Looks like we will make it to Dec 31, 2022. Will we make it to December 31, 2023?
This question is not hyperbole. I would even argue that this is the single most important question for at least the entire northern hemisphere.
I have been warning that Russia is preparing for a fullscale war since at least 2014. Putin basically said just that in his recent speech before the Russian Defense Ministry Board. If you have not seen this video, you really should watch it, it it will give you a direct insight into how the Kremlin thinks and what it is preparing for. Here is that video again:
I will assume that you have watched that video and that I don’t need to prove to you that Russia is gearing out for a massive war, including a nuclear one.
Foreign Minister Lavrov has publicly declared that “unnamed officials from the Pentagon actually threatened to conduct a ‘decapitation strike’ on the Kremlin…What we are talking about is the threat of the physical elimination of the head of the Russian state, (…) If such ideas are actually being nourished by someone, this someone should think very carefully about the possible consequences of such plans.”
So, we have the following situation:
For Russia this war is clearly, undeniably and officially an existential one. To dismiss this reality would be the height of folly. When the strongest nuclear power on the planet declares, repeatedly, that this is an existential war everybody ought to really take it seriously and not go into deep denial.
For the US Neocons this is also an existential war: if Russia wins, then NATO loses and, therefore, the US loses too. Which means that all those SOBs who for months fed everybody nonsense about Russia loosing the war to the general public will be held responsible for the inevitable disaster.
So much will depend on whether US Americans, especially those in power, are willing to die in solidarity with the “crazies in the basement” or not. Right now it sure looks like they are. Don’t count on the EU, they have long given up any agency. Talking to them simply makes no sense.
Which might explain Medvedev’s recent words “Alas, there is nobody in the West we could deal with about anything for any reason (..) is the last warning to all nations: there can be no business with the Anglo-Saxon world because it is a thief, a swindler, a card-sharp that could do anything.”
Russia can do many things, but it cannot liberate the USA from the grip of the Neocons. That is something which only US Americans can do.
And here we hit a vicious circle:
The US political system is most unlikely to be effectively challenged from within, big money runs everything, including the most advanced propaganda system in history (aka the “free media”) and the population is kept uninformed and brainwashed. And yes, of course, a major defeat in a war against Russia would shake this system so hard that it would be impossible to conceal the magnitude of the disaster (think “Kabul on steroids”). And that is precisely why the Neocons cannot allow that to happen because this defeat would trigger a domino effect which would quickly involve the truth about 9/11 and, after that, all the myths and lies the US society has been based on for decades (JFK anybody?).
There are, of course, plenty of US Americans who fully understand that. But how many of them are in a real position of power to influence US decision-making and outcomes? The real question is whether there still are enough patriotic forces in the Pentagon, or the letter soup agencies, to send the Neocons back down into the basement they crawled out of after the 9/11 false flag or not?
Right now it sure looks like all the positions of power in the US are held by Neolibs, Neocons, RINOs and other ugly creatures, yet it is also undeniable that people like, say, Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard are reaching a lot of people who “get it”. This *has* to include REAL liberals and REAL conservatives whose loyalty is not to a gang of international thugs but to their own country and their own people.
Will that be that enough to break through the wall of lies and propaganda?
I hope so, but I am not very optimistic.
First, Andrei Martyanov is absolutely spot on when he constantly decries the crass incompetence and ignorance of the US ruling class. And I very much share his frustration. We both see where this is all headed and all we can do is warn, warn and warn again. I realize that is is hard to believe in the idea that a nuclear superpower like the US is run by a gang of incompetent and ignorant thugs, but that IS the reality and simply denying it won’t make it go away.
Second, at least so far, the US general public has not (yet) felt the full effects of the collapse of the US-controlled financial and economic system. So flag-waving “morans” can still hope that a war against Russia will look like the turkey shoot “Desert Storm” was.
It won’t.
The real question here is whether the only way to wake up the brainwashed flag-waving “morans” is by means of a nuclear explosion over their heads or not?
“Go USA” is a mental condition which has been injected into the minds of millions of US Americans for many decades and it will take either a lot of time, or some truly dramatic events, to bring these folks back to reality.
Third, the US ruling elites are clearly going into deep denial. All this silly talk about US Patriot missiles or F-16s changing the course of the war in infantile and naive. Frankly this would all be rather comical if it was not so dangerous in its potential consequences. What will happen once the single Patriot missile battery is destroyed and the F-16s shot down?
How soon will the West run out of Wunderwaffen?
On a conceptual “escalation scale” what would be the next step up from Patriots and F-16s?
Tactical nukes?
Considering the rather idiotic notion that a “tactical” nuke is somehow fundamentally different from a “strategic” nuke irrespective of how it is used and where it is used is extremely dangerous.
I submit that the fact that the US ruling class is seriously contemplating both a “limited” use of “tactical” nukes and “decapitating strikes” is a very good indicator of the fact that the US is running out of Wunderwaffen and that the Neocons are desperate.
And to those who might be tempted to accuse me of hyperbole or paranoid delusions I will say the following:
This war is NOT, repeat, NOT about the Ukraine (or Poland or the three Baltic statelets). At its absolute minimum this is a war about the future of Europe. Fundamentally it is a war about the complete reorganization of our planet’s international order. I would even argue that the outcome of this war will have a bigger impact that either WWI or WWII. The Russians clearly understand this (see video above if you doubt that).
And so do the Neocons, even if they don’t speak about it.
The current situation is much more dangerous than even the Cuban missile crisis or the standoff in Berlin. At least then both sides openly admitted that the situation was really dangerous. This time around, however, the ruling elites of the West are using their formidable PSYOP/propaganda capability to conceal the true scope what is really going on. If every citizen of the US (and EU) understood that there is a nuclear and conventional cross-hairs painted on his/her head things might be different. Alas, this is clearly not the case, hence the non-existent peace movement and the quasi consensus about pouring tens of BILLIONS of dollars into the Ukrainian black hole.
Right now, the crazies are playing around with all sorts of silly ideas, including booting Russia off the UNSC (not gonna happen, since both Russia and China have veto power) or even creating a “peace conference” about the Ukraine without Russia’s participation (in a remake of the “friends of Syria” and “friends of Venezuela” thingie). Well, good luck with that! Apparently Guaido and Tikhanovskaia are not enough to discourage the Neocons and they are now repeating the exact same nonsense with “Ze”.
So, will we make it to December 31, 2023?
Maybe, but this is by no means sure. Clearly, this is not an assumption the Kremlin makes, hence the truly immense strengthening of all of Russia’s strategic deterrence capabilities (both nuclear and conventional).
God willing, the old adage “si vis pacem, para bellum” will save the day, as Russia is very clearly prepared for any time of conflict, including a nuclear one. China will also get there soon, but it is likely that 2023 will see some kind of end to the Ukrainian war: either a Russian victory in the Ukraine or a full-scale continental war which Russia will also win, (albeit at a much higher cost!). So by the time the Chinese will be truly ready (they probably need another 2-5 years) the world will be a very different place.
For all these reasons I submit that 2023 might well be one of the most important years in human history. How many of us will actually survive it is an open question.
A few comments first. For starters, I lost any trust I might have had for Tulsi Gabbard when she endorsed that ultra-fake liberal Bernie Sanders. Second, I have taken the decision not to comment on US internal politics on this blog, but in this case I think that rather than seeing Gabbard’s video as an internal US politics phenomenon, I see it as a sign of the amazing state of decay of the USA as a nation: when a (supposed) left liberal takes on the talking points of (supposed) conservatives, something major is happening, especially when you have a (supposed) liberal President in the White House. Finally, Gabbard is way, waaaaaaaay too smart not to see that the Dem Party is a political Titanic and no matter how loud the “propaganda orchestra” plays, that ship is sinking very, very fast. Time to leave it!
One more thing: I am willing to bet that Gabbard is planning to run for President in 2024 and considering the freak show on the Dem party side, her real opponent will be either Trump or Desantis. But look at her talking points – they are conservative through and through, which means that her running can takes votes away from the GOP candidates. Thus it is possible that while ostentatiously breaking away from the Dem party and the freaks running it, she will end up taking just enough votes on the right to give the victory to the Neocons running the Dem party (the GOP is also run by Neocons known as RINOs – Republican In Name Only).
These are just possibilities, and only time will show if Gabbard has had a real change of heart. She did not apologize for being a loyal Sanders/Biden supporter, but at least she did accurately describe the Dem party for what it is: an profoundly evil gang of freaks run by warmongering, racist, Neocon puppeteers.
Again, I am not interested in internal US politics which I describe as a useless fistfight between pilots for the control of a flight deck in an aircraft with no engines or even wings! However, the fact that the pilots are fighting shows that they realize that their situation is desperate. Can you recall another instance of a well-known politicians slamming the door on his/her party while that party controls both Congress and the White House?
Please think about this while listening to Tulsi Gabbard. And yes, it would be wonderful if she was for real. I have my (big) doubts but there is plenty of time before 2024 to get a better feel for what this is all about.
أقر السفير الأميركي السابق لدى موسكو مايكل ماكفول، أمس، بأنّ الدبلوماسيين الأميركيين الذين وعدوا كييف بالانضمام إلى حلف “الناتو” على مدى السنوات الماضية “كانوا يكذبون عليها».
ورداً على سؤال حول كذب واشنطن على المسؤولين في كييف بشأن آفاق انضمام أوكرانيا إلى حلف “الناتو”، أجاب ماكفول: “نعم، نعم، هذا هو العالم الواقعي».
في المقابل، علقت المتحدثة الرسمية باسم وزارة الخارجية الروسية ماريا زاخاروفا على تصريحات السفير الأميركي بالقول: “كما تقول الحكاية الشعبية “على خطى فرقة بريمن”.. وهنا سقط البنطال الأنيق عن الحمار ورأى الجميع ذيله العادي”.
يذكر أنّ الرئيس الأوكراني، فلاديمير زيلنسكي، قال في آذار/مارس الماضي، بأنّ على «أوكرانيا التصالح مع فكرة مفادها أنها لن تكون جزءاً من حلف شمال الأطلسي».
