By the constant administration of lies, the media puppeteers manufacture wars, protect the super-wealthy, and destroy democracy.

STAND WITH RT.COM AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT, BECAUSE IT DOES. THE ATTACK ON DISSENTING OPINION CAN ONLY GROW MORE FIERCE UNLESS ROBUSTLY REBUKED NOW.
Long ago the British ruling class decided to attach itself to the American empire as a junior partner in crime to avoid complete irrelevance in world affairs, and to share in the spoils of the new imperialism. These recent moves—against Assange, the mean-spirited and dishonest brutal hounding of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (with some military talking openly and approvingly by many voices in the establishment of a coup if necessary), plus repeated acts of criminality in the service of Washington’s filthy agenda, from Libya to Syria and the Ukraine and beyond, including now their abject alliance to hound Russia by any means necessary, including its instruments of global information, have shown that much touted British democracy—always more self-flattering myth than reality—is now little more than a dead man walking. Send these bastards a message and make your voice heard now! Express your support for RT.com, do it in any forum you can reach; send a letter to the Times (which they will likely not print but will count); contact your local media, for what is worth, if possible and /or send a letter. Yes, I know, it is a bit like punching on a knife, but that’s the nature of our struggle against this stifling monolith slowly killing all life on our planet. —P. Greanville

By Stephen Lendman

[dropcap]T[/dropcap] …

In contrast, RT International broadcasts real news, information and analysis, especially on major geopolitical issues – why it attracts a large, growing worldwide audience, wanting journalism the way it’s supposed to be, not state-sponsored propaganda Western media scoundrels feature.

 …

On Monday, RT’s editor-in-chief  Margarita Simonyan tweeted “(o)ur (bank) accounts in Britain have been closed. All of them. ‘Decisions not to be discussed.’ Long live freedom of speech.” NatWest Bank announced the closure, effective in December. So what’s going on? Russia is disgracefully bashed in the West for maintaining its sovereign independence, free from US dominance. 

 …

NatWest is part of the largely state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland. Britain’s dirty hands almost certainly are involved in closing RT’s accounts, likely complicit with Washington. Maybe banning RT altogether in the West is next, silencing a vital voice for truth and full disclosure if ordered.

 …

Instead of supporting inviolable free expression, The Times disgracefully called RT “a Kremlin-financed mouthpiece,” claiming “its broadcasts repeatedly show the West as a sea of chaos,” citing UK broadcast regulator Ofcom unjustifiably saying it lacks impartiality.

 …

RT’s previous bank, Barclays, closed its accounts in July 2015. The Times quoted Royal United Services Institute’s Russian and European security studies assistant director Jonathan Eyal, saying “(c)ertain questions are being raised over the corporation and its sources of funding.”  He failed to explain the BBC is owned, operated and controlled by Britain’s government, serving as its mouthpiece, in contrast to RT presenting fair and balanced reporting, offering a credible alternative voice.

 …

Not according to The Times, saying it portrays the West “as grim, divided, brutal, decadent, overrun with violent immigrants and unstable (and) tends to make favorable remarks about Donald J. Trump.”

 …

Fact: RT truth-telling is polar opposite US-led Western print and electronic propaganda, why it’s unjustifiably criticized.

 …

The Times: “Most analysts interviewed by RT toe the line, and any who do not are rebuked.” What rubbish!

 …

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]’m banned on Western television and radio because my views oppose America’s imperial agenda, complicit with Britain and other rogue allies.

 …

Yet RT interviewed me a number of times, letting me speak as freely and candidly as I write on various key issues – never “rebuk(ing)” or making me “toe the line.”

The Times: “It is unclear how many viewers RT actually reaches.”

 …

Fact: According to a February 2016 comScore study of RT viewership via computers, mobile devices and YouTube worldwide, it’s reaching 49 million unique users monthly.

