A special investigator will be appointed to prosecute alleged war crimes committed by Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan, as the Australian government considers its response to a four-year investigation into the allegations.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force's report, to be released next week in a redacted form, will be "difficult and hard news for Australians".

At least 55 separate incidents have been probed as part of the exhaustive four-year probe that has interviewed more than 330 witnesses.

We are reposting here this important article by Ullrich Mies from the German-language Rubikon site, in the form of a "raw" translation via Alison Blunt and deepl.com

Since March 2020, the form of rule that has been systematically unfolding since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989/1990 has been fully in evidence: A transnationally operating oligarchic caste has taken over rule in the Western "democracies".

The mass base of "traditional" fascism was the enthusiastic petty bourgeoisie, incited by propaganda (1). The leader (state) promised the masses salvation from all evils. The leader carried the masses, the masses carried the leader (state) and the latter led them into war and ruin in the interest of (monopoly) capital.

In the course of recent decades, a transnational, well-connected caste has emerged, which no longer conducts its wars only outwardly, but has recognized civil societies as a whole as a threat to its power. Since March 2020, the centers of power have expanded their wars inwards in the name of the corona infection regime.

By transnational "elite" fascism I mean an alliance of transnational capitalist class, transnational power elite (2) with the transnational digital, military, intelligence, science and media complex and the governments as their executive committees. I refer to this conglomerate as the parasites of civil societies, which serve as their "host" bodies.

Put another way: the elites have cannibalized the system so thoroughly that there's nothing left to steal, exploit or cannibalize.

The global elites' techno-fantasy of a completely centralized future, The Great Reset, is addressed as a future project. Too bad it already happened in 2008-09. The lackeys and toadies tasked with spewing the PR are 12 years too late, and so are the critics listening to the PR with foreboding.

Simply put, events outran our understanding of them. The future already manifested while we were trying to cram the present arrangement into an obsolete conceptual framework.

In broad-brush, the post-World War II era ended around 1970. The legitimate prosperity of 1946-1970 was based on cheap oil controlled by the U.S. and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Everything else was merely decoration.

The Original Sin to hard-money advocates was America's abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, but this was the only way to maintain hegemony. Maintaining the reserve currency is tricky, as the nation issuing the reserve currency has to supply the global economy with enough of the currency to grease commerce and stock central bank reserves around the world.

Four years after signing the now-infamous "Never Trump" letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump's foreign policy in the Middle East.

But even as he praises the president's support of what he describes as a successful "realpolitik" approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.

"We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there," Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is "a lot more than" the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.

Trump's abruptly-announced withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria remains perhaps the single-most controversial foreign policy move during his first years in office, and for Jeffrey, "the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government." The order, first handed down in December 2018, led to the resignation of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It catapulted Jeffrey, then Trump's special envoy for Syria, into the role of special envoy in the counter-ISIS fight when it sparked the protest resignation of his predecessor, Brett McGurk.

For Jeffrey, the incident was far less cut-and-dry — but it is ultimately a success story that ended with U.S. troops still operating in Syria, denying Russian and Syrian territorial gains and preventing ISIS remnants from reconstituting.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order to prohibit U.S. investment in Chinese firms that are owned or controlled by the Chinese military, the White House announced Thursday.

National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien said in a statement:

"Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to protect American investors from funding Communist Chinese military companies, including those designated by the Department of Defense in June and August of 2020.

"Many of these companies are publicly traded on stock exchanges around the world, and individual investors in the United States can unknowingly provide funds to them through passive institutional investment vehicles such as mutual funds and retirement plans. The President's action serves to protect American investors from unintentionally providing capital that goes to enhancing the capabilities of the People's Liberation Army and People's Republic of China intelligence services, which routinely target American citizens and businesses through cyber operations, and directly threaten the critical infrastructure, economy, and military of America and its allies and partners around the world.

"President Trump has no higher priority than the security of the American people."

The executive order addresses concerns by Republican members of Congress that American federal employees were investing in retirement plans that involved an index that included firms building China's military.

A top aide to former Vice President Joe Biden's transition team once helped steer $3 million in taxpayer dollars to a Hunter Biden-linked venture capital firm.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that Don Graves, a high-ranking executive at Key Bank, has been tasked to advise Biden on financial regulation issues during the transition process. Graves, who worked for the former vice president during the Obama administration, has been a long time fixture in the Biden family orbit.

As Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute, revealed in Profiles in Corruption, that relationship benefited Hunter Biden's business interests on at least one occasion.

