On February 7, the US-led coalition carried out several airstrikes on positions of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the province of Deir Ezzor. The coalition claimed that the SAA had “initiated an unprovoked attack against well-established Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF] headquarters”, added that “coalition service members” were co-located with SDF fighters during the attack and described the strikes as a self-defense act.
According to local sources, the US targeted positions of the SAA near the town of Khasham, located on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River where some clashes between the SAA and the SDF were also reported. Earlier pro-opposition sources speculated that the SAA was preparing to use Khasham as a foothold to attack the SDF position in the areas of the CONICO gas facility and the Jafar oil field. However, these reports were not confirmed by any evidence.
No doubts, the US-led coalition will use the incident to deepen the rift between the SAA and the Kurdish-dominated SDF. Earlier this month, Damascus allowed a large convoy of Kurdish fighters to reach the area of Afrin where Turkey is conducting a military operation against YPG/YPJ forces that are the core of the SDF. However, the relations between the sides remained complicated.
On February 7, the media wing of the YPG released a video showing two ATGM strikes at battle tanks of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF). The strikes were conducted in the Rajo and Bulbul districts of Afrin. The both tanks were allegedly destroyed. On the same day, reports appeared that two TAF service members died in the Afrin operation.
Meanwhile, the TAF and the Free Syrian Army captured Hawiz Hill and re-entered Shaykh Khurus. On February 8, clashes continued there. The SAA, the Tiger Forces and their allies made large gains against ISIS in the northeastern Hama pocket. The ISIS resistance remains in Suruj, Ibn Wardan Qastel and a number of small points across the remaining militant-held area.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham continued its attempts to exploit the SAA operation against ISIS attacking government positions west and north of Abu al-Duhur. Fierce clashes are ongoing there.
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Five Reasons To Be Absolutely Certain That The Establishment Is Lying About Syria
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
Whenever you see UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on video she’s trying to start World War Three. At today’s UN Security Council Haley gave remarks about why the UN should “take action” against two of the US power establishment’s favorite targets, Russia and the Syrian government, due to allegations that Bashar al-Assad has been using chemical weapons.
The idea that Assad might be using chemical weapons on his own people for some tactical advantage is not only a filthy and cynical lie, it is idiotic, it makes no sense at all when you think about it for a second—which is something most American audiences never do.
That’s right, just three weeks after the Trump administration unveiled its plan to keep thousands of US troops in Syria in order to force regime change, the tired old chemical weapons allegations have been unearthed and recirculated to trusting western mainstream media audiences.
I am not a Syria expert by any stretch of the imagination. If you want detailed information about what’s really going on in that nation I recommend getting in touch with real Syrians online and following the work of independent investigative journalists who regularly go there like Vanessa Beeley. Nevertheless, despite my lack of boots-on-the-ground expertise and intimate knowledge of every detail of what’s going on in that country, I am absolutely certain that the western power establishment is lying very extensively about what is going on in Syria.
One hundred percent certain, zero margin for error. I’d bet my life on it.
How can I be so sure? I’ll show you.
There are many, many, many piles of evidence substantiating the fact that the Syrian government has become the target of what is surely one of the largest and most sophisticated propaganda campaigns in human history, but most people don’t have time to comb through all the tiny details and sort through the complexities of what’s what. For this reason I thought it would be useful to compile a short list for people who, like me, don’t have time to dedicate themselves intimately to the in-depth study of Syria. This list makes it abundantly clear that there is an organized disinformation campaign saturating mainstream narratives about what is happening in Syria, making it therefore impossible to place any faith in the reports that are coming out about that nation’s government today. All you need is a little information and critical thinking.
Without further ado, here are five reasons why you can be as absolutely certain of the mass media’s deception in this area as I am.
1. The Bana Alabed CNN interview
I point to this one a lot. If you haven’t yet figured out that mainstream media outlets are tools of outrageous war propaganda, and you watch this interview with your eyes wide open, your jaw will drop to the floor and you will never see the world the same again.
