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False Flag Terrorism Isn’t a “Theory” … It’s ADMITTED and Widespread

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Source: Washington’s Blog

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this, this and this.

(2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked several attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.    The staged attacks included:

  • The German radio station Sender Gleiwitz [details below]
  • The strategic railway at POSunka Pass (Jabłonków Incident), located on the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia
  • The German customs station at Hochlinden (today part of Rybnik-Stodoły)
  • The forest service station in Pitschen (Byczyna)
  • The communications station at Neubersteich (“Nieborowitzer Hammer” before 12 February 1936, now Kuznia Nieborowska)
  • The railroad station in Alt-Eiche (Smolniki), Rosenberg in Westpreußen district
  • A woman and her companion in Katowice

The details of the Gleiwitz radio station incident include:

On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The Germans’ goal was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish saboteurs.

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans used human corpses to pass them off as Polish attackers. They murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection, given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.

(3) The minutes of the high command of the Italian government – subsequently approved by Mussolini himself – admitted that violence on the Greek-Albanian border was carried out by Italians and falsely blamed on the Greeks, as an excuse for Italy’s 1940 invasion of Greece.

(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).

(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

The U.S. Army does not believe this is an isolated incident. For example, the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies said of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service):

“Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

(9) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(10) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

(11) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(12) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” … so that “a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:

(13) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]”.

(14) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(15) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(16) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(17) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.

(20) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:

The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations ….

[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]

a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.

b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques, likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.

c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.

d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication.

***

The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.

(21) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(22) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(23) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(24) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).

(25) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this.

(26) The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “Dirty Wars“. And see this.

(27) Similarly, a CIA “psychological operations” manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a “martyr” for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:

At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.

(28) A Rwandan government inquiry admitted that the 1994 shootdown and murder of the Rwandan president, who was from the Hutu tribe – a murder blamed by the Hutus on the rival Tutsi tribe, and which led to the massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus – was committed by Hutu soldiers and falsely blamed on the Tutis.

(29) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.

(30) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(31) As reported by the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”. They lured foreign migrants into the country, executed them in a staged gun battle, and then claimed they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies”. Specifically, Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then – after killing them – posed the victims with planted evidence – “bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side” – to show Western diplomats.

(32) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying “iron bars inside the police station”. Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa subsequently admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(33) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have allegedthat 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.). 

(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 … even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)

(34) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

(35) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(36) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(37) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester.

(38) In 2003, the U.S. Secretary of Defense admitted that interrogators were authorized to use the following method: “False Flag: Convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.” While not a traditional false flag attack, this deception could lead to former detainees – many of whom were tortured – attacking the country falsely blamed for the interrogation and torture.

(39) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(40) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar’ – called for western intelligence services to create new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:

“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists…

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”

(41) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(42) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The soldiers apparently possessed explosives, and were accused of attempting to set off bombs. While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out. The extreme measures used to free the soldiers – rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial – could be considered an admission.

(43) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(44) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(45) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism” (as well as “transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.”)

(46) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:

He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior … infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything …. And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, … beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.

(47) An undercover officer admitted that he infiltrated environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups in 22 countries. Germany’s federal police chief admitted that – while the undercover officer worked for the German police – he acted illegally during a G8 protest in Germany in 2007 and committed arson by setting fire during a subsequent demonstration in Berlin. The undercover officer spent many years living with violent “Black Bloc” anarchists.

(48) Denver police admitted that uniformed officers deployed in 2008 to an area where alleged “anarchists” had planned to wreak havoc outside the Democratic National Convention ended up getting into a melee with two undercover policemen. The uniformed officers didn’t know the undercover officers were cops.

(49) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(50) The oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that – at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 – undercover police officers were arrested with a group of protesters. Videos and photos (see this and this, for example) show that violent protesters wore very similar boots and other gear as the police, and carried police batons. The Globe and Mail reports that the undercover officers planned the targets for violent attack, and the police failed to stop the attacks.

(51) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(52) Austin police admit that 3 officers infiltrated the Occupy protests in that city. Prosecutors admit that one of the undercover officers purchased and constructed illegal “lock boxes” which ended up getting many protesters arrested.

(53) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this.

(54) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.

(55) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.

(56) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(57) Two members of the Turkish parliament, high-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government – a NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(58) The former Director of the NSA and other American government officials admit said that the U.S. is a huge supporter of terrorism. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the U.S. organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets. The U.S. and its allies have been supporting Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups for many decades, and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Libya, Syria, Mali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries. U.S. allies are also directly responsible for creating and supplying ISIS.

It’s gotten so ridiculous that a U.S. Senator has introduced a “Stop Arming Terrorists Act”, and U.S. Congresswoman – who introduced a similar bill in the House – says: “For years, the U.S. government has been supporting armed militant groups working directly with and often under the command of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”

(59) The Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others. Ukrainian officials admit that the Ukrainian snipers fired on both sides, to create maximum chaos.

(60) Speaking of snipers, in a secret recording, Venezuelan generals admit that they will deploy snipers to shoot protesters, but keep the marksmen well-hidden from demonstrator and the reporters covering the events so others would be blamed for the deaths.

(61) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.

(62) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.

(63) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

(64) The CIA has admitted that it uses viruses and malware from Russia and other countries to carry out cyberattacks and blame other countries.

(65) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.

(66) Similarly, police frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:

In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.

Newsweek reported in 1999:

Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a “throwdown”–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable. Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot themduring a stakeout.

Wikipedia notes:

As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings.

(As a side note – and while not technically false flag attacks – police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways, as well.)

(67) A former U.S. intelligence officer recently alleged:

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

(68) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags.

(69) The Director of Analytics at the interagency Global Engagement Center housed at the U.S. Department of State, also an adjunct professor at George Mason University, where he teaches the graduate course National Security Challenges in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, a former branch chief in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security (J.D. Maddox) notes:

Provocation is one of the most basic, but confounding, aspects of warfare. Despite its sometimes obvious use, it has succeeded consistently against audiences around the world, for millennia, to compel war. A well-constructed provocation narrative mutes even the most vocal opposition.

***

The culmination of a strategic provocation operation invariably reflects a narrative of victimhood: we are the 
victims of the enemy’s unforgivable atrocities.

***

In the case of strategic provocation the deaths of an aggressor’s own personnel are a core tactic of the provocation.

***

The persistent use of strategic provocation over centuries – and its apparent importance to war planners – begs the question of its likely use by the US and other states in the near term.

(70) Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the “benefits” of of false flags to justify their political agenda:

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
– Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
– Josef Stalin

Postscript 1:  It is not just “modern” nations which have launched false flag attacks. For example, a Native American from one tribe (Pomunkey) murdered a white Englishwoman living in Virginia in 1697 and then falsely blamed it on second tribe (Piscataway). But he later admitted in court that he was not really Piscataway, and that he had been paid by a provocateur from a third tribe (Iroquois) to kill the woman as a way to start a war between the English and the Piscataway, thus protecting the profitable Iroquois monopoly in trade with the English.

Postscript 2:  On multiple occasions, atrocities or warmongering are falsely blamed on the enemy as a justification for war … when no such event ever occurred. This is more like a “fake flag” than a “false flag”, as no actual terrorism occurred.

For example:

  • The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war
  • One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. – who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war – but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress
  • Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this
  • Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger:

had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

  • The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by highly exaggerated reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this

Afterword: The corporate media will likely never report on false flags … as it is ALWAYS pro-war.

