"No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices."—Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.

Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can't escape it.

We're being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of Muslims, fear of extremists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government. The list goes on and on.

The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

Fear makes people stupid.

Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.

Turkey must withdraw its troops from Iraq within 24 hours to avoid the matter being reviewed by the UN Security Council, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi said Monday.

On Friday, media reports emerged of up to 150 Turkish military personnel having been deployed in northern Iraq's Nineveh province, allegedly to provide training to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

On Sunday, Baghdad said it would use all available options, including an address to the UN Security Council, if Turkey failed to withdraw its troops from northern Iraq within 48 hours.

"We demand from Turkey that it respect Iraq's sovereignty, we gave them 48 hours to resolve the issue and now there are only 24 hours," Abadi said, as quoted by his press office.

The U.S. assistant Secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, has arrived in Ukraine and traveled to the security Service of Ukraine, "Ukrinform" reported.

"Nuland, accompanied by U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, at around 14:00 on Sunday went to the SBU building in Volodymyrska, - the website reported.

Before that, the American diplomats visited the sculpture named "The Victorious Cossack". As a reminder, the U.S. Vice-President Joseph Biden, on December 8th, will speak in the Verkhovna Rada during his visit to Ukraine .

The - predictable - reaction across the West over the Russian Defense Ministry's very serious denunciation of Ankara embedded with ISIS/ISIL/Daesh still begs to be regarded as no less than astonishing.

The actual evidence is not even discussed by Western corporate media. It's all dismissed as "Russia claims..." Yet not only Sultan Erdogan has been systematically unmasked as a serial liar; the accumulating evidence points to Ankara both as an indirect ally and shady sponsor of the fake "Caliphate".

Whatever the Atlanticists can come up with to "excuse" the Erdogan system, at least the devastating PR debacle for the "democratic West" is now a fact of life all across the Global South.

At the same time an elaborate shadow play is in progress. NATO issues non-denial denials — after all it can never back off from its usual "Russian aggression" meme — while the Obama administration, predictably, wallows in doublethink; Turkey may not "support" ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, but Turkey must seal the border with Syria anyway.

Britain must join forces with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin to defeat Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL), London Mayor Boris Johnson wrote in his weekly newspaper column.

Johnson has also said the government's claim there are 70,000 moderate rebel ground troops willing to work with British armed forces may be "exaggerated." These troops, he wrote, may include jihadists who are ideologically aligned with al-Qaeda.

Last week, Prime Minister David Cameron told MPs: "We believe there are around 70,000 Syrian opposition fighters, principally of the Free Syrian Army, who do not belong to extremist groups, and with whom we can coordinate attacks on ISIL."

Saying it would be impossible to defeat Islamic State without the presence of ground troops, Johnson urged the UK government, which has vowed not to put British boots on the ground, to team up with Assad's forces.

"This is the time to set aside our Cold War mindset," Johnson wrote in The Telegraph. "It is just not true that whatever is good for Putin must automatically be bad for the West."

Turkey is building an airbase in Northern Iraq without the knowledge of the central government in Baghdad, images show.

Images taken by field sources in Iraq display construction of an illegal airbase named 'Bamerne' by the Turkish army in Northern Iraq.

Damascus has labelled as an "act of aggression" the US-led coalition's missile strike which killed three Syrian soldiers at an army base in the Deir ez Zor province.

On top of the fatalities, 13 personnel were injured and a number of military vehicles were destroyed when warplanes fired nine missiles at the Saeqa military camp.

The incident is the first of its kind since the coalition started to bomb Syrian territory more than a year ago, though the US-led alliance continues to deny it carried out the airstrike.

Considering the remarkable success of the Russian intervention in Syria, at least so far, it should not have come as a surprise that the AngloZionist Empire would strike back. The only question was how and when. We now know the answer to that question.

On November 24^th the Turkish Airforce did something absolutely unprecedented in recent history: it deliberately shot down another country's military aircraft even though it was absolutely obvious that this aircraft presented no threat whatsoever to Turkey or the Turkish people. The Russian Internet is full of more or less official leaks about how this was done. According to these versions, the Turks maintained 12 F-16 on patrol along the border ready to attack, they were guided by AWACS aircraft and "covered" by USAF F-15s in case of an immediate Russian counter-attack. Maybe. Maybe not.

But this hardly matters because what is absolutely undeniable is that the USA and NATO immediately took "ownership" of this attack by giving their full support to Turkey. NATO went as far as to declare that it would send aircraft and ships to protect Turkey as if it had been Russia which had attacked Turkey. As for the USA, not only did it fully back Turkey, it now also categorically denies that there is any evidence that Turkey is purchasing Daesh oil. Finally, as was to be expected, the USA is now sending The Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group into the eastern Mediterranean, officially to strike Daesh but, in reality, to back Turkey and threaten Russia. Even the Germans are now sending their own aircraft, but with the specific orders not to share any info with the Russians.

So what is really going on here?

Simple: the Empire correctly identified the weakness of the Russian force in Syria, and it decided to use Turkey to provide itself an element of plausible deniability. This attack is probably only the first step of a much larger campaign to "push back" Russia from the Turkish border. The next step, apparently, includes the dispatching of western forces into Syria, initially only as 'advisors', but eventually as special forces and forward air controllers. The US and Turkish Air Forces will play the primary role here, with assorted Germans and UK aircraft providing enough diversity to speak of an "international coalition".

As for the French, stuck between their Russian counterparts and their NATO "allies", they will remain as irrelevant as ever: Hollande caved in, again (what else?). Eventually, NATO will create a de-facto safe heaven for its "moderate terrorists" in northern Syria and use it as a base to direct an attack on Raqqa. Since any such intervention will be completely illegal, the argument of the need to defend the Turkmen minority will be used, R2P and all. The creation of a NATO-protected safe heaven for "moderate terrorists" could provide the first step for breaking up Syria into several smaller statelets.

Alarmed by President Erdogan's political adventurism, a group of leading Turkish businessmen has asked the head of the Russian-Lebanese Business Council, Jacques Sarraf, to organize a meeting with their Russian colleagues in Lebanon.

Relations between Moscow and Ankara have sunk to new depths after a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Russian bomber in Syria in what President Putin slammed as a "stab in the back by accomplices of terrorism".

Russia retaliated against the unwarranted attack with a series of hard-hitting economic sanctions against Turkey.

After the recent Paris terror attacks, the French government is proposing to forbid and block the use of the Tor anonymity network, according to an internal document from the Ministry of Interior seen by French newspaper Le Monde.

That document lays out two proposed pieces of legislation, one around the state of emergency, and the other concerning counter-terrorism.

In the former, the French government is considering to "Forbid free and shared wi-fi connections" during a state of emergency. This comes from a police opinion included in the document: the reason being that it is apparently difficult to track individuals who use public wi-fi networks.

The latter piece of legislation, meanwhile, says the government is considering "to block or forbid communications of the Tor network." The legislation, according to Le Monde, could be presented as early as January 2016.

Tor is a network of servers maintained by volunteers, which route a user's traffic through several different points, obfuscating their original, and perhaps identifying, IP address. At first a project from the US Navy, and now attempting to diversify its funding, Tor has become more popular recently, especially after the 2013 Snowden revelations around various mass surveillance programs.

It is used by journalists, whistleblowers and people who just want to protect their privacy online, as well as terrorists, pedophiles, and cybercriminals.

The internal document reviewed by Le Monde suggests that the French government may propose legislative measures as well as technological ones against Tor.