After the highly suspicious and hotly disputed accusations of sarin gas use by the Syrian government in the Idlib province back in April of last year, a little girl was paraded before the CNN audience to condemn Assad and plead for western intervention. Anyone watching the interview can see that it is very obviously scripted, and the little girl is sounding out pre-written syllables in a way that children simply do not speak, using words and concepts that no seven year-old could possibly understand. This is self-evident to anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in not seeing it.
Additionally, other video footage from around the same time showed that the girl did not speak English enough to even understand basic questions about what kind of food she likes to eat, instead regurgitating the pre-scripted line “Save the children of Syria” in response.
More disturbingly, because this interview was scripted, it means that CNN’s Alisyn Camerota necessarily had the other half of the script the girl was reading from. A prominent newscaster from a top US mainstream media outlet knowingly participated in a fake, scripted interview designed to manufacture support for western military interventionism, and sold it to CNN’s audience as a real interview.
The footage from that fake interview was then re-used by CNN to bully congressman Thomas Massie for his opposition to Syrian interventionism.
Similar to item number one, independent researcher Robert Stuart has shown conclusively how the world’s oldest and largest broadcasting organization, the BBC, aired a documentary containing footage meant to implicate the Assad government that anyone looking can recognize as clearly fake.
In a presentation for Media on Trial, Stuart breaks down part of the BBC documentary Saving Syria’s Children showing clear and undeniable evidence that the footage which purports to show victims of an Assad napalm bombing has been staged and faked from top to bottom. The presentation is packed with information and the the 19-minute clip is definitely worth watching in its entirety, but for me the real clincher comes at around the four-minute mark after Stuart explains what burn victims tend to look and behave like, and he simply turns the sound off on the video footage and replays it with the question “just ask yourself, is this real?”
It isn’t. Plainly it isn’t. Watch it and see for yourself; it’s as fake as the Bana Alabed interview.
It can be hard to catch propagandists in the act in a clear and undeniable way, but these are two irrefutable examples of the top outlets in both the US and the UK airing blatantly deceitful disinformation to manufacture support for military interventionism. You can say that this doesn’t mean every single thing western media reports has been deliberately and deceptively manufactured in the same way, and that’s fair… but you also can’t say there’s any good reason to go believing them, either. If the propaganda effort is that pervasive that it’s airing brazen military psyops at the very top echelons of western media, you simply cannot trust anything they say about Syria. The fact that a known compulsive liar could technically be telling the truth about something at any given moment is not a legitimate reason to place your trust in him.
3. The White Helmets
This one is a rabbit hole and a half, and I cannot possibly list all of the countless pieces of evidence here against the so-called “Syrian Civil Defense” aka the White Helmets, but let me try and sum it up.
Whenever you hear about a new Assad atrocity, the original source of the report is this extremely shady organization with extensive ties to both terrorist groups and western warmongers. Here’s a new article from the Washington Post, originally from Associated Press, advancing the narrative in the headline that “Syrian activists” are reporting a chlorine gas attack. Read the article, and guess who those “Syrian activists” turn out to be? White Helmets.
You can spend days and days researching this one (and some people have devoted their lives to exactly that), but just to get at the basics of this high-level manipulation, here is a video showing footage and testimony connecting the White Helmets to violent extremist groups, and here is an article with an assortment of supporting articles detailing the organization’s funding from the US, the UK and the EU as well as its ties to Al Qaeda. In this illuminating interview Vanessa Beeley even goes so far as to say that the White Helmets are literally just Al Qaeda members who put on white plastic headgear when they want to film propaganda to advance their agendas.
Once dismissed as a baseless conspiracy theory, it is now a known and admitted factthat the US has been arming terrorist factions in Syria to advance its regime change agendas. Utilizing extremist groups is one of the many ways the US-centralized war machine has found to get around the resistance of the American people to participating in new wars with US boots on the ground; they enlist the help of violent terrorist factions to attain their bloodthirsty goals. This is a known fact. Is there any reason to resist the notion that they’d enlist those groups in fabricating psyops as well?
