On 17 September 2016 aircraft of the so-called 'coalition', led by the United States, bombed Syrian Army troop positions at Deir Ez-Zor. Aircraft from the United States, United Kingdom, Denmark and Australia took part in the attack. Between 62 and 90 (reports vary) Syrian troops were killed and more than 100 injured. The attack allowed ISIS forces to take control of what was a vital area protecting the airport.


At the time, the attack was labeled a "mistake". Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull apologized, saying he regretted the loss of life and injury to Syrian personnel.

A spokesman for the Syrian government said that the attack was "intentional", a view shared by Syria's ally, Iran. The US military ordered an inquiry into the incident. It is usually the case with such inquiries that little is done, nothing other than "regrettable mistakes" are admitted, and no-one is sanctioned.

Often, some reason is found to attribute the "error" to the enemy's actions, as with the bombing of the Kunduz Hospital in Afghanistan.

The term Back Door Man has several connotations. In the original blues song written by Willie Dixon, it refers to a man having an affair with a married woman, using the back door to flee before the husband comes home. During the Gerald Ford Presidency, Back Door Man was applied to Dick Cheney as Ford's White House Chief of Staff and his "skills" at getting what he wanted through opaque means. More and more as Cabinet choices are named, it looks like the entire Trump Presidency project is emerging as Henry A. Kissinger's "Back Door Man," in the Cheney meaning of the term.

Long forgotten is Trump's campaign rhetoric about draining the swamp. In October during his campaign candidate Trump issued a press release stating, "Decades of special interest dealing must come to an end. We have to break the cycle of corruption...It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C...That is why I am proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again."

So far, the President-elect has already named more billionaires to cabinet and other top posts than any other president in US history - Betsy DeVos of the AmWay fortune as Education Secretary, Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary, Linda McMahon as Small Business Administrator, and Vincent Viola, as Army Secretary. That's not including Trump himself as a putative billionaire.

Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson left a meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump asserting that an upcoming deal with the Pentagon will slash the price of the F-35 program "significantly," noting that the aerospace company plans to add about 1,800 jobs to a plant in Texas.

President-elect Donald Trump and Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson convened for a second meeting on Friday to inch closer on a deal to lower the "tremendous cost and cost overruns" of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. After holding negotiations at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in late December 2016, Trump tweeted that he would ask Boeing to price out "comparable" F/A-18 Super Hornets.


Hewson "certainly" agreed with Trump "that we need to get the best capability to our men and women in uniform and we need to get it at the lowest possible price," according to a statement. The Pentagon is slated to purchase 2,158 more F-35s through 2036, the Congressional Budget Office said in a brief, and the tenth block of F-35s the US is buying from Lockheed is its largest yet, at 90 aircraft. In December 2016, Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan expressed his hope that F-35 costs could be trimmed six to seven percent.

The Russian President is long overdue for a visit to one of the centerpiece regions of the emerging Indo-Pacific century, and the overlap of infrastructure, trade, and institutional interests there should give President Putin more than enough reasons to seriously consider taking a trip to South Asia.

Global politics have been steadily shifting eastward over the years as international affairs increasingly take on an Asian tone, though the prevailing sentiment has been that the Pacific region will dominate in the coming future. While there's plenty of evidence to suggest that East and Southeast Asia will increase their global importance all across this century, comparatively less has been said about the future potential of South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean region.

In fact, it can be confidently argued that the 21st century won't just be about the Asia-Pacific, but rather the Indo-Pacific, because these two areas of the world are interconnected and becoming geopolitically inseparable.

The maritime portion of China's One Belt One Road vision of global connectivity heavily depends on the Indian Ocean for facilitating trade between the People's Republic and its Mideast, European, and African partners, with the game-changing flagship project of CPEC functioning as a convenient mainland shortcut for expediting commerce to China by means of the state-of-the-art overland routes being built all across Pakistan. Similarly, India is forecast to maintain steady and impressive growth throughout the coming years, thereby giving it enormous market potential and economic influence.

"It doesn't make sense to can the general in the middle of an active deployment," rages D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) after Maj. Gen. Errol R. Schwartz, who heads the D.C. National Guard and is an integral part of overseeing the inauguration, has been ordered removed from command effective Jan. 20, 12:01 p.m., just as Donald Trump is sworn in as president.

As The Washington Post reports, Maj. Gen. Errol R. Schwartz's departure will come in the midst of the presidential ceremony, classified as a national special security event — and while thousands of his troops are deployed to help protect the nation's capital during an inauguration he has spent months helping to plan.

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has accepted a $13 million penalty to settle charges that it overcharged more than 149,000 clients during a 14-year period ending in 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced in a press release on Friday.

"Investors must be able to trust that their investment advisers have put appropriate safeguards in place to ensure accurate billing," SEC New York Regional Office Director Andrew Calamari said.