As US Empire Fails, Trump Enters a Quagmire

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By Kevin Zeese

Source: Information Clearing House

A quagmire is defined as a complex or unpleasant position that is difficult to escape. President Trump’s recently announced war plans in Afghanistan maintain that quagmire. They come at a time when US Empire is failing and its leadership in the world is weakening. The US will learn what other empires have learned, “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.”

During the presidential campaign, some became convinced that Trump would not be an interventionist president. His tweets about Afghanistan were one of the reasons. In January of 2013, he tweeted, “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” Now, we see a president who carries on the interventionist tradition of US Empire.

While Afghanistan has been a never-ending active war since 9-11, making the 16-year war the longest in US history, the truth is the United States became directly involved with Afghanistan some 38 years ago, on July 3, 1979. As William Rivers Pitts writes “On that day, at the behest of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter signed the first directive in an operation meant to destabilize the Soviet-controlled government of Afghanistan.” In fact when the US dropped the MOAB bomb, Trump was bombing tunnels built with the assistance of the CIA in the 1980′s for the mujaheddin and Bin Laden.

Trump’s Afghan policy is inaccurately described as a new approach but has only one element that is new – secrecy, as Trump will not tell us how many soldiers he will send to this war. His so-called new strategy is really a continuation of the permanent war quagmire in Afghanistan, which may be an intentional never ending war for the empire’s geopolitical goals. Ralph Nader reviews 16 years of headlines about Afghanistan, calling it a “cruel boomeranging quagmire of human violence and misery… with no end in sight.”

Another Afghan Review Leads To Same Conclusion: More War

During his campaign for president, Trump called for the US to pull out of Afghanistan. Early in his administration, President Trump announced a review of the Afghanistan war. This week when he announced escalation of the war, Trump noted this was his instinct. Unfortunately, the president did not trust his previous instincts and missed an opportunity to end the war.

We have seen how President Trump refuses to admit mistakes, so it is highly unlikely he will change course from this mistaken path. His rationale is so many US soldiers have given their lives that we must stay until the United States wins. This is the quandary – the US must continue the war until we win because soldiers have died but continuing the war means more will die and the US must stay committed to war because more have died.

After we read President Trump’s Afghanistan war speech, we went back and re-read President Obama’s Afghanistan war speech given in March 2009.  It is remarkable how similar the two speeches are. When Russian president Putin was interviewed by filmmaker Oliver Stone as well as when he was interviewed by Megyn Kelly, he made a point proven by US policy in Afghanistan, “Presidents come and go, and even the parties in power change, but the main political direction does not change.”

Both presidents conducted a lengthy review early in their administration and both talked with generals and diplomats who convinced them to escalate rather than end the war. Both presidents put forward what they claimed was a new strategy but in reality, was just doing the same thing over again: more troops, building up Afghanistan’s military by working closely with them, using economic and diplomatic power and putting pressure on Pakistan not to be a safe haven for the Taliban and those fighting against the United States.

To ensure a quagmire both presidents said that decisions would not be based on a timeline but on conditions on the ground. Both promised victory, without clearly defining what it would mean; both raised fears of the Taliban and other anti-US militants using Afghanistan to attack the United States again. Trump had the advantage of knowing that President Obama’s approach had failed despite repeated bombings in Pakistan and working with Afghan troops, but that didn’t alter his course.

Afghanistan Victims of a February, 2012 US air strike that killed 8 children in Kapisa, Afghanistan.

Failure To Learn Lessons Ensures Repeating Them

According to Mike Ludwig, since President Obama approved a troop surge in 2009, the war in Afghanistan has claimed at least 26,512 civilian lives and injured nearly 48,931 more. In July, the United Nations reported that at least 5,243 civilians have been killed or injured in 2017 alone, including higher numbers of woman and children than previous in years. Trump seems less concerned than previous presidents with killings of civilians.

Trump noted that the Afghanistan-Pakistan region was now the densest part of the world when it comes to anti-US militants, saying there were 20 terrorist groups in the area. President Obama added tens of thousands of troops to the Afghanistan war, dropped massive numbers of bombs and the result was more terrorism. The US was killing terrorists but the impact was creating more anti-American militants. Trump failed to connect these dots and understand that more US attacks create more hatred against the United States.

After Obama failed to ‘win’ the war by adding tens of thousands of troops, with more than 100,000 fighting in Afghanistan at its peak, Trump should have asked his generals how adding thousands more (reports are between 4,000 and 8,000 soldiers) would change failure to success. Wasn’t there anyone in the room who would tell Trump there is nothing new in the Trump strategy that Obama and Bush had not already tried. Steve Bannon was the most opposed to war in the administration and reportedly fought against more war, but he was not in the room. Did anyone in the room stand up to the hawk-generals?

The policy of working more closely with the Afghan military in order to build them up ended in disaster in the Obama era. The New Yorker wrote in 2012: “We can’t win the war in Afghanistan, so what do we do? We’ll train the Afghans to do it for us, then claim victory and head for the exits.” But, the US discovered that it could not train the Afghans in the ‘American way of war.’ In 2012, the Obama administration ended the program of fighting alongside Afghan soldiers to train them because those soldiers were killing US soldiers. How many US soldiers will die because Trump was ignorant of this lesson?

Trump also took the wrong lesson from the Iraq war and occupation. He inaccurately described the so-called withdrawal from Iraq as hasty. He points to the rise of ISIS as created by the vacuum in Iraq when the US reduced its numbers of troops. Trump said the US “cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.”

In fact, ISIS rose up because the killing of hundreds of thousands, some reports say more than a million, of Iraqis, displacement of more than a million more, the destruction of a functioning government as well as war crimes like the Abu Gharib torture scandal made it easy to recruit fighters. Furthermore, the training and supply of weapons to Sunnis during the ‘Awakening’ created armed soldiers looking for their next job.

It was US war and occupation that created ISIS. The seeds had been planted, fertilized and were rapidly growing before the US reduced its military footprint. Trump is repeating the mistake of more militarism, and in the end ISIS or some other form of anti-US militancy will thrive.

The US does not want to face an important reality – the government of the United States is hated in the region for very good reasons. Bush lied to us about 9-11 when he claimed they hate us for our freedoms. No, they hate the US because US militarism kills hundreds of thousands of people in the region, destroys functioning governments and creates chaos.

Victory Means Something Different to an Empire

In trying to understand why the US is fighting a war — a war that has been unwinnable for 16 years — it helps to look at a map and consider the resources of an area.

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former adviser, predicts the US will be in Afghanistan for the next 50 years. Indeed, that may be the ‘victory’ the empire seeks. Afghanistan is of geopolitical importance. It is a place where the US can impact China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ to Europe where China can take the place of Russia and the United States in providing wealthy Europeans with key commodities like oil and gas. Just as the United States has stayed in Germany, Italy and other European states and Japan after WW II,  and in Korea after the Korean war, the empire sees a need to be in Afghanistan to be well positioned for the future of the empire. Terrorism is not the issue, economic competition with China, which is quickly becoming the leading global economic power, is the real issue.

And, competition with Russia and China is at the top of the list of the bi-partisan war party in Washington. Pepe Escobar points out that “Russia-China strategic partnership wants an Afghan solution hatched by Afghans and supervised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (of which Afghanistan is an observer and future full member). So from the point of view of neocon/neoliberalcon elements of the War Party in Washington, Afghanistan only makes sense as a forward base to harass/stall/thwart China’s Belt and Road Initiative.”

Afghanistan is next to China, India and Pakistan, three nuclear powers that could pose military risks to the United States. Having multiple bases in Afghanistan, to allegedly fight terrorists, will provide the forward deployment needed to combat each of those nations if military action is needed.