4. Critical thinking
Consortiumnews recently ran an essay by Rick Sterling titled “WMD Claims in Syria Raise Concerns over U.S. Escalation” discussing the US war machine’s extensive history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to manufacture support for military interventionism. Sterling discusses the flimsy grounds for the basis of the current anti-Assad narrative being rammed down our throats today, and reminds us simply that we have been here before, beginning his essay with the words, “It’s the WMD story all over again.”
The Iraq invasion was less than fourteen years ago, and now we’re being scaremongered about a brand new evil dictator in the same region, right next door to Iraq, who also happens to have a great love of acquiring and using WMDs. According to a new report by Reuters, citing anonymous officials as sources, there is now a risk of those weapons of mass destruction coming “to US shores”.
“It will spread if we don’t do something,” the official warns in the Reuters report.
Come on, people. Think harder. We’ve done this exact dance before, and not even that long ago. They lied to you then, and they are lying to you now. If the Iraq invasion didn’t permanently shatter your trust in this schtick, it should have. But it’s not too late to fix that. Look at this thing critically and stop swallowing their swill.
The propagandists focus on chemical weapons because there’s nothing else they could accuse the Assad government of doing that the US war machine doesn’t do constantly. They can’t accuse him of merely killing civilians with bombs, for example, because the US does that every day. If Nikki Haley tried telling the UN that there was simply too high a civilian death toll in Syria and Russia’s bombing campaigns, the rest of the world would just say “Oh really? America doesn’t like civilians dying in air strikes anymore? Because we’ve all been meaning to talk to you about that…”
5. Common sense
As noted by Max Abrams, “Assad has strong incentives not to use chemical weapons again whereas regime change supporters have every incentive to say he did.” The leverage he’d be giving people like Nikki Haley to draw the wrath of the world down upon his head by committing internationally reviled war crimes would make it nonsensical for him to use an inefficient weapon like chlorine gas. It would be strategically disastrous, it wouldn’t profit him any, bombs work much better, and his consistent denial of using those weapons (both inside Syria and outside) would invalidate any small advantage he might get from sending a scary message to his enemies.
Add to this the fact that some places these weapons are alleged to have been used are not only packed with his own civilians but his own soldiers as well, and you’re looking at a completely absurd story.
If you really think about it, the only way to believe the establishment Syria narrative is to believe that Bashar al-Assad has an actual, literal sexual fetish for committing war crimes on his own people. Not only that, but you have to believe he only developed this bizarre, previously unknown sexual kink in the last few years. That’s the only way this notion that he’s been gassing his own civilians willy nilly can possibly make any sense at all.
Which is more likely? That, or the same establishment that lied to you about Iraq lying to you about Iraq’s next-door neighbor?
Believing the establishment Syria narrative is indefensible. Spread the word.
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Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
Parting shot—a word from the editors The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.—Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Our Enemy, Ourselves
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
By W.J. Astore
A US Navy F-18 Hornet, like the one used to down a Syrian jet on a mission to attack ISIL terrorists. Whose side is Washington really on?
In my latest article for TomDispatch.com, I suggest how America can pursue a wiser, more peaceful, course. This is exactly what our leaders are not doing (and haven’t been doing for decades), as I document in the first half of my article, which I’m sharing here. Bottom line: perpetual war doesn’t produce perpetual peace. Nor does it make us safer.
Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countries or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new National Defense Strategy), the U.S. military is engaged globally. A network of 800 military bases spread across 172 countries helps enable its wars and interventions. By the count of the Pentagon, at the end of the last fiscal year about 291,000 personnel (including reserves and Department of Defense civilians) were deployed in 183 countries worldwide, which is the functional definition of a military uncontained. Lady Liberty may temporarily close when the U.S. government grinds to a halt, but the country’s foreign military commitments, especially its wars, just keep humming along.