وأضاف زيلنسكي: «لقد سمعنا طوال أعوام، بشأن الأبواب المفتوحة المفترضة، لكننا سمعنا أيضاً أنه لا يمكننا الانضمام إليه. هذا صحيح، ونحن في حاجة إلى الاعتراف بذلك».
وفي سياق متصل، رأت عضو الكونغرس السابقة تولسي غابارد أن عدم وجود أهداف أميركية واضحة في أوكرانيا قد يؤدي إلى تكرار السيناريو الذي واجهته بلادها في العراق أو أفغانستان.
وأوضحت غابارد، في تصريح لقناة “فوكس نيوز”، أن “إدارة الرئيس جو بايدن فشلت في تحديد المهام في هذا الصراع”، مشيرة إلى أنه “يمكننا أن ننظر إلى أفغانستان والعراق، وهو مثال حديث جداً لما يحدث عندما لا تكون لديك مهمة محددة”.
وتابعت غابارد أن «المواطنين الأميركيين قد شعروا بالفعل بآثار العقوبات، المتمثلة في ارتفاع أسعار السلع الأساسية»، في إشارة إلى العقوبات الغربية، التي قادتها الولايات المتحدة ضد موسكو.
ولفتت إلى أنّ “الشعب الأميركي له الحق في معرفة كم تكلفه أوكرانيا، وما الذي سيحصل عليه نتيجة اهتمام واشنطن بدول ما بعد الاتحاد السوفياتي”.
While Joe Biden has faced some mild Congressional pushback for bombing the Iraq-Syria border, Tulsi Gabbard says her former colleagues are ignoring the larger issue: the ongoing US dirty war on Syria.
After a decade of proxy warfare that empowered Al Qaeda and ISIS, the US is now occupying one-third of Syria and imposing crippling sanctions that are crushing Syria’s economy and preventing reconstruction. While Gabbard has been vilified for her stance on Syria, many top White House officials — including Joe Biden himself — have already acknowledged the same facts that she has called out.
Aaron Maté plays clips of Biden and some of his most senior aides admitting to the horrific realities of the US dirty war on Syria, and argues that Gabbard only stands apart in being wiling to criticize it.
Featuring video clips from: Tulsi Gabbard, former Democratic Congressmember; President Joe Biden; Brett McGurk, National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa; Martin Dempsey, former Joint Chiefs chairman; Rob Malley, Special Envoy for Iran; John Kerry, Special Envoy for Climate & former Secretary of State; former President Donald Trump; Alena Douhan, UN Special Rapporteur on Sanctions; Dana Stroul, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East; Vice President Kamala Harris.
The first rule of screenwriting, or in fact any fiction writing, is, “Conflict doesn’t create character, it reveals it.” People are who they are and we only find out what they are made of when tested to their limit.
This is the essence of all good storytelling — create characters who rise to be role models for us as we navigate our way through a Universe hostile to our very existence.
While I hesitate to ascribe such noble ideas as ‘character’ to any politician there are a few out there who have shown great potential. I’ve written about all of them at various times in the past few years.
Matteo Salvini in Italy, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Russian President Vladmir Putin, Nigel Farage in the UK and even a flawed figure like Donald Trump are all examples of men who history will remember as having stood up when needed.
At times each of them tried to move heaven and earth to stop the degradation of society, culture and the human condition in the face of an implacable enemy – communist ideologues bent on forcing humanity into submission to their will.
But with the Supreme Court abdicating its primary responsibility under the Constitution last week citing itself in an unconstitutional ruling from 1925 (H/T Martin Armstrong for this) means it is over for Trump and the U.S. to stop the final transformation of the U.S. into an oligarchy in reality if not in spirit.
There is no mechanism for states to redress grievances of any import now. What was left of the compact between equal sovereign states died with a whimper in the halls of the SCOTUS and to thunderous applause by the BlueCheckMarked Sneetches on Twitter.
This means that a stolen election will in all probability stand up come Inauguration Day. The entrenched oligarchy has won this round.
Fine. But it doesn’t mean the efforts of the men I just listed will have been in vain. In fact, quite the opposite.
Because what it has done is revealed the character of everyone involved. What they do next now that they have the power they’ve always craved to transform America will determine what people who have principles other than raw power will do.
We’re beginning to see that response form up. This election isn’t over but the positioning for the future a post-republic America has already begun.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Ben Franklin@RepThomasMassie & I intro'd 'Protect Our Civil Liberties Act' (HR8970) to repeal the so-called Patriot Act & end illegal government surveillance pic.twitter.com/QEB8gKxFKu
Since election day Tulsi Gabbard, a tweener between Gen-X and a Millennial, has been a non-stop source of, admittedly, Quixotic bills to put paid her insurgent campaign in the Democratic primaries as someone interested in fixing real foundational problems with the country and the bipartisan corruption in Washington.
She continues to reach across party lines introducing legislation which form the basis for a populist election strategy targeting the 2022 and 2024 elections.
From whistleblower protection to repealing Section 230 of the CDA to the bill in the tweet above co-sponsored with libertarian Thomas Massie, Gabbard is an example of what the future holds for the political future once this meta-stable, oligarchic rule-by-men period of America is over.
It’s clear that Gabbard wants no part of being a part of the Democratic Party that’s in power now. That’s why she didn’t run for re-election and I suspect these moves are all laying the groundwork for a return to politics in 2024 as an independent or Sanders-like outsider.
I’ve been writing for years now that our problems stem from an unwillingness of the older generations of politicians to give up power. If anything, they persist because they are owned by the forces that put them there in the first place to pull off this betrayal of the people that has been in the works for decades.
And they will stay in place until they are no longer needed. Just ask Diane Feinstein who is now being sacrificed to make way for the transition team to finish the job she started.
I always saw Trump as Gen-X’s moment to pull a Ronald Reagan and say, “Mr. Trump, tear down this Swamp!” but the real story is that Gen-X is allowing Obama to do that tearing down and hand what’s left back to the old monied elites.
The fight now is between the cross-currents within Gen-X. Equal parts commie and libertarian the one uniting principle is a desire to reform the old order.
It is my read that people like Gabbard, Massie, Sen. Rand Paul and a few others see the problem. Gabbard’s a leftist, but she’s no doctrinaire commie. That makes her and interesting pivot figure around which a coalition to retake control or build back better the U.S. can be formed. This will be necessary once Obama’s incoming crew of vandals overreaches and are thrown out on their asses.
Regardless of the outcome in the coming months and years the changing of the guard is close at hand. Post-Trump America will look very different than pre-Trump. Trump was the apotheosis of the Boomers.
His legacy will be forcing the Deep State into the open, bringing the fight against them out of the shadows.
Trump, however, doesn’t represent the future of America. He’s weighed down with the mythology of an America that never really existed.
That mythology, however, is something worth building on not allowing Obama and The Vandals to tear down. I believe Gabbard understands this.
I also believe at least 75 million Americans understand this.
For the American people to not be frog-marched into the dystopian nightmare of Klaus Schwab’s dreams it will be the revealed character of the Gabbards, Massies and Pauls to lead once the violence reaches a crescendo.
Make no mistake, there will be violence. It is inevitable because the people who voted for Trump will not be placated with UBI or settle down as their voices are silenced.
The fraudsters will forever be looking over their shoulders, lashing out at minor opposition as traitors who need to be put down.
Here we are presented with a staged picture with three white privilege guys straight out of central casting for the latest Obama-produced ‘documentary’ on equality coming to Netflix in the spring.
This is your “Unity” agenda from the most statist of state house organs, NPR, the echo chamber of choice for the low-information ‘informed’ shitlib. This is the face of the Biden/Harris administration.
This is just the beginning of what we can look forward to when the GOP loses both seats in the Georgia run-off and the Democrats, despite historically-low support and engagement with actual voters, run the table.
Once ensconced they will persecute their political enemies in ways only Alex Jones has contemplated to this point. And it will be this escalation that will reveal the quality of the character of these next-generation politicians.
They will have the choice, leader of men or cowards. The republic we’ve known is dead. Maybe that’s a good thing. But what comes after won’t be up to the people who just destroyed it. That job is the next generation’s job. Their moment is coming in the next couple of years. They will have to be ready.
Fox ‘News’ host Tucker Carlson effectively abandoned the Republican Party on June 19th as “too weak,” and urged “it’s time to find new leaders.” If he were attempting to start a third-party run for the White House, this rant would be ideal, especially because, as of noon two days later, on June 21st, it had nearly 1.4 million views and nearly 20 thousand viewer-comments — overwhelmingly favorable. Here are its highlights:
Jun 19, 2020, 1,389,994 views and 20K comments, overwhelmingly favorable — [all as of noon on Jun 21]
A supporter of the Democratic Party is (1:30) someone who “wants more foreign wars and enjoys sucking up to banks … You vote for Republicans to protect you from this.” Confederate statues in Old Dixie were removed because of (2:00) “illiterate vandals.” Carlson (3:00) condemned the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, who had said “racism is America’s Achilles’ heel. It has been embedded into our culture for 400 years” as “accusing America of being ‘irredeemably racist’,” as if such an allegation shouldn’t even be published but instead banned. He condemned “so many on the right” for doing “exactly the same thing” (alleging that America is “irredeemably racist” or “racism is America’s Achilles’ heel. It has been embedded into our culture for 400 years”). They “did everything possible to accommodate the demands of … rioters. .. They didn’t blame the rioters, they blamed the cops.” “Ordinary Americans came under attack for the color of their skin, actual racism [against Whites]. … And yet no Republicans rose to defend them.” Carlson (5:25-) condemned Trump and said that Obama would have crushed the rioters, not like Trump and the Republicans who were (7:50-end) “too weak. … The crisis has revealed the truth. Now we know who they are. It could not be clearer. And now it’s time to find new leaders.”
Tucker Carlson has, perhaps, been running for the U.S. Presidency ever since at least the time when he started to become an advocate of the anti-regime-change-war candidate for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Tulsi Gabbard.
Here is another Fox PR for Gabbard on 10 March 2020.
All of those were Republican Fox ‘News’ pumping the only anti-neoconservative (or anti-imperialist) Democratic Presidential candidate, and Tucker Carlson was the leader of that anti-neocon thrust, as if the Republican Party weren’t just as neocon (supportive of U.S. imperialism) as is the Democratic Party.