In December 2013, Hunter Biden, along with his long-time business associate Devon Archer, invested in a Hawaii-focused venture capital fund called mbloom. The investment, which was meant to provide seed capital for technology startups, was the result of a public-private partnership between Biden's firm, Rosemont Seneca Technology (RST) Partners, and the state of Hawaii.

As part of the agreement, RST would provide five million for the fund, with the Hawaii Strategic Development Corporation (HSDC) matching the same amount.

Alarming chatter surrounds Trump loyalists being installed in top positions at the Pentagon in the waning days of the current administration, according to a Democratic congresswoman.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said on Wednesday that classified information regarding Russian interference, secrets which President Trump's allies have sought under the belief they will reveal a conspiracy to undermine his ascendancy to the White House, are in jeopardy of being exposed.

This warning, which the former Air Force captain delivered in an MSNBC appearance along with former CIA Director John Brennan, follows a shakeup that began last week with the ouster of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and led to the entry of Ezra Cohen-Watnick, an aide to national security adviser Michael Flynn at the beginning of the administration, as acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Kash Patel, an ex-aide to former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and the House Intelligence Committee's Devin Nunes, as the Pentagon chief of staff, and retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata as policy chief.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's legal team submitted their closing argument to a British magistrates' court. They argue, "It is politically motivated, it is an abuse of the process of this court, and it is a clear violation of the Anglo-U.S. treaty that governs this extradition."

The closing argument relies on evidence presented by witnesses, who testified during a trial in September, and details how President Barack Obama's administration declined to prosecute Assange. President Donald Trump's administration reversed this "principled" position because of the nature of Assange's "disclosures to the world and the nature of his political opinions, which inevitably attracted the hostility of the Trump administration and the CIA."

Prosecutors will submit their closing argument on November 20, and Judge Vanessa Baraitser is expected to rule on the extradition request on January 4.

Russia plans to build a naval base in Sudan, according to a bilateral draft agreement between the two nations.

The agreement would allow Russia to establish a naval logistics base in Sudan for the repair and supply of warships as well as provide rest to sailors, according to the document published on November 11 on a Russian government website after Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin approved it.

A naval base in Sudan would expand Russian influence in northeast Africa along vital shipping routes in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

The draft agreement says that up to 300 crew and four warships may stay at the naval logistics base, including ships with nuclear-propulsion systems.

A lot has happened very rapidly in the past two days and I will begin this analysis by a few bullet points summarizing what just happened (not in any particular order, including chronological):

• The war which has just ended was a real bloodbath and it has seen more casualties (counting both sides) than what the Soviet Union lost in 10 years of warfare in Afghanistan
• This war is now over, Russian peacekeepers have already been deployed along the line of contact. So far, neither side has dared to resume hostilities (more about that below).
• There have been two days of celebrations in Baku where President Aliev has declared that the war was a triumph for Azeri forces and that Pashinian got nothing. He is right.
• The Azeris are now declaring that they want compensation from Armenia.
• There are now Turkish forces in Azerbaijan and Russian and Turkish forces have created a joint committee to coordinate actions.
• Erdogan has insisted that he wanted Turkey to send in peacekeepers, but Putin has categorically rejected this demand: like any other state, Azerbaijan has the undisputed right to invite foreign forces on its territory, but these forces will not have the status and rights of a peacekeeping force.
• Violent riots have broken out in Erevan where violent mobs have stormed government buildings, beaten officials and sacked the Parliament.
• Seventeen Armenian opposition parties have declared that they want a committee of national salvation and the resignation of Pashinian.
• Nobody knows where Pashinian is hiding, but he seems to still be somewhere in Armenia.
• These mobs also destroyed the Soros offices in Erevan and they are now looking for Pashinian "the traitor" to lynch him.
• Pashinian has complained on Twitter that his offices were sacked, that a computer, his driver license and, I kid you not, a bottle of perfume (poor perfumed baby!) were stolen.
• The Russian peacekeeping force will be constituted of subunits of the 15th Independent Motorized Rifle Brigade which itself is part of the 2nd Guards Combined Arms Army of the Central Military District. It will include about 2000 armed soldiers, APCs and IFVs, specialized vehicles (EW, C3I, etc.), drones and air defense systems.
• Russians peacekeepers will stay deployed in this area for no less than 5 years.
• Russia will now control both the Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) corridor and the Nakhichevan corridor.

Now let's look at the position of the parties at the end of this war and compare them.