Comment: Hezbollah is on alert too. This report is from South Front:

Comment: Previously:

• Republicans unhappy after AG Sessions refuses to charge Lois Lerner in IRS Tea Party scandal
• Lawmakers told IRS tea party probe will take years
• Judicial Watch sues IRS for stonewalling on tea party FOIA
• Tea Party group response to IRS' request for its reading list: Send them copy of U.S. Constitution!

Comment: See also:

• James Comey attempted to discredit Trump's wiretapping claims that proved true
• Former Trump adviser Roger Stone: Wiretapping at Trump Tower 'a bigger scandal than Watergate'
• Wiretapping against Trump: The spectacle, the implications and the outrage
• No stranger to wiretapping: Obama administration tapped phones and computers of friends and foe alike

Comment: We hear that interstellar asteroid Oumuamua has no president yet (hint, Hillary, hint!).

Comment: These Roy Moore accusations are getting fishier by the minute. See:

• Roy Moore case: Calls for arrest of attorney Gloria Allred over possibly forged signature in accuser's yearbook
• Former Alabama mall manager says Roy Moore was not banned over harassment claims
• Ned Ryun suspects McConnell camp planted Roy Moore story
• Roy Moore caught up in Hollywood Weinstein Hysteria
• Mother of Leigh Corfman, one of Roy Moore's accusers, has contradicted a key detail of her daughter's sexual misconduct story

Comment: It is only natural that the US and UK militaries have no idea about civilian deaths. Their purpose in invading the Middle East was to steal and plunder; the pretense of minimising human casualties was mere Public Relations management. They did it in Iraq and Libya, and tried it in Syria via proxy terrorist armies, along with their NATO friends and their allies of the Middle Eastern axis of evil: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel.

Naturally, making living conditions unbearable creates mass migration and refugees - and where should all these displaced people go if not Europe? Now Europe has a problem, but they should have thought about that before taking part in US-led imperial adventures.

On the New York Times report on civilian casualties, Albawaba reports:

While official figures indicate that only one in 157 airstrikes caused a civilian fatality, the report published Thursday [by The New York Times] claims as many as one in five resulted in civilian death.

So why, presuming the second figure is the more correct one, was the coalition allowed to get away with lying?

The high numbers of civilians dying have sometimes been reported in international media. For instance, coalition airstrikes on the Jadidah district of Mosul which killed "up to 200 civilians" on March 17 gained coverage.

The Guardian reported on March 25 that the coalition had "launched a formal investigation into reports of civilian casualties."

According to Airwars, an NGO which monitors civilian casualties, that probe found that a U.S. strike had killed between 105 and 141 civilians. Locals, meanwhile, gave estimates as high as 600 dead.

Still, despite the initial outrage, there was no follow up by the press. The results of that investigation were not published or interrogated by mainstream outlets.

The reason for this, the New York Times report suggests, is that most of the coalition's process for analyzing civilian deaths "is hidden" meaning that "its thoroughness is difficult to evaluate independently."

What a load of mumbo-jumbo jargon. For all we know, "hidden" means they are not counting at all.

Another reason that the coalition has not been held accountable by the media is that local reporting is weaker than elsewhere. Chris Woods, director of Airwars, told the New York Times that his organization "may be significantly underreporting deaths in Iraq" as a result.

Another reason is that the moral standards and profesionalism of Western media, such as the New York Times, which pushed the 'weapons of mass destruction' narrative back in 2003, are weak and do not dare to speak truth to power.

Still, despite this weakness, Airwars itself has claimed that 3,000 Iraqi civilians have died in coalition airstrikes since 2014. That is, six times as many as the 466 civilian deaths the coalition has publicly acknowledged.

In fact, the New York Times investigation found "a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all."

Because they are not interested in the truth - much less in letting the truth be known.

In reaction to reports of civilian deaths as a result of the March 17 strike, U.S. Central Command released a statement saying: "Our goal has always been for zero civilian casualties"

It continued by blaming "ISIS's inhuman tactics terrorising civilians, using human shields and fighting from protected sites such as schools, hospitals, religious sites and civilian neighbourhoods."

The New York Times report, however, disputed coalition claims that casualties were hard to avoid because ISIS was embedded within the civilian population. That investigation found that "in about half of the strikes that killed civilians [there was] no discernible ISIS target nearby."

"In the eyes of the coalition, its diligence on these matters points to a dispiriting truth about war" the report says. "Supreme precision can reduce civilian casualties to a very small number, but that number will never reach zero."

Perhaps the same mentality is why the media did not ask more questions before now. Civilian casualties of U.S. wars are seen as inevitable - and the loss of Iraqi lives is no longer news.

Oh, but on many occasions the US did take care about who and how to target - that is, to target away from ISIS. See:

As Russian MoD releases evidence of US military cooperation with ISIS, Lavrov slams illegal US presence in Syria

where we read:

Lavrov also highlighted a statement from the Russian Defence Ministry which unequivocally accuses (with accompanying photographic evidence) the US of failing to target ISIS fighters in Syria while allowing them safe passage away from oncoming Syrian Arab Army liberators.

Syria has repeatedly stated, including at the United Nations, that US troops and airmen in Syria are not actually fighting ISIS but are merely playing an obstructionist role to the inevitable Syrian victory, one which includes the arming and financing of terrorist groups. [...]

"The US side categorically refused to carry out airstrikes against Daesh terrorists, claiming that the militants were 'voluntarily surrendering' and now fell under the provisions of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War."

Comment: Al Franken has a history of jokes in very poor taste, and many of the incidents in which he's been accused seem like a complete misunderstanding of what is actually funny. It seems like this case with Huffington is not in the same class, since she herself says there wasn't any misconduct. However, it looks like the former funnyman, current Senator, has a recurring problem knowing when his female counterparts are in on the joke, and easily crosses the line into misconduct.

See:

• Los Angeles broadcaster accuses Senator Al Franken of sexual harassment
• Second woman accuses Al Franken of inappropriately touching her
• Appropriate response to sexual misconduct vexes both parties in wake of Franken, Moore allegations

Comment: It seems the liberal media, in the wake of Weinstein's Weinergate, and subsequent avalanche of sexual misconduct allegations, are changing their tune on the Bill Clinton accusations. After all, how can someone condemn a current politician or celebrity while Clinton gets a pass?

See:

• 20 years too late, Vox columnist admits Bill Clinton should have resigned over sex scandals
• The Left is turning on Bill Clinton and Joe Biden over their disgusting actions towards women
• 1999 Dan Rather interview on Bill Clinton sexual assault allegations exposes media's Democrat bias

And just in case you were beginning to think Bill Clinton isn't a total scumbag:

• Bill Clinton facing fresh allegations of sexual assault from four women
• Victims of Bill Clinton's sexual assaults slam mainstream media coverage, praise Drudge and Breitbart for fair reporting
• Sex & politics: How professional feminists saved Bill (and Hillary) Clinton in the 1990's
• Two of Bill Clinton's rape victims hit back at Hillary after she claimed they 'misremembered' assaults