In all of the polling of Democratic primary voters, Gabbard never received an average level of support that was above 3%; so, she was one of the least appealing candidates to Democratic Party voters. If anything, her frequent appearances on Republican Party ‘news’-media reduced instead of increased her support from Democratic Party voters. Clearly, the Democratic Party is strongly neoconservative, not only from the donor class, but also from the voter class.
Carlson has therefore been running (if he is) in order to appeal to Republican and independent Whites who support police (even racist ones), consider racial integrationists to be mainly “illiterate vandals” instead of peaceful demonstrators, and feel that a “strong” President would put down any violent demonstrators by prohibiting the demonstrations and cracking the heads of anyone who would demonstrate against barbarically racist cops.
What this might suggest to be the case is that Carlson is planning to run third-party to appeal to the most disadvantaged Whites who compete against Blacks. As the February 2020 Brookings study “Examining the Black-white wealth gap” said, “At $171,000, the net worth of a typical [median] white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a [median] Black family ($17,150) in 2016.” However, since the numbers of people increase at the lower end of the wealth-distribution and decrease very sharply at the higher end of it, there are a great many poor Whites in the U.S., and Carlson is pitching to them. Poor Whites receive none of the extra consideration from the Government that all Blacks can on many federal and state “affirmative action” and other programs, and they therefore compete against black applicants at a disadvantage on the existing legal basis.
Regarding Carlson’s alleged opposition to U.S. imperialism, Trump himself spoke not much differently from today’s Carlson on that, but it has merely become a Republican talking-point against the neoconservative Barack Obama’s policies, just as Obama himself talked up a storm against George W. Bush’s neoconservative policies while running against Hillary Clinton in 2008. However, the American people have never really rejected neoconservatism. For example, Americans have no objection to the U.S. Government invading a country that never so much as threatened to invade the U.S. During 1992-2003, Gallup kept polling Americans on the question “Would you favor or oppose invading Iraq with U.S. ground troops” and consistently there were 2-to-1 to 3-to-1 margins saying “Favor” instead of “Oppose” on that. Moreover, during Gallup’s 7 pollings on that question during December 2002 and January 2003, the detailed demographic breakdowns showed that every category of Americans except post-college graduates, Democrats, Liberals, and Blacks were in favor of invading. That’s because invading Iraq, and even being neoconservative, were considered ‘Republican’ policies then. Americans have no problem with the Government’s committing the international war-crime of “aggressive war.” None whatsoever.
It is quite interesting to observe how many commentators are completely misreading the current race riots or compare them with previous race riots in the history of the US. I suppose that by telling themselves that these latest riots are “just like” or “not nearly as bad” as past US race riots they try to reassure themselves by maintaining the illusion that what is taking place now is of limited and/or temporary magnitude. It is not.
No, it is not “just like” the past
Oh sure, there is plenty of racial violence (by all sides) in US history, from the very inception of the US as a slave-owning society, to the immense number of lynchings (which took place in the North as much as in the South, those interested ought to read “At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America” by Philip Dray) to the murderous “Tulsa Massacre” which even saw Black neighborhoods bombed from the air! And while those who point out that there have been many race riots in the past are correct, they are fundamentally missing the key fact that the current “race riots” are not “just” race riots, but the result of many more complex and multi-layered phenomena. The best proof of this qualitatively new nature of the riots is that they have not only spread across the US like wildfire, but that they also spread to Europe and in Asia and Oceania (see here and here). Even some Japanese joined this decidedly gaijin phenomenon!
So what is going on here?
Unless we assume that Danes, Belgians or New Zealanders have been personally victimized by racist US cops, we have to admit that what triggered this worldwide rash of protests is not a first-hand personal trauma, but only second-hand exposure to a very specific narrative spread with quasi total uniformity by the legacy corporate ziomedia. I call this narrative “Black is Beautiful“.
The pernicious “Black if Beautiful” ideological dogma
Black is beautiful began in the US in the 1960 and it has since become an integral part of the western doxa, an ideological dogma which cannot be challenged without immediately resulting in an accusation of “racism”. Simultaneously, another ideological dogma was developed, the one which claims that “all races are equal”, but without ever really defining the terms “race” or the term “equal”. Interestingly, the notions that Black is beautiful or races are all equal are never demonstrated, only proclaimed, and any insistence that these notions be factually substantiated also results in an immediate accusation of “racism”.
It is not my purpose today to assess the merits (or lack thereof) of this narrative. But what I want to point out is this: any narrative which cannot be challenged or questioned without immediately being branded “racist” is an extremely intolerant one. It is also obviously a narrative which fears any scrutiny for empirical evidence. Yet, those who otherwise denounce the “lying media” or say things like “I don’t believe it unless the government denies it” or “how do you know when a politician is lying? when his lips are moving” seem to be more than willing to uncritically accept these ideological dogmas.
Furthermore, one key tenet of any honest quest for true moral values is that it be equally applied to all (if it ain’t – then it is, by definition, hypocrisy). Yet just try to mention something like “White is Beautiful” or, say, support the idea of a “National Association for the Advancement of White People” or wear a Tshirt with “White Lives Matter” on it and you will will be instantly branded a racist. Why? Because far from promoting real “equality” the modern liberal ideology really preaches Black superiority – a special status for Blacks which cannot be symmetrically granted to White (or any other) people. Furthermore, since most people agree “that beauty is in the eye of the beholder“, we can immediately conclude that the thesis “Black is Beautiful” is really an opinion, not an established fact. Presumably, it would imply the right to the opinion that “Black is not beautiful”, right? LOL, good luck with that! Again, this is a clear case of bias/hypocrisy and, most crucially, the categorical rejection of any dissenting opinion. Finally, what does the term “Black” even mean here? Does it only apply to US and Sub-Saharan Blacks (apparently so), or does it also include, say, Ethiopians, Somalis, Tamils or even Australian Aborigines? Does it also apply to dark skinned Greeks or Sicilians? Yet again, we see that the category “Black” is entirely meaningless (as it the category “White” or “Yellow” – by the way!).
Those who have read me in the past know that I don’t even accept the notion of “race” which, in my opinion, is wholly non-scientific. I also loathe the so-called “White nationalism” of the Alt-Rights & Co. which I consider as a rather primitive form of racism (which I defined under #4 here) and even a whitewashing of the Nazi ideology which is “pushed” by the deep-state (for details, please see my article here on this topic). Yet, following my previous article on this topic, I still had a few knuckleheads accusing me of, what else, “racism”. I think of these people as “pachinko brains”(“payazzo brains” would also work): they take each idea they come across as an “ideological ball” and they immediately assume that it absolutely *must* fall within one of a very limited set of categories. For them the simply fact of saying, for example, “the thesis about racial equality has never been properly defined, never mind proven” can only mean one thing: the person saying so is a racist. Period. No other options possible. What they obviously miss is that a person which does not even accept the notion of “race” cannot be a “racist”, but who cares about these logical niceties, right? Virtue-signaling is much, much more important than facts or logic, at least for pachinko-brains.
I strongly believe that the western media, especially the US media (Hollywood/Amazon/Neflix/etc) have literally brainwashed much of the poorly educated youth (and that is an understatement!) into a weird form of Black-anything worship, a cult-like certitude that everything Black deserves a grateful standing ovation. Hence the sudden appearance of Black cowboys, Black Celts and Vikings and even of the Black Knights of the Round Table who, apparently, were also Black. There is even a new term created for this kind of “creative re-writing of history”: color-blind casting. I am awaiting the first appearance of Black “Snow-Black” (as opposed to Snow-White) with impatience…
The Empire is universally hated, and not just for its (very real) racism
This would all be rather harmless and even comical if it weren’t for the “other side of the ideological coin”: the AngloZionist Empire has totally and comprehensively lost any kind of moral or political authority, both in the US and in the EU (as well as in the 5 Eyes nations and other US colonies like Germany or Japan). In the past, the AngloZionist Empire was just as evil as it is today, but at least it had the means to provide a high degree of material welfare to its citizens, but now that the Empire is falling apart and in a major economic crisis, more and more people are turning their rage against their own government or, maybe even more accurately, against the obscenely wealthy ruling classes which have a total control of the US and/or EU political scene.
Remember how George Orwell wrote in his masterpiece 1984 “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever“? I believe that a lot of people, Black and White, felt something similar when they saw the appalling footage of the slow murder of George Floyd by a gang of clearly stupid White cops. Yes, the image itself did not show Orwell’s boot, but the way that cop was crushing his knee into the neck of Floyd sent the same message “resistance is futile, we will crush you“. And many alienated and disenfranchised people (Black and White) felt a profound sense of outrage and even rage, hence the explosion of riots worldwide.
So where do we go from here?
Simply put, things are not going to get better. Neither the US (as the host of the Empire) nor the Empire itself (which is a parasite living off the US) are in any condition to reform themselves. This train has left a very long time ago (and it appears that 80% of US Americans agree with that). As long as the Empire (thought of as “The West”) still had some credibility left, it could at least pretend to be willing to right many undeniable wrongs without subverting itself in the process. After all, the best way to control a potentially dangerous opposition is to infiltrate it and then redirect it in a safe direction (that is basically the main role given to the Left wing of the Democratic Party and its pretend-revolutionaries leaders like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard: a glorified safety valve). Furthermore, the entire BLM movement – being both racist and violent – has exactly zero potential, even partially, to reform the Western society (abolishing police departments does not qualify). This does not mean, however, that it cannot greatly contribute to the final collapse of the Empire. After all, what we see today is that all the symbols of power of this society (politicians, cops, corporations, religious leaders, etc.) are “taking a knee” when faced with what any mentally sane society would immediately recognize as a textbook case of criminal rioting. And when one politician dares to appeal for a full restoration of law and order, he gets vilified along with the editor who dared to post it. In other words,
The Empire is taking a knee
This is not unlike what happened to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s when basically the entire ruling elite felt that it had lost any will to stand up against the opposition and when it became trendy to bash everything Soviet (much of which very much deserved such bashing, but not everything!). That state of affairs led to, first, the collapse of the soviet society Soviet Union in 1991 and, second, the collapse of the Russian society in 1993. The Soviet Union, just like the United States, was born from a bloodbath and for decades the Soviet leaders could use their police/security forces, and even the military, to crush any dissent, as in what happened in Novocherkassk massacre in 1962. Yet by 1991 and 1993 even the KGB special forces refused to take any action against the demonstrators. Why? Because by 1990 the Soviet Empire had also completely “taken a knee” before (a completely imagined and non-existing) the West just as the West today is “taking a knee” before (a completely imagined and non-existing Wakanda-like) Africa. Considering the evils which the West has wrought upon the African continent in general, and Sub-Saharan Africa especially, there is some karmic justice at work here, but this will be of very little consolation for all the people (irrespective of race) who are now suffering from the criminal mayhem of the BLM-inspired mobs (or from the violence of the police forces for that matter!).