 …

It’s no secret why. It’s delivering what growing millions of viewers want – real news, information and analysis, polar opposite Western scoundrel media propaganda.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html  Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

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BY BINOY KAMPMARK

“The particular incident that I was involved in resulted in the POW that I captured actually being executed, murdered. Now, I can’t remember if he [the executioner] cut the cuffs off first or if he cut the cuffs off after he shot him. That’s one point I can’t remember there, because I wasn’t looking, I didn’t want to look. I turned around, and the guy was dead. He’d been shot through the forehead.”

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or Frost, investigation and prosecution would be a form of deliverance, a necessary catharsis for his years of depression and onerous guilt. His statement almost assumed that of a desperate plea: “I believe I should be punished with the full weight of the law, and justly. I do not believe this should be brushed under the carpet.”

Frost’s case is not unusual. In May this year, a former lance corporal of the Army’s elite 1st Commando Regiment, given the name Dave, found keeping a lid on his role in a raid resulting in the deaths of Afghan children, impossible. He had been charged, along with his sergeant colleague, with manslaughter by former director of military prosecutions, Brigadier Lyn McDade. “From the moment I realised there were dead children, I was horrified, numb, just struggling to grasp.”

His missions were typical, operating in conditions of killing or capturing Taliban targets. In the blood lust and fury, there were bound to be casualties, notably against civilians. The fundamental problem in this approach remains its often unreliable foundation: that of suitable intelligence.

“The intelligence we received,” claimed Corporal Geoff Evans, “was of varying quality. Sometimes it was very, very good, and other times it felt like they were throwing a dart at a map.” All the travails, in fact, of guerrilla war and insurgency.

In this specific case, the prosecutor’s views, outlined in a memorandum from September 23, 2011, identified the sergeant as the individual giving the order to detonate grenades, “an indiscriminate weapons system, into a very confined space, when they ought to have known, and during the attack knew for certain, that women and children were present.”

According to Brigadier McDade, “the evidence discloses that Sergeant J and Lance Corporal D knew for certain there were women and children in the room. They both provided statements to the inquiry officer to this effect; specifically that they could hear the women and children screaming from inside the room.”

The lance corporal did have his case dismissed, but the ADF dug in its bureaucratic heels in not formally exonerating him and the sergeant. The lance corporal also took issue with the brigadier’s assessment of his state of awareness:

“We didn’t believe there would be any women and children in that room for two reasons, that being that we had earlier found who we believed to be the family living in that compound and removed them from an earlier room. And secondly, that we were now receiving gunfire from that room and we believed that we had found the insurgents that we had been told were staying there.”

Battle field conditions, and the search for the unruly and violent on the ground as convenient scapegoats of armchair ignorance, remain perennial themes. Controlling what happens in that field is, at best, an overly confident assertion in the face of adversity.

The point of such atrocities is that they are irreversible and immutable. As Lance Corporal “Dave” explained, despite disagreeing with the assessment of alleged criminality, “When you’ve realised you’ve killed children, devastating doesn’t even begin to describe it, and I feel like I can’t fix it and I can’t atone for it. I can’t do anything to undo the damage that was done.”

Atrocity is axiomatic to the waging of war. The righteous wars, pursued with misplaced moral outrage, tend to be the worst. The post-September 11, 2001 conflicts suffer from a brutalised mix of humanitarianism and vengeance, one that has been unsparing to Australia’s soldiers, and their victims.

Instead of putting a brake on enthusiastic deployments to distant, even irrelevant theatres of conflict, Australian governments continue to engage in blind, and damaging deployments. Where the Stars and Stripes go, the Southern Cross will follow. When that happens, there will be more Lance Corporal Daves and Sergeant Frosts.

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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“Will Washington risk nuclear war to protect al-Qaida?”

Photo by quinn.anya

With Donald Trump’s bid for the White House disintegrating by the second, there is no longer even the flimsiest excuse for those who purport to be “progressives” to withhold their vote from the one party on the ballot that opposes imperial wars, the rule of the rich, and the domestic mass Black incarceration regime: the Green Party. The alternative is a very short countdown to global war with Russia and, inevitably, China, and the possible extinction of the species. The overarching issue in the impending election is not the composition of a future U.S. Supreme Court, but whether humanity will be allowed to have a future.

