Perhaps more than any other region in Syria, Aleppo has been the hub of the NATO/US/Gulf media and NGO propaganda, intent on demonization of the Syrian Government and Syrian Arab Army. White Helmet central, Aleppo has been the concealed nest of Al Nusra operatives, overt or covert, disguised as the ‘Syria Civil Defence’, white helmeted “saviours of all Humanity” provided the Humanity has no associations with the Syrian Government, Shia, Kurdish or Christian factions in or surrounding Aleppo.

Since the Syrian Arab Army has advanced deeper into Al Nusra and ISIS territory uprooting the terrorist cells, the truth has revealed itself by degrees.

Probably first to break mainstream media ranks, was Stephen Kinzer of the Boston Globe:

“COVERAGE OF the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why.

For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents:

“Don’t send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it.”

This was followed by Peter Oborne of the Daily Mail:

More recently, even the Washington Post has reluctantly joined the small band of truth-sayers disseminating the reality of terrorist besieged and occupied Aleppo. Finally it is being revealed that the streets claimed to be furrowed by Syrian Government barrel bombs were in fact scarred by terrorist Hell Cannon missiles ranging from crude cooking gas canisters filled with nails, glass and a variety of projectiles to mortars & shells fired indiscriminately into Government held civilian areas.

One particular resident has been consistently outspoken regarding the “moderate rebels” and the unstoppable tide of Rami Jarrah, Syria Campaign, White Helmet propaganda. All names are withheld for their security as there is an ever present risk of reprisals from the now pressurized terrorist gangs and brigands who remain trapped by the SAA, Hezbollah advances.

“President Assad is not exterminating his people. I’m still alive, and no one said a word to me. If something bad happened to me in the near future, it would be because of the terrorists’ policy of extermination. I’m living happily because there are Syrian soldiers who are defending us in hot summers and cold winters. The UN is lying as usual in their reports about Aleppo and Syria in general.” ~ Voice From Aleppo: Stop the Lies

For all previous reports from this individual who has lived through the daily terrorist incursions and shelling in Aleppo, for the last 9 months please go to The Wall Will Fall.

“Corruption!”: Everyone Has It

After years of 24/7 brainwashing of the world with tons of lies, on all type of media, in focusing on ‘spreading democracy’ by force on other nations, or changing regimes that don’t obey them, and after all these evil strategies were in vain… perhaps they could solve the problem by removing the “democracy glasses” they forced the globe to wear in the first place. Apart from anything else, no one believes that they really wanted to spread real democracy and freedom in the world. It’s all phony and fake versions of democracy that destroy nations.

Syrians were living peacefully for decades, happily and independent. We had corruption? And who doesn’t have it [Organized crime, and white collar crime? Who doesn’t have it? An ever increasing wealth gap? Who doesn’t have it?]?

They need serious reforms in politics and government? Many reforms actually took place between 2000-2010, and many of the old corrupted figures left Syria before 2005 to live abroad – with their stolen fortunes. These same corrupt figures went on to become the “moderate rebels” greatest supporters.

What I always used to say is that before the crisis, Syria had almost 80-95% of what any nation seeks to have – a 75-80% legal and straightforward progress. 15-20% corruption at worst. A society where the progress is possible after paying bribes, something no one is proud of but we can’t do much about it unfortunately. We only lacked 3-5% of political reforms and freedom.

This whole crisis, destruction, cleansing, uprooting people from their homes, poverty, refugees problem, infrastructure systematic destruction, raping women, beheading innocents, looting, erasing priceless heritage and historical and sacred buildings and architecture, creating all zombie-like trash criminals that invaded us from all over the world…..

All that and a lot more, was created in the name of gaining those missing 3% of rights. As result, Syrians lost 80% of what they had before, and didn’t gain the 3% that was promised to them.

Within days of the 28th anniversary of the chemical weapons attack on the residents of Halabja in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region – which a 1991 Human Rights Watch investigation called “the single largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in the world” – we are monitoring reports of chemical weapons once again being used against a civilian population in Iraq.

The Islamic State or Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) – against the predominantly Iraqi Shia Turkmen residents of Taza Khurmato (also known as Taza), a farming village just south of the city of Kirkuk.

This week, I talked with Mustafa al-Obeidi, head of an Iraqi humanitarian organization who visited the village of Taza just a week after the March 8, 2016 chemical weapons attack by ISIS. He claims that as many as 6,000 inhabitants have been made violently ill by the mustard gas and chlorine-containing rockets used in the attack. This far outstrips media reports, which estimate 500 to 800 casualties.

Al-Obeidi claims that the public health center in Taza could confirm the high number of those affected, however Iraq’s Ministry of Health has asked the center’s medical staff to stay quiet. He believes that the Iraqi government might be downplaying the severity of the attack in order to avoid panic.