So what can decent people do next?
Well, for one thing we don’t have to chose between White and Black racism. In fact, the only logical (and moral) stance today is to reject any and all forms of racism, very much including the Hollywood-promoted anti-White (and, I would add, anti-family, anti-male and anti-Christian) and pro-Black racism. And, crucially, we need to reject anti-White racism not because there is such a thing as a “White race” out there, but because the current anti-racist ideology is every bit as oppressive and intolerant as the racist anti-Black (and not only!) ideology of the heydays of the western Empire. The enemy of my enemy is NOT always my friend and between White-supremacists and Black-supremacists, the only morally correct choice is to categorically reject any and all forms of supremacism, even and especially the one which happens to be promoted by those who oppress us all: the (multi-ethnic) oppressive ruling classes of the Empire.
So let the Empire’s leaders take a knee if they want to: let them show their cowardice and hypocrisy.
We don’t have to. Yes, it takes much more courage to speak against the prevailing ideological dogmas than to meekly parrot the official narrative. That is the price to be paid for true, inner, freedom.
RT just posted an article entitled “Sanders joins Biden livestream to give full-throated ENDORSEMENT” which begins like this:
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders made a surprising appearance on former Vice President joe Biden’s livestream to give the rival for the Democrat presidential nomination an enthusiastic endorsement against President Donald Trump.
Denouncing Trump as a “racist, sexist, homophobe” who “lies all the time,” Sanders announced he was now supporting Biden’s presidential bid. The self-described democratic socialist had suspended his campaign last week, saying he would stay on the ballot to influence party policy at the convention – but apparently changed his mind on Monday.
“I am asking all Americans — I’m asking every Democrat, I’m asking every independent, I’m asking a lot of Republicans — to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy which I endorse,” Sanders said.
Finally that SOB showed his true face, the face of an ultimate fake. His appeal to identity politics (“racist, sexist, homophobe”) also shows were his REAL values are, and that sure ain’t Socialism!
In the past, Bernie already showed his true face when he endorsed Hillary or when he backed the Israeli murderous attack on Lebanon (which, glory be to God, resulted in the “Divine Victory” of Hezbollah and arguably one of the worst defeats in modern military history for the Zionist entity).
I don’t like Trump any more than Bernie does, but I also realize that Trump is probably the main reason why we did not have a major war involving the USA (yet?), whereas Hillary and Biden are the ultimate pseudo-liberal war-mongers. I can understand somebody hating Trump and voting for a real pro-peace candidate, but being anti-Trump and pro-Biden makes exactly *zero* sense.
Yet both Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders did exactly that.
This proves their total hypocrisy which is now simply undeniable.
This entire debacle just shows that what the USA needs is not a different, putatively better, president, but what the US State Department calls “regime change”.
I am not a Socialist, but I do know Socialism (I took the time to actually *study* Marxism-Leninism) and I have always felt offended when US Americans referred to Bernie, or even Obama, as “Socialists”. This is utterly ridiculous and has no connection to reality. There are NO real Socialists (of whatever variety) amongst US politicians and only a terminally brainwashed population can mistake folks like Obama or Bernie for “Socialists”. Heck, some US Americans even believe that government bailouts of major corporation are also evidence that the US government is “Socialist”! The lack of political education of most US Americans is nothing short of amazing.
Now you know why Socialism (nevermind Marxism or Dialectical Materialism) is never taught in the USA, not even at a college level (and when it is, it is mostly fake; Michael Parenti would be a pretty good teacher, but he is one guy in a huge system, so nobody hears his voice).
Okay so now we know that the pseudo-liberal pseudo-Left has now fully endorsed Biden. This just goes to prove that the entire Dem Party is, and has been for a very long time, a tool in the hands of the Deep State.
I would like note that Trump succeeded in getting elected against the wishes of the folks who ran the Republican Party. This would be impossible in the Democratic Party, which just goes to prove that while both parties are corrupt to the bone, there is still some real diversity in the GOP. But the Dem Party truly walks in lockstep, probably towards its own demise.
For the time being, let us all rejoice in the fall of Bernie, the shyster and scumbag who tried to pretend that he was a Socialist while, in reality, being a safety valve for the Dem Party, a warmongering Zionist and a tool of the US Deep State. Bernie will go down in history as the ultimate fake.
The COVID19/SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is, by any measure, an immense planetary crisis which will probably change the world we live in forever. Still, there are other issues which are maybe not quite as dramatic and important, but which deserve not to be forgotten. Here are some of those
The grand betrayal of Tulsi Gabbard
It was pretty clear to most observers that Tulsi Gabbard, being the only real “peace candidate” would never be allowed to get the nomination, nevermind make it into the White House. It was also clear that Tulsi, for all her very real qualities, simply did not have what it takes to take on “The Swamp”. Still, in spite of this all, her candidacy and campaign were like a huge pitcher of cool water in the middle of an immense and dry desert. Her uniqueness amongst all the candidate is what make her betrayal even more painful for those who respected or even supported her. Once it became clear that she would never get the nomination, not only did she not run as an independent (something which Hillary seems to fear a lot), she endorsed Uncle Joe, the clearly senile, totally corrupt and generally repugnant frontman for the Clinton gang. This endorsement of Biden is something which she did not have to do, but she did it.
When the DNC stole the nomination from Sanders, he did not lead a protest or run as an independent, he endorsed Hillary. I always considered him a fraud for this (and many other) reasons. Now Tulsi Gabbard is doing the same thing, which probably is a good indicator that the Democratic Party is evil and corrupt to the core, which is hardly big news, but which is dramatically confirmed by Gabbard’s profoundly immoral decision. Why do I say that? Because Biden is the ultimate “anti-Gabbard”, she should have endorsed either Bernie, or even Trump, but instead she endorsed a morally corrupt warmonger, a total pawn for the MIC.
At the end of the day, she mostly betrayed herself, and that is the saddest aspect of this debacle.
The AngloZionist Empire – as clueless as ever
I have forced myself to listen to the daily COVID19 briefings from the White House and I have to say that Trump’s constant flag-waving and self-worshiping is almost physically painful to watch. The worst parts of these briefings are when Trump, or Pompeo, speak about the US “leadership” as if the entire planet was desperately expecting the US to help. It does not. In fact, most of the planet is disgusted by US action, be it the denial of vitally needed meds to countries like Iran or Venezuela, to the attempts are buying off German vaccines, to the mantric repetition about how great the US private sector is and how Amazon and Walmart will help us weather this crisis.
The truth is that this worldwide pandemic will allow us all to compare how different political systems, countries and cultures have reacted to the threat. In a year or so, we shall all know how free-market capitalism and libertarianism compared with social-democracies, socialist and even communist countries when their population needed protection and assistance.
True, other countries have responded with truly amazing incompetence (including several EU countries), so the inability to protect its citizens is not a purely US problem, it really affects all the countries currently subjugated by the Empire.
Finally, it appears that the China-bashing strategic PSYOP has largely failed. Most fake-news about China was quickly and rapidly debunked, and even the legacy corporate ziomedia could not completely obfuscate the fact that China is, so far, the only country on our planet which defeated COVID19.
Will there be an “ideological lessons learned” once the crisis subsides? I sure hope so!
Nope, that sure ain’t gonna happen this time around.
Serbia betrayed by Europe (again!) while Russia provides vital aid to Serbia and Italy
Serbia has been betrayed by the Europeans, again. This time around, the Europeans did not bomb Serbian civilians, they simply refused to sell the meds needed to respond to the crisis. President Aleksandar Vucic has now officially declared that the EU solidarity “exists only on paper“. He then openly appealed for China to help, and help China did – the Chinese sent aircraft filled with much needed medical equipment and doctors. Then Russia followed suit and sent 10 heavy transporters filled with gear and specialists.
Even more amazing (and appalling) is the fact that the Empire does not even help its own subjects – in Italy, it was Russia again which organized a major air bridge (over 15 heavy transporters!) and now we see Russian Army units deployed in northern Italy to help the struggling Italians. Check out these short videos reports by the Russian military. You don’t need to understand Russian to see the size of the air-bridge the Russian Aerospace Forces have established or to how grateful the Italian officials are!
I have to say that the Serbs have been fantastically naive to trust the very same people who bombed them, in total illegality, for 78 days, murdering scores of innocent civilians (including those murdered in the TV stantion). For example, the Serbs could have considered how the EU has been lying to Turkey, for decades. But no, the Serbian elites now seem to think that they will be able to fill their pockets with lucrative contracts with the EU.
Hopefully, what these events have demonstrated shall not be forgotten when the next elections take place in Serbia.
That also goes for Italy.
And, finally,
The situation in northern Syria and Iraq
The situation in northern Syria and Iraq has developed pretty much as expected. So far, the Turks have been unable to re-take full control of the M4 highway. As a result of that failure, the joint Russian-Turkish patrols have not been able to move along the full length of the highway as spelled out in the agreement between Russia and Turkey. Clearly, Turkey lacks either the will, or the capability, or both, to remove the Takfiri forces from the M4 highway. So far, the Russians and Syrians have very kindly agreed to wait a little longer, but the recent visit of Russian Defense Minister Shoigu to Damascus clearly shows that big decisions are being worked on:
As for Iraq, the various Shia militias are doing exactly what everybody had predicted, they are executing limited but very disruptive strikes against US forces in Iraq. Here is a good infographic by the Institute for the Study of War which sums it up very nicely:
What we have hear is a small trickle of attacks which do not yield any major victory to the Iraqi forces, but which over time will tremendously demoralize US forces. Finally, such “death by a thousand cuts” strategy also will severely limit the operational capabilities of the US forces in Iraq: when you are mostly busy protecting yourself, you have less time to murder locals.