Afghanistan also borders on Iran, which could be a near-future war zone for the United States. Positioning the US military along the Afghanistan-Iran border creates a strategic advantage with Iran as well as with the Persian Gulf where approximately 18.2 million barrels of oil per day transit through the Strait of Hormuz in tankers.

Afghanistan’s land contains $3 trillion in rare earth minerals needed for computers and modern technology including rich deposits of gold, silver, platinum, iron ore and copper. The US has spent $700 billion in fighting a failed war and President Trump and empire strategists are looking to make sure US corporations get access to those minerals. Since the US Geological Survey discovered these minerals a decade ago, some see Afghanistan as the future  “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, a raw material used in phone and electric car batteries. US officials have told Reuters that Trump argued at a White House meeting with advisers in July that the United States should demand a share of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.

Jeffrey St. Clair reminds us not to forget the lucrative opium trade. Afghanistan is the largest source for heroin in the world. He writes:

Since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, opium production has swelled, now accounting for more than one-third of the wrecked Afghan economy. In the last two years alone, opium poppy yields have doubled, a narcotic blowback now hitting the streets of American cities from Amarillo to Pensacola. With every drone strike in the Helmond Province, a thousand more poppies bloom.

The decision on a never ending war — with no timetable for exit — is evidence that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are in charge of US foreign policy with Trump as a figurehead.  Of course, the war also ensures immense profits for the war industry. St. Clair emphasizes that “in 2016, the Pentagon spent $3.6 million for each US soldier stationed in Afghanistan.  A surge of 4,000 to 10,000 additional troops, either as ‘private military units’ or GIs, will come as a welcome new infusion of cash to the dozens of defense corporations that invested so heavily in his administration.”

The firing of Steve Bannon just before the meeting that decided Afghanistan’s future was not coincidence as he was the opponent of escalation. Glenn Greenwald writes in the Intercept that this permanent power structure has been working since his election to take control of foreign policy. He also points to the appointment of Marine General John Kelly as chief of staff and how National Security Adviser, General McMaster, has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy. The deep state of the permanent national security complex has taken over and the Afghan war decision demonstrates this reality.

With these geopolitical realities, staying Afghanistan may be the victory the Pentagon seeks — winning may just be being there. The Intercept reported this week that the Taliban offered to negotiate peace, but peace on the terms of the Taliban may not be what the US is seeking.

Call for an End to War for Empire

It would be a terrible error for people to blame Trump for the Afghanistan war which began with intervention by Jimmy Carter, became a hot war after 9-11 under George Bush, escalated under Obama and now continues the same polices under Trump. The bi-partisan war hawks in Congress for nearly 40 years have supported these policies. Afghanistan is evidence of the never ending policy of full spectrum dominance sought by the US empire. The bi-partisans warriors span the breadth of both parties, Jeffrey St. Clair highlights the Afghanistan war cheering by Senator John McCain and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Throughout recent decades the United States has failed to show what Kathy Kelly called the courage we need for peace and continues the cowardice of war. In fact, many ask why are we still at war in Afghanistan: Osama bid Laden is dead, other alleged 9-11 attack attackers are caught or killed. This shows that calling Afghanistan the longest running Fake War in US history is right — fake because it was never about terrorism but about business. If terrorism were the issue, Saudi Arabia would be the prime US enemy, but Saudi Arabia is also about business.

We share the conclusion of human rights activist and Green vice presidential candidate in 2016 Ajamu Baraka who wrote for the Black Alliance for Peace that:

In an obscene testament to U.S. vanity and the psychopathological commitment to global white supremacy, billions have already been wasted, almost three thousand U.S. lives lost and over 100,000 dead. It is time to admit defeat in Afghanistan and bring the war to an end. Justice and common sense demand that the bloodletting stop.

When we understand the true motives of US Empire, that conclusion is even worse — to steal resources from a poor nation and put in place permanent bases from which to conduct more war. US hegemony is costly to millions of people around the world and at home it sucks more than 54% of discretionary spending from the federal budget and creates an empire economy that only serves the wealthiest corporate interests that profit from transnational military dominance while creating a record wealth divide where most people in the United States are economic slaves. It is not only time to end the Afghanistan war but to end US Empire.

Does the Washington Post Have Fake News?

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

There are two kinds of fake news:

One is a report of something that actually didn’t happen, which for a newspaper to do can reasonably be called lying, inasmuch as a newspaper is expected to report only things that happen, and any violation of that strict standard — which separates journalism from propaganda — is at least negligence violating the very reason why consumers purchase or subscribe to a newspaper (that reason being trustworthiness). This deception amounts unqualifiedly to lying, in any case where a reasonable assumption can be made that the given false ‘news’ report’s falsehood results from the publisher’s propagandistic orientation and intention to deceive on that given matter. (This might be done in order to please the controlling stockholder of an advertiser, or for many other reasons.) In such cases, the fake news is propaganda instead of news. To sell to consumers propaganda as ‘news’ is additionally to deceive them into paying the publisher in order to become deceived by the publisher; so, it’s a deception on top of a deception; it is actually deception-squared. That’s why selling such ‘news’ is even worse than merely giving it away for free (such as honest PR or propaganda is — it is free).

The other type of fake news is omission of a crucial fact from a report, whenever the omission is so crucial that it will sway some readers to believe «x» when «not x» is true, and therefore such an omission is equivalent to lying. This is a far more subtle type of deception, because it relies upon the consumer to deceive himself, instead of upon the publisher explicitly asserting the falsehood to the reader or hearer. Such «sins of omission» are impossible to outlaw, but are more insidious than direct lying is, because any publisher can easily abuse this power to deceive, merely by making clear to his employees what types of facts they will be penalized (demoted etc.) for reporting. For example, any publisher who causes employees to exclude stating as a fact that some public official is lying or did lie about a particular matter, when proof is available that the given official did lie about it, would be publishing fake news on that matter. However, more often, a publisher simply establishes a policy not to hire editors (or producers) who would allow a report to be published that calls a «liar» a person whom the publisher favors, not even if that person can be proven to have lied — he may be said to have «erred» maybe, but not «lied». The tendency, therefore, is that people in power may be described as «lacking in experience» or etc., but not described as a «liar».

Examples will be provided here of both types of fake news in the Washington Post, all of which examples exhibit the same intention to deceive readers in the same type of way on a particular broader subject. This broader subject that’s being deceptively presented is whether or not the U.S. should conquer foreign countries; or, in other words, whether or not America’s military-industrial complex (which thrives upon taxpayers’ enhanced appetites for financing and shedding blood for the nation’s conquests abroad) will be served. Service to that objective is otherwise called «neoconservatism» or neoconservative propaganda, which is the way that the Washington Post will be documented here to be. Understanding the motive for such fake news is far more complex; the only issue to be addressed here is the fake news itself — this particular agenda (neoconservatism) for the WP’s fake news:

First of all, here, will be the paradigmatic case of neoconservative propaganda: the deceptions that were perpetrated upon the American public in order to invade Iraq.

As has been pointed out by many books and by some bloggers, the Washington Post was, in 2002 and 2003, one of the leading deceivers of the American public into invading Iraq so as to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The fact that President George W. Bush lied to assert that he was in possession of conclusive evidence that Hussein was producing WMD in 2002 was, in at least one instance, incontestable practically at the very moment that he said it, but this crucial fact was never reported by the Washington Post, not even when the authoritative agency in the particular instance, the IAEA, made repeated attempts to draw the attention of America’s reporters to the lie.

