After US-NATO forces have bombed Libya into bedlam the question remains open who will fall victim to Washington's "humanitarian" mission next, expert in political and military affairs Brian Cloughley asks.

NATO's saber-rattling and muscle-flexing anywhere in the world always looks like a bad omen since the Alliance has never learnt from its mistakes.

NATO's military campaign in Libya has led to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions, however, Washington is unwilling to admit that it was a grave mistake for the US to topple Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

"US-NATO's three billion dollar jamboree of aerial destruction that reduced Libya to bedlam was described by the West as a military triumph, and hailed in 2012 by two prominent US-NATO military figures [Ivo H. Daalder and Admiral James G. Stravridis] as demonstrating that 'by any measure, NATO succeeded in Libya'," author and expert in political and military affair Brian Cloughley underscored in his article for Strategic Culture Foundation.

From collaborating on torture techniques to mind control experiments.

Psychiatrists and psychologists have been used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to facilitate mind control and torture in Project MKUltra and in the American Psychological Association-bolstered CIA torture program. Psychiatric political abuses in nations that are U.S. enemies have been routinely denounced by U.S. establishment psychiatry and the U.S. government, especially during the Cold War within the Soviet Union (where political dissidents were diagnosed with "sluggish schizophrenia" and psychiatrically hospitalized and drugged). However, the abuse of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment to subvert human rights has occurred not only in the totalitarian governments of U.S. enemies but in the United States as well.

While the following list of political abuses of U.S. psychiatry and psychology begins with the infamous Project MKUltra and recent American Psychological Association torture scandal, this should not be taken to imply that these more sensational abuses are the most important ones. For gay Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans, the political abuse of psychiatry and psychology is a significant part of their traumatizing American history, and while MKUltra resulted in severe trauma and even death, mental health professionals' current enabling of dehumanizing American institutions continues to create, quite possibly, even greater damage.

1. Project MKUltra

This CIA program of experiments on human subjects, which began in the early 1950s, used drugs (including LSD) and other procedures (including sensory deprivation and electroshock) to weaken and break an individual and force confessions. MKUltra has been documented by the U.S. Congress' Church Committee investigations, acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court, and detailed in The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences by former State Department officer John Marks.

In MKUltra, there was widespread involvement by at least 80 institutions (including universities, pharmaceutical corporations, and prisons) and 185 researchers, including some of America's leading psychiatrists such as Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West and leading psychologists such as Henry Murray. Among the subjects in one of Murray's MKUltra experiments at Harvard was 17-year-old undergraduate Ted Kaczynski, and serving as a subject in another MKUltra experiment was a young prison inmate named Whitey Bulger.

Maintaining the anti-Russian sanctions is not in Germany's best interest and Berlin now considers lifting some of them, a German political analyst said on Friday.

"The sanctions [on Russia] have gone a bit too far and are not in the best interest of our economy. Still, the government has taken certain steps to minimize their impact, above all Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has been working hard to mend fences with Moscow," Hubert Tilicke said during a Moscow-Berlin video linkup organized by Russia Today.

Three suspects testified Wednesday on Syrian state television that they received arms and weapons from abroad to fuel a wave of protests in the country.

Anas al-Kanj, who presented himself as the head of an "armed terrorist group" is heard saying in a taped broadcast that he received "arms and money" from abroad, namely neighbouring Lebanon, to fuel unrest.

Kanj, 29, said the funds and weapons were sent by Lebanese MP Jamal Jarrah through an intermediary, Ahmad al-Uda, who identified himself as a member of Syria's banned Muslim Brotherhood.

Jarrah is a member of the Future Movement of Lebanon's caretaker prime minister Saad Hariri, whose government collapsed in January after the Syrian-backed Hizbollah and its allies quit the cabinet.

Vladimir Putin has ordered a memorial to all victims of political repression in Russia's history. The work named "The Wall of Grief" will be installed on a Moscow street named after famous dissident Andrey Sakharov.

Vladimir Putin also charged the Russian government with finding sources to finance the project.

Sources in the State Museum of Gulag History told Interfax news agency that "The Wall of Grief" monument will be based on a draft created by sculptor Georgy Frangulyan. The museum has already started to collect donations to finance the project. Frangulyan is known as the sculptor of the monument installed on Boris Yeltsin's grave.

"The monument will become a warning to coming generations that tragic consequences of authoritarian policies touch everyone and can be repeated at any given moment," reads the author's description of the Wall of Grief sculpture.

There is already a monument to victims of Stalinist purges in central Moscow - the so-called Solovetsky Stone stands in front of the building that once housed the KGB and its predecessors, the NKVD and Cheka. It stands where the statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky used to be.