Still, sooner or later the Shias will have to step up their attacks because forcing the occupation forces to hunker down and actually kicking them out of your country are two very different propositions. These small strikes are very useful, not only because they demoralize the enemy, but because by forcing him to stay inside fortified “secure” areas only makes them better targets for a bigger missile strike.
This is a very sound strategy against which the US forces have no good option, other than throwing in the towel and leaving, which they will have to do anyway (except that they call it “declare victory and leave”, but its the exact same thing).
I’m continuing to run for the same reason I originally began this race: to bring about a sea change in our longstanding foreign policy of carrying out regime change wars, end the new cold war & nuclear arms race, and invest the trillions wasted in such wars into the American people
The most powerful al-Qaeda enclave in the world today is in Idlib, Syria. Yet Pompeo and corporate media call these terrorists “rebels” and want to protect them. Question to President Trump and all Democratic candidates: Do you want to protect al-Qaeda or defeat them? Voters have a right to know.
I love our country. I’ve served as a soldier for nearly 17 years, deployed twice to the Middle East, and served in Congress for over 7 years. If Hillary & allies can destroy my reputation by implying I am a traitor to the country I love, they can do it to anyone #StandWithTulsi
Trump disgraces our military by using our men & women in uniform as mercenaries serving the interests of multinational corps (e.g. Exxon) & foreign countries (e.g. Saudis). We must stand side by side—no matter our political party—to end this travesty.
To defeat Donald Trump in 2020, we need to understand why he won in 2016. As long as Democrat party leaders dismiss and disrespect those who voted for Trump, we will lose. As president I will bridge the partisan divide and work side by side with all Americans to get things done.
I hope that this will bring some joy to those of you who celebrate Christmas today! Kind regards The Saker PS: please don’t make this one about politics, okay? I am just happy to see a normal healthy couple simply singing together (pretty well, actually), that’s all. And while I don’t think that Gabbard has a chance in 2020 (“they” will never let her), at least there is one US politicians that doesn’t make me feeling like tossing a brick at the screen 🙂 Thank you!
Posted on December 20, 2019 by uprootedpalestinians
December 19, 2019
Saker comment: I would have preferred a “Nay” from her, but her “Present” is at least more courageous than what the rest of the Dems did. I disagree with her vote, but at least I don’t feel that she has betrayed her oath to the US Constitution or that she betrayed her country – which is what I accuse the Dems of doing. I forced myself to listen to some of the speeches on the floor of the House yesterday and I have to say that what I heard was the most disgusting and revolting lies, misrepresentations, obfuscations, hypocritical condemnations, etc. that I ever heard in my life. It is my opinion that every person who voted “Yea” is a spineless traitor and should be treated as such. As for the Democratic Party, I see it as the #1 threat to the survival of the USA. Yes, I do want the AngloZionist Empire to collapse and wither away, but I wish the country USA (as opposed to the Empire) well and I look forward to the day when the US will become a “regular” country like all the other former empires have become.
What is taking place is a slow-motion coup d’état by one faction of the ruling elites against another one. We don’t have to side with either faction, but it is important to denounce this illegal, immoral and illegitimate coup for what it is. Now Pelosi is not committing to pass on the articles of impeachment to the Senate. I wonder if she, or the rest of them, have ANY sense of shame at all… (rhetorical question, we all know the answer, don’t we?)
A mafia runs editors. Freedom of the press is dead. Journalists and ordinary people must stand up.
Introduction
Syria
Newsweek Suppression: A Timeline of Events
Editors at Fault
Is Rep. Ilhan Omar a Spy?
External Control of the Media Narrative
INTRODUCTION
Until several days ago, I was a journalist at Newsweek. I decided to hand my resignation in because, in essence, I was given a simple choice. On one hand, I could continue to be employed by the company, stay in their chic London offices and earn a steady salary—only if I adhered to what could or could not be reported and suppressed vital facts. Alternatively, I could leave the company and tell the truth.
In the end, that decision was rather simple, all be it I understand the cost to me will be undesirable. I will be unemployed, struggle to finance myself and will likely not find another position in the industry I care about so passionately. If I am a little lucky, I will be smeared as a conspiracy theorist, maybe an Assad apologist or even a Russian asset—the latest farcical slur of the day.
Although I am a British citizen, the irony is that I’m half Arabic and half Russian. (Bellingcat: I’m happy to answer any requests.)
It is a terribly sad state of affairs when perfectly loyal people who want nothing but the best for their countries are labelled with such preposterous accusations. Take Iraq war veteran and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for example, who was the target of such mud slinging for opposing U.S. involvement in Syria and for simply standing up to the Democratic Party’s most corrupt politician, Hillary Clinton. These smears are immature for a democracy—but I, in fact, welcome such attacks.
When the facts presented are utterly ignored and the messengers themselves are crucified in this way, it signals to right-minded people who the true perpetrators of lies are and where the truth in fact lies.
That truth is what matters most to me. It is what first drove me to journalism while I was working in Jersey’s offshore finance industry after completing my degree from Binghamton University’s School of Management in upstate New York. I was so outraged when I grew to realize that this small idyllic island I love and had grown up on since the age of nine, a British Crown dependency fifteen miles off the coast of France, was in fact a hub for global tax evasion. This realization came to me while the British people were being told that austerity had to continue—public funding for schools, hospitals, policing and all matter of things were to be slashed—all while the government “recovered” after bailing out the banks following the 2008 crash. That austerity lie was one I could no longer stomach as soon as I came to understand that my fairly uninspiring administrative role was in fact a part of this global network of firms to help multinational companies, businessmen, politicians and members of various royal families in avoiding paying trillions in tax—all under a perfectly legal infrastructure that the government was fully aware of, but kept quiet about.
In my naivety, as I left that industry and began my journalism training, I wrote a piece that detailed some of this corruption in hopes of changing the public awareness around these issues and in hopes that they no longer continued—albeit I did so in a manner of writing and sophistication I would be embarrassed of presently—but to my disappointment at the time, the piece was hardly noticed and the system remains little changed to now. Nonetheless, since that moment, I have not once regretted speaking truthfully, most especially for my own mental wellbeing: I would not have been able to regard myself with a grain of self-respect had I continued to engage in something I knew was a lie. It is the very same force that compels me to write now.
There is also another, deeper force that compels me to write. In my years since that moment when I decided to become a journalist and a writer, although I suspect I have known it intrinsically long before, I have come to learn that truth is also the most fundamental pillar of this modern society we so often take for granted—a realisation that did not come to us easily and one that we should be extremely careful to neglect. That is why when journalistic institutions fail to remember this central pillar, we should all be outraged because our mutual destruction follows. It may sound like hyperbole, but I assure you it’s not. When our record of where we come from is flawed, or our truth to put it more simply, the new lies stack on top of the old until our connection to reality becomes so disjointed that our understanding of the world ultimately implodes. The failure of current journalism, among other factors, is undoubtedly linked to the current regression of the Western world. In consequence, we have become the biggest perpetrators of the crimes our democracies were created to prevent.
Of course, for those who pay attention, this failure of mainstream journalism I speak of is nothing new. It has been ongoing for decades and was all too obvious following the Iraq war fiasco. The U.S. and U.K. governments, headed by people who cared for little other than their own personal gain, told the people of their respective countries a slew of fabrications and the media establishment, other than a handful of exceptions, simply went along for the ride.
This was something that consumed my interest when I was training to be a journalist. How could hundreds of reputable, well-meaning journalists get it so wrong? I read numerous books on the issue—from Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty to work by Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times who was booted out for opposing that war (who I disagree with on some things, for the record)—but still, I believed that honest journalism could be done. Nothing I read however, came close to the dishonesty and deception I experienced while at Newsweek. Previously, I believed that not enough journalists questioned the government narrative sufficiently. I believed they failed to examine the facts with close enough attention and had not connected the dots as a handful of others had done.
No. The problem is far worse than that.
SYRIA
In the aftermath of the Iraq war and during my time studying this failure of the media since, I was of course extremely aware of the high likelihood that the U.S. government narrative on Syria was a deception. For starters, there were the statements made by the retired four-star general, General Wesley Clark, to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in 2007, four years prior to the beginning of the Syria conflict. The following is worth watching to in full.
Nonetheless, once I joined IBTimes UK in 2016, after training with the Press Association and working at the Hull Daily Mail (both of whom I am eternally indebted to for giving me an excellent foundation for starting my career) I solidly understood that journalism was not the profession of making unverifiable claims. I, or any journalist for that matter, could not out-right say that the nature of the Syrian conflict was based on a lie, no matter how strongly we suspected it. To do so, we would need unshakeable evidence that pointed to this.
Through the years, good journalists did document evidence. Roula Khalaf, who will soon take over from Lionel Barber as the editor of the Financial Times, wrote one such piece alongside Abigail Fielding-Smith in 2013. It documented how Qatar provided arms and funded the opposition of Bashar al-Assad’s legitimate government to the tune of somewhere between $1 and $3 billion from the outset of the conflict, rubbishing claims that it was a “people’s revolution” that turned violent. Footage captured by Syrian photographer Issa Touma—made into a short film titled 9 Days From My Window in Aleppo—similarly showed how Qatar-funded jihadists from the Al-Tawhid Brigade were present in the streets of Syria’s capital from the very outset of the war.
“Fighters re-enter my street,” Touma says as he films covertly out of his window. “They look different. They are heavily armed men with beards. I had only heard about them before. This is Liwa al-Tawhid. National television calls them terrorists. The international press calls them freedom fighters. I don’t care what they call it—I refuse to chose a side. But it’s a lie that the revolution started peacefully everywhere. At least in my street, Al Said Ali Street, it started with guns. It didn’t start peacefully at all.”
Veterans of the trade Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk also poked holes in the U.S. government narrative, but their treatment by other journalists has been one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the press.