The time has come. Six years after the Supreme Court’s malignant Citizens United ruling, nearly every American plainly sees how our nation’s historic, political ethic of citizen equality — “one person one vote” — has been buried in a roaring avalanche of corrupt, corporate money and voter suppression. Moreover, nearly nine years after Wall Street thieves wrecked our economy, the great majority also plainly sees that the court’s turbo-charge of money politics has produced economic policies that richly reward the plutocratic robbers and coldly abandon the robbed.

There’s no need to convince the American people that they’ve been stiffed. As they reveal in poll after poll, they know it, for they’re experiencing it personally, and they’re furious at the business-as-usual establishment that has done it to them. A major, non-partisan survey taken last September by Public Policy Polling found:

— 80 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats “strongly agree” that special interest money has too much influence in political campaigns. Only 4 percent in either party disagreed.

— 85 percent of GOP primary voters and 86 percent of Democrats agree that elections would be less corrupt if candidates focused on small donations from ordinary people, rather than on big money from special interests.

Trudeau’s budding “bromance” with US President Barak Obama in March marks the first official visit by a Canadian leader since 1997, when Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien visited the last charismatic Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Both visits were friendly–Clinton gushed at the time: “We have the most comprehensive ties of any two nations on earth.” Chretien was not invited by Clinton’s successor, George Bush, who was furious when Chretien refused to join his “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq. More like ‘bro-hate’.

Trudeau’s new-found mentor had some witty advice. Obama joked about Trudeau’s previous jobs: “If things get out of hand, remember the prime minister used to work as a bouncer,” referring to Trudeau’s reminiscences in his memoirs Common Ground. He also laid on a lavish state dinner for Trudeau and his wife Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau, featuring Canadian staples poutine, Nanaimo bars and white chocolate snowballs.

Both visits had their problems. Back in the 1990s, the top item was the enduring boycott by the US of Cuba, by then almost four decades old. Despite being a fellow liberal, US President Clinton was lamely defending the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act, passed by Congress the previous year, which allowed Americans to sue foreign companies doing business in Cuba. Governments around the world condemned the act, arguing that the law ran counter to the spirit of international law and sovereignty.

Trudeau likes the family analogy, toasting the two nations as “siblings” at the White House dinner. “To be able to count on a friend who has lived through many of the things I am about to encounter on the political stage, on the international stage, is a great comfort to me. I’m always pleased to hear from President Obama about how he’s dealt with difficult issues of the past because he is a man of both tremendous heart and tremendous intellect.”

Trudeau’s honeymoon with the US could be coming to an end, but not with his political soul mate. In the few short months before Obama retires, there is still time to advance an agenda which the next US president will at least have to contend with. This will include an address to Canada’s parliament later this spring. That would make him the first US president to do so since Clinton was invited by Chretien in 1995. Trudeau is hopeful about this historic moment for both leaders–and both countries: “On our own, we make progress. But together, we make history.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority. This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream” — a Dan Rather equivalent, say –asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.

The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

Recently the New York Times produced another propaganda gem. This article, entitled “A New Libya, With Very Little Time Left,” led with the “grisly” description of the death of “dictator” Muammar Gaddafi. Interesting that there was no condemnation of the grisly anal rape and gangland execution of the former president. I suppose this is the vaunted objectivity of the Times rearing its own “pock-marked head.” The article also noted Hillary Clinton’s vulgar moment of levity after receiving word of Gaddafi’s death on her mobile (“We came, we saw, he died.”) But in the spirit of journalistic impartiality the paper of record declined to record disgust—or would it have been delight—at the former Secretary of State’s effusive taunt.

Of course, to imply that the brutal assassination of the leader of a sovereign state by foreign-backed terrorists was a criminal act would be to implicate Hillary Clinton in a war crime. And that, we all know, is off the table. But that is the first point to make in an honest discussion of Clinton’s involvement in Libya. It was a war crime, violating the U.N. Charter and the Nuremburg principals. Wars of aggression, as Nuremberg judge Robert Jackson limned, “are the supreme international crime, because they contain within them the evil of the whole.” Precisely the story of Libya, a country with the highest standard of living in Africa, destroyed by Western NATO aerial forces backing terrorist jihadists on the ground. The once proud nation is now a festering swamp of extremism and an escape valve for ISIS fighters being routed in Syria.

The Missing Narrative

Over the course of his career, Gaddafi implemented a huge raft of social and economic programs that were highly popular with the people. It seems hard to reconcile the notion of a populace living in perpetual fear with one that receives free education, healthcare, housing, and a novel system of direct democracy—born in an Islamic state.

