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Best of the Web: Vanessa Beeley travels to Aleppo to expose the truth buried under NATO propaganda

Vanessa Beeley
Mint Press News
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 23:18 UTC
road to Aleppo
Passing through Khanaser, al-Safira, and the industrial city of Sheikh Najjar on the road to Aleppo.
Editor's Note: This article is the first in a two-part series of one Western journalist's journey to Aleppo, a city ravaged by an insurgency supported by the United States, NATO member states, and their allies in the Gulf states and Israel.

In Part I, Vanessa Beeley lays out the mainstream narrative on Syria, revealing a neoconservative agenda promoted by NATO-funded NGOs. These NGOs paint the destruction of the historic city as being caused by the Syrian government under Bashar Assad, not the violent armed insurgents which receive arms, funding and training from Western governments and their allies.
Aleppo has become synonymous with destruction and "Syrian state-generated" violence among those whose perception of the situation in the war-torn nation is contained within the prism of mainstream media narratives.

The NATO-aligned media maintains a tight grip on information coming out of this beleaguered city, ensuring that whatever comes out is tailored to meet State Department requirements and advocacy for regime change. The propaganda mill churns out familiar tales of chemical weapons, siege, starvation and bombs targeting civilians - all of which are attributed to the Syrian government and military, with little variation on this theme.

The purpose of this photo essay and my journey to Aleppo on Aug. 14 was to discover for myself as a Western journalist the truth behind the major storylines in the U.S. and NATO narrative on Syria.
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Caesar

Best of the Web: America's war-talk is all bluster, Putin has slammed it with a geopolitical judo swing

Finian Cunningham
Sputnik News
Wed, 05 Oct 2016 17:27 UTC
Obama and Putin
© AP Photo/Amanda VoisardIn this Monday, Sept. 28, 2015, photo, provided by the United Nations, US President Barack Obama, left, and Russia's President Vladimir Putin toast during a luncheon hosted during the 70th annual United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters.
With a swift, determined twist, Russian leader Vladimir Putin has wrong-footed his American adversary, pinning him to the ground over the Syrian crisis.

Writhing and flustered, the American opponent is protesting at being upended. First, in the form of a contorted media campaign smearing Russia's military operations as somehow criminal.

Second, the Americans are breathlessly claiming that Russia's "outrageous" support for Syrian state forces is scuppering peace efforts.

Third, the Americans have tried to intimidate Russia by cutting off diplomatic contact over Syria, which is a veiled attempt to threaten Russia militarily, either from direct US intervention in Syria or indirectly by upping supply of anti-aircraft missiles to the proxy terror groups.

Russia is having none of this American menacing. It has proceeded to ramp up the military offensive along with Syrian forces to defeat the Western-backed terror groups in their last redoubt in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. If the anti-government mercenaries are vanquished there, then the six-year foreign-fueled war for regime change in Syria is all but over.
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Pistol

Best of the Web: Police brutality is CLASS warfare, not 'race war': 19 Americans killed by cops this week, most of them NOT Black

Patrick Martin
World Socialist Website
Tue, 04 Oct 2016 21:08 UTC
US militarized police
These people don't care if you're white, black or yellow
At least 19 people lost their lives in encounters with police in the United States last week. The victims, all men, ranged in age from 18 to 53. Seventeen were shot to death, one tased, and one both tased and beaten and strangled. In only two of the cases were the victims shot while engaged in violent attacks on others. All the others were shot while fleeing or allegedly resisting police, or while experiencing mental health or emotional crises.

In several instances the police killings sparked protests. In El Cajon, California, a suburb of San Diego, there were protests over the death September 27 of Alfred Olango, an immigrant from Uganda who was tased and shot to death while unarmed. Olango was having an emotional breakdown after learning of the death of a friend.

In Pasadena, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, more than 100 people gathered to protest the killing of Reginald Thomas, father of eight children, after police were called to address a domestic dispute early Friday. The 36-year-old black man, who was reportedly bipolar, was said to be waving a knife and a fire extinguisher when police arrived.

Comment: Class, not race, is the primary determinant of who gets killed by The Enforcers; a fact that is almost completely lost in a climate where hysteria favors the super-rich super-elite because ordinary people turn against each other and forget about the bank bailouts, the illegal wars, the rigged elections, the illegal surveillance state, the destruction of civil liberties, etc, etc.