Hersh—who exposed the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, the clandestine bombing of Cambodia, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, in addition to telling the world the real story of how Osama Bin Laden died—was shunned from the industry for reporting a simple fact: Bashar al-Assad’s government is not the only actor with access to chemical weapons in Syria. After a sarin attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in 2013, he was further smeared for reporting that Barack Obama withheld important military intelligence: samples examined in Britain’s Porton Down did not match the chemical signatures of sarin held in the Syrian government’s arsenals.
Fisk, writing days before the Syrian conflict escalated, in a piece that asked Americans to consider what they were really doing in the Middle East as the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 approached, also raised important questions, but he too was largely ignored.
The following year, after the alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, I documented the intriguing story of Shajul Islam, the British doctor who purported to have treated the alleged victims and appeared on several television networks including NBC to sell the case for retaliation. He gushed with heroism, but it was not reported he was previously charged with terror offences in the U.K. and was in fact considered a “committed jihadist” by MI6. He was imprisoned in 2013 in connection with the kidnapping of two Western photo-journalists in northern Syria and was struck off Britain’s General Medical Council in 2016. Why he was released without sentencing and was allowed to travel back to Syria remains a mystery to me.
I also refused to recycle the same sloppy language used, inadvertently or not, by a number of other publications. Al Qaeda and their affiliates had always been referred to as terrorists as far as I was aware—why the sudden change to “rebels” or “moderate rebels” for the purposes of Syria? Thankfully, the news editor I worked with most frequently at the time, Fiona Keating, trusted my reporting and had no problems with me using the more appropriate terms “anti-Assad fighters” or “insurgents”—though one could arguably say even that was not accurate enough.
When buses carrying civilian refugees hoping to escape the fighting in Idlib province were attacked with car bombs in April of 2017, killing over 100, most of them women and children, I was disappointed with the Guardian and the BBC for continuing with their use of this infantile word, but this was not the language I felt to be appropriate in my report.
At roughly the same time, in light of the Khan Sheikhoun attack, confronted with an ever-growing list of irregularities and obvious falsifications—such as increasing evidence that the White Helmets were not what they purported of being, or the ridiculousness that the Western world’s de facto authority on Syria had become 7-year-old Bana al-Abed—I wrote an opinion piece that came short of calling the narrative around the Syrian conflict a lie, but simply pleaded that independent investigations of the alleged chemical weapons attack were allowed to take place before we rushed head first into war. I still believed honesty would prevail.
That piece was ultimately declined by IBTimes—though I covertly published it in CounterPunch later—but the rejection email I received from the editor-in-chief at the time makes for interesting reading.
I was sad to hear that asking for an independent investigation into a chemical weapons attack was an “incendiary theory,” but I was forced to move on.
By that summer, I was let go alongside a number of other journalists from the publication after the Buzzfeed-style model of click-bait-aggregation journalism was heavily punished by a new Google algorithm and had largely failed: page views plummeted and editors couldn’t seem to understand it was because we weren’t doing any real journalism. Having felt frustrated with the industry, I decided to not pursue another position in reporting and decided to move to mainland Europe in hopes of pursuing my other passion—literature—with aspirations of being able to write more freely.
Fast forward to 2019, I decided to return to journalism as I was feeling the pressure to have “a grown-up job” and could not count on my ability to be a novelist as a means of long-term career stability. So when I joined Newsweek in September, I was extremely thankful for the opportunity and had no intention of being controversial—the number of jobs in the industry appeared to be shrinking and, besides, the Syrian conflict appeared to be dying down. As soon as I arrived, Newsweek editor-in-chief Nancy Cooper emphasised original reporting and I was even even more pleased. I wanted to come in, get my head down and start building my reputation as a journalist again.
Then on October 6, President Donald Trump and the military machine behind him threw my quiet hopes of staying well clear of Syria into disarray. He announced the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the country and green-lit the Turkish invasion that followed in a matter of days. Given my understanding of the situation, I was asked by Newsweek editors to report on this.
Within days of the Turkish invasion into Syria beginning, Turkey was accused of using the incendiary chemical white phosphorus in an attack on Ras al-Ayn and, again, having pitched the story, I was asked to report on the allegations. This spurred a follow-up investigation on why the use of the substance—a self-igniting chemical that burns at upwards of 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit, causing devastating damage to its victims—was rarely considered a war crime under the relevant weapons conventions and I was commended by Nancy for doing excellent journalism.
It was while investigating this story that I started to come across growing evidence that the U.N.-backed body for investigating chemical weapons use, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), issued a doctored report about an alleged chemical attack in Douma in April of 2018, much to the anger of OPCW investigators who visited the scene. Once Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday published his story containing a leaked letter that was circulated internally from one of the disgruntled OPCW scientists, I believed there was more than enough evidence to publish the story in Newsweek. That case was made even stronger when the letter was confirmed by Reuters and had been corroborated by former OPCW director-general Dr. Jose Bustani.
Although I am no stranger to having story ideas rejected, or having to censor my language to not rock the ship, this was a truth that had to be told. I was not prepared to back down on this.
Let me be clear: there is evidence that a United Nations body—whose jurisdiction was established after the world agreed to never repeat the horrors of World War I and World War II, such as German forces firing more than 150 tons of chlorine gas at French colonial troops in Ypres—is being weaponized to sell the case for war.
After OPCW experts found trace levels of chlorine when they visited Douma—i.e. no different than the levels of chlorine normally present in the atmosphere—or raised concerns that the canisters may have been tampered with or placed, both of which were reflected in their original reports, they made protestations because this information was withheld from the final report that was released to the world’s media. Instead, the final wording said chlorine was “likely” used and the war machine continued.
This is not a “conspiracy theory” as Newsweek sadly said in a statement to Fox News—interestingly the only mainstream publication to cover my resignation. Real OPCW scientists have met with real journalists and explained the timeline of events. They provided internal documents that proved these allegations—documents that were then confirmed by Reuters. This is all I wanted to report.
Meanwhile, OPCW scientists were prevented from investigating Turkey’s alleged use of white phosphorus. This flagrant politicization of a neutral body is opening the world up to repeating the same horrors we experienced in those two devastating wars.
This is unacceptable and I resigned when I was forbidden from reporting on this.
NEWSWEEK SUPPRESSION: A TIMELINE OF EVENTS
I first became aware of the Mail on Sunday report on Monday, November 25, and this is when I raised it with Alfred Joyner, Newsweek’s global executive producer, who had been my main point of contact for pitching stories.
Following a conversation with Alfred, he asked me to write the pitch in a note to him and Newsweek’s foreign affairs editor, Dimi Reider, on the company’s internal messaging system. The following is a copy and paste of that pitch, alongside the conversation that followed in the next few days.
Once I returned to the office on Thursday, November 28, I proceeded to have a conversation with Dimi, but to my disappointment, he did not address any of my protestations against why the article could not be published. He made the famous joke about former Soviet politician Leonid Brezhnev irrelevantly, one he had already made to me a couple of weeks before, and after listening to my reasoning for wanting to have the story published for several minutes, all he had to say was: “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’s a no.”
The following morning, feeling incredibly frustrated, I wrote an email to Nancy and Newsweek’s digital director and London bureau chief, Laura Davis, to express my concerns.
Several stressful days passed where I did not hear from either Laura or Nancy, but in the meantime, as I tried to continue as best as I could with my every day reporting role, I noticed how an entertainment editor by the name of Tufayel Ahmed began to pick up most of the following stories I wrote.
In my experience of working with editors in the past, if an issue ever arose with a story, we would have a perfectly civil conversation, I would make the relevant adjustments where necessary and the article would be published without further problems. That was not my experience with Tufayel.
At first, when he sent me long, overly critical and often hostile criticisms on articles I wrote, I considered asking him to step into a meeting room in order to ask him whether I had inadvertently done something to offend him. Having come from a newspaper background where mistakes in articles required embarrassing apologies printed in the paper the next day, and having held the belief that editors were your best friend and should always be kept on side, I always prided myself in filing copy that was free of any errors and throughout my career, I was frequently commended for doing exactly this.
In my time at the Hull Daily Mail for example, regarded as one of the U.K.’s best regional newspapers, I do not recall a single correction being printed on any of the articles I wrote. That was the case despite covering murder trials, rape cases and numerous other sensitive stories.
On the eve of the Brexit referendum, despite still being a trainee reporter, I had built such a reputation for my accurate journalism and my attention-to-detail skills that I was even entrusted to single-handedly edit and publish copy from two politics reporters to the publication’s website, while managing the live blog, all social media channels and filing my own stories on national developments as the results came in. The following morning, following a short nap, the editor was so impressed with my efforts that I was asked to conduct the interviews with the local leaders of each political party, despite being one of the most junior reporters on the team.
Furthermore, in close to 1,000 published articles for IBTimes UK, I can only recall one incident where an article required a correction. An Israel lobby group—forgive me for being unable to recall which one—objected to my use of the word “settlements” and requested that it be replaced with “settlement units” instead. This was a reasonable request and the article was updated to reflect this without further incident.
I do not say these things to be self-congratulatory. I say these things because I was deeply saddened and disturbed. Because when I finally received a response from Laura about the OPCW story on December 5, six days after my initial email and after repeated attempts to speak to her in person, only one paragraph was devoted to the leaked letter and the rest of the email attacked my capability as a journalist.
It listed all the instances that Tufayel had criticised me on, unfairly mischaracterising my actions, in addition to listing one genuine mistake I made in the course of everyday reporting—something not to be unexpected when every day I was expected to write four stories, often about complicated topics, sometimes with no prior experience in them. Nonetheless, even for this story, I had taken immediate action needed to resolve and had apologised to editors at the time, the characterisation of what took place in Laura’s email was deeply maligned.
That was the moment I knew beyond doubt what my gut had been telling me before: there was no valid reason for this OPCW story not to be published. It was simply being suppressed. I was being attacked for pushing back against this.
As I have nothing to hide, I will publish Laura’s response in full.
You will see my full response in due course, but first, some further comments about Laura’s criticisms must be addressed.
EDITORS AT FAULT
My first “indiscretion” is rather simple to address. I believe—however I must admit I am not certain, as the information was never published—that the article Laura is referring to this. Regardless of which piece it was, the following events took place.
