Who "won" a debate is inherently subjective. The idea of winning a debate necessarily entails a goal to be achieved. What this goal is, therefore, says as much about the person judging its achievement as the goal itself. Pundits are ostensibly supposed to judge whether or not a candidate said what "the voters" want to hear. But what ends up happening, invariably, is they end up judging whether or not the candidate said what they think voters wanted to hear. This, after all, is why pundits exist, to act as a clergy class charged with interpreting people's own inscrutable opinions for them. The chasm between what the pundits saw and what the public saw was even bigger than usual last night.

Bernie Sanders by all objective measures "won" the debate. Hands down. I don't say this as a personal analysis of the debate; the very idea of "winning" a debate is silly to me. I say this because based on the only relatively objective metric we have, online polls and focus groups, he did win. And it's not even close.

Sanders won the CNN focus group, the Fusion focus group, and the Fox News focus group; in the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters. He won the Slate online poll, CNN/Time online poll, 9News Colorado, The Street online poll, Fox5 poll, the conservative Drudge online poll and the liberal Daily Kos online poll. There wasn't, to this writer's knowledge, a poll he didn't win by at least an 18-point margin. But you wouldn't know this from reading the establishment press. The New York Times, the New Yorker, CNN, Politico, Slate, New York Magazine, and Vox all unanimously say Hillary Clinton cleaned house. What gives?

On October 19th, voters head to the polls to decide who will be Canada's next Prime Minister. Unlike the United States, which is dominated by two parties, Canadians have a whopping three main political parties to choose from: the right-wing Conservative Party, the centre-right Liberal Party and the centre-left New Democratic party.

Canada's political system is based on the British model of a parliamentary democracy, where the leader of the party that wins the most seats becomes the acting head of state. Under this model, elected members of parliament are not allowed to speak freely on matters of personal opinion or even to give voice to the needs of their local constituents, but must vote along party lines as outlined by the leader and dictated by the party 'whip' who 'whips' party members into line and prevents them from telling the truth, if possible.

Regardless of which of the three main political parties in Canada a person belongs to, any prospective political candidate that chooses to tell the truth about controversial subjects like Israel or 9/11 may quickly find themselves out of a job.

"We are independent in the gas issue", - happily announces Poland having finally built a terminal for receiving liquefied natural gas (LNG). However, the new marine way of delivering gas from Qatar instead of saving financial resources will entail even much higher costs than earlier. Warsaw is already paying - now, that it has not yet received one single cubic meter of gas.

"Poland has achieved her strategic goal: we are independent in the gas issue" said the Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz at the opening ceremony of the new LNG terminal in the city of Swinoujscie, obviously referring to the cherished dream of the Polish government - giving up Russian gas.

"Now we can get 90% of gas from other sources. Next year, provided we work hard, we will become 100% independent from gas supplies from the East", Kopacz said. According to her, the terminal will allow Poland to purchase liquefied gas from anywhere in the world and get it by sea. "This independence will enable us to negotiate gas price", the Polish Prime Minister added.

Recently the Department of the Treasury, responsible for keeping track of sanctions and violations of sanctions, turned its bureaucratic eye toward the massive convoys of Toyota Hilux pick-up trucks in possession of ISIS. How the heck did they get such a massive fleet of identical tactical war-machines? They put some pressure on Toyota at first: do you know anything about how these bad guys got all the trucks? Toyota had no clue, as it only makes cars.

But just down the road the answer had been obvious for several years: the State Department had long been providing these Toyotas to its "Free Syrian Army" which, as Syria expert Josh Landis at the University of Oklahoma asserts, somehow manages to deliver between 60 and 80 percent of its US-supplied goodies to ISIS or al-Qaeda. How did ISIS get the Toyotas? From the State Department.

Ron Paul Institute Executive Director joins Sputnik News to discuss the Toyota fiasco and the larger Afghanistanization of the Syria conflict on Radio Sputnik yesterday. Is Zbigniew Brzezinski riding again, taking the US to oblivion this time? Listen to the full interview with Daniel McAdams on Radio Sputnik to find out...

Brussels is likely to force Serbia to impose sanctions against Russia if Belgrade wants more progress in EU accession negotiations, the Serbian Blic newspaper reports.

According to Blic, Serbia hopes that EU-Russia relations will improve in the coming year and Belgrade will not have to choose between Brussels and Moscow.

"The government in Belgrade will have to align their behavior with Brussels to a much greater extent," the newspaper cited Belgrade diplomatic sources as saying on Thursday, explaining that this means that Serbia will be asked to conform to European anti-Russia sanctions.

Serbia applied to join the European Union in 2009, and received EU candidate status in 2012. Currently, Belgrade is in the process of negotiating its accession to the bloc.

• Suit is first to rely on Senate's $40 million investigation of the CIA's program
• Two psychologists made $80 million to set up what is described as an 'experimental torture program'
• One died and the other two were mentally traumatized after undergoing the techniques

Two former detainees and the family of a third who died in custody filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the American psychologists who designed the CIA's torture techniques, in the first legal action to rely on the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of the government's interrogation program.

The plaintiffs accused James Elmer Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen of torture, cruel and degrading punishment, war crimes and conducting an "experimental torture program" as part of a "joint criminal enterprise" with the nation's top intelligence agency.