See also:

US Police State - All the ways you can comply and still die during an encounter with police

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Meteor

Best of the Web: Battle of Armageddon: Will it come on Obama's or Clinton's watch?

Phil Butler
Sputnik
Sat, 01 Oct 2016 16:13 UTC
Fall of Babylon painting
© Wikipedia
"Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags".. - John Kirby, US State Department.
The battle of Armageddon refers to the final war between human governments and God. In the book of Revelations, in Christian scriptures, this ultimate battle of good and evil takes place on a plain beneath the Israeli town of Megiddo. Most scholars agree the reference to the town is figurative only, but Tel Megiddo is just over 80 miles from embattled Damascus, Syria. I know this is an interesting revelation for some, but geographic proximity to end days is not the only "coincidental" moment of our time.

There's a song from the 1960s that comes to mind. The melody and lyrics of the Zager and Evans super hit tune "In the Year 2525" are droning in my brain this morning, one stanza in particular: "In the year 7510 If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then Maybe he'll look around himself and say Guess it's time for the Judgement day."
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Attention

Best of the Web: Bombshell: Pentagon paid PR firm $540mln to film terrorist propaganda

Crofton Black and Abigail Fielding-Smith
Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Sun, 02 Oct 2016 16:55 UTC
zarqawi
US contractor Nicholas Berg is filmed sitting in front of Zarqawi, centre, and his henchmen moments before he is murdered. Zarqawi pioneered the use of internet videos as a tool of terror - did he work for Bell Pottinger by any chance?
The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda programme in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

Bell Pottinger's output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.

The agency's staff worked alongside high-ranking US military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.

Bell Pottinger's former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a "covert" military operation "covered by various secrecy agreements."

Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.

Comment: Fast forward ten years and ask yourself: how much of the ISIS propaganda we see today is also produced by a British PR firm to "track suspected sympathizers"? How much of the "al-Qaeda material" used by Bell Pottinger in their black propaganda was produced by military/intelligence?

Remember the context: the American occupation was facing a strong strong insurgency from Iraqis fighting against the illegal invasion and occupation of their country. Covert military strategy in such a scenario should be obvious: polarize the population view white/grey/black propaganda to gain support for the puppet regime, radicalize the nutjobs, terrorize the population, and paint the patriotic insurgency as terrorists, thus delegitimizing them. Black ops are employed for the same purposes.

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MIB

Best of the Web: U.S. Special Forces officer: How the CIA armed and trained jihadists for war in Syria

Alastair Crooke
Consortium News
Thu, 29 Sep 2016 00:00 UTC
jihadists in training
The West blames Russia for the bloody mess in Syria, but U.S. Special Forces saw close up how the chaotic U.S. policy of aiding Syrian jihadists enabled Al Qaeda and ISIS to rip Syria apart, explains ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.

"No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort", a former Green Beret writes of America's covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian insurgents, "they know we are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, 'Fuck it, who cares?'". "I don't want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans," the Green Beret added.

In a detailed report, US Special Forces Sabotage White House Policy gone Disastrously Wrong with Covert Ops in Syria, Jack Murphy, himself a former Green Beret (U.S. Special Forces), recounts a former CIA officer having told him how the "the Syria covert action program is [CIA Director John] Brennan's baby ...Brennan was the one who breathed life into the Syrian Task Force ... John Brennan loved that regime-change bullshit."

In gist, Murphy tells the story of U.S. Special Forces under one Presidential authority, arming Syrian anti-ISIS forces, whilst the CIA, obsessed with overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad, and operating under a separate Presidential authority, conducts a separate and parallel program to arm anti-Assad insurgents.

Comment: Yes, pity Syria - that has, however indirectly, and for the last how many years, bravely fought a life or death struggle against one of the most maniacal, covert and pathological forces ever to walk Earth - the CIA. And if that isn't bad enough, it has one of the most maniacal, covert and pathological forces on Earth spreading lies about the whole tragedy - the Western media.

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Propaganda

Best of the Web: U.S. propaganda failing: Even mainstream now admits that moderate rebels are al-Qaeda

Bernhard
Moon of Alabama
Fri, 30 Sep 2016 15:17 UTC
syria
© Carlos Latuff
The Obama administration, and especially the CIA and the State Department, seem to be in trouble. They shout everything they can against Russia and allege that the cleansing of east-Aleppo of al-Qaeda terrorist is genocidal. Meanwhile no mention is ever made of the famine of the Houthis in Yemen which the U.S. and Saudi bombing and their blockade directly causes.