In 2018, confirming the earlier reporting by Hersh, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced that the Pentagon has no evidence to support the allegations that the Syrian government used sarin in Ghouta, as reported here by the Associated Press. As Newsweek did not report this fact (more evidence of suppression?) I linked to an opinion piece on our website that addressed that report. The first line of that piece links back to the AP story. When questioned by Tufayel why I did this, I explained that I was simply trying to link to references on our website, explaining to him the source was AP—ironically, I was trying to help Newsweek gather more clicks. The information which was ultimately removed from my article was not badly sourced.
The second point listed by Laura—the only occasion out of 156 stories written during my two-month stint at Newsweek where an article required a correction—raises another serious problem at the publication: editors tell journalists what to report.
This article was assigned to me by Alfred on Newsweek’s internal messaging system, as is commonplace for editors to do, and I felt obliged to report the story, although I had concerns and it is not one I personally would have chosen to do. I raised these concerns with Alfred—whose background is in video editing, not journalism—but instead of ditching the story, a new angle was suggested and a new headline was provided too. Feeling that I couldn’t challenge his authority any further without being rude, I proceeded as best as I could, but in the course of doing so, I made two mistakes: One, I neglected to reach out for comment on two of the five parties involved (thinking Facebook, who I contacted, would comment on behalf of the remaining). Two, I wrongly reported that some funds were donated by Mark Zuckerburg as opposed to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
When the Facebook spokesperson returned my request, she simply pointed me in the direction of tweets made by the remaining individuals and asked if I could update accordingly. The tweets did not criticize our reporting, but of the original reporting done by Popular Information, the source assigned to me by Alfred to base my reporting on.
Once their statements came to my knowledge (which reflected the concerns I had about the article in the first place), I alerted Alfred immediately and did my best to redress. Laura’s criticism also neglected to mention that Newsweek’s chief sub-editor—whom I will not name as he has been among a handful of editors to treat me fairly—was the one to look over the article and he had no problems in publishing my piece.
This practice of editors telling journalists what to write, with what angle and with headlines already assigned is completely backwards and is the cause of numerous problems. How can journalists find genuine newsworthy developments if what to write has already been scripted for them?
I spoke to several Newsweek journalists about this very problem prior to my departure and they shared the same concerns. This was the very same problem that led to Jessica Kwong’s firing a week before my resignation.
Kwong, who I do not know, wrote a story titled “How is Trump Spending Thanksgiving? Tweeting, Golfing and More,” a day before the day in question—only for it to emerge that Trump made a surprise visit to Afghanistan. No proper journalist would have written that piece by their own volition—it was only done because editors were on their tireless crusade for clicks.
In the end, she was fired because she did not approach the White House for comment, although all the information came from the president’s public diary.
“Dear press office,” her email should have read supposedly. “I am writing a piece that is of no useful public information, but will be criticising the president for what he choses to do in his leisure time on Thanksgiving. Can you please provide a statement at your earliest convenience.”
For goodness sake, whatever your opinions are of President Trump, what were most of you doing on Thanksgiving Day?
Most appallingly, in a team meeting between the New York and London offices following the firing, where “lessons to be learned” were discussed at length, the editor in question tried to make a joke along the lines of: “Don’t worry guys! I’ve learned my lesson! I’ll happily edit the story ‘What’s Trump doing on Christmas Day?” Silence followed. You should have seen the faces of the journalists in the room.
A final note on the contents of Laura’s email, for the rest is addressed in my response.
Yes. I did make adjustments in the content management system and republished some articles. Journalists are permitted to do this if they spot small mistakes—such as in spelling or grammar, for example—but I did not editorialise as the email claims. And yes. On the white phosphorus story, I did question an editor’s judgement. It was Nancy’s in fact.
After the article had been published, she amended the headline so that it was more attention grabbing, but the grammar she used made it non-sensical and she also didn’t abide by Newsweek’s own house style in doing so. (She wrote “US” not “U.S.”) I didn’t want an article I spent three weeks working on to be ruined because of sloppiness. Is there something so wrong with that? For the record: I am still unhappy with the headline on the piece as it stands.
Now, before I return to my response and to my ultimate resignation, there were several other important things to note.
IS REP. ILHAN OMAR A QATARI SPY?
On Saturday, November 30, a day after I sent my initial email to Laura and Nancy, I was working a weekend shift and there had been a change in the rota: Tufayel was to be the news editor for the day. There was nothing demonstrably unusual about this, but what did strike me as odd is how I was immediately assigned a story about some relatively unknown congressional candidate who had been kicked off Twitter for tweeting something in relation to the Democratic Congresswoman of Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, and allegations that she was a spy.
The nature of the story was not odd in itself, but only seemed strange because of Dimi’s earlier refutation of my OPCW piece.
“It’s not just about Syria,” he wrote. “This was part of my reluctance to put take up this weird story going around since yesterday about Ilhan Omar being a Qatari spy. Not a single serious U.S. site picked it up, which confirms my hunch it’s BS.”
At the time, not knowing about the story, I thought that was fair enough—it seemed like a ridiculous claim. In fact, when I had seen that line written in Dimi’s refutation, it further enraged me: why was my provable story about the existence of this leaked letter (verified by Reuters!!!) being smeared by being placed next to this?
Regardless, when I was assigned the story by Tufayel, I did my best to be professional and I did what I always did: I pulled up as many resources as I could find on the matter at hand and began to research and fact-check. That was when I was shocked to discover this report in Al Arabiya about Ilhan.
The publication acquired a 233-page legal deposition, made to a U.S. district court, by a Kuwaiti-born Canadian businessman by the name of Alan Bender. He gave evidence against the Qatari emir’s brother, Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani, after al-Thani was accused of ordering his American bodyguard to murder two people and after holding his hired American paramedic prisoner. In that deposition, Bender claimed to have high connections among Qatari officials—presumably why he was asked to testify—and it was there that he made the Ilhan spy allegations.
Now, I have no further evidence to support Alan Bender’s claims—I will be the first to admit I know very little about Qatari politics—but surely a well-connected businessman’s deposition in a U.S. court of law did not justify Dimi’s “hunch it’s BS” without providing further evidence. If Alan Bender’s claims are untrue and he is lying under oath, he has to answer for them. I suddenly realised that this was a test.
Would I get the hint and do my reporting in line with management orders? Or would I continue to report perfectly publishable details that are in the public interest?
Of course, there is the possibility I was assigned the article by mere happenstance, but what took place after I submitted my draft copy to Tufayel for editing was revealing. The draft I submitted was as follows.
All reasonable journalists, I hope, will not find anything wrong with my reporting here. Despite this, following the submission of my draft, all references to Alan Bender were scrubbed from my piece, and so too was the link to the Al Arabiya’s story. All that was left of the newsworthy information I provided on the matter were the words “baseless claims”.
How was Tufayel so certain that the claims were baseless? Did he have information to the contrary of what Alan Bender said? Or was there any other journalistic justification for removing information that was provided in a court of law, although I clearly stated there was no other evidence to currently support the claims? Was there any good reason at all? I suspect not, other than the fact that it could be deeply damaging if the allegations emerged to be true, and that management orders had been to suppress anything Alan Bender said, as was the same across most media organizations across the U.S.
Curiously, Nancy later amended the article again, this time changing the word “baseless” to “unverified”—softening the language, I imagine, in order to not draw unnecessary attention to it.
This is shown by the content management system (CMS) logs that capture all changes made.
EXTERNAL CONTROL OF THE MEDIA NARRATIVE
While all this was going on, and while I waited for a response from Laura, I started to have strong suspicions that something wasn’t quite right with Dimi, the so-called foreign affairs editor. For starters, he rarely did any foreign affairs editing. He rarely did any editing at all.
Newsweek has a system where reporters paste the relevant CMS link of draft articles ready to be edited into a “publishme” channel of the internal messaging system and editors make their way down the list, picking up stories that reporters had filed. Once they are looked over and published, editors dropped them in another channel called “published_stories” for all to see.
I made a habit of watching this list closely—it was useful to know what other reporters had filed in order to be able to link to their stories and also for ensuring articles were not repeated accidentally. In the two months I spent at Newsweek, I saw Dimi post in the “published_stories” channel only a handful of times. This is odd as most editors publish several stories a day. Instead, his most active contributions to the messaging system were with funny tweets or articles in the “general” thread. Sadly, I do not have physical evidence to support this, but the journalists I worked with will know this to be true.
The only times Dimi appeared to be involved is when a story had the potential to be controversial. He worked on my white phosphorus investigation, made the decision to not publish anything about the original Ilhan spy claims and rejected my attempts at publishing the OPCW leaks.
While working on that white phosphorus story, before I was fully aware of his background, he spoke to me of how he co-founded +972 Magazine—a liberal Israeli publication that started out by covering the 2008-2009 Gaza War. I glanced at his resume and was honored to be working with such an accomplished foreign affairs journalist. I had genuinely hoped to build a closer relationship to him.
That was why I was so bewildered when he flatly refused to publish the OPCW revelations. Surely any editor worth their salt would see this as big? Of course, I understood that the implications of such a piece would be substantial and not easy to report—it was the strongest evidence of lies about Syria to date—but surely most educated people could see this coming? Other evidence was growing by the day.
But no. As the earlier messages showed, there was no desire to report these revelations, regardless of how strong the evidence appeared to be. Dimi was simply happy to defer to Bellingcat—a clearly dubious organization as others have taken the time to address, such as here and here—instead of allowing journalists who are more than capable of doing their own research to do their job.
It was this realization that made me start to question Dimi. When I looked a little deeper, he was the missing piece.
Dimi worked at the European Council on Foreign Relations from 2013 and 2016—the sister organization to the more prevalent think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Some may be asking why this matters, but the lobbying group—the largest and most powerful in the United States—is nicknamed “Wall Street’s think-tank” for a reason, as the book by Laurence H. Shoup with the same title explains.
To understand just how influential the body is, it is worth noting that 10 of George H. W. Bush’s top 11 foreign policymakers were members, as was the former president himself. Bill Clinton, also a member, hired 15 foreign policymakers with CFR membership from a total of 17. George W. Bush hired 14 CFR members as top foreign policymakers and Barack Obama had 12, with a further five working in domestic policy positions.
