Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

¬ Leonard Cohen, 'Everybody Knows'

French media reported yesterday that a police officer has been held in custody since December 23rd after he was chased and arrested in a busy Paris train station in possession of 'military-grade explosives and weapons'. The 29-year-old gendarme, stationed locally in Paris, was 'off-duty' at the time, but despite interrogating him for four days, investigators won't or can't say what he was doing passing through Gare de Lyon train station in central Paris with a sack full of terrorist goodies at the height of Christmas rush-hour. What they do know however, is that this particular cop was formerly in the military and is an expert in handling explosives.

Three days ago, coincidentally, or not, Strasbourg train station was temporarily evacuated after someone called in a bomb threat. This confluence of 'terror by train' reminds me of the unusual derailing of a high-speed train on the Paris-Strasbourg line - France's first fatal crash in 30 years of TGV travel - the day after the multi-site terror attacks in Paris in mid-November 2015. Despite the protestations of the train driver in that 'accident', and eyewitness reports of an explosion before the train derailed, the authorities immediately discounted sabotage and blamed the driver for 'speeding' (which he denied). Joe Quinn wrote about it at the time:

One possible reason for this irrational approach to the disaster that killed 11 people and injured 42 is that any reference to a terrorist attack as the cause of the derailment would immediately recall the worst terrorist atrocity in France prior to the Paris attacks last weekend.

On June 18th, 1961, at 3.10pm, a French train on the Paris-Strasbourg line derailed, killing 28 people and injuring 170. Several days before, a stationmaster near the crash site received a letter threatening an attack on the line. The letter was apparently ignored by police and the truth about the attack - that it was caused by a bomb on the line - was kept secret for 20 years.

The reason for the cover-up appears to have centered on the fact that the perpetrators were members of a NATO covert paramilitary force tasked with carrying out terrorist attacks on French civilians and politicians in an effort to influence French public and political opinion on the question of Algerian independence, and ensure the continued allegiance of European countries to NATO's ideology of thwarting closer Soviet-European ties. At one point the group, known as the Organisation of the Secret Army (OSA), attempted a coup d'etat against the government of Charles de Gaulle.

It is possible, therefore, that the reason French authorities were so quick to discount terrorism as the cause of the TGV crash one day after the Paris terror attacks was to avoid establishing a link, if only circumstantial, between previous home-grown terrorism of the NATO variety, and the current Muslim terror threat. Two threats which, in the final analysis, may be revealed as having the same origin.

2018 was actually a remarkably quiet year for mass casualty 'Islamist terror attacks' in Europe and the West as a whole, especially compared to the previous 3 years. Before the incident at the Christmas Market in Strasbourg, France, on December 11th, I can think of only two other mass casualty 'Islamist terror attacks' taking place anywhere in the West in 2018: one that took place in Carcassone and nearby Trebes, in southern France, in March this year, and which left 4 people dead (excluding the perpetrator). A second took place in Liege, eastern Belgium, in May this year, and left 3 people dead (also excluding the perpetrator).

Coincidentally, or not, French security services on December 11th arrested three more people in connection with that March attack.

Documents released on Thursday from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department LVMPD point to multiple shooters and a contaminated crime scene in an already controversial investigation into the Las Vegas shooting over a year ago.

The LVMPD released 18 voluntary statements made by officers who responded to the shooting in Las Vegas October 1, 2017. One of the documents that stood out from the rest was the sworn statement of Sergeant William Matchko (P#8525), document #11, in which he states the LVMPD knew of multiple shooters who they planned to wiretap after they discovered Stephen Paddock's dead body in a suspected suicide.

In what is a routine procedure, officers are often asked to give a statement very soon after an event, commonly referred to as a witness officer interview. Matchko's interview was conducted by the LVMPD - Force Investigation Team on October 3, 2017 at 6:40PM, just two days after the Las Vegas shooting.

Too many of those protesting the removal of U.S. forces are authors of the catastrophe that tore Syria to pieces.

President Donald Trump's announcement of an imminent withdrawal of US troops from northeastern Syria summoned a predictable paroxysm of outrage from Washington's foreign policy establishment. Former secretary of state and self-described "hair icon" Hillary Clinton perfectly distilled the bipartisan freakout into a single tweet, accusing Trump of "isolationism" and "playing into Russia and Iran's hands."

Michelle Flournoy, the DC apparatchik who would have been Hillary's secretary of defense, slammed the pull-out as "foreign policy malpractice," while Hillary's successor at the State Department, John Kerry, threw bits of red meat to the Russiagate-crazed Democratic base by branding Trump's decision "a Christmas gift to Putin." From the halls of Congress to the K Street corridors of Gulf-funded think tanks, a chorus of protest proclaimed that removing U.S. troops from Syria would simultaneously abet Iran and bring ISIS back from the grave.

US cyber-security experts have blamed Russia for meddling in American elections since 2016. Now it has emerged that authors of a Senate report on 'Russian' meddling actually ran a "false flag" meddling operation themselves.

A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.

Described by the New York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agency. His partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone.