Future wars will have much more devastating weapons than airstrikes, tanks and even nuclear weapons. Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations warned about new threats, including geophysical and genetic weapons that could pose threats to Russia's well-being in the future.

Future weapons will be based on energy, electromagnetic, radiological, geophysical and genetic principles. There will also be special information weapons to change people's perception, completely changing their mind, the Ministry said.

Geophysical weapons that can alter the weather were already talked about in the past. People even wondered whether some hurricanes and earthquakes were "natural" disasters, speculating that it was possible to alter the climate and set off earthquakes using electromagnetic fields.

These deadly weapons of the future will target main control centers, essential facilities, technology, infrastructure and population.

Russian special services are working tirelessly to prevent potential terrorist attacks by extremists in retaliation to Moscow's operation in Syria, Dmitry Peskov, presidential press secretary, has said.

Peskov noted the situation was similar to other places in the world - in all nations special services are constantly taking steps to counter terrorism in all of its manifestations. In Russia, this task is being fulfilled by the Federal Security Service and the National Anti-Terror Committee, he said.

The Russian Air Force mounted several strikes on terrorist positions in Syria on Wednesday, soon after the country's upper house unanimously voted to endorse President Putin's request to use the nation's military in Syria to fight terrorism. The head of the presidential administration Sergey Ivanov emphasized that Russia would not be involved in any ground operation - aid would only be in the form of airstrikes.

In press comments on Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin called the operation in Syria "preemptive strikes against terrorists" adding that the use of military forces abroad had been prompted by the fact that a relatively large number of Russian citizens had joined the terrorist groups in Syria, and these people could potentially pose a threat to Russia's national security. The president said that extremists must all be defeated in the Middle East and not allowed to return to their home countries.

In late February, the head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Aleksandr Bortnikov, urged deeper professional cooperation between special services in their common fight against the Islamic State terrorist group (IS, previously known as ISIL and ISIS). He noted that Russia was especially interested in cooperation with the United States in the common fight against IS and added that the existing intelligence exchange was already helping to achieve positive results.

Russia started its air campaign against ISIL in Syria, following a request for assistance from Damascus in the fight against terrorism.

Soon after the first Russian strikes in Syria some media outlets were quick to come up with reports claiming that the Moscow-led campaign already resulted in civilian deaths.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin refuted the rumors of Russian airstrikes hitting non-terrorist infrastructure in Syria as groundless, emphasizing that there has been no verified information of such activity.

Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konoshenkov told reporters on Wednesday that Moscow had carried out 20 airstrikes solely against the Islamic State on the first day of its air campaign. He also underlined that the Russian jets did not hit any civilian infrastructure or areas nearby - as was alleged earlier by some media.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky, director of the Canadian Centre for Research on Globalization, spoke to Sputnik in an exclusive interview about how Russia is helping Syria in the fight against the US-supported terror groups in Syria.

As Russia launches airstrikes against ISIS at the request of Syria's government, Western media outlets have ramped up the vilification of the Kremlin. By doing so the US coalition is trying to save face and cover up for its failures in the Middle East, experts told RT.

'US government & media: work in tune to demonize Russia'

According to journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin, "there is a whole history of [US] government cooperation with the media" that is aimed at delivering a "unified message" for the public to rally around, thereby serving the interests of those in power.

"I think anyone who believes that the news media and the government don't cooperate and collaborate is deluding themselves," he told RT.

Maupin said the history of media-government collusion dates back to at least the 1960s with the introduction of the FBI COINTELPRO program, which "consciously planted false stories in the news."

"You can go back even earlier than that - there is a whole history of government cooperation with the media in order to put out a unified message and rally the public around what they want to achieve."

According to Maupin, the Western media does not practice what it preaches around the world regarding 'freedom of the press.'

"The US frequently goes around the world championing what it calls 'freedom of the press,' denouncing governments when they don't uphold the freedom of the press in ways the US feels are acceptable," he said. "US media claims to be objective, fair and balanced and neutral, but in reality it puts forward a very clear perspective on world events and that perspective is very hostile to Russia... any independent-minded government is going to be demonized in the US media."

The Iraqis have to carry highly complex negotiations with representatives of ISIL to save the lives of their sons and daughters who were abducted by the militants. Some of these abductees are sold or punished. Women are stoned to death or sold as sex slaves.

Sputnik has been provided with exclusive information on the 'prices of people' in the slave markets of Iraq and Syria.

In addition, there is also information about the risks faced by these negotiators. When delivering a ransom, negotiators run the high risk of losing their life or losing all the money without getting the release of the hostages.

The most 'valuable' prisoners are kept underground. The Iraqi prisoners are held in prison, which is a real underground city, and is located in Anbar province in western Iraq. For the release of these prisoners, ISIL militants ask for up to $120,000 in cash.