Just when we thought the enemy of the week was going to be North Korea again. Or maybe Russia. Or Syria. It turns out that Washington's enemy of this week is...Iran! The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is pushing through a bill slapping additional sanctions on Tehran. While just a couple of weeks ago Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reported to Congress that Iran is meeting its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal, President Trump accused Tehran of not abiding by the "spirit" of the treaty. Whatever that is. More in today's Liberty Report... read on...
A senior Rand analyst, inadvertently, gave the game away in a recent article inculpating Syrian President Bashar al Assad over the alleged toxic massacre of civilians on April 4. The Rand Corporation, a longtime conduit for CIA propaganda, wrote: "The use of chemical weapons today provokes international condemnation… Those who order their deployment risk being charged with war crimes."
The Western objective, as tacitly admitted above, is therefore to brand the Syrian leader and his government as depraved war criminals, deserving pariah status and excommunication by the "international community."
The alleged use of chemical weapons, a particularly odious weapon of mass destruction (WMD), serves as an effective prop to channel Western public outrage against Assad. Allegedly killing civilians with bullets and bombs just doesn’t have the same psychological power to incite public disgust. Poisoning little children with lethal chemicals is a more effective label with which to demonize the alleged perpetrator.
But the more pertinent WMD issue here is Weapon of Mass Disorientation. And in particular how Western governments, their servile corporate-controlled media, like theRand Corp, New York Times, CNN, BBC, Guardian and France 24, and so on, and local proxy mercenaries inside Syria are covertly deploying deadly chemicals in a series of propaganda stunts. Not only deploying deadly chemicals against civilians in a most cynical and callous way, but getting away with their crimes of murder through an audacious distortion of reality. All made possible because of the West’s media weapon of mass disorientation. read on...
Privacy advocates are hailing it as a major victory for Americans whose communications have been caught in the NSA’s dragnet.
If this is a victory, it’s a hollow victory.
Here’s why.
Since its creation in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman issued a secret executive order establishing the NSA as the hub of the government’s foreign intelligence activities, the agency has been covertly spying on Americans, listening in on their phone calls, reading their mail, and monitoring their communications.
For instance, under Project SHAMROCK, the NSA spied on telegrams to and from the US, as well as the correspondence of American citizens. Moreover, as the Saturday Evening Postreports, “Under Project MINARET, the NSA monitored the communications of civil rights leaders and opponents of the Vietnam War, including targets such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohammed Ali, Jane Fonda, and two active US Senators. The NSA had launched this program in 1967 to monitor suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, but successive presidents used it to track all manner of political dissidents.”
Not even the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the creation of the FISA Court, which was supposed to oversee and correct how intelligence information is collected and collated, managed to curtail the NSA’s illegal activities. read on...
No, the government is not going to close down. It's all a ruse. The budget "crisis" was solved by agreeing on a 1,600 page bill that spends more on the military and more on government programs at home. There's something in it for politicians of almost every stripe. The Russian "threat"? Don't worry! There's $100 million for a fun to counter "Russian propaganda" in Europe. Terrorism? There's a $15 billion appropriation to fight terrorism. Don't worry that Washington's interventionist foreign policy is the primary cause of terrorism. Just spend! More in today's Liberty Report... read on...
One of the problems of the interventionista –wanting to get involved in other people’s affairs “in order to help”, while genuinely wanting to do good, results in disrupting some of the peace-making mechanisms that are inherent in human’s affairs, a combination of collaboration and strategic hostility. As we saw in the prologue, the error continues because someone else is paying the price.
I speculate that had IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots) and their friends not gotten involved, problems such as the Israeli-Palestinian one would have been solved, sort of –and both parties, especially the Palestinians would have felt to be better off. As I am writing these lines the problem has lasted seventy years, with too way many cooks in the same tiny kitchen, most of whom never have to taste the food. I conjecture that when you leave people alone, they tend to settle for practical reasons.
People on the ground, those with skin in the game are not too interested in geopolitics or grand abstract principles, but rather in having bread on the table, beer (or, for some, nonalcoholic beverages such as yoghurt drinks) in the refrigerator, and good weather at outdoors family picnics. Also they don’t want to be humiliated in their human contact with others.
For imagine the absurdity of Arab States prodding the Palestinians to fight for their principles while the potentates are sitting in carpeted alcohol-free palaces (with well-stocked refrigerators full of nonalcoholic fermented yoghurt)and the recipient of the advice living in refugee camps. Had the Palestinians settled in 1947, they would have been better off. But the idea was to throw the Jews and neo-crusaders in the Mediterranean; Arab rhetoric came from Arab parties who were hundreds, thousands of miles away arguing for “principles” when Palestinians were displaced, living in tents. read on...