Basically an admirer of Gamal Nasser’s theories of economic nationalism as a path between Cold War polarities, Gaddafi was an independent-minded, anti-imperialist Muslim radical. He dramatically altered the shape of the state several times, lastly by creating something called the Jamahiriya, which was a radical form of direct democracy, or at least an attempt at it. In short, small communities would meet, debate issues, and send off representatives to a people’s congress to shape laws based on community decisions. Then this legislation would be sent to revolutionary committees for implementation. Observers have noted instances in which Gaddafi, in a nominal role of avuncular overseer, was rebuffed by the Jamahiriya system and times where he rejected its demands. As head of the armed forces, he never really relinquished the power that would have made the Jamahiriya all the more empowering to the population. But this is not to say it does not include elements that American democracy could not profit by, notably the Jeffersonian and anarchic notion of delegating decision-making to the most grassroots level.

It was Gaddafi who supported the African National Congress (ANC) at a time when Washington considered it a brutal terrorist organization, and Nelson Mandela as its sinister cohort. It was Gaddafi who put $300 million dollars up to start a fund that created Africa’s first satellite communications system called RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization). (It would no longer have to rent American satellites at exorbitant rates.) In that regard, Gaddafi was a driving force in building pan-African institutions. The goal was his long-stated aim to reduce the influence of imperial power on Libya and the continent at large. Doing his best Hugo Chavez impersonation, he used oil wealth to lessen dependency on the exploitative International Monetary Fund and to attempt to de-dollarize the African continent. At the time of his assassination, he was busily creating an African Investment Bank that would provide interest-free development loans to other African nations. He proposed an African Central Bank to be based in Nigeria. He was working on a Cameroon-based African Monetary Fund. He was sketching a blueprint for a gold-backed African currency. He also played a role in the continental rejection of AFRICOM, the imperial headquarters Washington wanted to install to better exploit and police the continent.

For Africans, these were monumental undertakings and offered the hope of independence from Western militaries, multinationals, and creditors. For the West, Gaddafi’s actions were the ultimate crime. He was essentially trying to block the IMF from furthering shackling Africa in suffocating debt that, to be sure, would provide a steady flow of interest payments back to Western banks. He also effectively proposed a de-dollarized African economic block free of both the dollar reserve currency and Western lending institutions. He understood that both were tools of oppression and enslavement. He wanted to replace these extractive tools with continental development funds beneficial to Africans.

For all of this he was murdered and his country reduced to ruin.

As part of the run up to war, Barack Obama froze some $30 billion belonging to the Libyan Central Bank. This money was going to fund the above developments. How convenient that the money was frozen, which derailed the projects, and that a no-fly zone was implemented, which immediately led to the illegal war that overthrew the Gaddafi government.

Ulterior Motives

It’s obvious that the United States sought to unseat Gaddafi because he threatened the global superstructure of U.S. power. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Washington isn’t afraid of Islam but independence. This tragic spectacle has played out ad nauseum across the history of the American empire. In North America itself, in Central and South America, in Africa, in Eastern Europe, and throughout Asia. Anywhere freethinkers rear their un-indoctrinated heads, they are swiftly cut down. Rulers like Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and Hugo Chavez are demonized not for their flaws as governors but for their virtues as nationalists. Independent domestic economics, independent foreign policies–these are the bête noir of Washington’s imperial plan.

Sadly, the rest of the world has been slow to learn the hard lesson that the United States can’t be trusted. This should have been obvious to the world during the Native American genocide. But each new generation of leaders forget their history and repeat the gullibility of their forbears. Yet it is also every new generation of American leaders that somehow ingest the vices of their antecedents.

As time was running out, Gaddafi fielded several peace proposals to the West, ignored by Hillary Clinton as she made an impassioned push for war. He tried vainly to deny the lies promoted incessantly by the Western media: that he was minutes away from committing genocide on his own population. He never had a chance. Media is the spearhead of American foreign policy. Controlling the narrative is the fight that must be won before the war is fought. There is no better practitioner of this shadowy art than Washington.

As with the Gaddafi article, propaganda succeeds by what it leaves out. The corporate media leaves out American aggression, whether through the cynical manipulation of institutions like the UN and the IAEA, which provide nominal legitimacy for state violence, or through the clandestine use of proxy armies, which provide plausible deniability for Washington kingmakers. We are portrayed as an innocent bystander who simply responds, like a dutiful father saddened by the cruel playground behavior of a child. The ensuing discipline is therefore entirely justified, just another form of hard love from the patriarch that wants the best for everyone. This is the worldwide myth of American exceptionalism. It must be universally discredited before it is universally defeated. In a grim sort of consolation, Hillary Clinton will doubtless give us many new opportunities to make the case.