As Donald Trump and congressional Republicans prepare to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, possibly without a replacement program, Americans, especially the poor, can expect health care in the US to remain "an international scandal," Noam Chomsky says.

Access to health care is a leading example of the gap that exists in America between public opinion and establishment power, philosopher and social critic Chomsky told Truthout in a new interview centered around efforts among the political class in the US to end the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the signature policy of President Barack Obama's outgoing administration.

"The US health care system has long been an international scandal, with about twice the per capita expenses of other wealthy countries and relatively poor outcomes," Chomsky said. "The ACA did, however, bring improvements, including insurance for tens of millions of people who lacked it, banning of refusal of insurance for people with prior disabilities, and other gains."

On Thursday, just more than a week before Donald Trump's presidential inauguration, the US Senate took the first step to repeal the ACA, even as there is no clear plan to replace the law.

"It's conceivable that [congressional Republicans] might patch together some kind of plan, or that the ultra-right and quite passionate 'Freedom Caucus' may insist on instant repeal without a plan, damn the consequence for the budget, or, of course, for people," Chomsky said.

If there were an award for double standards, a Golden Globe for double standards perhaps, the Trump-fearing, Brexit-loathing chattering class would win it hands down. For months now, these people have been fretting over 'fake news', warning we live in a 'post-truth' era, sneering at the little people for buying into the lies of any demagogue that promises them a simpler, more immigrant-free life. And yet now these same people are publishing and sharing and snarking over a document that is utterly unverified, its source unknown, its claims unproven, and its tales about as tall as you can get. The dodgiest of dossiers. But it's okay to push this fantastical 'news', these rumours, because their target is Trump, and we all hate Trump, right?

Buzzfeed, being the youthful, somewhat hip mouthpiece of every middle-of-the-road liberal platitude, has for months been tut-tutting over Western society's descent into 'post-truth'. In December it castigated US Congress for failing to stand up to 'fake news', to do something about 'the rampant conspiracies that were shared widely during the presidential election' and all the 'disinformation and propaganda' about Hillary. And yet yesterday, it published conspiracies of its own, which have now been widely shared, and which could very easily be given the name 'disinformation' or 'propaganda', or certainly 'utterly unsubstantiated claims': the intelligence document that says Trump is up to his neck in Russian contacts and once hired prostitutes to piss on a bed the Obamas had slept in.

Yes, this is the dossier, allegedly compiled by a former British intelligence worker - and British intelligence people never lie, yeah? - which says Trump has 'deep ties' with Russia. It runs through, or rather alleges, various points of contact. One story in particular has caught Twitter's and the media's attention: the claim that Trump hates the Obamas so much that he travelled to a Moscow hotel they once stayed in and hired Muscovite prostitutes to urinate on their actual bed. All while being filmed by Russian intelligence, who had put cameras in the room, and who then blackmailed Trump and basically said to him: 'Do as we say and wreck America for us or your anti-Obama piss party with hookers will be revealed.' If you believe this, you'll believe anything.

If you hadn't heard of RT before 2017, you probably have by now. Since the US Intelligence report fingering RT as one of the main tools of an "evil Kremlin conspiracy" to hack US elections, word about the channel is spreading and the American mainstream media is literally losing its mind.

A number of outlets are on a (Quixotic) quest to prove that no one watches RT on air, no one views it online and that basically it doesn't exist. "RT is a myth." "Fake media that has no following." "Propaganda channel that lies about everything." But it seems that in their haste to accuse RT of fake news, fake numbers and whatnot, reporters forget to do one simple but quite important thing - fact check and verify their claims. As if "fact check" is "so last century" and "fake news" is "the new black."


Well, if that's the reality of modern American journalism, RT will have to step in and do the job for our colleagues. Here's the latest Washington Post "investigative" story which digs up an ancient groundless report about RT and tries to sell it as news. Below, we will examine reporter's article and help him fill in the gaps.

1) WaPo: "RT is credited with... denigrat[ing] Secretary Clinton" with segments like "Clinton and ISIS Funded by the Same Money"; and casting doubt on the outcome of the US election with clips like "Trump Will Not be Permitted to Win."

FACT CHECK: What is clearly missing here are the hyperlinks to the mentioned "segments" and "clips". Here is this segment and here is this clip. Now, we see that what is being presented as RT's editorial materials, are in fact extracts from Julian Assange's interview with John Pilger, which RT licensed from Dartmouth films last November. Another important note: This interview became one of the most viral news interviews of the year with the full 25-minute version almost hitting 2 million views.

The "fog of war" erupts in the confusion caused by the chaos of war. And in the media, it's an intentional phenomenon that makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction.

While the battles over war narratives evolve, they all have a common goal: to distort reality on the ground.

Such is the case on the crisis in Syria, the new cold war with Russia, and even the buildup for President Bush's support for Kuwait's "humanitarian" war against Iraq.