I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, "Where is that?" If I offer a clue by referring to "Bikini", they say, "You mean the swimsuit." Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered "unsafe" on a Geiger counter. Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called "Bravo". The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women's Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: "You, too, can have a bikini body." A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different "bikini bodies"; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers. Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions" of democratic societies. He called it an "invisible government".

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make "the world free from nuclear weapons". People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

Nowadays, a variety of means are being used in order to implement and extend the "controlled chaos" in the national economies and societies in the geopolitical struggle. The actor, who is using the tool, is maintaining the "controlled chaos" within the opposing country.

Steven Mann, the US foreign policy expert who took part in the developing of many of the current "controlled chaos" hotspots in various parts of the world, speaks openly of the need to use "increased level strongly-worded criticism", and causing "controlled chaos" to secure and promote the US national interests.

Steven Mann is a key figure behind the development of the "controlled chaos" theory as a means of furthering US national interests. Mann was born in 1951 and graduated from Oberlin College in 1973 with a B.A. in German. In 1974 he obtained an M.A. in German Literature from the Cornell University and has been a member of the Foreign Service since 1976. He received a Harriman Institute for Advanced Soviet Studies scholarship to obtain an M.A. in Political Science from the Columbia University in 1985-1986. He graduated from the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

While the world's attention zeroed in on the attacks in Brussels, the U.S. made a stunning admission of responsibility for an attack of its own last year in Afghanistan: the deadly bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Kunduz.

"As commander," said Gen. John W. Nicholson, who now commands U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, "I wanted to come to Kunduz personally and stand before the families, and the people of Kunduz, to deeply apologize for the events."

Those "events" comprised a bombardment via airstrike on the hospital on October 3, 2015 — and left 42 people dead and 37 injured.

Officials are finally admitting the F-35 fighter has turned into a nightmare—but it's too late to stop the $400 billion program now.

Way back in the early 2000s, the U.S. military had a dream. To develop a new "universal" jet fighter that could do, well, pretty much everything that the military asks its different fighters to do.

But the dream of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter turned into a nightmare. The program is six years behind schedule and tens of billions of dollars over budget. And now, 16 years after the JSF prototypes took off for their first flights, top officials are finally owning up to the trauma the $400 billion fighter program has inflicted on America's finances and war readiness.

In a remarkable period, beginning in February and lasting several weeks, senior officers and high-ranking bureaucrats finally publicly copped to the warplane program's fundamental failures.

Blanket media coverage and calls for revenge just fuel the cycle of violence
The purpose of terrorism is not to destroy or kill. It is to pursue a political cause through the massive publicity that is attached to terrifying incidents. Today's bombs in Brussels, apparently related to the attacks in Paris last year and the capture of Salah Abdeslam last Friday, are patently intended to do just that. Merely killing passers-by serves no warlike purpose in itself. The explosive force derives from our reaction to it, from the public attention awarded to it and from the response of the political community. Publicity and response are the terrorists' "useful idiocies".

There is no way any community can make itself immune to terror attacks. Since they are random, no protection can defend that community from them. No amount of police work or surveillance, no deployment of armies or navies, let alone of missiles or nuclear weapons, can guard against them. Intelligence and surveillance can go so far, but the bombers and killers will get through any net.


Political terror is as old as war. From the Roman legions to Bomber Command, the instilling of horror in civilian populations has been a standard weapon. "Fighting terrorism" is as meaningless as "fighting guns".

What is not stupid is seeking to alleviate, or not aggravate, the rage that gives rise to acts of terror, and then to diminish the potency of the incident itself. The first requires a wiser foreign policy than most western nations have shown towards the Muslim world over the past decade. The second is even harder to achieve. It demands patience and restraint in publicising terrorist incidents and in responding to them.

The blanket media coverage assured for any act of violence is reckless. The media must "report", but it need not go berserk in reveling in the violence caused, as it manifestly has done to Islamic State brutality. More serious, the intention of the terrorist is clearly to shut down western society, to show liberal democracy to be a sham and to invoke the persecution of Muslims. Yet that is the invariable response of the security industry to these incidents. Convinced of its potency, it dare not admit there are some things against which it cannot protect us. So when incidents occur it jerks the knee and demands ever more money and ever more power. It must not be given them.