Congress ended the week by passing a continuing resolution keeping the government funded for one more week. This stopgap funding bill is designed to give Congress and the White House more time to negotiate a long-term spending bill. Passage of a long-term spending bill has been delayed over objections to Republican efforts to preserve Obamcare's key features but give states a limited ability to opt out of some Obamacare mandates. read on...
Friday night’s failed missile launch by North Korea has exposed a kind of cognitive dissonance in the western mainstream media and also some alt-media sources.
On the one hand, North Korea is an evil state whose nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems are capable of setting hell-fire upon East Asia and even parts of the western United States.
At the same time, some of these same sources are promulgating an antithetical narrative that North Korea is little more than an ineffective dictatorship whose weapons delivery systems cannot get off the ground and whose conventional weapons are so lacking that during parades, fake weapons are on display.
The fact that this second narrative has captured hearts and minds across the spectrum is best illustrated by the fact that maverick conservative alt-media figure Milo Yiannopoulos has posted a story about just how poorly North Korea is armed, citing, NBC news, Fox news, and the left-wing UK tabloid Daily Mirror.
So which is it? Is North Korea a kind of bite sized ‘evil empire’ ready and willing to destroy much of the world at a moment’s notice, or is it a comical commie monarchy whose weapons are just for show?
Donald Trump expressed his own unique brand of cognitive dissonance on the matter, Tweeting: "North Korea disrespected the wishes of China & its highly respected President when it launched, though unsuccessfully, a missile today. Bad!"
This is the same Donald Trump who in 2013 said of China, "China is not our friend. They are not our ally. They want to overtake us, and if we don’t get smart and tough soon, they will." read on...
Maybe the president believes he’s won a great victory over the wicked Syrians by lobbing cruise missiles at one of their underused air bases. Maybe Trump believes that he’s scared the evil Russians and the too big for their sampans Chinese into obedience.
His 22,000 lb MOAB terror bomb on Afghanistan should keep those pesky Taliban quiet for a while even though the Pentagon claimed the intended target was a group- Khorosan – that may not actually exist.<
Those major malefactors, the crazy North Koreans, could be about to feel America’s full military might if they so much as twitch.
Not content with nearly stirring up a new war with North Korea, President Donald Trump is now waving the big stick at another of Washington’s favorite bogeymen, Iran. For the Trumps, Iran is poison.
In recent days, President Trump has threatened to renounce the six-power nuclear agreement to freeze or shrink Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. This sensible pact was signed during the Obama administration by the great powers: US, Britain, France, Russia, Germany and China. Trump appears willing to abrogate the treaty and outrage the other great powers just because he hates Iran for some reason and, it appears, Muslims in general.
The Trump administration seems increasingly influenced by Israel’s far right Netanyahu government. In fact, PM Netanyahu often appears the most moderate member of his rightist coalition which is dominated by militant West Bank settlers. read on...
What would have happened had there been no Iraq War in 2003 and Saddam Hussein had stayed in power? Where would we be today? It’s the 28th of April 2017. Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, now a member state of the newly reconstituted United Arab Republic (with Syria and Egypt), is celebrating his 80th birthday. There are big processions on a gloriously sunny and very hot day in Baghdad. Among visiting foreign heads of state was Zimbabwe’s 93-year-old President Robert Mugabe, who joked that if Saddam gave up smoking Cohibas and started drinking herbal teas he might even live to be as old as him... read on...
AN OPEN MEMORANDUM FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE From: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) Subject: Mattis ‘No Doubt’ Stance on Alleged Syrian CW Smacks of Politicized Intelligence
Donald Trump’s new Secretary of Defense, retired Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, during a recent trip to Israel, commented on the issue of Syria’s retention and use of chemical weapons in violation of its obligations to dispose of the totality of its declared chemical weapons capability in accordance with the provisions of both the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions.
“There can be no doubt,” Secretary Mattis said during a April 21, 2017 joint news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman, “in the international community’s mind that Syria has retained chemical weapons in violation of its agreement and its statement that it had removed them all.” To the contrary, Mattis noted, “I can say authoritatively they have retained some.”
Lieberman joined Mattis in his assessment, noting that Israel had “100 percent information that [the] Assad regime used chemical weapons against [Syrian] rebels.”
Both Mattis and Lieberman seemed to be channeling assessments offered to reporters two days prior, on April 19, 2017, by anonymous Israeli defense officials that the April 4, 2017 chemical weapons attack on the Syrian village of Khan Shaykhun was ordered by Syrian military commanders, with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s personal knowledge, and that Syria retained a stock of “between one and three tons” of chemical weapons. read on...
