Baltimore—When Rory Fanning, a burly veteran who served in the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion and was deployed in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2004, appeared at the Donald Trump rally in Chicago last month he was wearing the top half of his combat fatigues. As he moved through the crowd, dozens of Trump supporters shouted greetings such as "Welcome home, brother" and "Thank you for your service." Then came the protest that shut down the rally. Fanning, one of the demonstrators, pulled out a flag that read "Vets Against Racism, War and Empire."(watch video below)

"Immediately someone threw a drink on me," he said when I interviewed him on my teleSUR show, "Days of Revolt." "I got hit from behind in the head three or four times. It was quite the switch, quite the pivot on me. Questioning the narrative, questioning Donald Trump's narrative, and I was suddenly out of their good graces."

Nationalists do not venerate veterans. They venerate veterans who read from the approved patriotic script. America is the greatest and most powerful country on earth. Those we fight are depraved barbarians. Our enemies deserve death. God is on our side. Victory is assured. Our soldiers and Marines are heroes. Deviate from this cant, no matter how many military tours you may have served, and you become despicable. The vaunted patriotism of the right wing is about self-worship. It is a raw lust for violence. It is blind subservience to the state. And it works to censor the reality of war.

"A lot of soldiers who've come back from war see themselves as anything but a hero," Fanning said. "To throw that term around loosely is dangerous. It's a way to manipulate soldiers. It buys their silence."

"Soldiers are not encouraged to talk about the realities of war when they come back," he said. "They're labeled a hero or warrior. That's a major problem. It leads to further seclusion, isolation with soldiers. We talk about the suicide rates amongst veterans—22 a day. It's because we're not allowed to talk about what we saw overseas, how unjust it was, how we feel like bullies. How many innocent people have been killed since 9/11? Throwing out words like 'heroes' does a disservice to the experience of veterans and all the innocent people that have been killed since then."

War, up close, bears no relation to the myth. It is depraved and cruel. It has nothing to do with noble ends or justice. Killing is a dirty, ugly business. There is a vast disparity between war's reality and the myth peddled by the press, the entertainment industry, politicians and churches.

"What I didn't know as I entered [Afghanistan] with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion was that the Taliban had essentially surrendered after the initial assault by the Air Force and the special forces," Fanning said of his first tour, which started in late 2001. "Our job was essentially to draw the Taliban back into the fight. Surrender wasn't good enough for politicians after 9/11. We wanted blood. We wanted a head count. It really didn't matter who it was. So we'd walk up to people, people who had been occupied ... , involved in civil war before that, with tons of money at our disposal. We'd said, 'Hey, we will give you this amount of money if you point out a member of the Taliban.' An Afghan would say, 'Sure, absolutely. There's a member right there.' So we go next door. We'd land in their neighbor's front yard, put a bag over every military-aged person's head, whether they were a member of the Taliban or not, give the person who identified that person money. Then that person would also get that neighbor's property. In a country with as much desperation and poverty as Afghanistan you'd do anything to put money or food on your family's table. Essentially that's what we were doing. But we were also bringing people who had absolutely no stake in the fight into the war. We were creating enemies.

"I signed up after 9/11 to prevent another 9/11 from happening," he went on. "But soon after arriving in Afghanistan I realized I was only creating the conditions for more terrorist attacks. It was a hard pill to swallow. We were essentially bullies."

The disproportionate use of force on the part of the American occupation forces not only left huge numbers of civilians dead but served as a potent recruiting weapon for insurgents.

In complying with a request made by the Turkish president's son, Ankara blocked websites detailing alleged criminal connections between him and a businessman recently arrested in the United States.

Turkey blocked 21 news websites detailing the US criminal case related to Bilal Erdogan, son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

On March 22, Turkish national Reza Zarrab was arrested in the United States for fraud, money laundering and evading sanctions against Iran. Zarrab was previously implicated in a 2013 Turkish corruption scandal, which was tied to Bilal Erdogan, who was tied to the indictment though a connected businessman, Sıtkı Ayan.

