The US Central Intelligence Agency and its media outlets started the conspiracy - so let's turn the tables on them. Could the CIA be setting Hillary Clinton up in a false flag hit for the purpose of blaming it on Russia?

This week saw the Washington Post newspaper float a bizarre theory that Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton may have been poisoned by Russian agents on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Post quoted a renowned US sports-injury doctor as saying that Putin or Republican candidate Donald Trump, working in league, may have induced Clinton's recent bout of ill health.

And the doctor recommended that the Clinton campaign team get a toxicological analysis of her blood carried out, on the suspicion that she may have been poisoned.

For several months now, the 68-year-old former senator's health has been the subject of intense public speculation, not least fanned by her Republican rival Donald Trump.

Apparent facial seizures while addressing public platforms and coughing spasms in front of media reporters culminated last Sunday at a New York event commemorating the 9/11 terror attacks, when Clinton was videoed collapsing on a sidewalk as aides bundled her limp body into the back of a van.

Clinton's campaign team later said she was suffering from pneumonia, which forced her to take three days off from political rallying this week. She has since resumed the stumps, having apparently made a recovery.

However, after weeks of dismissing claims about Clinton's ill-health as wild conjecture, the Washington Post then gives vent to the even wilder notion that the Democrat candidate has been poisoned by Russian agents.

The Post, on one hand, half-acknowledges that the "theory" is far-fetched. Yet, the newspaper - one of America's top publications - also sneakily adds credence by going on in the same article to reiterate baseless British claims that Russia's Putin ordered the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexander Livitnenko while he was living in exile in London in 2006.

Livitnenko's death from Polonium poisoning was more likely caused by shady rivals in the criminal underworld. There is no evidence that Russian state agents were involved in his demise. But the claims have provided Western media with plenty of material to continue demonizing Moscow and Vladimir Putin in particular, as the Washington Post article demonstrates.

The F-35, a fighter jet recently deemed "ready for combat" but which has also become a symbol of a bloated Pentagon budget, is in trouble again. The US Air Force is grounding 13 of the warplanes and pausing production of 42 more, blaming "improper manufacturing processes."

For being part of a $1.12 trillion project, the US military's costliest weapons program ever, the stealthy Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II might be expected to be presented as one tough cookie. But this cookie is crumbling, specifically from the inside, where poorly built insulation material is "crumbling" into fuel tanks, according to a statement from the US Air Force, Reuters reported.

Problems with material breaking off into fuel tank cooling lines "was discovered during depot modification of an F-35A and affects a total of 57 aircraft," Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said Friday.

A British parliamentary inquiry into the Libyan fiasco has reported what should have been apparent from the start in 2011 - and was to some of us - that the West's military intervention to "protect" civilians in Benghazi was a cover for what became another disastrous "regime change" operation.

The report from the U.K.'s Foreign Affairs Committee confirms that the U.S. and other Western governments exaggerated the human rights threat posed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and then quickly morphed the "humanitarian" mission into a military invasion that overthrew and killed Gaddafi, leaving behind political and social chaos.

The report's significance is that it shows how little was learned from the Iraq War fiasco in which George W. Bush's administration hyped and falsified intelligence to justify invading Iraq and killing its leader, Saddam Hussein. In both cases, U.K. leaders tagged along and the West's mainstream news media mostly served as unprofessional propaganda conduits, not as diligent watchdogs for the public.

Last Sunday, I, like millions of people around the world, was intrigued by the collapse of Hillary Clinton at the 15th 9/11 memorial in New York City.

I quickly visualized ear-to-ear grins on those who were convinced Clinton has serious health problems. 'Vindicated!' I could hear them say.

Next, I turned my attention to the mainstream media, which had just spent the last year arrogantly scoffing at all those 'conspiracy theorists' claiming that Clinton is very (and possibly terminally) ill. I could see them squirming behind their rickety old typewriters, wondering how they'd wriggle out of this one. Belatedly, some in the MSM have now conceded that Clinton's health is a campaign issue.

I predicted that Putin would be blamed. So I waited for the shoe to drop. And I waited. And then waited some more. Hang on, let me scour Twitter again, surely it will be there...

Come on MSM, lift your game! Are you all worn out, bereft of inspiration, or just cringing at the thought of having to trundle out more hyper-russophobic fantasy? We all know the headline you want to write:

"Putin 'did a Litvinenko' on Clinton"

Isn't that the next logical step in your trumpeting of Clinton by demonizing Putin?

Ukraine will impose sanctions on Russian defense firms and financial institutions, as well as transportation companies operating on the Crimea Peninsula, President Petro Poroshenko said Friday.

According to Poroshenko's statement posted on his official website, the restrictive measures will be applied to Russian defense companies and financial institutions allegedly providing military equipment and financing for self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics in eastern Ukraine. The sanctions will also affect shipping and air transport operators that violate Ukraine-imposed ban on entry to Crimean ports and airports, Poroshenko added.

