On the night of September 17, 1961, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, was flying to a meeting in Northern Rhodesia to negotiate a possible resolution to the conflict in the newly independent Republic of the Congo. His flight never reached his final destination. The next day, the site of its crash was discovered just miles from the airport. 15 passengers, including Hammarskjold, were dead, and the only survivor died soon after. Written off as the result of pilot error by the official Rhodesian inquiry, the UN's own investigation did not come to any definite conclusions. Now, over 50 years later, new evidence has come to light that raises the distinct possibility that Hammarskjold's plane was attacked. The publication of Dr. Susan Williams's book Who Killed Hammarskjold? prompted an independent commission and UN resolutions aimed at finding the truth, but some major powers - the U.S. and UK - are blocking access to key documents.

On this episode of the Truth Perspective, we discussed this evidence, Secretary General Hammarskjold, the circumstances of his death, and why it matters today. Joining us was Dr. Henning Melber, Director Emeritus and Senior Advisor of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala; Senior Advisor to the Nordic Africa Institute; Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Political Sciences/University of Pretoria and the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein; and Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. He has published several books, including Peace Diplomacy, Global Justice and International Agency: Rethinking Human Security and Ethics in the Spirit of Dag Hammarskjöld.

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The US is training "dozens" of rebels to battle Islamic State in Syria, in the hope of fixing mistakes that swamped the Pentagon's previous multimillion dollar effort, when most of the equipment and recruits were lost or ended up on the side of terrorists.

"Dozens of people are now being trained," US Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the US-led coalition, confirmed to reporters. "It's still relatively small as we see if this works," he said, while refusing to comment on the scale of the program.


Warren provided neither a definite figure for the number of individuals in training nor their location. Citing an unnamed source, Reuters reported that it had been taking place in Turkey, just as with America's previous attempt to bolster the so-called moderate Syrian opposition. "A training and equipping program that we are now doing that is based on the lessons that we learned from our ill-fated train and equip program of 2015," Warren said.

The US previously failed in its an attempt to train and equip rebels, having to stop the program following a scandal, when it was revealed that one group of trainees had surrendered one quarter of its US-supplied weapons, ammunition, and vehicles to the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front in exchange for safe passage.


Originally, the Pentagon's program was intended to graduate 3,000 well prepared New Syrian Forces fighters in 2015, and 5,000 annually afterwards, allegedly to combat Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). On that, the Department of Defense spent reportedly nearly $400 million, which equaled roughly $2 million per fighter - a figure that the Pentagon denied.

A US spy agency's new $1.7 billion western headquarters will be constructed in St Louis, Missouri, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has had its offices for 70 years.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) hopes to build its new western HQ in north St Louis, where it was offered free land on the site of the failed Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex.

The failed projects were demolished in the 70s, when many African-Americans residents moved to nearby Ferguson, now infamous as the city where teenager Michael Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson in 2014.

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner had hoped to entice the spy agency to the Prairie State by also offering free land, but the spy agency chose to remain in St Louis.

The competition between the two states has drawn attention to the government spying agency which has enjoyed a far lower profile than that of the NSA, the CIA and other elements of the US's large intelligence apparatus.

The State Department has suspended its internal review into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or her top aides mishandled emails containing information now deemed 'top secret."

Spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said Friday the department had paused the review to avoid interfering with an ongoing FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private server while she was America's top diplomat. She said the decision was made after the department sought the FBI's advice on how to proceed with the review and received word that it should follow its standard practice. Trudeau said the department's standard practice is to place internal reviews "on hold while there is an ongoing law enforcement investigation underway."

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

"Of course, we do not want our internal review to complicate or impede the progress of their ongoing law enforcement investigation," Trudeau told reporters. "Therefore, the State Department at this time is not moving forward with our internal review." Trudeau said the department would "reassess next steps" in the internal review process once the FBI completes its probe.

Russia Defense Report: The Hero of Palmyra

The former US National Security Agency worker said Turkey warned Belgium that some of the men behind the attacks were involved in terrorist activities

Spy whistleblower Edward Snowden claims the terror attacks in Brussels could have been stopped because Turkey shared information about the killers with Belgian security forces.

The former US National Security Agency worker, who is described as a traitor by British and American intelligence services after leaking huge amounts of data relating to mass surveillance, was referring to reports that Turkey warned Belgium that some of the men behind the attacks were involved in terrorist activities.

Snowden, speaking from an undisclosed location in Russia at a video conference hosted in Tucson, Arizona by the University of Arizona College of Behavioral Sciences, also cited news stories that Russia warned the US about the Tsarnaev brothers, who were behind the Boston Marathon bombing, but the authorities did not take any action, reports Sabah.