The websites, including those of the newspapers Haberdar and Cumhuriyet were blocked, but no warning or court order was given prior to the block. It was only after the websites were blocked that officials sent notes to Haberdar.

Along with information about the connections between Bilal Edogan and the criminal case, newspapers cited fragments of a leaked wiretaps of a conversation between Bilal and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made during the 2013 anti-corruption operation.

Large-scale fighting has begun in Nagorno-Karabakh with the Azerbaijani army starting an offensive on the night of April 2nd, 2016 across the whole line of contact with the armed forces of Armenia, and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. After the day of fighting it was ceased, but may resume at every moment. Artillery, aviation and tanks were used, with both sides blaming each other for the escalation of the conflict, but the features of the Azerbaijani attack indicates a pre-planned operation. The age-old conflict between the two peoples of the region: Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis, related to the Turks, broke out with renewed vigor.

US President Barack Obama has said there is "no doubt" that innocent civilians have been killed in drone strikes worldwide, despite intelligence on the targets being "checked, double-checked, triple-checked." Drone warfare has become a symbol of post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other countries. The Obama administration has continuously expanded the drone program over two presidential terms, drawing heavy criticism for the extent of civilian deaths - also known as "collateral damage."

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, President Obama was asked to comment on the rising death toll in US drone strikes in the Middle East and beyond. "In the past, there was legitimate criticism that the legal architecture around the use of drone strikes wasn't as precise as it should have been," he said, as cited by AP. "There's no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn't have been. In situations of war, you know, we have to take responsibility when we're not acting appropriately," Obama added.

He claimed that, in general, the US military and CIA - the main drone operators - use "vigorous criteria" to gather the intelligence used in targeting, and that this intelligence is "checked, double-checked, triple-checked before kinetic actions are taken."

The president's straightforward acknowledgement of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes stands out among his previous statements on the issue. To date, Washington has preferred to downplay public criticism by making formal apologies or denying any wrongdoing.

On the night of October 3, 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130 gunship repeatedly attacked a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Forty-two people were killed and dozens wounded. The US military plane had conducted five strafing runs over the course of more than an hour despite MSF pleas to Afghan, US and Nato officials to call off the attack.

As we reported at the time, MSF were unequivocal in their condemnation of the American attack. The hospital was 'intentionally targeted' in 'a premeditated massacre'; it was a 'war crime'. The medical charity rejected US assurances of three inquiries by the US, Nato and the Afghan government. MSF demanded instead an independent international investigation. It was to no avail. The US ignored public outrage and went ahead with its standard whitewashing procedures when it commits war crimes that get exposed. The outcome was announced on March 18. BBC News reported:

'The US military has disciplined more than a dozen service members after an air strike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in Afghanistan killed 42 people last year.

'The Pentagon has acknowledged that the clinic was targeted by mistake, but no personnel will face criminal charges.'

Note that the BBC wording - 'the Pentagon has acknowledged that the clinic was targeted by mistake' - is deceptive bias. The BBC made no mention that MSF had presented strong evidence that the clinic was 'deliberately targeted', that the attack was a 'war crime', and that there was an urgent need for an independent inquiry.

A real leak of data from a law firm in Panama would be very interesting. Many rich people and/or politicians hide money in shell companies that such firms in Panama provide. But the current heavily promoted "leak" of such data to several NATO-supporting news organization and a US government-financed "Non Government Organization" is just a lame attempt to smear some people the U.S. empire dislikes. It also creates a huge blackmail opportunity by NOT publishing certain data in return for this or that desired favor.

French lawmaker Thierry Mariani drafted a resolution that aims to lift anti-Russian sanctions and plans to present the document in the French National Assembly at the end of April.

Mariani, a prominent member of the center-right political party The Republicans, is a strong believer that sanctions against Russia have hurt the French economy and damaged Russo-French relations. To fix this, Mariani, came up with the draft version of the resolution #3585, which he will officially put forward to French lawmakers on April 28.