During a press conference with Britain’s Tony Blair, Bush said, on 7 September 2002, that a «new report» had just come out of the IAEA that Iraq «were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need,» in order to invade and overthrow Saddam Hussein. The IAEA made clear that «There’s never been a report like that issued from this agency», but the WP (like the rest of America’s press) failed to report that the IAEA was accusing the U.S. President, of, essentially, concocting an IAEA ‘report’, on this vitally important matter, a ‘report’ that never existed — in other words, of outright lying in order to assert that the case to invade Iraq had already been made by the IAEA.

This instance wasn’t like all of the U.S. ‘intelligence failures’ in which the President’s own — i.e. U.S. — intelligence agencies, had refused to contradict him in public; this was instead an entirely independent intelligence agency that the President was citing as an authority here — and they were directly contradicting him, in public, about it. They just couldn’t get word out about that, to the American public. So, the idea that Bush wasn’t lying in order to ‘justify’ his invading Iraq, but was only relying upon America’s own faulty intelligence agencies regarding the matter, definitely does qualify as fake news in the WP, and it persists even today, as fake ‘history’ about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The invasion on 20 March 2003 wasn’t ‘an error’; it was a crime, and a very massive one.

This fake news that Bush had ‘erred’ to invade Iraq was of the indirect type because it entailed suppression of the crucial fact from being published; it wasn’t fake news because the WP published their own lies about it. However, such stenographic ‘reporting’ of the government’s lies is merely passing along a dictatorship’s propaganda, not publishing real news. Real news always requires a publisher’s own investigation and the skepticism that any real scientist has about any allegation. In matters so important as an invasion of a foreign country, ‘news’-reporting can’t get any worse than such stenography being palmed-off as ‘news’, and the persons to be blamed for this fraud against the public are never the mere employees (who might lose their jobs if they don’t comply) but the publisher himself or herself — ultimately the controlling stockholder in the firm, who wouldn’t invest in the given ‘news’-organization if it were to be fully honest.

More recently, the WP has published fake news about Syria’s Bashar al-Assad (who is a Ba’athist, like Saddam Hussein was), like it had published fake news about Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

On 2 April 2017, it was «‘The hospitals were slaughterhouses’: A journey into Syria’s secret torture wards».

On 15 May 2017, it was «Syria using crematorium to hide executions, State Department says».

On 16 May 2017, it was «‘I still have nightmares’: Voices from inside Assad’s torture network in Syria».

All were based upon PR-agency-shopped allegations and questionable evidence (like ‘Saddam’s WMD’ etc. had also been) from people who either were, or could have been, Al Qaeda affiliated, or else Islamic Brotherhood affiliated, extremist Islamists — supporters of Sharia law. And it all started with (and the WP’s ultimate sources were uncorroborated testifiers as having personally experienced what was shown in) «the Caesar photographs», from «the Syrian Detainee Report». As wikipedia puts it (my boldfaces):

The source, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, was at the time a photographer with the Syrian military police who worked secretly with a Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Movement. His job was «taking pictures of killed detainees» at just two military hospitals in Damascus.[5] He told war crimes investigators that he used to be a forensic investigator. But once the Syrian uprising began, his job became documenting the corpses of those killed in Syrian military prisons.[8] He did not claim to have witnessed executions or torture.

As the U.S. government’s Wilson Center explains about the Syrian National Movement:

The 2011 uprising

After Syrians launched their own uprising in March 2011, the [Muslim] Brotherhood took a leading role in assembling the exiled opposition in the Syrian National Council. It was launched in August 2011. The Brotherhood was the only organized and experienced movement among an otherwise deeply fragmented opposition. It also had support from Qatar and Turkey. But its domination over the opposition in exile was contested. The Brotherhood’s immediate challenge was competition from rival Islamists who secured influential positions on the Syrian National Coalition, the Council’s successor, which was established in November 2012.

The rival Islamists included the Coalition’s first president, Sheikh Mouaz al Khatib. Khatib, a former preacher at the historic Umayyad Mosque, had special legitimacy since he had just left Damascus. Another rival was Imad al din al Rashid, former vice-dean of the Faculty of Sharia of Damascus. His Syrian National Movement, an alliance of secularists, moderate Islamists and Salafis [«Salafis» means extreme fundamentalist Muslims], failed to recruit significant following.

Both Qatar and Turkey are run by fundamentalist («Sharia») Sunni Muslims who want to conquer the Shia Muslims who lead the fundamentalist Shia regime in Iran and the non-sectarian secular regime in Syria. These Sunnis want also a (U.S.-supported) gas pipeline to be built through Syria to transport Qatar’s gas into the EU to grab market-share away from Russia, which is the main country that America’s aristocracy wants to weaken and ultimately to conquer.

Saddam Hussein had been supported by America’s aristocracy when Saddam was trying to conquer Shiite Iran back in the 1980s, but became opposed by the U.S. aristocracy as soon as he turned against and invaded fundamentalist Sunni Kuwait and became friendly toward secular Russia, which since 1979 has been plagued by (U.S.-Saudi-backed) «mujahideen» (who became called «Taliban» and some of whom then became «Al Qaeda») and other fundamentalist Sunnis in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere, who want a Sharia-law-ruled Russia. The Obama regime in America came into office in 2009 determined to overthrow Syria’s secular leader Bashar al-Assad; and, starting in 2010, actively pursued organizing rebels against Syria’s secular government. On 24 September 2010, Jared Cohen of Hillary Clinton’s State Department was working to find a way to stir demonstrations to bring down Assad’s government; and, on 23 June 2011, he was meeting inside the London Ecuadorean Embassy with Google’s Eric Schmidt to pry out of Julian Assange information about how to do this; and, on 25 July 2012, Cohen was (now as a high Google executive paid by top Hillary backer Schmidt) telling Hillary’s other aides about Cohen’s own progress in putting the Syrian overthrow-plan into effect. Google also assisted the 1 March 2013 start of Hillary’s plan for the February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which used nazis to bring down Ukraine’s government, just as they used jihadists to bring down Syria’s government — extremists in both cases.

With ‘allies’ such as Saudi Arabia’s despots, and such as the apartheid Israeli ‘democracy’ (which latter is so theocratic it doesn’t even have any constitution), the U.S. government is no ‘democracy’, despite its Constitution (which the U.S. government routinely violates). But whereas the Washington Post calls Russian Television ‘fake news’, Russian Television presents news about those regimes and their allies, while the WP presents lies about RT, and about Russia, and about any ally of Russia (such as Saddam Hussein was, and Bashar al-Assad is). If this sounds like a lopsided characterization, it’s nonetheless stated because the associated reality is also lopsided. That’s the reality which should be reported but is instead blacked-out in America’s press

Of course, one of those Russian allies is Syria, whose government the U.S. government therefore is at war against, and has invaded, while pontificating that the world’s most ‘aggressive’ country is Russia, and while claiming to be the moral authority that can dictate morality to the ‘barbarous’ Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.

On 16 December 2016, Human Rights Watch published «If the Dead Could Speak: Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria’s Detention Facilities», claiming to confirm the «Caesar» photos. Then, on 7 February 2017, Amnesty International published «Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Exterminations at Saydnaya Prison, Syria», further ‘confirming’ the alleged depravity of Assad’s government. Yet a third ‘authority’ that was additionally cited in the three articles in the Washington Post that were here referred to as having alleged that Assad was doing these types of things to innocent people during the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-Turkey-UAE-Kuwait war to conquer his country, was the Syrian Network for Human Rights. How reliable, then, are these three alleged ‘authorities’ on that subject?