A total of 31 people died and hundreds more were injured in the terror attacks on the Belgian capital, with ISIS later claiming responsibility.

In 2011, Donald Rumsfeld went on a radio and television tour to promote sales of his revisionist memoir. Of course, most hosts refused to ask him any questions of substance. However, one radio host hailing out of Chicago, Mancow Muller, was unafraid of asking hard-hitting questions.

On the show, Mancow asked Donald Rumsfeld what his thoughts were on World Trade Center Tower 7. His answer was ridiculous.

"What is building 7? ...I've never heard that before." said Donald Rumsfeld

Amazingly, some folks still believe that only two towers fell that fateful day back in September 2011. The fact that Tower 7, a 47-story building, collapsed, was but a small blip in the media. Since 9/11, World Trade Center Tower 7 is rarely, if at all mentioned in the mainstream media.

Insanely enough, when tower 7 is mentioned to some people, they think that it's a conspiracy theory that it fell.

For the second time in 2016, Pakistani Prime Minister, Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, paid an official visit to Riyadh in March. He took part in the closing ceremony of the Northern Thunder military exercise in the Saudi desert. The intensity of the visits is dictated by the importance of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in the foreign policy of Pakistan, as well as the need to maintain a balanced approach to the countries of the region as a whole, given the recent intensification of relations with Iran. It is noteworthy that it is also the second time that the Prime Minister was accompanied by Chief of Army Staff, General Raheel Sharif on a foreign trip to the KSA. Much remains yet to be clarified.

Military contacts between Islamabad and Riyadh have been maintained for several decades. The first bilateral agreements were signed back in the 60's; in the 80's, two teams of Pakistani ground troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia. In recent years, the commands of the two capitals hold annual joint military exercises, for example, Al Shihab-1 in 2015.

Despite the significant financial support from the KSA of social, economic, military and other projects in Pakistan, the relationship between the royal dynasty and the military and civil administration of Islamabad were not always smooth. The most recent failure occurred in March 2016. The royal family appealed to the Prime Minister, N. Sharif (and he publicly promised) to post part of the Pakistani army in the zone of military conflict in Yemen against Huthis Shiite in support of the KSA. But after ten days under the pretext of protecting only the holy places, the National Assembly of Pakistan (the lower house of parliament) refused. The Pakistani media wrote about a certain pressure the generals applied to parliamentarians.

The latest of Riyadh's military appeals to Islamabad, announced in December 2015 as part of an alliance of 34 countries to combat the terrorist threat in the region, once again caused a lot of questions from the military leadership of Pakistan, as well as Malaysia and Lebanon about the goals and objectives of the new military campaign, the place and role of each participating country. For a long time, issues remained unclear related to the operational strategy, antiterrorist working methods, management, control and composition of the proposed cooperation. For two months, Islamabad did not comment. Sharif's visit to Riyadh in March lifted the veil. According to the Pakistani media, Rawalpindi (the location of the Army headquarters) plans for its participation to include the exchange of intelligence information, the supply of military equipment and the development of counter-extremist propaganda.

Apparently, the West has not been too happy that Damascus and Moscow scored one of the most significant victories against Daesh by pushing the brutal group out of Palmyra, the monumental ruins of a once prosperous ancient city that not so long ago attracted as many as 150,000 tourists annually.

In an interview with Sputnik, foreign policy expert Andranik Migranyan confirmed that liberation of one of the greatest historical monuments in the world should have necessarily attracted major global attention. But it did not.

"There is no way that the West could have truly appreciated and celebrated this event since the city was freed by the Syrian Arab Army assisted by Russia," the political scientist explained. He called Palmyra's liberation "a triumph" both for Damascus and Moscow, but added that the strategically important city was freed by those people, whom the West "would not really want to see as triumphant."

Source - Translated by K.A.

When President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin acknowledged the military personnel, who had particularly distinguished themselves in Syria, in the Kremlin last week, few people knew that Colonel General Aleksandr Dvornikov, who was honoured with the title Hero of Russia, had commanded our troops in that Arab country for almost 6 months.

Previously the name of the military leader, who held the post of first Deputy-Chief of Staff of the Central Military District, was never mentioned in connection with the air - and especially not with the ground - operation against the terrorists. And only a narrow circle of people was even aware that Dvornikov was sent on assignment to Syria, that he was directing our units and coordinating their interaction with the local government forces.

The details of many of the combat operations developed and executed under Dvornikov's command are still classified. Nevertheless, in this exclusive interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the general recounted some of the events of his Syrian campaign for the first time.