Hillary Clinton cannot be stopped, but she can at least be denied a sweeping mandate to plunge the planet into a new dark age – a catastrophe that is only one U.S. airstrike away, in Syria. The U.S. is poised to put its planes and missiles at the service of al-Qaida, the main jihadist army occupying the eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo. Although the Clinton campaign and most of the corporate media speak of a “siege of Aleppo” by Syrian government and Russian forces, all but 250,000 of the city’s more than 1.2 million residents live on the government-controlled side of the city, which has been shelled by jihadists entrenched in the eastern pockets for the past four years. The campaign to liberate eastern Aleppo is primarily a battle against the former al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaida affiliate that recently changed its name and will doubtless do so again, along with various smaller, supporting jihadist outfits, some of which the U.S. insists are “moderate.” Thus, Aleppo is the epicenter of the “war on terror” that the American and global public has been drafted into since 2001 — with the United States acting as defender of the very jihadists that are blamed for the 9/11 attacks.

“The campaign to liberate eastern Aleppo is primarily a battle against the former al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaida affiliate.”

What absolute madness! Once digested, the truth about the U.S. project in Syria would annihilate the legitimacy of the American ruling circles that have brought us this nightmare of depravity and betrayal, most of whom are now gathered in Hillary Clinton’s Big Tent, scheming on ways to kill some Russians [3].

The only forces that are actually battling al-Qaida are the Syrians and their allies, backed for the past year by the full strategic weight of Russia. Before the Russians brought their air force into play, the U.S. had hardly touched the main forces of ISIS, the al-Qaida offshoot, allowing the Islamic State’s tanker convoys to trade oil with Turkey under full view of overwhelming U.S. airpower. Russia’s entrance into the Syrian conflict — which is a totally legal agreement between sovereign nations, whereas the U.S. and its allies are invading aggressors under international law — revealed to the world public Washington’s true role as the superpower protector of international Islamic jihad. Most importantly, Russia’s engagement broke al-Qaida’s siege of Aleppo, which could have led to the collapse of the Syrian government and a jihadist takeover in Damascus. At that point, the U.S. and its European, Turkish and Persian Gulf Arab allies might have halted their financing and arming of al-Qaida and ISIS, and moved to occupy Syria, themselves – if they had a plan, at all. Most likely, Syria would have disintegrated into genocidal chaos, many times worse than Libya, the previous victim of America’s policy to deploy jihadists as foot soldiers of empire.

“Russia’s entrance into the Syrian conflict revealed to the world public Washington’s true role as the superpower protector of international Islamic jihad.”

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s punishment for saving Syria from being entirely overrun by western-backed jihadists and a bloodbath even greater than the half-million that have already died as a result of U.S. policy, the Russians now face direct attack from the United States. It could come any moment, and is highly likely if Clinton wins what she can claim is a resounding “mandate” in November. The “no fly zone” that Clinton wants to impose over Syria would mean war with Russia from the very second it was implemented since, under U.S. military doctrine, it requires the immediate destruction of all “enemy” air defenses [4]. That was a relatively easy assignment for NATO forces in Libya, in 2011, but Syrian airspace is now guarded by the world’s most sophisticated defense systems, manned by Russian operators, guarded by Russian Marines, and backed by Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. Will Washington risk nuclear war to protect al-Qaida? Isn’t it insane to have to ask such a question?