Wikipedia’s section «Criticism of Human Rights Watch» has a subsection «Allegations of Bias», which states, among other things:

Ideological and selection bias[edit]

HRW has been accused of evidence-gathering bias because it is said to be «credulous of civilian witnesses in places like Gaza and Afghanistan» but «skeptical of anyone in a uniform».[1] Its founder, Robert Bernstein, accused the organization of poor research methods and relying on «witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers».[2] In October 2009, Bernstein said that the organization had lost critical perspective on events in the Middle East:[2] «[T]he region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region».[2] HRW responded by saying that HRW «does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world».[3] Tom Porteus, director of the HRW’s London branch, replied that the organization rejected Bernstein’s «obvious double standard. Any credible human rights organization must apply the same human rights standards to all countries».[4]

According to The Times, HRW «does not always practice the transparency, tolerance and accountability it urges on others».[1] …

Fundraising[edit]

On September 7, 2010, it was announced that George Soros planned to donate $100 million to Human Rights Watch.[69] Soros’ donation was criticized by Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor.[70]

Journalists have criticized Human Rights Watch for requesting, encouraging or accepting financial donations in Saudi Arabia and for its fundraising methods.

Moreover, the PR department of New York’s Syracuse University headlined on 17 December 2016, «HRW Validates Caesar Report on Syrian Torture, First Reported by Law Professor David Crane» and reported regarding the HRW study, which was co-authored by Professor Crane:

Commissioned by London law firm Carter-Ruck on behalf of Qatar, the Caesar Report’s other co-authors were international prosecutors Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva QC and Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. This team — which also included forensics experts — analyzed 835 images, 150 of those in depth, uncovering evidence of starvation, beatings and strangulation, as well as an obsessive documentation of the killings. The lawyers also cross-examined Caesar and found him to be «a truthful and credible witness,» according to Crane.

Qatar had commissioned anti-Assad PR from HRW, and got what they had paid for, in their «Caesar Report».

Regarding Amnesty International’s report, which was issued on 7 February 2017, the invariably cogent «Moon of Alabama» blogger headlined and documented appropriately about it the same day, «Hearsay Extrapolated — Amnesty Claims Mass Executions In Syria, Provides Zero Proof», but one could also say that it provided zero evidence (but lots of allegations). Three days later, the also credible Tony Cartalucci bannered «US Cooks Up New Syrian Atrocities Amid Syrian Talks». Then, yet another day later, on February 11th, the brilliant Rick Sterling headlined «Amnesty International Stokes Syrian War» and he utterly destroyed the AI study’s credibility. Among many other things, he tracked the AI study’s funding and backing back to Soros and other rabid haters of Russians. Finally, on February 25th, Paul Mansfield bannered «Amnesty fake report ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ invents Assad war crimes to undermine Syria peace talks».

As regards the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), it (and other U.S.-arsistocracy-backed fronts) was discussed by Helena Glass, on 8 February 2017, headlining «Amnesty International – A Propaganda Machine»:

Like the Syrian Observatory of [for] Human Rights, the SNHR is a one man show. One man who lives in the UK, who has no background, and who adamantly and openly hates Assad. Neither of these ‘organizations’ list their funding although it is widely believed to come from the UK’s GCHQ.

BOTH organizations claim to have ‘a network of spies on the ground in Syria with whom they converse daily for information’. Like SOHR, Fadel Abdulghani, the Director of Syrian Network of Human Rights, lists absolutely no previous background or history on social media sites. He never existed prior to becoming an expert…and Chairperson of his one man show…

But it gets worse: Fadel Abdulghani is aligned with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which the US and Australia consider an alias of MEK. MEK, headed by Maryam Rajavi was considered a terrorist organization by the US as of 2003 and was delisted in 2012.

It gets worse: The delisting of MEK as a terrorist organization was made by then Secretary of State – Hillary Clinton!

Uh-oh.

Thus it would appear that one of Amnesty International’s prime source[s] for their claim that Assad tortured and murdered 13,000 comes from one man who is affiliated with a former terrorist organization who has no background or previous experience and who would seem to have been ‘created’ from thin air…and possibly funded by GCHQ! Wow!

Apparently, Maryam Rajavi openly declares that she is the leading advocate and voice to ‘violently over-throw the government of Iran’.

The international war to overthrow Assad is barbaric, and nothing that is said in the present article is necessarily rejecting the possibility that some of the gruesome things that have been alleged about Assad’s handling of his side of that international invasion against Syria’s government might be true. But that’s not the topic here, anyway; the topic is instead the question as to whether the Washington Post has fake news. It certainly does — and lots of it, including also, for example, that ‘news’paper’s continuing not to report that the coup that occurred in Ukraine in February 2014 was a coup by the U.S., and no grass-roots democratic revolution, such as the U.S. regime (and its propaganda-organs) claim it to have been. That ‘news’paper’s subscribers are buying propaganda.

Reality and its enemies

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By Lawrence Davidson

Source: Intrepid Report

There is an ongoing reality that is destroying hundreds of thousands of lives in the Middle East. And though most Americans are ignorant of the fact, and many of those who should be in the know would deny it, the suffering flows directly from decisions taken by Washington over the last 27 years.

Some of the facts of the matter have just been presented by the first Global Conflict Medicine Congress held at the American University of Beirut (AUB) earlier this month (11–14 May 2017). It has drawn attention to two dire consequences of the war policies Americans have carried on in the region: cancer-causing munition material and drug-resistant bacteria.

● Cancer-causing munition material: Materials such as tungsten and mercury are found in the casing of penetrating bombs used in the first and second Gulf wars. These have had long-term effects on survivors, especially those who have been wounded by these munitions. Iraqi-trained and Harvard-educated Dr. Omar Dewachi, a medical anthropologist at AUB fears that “the base line of cancers [appearing in those exposed to these materials] has become very aggressive. . . . When a young woman of 30, with no family history of cancer, has two different primary cancers—in the breast and in the oesophagus—you have to ask what is happening.” To this can be added that doctors are now “overwhelmed by the sheer number of [war] wounded patients in the Middle East.”

● Drug-resistant bacteria: According to Glasgow-trained Professor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at AUB Medical Center, drug resistance was not a problem during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988. However, after the fiasco of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, things began to change. In the period after 1990, Iraq suffered under a vicious sanctions regime imposed by the United Nations at U.S. insistence. During the next 12 years “Iraqis were allowed to use only three antibiotics” and bacterial resistance quickly evolved.

Those resistant bacteria spread throughout the region, particularly after the American invasion of the country in 2003. Today, according to a Medecins Sans Frontieres analysis, “multidrug resistant [MDR] bacteria now accounts for most war wound infections across the Middle East, yet most medical facilities in the region do not even have the laboratory capacity to diagnose MDR, leading to significant delays and clinical mismanagement of festering wounds.”

Insofar as these developments go, it is not that there aren’t contributing factors stemming from local causes such as factual fighting. However, the major triggers for these horrors were set in motion in Washington. As far as I know, no American holding a senior official post has ever accepted any responsibility for this ongoing suffering.

Hiding reality

As the cancers and untreatable infections grow in number in the Middle East, there is here in the United States a distressing effort to rehabilitate George W. Bush—the American president whose decisions and policies contributed mightily to this ongoing disaster. It is this Bush who launched the unjustified 2003 invasion of Iraq and thereby—to use the words of the Arab League—“opened the gates of hell.” His rehabilitation effort began in earnest in April 2013, and coincided with the opening of his presidential library.