As a student of history, I was warned to avoid the notion of inevitability. Still, given such data points and others like them, is there anything more predictable in this country’s future than incessant warfare without a true victory in sight? Indeed, the last clear-cut American victory, the last true “mission accomplished” moment in a war of any significance, came in 1945 with the end of World War II.
Yet the lack of clear victories since then seems to faze no one in Washington. In this century, presidents have regularly boasted that the U.S. military is the finest fighting force in human history, while no less regularly demanding that the most powerful military in today’s world be “rebuilt” and funded at ever more staggering levels. Indeed, while on the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised he’d invest so much in the military that it would become “so big and so strong and so great, and it will be so powerful that I don’t think we’re ever going to have to use it.”
As soon as he took office, however, he promptly appointed a set of generals to key positions in his government, stored the mothballs, and went back to war. Here, then, is a brief rundown of the first year of his presidency in war terms.
In 2017, Afghanistan saw a mini-surge of roughly 4,000 additional U.S. troops (with more to come), a major spike in air strikes, and an onslaught of munitions of all sorts, including MOAB (the mother of all bombs), the never-before-used largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, as well as precision weapons fired by B-52s against suspected Taliban drug laboratories. By the Air Force’s own count, 4,361 weapons were “released” in Afghanistan in 2017 compared to 1,337 in 2016. Despite this commitment of warriors and weapons, the Afghan war remains — according to American commanders putting the best possible light on the situation — “stalemated,” with that country’s capital Kabul currently under siege.
How about Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State? U.S.-led coalition forces have launched more than 10,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since Donald Trump became president, unleashing 39,577 weapons in 2017. (The figure for 2016 was 30,743.) The “caliphate” is now gone and ISIS deflated but not defeated, since you can’t extinguish an ideology solely with bombs. Meanwhile, along the Syrian-Turkish border a new conflict seems to be heating up between American-backed Kurdish forces and NATO ally Turkey.
Yet another strife-riven country, Yemen, witnessed a sixfold increase in U.S. airstrikes against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (from 21 in 2016 to more than 131 in 2017). In Somalia, which has also seen a rise in such strikes against al-Shabaab militants, U.S. forces on the ground have reached numbers not seen since the Black Hawk Down incident of 1993. In each of these countries, there are yet more ruins, yet more civilian casualties, and yet more displaced people.
Finally, we come to North Korea. Though no real shots have yet been fired, rhetorical shots by two less-than-stable leaders, “Little Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un and “dotard” Donald Trump, raise the possibility of a regional bloodbath. Trump, seemingly favoring military solutions to North Korea’s nuclear program even as his administration touts a new generation of more usable nuclear warheads, has been remarkably successful in moving the world’s doomsday clock ever closer to midnight.
Clearly, his “great” and “powerful” military has hardly been standing idly on the sidelines looking “big” and “strong.” More than ever, in fact, it seems to be lashing out across the Greater Middle East and Africa. Seventeen years after the 9/11 attacks began the Global War on Terror, all of this represents an eerily familiar attempt by the U.S. military to kill its way to victory, whether against the Taliban, ISIS, or other terrorist organizations.
This kinetic reality should surprise no one. Once you invest so much in your military — not just financially but also culturally (by continually celebrating it in a fashion which has come to seem like a quasi-faith) — it’s natural to want to put it to use. This has been true of all recent administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, as reflected in the infamous question Madeleine Albright posed to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell in 1992: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
With the very word “peace” rarely in Washington’s political vocabulary, America’s never-ending version of war seems as inevitable as anything is likely to be in history. Significant contingents of U.S. troops and contractors remain an enduring presence in Iraq and there are now 2,000 U.S. Special Operations forces and other personnel in Syria for the long haul. They are ostensibly engaged in training and stability operations. In Washington, however, the urge for regime change in both Syria and Iran remains strong — in the case of Iran implacably so. If past is prologue, then considering previous regime-change operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the future looks grim indeed.
