The release of the "Grassley Memo" earlier this week should have made headlines, but it didn't. In addition to confirming key details from the earlier Nunes Memo on FISA abuses, the Grassley memo contained even more details on the incredible manipulation of the 2016 US presidential election. Perhaps the media is ignoring the memo because the manipulation it demonstrates is not the manipulation they want to report. There is no evidence of Russian meddling in the memo. Instead, it looks more and more like British intelligence colluded with the Clinton campaign and key elements in the US intelligence community in an attempt to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. Think the Brits would never do such a thing? Think again. Former CIA officer Phil Giraldi joins today's Liberty Report to break down this new information... read on...
The so-called Nunes memo prepared for the Republican majority on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, even if overblown, clearly suggests that there might have been an unwarranted and quite possibly illegal Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance of a former Trump staffer over his completely legal Russian business ties. read on...
Last night the illegal US occupation force in north-east Syria attacked a group of Syrian government aligned troops and their Russian support. The incident happened north-east of Deir Ezzor city on the east side of the Euphrates. The US claims that it killed some 100 Syrian soldiers that were allegedly attacking its proxy forces in an attempt to recover oil fields.
There is a factual separation of areas south-west of the Euphrates under Syrian government control and north-east of the Euphrates under US occupation. But several locations around Manbij, Raqqa and Deir Ezzor contradict that and are under control of the respective other side. The US claims that a "de-confliction line" along the Euphrates is agreed upon. The Syrian government says that no such agreement exists.
An small area across the Euphrates north-east of Deir Ezzor had been taken by Syrian government forces months ago. It is near some oilfields which the US wants to keep away from the Syrian government.
"The US wants to keep Syria weak and poor," says Prof. Joshua Landis. According to Landis the US is keeping the north-east of Syria under occupation to deny Syria access to its oil and its best agricultural land. It wants to turn Syria into a swamp for Russia and Iran to the benefit of mostly Israel. read on...
What's the connection between the Clinton Global Initiative and the NGOs who continue pushing for a "humanitarian" war on Syria? What's the truth behind new claims of Assad's chemical attacks? What about the "White Helmets"? Are they selfless heroes or al-Qaeda PR agents? Veteran journalist Vanessa Beeley joins today's Liberty Report to break down the latest round of war propaganda... read on...
Countering Russia has become a lucrative industry in Washington. In recent years, the think tank business has exploded. But who funds these organizations, who works for them and what are the real agendas at play?
From the start, let’s be clear, the term "think tank" essentially amounts to a more polite way of saying "lobby group." Bar a few exceptions, they exist to serve – and promote – the agendas of their funders.
However, particularly in the United States, the field has become increasingly shady and disingenuous, with lobbyists being given faux academic titles like "Senior Non-Resident Fellow" and "Junior Adjunct Fellow" and the like. And this smokescreen usually serves to cloud the real goals of these operations.
Think tanks actually originate from the Europe of the Dark Ages. That's 9th-century France, to be precise. But the modern American movement is modeled on British organizations from around a millennium later, many of which, such as "RUSI (1831)," still exist today. The concept was possibly brought to America by the Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie. And his "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace" (1910) is still going strong.
Yet, the real boom in the "think tank" industry came with the era of globalization. With a 200-percent rise in numbers since 1970. And in recent years, they’ve become more transnational, with foreign states and individuals sponsoring them in order to gain curry favor in Washington. read on...
Responses to the recently-released House Intelligence Committee memo are framed by the mainstream media according to whether viewers are on "Team Democrat" or "Team Republican." You are supposed to think either that Rep. Nunes is a hero or that the Republicans are trying to destroy everything that is holy and good about the FBI and intelligence community. But what about those of us on "Team Liberty"? We look at the FISA memo and see another in a long line of abuses of our liberties by the National Security State. Author and journalist Jim Bovard joins today's Liberty Report to give us the real historical context for recent revelations... read on...
Tehran has begun highlighting in loud decibel its hitherto-low key voice of disquiet that the United States is transferring the Islamic State* fighters from Syria and Iraq, where they have been defeated, to Afghanistan.
On January 30, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said: "The US goal of transferring the ISIL terrorists to Afghanistan is aimed at creating the justification for its continued deployment in the region and for buttressing the security of the Zionist regime." Indeed, any statement at the level of the Supreme Leader invariably draws attention as signaling an authoritative policy directive based on careful decision taken in the light of relevant intelligence inputs.
The point is, three days before Khamenei spoke, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) had an encounter with ISIS terrorists infiltrating Iran’s western province of Kermanshah from Iraq. By all accounts, it was a major encounter in which three IRGC personnel were killed, including an officer of the rank of major. According to the commander of the IRGC’s ground forces, Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, as many as sixteen ISIS terrorists were captured. Incidents of this nature are happening with increasing frequency along Iran’s borders and Iranian security agencies are busting large caches of explosives and arms smuggled across the border, but this is the first time such a big encounter took place.
Significantly, the senior foreign policy advisor to the parliament speaker, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, who is an influential voice in the Iranian diplomatic circuit, raised the issue of the US’ covert transfer of ISIS fighters to “northern Afghanistan” at a meeting with Jan Kubis, chairman of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq on January 28. read on...
Americans like to think of their country as different from those run by military regimes. They are only fooling themselves. Ever since the federal government was converted into a national-security state after World War II (without a constitutional amendment authorizing the conversion), it has been the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that have run the government, just like in countries governed by military dictatorships.
Oh sure, the façade is maintained — the façade that is ingrained in all of us in civics or government classes in high school and college: that the federal government is composed of three co-equal, independent branches that are in charge of the government.
But just a façade. It’s fake. It’s a lie.
It’s true that the federal government used to consist of three branches. But that quaint notion disintegrated when the federal government was converted to what is known as a “national-security state” after World War II. Even though it was done without a constitutional amendment, that conversion effectively added a fourth branch of government to the federal government — the national-security branch, which consists of the NSA, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
The addition of that fourth branch fundamentally altered the original three-branch concept, especially because the fourth branch quickly became the most powerful branch. The reason is because ultimately government is force, and the fourth branch is where the most force was concentrated within the new, altered governmental structure. read on...
The release of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo on the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process set off a partisan firestorm. The Democrats warned us beforehand that declassifying the memo would be the end the world as we know it. It was reckless to allow Americans to see this classified material, they said. Agents in the field could be harmed, sources and methods would be compromised, they claimed. read on...
The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms... and, as The Duran's Alex Christoforou writes, according to California Congressman Adam Schiff, those pesky Russians are using bots to promote the second amendment with an ultimate goal of having Americans"‘kill each other."
Once again, another brilliant plan hatched by Putin... good thing Schiff caught on to it and can now begin seizing American’s guns so as to thwart Russia’s evil plan.
On Thursday Democrat Schiff spoke to a crowd at the University of Pennsylvania, where the TDS – "Russia hysteria virus" infected Schiff told the crowd Russian ads promoted the Second Amendment during the 2016 election “so we will kill each other.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Thursday that Russia promoted content that supported the Second Amendment on social media during the 2016 election because they wanted Americans to kill one another. read on...