In an interview given at that time, Bush set the stage for his second coming with an act of self-exoneration. He said he remained “comfortable with the decision making process” that led to the invasion of Iraq—the one that saw him fudging the intelligence when it did not tell him what he wanted to hear—and so also “comfortable” with the ultimate determination to launch the invasion. “There’s no need to defend myself. I did what I did and ultimately history will judge.”

The frivolous assertion that “history will judge” is often used by people of suspect character. “History” stands for a vague future time. Its alleged inevitable coming allows the protagonist to fantasize about achieving personal glory unchallenged by present, usually significant, ethical concerns.

Those seeking George W. Bush’s rehabilitation now like to contrast him to Donald Trump. One imagines they thereby hope to present him as a “moderate” Republican. They claim that Bush was and is really a very smart and analytical fellow rather than the simpleton most of us suspect him to be. In other words, despite launching an unnecessary and subsequently catastrophic war, he was never as ignorant and dangerous as Trump. He and his supporters also depict him as a great defender of a free press, again in contrast to Donald Trump. However, when he was president, Bush described the media as an aider and abettor of the nation’s enemies. This certainly can be read as a position that parallels Trump’s description of the media as the “enemy of the American people.”

But all of this is part of a public relations campaign and speaks to the power of reputation remodeling—the creation of a facade that hides reality. In order to do this you have to “control the evidence”—in this case by ignoring it. In this endeavor George W. Bush and his boosters have the cooperation of much of the mainstream media.

No sweat here: the press has done this before. Except for the odd editorial the mainstream media also contributed to Richard Nixon’s rehabilitation back in the mid-1980s. These sorts of sleights-of-hand are only possible against the background of pervasive public ignorance.

Closed information environments

Local happenings are open to relatively close investigation. We usually have a more or less accurate understanding of the local context in which events play out, and this allows for the possibility of making a critical judgment. As we move further away, both in space and time, information becomes less reliable, if for no other reason than it comes to us through the auspices of others who may or may not know what they are talking about.

As a society, we have little or no knowledge of the context for foreign events, and thus it is easy for those reporting on them to apply filters according to any number of criteria. What we are left with is news that is customized—stories designed to fit pre-existing political or ideological biases. In this way millions upon millions of minds are restricted to closed information environments on subjects which often touch on, among other important topics, war and its consequences.

So what is likely to be more influential with the locally oriented American public: George W. Bush’s rehabilitated image reported on repeatedly in the nation’s mainstream media, or the foreign-based, horror-strewn consequences of his deeds reported upon infrequently?

This dilemma is not uniquely American, nor is it original to our time. However, its dangerous consequences are a very good argument against the ubiquitous ignorance that allows political criminals to be rehabilitated even as their crimes condemn others to continuing suffering. If reputation remodelers can do this for George W. Bush, then there is little doubt that someday it will be done for Donald Trump. Life, so full of suffering, is also full of such absurdities.

 

Dr. Davidson has done extensive research and published in the areas of American perceptions of the Middle East, and Islamic Fundamentalism. His two latest publications are “Islamic Fundamentalism” (Greenwood Press, 1998) and “America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood” (University Press of Florida, 2001). He has published thirteen articles on various aspects of American perceptions of the Middle East. Dr. Davidson holds a BA from Rutgers, an MA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Alberta.

Manufactured Reality: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

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(Editor’s note: though this article was originally published in 2008 it remains sadly relevant. We’ve appended it with a more recent video from Truthstream Media which needs to be seen and shared.)

Source: Global Research

In order to force a new reality upon any targeted populace, the masters of the universe follow a simple strategy – they immediately make things twice as bad as they intend to keep them, only to take one step back after a short while, so that the new manufactured reality will be easier to accept.  This strategy holds constant from the manipulation of oil prices to the military strategy to rule the world by force.

In the terror war, nuclear terrorism has become the weapon of both first choice and last resort for American war planners.  It was more important to create the impression that nuclear war was imminent than it was to convince the world that we intended to use nuclear weapons as our ace in the hole.  The world had to be terrorized into believing that our insane cowboy president was about to unleash nuclear war upon the world, so that it could be held over the people’s heads.  The world had to be shocked and awed by American military supremacy into submitting to Bush’s demands.

America took two giant steps forward militarily, intending in the end to take one step back from the precipice of actual global thermonuclear war, to a more limited approach that only called for a limited use of “tactical” nukes.  A two-track approach to the war was undertaken; one path leading to immediate global nuclear war and another “democratic” approach, which put-off the use of nuclear weapons until some future action, in order to create unlimited opportunities for subversion where America’s full military might could be brought to bear upon more specific targets.  (Have they already been used?)  http://webwarper.net/ww/~av/www.redress.cc/global/dhalpin20080517

The threat that full-scale nuclear war in the center of the world’s primary energy basket was imminent created a global atmosphere of mortal fear and dread, while covert limited wars were simultaneously pursued.  This was intended to cow both the American people and the people in the targeted countries into submission to presidential dictates. The threat of general nuclear war was used to intimidate the targeted governments into “playing nice” diplomatically, while America interfered in their national affairs, introducing its revolutionary “democratic” form of politics, which included backing extremist groups.

Fear of US nuclear forces provided cover to American agitation in the Middle East region along the lines of “Operation Gladio,” which was used against our own allies in Europe.   In both operations, sympathetic right-wing leaders were found who could be bought, to be groomed by the CIA, to cultivate and organize local opposition groups.  From these agitated groups more violent radicals were found and hired to stage terrorist (“false flag”) attacks upon civilians and the governments, to be blamed upon their local opposition, which were usually actual patriot groups.

The second leg of the neoconservative war doctrine is the spreading of subversion under the cover of implanting democracy by force, and its companion, the spreading of force through democratic means.  Divisive political campaigns in targeted nations (including staged attacks by extremists) were engineered, to split the tribal societies into heavily-armed polarized factions waiting for retribution.

We have this apt description of this divisive American strategy from former Pakistani  ISI agent, turned human rights activist, Khalid Khawaja:

“Many of us call it a battle between East and West, between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian world, but it is neither of these. It is in fact the ruling regimes that want to dictate their will…

Ninety percent of people accept to be ruled, but there always remain some elements who refuse to succumb. They fight for freedom and resist till their last. However, in this conflict of two minorities – those who impose their will and those who resist it – the majority remains the sole victim. Yet people talk about Islam versus Christianity or Judaism. The basic theme remains the same. There is a group of people who want to impose their will, whether they happen to be Christian or Muslim, and there is a group of people who want to resist, and there is a silent majority which is trampled in between.”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GF22Df04.html

Mr. Khawaja continues to delve into the under-discussed cause of the whole war on terror:

“In Afghanistan’s case, a similar game was carried out on a massive scale when Muslim youths from all over the world were brought in by Pakistan and the US [to fight against the Soviets in the 1980s]. They were tools for the empires’ proxy war. The name of jihad was used…it is a question of a state imposing its will. The message is clear: if you are against us, we will kill you and your sympathizers. In this state terrorism, there is no exception, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Pakistan, India, the US or Israel. All are the same.

When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets crushed. When two elephants make love, it is again the grass that gets crushed. Whether states fight with each other or make friendships, it is only the tools who became victims.”

The same deception has been practiced in both Iraq and Afghanistan, to prolong both of those wars until the doctrine could be spread beyond them.  Both countries had been targeted for regime change, but nonetheless, even after the first regime was replaced, the doctrine of creating surrogate militias to promote democratic revolution was still developed in each one, targeting the new regimes.  In each country violent extremist groups, usually identified as “al Qaida related,” were put on the American payroll to fight against US troops and US installed governments.  The hiring and training of these “militia” mercenary groups falls within the recognized definition of treason, “levying war against [the United States].”