Despite the dismal record of the last decade and a half, our civilian leaders continue to insist that this country must have a military not only second to none but globally dominant. And few here wonder what such a quest for total dominance, the desire for absolute power, could do to this country. Two centuries ago, however, writing to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams couldn’t have been clearer on the subject. Power, he said, “must never be trusted without a check.”
The question today for the American people: How is the dominant military power of which U.S. leaders so casually boast to be checked? How is the country’s almost total reliance on the military in foreign affairs to be reined in? How can the plans of the profiteers and arms makers to keep the good times rolling be brought under control?
As a start, consider one of Donald Trump’s favorite generals, Douglas MacArthur, speaking to the Sperry Rand Corporation in 1957:
“Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
No peacenik MacArthur. Other famed generals like Smedley Butler and Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke out with far more vigor against the corruptions of war and the perils to a democracy of an ever more powerful military, though such sentiments are seldom heard in this country today. Instead, America’s leaders insist that other people judge us by our words, our stated good intentions, not our murderous deeds and their results.
For ten suggestions (plus a bonus) on how the U.S. can pursue a wiser, and far less bellicose, course, please read the rest of my article here originally posted with TomDispatch.com.
Parting shot—a word from the editors The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.—Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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A Scandal of The West’s News-Suppression, to ‘Justify’ U.S.-v.-Russia War
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INFAMY DOES NOT WIN ALL THE TIME. TRUTH WILLS OUT, AS THEY SAY. Decency and personal courage, often at great cost, cannot be stamped out.
The shady entrepreneur William Browder, rubbing elbows with fellow plutocrats at the WEF. Ironic this man should be related to the CPUSA's longtime leader, Earl Browder.
Magnitsky
Magnitsky’s death in prison thus provided the factual basis for the first of the economic-sanctions regimens that were imposed by The West against the Russian Government, the 2012 Magnitsky Act — sanctions that preceded the 2014 sanctions which were imposed on account of Russia’s response to America’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine. However, that account of the Magnitsky incident is full of lies, according to a 2016 documentary investigation into the matter. But publication of this video investigation — at Youtube or anywhere — is effectively banned in The West.
Here’s how Gilbert Doctorow, who is one of the extremely few people in The West who managed to see this totally-suppressed-in-The-West investigative news-documentary that was done (and which he said proved to him with the conviction that the basis of the Magnitsky Act is lies) expressed his shock, at what he saw and learned from it:
Furthermore, another investigator, Alex Krainer, had his book, which was published on the matter, withdrawn promptly without explanation; so, Krainer put his investigation online, and its findings were entirely consistent with Nekrasov’s findings. Here is an excellent interview of Krainer about what he said in his book:
APPENDIX
Read Gilbert Doctorow’s scathing essay on the Magnitsky Affair, as published on a Belgian website and largely ignored or suppressed by mainstream media in the West. Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord. His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. orange button below.
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A. Nekrasov
A film review: Andrei Nekrasov, ‘The Magnitsky Act. Behind the Scenes’ | At the end of the twists and turns in this expose, the viewer is ready to see Browder sink through the floor on a direct transfer to hell like Don Giovanni in the closing scene of Mozart’s opera
by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.
Despite all the threats of lawsuits and physical intimidation which William Browder brought to bear over the past couple of months to ensure that this film would not be screened anywhere, on Monday, 13 June, it was shown privately in a museum of journalism in Washington, D.C.No doubt, the courage of the museum’s directors gave heart to others, and now there is talk that the film will be shown publicly in Norway, where its production company is located, but where an attempt several weeks ago to enter it into a local festival for documentaries was rejected by the hosts for fear of law suits. Moreover, a Norwegian court has in the past week declined to hear the libel charges which Browder’s attorneys were seeking to bring against the film’s director and producers.In this brief essay, I will not go into the background issues of how the wealthy and influential investment banker William Browder has been moving heaven and earth to suppress it. I dealt with that issue in my account of the cancelled screening of the film in the European Parliament at the end of April where I was a member of the audience:
Instead, I will devote a few words to the film itself, which I have now seen privately.