But more and more major news accounts support the Russian allegation that the "moderate rebels" the U.S. is coddling in Syria are actually in cahoots with al-Qaeda if not al-Qaeda itself.

Reuters reports (though only at the end of a longer story):
In Aleppo, rebels in the Free Syrian Army are sharing operational planning with Jaish al-Fatah, an alliance of Islamist groups that includes the former Syrian wing of al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, in nearby Hama province, FSA groups armed with U.S.-made anti-tank missiles are taking part in a major offensive with the al Qaeda-inspired Jund al-Aqsa group.

Comment: See also: SOTT News Snapshot: U.S. rages at Russia for attacking its terrorist allies in Syria

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Yoda

Best of the Web: A year of Russia fighting against Western imperialism: 5 key milestones of the Russian air campaign in Syria


RT
Fri, 30 Sep 2016 14:58 UTC
russia airstrikes
Precisely a year ago Moscow joined the campaign in Syria at the request of Damascus. While killing thousands of jihadists, Russia suffered military losses, but became one of the driving forces behind attempts at the national reconciliation process.

On September 30, 2015 Russian jets conducted their first strikes against terrorist targets in Syria, hitting Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL) positions near the cities of Homs and Hama.

By that time the US-led coalition had been already active in Syria for over a year. Yet Russia became the only state which received an official request from Syrian President Bashar Assad to conduct air strikes in the country. The Russian jets operated from the Khmeimim air base located in Syria's Latakia Governorate.

Liberation of Palmyra

During its mission, the Russian Air Force aided the Syrian army in liberating one of the country's key cities and a world heritage site - Palmyra. The ancient city had been under the control of IS since May 2015 before it was retaken by government forces backed by Russian airstrikes in March this year.

Jihadists destroyed numerous historical landmarks during the occupation, while leaving roads, houses and monuments booby trapped. Russian and Syrian sappers defused thousands of mines left by the terrorists after their retreat. Following the liberation of the ravaged city, the world-famous Russian conductor Valery Gergiev led a concert in Palmyra to support its restoration and honor the victims of the war.

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Attention

Best of the Web: Volunteers by day, terrorists by night: The double life of White Helmets


South Front
Thu, 29 Sep 2016 00:01 UTC
Double Life of White Helmets
© twitter.com / GjoeneA worker of a social canteen
Volunteers of the White Helmets civil defense organization have a double life: they are 'volunteers' by day and terrorists by night.

Photos, published online, reveal 'the second life' of volunteers of the White Helmets civil defense organization that operates throughout the Syrian territory, controlled by the 'moderate' opposition.

According to the photos, the volunteers spend one part of their lives, providing assistance to civilian population, and then transform into members of terrorist groups and shoot at the same civilians.

Comment: See also:

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Bad Guys

Best of the Web: US condemnation against phantom Syria and Russian "humanitarian crimes" - prelude to NATO-style invasion?

Finian Cunningham
Strategic Culture Foundation
Wed, 28 Sep 2016 16:28 UTC
syria soldier
© pbs.org
The crescendo of US-led condemnations against Syria and Russia over alleged humanitarian crimes in Syria grows louder by the day. The eerie sense is that this «outcry» is being orchestrated as a prelude to a NATO-style intervention in Syria.

Such a NATO maneuver would follow the template for former Yugoslavia and Libya, leading to greater civilian deaths, territorial disintegration, a surge in regional terrorism and more international lawlessness by Western states.

The concerted, emotive appeals over the past week - bordering on hysteria - indicate a propaganda campaign coordinated between Washington and its Western allies, the mass media and the US-led NATO military alliance.

It was US ambassador the United Nations Samantha Power who led the chorus of accusations against Russia and its Syrian ally, using the Security Council emergency meeting last weekend to condemn «barbarism» of renewed violence around the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. Britain and France piled in with more unsubstantiated condemnations of war crimes, as did shameless UN officials, Ban Ki-Moon, the secretary general, and Staffan de Mistura, the UN's special envoy to Syria.


Comment: Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova swiftly rebuked Samantha Power for her "barbarism" comments at the UN:

Few people would countenance war, but surely Syria has the sovereign right to defend its nation from a foreign-fueled war on its territory. In all the lachrymose lecturing from the likes of Samantha Power, the pertinent question of who started this war in the first place gets lost in rhetorical fog.
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