That destabilizing doctrine is now being exported into Iran from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where beachheads have been established for a planned assault upon the entire neighborhood. These training centers are terrorist camps, plain and simple.  These are the American trained terrorists who will carry the limited warfare scenario into Iran under cover of the greater threat of nuclear terrorism.  The United States of America is the world’s number one supporter and exporter of terrorism; it always has been.

In order to carry out the Israeli-centric PNAC (Project for a New American Century) terror war plan that they have committed to, Bush and Cheney have doggedly undermined America’s national interests at home and all over the world.  America’s national interest has always been based on advancing liberty and human rights to the whole world, but now, under the neocon plan, these are rights that must be earned.  Bush was sent unto the world to turn reality upon its head.

On a rotating basis, America and Israel took turns slinging threats of nuclear annihilation and libelous invective at Iran and Syria, hyping the threats to intensify the notion that a nuclear attack was becoming imminent.  As Israel and America ramp-up the war-mongering against Iran and Syria, Israel sings out the threats first, then America will provide the chorus and hopefully the highly desired “money shot” afterwards.

As a final machination, to seal America and Israel’s position, the neocon doctrine unlocked the prohibition of the offensive use of nuclear weapons, even in civilian areas.  It is this new free use of nuclear weapon doctrine that is the icing on the cake for those who are plotting to seize the world under the threat of American nuclear terrorism.  Because it is now possible, it is easy to convince us all that our cowboy administration of religious zealots is about to commit an insane act, i.e., unleashing nuclear war to eliminate the possibility of a nuclear war.

Patriotic anti-government voices in this country and in the targeted countries, helped to create a strong public perception that nuclear war was imminent.  Antiwar voices of protest like mine sound a warning to alert the people to the crimes being planned that must be heard, but in so doing, we play into the government scheme by helping to hype the threat.  It is both necessary and natural that patriots arise to defend their nations in the face of American invasion or aggression.  We play a vital role in the planned drama, as it unfolds.  We have convinced the world that Bush and Cheney were insane enough to radiate the Middle Eastern oil fields, in order to steal the world’s oil.  We now may have to convince the world that the crazies themselves are the source of most of the terrorism which we fight.

It is pretty obvious that they really are that insane, but it should be even more obvious that their greedy masters don’t want their world destroyed, they only want to control it.  Why should they actually nuke Iran, if they can persuade the locals to overthrow the regime for us, causing less collateral damage (it would be difficult to operate the Middle East oil facilities, if they were all radioactive).  We have to convince the American people that Bush even though the little dictator is both stupid and insane, the real deciders are neither of those things.  It is their wills which will prevail, meaning that there are other less final, less costly ways to takeover the oil reserves and the pipeline routes.

We have to concentrate on stopping the secret war, without being blinded by the glare of nuclear terrorism.  Exposure of American sponsorship of world terrorism (some of the very “terrorism” we are fighting) must become our top priority.  Legal actions must be taken to stop the illegal support of terrorism upon civilians by our government.  Further legal actions must be taken to separate American foreign policy from Israel, in order to bring the terror war to an end.

Israel has been the primary source for most of the “intelligence” that launched the war on Iraq, the Iranian reactors and hypothetical nuclear weapons, as well as the alleged Syrian reactors.  America turned Israel’s evidence into grounds for waging war, even nuclear war.  They are behind the new push to find other Syrian nuclear facilities as well as the alleged Iranian warhead blueprint.

Israel is behind every military move against Iran that is being brought-up in the press.  It was the first to suggest taking out Iranian reactors, the first to recommend a naval blockade of Iran and an embargo on air flights between Iran and Syria and Lebanon.  American Zionist Congressional leaders gladly took up the torches lit by Israel, to create Israeli security at America’s expense.  A Congressional resolution is awaiting passage in the Senate, which demands that our government carry-out these acts of war, both the naval blockade and the air embargo, House Resolution 1194.

The American people must rise-up in outrage to the terrorists who rule over us and stop the planned escalation, as a first step to de-escalating the war.  It is time for us to take our own two steps forward, to force the aggressors to take one step back and begin to tear-down their manufactured reality.

 

Contact author: peter.chamberlin@yahoo.com

Related Video:

Comey’s Quixotic Quest to Prove Russian Involvement in Elections

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey may be physically imposing at 6 feet, 8 inches tall. However, when it comes to his oratorical skills, or, in his case, the lack thereof, Comey is nothing more than a «snake oil» salesman trying to market fanciful conspiracies masked as fact. Trying to emulate one of his predecessors, J. Edgar Hoover, Comey said that when it comes to protecting the democratic process, Russia is «the greatest threat to any nation on earth, given their intention and their ability». Comey’s rhetoric is right out of the pages of the Cold War and Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist «witch hunts». Comey engaged in McCarthyite tactics by referring to WikiLeaks as «a conduit for the Russian intelligence services».

It is hard to tell whether President Trump agrees with Mr. Comey. Trump has indicated that it is within his power to fire Comey, but has given no further indication as to whether the FBI director will serve out the traditional ten-year term. There is one thing for certain. Comey may not want to appear as a right-wing, Cold War-mentality neoconservative, but his professional and personal history indicates that when it comes to Russia-bashing, it is in his blood. Comey supported and donated to the presidential campaigns of the psychotically anti-Russian John McCain, as well as the neocons’ darling Mitt Romney.

After leaving the Justice Department in 2005, Comey became General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s largest contractor. When it comes to war-making, Lockheed Martin has profited handsomely from ensuring that military tension remains a hair-trigger from war from the Baltic region and the Balkans to the Korean peninsula and the Middle East. Feeding the «war-porn» addicts in the U.S. Congress, including the likes of Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, improves the bottom line of Lockheed Martin, a firm in which Mr. Comey likely still has a significant personal financial stake.

Comey and his neocon friends have decided that the best way to challenge the anti-globalist populist wave that is sweeping the world is to deploy a wide brush and paint every sovereigntist political campaign and leader – both left and right – as Russian «tools» and Kremlin «agents». It worked for Hoover during the Cold War when he decided that the best way to avert the attention of the American public away from his friends in organized crime and his own well-known homosexuality was to claim that «Communists» had infiltrated every sector of American society. In his attempt to fill Mr. Hoover’s high-heeled shoes, Comey accuses Russia of being the greatest threat to free elections on earth.

One only need examine the record of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since its creation in 1947 to find out that it has been the United States that has been the greatest threat to free and fair elections around the globe. When it comes to election interference, no country – Russia, China, the former Soviet Union, apartheid South Africa, or North Korea – holds a candle to the boys at Langley. In 1948, a CIA full-court press of bribes, threats, and infiltration ensured the defeat of the Communist Party by the U.S.-supported Christian Democrats in the Italian general election. This same template was used again and again by Washington in countries ranging from Chile and Nicaragua to Australia and Russia.

Now, the CIA, headed by the neo-Cold Warrior and right-wing religious extremist Mike Pompeo, and its allies, are trying to turn the tables in suggesting that Russia has been able to almost singlehandedly affect the U.S. presidential campaign, the «yes» vote in the European Union Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, the French presidential election, and the «no» vote in the Italian constitutional reform referendum. There is a major problem with this thinking. If Russia were as powerful as claimed by the Comey, Pompeo, and others, Austrian nationalist Norbert Hofer, not the anti-Russian emigré from Estonia, Alexander Van der Bellen, would have won the Austrian presidential election. And it would have been the Dutch Freedom Party nationalist Geert Wilders, not the globalist Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who would have been the victor in the Netherlands election.