Islamist Chechen fighters who honed their combat skills at Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) training camps are at war against Ukrainian rebels, confirms the Times. Tumbleweed.

The report in British newspaper the Times, that Chechen Islamists, many reeling from defeat in Syria and Iraq amongst the alphabet soup of fanaticism, had indeed arrived at the war front in eastern Ukraine, woke me up from any Christmas torpor.

An earlier report in the New York Times had revealed that the Islamist Chechens were under the command of the fascist "Right Sector" and were there to "fight Russians" because "we like fighting Russians" and "will never stop fighting Russians."

For the Times at Christmas it was enough to quote one of their commanders: "Putin is our common enemy." A quote which of course could have come from the editor of the Times!

They got their name from high-visibility jackets that French motorists have since 2008 been legally obliged to purchase and carry in all vehicles. Beginning as rallies in France in mid-November in protest against fuel tax hikes, the Yellow Vest movement voiced opposition to President Emanuel Macron's economic reforms, and even demand that he resign.

Inspired by Yellow Vest protests in France, copy-cat rallies have also been held in Belgium, Portugal, Ireland, the UK, Sweden and Germany. What is going on here, and where is it all headed?

On today's The Debate, we discuss the revolutionary mood in Europe with Kenneth Fero, lecturer at Coventry University in the UK, and Niall Bradley, editor at independent news site SOTT.net

Europeans are in revolt against the political and moral order and it's wonderful.

The emptiest, dumbest platitude of our time, uttered both by establishment stiffs like the Archbishop of Canterbury and by self-styled radical leftists, is that the 1930s have made a comeback. Treating that dark decade as if it were a sentient force, a still-extant thing, observers from both the worried bourgeoisie and the edgy left insist the Thirties have staggered back to life and have much of the West in their reanimated deathly grip. Looking at Brexit, the European turn against social democracy, the rise of populist parties, and the spread of 'yellow vest' revolts, the opinion-forming set sees fascism everywhere, rising zombie-like from its grave, laying to waste the progressive gains of recent decades.

This analysis is about as wrong as an analysis can be. Comparing contemporary political life to events of the past is always an imperfect way of understanding where politics is at. But if we really must search for echoes of today in the past, then it isn't the 1930s that our era looks and feels like - it's the 1840s. In particular 1848. That is the year when peoples across Europe revolted for radical political change, starting in France and spreading to Sweden, Denmark, the German states, the Italian states, the Habsburg Empire, and elsewhere. They were democratic revolutions, demanding the establishment or improvement of parliamentary democracy, freedom of the press, the removal of old monarchical structures and their replacement by independent nation states or republics. 1848 is often referred to as the Spring of Nations.

Even the neo-con warmongers' house journal The Guardian, furious at Trump's attempts to pull US troops out of Syria, in producing a map to illustrate its point, could only produce one single, uncertain, very short pen stroke to describe the minute strip of territory it claims ISIS still control on the Iraqi border.

Of course, the Guardian produces the argument that continued US military presence is necessary to ensure that ISIS does not spring back to life in Syria. The fallacy of that argument can be easily demonstrated. In Afghanistan, the USA has managed to drag out the long process of humiliating defeat in war even further than it did in Vietnam. It is plain as a pikestaff that the presence of US occupation troops is itself the best recruiting sergeant for resistance. In Sikunder Burnes I trace how the battle lines of tribal alliances there today are precisely the same ones the British faced in 1841. We just attach labels like Taliban to hide the fact that invaders face national resistance.

The secret to ending the strength of ISIS in Syria is not the continued presence of American troops. It is for America's ever closer allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to cut off the major artery of money and arms, which we should never forget in origin and for a long time had a strong US component. The US/Saudi/Israeli alliance against Iran is the most important geo-political factor in the region today. It is high time this alliance stopped both funding ISIS and pretending to fight it; schizophrenia is not a foreign policy stance.

It is worth starting by noting that a high percentage of the Integrity Initiative archive has been authenticated. The scheme has been admitted by the FCO and defended as legitimate government activity. Individual items like the minutes of the meeting with David Leask are authenticated. Not one of the documents has so far been disproven, or even denied.

Which tends to obscure some of the difficulties with the material. There is no metadata showing when each document was created, as opposed to when Anonymous made it into a PDF. Anonymous have released it in tranches and made plain there is more to come. The reason for this methodology is left obscure.

Most frustratingly, Anonymous' comments on the releases indicate that they have vital information which is not, so far, revealed. The most important document of all appears to be a simple contact list, of a particular group within the hundreds of contacts revealed in the papers overall. This is it in full:

The announcement by President Trump that US troops would be leaving Syria has been met with anger not just by neocons, but by Hollywood 'liberals' too. Aren't progressives supposed to oppose wars and illegal occupations?

Of course, we have to be cautious. Trump's announcement of a troop withdrawal from Syria, for now at least, is just words. We need to see evidence of soldiers leaving before we start to celebrate. We need to read the small print with a large Sherlock Holmes-style magnifying glass.

Even so, it's a positive development as it marks a further winding down of the conflict. Some though don't see it that way.