The pair earned more than $80 million for developing a set of brutal interrogation methods, including simulated drowning known as waterboarding, beatings, starvation and confinement in "coffin-like boxes," for supervising their use on detainees in secret overseas CIA prisons and for personally applying them to detainees, according to the suit.

"Mitchell and Jessen conspired with the CIA to torture these three men and many others," said Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Human Rights Program. "They claimed that their program was scientifically based, safe and proven, when in fact it was none of those things. The program was unlawful and its methods barbaric."

President Obama will keep 5,500 US troops in Afghanistan when he leaves office in 2017, a significant change to a previous withdrawal plan. The mission of the troops will not change, however.

The troops will be based at four locations: Kabul, Bagram, Jalalabad, and Kandahar.

The US will maintain the current 9,800 troops throughout most of next year, and then draw that number down to 5,500 in 2017.

"It's the right thing to do," Obama said at the White House. "As commander in chief I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again."

The Palestinian campaign to boycott Israeli goods has exacted a major cost on Israel's exports to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. This victory is quietly acknowledged in a World Bank report released this week. Palestinian imports from Israel dropped by 24 percent during the first quarter of 2015, the report states.

The World Bank explains that the drop "is the result of reduced economic activity, but also a growing trend among Palestinian consumers to substitute products imported from Israel by those from other countries, as a result of which non-Israeli imports were up 22 percent."

Captive market under occupation

Israel controls the movement of people and goods to and from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Those territories are a captive market for its goods and one of Israel's primary export destinations.

The value of Israeli goods sold to the West Bank and Gaza Strip stood at $3.4 billion in 2013, according to Israeli government statistics. In 2014, it fell to $2.9 billion - a drop of almost one fifth. The further fall in 2015, indicated in the World Bank report, suggests the boycott by Palestinians alone could cost Israel hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Despite the drop this year, Israeli goods still represent 58 percent of total imports to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The World Bank adds that the Palestinian trade deficit declined by 6 percent during the first quarter of this year relative to the same period in 2014. But the trade deficit stands at 38 percent of GDP, which is "extraordinarily high."

Iraqi army soldiers, backed by volunteer Shia forces, have liberated most parts of the northern town of Baiji and the country's largest oil refinery there from the grip of Daesh terrorists, security sources say.

Sabah al-Numani, spokesman for Iraq's counter-terror forces, said Thursday that government troops are now in control of most parts of the strategic complex near the northern town of Baiji, situated some 190 kilometers (118 miles) from the capital, Baghdad.

"Counter-terrorism forces with volunteers are holding a tight grip over all the gates of the refinery and its facilities," Numani said.

The new army gains against the terrorists come a day after Iraqi armed forces and volunteer fighters launched a large-scale military offensive against Daesh Takfiris to recapture Baiji, a city located on the main road between Baghdad and the Daesh-held city of Mosul in the northern province of Nineveh.

Meanwhile, Baiji's Mayor Mohammed Mahmoud also said Iraqi federal police have retaken control of most of the city.

"I can confirm to you that our forces won the battle of the refinery and for Baiji town. We managed to control almost all parts of the town and now we are surrounding some Daesh snipers entrenched in some buildings," he said.

Hadi al-Amiri, who heads Iraq's Badr Organization, also praised the progress in the ongoing army offensive against Daesh, saying, "We caught the enemy off guard and we attacked them from all directions."

Using flight records, court cases and prisoner testimonies among other documents, journalists say they have compiled a comprehensive snapshot of the redacted details in the 500-page US Senate report on the CIA's post-9/11 torture tactics.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report's used color-based code names to conceal the CIA's prison sites. It took researchers at the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Rendition Project nine months to match the code names with public source data in order to point to the specific countries where prisoners were taken to black sites. They also discovered how long prisoners were detained, and what happened afterwards.

Through the work, researchers were able document the movements of 119 prisoners over a three-year period from 2002 to 2005. The report's authors said that under the CIA's rendition, detention and interrogation program, more than 130 people are known to have been tortured in the agency's own secret prisons, which operated across the world between 2001-2009.

One such account involves the CIA capture of a Palestinian man in Pakistan named Abu Zubaydah, in late March 2002, who they wrongly thought was the "number three in Al-Qaeda." Since the program was in the beginning stages, the CIA did not know where to hold him, and this resulted in a succession plans meant to keep the program secret and avoid detection by a watchdog agency like the International Committee of the Red Cross or even the US' own military.

The CIA began its rendition and torture program by using the black site nicknamed "Green" in Thailand where officials agreed to host the site and provide security for it, but then "problems with the hosts soon emerged. Reshuffles of Thai government personnel meant that the CIA Station Chief had to engage in 'continued lobbying' to keep the prison open. Less than a month after the site was set up, the agency estimated that the numbers of Thai officials who knew about it was already in double figures. It did not take long for media organizations to pick up on the fact that the CIA's most important catch was being held in Thailand," according to the report.

The Thailand site was where the CIA interrogators pioneered their torture techniques by repeatedly waterboarding Abu Zubaydah, depriving him of sleep, forcing him into stress positions and holding him in boxes. He once spent 11 days in a coffin-shaped box, and another box was less than three square feet, in which he spent 29 hours.