The voting on the resolution at the end of the month will show the true stance of lawmakers at the French parliament. According to Mariani, many French politicians, both from the left and the right of the political spectrum, understand that anti-Russian sanctions are ineffective and hurt the French economy.

An Estonian politician has come up with a proposal to ban the Koran in public places, saying that the "negative and criminal side" of Islam is very strong and that banishing the Muslim sacred book is good for Estonia's safety.

Outlawing the Koran was proposed by Kristiina Ojuland, head of the People's Unity Party (PUP), Estonian media reported.

"Today, the negative and criminal side of Islam is so strong that we believe this move is a necessary measure to provide safety for our country and our nation, especially our women and children," Ojuland, who served as Estonia's foreign minister from 2002 to 2005, told the Estonian BNS news agency.

The party's leadership said it is concerned over the growing number of refugees arriving in the EU and in particular in Estonia.

"We decided to start gathering information from the population on cases of abuse and harassment, which is hushed in the mainstream media," Triin Raidmets, the leader of the PUP branch in Pärnu, said.

Any questions about Russia's and China's long term cooperation were put to rest, after conducting research on what these two Anti-West colossuses are doing, on a daily basis.

This week, I did a web search on the popular internet engines, Google and Bing. I did this, to follow up on my previous Moscow-Beijing Express article, where I pondered if these two giants on the world stage were hopefully transforming the "Putin-Xi marriage", into a truly long term, bilateral alliance, for the future. See The Xi-Putin honeymoon is over-now it's time to make the China-Russia marriage succeed long term

What I found even surprised me and definitively reassured my hypothesis of hope.

I looked for "Russia + China" and "Xi + Putin". In each case, behind the Great Western Firewall, there were a couple of recent entries, and then mostly dated drivel from 2014 and before. There is obviously a reason for this. It is called censorship and propaganda. It's probably not the search engines' fault. The carefully scripted Western narrative of supreme empire and global hegemony is happening in the newsrooms and editorial boards of newspapers, radio and television stations across Eurangloland. This is being confirmed over and over, as shown in this article, with accompanying videos: Top German Journalist Admits Mainstream Media Is Completely Fake: "We All Lie For The CIA"

If you search for the same strings in Chinese though, you enter another reality, and I suspect the same observation would be true in Russian. The Chinese language web is saturated with articles, photos and videos of "Russia + China" and "Xi + Putin", and it is up to today's date and added to, with every bilateral contact and collaboration.

Chinese government for the first time appointed a Special Representative for Syria, who was the former Chinese ambassador to Iran, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hong Lei said. "China appointed a special envoy in order to better promote peace negotiations, to contribute to better contact with the relevant parties," the official representative of the Chinese Foreign Ministry said. Hong Lei also said that China supports the efforts of the Special Representative of the UN on Syria Staffan de Mistura on peaceful settlement of the Syrian crisis. "China comes from the fact that a political solution is the only way out of the Syrian crisis," he added.

Linking China to a political solution of the Syrian conflict will play into the hands of Russia and the legitimate government of Syria, political analyst Anton Khashchenko said. "On the whole, the decision of China is positive for Russia and for Syria too. If you look at China's position over the past few years on the Syrian conflict, it together with Russia has vetoed the UN Security Council on the Syrian issue for four times. China as well as Russia supports the legitimate authority in Syria."

In China, as well as in Russia, there is a problem amongst its own citizens, who are attracted to Daesh. Beijing is not interested in the fact that these people are returning to China after training with the militants. "It is for these reasons and for a number of others that I think China's decision to appoint a Special Representative is such an important point, including fixing of the negotiating political process that has begun already at a normal level," Anton Khashchenko told Sputnik. According to him, China is fully interested in putting an end to terrorist groups in the region, including those that are prohibited in Russia and other countries.