The Magnitsky Act. Behind the Scenes is an amazing film which takes us through the thought processes, the evidence sorting of the well-known independent film maker Andrei Nekrasov as he approached an assignment that was at the outset meant to be one more public confirmation of the narrative Browder had sold to the US Congress and to the American and European political elites. That story was all about a 36 year old whistleblower “attorney” (actually a bookkeeper) named Sergei Magnitsky who denounced on Browder’s behalf the theft of Russian taxes to his boss’s companies amounting to $230 million and who was rewarded for his efforts by arrest, torture and murder in detainment by the officials who perpetrated the theft. This shocking tale drove legislation that was a major landmark in the descent of US-Russian relations under President Barack Obama to a level rivaling the worst days of the Cold War.
At the end of the film we understand that this story was concocted by William Browder to cover up his own criminal theft of the money in question, that Magnitsky was not a whistleblower, but on the contrary was likely an assistant and abettor to the fraud and theft that Browder organized, that he was not murdered by corrupt Russian police but died in prison from banal neglect of his medical condition.
The cinematic qualities of the film are evident. Nekrasov is highly experienced as a maker of documentaries enjoying a Europe-wide reputation. What sets this work apart from the “trade” is the honesty, the integrity of the film-maker as he discovers midway into his project that key assumptions of his script are faulty and begins an independent investigation to get at the truth.
It is an inconvenient truth that he stumbles upon, because it takes him out of his familiar milieu of ‘creative people’ who are instinctively critical of the Putin regime and of its widely assumed violation of human rights and civil liberties. We see how well-known names in the European Parliament, in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, in NGOs that are reputed to be watchdogs, in the team of court investigators in New York have taken on faith the arguments and documentation (largely in Russian and inaccessible to them) which they received from William Browder and then rubber-stamped his story as validated without making any attempt to weigh the evidence. Their intellectual laziness and complacency is captured fully on film and requires no commentary by the director. One of those especially skewered by her own words is German Bundestag deputy (Greens) Marieluise Beck. It is understandable to me now that I have viewed the film why she was one of the two individuals whose objections to its showing scuttled the screening in the European Parliament in April. By the end of The Magnitsky Act, Nekrasov finds that he has become a dissident in his own subculture within Russia and in European liberal circles.
Another exceptional and striking characteristic of the filmmaker is his energetic pursuit of all imaginable leads in his investigative reporting. Some leads end in “no comment” while others result in exposing whole new ranges of lies and deception in the Browder narrative. Nekrasov’s diligence is exemplary even as he takes us into the more arcane aspects of the case such as the course of money flow from the alleged tax fraud. These bits and pieces are essential to his methodology and justify the length of the movie, which approaches two hours.
Nekrasov largely allows William Browder to self-destruct under the weight of his own lies and the contradictions in his story-telling at various times. His camera is always running, even if his subjects are not thinking about the consequences of being taped. Browder’s supposed lapses of memory, set in the context of involuntary facial expressions of stress and nervousness, will be used against him by the viewer even if they would be thrown out by a judge in a court of law.
At the end of the twists and turns in this expose, the viewer is ready to see Browder sink through the floor on a direct transfer to hell like Don Giovanni in the closing scene of Mozart’s opera. Nothing so colorful occurs, but it is hard to see how Browder can survive the onslaught of this film if and when it gets wide public viewing.
Russia's Yasen submarine class—formidable as they are, they will be complemented and replaced by the Husky class.
(Strategic Culture Foundation) – Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to sign the State Armament Program for 2018-2025, which comes at a budget of 19 trillion rubles, before the year-end. The document emphasizes the role of new breakthrough technologies. Husky-class submarines are a good example of state-of-the-art weapons the Russia’s military will receive while the program is implemented. On December 20, Adm. Vladimir Korolev, the commander of the Russian Navy, reviewed the preliminary conceptual design of a fifth-generation submarine, which was developed by St. Petersburg Marine Design Bureau “Malakhite.”
Husky project design.
Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation (UAC) has announced the start of the development of a fifth-generation Husky-class stealth nuclear submarine to replace the existing Yasen-class boats. The research and development stage of the project is scheduled to be completed next year. The goal is to have a cost-effective multi-purpose nuclear submarine, with a construction time of four to four and a half years to produce 15-20 submarines totally. There are few details about the class in open sources, but whatever is already known suggests that Husky subs will be a technological breakthrough. United Ship-Building Corporation President Alexei Rakhmanov said it will be “an absolutely different submarine from the viewpoint of physical fields” to be “standardized to combine key elements of strategic and multipurpose submarines.”
Oleg Vlasov, head of the robotics sector of the Malakhit Bureau, said that the Husky-class submarine will be equipped with robotic systems able to operate in water and air. According to Deputy Navy Commander Vice Adm. Viktor Bursuk, the construction of Husky-class multi-purpose nuclear submarines is expected to begin in 2023-2024. The first Husky is to be delivered in 2025, while the last would be delivered in the 2030s.
This is a very special program expected to result in something the world has never seen before. The new class is expected to have a common hull design, a common sonar, power and propulsion systems for three variants: a new nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN), a nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN), a nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine (SSGN). The SSGN variant will incorporate a vertical launch system (VLS) payload module.
The displacement of a SSBN version, if ever built, will be larger to accommodate intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The SSGN and the SSBN variants would be added an extra hull section. The SSBN variant could be built contingent on what happens with the New START arms control treaty.
The basic attack submarine design is expected to have the following specifications: displacement: between 4,000 and 6,000 tons (about 13,800 tons submerged), length: 140m, width: 13m, draft: 9.4 m, depth: 600m, endurance: 100 days, crew: 64, service life: 25-30 years. The expected speed is between 32 to 33 knots. The boat will be capable of delivering and recovering special operations forces and their gear.
The armament suite will include 30 533m torpedoes, sea-mines and cruise missiles launched via 10 torpedo tubes. SSGN’s 8 launchers will accommodate 32 cruise missiles. The SSGN variant will also be armed with the 3M22 Zircon hypersonic anti-ship missile, which is already undergoing tests. The new missiles capable of Mach 5.0-Mach 6.0 will have a range of 250 miles, with sheer speed making it extremely difficult to intercept with existing missile defense technology. The weapon is currently in testing. It is expected to enter into production in 2018.
Russia will be the only nation in the world to launch serial production of hypersonic weapons, leaving the US far behind. Admiral Cecil Haney, the head of US Strategic Command, warned that American anti-missile and anti-aircraft defense systems would be virtually incapable of intercepting the Russian hypersonic missile. Harry J. Kazianis, Executive Editor of The National Interest,believes that such missiles could «could turn America’s supercarriers into multi-billion dollar graveyards for thousands of US sailors».
The new class will incorporate various technologies of the Borei-class as well as the Project 885-M Yasen class of SSNs. It is expected to have liquid metal cooled reactors. Improved composites and new polymers are supposed to be used throughout from the hull coating to the dive planes, rudders, stabilizers, propellers (or pump jet propulsors), drive shafts and possibly even the hulls themselves, further reducing the ship’s acoustic signature. New multi-layer composite materials still in testing will isolate working mechanisms from vibrations. The composite material has a high internal loss factor, or sound absorption properties can change when vibration occurs, completely preventing the spread of vibrational energy. Composites don’t corrode and thus wouldn’t need to be painted, reducing maintenance costs.
Husky has the torpedo tubes in the bow pointing directly forward with the sonar below it. The ship will also have long flank arrays. A modern conformal array will be installed.
Featuring lowered noise, automated control systems, reactor safety, and long-range weapons, the new fifth-generation submarine would be designed to serve the Navy for 52 years. Taking into account the technological sophistication of Russia submarines in production, such as Yasen– class, and the production capacity of Sevmash, the principal nuclear submarine shipyard, there is each and every reason to believe that the knowhow and production capacity exist to make Russia the first country in the world to have a fifth generation submarine in service.
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.—Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
