Carl von Clausewitz once coined the aphorism that "War is the continuation of politics by other means." The US has turned that on its head - making politics the continuation of war by any means possible. We see it in abundance in their 'ceasefire agreements' from Donbass to Aleppo.

On the 13th of September a new ceasefire went into effect in Syria. The ceasefire itself has been shrouded in mystery, its terms remain unreleased and only a few scraps of information have been released to the public. As Paul Mansfield wrote in a recent SOTT Focus, Russia and the US are alleged to have agreed to begin joint strikes against the al Nusra terrorist group in Syria following 7 days of a nationwide ceasefire. Already this plan has begun falling apart. Russia has exposed the US for neglecting its role in separating 'legitimate opposition' from al Nusra. Since this is exactly what happened during the last Syrian ceasefire we shouldn't be surprised.

But in the end, by bending to Russia's political savvy, the West continues to lose its mask of sanity.

Terrorists groups, which Russia expected to be separated from 'moderate rebels' with US help, and be subject to joint US-Russian attacks, are instead using the ongoing ceasefire to regroup, the Russian president said.

"We agreed that the Al-Nusra Front and the likes of it would be separated from the so-called healthy opposition factions, and we would be shown where the latter are located. But what we see today is not separation of the healthy part of the opposition and the terrorists. We see terrorist forces trying to regroup." Vladimir Putin told journalists on Saturday.

Moscow and Washington agreed last week to use their influence on the Syrian government and the so-called moderate rebel forces respectively to establish a ceasefire in the war-torn country. While violence diminished, progress is undermined by violations.

Russia has repeatedly complained that the US is failing to keep its part of the bargain and stop the mingling of armed groups, which genuinely want peace in Syria, and those which want the hostilities to continue.

"Five or six" US special forces troops had to withdraw from the town of al-Rai on Syria's border with Turkey, after allies from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) had driven them out, calling them "infidels" and "crusaders," several media outlets have reported.

The Turkish military, which last month openly crossed the Syrian border to fight against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), has admitted that US soldiers are providing a supporting and coordinating role in the operation being carried out between the Syrian towns of Azaz and al-Rai, Reuters reports.

A video posted on Twitter on Friday evening showed that they were not welcome in al-Rai.

The footage shows a group of agitated men, gathered in the town square, shouting anti-American slogans in Arabic, as a cavalcade of vehicles passes by.

The chants include: "Down with America," "Get out you dogs," and "They are coming to Syria to occupy it." Voices in the background call them "infidels" and "crusaders," while one man says "We will not fight alongside you."

The FBI is boosting its efforts to uncover evidence that would allow the Justice Department to launch a criminal case against Russian hackers allegedly trying to meddle with the upcoming US presidential election, Reuters reports citing officials.

Washington sees legal action as the best response to increasing attempts to hack US political parties and political figures, which Washington believes were carried out by Russia.

"Doing nothing is not an option, because that would telegraph weakness and just encourage the Russians to do more meddling, but retaliating in kind carries substantial risks," an unnamed official in the US administration told Reuters.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest confirmed Thursday that gathering evidence would be no easy task for the FBI. "We're in unexplored territory here, and the president is quite interested in trying to establish international norms," Earnest said.

"I'll let the FBI speak to what evidence they have amassed, but I think they're also cognizant of the fact that as soon as they make a declaration like that, most people are going to understandably be interested in seeing that evidence. And some of that evidence may not be something we want to show," he said.

Warring hotspots all over the world are flaring up in 2016 in what amounts to preparation for World War III between the military forces of the US led Western Empire against the forces of the Eastern axis led by Russia and China joined by Iran and North Korea. Let's be clear - the globalists are the puppet masters behind the Western forces intentionally provoking catastrophic world war. We live in a time when the earth's ruling elite has willfully created this foreboding, seemingly suicidal endgame scenario, using US Empire to prod, orchestrate, and push the world into two enemy camps in a West vs. East showdown. Global war timed with the inevitable collapse of their Ponzi-schemed global economy will open the floodgate to unbridled tyranny brought on by their long plotted one world government. The systematic destruction of the West and its First World affluence is but part of this sinister scheme to destabilize every region on the planet in order to engineer such dire, devastating conditions that the surviving global masses will automatically seek refuge and protection from deep state's one world governance as their only means of staying alive. Meticulously creating the conditions most ripe for war, ecological degradation leading to disease and famine ensures that the elite's eugenics depopulation agenda will leave a slave class of a half to one billion people on earth to serve the diabolical ruling class.

Thus as the only means of escaping this horrific outcome, it's extremely important to expose this nightmarish globalist agenda that's using the US Empire-NATO war machine to aggressively provoke rising world tensions and hostilities as precipitating pre-WWIII events. Per last year's UN Global Trends Report, at near 60 million, 2014 saw more people being displaced around the world than any previous time in recorded history. The elite's carefully engineered global hotspots cover every corner of the globe, from the US-induced political and economic unrest creating havoc now in Brazil and Venezuela; a stepped up war in Ukraine flanked by the built-up deployment of hostile NATO troops at the Russian border; ongoing war with no end in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, and prewar skirmishes, flare-ups and small scale wars in Somalia, Pakistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Sudan, Burundi and Central African Republic all the way eastward to the rising tensions in the South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula as well as stretching northward to the Arctic Circle, the West's push for confrontation, aggression and domination against the Eastern alliance is making global war eminent and virtually unavoidable.

The Commission on Presidential Debates have confirmed Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein will not share the stage with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for the highly anticipated first presidential debate.

The third-party candidates didn't register enough support in various polls to qualify, the commission said Friday.

There is a 15 percent polling average threshold the commission sets, based on five polls of its choosing. Clinton averaged 43 percent, and Donald Trump 40.4 percent. Johnson averaged 8.4 percent, while Stein was trailing at 3.2 percent, according to the Associated Press.

Three televised presidential debates, starting with one on September 26 at Hofstra University in New York, will feature the presidential nominees from the Republican and Democratic parties, as has been the case since 1992.

But there is still a chance for the two long shots in the second and third presidential debates, if they can reach the 15 percent standard.

In pursuit of a new Cold War with Russia, Official Washington wants to expand NATO into the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, creating the potential for nuclear war to protect a sometimes reckless "ally"

A Republican leader calling for a new military base in Georgia is hardly newsworthy — the state already has more than a dozen such installations. But when it's the speaker of parliament in the country of Georgia, who belongs to that nation's Republican Party calling for a U.S. military base on Russia's southern border, and for a constitutional amendment to guarantee his country's commitment to NATO, that should raise some eyebrows.

Although major U.S. papers didn't report that news this month, it reflects another escalation of NATO's dangerous confrontation with Moscow. Eight years ago, Georgia's intense campaign to join NATO — combined with its reckless aggression against the breakaway territory of South Ossetia — helped spark a brief but bloody war with Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Today, the U.S.-led military alliance is once again promoting its expansion plans in Georgia and other countries on Russia's periphery as if the Cold War had never ended.

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.