Its European sister act is also highly influential, as this graphic from its website about current members demonstrates.
It is also worth noting that the CFR’s current chairman is David Rubenstein, co-founder and executive chairman of the Carlyle Group—the same Carlyle Group which previously described itself as the “leading private equity investor in the aerospace and the defense industries,” until it probably decided it was not a good look to boast about its war profiteering, though its investments in those industries remain.
It is the same Carlyle Group that hosted Osama bin Laden’s brother as the guest of honor for the group’s annual investor meeting in Washington D.C. the same day the Twin Towers fell. George H. W. Bush, an informal advisor to Carlyle, was also present.
Furthermore, one of the CFR’s most notorious exports was former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—a man famously described by Christopher Hitchens as America’s greatest ever war criminal. His long list of crimes against humanity cannot be summarized quickly.
Jeffrey Epstein was also a member from 1995 to 2009 and in a PR push, the CFR recently announced its decision to donate $350,000 to help fight sexual trafficking victims, equivalent in amount to the donations received from him. It may be obvious to state, but the Epstein story is another that’s not being investigated adequately by the media.
But what about the think tank’s influence on journalism?
I’m unaware if what I will report here is common knowledge to the rest of the industry, but what I discovered when researching this topic is unacceptable to me.
I learned that aside from a large number of prominent journalists holding membership, I discovered that the CFR offers fellowships for journalists to come work alongside its many State Department and Department of Defensive representatives. A list of historical fellows includes top reporters and editors from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and CNN, among others—not forgetting journalists from Newsweek.
The most prominent CFR member to join Newsweek’s ranks was Fareed Zakaria. After stints at Yale and Harvard, at the age of 28, Zakaria became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs—the CFR’s own in-house publication. From there, he became the editor of Newsweek International in 2000, before moving on to edit Time Magazine in 2010.
When CIA intelligence analyst Kenneth Pollack wrote a book titled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, Zakaria lauded the work and described Pollack as “One of the world’s leading experts on Iraq.”
Interestingly, once the war had started in 2003, Foreign Affairs—where Zakaria writes to this day—was ranked first by research firm Erdos and Morgan as the most successful in influencing in public opinion. It achieved the accolade in 2005 and again in 2006. Results for other years are not known.
Scrolling through LinkedIn and Twitter, numerous individuals listed as journalists have taken the same path Zakaria has taken. They complete State Department-funded “diplomacy” degrees from prestigious universities—such as Harvard, Yale, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins, or at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London—before gritting their teeth at publications or think tanks funded by the CFR or Open Society Foundations. Once their unquestioning obedience is demonstrated, they slowly filter into mainstream organizations or Foreign Affairs.
It also emerged that this is the same path that Dimi has taken. +972 Magazine’s biggest funder is the Rockefeller Brother’s Fund, whose president and CEO, Stephen Heintz, is a CFR member. In addition to his work with the ECFR, Dimi is also listed as a research associate at SOAS.
This conflict of interests may be known to other journalists in the trade, but I will repeat: this is unacceptable to me.
The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media—imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member’s club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked. As a result, journalism is quickly dying. America is regressing because it lacks the truth.
The Afghanistan Papers, released this week by the Washington Post, showed further evidence of this. Misinformation, a trillion dollars wasted and two thousand Americans killed—and who knows how many more Afghanis. The newspapers ran countless stories on this utter failure, however, none will not tell you how they are to blame. The same mistakes are being repeated. The situation is becoming more grave. Real journalists and ordinary people need to take back journalism.
This was the letter I sent to Newsweek when I resigned.
UNITED STATES – OCTOBER 1: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, attends a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere hearing in Rayburn Building, October 1, 2014, on Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi who is imprisoned in Mexico. Tahmooressi, who suffers from PTSD, has been held in Mexico since being arrested in March for carrying guns across the border. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
BEIRUT, LEBANON (11:00 A.M.) – U.S. congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D) of Hawaii will attempt to force a vote in the House of Representatives next week to require President Donald Trump to withdraw the remaining American troops from Syria.
“President Trump’s deployment of U.S. troops to secure Syrian oil fields that do not belong to us, with talks of welcoming in private oil corporations to take the oil, is unconstitutional and a violation of international law,” the congresswoman said in a statement last week.
If she is successful, the resolution will require the U.S. Armed Forces to withdraw from Syria unless they are engaged in anti-terror operations.
However, the presidential hopeful is facing heavy opposition from those within her own party, as the House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D) of Maryland told Al-Monitor on Wednesday that he intends to vote ‘no’ against the resolution.
“I intend to vote no,” Hoyer told Al-Monitor, adding that “we haven’t whipped this, but I think our members think an immediate withdrawal would not be appropriate.”
Gabbard, who has attempted to pass a similar resolution in the past, has been one of the most outspoken anti-war politicians in Washington; this stance has brought on unfounded allegations of Russian collusion from members of the Democratic Party.
For a few days, active Democrats were stunned by — and America’s political news-media were focusing heavily upon — this string of tweets from Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard:
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a …
4:20 PM – Oct 18, 2019
Tulsi Gabbard✔@TulsiGabbard
Replying to @TulsiGabbard
… concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and …
4:20 PM – Oct 18, 2019
Tulsi Gabbard✔@TulsiGabbard
Replying to @TulsiGabbard
… powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
4:20 PM – Oct 18, 2019
She was challenging there the top-down-imposed ‘historical’ narrative of her own Party (‘Russiagate’ included), regarding not only that Party’s latest Presidential nominee Clinton, but the Party’s entire leadership ever since at least 9/11 (along with the leadership of the Republican Party) and the resulting transformation of this nation into a permanent-warfare state, one invasion after another — what she has referred to, throughout her entire campaign, as “regime-change wars.”
It backfired against Gabbard.
There is no indication, in any of the polling since that happened, which shows that this attack against Clinton helped Gabbard’s campaign, and there is even one poll which seems to indicate that it instead sharply turned many Democratic Party voters, in the first of all of the contested states, Iowa, firmly and decisively against her.
On October 24th, was headlined from Iowa State University “Buttigieg jumps to second in Iowa State University/Civiqs poll”, reporting that, “The online poll of 598 likely caucus-goers also asked voters to list the candidate they do not want to win the nomination. Biden and Sanders topped this list. Peterson says Tulsi Gabbard was third, moving from nearly 7% in September to 17%.”
This poll was taken during October 18-22, which is precisely the period when the suddenly now-personal war between Gabbard and Clinton, about the goodness or badness of post-9/11 permanent-warfare America, was the focus of this nation’s political news. A full 10% of Iowa’s registered and active Democrats (17%-7%) had suddenly switched to placing Gabbard onto their “DO NOT want to be the nominee” list. And the percentage who were saying that they were intending to vote for her declined down 67%, to 2%, from its previous 6%. So: she had lost two-thirds of her Party’s voters, while she had more than doubled (17/7) the number of Democratic Party voters who are outright hostile against her. That’s a stunning change since their September poll.
Gabbard has been interviewed hostilely on Democratic Party ‘news’-media (because she has been challenging her Party’s neoconservatism), but supportively interviewed on Republican Party ‘news’-media (as if that Party weren’t actually just as neocon as the Democratic Party), and she has consistently said that she will not run as a third-party candidate even if one of her Party’s neocons (such as Biden, Buttigieg, or Warren) wins its nomination. But candidates have said this sort of thing before and subsequently reversed their position on the matter, and she might do that; so, she still remains a factor to consider in the 2020 contest.
Right now, Republican ‘news’-media, such as Fox News, are continuing to give her air-time, such as Fox’s Hannity did on October 24th, in a good summary-presentation of the Clinton-Gabbard conflict about the future of the Democratic Party regarding international relations, which was titled “Tulsi Gabbard: This is what’s so dangerous about Hillary Clinton”.
Apparently, Gabbard’s strategy now is to continue to present to voters, both in the Democratic and in the Republican Parties as well as to independents, her vision of the type of country that America ought to be (not the type of country — for example — that invaded Iraq on the basis of lies in 2003); and, if she becomes rejected by her own Democratic Party, then, at that time, she might be able, with her now-established name-recognition and clearly articulated policy-views, to become the Green Party’s 2020 candidate and to present an appeal designed in order to draw enough independents, plus both Democrats and Republicans who have come to reject their former Parties, so as to stand a realistic chance of winning in 2020, in essentially the same way that Abraham Lincoln did in 1860, when the Republican Party replaced the previous Whig Party. If the Democratic Party nominates Bernie Sanders, then she wouldn’t do that, but, otherwise, she might. Consequently, any intelligent Democrat whose main concern is to win the Presidency in 2020 (so as to have a Democrat as President starting in 2021) will be voting for Sanders, because, otherwise, Tulsi Gabbard could well throw a monkey wrench into the Presidential campaign machinery for both of the existing Parties — and that might produce a replacement of the Democratic Party by the Green Party, in the same way that the Republicans replaced the Whigs in 1860. It could happen again — but this time to the Democratic Party.
Russian Army Trucks in Italy
I was sad to hear that asking for an independent investigation into a chemical weapons attack was an “incendiary theory,” but I was forced to move on.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
BEIRUT, LEBANON (11:00 A.M.) – U.S. congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D) of Hawaii will attempt to force a vote in the House of Representatives next week to require President Donald Trump to withdraw the remaining American troops from Syria.
“President Trump’s deployment of U.S. troops to secure Syrian oil fields that do not belong to us, with talks of welcoming in private oil corporations to take the oil, is unconstitutional and a violation of international law,” the congresswoman said in a statement last week.
However, the presidential hopeful is facing heavy opposition from those within her own party, as the House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D) of Maryland told Al-Monitor on Wednesday that he intends to vote ‘no’ against the resolution.
“I intend to vote no,” Hoyer told Al-Monitor, adding that “we haven’t whipped this, but I think our members think an immediate withdrawal would not be appropriate.”
Gabbard, who has attempted to pass a similar resolution in the past, has been one of the most outspoken anti-war politicians in Washington; this stance has brought on unfounded allegations of Russian collusion from members of the Democratic Party.