What makes legendary film-maker Oliver Stone tick? How is he able to reach millions with such powerful messages? What motivated him to make his most recent and very controversial "The Putin Interviews," which is driving the neocons and Washington elites crazy? Today's Liberty Report catches up with Stone from his Paris hotel room for a very lively and spirited conversation. You will not see this kind of interview on the mainstream media, which has been in "attack" mode since the film came out. Watch it here -- and don't miss Stone's surprise ending! read on...
The New York Times has finally admitted that one of the favorite Russia-gate canards – that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred on the assessment of Russian hacking of Democratic emails – is false.
On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.
In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”
However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.” read on...
It’s obvious Mad Dog and the war-makers take us for complete idiots.
On Wednesday Trump’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, otherwise fondly known as Mad Dog, said Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government backed down on a chemical attack after a stern warning from the United States.
“It appears that they took the warning seriously,” Mad Dog told reporters. “They didn’t do it.”
It is common practice now for the government to make outrageous claims and not bother to offer a scintilla of evidence. This was certainly the case with Mad Dog’s claim earlier in the week that the evil al-Assad planned to gas his own people.
It’s equally common for the establishment media to not ask for evidence and report fantasy and fairy tales as granite-hard fact.
Members of Congress also take this fallacious “intelligence” as gospel truth, as demonstrated by Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He said Trump will bomb the be-jesus out of Syria if they launch a chemical attack. read on...
It has become the conventional wisdom that the information world has been forever changed by the advent of the Internet Age. Whereas in the past the established media were the only source of news and opinion, we are led to believe that now, with a virtually unlimited availability of independent voices, facts cannot be concealed and "the truth will out."
Unfortunately, that notion is far from reality, at least when issues of war and peace are concerned. While proliferation of first cable channels and then online publications means the establishment American networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, plus CNN) and newspapers (New York Times (a/k/a, the "newspaper of record"), Washington Post) have a smaller market share than in the past, they still have a near monopoly on the legitimacy and public significance of information. This means that while "alternative media" – itself a dismissive term relating to the presumed unreliability of contents – might report and document information contrary to the official line emanating from prestige media operating in symbiosis with their government sources, they can be ignored.
Despite the ubiquitous accessibility of online independent media, news and commentary about national security issues in the U.S. and Western Europe displays an almost Soviet-style façade of uniformity. Unlike the practice of the totalitarian states of the 20th century, maintaining the credibility of official media does not require the physical repression of alternatives. Instead of suppressing dissent, is it sufficient to maintain major media's role as gatekeeper and certifier of reliability. Information originating in "alternative" circles becomes reliable and publicly actionable only when picked up and disseminated by the "mainstream media" (MSM), thus validating the information and its ostensibly "alternative" source. Unless and until that happens, alternative information and opinion, especially that which runs counter to the MSM/government/corporate narrative, is ignored and relegated to "conspiracy theory," "internet chatter," or even subjected to the dread label of "denier" of some established, obligatory truth, for example the "Bosnian genocide" and Serbian guilt. read on...
That was Ron Paul’s message to our audience in Texas earlier this spring, and it has been his consistent message since first running for Congress in the 1970s. So why do seemingly endless wars remain such a stubborn feature of the American presidency, with the shameful complicity of Congress? read on...
What does Saudi King Salman's surprising succession shake-up earlier this month tell us about stability in the kingdom? Perhaps more than we might think. The new crown prince, bin Salman, is the warhawk architect of the genocidal war on Yemen and the strange blockade of Qatar. The young crown prince is very close to the Trump family and is very well-regarded in Israel. And he hates Iran. Will internal unrest over a failing economy and foreign military adventurism spell doom for young bin Salman? We look at the evidence in today's Liberty Report... read on...
According to a new Gallup survey, over the past eleven years Americans' satisfaction with the level of freedom in the country has declined by 16 percent. The US freedom ranking in the world has dropped from 11th to 71st. No other wealthy democracies have experienced such a decline. What's behind it? The Snowden revelations? Endless wars? Financial system? Our take in today's Liberty Report... read on...
Last night the White House released a shock statement that the Syrian government was about to use chemical weapons "again" on its citizens and that the United States would launch a massive response. At the time, the AP reported that neither the State Department nor the Pentagon or intelligence agencies seemed to know anything about it. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley warned that any attack on citizens of Syria would be automatically blamed on Assad (as well as Russia and Iran). It seems Trump is ready for a massive attack on the Syrian government -- coincidentally just a day after a major piece by Seymour Hersh showed that the US intelligence community knew that the April "chemical attack" was no such thing but that Trump launched 59 Tomahawk missiles anyway. Trump constantly accuses CNN of purveying "fake news," but he has shown himself to also be a master at fake news. Something they have in common. More in today's Liberty Report... read on...
Last year on the campaign trail, crowds roared when Donald Trump denounced his opponent as "trigger-happy" Hillary. But President Trump is rapidly incarnating the vice he condemned. Nowhere is this more evident than in Syria, where Trump’s recklessness risks dragging America into a major war.
US policy toward Syria has been a tangle of absurdities since 2012. President Obama promised 16 times that he would never put US "boots on the ground" in the four-sided Syrian civil war. He quietly abandoned that pledge and, starting in 2014, launched more more than 5,000 airstrikes that dropped more than 15,000 bombs on terrorist groups in Syria.
Four years ago, Trump warned in a tweet: "If the US attacks Syria and hits the wrong targets, killing civilians, there will be worldwide hell to pay." But the Trump administration has sharply increased US bombing while curtailing restrictions that sought to protect innocents. A British-based human rights monitoring group estimated Friday that US-led coalition strikes had killed almost 500 civilians in the past month — more than any month since US bombing began. A United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that coalition airstrikes have caused a "staggering loss of civilian life."
The carnage is sufficiently embarrassing that "the Pentagon will no longer acknowledge when its own aircraft are responsible for civilian casualty incidents,"Micah Zenko of the Council of Foreign Relations recently noted. read on...
Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is challenging the Trump administration’s version of events surrounding the April 4 “chemical weapons attack” on the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun – though Hersh had to find a publisher in Germany to get his information out.
In the Sunday edition of Die Welt, Hersh reports that his national security sources offered a distinctly different account, revealing President Trump rashly deciding to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian airbase on April 6 despite the absence of intelligence supporting his conclusion that the Syrian military was guilty.
Hersh draws on the kind of inside sources from whom he has earned longstanding trust to dispute that there ever was a “chemical weapons attack” and to assert that Trump was told that no evidence existed against the Syrian government but ordered “his generals” to “retaliate” anyway.
Marine General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Marine General, now Defense Secretary James “Mad-Dog” Mattis ordered the attacks apparently knowing that the reason given was what one of Hersh’s sources called a “fairy tale.”
They then left it to Trump’s national security adviser Army General H. R. McMaster to further the deceit with the help of a compliant mainstream media, which broke from its current tradition of distrusting whatever Trump says in favor of its older tradition of favoring “regime change” in Syria and trusting pretty much whatever the “rebels” claim. read on...
