culture of
26:06 accountability an impeachment it would
26:08 that would matter more than who was
26:10 stepping into the office but what do you
26:12 say to all these wise people who say
26:14 don't be stupid and make pense president
26:20 well I
26:22I you know personally in my experience
26:26 on impeachment going back to congressman
26:30 Gonzalez uh and also now we find out
26:35 that Obama did not attack Syria in 2013
26:43 Ben Rhodes recently said this that Obama
26:47 feared impeachment uh you know I think
26:50 it would be good to send a shot across
26:53 the bow of Trump or any other president
26:56 as I tried to do with bush senior I
27:00 tried to do with Clinton I had a
27:01 campaign impeach Clinton for the right
27:04 reasons not a having fellatio with right
27:07 Monica Lewinsky and lying about it but
27:09 all these bombings that he was doing uh
27:11 and then we just discussed uh my effort
27:16 with Ramsey Clark on Bush jr. and I
27:20 tried to get you notes a member of
27:23 Congress to introduce bill of
27:25 impeachment against Obama but I failed
27:28 so I we we have a an imperial presidency
27:33 as you know indeed after 9/11 2001 we
27:37 have a hyper imperial presidency result
27:40 i thirty Seconds there is value there is
27:43 value in introducing a bill of
27:47 impeachment and I'm certainly prepared
27:49 to do that on Syria if a member of
27:51 Congress wants to talk with me and also
27:54 pursuant to your suggestion on the ban
27:57 against the Muslims and send a shot
28:01 across Trump's bow and cast a character
28:06 surrounding him I think there's value in
28:08 that I certainly agree I hope some
28:10 members of Congress are listening and
28:11 take you up on it Francis boiled thank
28:14 you very very much for coming on talk
28:16 nation radio well thank you very much
28:19 David for heavy on this is talk nation
28:22 radio I'm david swanson take action at
28:25 roots action org help end war at world
28:29 beyond war
28:31 all task shows can be heard at david
28:34 swanson org talk nation radio is
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28:45 please support pat station talk nation
28:48 radio is funded by contributors at david
28:50 swanson org there is no way to peace
28:54 peace is the way until next time
28:58[Music]

See also: Can Trump Recruit Tulsi Gabbard? (21/11/16) | PowerLine, Tulsi Gabbard: 5 Things To Know About Politician Considered For Trump’s Cabinet (21/11/16) | Hollywood Life, Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard 'Under Serious Consideration' for Trump Cabinet (22/11/16) | ABC News, voteTulsi.com.

November 21, 2016

New York, NY—U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) today released the following statement on her meeting with President-elect Donald Trump regarding Syria:

"President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face. I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government—a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.

"While the rules of political expediency would say I should have refused to meet with President-elect Trump, I never have and never will play politics with American and Syrian lives.

"Serving the people of Hawaiʻi and our nation is an honor and responsibility that I do not take lightly. Representing the aloha spirit and diversity of the people of Hawaiʻi, I will continue to seek common ground to deliver results that best serve all Americans, as I have tried to do during my time in Congress.

"Where I disagree with President-elect Trump on issues, I will not hesitate to express that disagreement. However, I believe we can disagree, even strongly, but still come together on issues that matter to the American people and affect their daily lives. We cannot allow continued divisiveness to destroy our country.

"President-elect Trump and I had a frank and positive conversation in which we discussed a variety of foreign policy issues in depth. I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no fly/safe zone would be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country, and the world. It would lead to more death and suffering, exacerbate the refugee crisis, strengthen ISIS and al-Qaeda, and bring us into a direct conflict with Russia which could result in a nuclear war. We discussed my bill to end our country’s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government, and the need to focus our precious resources on rebuilding our own country, and on defeating al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups who pose a threat to the American people.

"For years, the issue of ending interventionist, regime change warfare has been one of my top priorities. This was the major reason I ran for Congress—I saw firsthand the cost of war, and the lives lost due to the interventionist warmongering policies our country has pursued for far too long.

"Let me be clear, I will never allow partisanship to undermine our national security when the lives of countless people lay in the balance."

"Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education - Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia -- and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post. These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT. And they love war. While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life." John Pilger.

This article is republished with permission from John Pilger. It was first published at http://johnpilger.com/articles/inside-the-invisible-government-war-propaganda-clinton-trump

The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term "public relations" as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.

In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade - behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, "Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!"

Bernays' influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was "engineering the consent" of people in order to "control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it".

He described this as "the true ruling power in our society" and called it an "invisible government".

Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.

Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.

But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.

In the second city - in another country nearby - almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.

The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by "us" - by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America.

Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city - which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.

Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.

What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.

Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.

Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was "vindicated" for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell's fabrications.

The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, "What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?"

He replied that if journalists had done their job, "there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq".

It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question -- Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.

There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.

When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria - and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande's bombast about France being "at war" and "showing no mercy". That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.

The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an "agreement" that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.

As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.

From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics - the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.

Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked."

The West's medieval client, Saudi Arabia - to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars' worth of arms - is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished.

Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs - "our" bombs - that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals.

The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.

Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education - Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia -- and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post.

These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.

And they love war.

While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life.

In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.

In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call "regime change" in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi's influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable.

So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, "We came, we saw, he died!"

The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: "Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong."

Intervention - what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.

According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, "most [of them] under the age of ten".

As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS. Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.

All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine - except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.

Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

There is almost the joie d'esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America's design for the 21st century.

This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.

To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China.

In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, "I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over." That was not news.

Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.

The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world - unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China.

She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria - a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime - a distinction for which the competition is fierce.

Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.

That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.

Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way - in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.

Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton's victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays' "torches of freedom".

George Bush's press spokesman once called the media "complicit enablers".

Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons."

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

Inside see Syrian Girl's excellent video report on how the media has played reporting on Syria, using children's photos. She really explains the details well and her video contains footage that I have not seen before and new information.

Washington’s intention to overthrow Syria's legitimate and democratically-elected President Bashar al-Assad results from his refusal to back a Qatari gas pipeline project, an attorney says. Article first published by Iranian Press TV at http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/03/453669/Washington-Bashar-alAssad-Qatari-gas-pipeline-project

According to an article published by Politico on Thursday, American attorney and nephew of US President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wrote that the US decided to topple Assad after he declined to back a gas pipeline project of the Qatari government.  Article first published by Iranian Press TV at http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/03/453669/Washington-Bashar-alAssad-Qatari-gas-pipeline-project

The project was aimed at building a gas link from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey to Europe.

The $10 billion pipeline project first surfaced in 2000 and the CIA went ahead with the plan until nine years later Assad announced that he would not support the pipeline initiative, a move that could grant Qatar direct access to European energy markets via terminals in Turkey.

“Soon after that the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria," said Kennedy.

“If completed, the project would have had major geopolitical implications. Ankara would have profited from rich transit fees. The project would have also given the Sunni kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America's closest ally in the Arab world," he noted.

Kennedy added that the pipeline would have also strengthened Saudi Arabia by giving the kingdom additional leverage against Iran.

In a separate interview with Sputnik, Kennedy said, “If we study the history of America’s relation with Mideast and looking at the US’ violent intervention in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt over time and the extraordinary and astonishing thing is the solid record of the cataclysmic failure every time we venture there in violent fashion. Most Americans are completely unaware of us attempting to overthrow the democratically elected government in Syria, contrary to our own state department policy and contrary to American values.”

Since March 2011, the United States and its regional allies, in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have been conducting a proxy war against Syria. The years-long conflict has left somewhere between 270,000 to 470,000 Syrians dead and half of the country’s population displaced.

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