If you were ever wondering how war criminal politicians feel about their crimes, look no further than recent leaked emails between former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and his former US counterpart, Colin Powell.

In early 2003, both Straw and Powell were major front-men for their governments in the push to launch the illegal invasion of Iraq. Straw wanted the British government's 'dodgy dossier' in Iraq's non-existent WMDs to be "hardened up" with something he appropriately called a "killer paragraph". For his part, Powell went to the UN and touted the evidence of an Iraqi source that was known to the Defense Intelligence Agency as "a liar and a fabricator". Powell wiggled a vial of white powder at the UN, claiming it was anthrax (although it probably came from Dubya's coke stash) and said Saddam might have boatloads of the stuff. It was a provocative display, and Powell reminded people that the anthrax attacks of 2001 freaked everyone out, so they should also be freaked out about Saddam now too.

"I do not like the Americans. It's simply a matter of principle for me."

— Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, September 12, 2016

The frictions excited by the antics of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte have caused even greater heat over the last few days, with calls for the departure of US special forces operating in Mindanao. Having already made it clear to Washington that he intends pursuing "an independent foreign policy," he has now insisted that the general root of ills in instability lie in the troublesome, headache-causing alliance with the United States.

A continuing problem of that alliance remained US forces in Zamboanga on the island of Mindanao, ostensibly engaged in advising local troops on counter-terrorism operations. "For as long as we stay with America, we will never have peace in that land [Mindanao]. We might as well give it up." It was therefore imperative that "those [American] special forces, they have to go." He did not want "a rift with the US, but they have to go."

Nothing could stand in greater contrast to such sentiment than the pact of 2014 signed between Manila and Washington, a confirmation of all the ills Duterte despises. While that agreement did not countenance the reopening of US bases in the Philippines, something that would have had a constitutional hurdle to climb, it permitted roving and near unlimited US access to military bases across the country.

Despite the pretense of being severed from the US umbilical cord in 1946, the neo-colonial aftertaste has remained. From 2002 to 2013, $441 million in security funding was provided to Manila. The Obama administration had set aside a hefty $120 million in military aid for 2016.

As Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago, chairman of the Philippines Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, explained with the signatures on the agreement barely dry, the agreement was of limited value to the country, while being splendid for US interests.

It is hardly a secret that the most vocal advocates of NATO expansion into East-Central Europe were the U.S. weapons manufacturers and their lobbyists. For instance, one of the founders of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, a non-profit advocacy organization, was Bruce Jackson, a vice president at Lockheed Martin and a former U.S. Army intelligence officer.¹ As even the New York Times pointed out at the time, such a work biography was fairly common among those who pressured the Congress into expanding the Alliance, though the threat from its main enemy (as well as the main enemy itself) turned into dust. In just two years in the mid-1990s, the six biggest U.S. arms makers - MacDonnell Douglas, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Textron Inc. - reported spending $51 million on lobbying, most of which went into the push for NATO expansion.² As the result, NATO almost doubled, expanding from 16 to 28 member states. Prodded by the big money, the Clinton Administration did not mind opening the Pandora's box of future European conflicts and the six giants of the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex could rub their hands with a great deal of satisfaction. The vast new weapons markets, closed to them until the East-Central European militaries were forced to become "interoperable" with NATO "standards," were theirs for taking. The East-Central European political elites, brought to power and/or infiltrated by these same corrupt corporate and lobbying networks, slashed their states' health, education, and social programs, but embraced high military spending with open arms. Even while there was less and less money for bread, the money for guns was always found.

Is it shame and guilt I smell in mainstream media as Yemen's engineered mass oppression has become a burden no sane journalist can rationalize any longer? Could it be that Western capitals are about ready to flip alliances?

Don't hold your breath just yet but change is most definitely in the air. Yemen has once again grabbing some media attention. Whatever unspoken ban Riyadh managed to impose on the press is just about melting away. Whatever political perspective journalists were taught to follow, has just about disappeared by the reality of a war of aggression which has been as vicious as it has been bloody.

And while the United Nations has still to play catch up on its official figures (Yemen's death toll has been vastly underestimated), this war the kingdom has insisted on waging is finally being labeled a grand atrocity.

It's no secret that Israeli-Palestinian relations have been marred by tension since mid-2014. At that time, the path toward a political solution reached an impasse and negotiations were suspended, leading to nonstop Israeli accusations that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is not a partner for peace and that he has been inciting violence against Israelis.

The latest Israeli allegation against Abbas came in a report broadcast by Israel's Channel 1 on Sept. 7, claiming that Abbas was an agent for the Soviet KGB when he was a member of Fatah's Central Committee in 1983. According to the report, Abbas' code name was "Krotov," and he was recruited during his Ph.D. studies in Moscow and served as a KGB agent in Syria.

The Israeli allegation immediately sparked angry reactions from Palestinians, and many Palestinian officials protested. In a Sept. 8 statement to Agence France-Presse, presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said he considered the Israeli accusation part of an Israeli smear campaign against Abbas aimed at weakening the Palestinian position.