Of course, the U.S. is not rolling the dice on humanity’s future because of concern for the welfare of its jihadist proxies, whom it has nourished since birthing the international jihadist network in Afghanistan, in concert with Saudi Arabia, more than three decades ago. Washington is quite prepared to incinerate its pet Salafists and “Takfiris” when convenient to its larger global aims. The jihadists are simply tools for the destruction of troublesome sovereign states in the drive for global U.S. domination. Their deployment has been a bipartisan project of the permanent War Party embedded in the duopoly system. Barack Obama turned to the jihadists to rebuild the U.S. capability for “power-projection” in the region after the disastrous failure of George Bush’s massive American “boots on the ground” gambit in Iraq. Obama, with Secretary of State Clinton urging him on, began the renewed American offensive in the Arab world with his own “Shock and Awe” bombardment of Libya, providing air cover and arms for various Islamist factions, including al-Qaida. Five years later, Libya is a broken country.

“The ‘no fly zone’ that Clinton wants to impose over Syria would mean war with Russia from the very second it was implemented.”

Syria was a much harder target. In a super-heated cauldron of foreign arms and money, the various jihadist groups formed their own alliances. A split within the al-Qaida family produced ISIS, intent on establishing its own caliphate regardless of its benefactors’ political and battlefield priorities. If there ever were any armed “moderates” — i.e., non-jihadists — arrayed against the Assad government, they were militarily insignificant. It was a jihad war, backed by a super-power in alliance with al-Qaida.

By 2012, analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency were alarmed that the United States and its allies seemed to be purposely creating the conditions for jihadists to establish a caliphate [5] in parts of Syria and Iraq. A year later, ISIS — the “rogue” jihadist outfit — announced its presence in the region. It was already quite clear that the other al-Qaida army, al-Nusra, was the strongest “rebel” force in Syria. So, when the Syrian government was blamed for a chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds near Damascus, in August of 2013, President Obama was forced to confront the consequences of his jihadist war. If he followed through on his threat to directly attack the Syrian military — an assault that would likely destroy the Syrian state — then there would be nothing to stop the two al-Qaidas from taking over the country.

Obama blinked. He called off the air attack, and took up Russia’s diplomacy for the peaceful destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons capability. For the next two years, Obama appeared to be content to keep the war going, grinding down the Syrian government and its allies, piling up the body count, but resisting pressures from the War Party to bomb the Assad government out of existence.

“If there ever were any armed ‘moderates’ — i.e., non-jihadists — arrayed against the Assad government, they were militarily insignificant.”

Then Russia entered the picture with all four feet last year, and upped the ante. Obama and others in his administration and within the U.S. military are clearly still resisting the demands of the Total War Party, now headquartered in Hillary Clinton’s Big Tent — despite the U.S. bombing raid that killed more than 80 Syrian soldiers on the front lines with ISIS, last month, an alleged “mistake” carried out by mutineers [6] that brought the world much closer to all-out war.

Donald Trump never had more than an outside chance of winning the presidency. His opposition to “free trade” and “regime change” — NOT his overt racism — ensured that U.S. imperial ruling circles would unite behind Hillary Clinton, giving her an insurmountable advantage in money and media.

The Trump campaign is in its death throes, and Hillary cannot be stopped. But she can be slowed down in her rush to war. Those “progressives” that were resigned to cast their vote for Hillary out of fear of Trump have no reason to tremble at the prospect of an orange presidency. Rather, they should be terrified of Hillary Clinton getting the kind of landslide that she will interpret as a mandate for war with Russia – a war in defense of al-Qaida in Syria.

According to the New York Times [7], Clinton likes to tell crowds, “I am the last thing standing between you and the Apocalypse.” But, in truth, she represents the greatest threat of apocalypse in the world today.

Vote Green, wherever you live, if you want to keep on living.

Links

[1] http://blackagendareport.com/apocalypse_hillary

[2] http://blackagendareport.com/taxonomy/term/6941

[3] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/ex-cia-chief-who-endorsed-clinton-calls-for-killing-iranians-and-russians-in-syria/

[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-usa-pentagon-idUSTRE7214EX20110302

[5] http://www.globalresearch.ca/defense-intelligence-agency-create-a-salafist-principality-in-syria-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/5451216

[6] http://blackagendareport.com/us_rulers_split_over_syria

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/hillary-clinton-campaign-final-weeks.html?_r=0

[8] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

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