If Russia’s intentions were as malignant as claimed by the neocons and the Cold Warriors, a dubious Russian-backed coup operation in Montenegro would have been successful and not a failure. When it comes to coup-making and putsches, it is Langley that excels, especially with its own unlimited funds, coupled with those of international hedge fund tycoon George Soros, at its disposal. It is American fingerprints that have been found in successful and aborted «color revolutions» in Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Macedonia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Armenia, and the Srpska Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was joint CIA-Soros funds that gave rise to the bloody «Arab Spring» uprisings in Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. The Arab Spring template has been moved by the globalist power centers to create havoc in socialist Venezuela, with their eyes soon to be set on Bolivia.

The strategy of the globalists and their puppets, such as Comey, Lindsey Graham, and others, is to demonize as «Russian agents» those who pose a threat to the «world order» fashioned by the CIA, Wall Street, and the Pentagon. Therefore, leftist anti-globalists like British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, French leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and U.S. Independent Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders are given the same McCarthyite «Russian agent» labels, as have Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Alternative for Germany leader Frauke Petry.

Globalist politicians – left and right – now routinely engage in claims of Russia involvement in their nations’ political processes to mask their own ineffective leadership. In January of this year, Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said he could not rule out «Russian interference» in Sweden’s 2018 general election. There is little doubt that if Löfven loses, he will blame it all on «the Russians».

The New York Times suggested that Russia was financially backing Mr. Wilders in the Netherlands election but the paper paid scant attention to the fact that Israel is the Dutch opposition leader’s biggest financial «sugar daddy». It is amazing that the tools of the globalists, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, did not claim that Russia interfered in the February 5, 2017 general election in the Principality of Liechtenstein, because an anti-EU and anti-migrant party, «Die Unabhängigen», («The Independents»), came in third, beating a traditional third party.

Mr. Comey testified about intelligence proof he has confirming Russian interference in the U.S. election. Let’s examine the history of U.S. intelligence «proof». It includes intelligence reports from a phony Iraqi defector named «Curveball» that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, fake signals intelligence intercepts on a non-existent North Vietnamese naval attack on the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy in 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, phony intelligence reports on Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi committing mass executions of Libyans in 2011, fake reports on Iranian nuclear weapons development after it ended its weapons program in 2003, and, more recently, a dubious intelligence dossier from a mid-level former British MI-6 employee who successfully shopped «dirt» to the Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton campaigns on Trump and «golden shower» parties in Moscow. The dossier, embraced by Comey, is said to «prove» Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. British «dossiers» on just about everything, from the Number 10 «dodgy dossier» on Saddam Hussein’s weapons to the «dirty dossier» on Trump, are about as credible as everything else in the British tabloids. Comey should read Harry Potter books, not FBI and CIA intelligence reports, if he wants to wallow in fiction.

Hastening the Downfall of the Neocons

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By L’Ordre

Source: Dissident Voice

Neocons, whose name fits almost every mainstream politician and commentator, say America is destined to rule the world through violence, intimidation and the belief in its own moral superiority. Unfortunately, despite losing wars, their variant of fascism evades condemnation and trial thus far.

It is saddening to see politicians responsible for maintaining our catastrophic, failed foreign policies in the United States and the United Kingdom continue to evade justice since their illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Such neocons, including Tony Blair in Britain, have even been taken back from the sewer and polished by the press for us, almost as if they had not committed war crimes and bathed in the blood of innocent people.

For the press to present Tony Blair’s face to us, let alone allow him to assert his judgments and advise us, after he lied to us all and bloodied his hands with the children of Iraq, is an assault on human intelligence and dignity. For any journalist to present George W. Bush in a fond way because he isn’t Donald Trump is a disgusting attack on the memory of the women he massacred and the welfare of the children he orphaned.

A madness driven by the bizarre US Presidential Election of 2016 has overtaken much of the political left, who are realigning themselves to be primarily anti-Donald Trump and generally favorable towards anyone else. This has driven them into openly siding with Hillary Clinton and even George Soros, proclaiming that the CIA, the billionaire world elite and the reactionary warmongers of 2003 are now heroes of progressivism because of their opposition to Donald Trump.

What the strange theater of the Election has succeeded in doing was to twist minds and fragment the political left, not only in the United States but across the West. Many on the so-called center left are convinced the only thing to do with left wing activism over the next decade is to oppose Donald Trump, and that means they want to even support nationalist, neoliberal and neoconservative authority figures and even deep state thugs who might want to assassinate and overthrow the foolish President.

In truth, what Donald Trump represents is the same for the world as Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Anyone freshly aligned against Donald Trump and the “alt right”, who now looks back in adoration at the murderers Barack Obama and George W. Bush, has been deceived and led on like a donkey. These war criminals are all identical, as far as world human welfare is concerned. They have no goal other than to position the United States as the moral chieftain over humanity, held up by the chauvinists on one side and the cowards terrified of America’s military strength on the other. According to one approach, people in either category must be named and shamed endlessly until their evil views are exposed and met with as much revulsion as Nazism.

The troubling reality, something few American readers are likely to accept here, is that the United States cannot be fixed. The same can be declared about the Western political system in its entirety, meaning all the other supposedly “exceptional” countries bragging at the top of all the lists of free and democratic states.

When modern democratic republics were new, their purity was thwarted by acts of betrayal. We were told the values of the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the transition away from absolute monarchy in Britain had prevailed. In fact, such attempts to form true republics were all corrupted, sabotaged and kept from completion by reactionaries within years of taking place, and only the ideals remained alive in desperate hearts. What was intended in the French Revolution, in taking the ax to the root of power, was kept from completion by the Thermidorian Reaction. In the centuries following such betrayals, we inherited this parody we see, a hollow shape of splendor cut from the vilest corruption, lies and moral sewage. This shape is what people are today mistaking for “democracy”, while it is used as an excuse to wage crusades and massacre other nations when we are told they are inferior.

One might strike back against the arguments made here by accusing me of being too forceful in deciding what is best for Americans without being one of them, but not one shred of any argument here is concerned with the future of the American people. The American people have shown too little regard for anyone else in their short but violent history to be the concern of the rest of the world. The only thing that should matter to us is neutering this destructive regime and ending the unprecedented evil it now embodies. As the only country to have used nuclear weapons, no crime is too great for Americans to commit. No injury to America’s interests could mean anything other than saving civilians from the regime’s endless war of terror.

What happens in the United States is not the concern of Americans foremost, but the concern of others. The US has committed global crimes and invaded the lives of everybody in the world, leaving the entire world with a supreme responsibility to stop the destructive aggressor. The fate of the United States must be decided by non-Americans first and by Americans second, because it has imposed itself so egregiously on the rest of the world. If the rest of humanity were to choose that this destructive regime should be destroyed, no attempt by Americans to appeal against justice can be allowed.

Mass murder will be the hobby of every Western government until there is a punishment for the neocon mentality. Since the neocons are invaders, they should be punished according to whatever laws exist in the land they helped invade. Neocons should be subjected to native justice, because to use our Western laws in punishing those of us who invaded oppressed nations would only be another arrogant policy against the oppressed.

The future contains great peril for the neocons. America’s behavior has proven it will never voluntarily give up its criminal designs, and will have to be physically defeated or rendered much weaker before it can be brought to justice. Until that day arrives, everything that immobilizes the American political system, confounds their deranged politics further, or leaves America vulnerable to foreign threats will be part of the regime’s collapse. For those who doubt this collapse, see the history of prior empires, and be aware that surviving longer only increases the horror and violence to descend on them in the end. It means less suffering to collapse now than later