Brussels, the administrative capital of Europe, was turned into a war zone after a series of deadly bomb blasts caused the city to shut down all transport links to the outside world.

Zaventem International Airport was struck by two blasts during the early morning rush hour. An hour later, a metro station in downtown Brussels underneath the European Council headquarters was also hit by a third bomb.

The vicinity of the third blast is where key European Union buildings and related offices are located. Terrified administrative staff spoke of feeling shockwaves in the upper stories of buildings as chaos and bloodshed descended on the streets below.


The capital is also the headquarters of the US-led NATO military alliance, whose stated aim is to maintain security in Europe.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel quickly declared the entire country on maximum security alert and relayed warnings from authorities for everyone including workers to "stay indoors or stay in place."

The Syria government forces have regained control of historic area of Palmyra, Syrian brigadier-general said.

"The Syrian army regained control of the historic town of Tadmur (Palmyra) with small weapons," a Syrian brigadier-general told Sputnik. Thus, he emphasized that the town was taken without air assistance.

Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, when mass anti-government protests against President Bashar Assad escalated to an armed confrontation between government troops and allied militia on the one hand, and Syrian opposition factions and radical Islamists on the other.

A 27-year-old U.S. marine was killed this weekend by an ISIS rocket attack on a base that the American public didn't know existed. The death forced the Pentagon to reveal on Sunday—the 13th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War—that it was in the process of setting up a base for marines in Northern Iraq. The Pentagon had supposedly "planned to acknowledge" this escalation of U.S. forces in Iraq later this week, an unnamed defense official told CNN.

The base was attacked a second time on Monday, CNN reported.

The New York Times reported:

In a conference call with reporters, Colonel Warren said the Marines were not combat forces because they were positioned at the outpost to provide "force protection" to American military advisers working alongside Iraqi troops. "They won't kind of go off and conduct any type of mission on their own," he said, referring to the Marines. "They don't really have that capability anyways. They're just providing coverage, right? They're providing fire support coverage for the several thousand Iraqi soldiers and the several hundred advisers."

"Force protection" is military jargon for providing security. But the U.S. military has long contracted out its security in Iraq to foreign workers—a policy that has been met with harsh criticism from human rights and labor activists, among many others.

Operation Gladio is undisputed historical fact. Gladio was part of a post-World War II program set up by the CIA and NATO supposedly to thwart future Soviet/communist invasions or influence in Italy and Western Europe. In fact, it became a state-sponsored right-wing terrorist network, involved in false flag operations and the subversion of democracy.

The existence of Gladio was confirmed and admitted by the Italian government in 1990, after a judge, Felice Casson, discovered the network in the course of his investigations into right-wing terrorism. Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti admitted Gladio's existence but tried to minimize its significance.

The main function of the Gladio-style groups, in the absence of Soviet invasion, seems to have been to discredit left-wing groups and politicians through the use of "the strategy of tension," including false-flag terrorism. The strategy of tension is a concept for control and manipulation of public opinion through the use of fear, propaganda, agents provocateurs, terrorism, etc. The aim was to instil fear into the populace while framing communist and left-wing political opponents for terrorist atrocities.

The aviation and general security services firm ICTS handles security operations at Brussels airport, the scene of a bomb attack yesterday morning.

ICTS was established in 1982 by former members of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency and El Al airline security agents, and has a major presence around the world in airport security including operations in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Japan and Russia. ICTS uses the security system employed in Israel, whereby passengers are profiled to assess the degree to which they pose a potential threat on the basis of a number of indicators, including age, name, origin and behavior during questioning.

Chairman of the Supervisory Board at ICTS is Menachem J. Atzmon. Atzmon is a former Likud party member who was indicted and convicted in 1996 in a fraud and embezzlement case relating to the misappropriation of funds raised by charities. Atzmon is also the CEO of the port authority of Rostock in Germany.

This will not, however, be the first time that ICTS has come under scrutiny for possible security lapses leading to a 'Muslim terror attack'.