A new mini-crisis erupted in late August near the Strait of Hormuz when small patrol boats from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intercepted and continued to sail within a few hundred yards of a U.S. destroyer, the USS Nitze. The Nitze responded by firing warning shots. U.S. officials immediately condemned the incident as a terrible provocation, a theme that members of the American media obediently echoed. No one seemed to question why it was not provocative for the United States to sail a heavily armed destroyer (along with other warships) six thousand miles away from the American homeland to operate within a few miles of the Iranian coast. Yet Iran’s interception of that warship was automatically deemed provocative.
Category: Head Stories
… [the] renewed Philippines nationalism, … The explanation by the Western corporate media, which caters to a very basic secondary school level of education, about the reasons behind the recent war of words between U.S. President Barack Obama and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, had little to do with the leader of the Philippines calling Obama a «Putang ina» or «son of a whore» in Tagalog. The breakdown in relations between the Philippines, a former and much-abused American colony, and the United States is based on renewed Philippines nationalism, a disgust by Duterte for the selective human rights agenda of the Obama administration, and the Philippines leader’s antipathy for those schooled in Muslim beliefs in neighboring Indonesia.
American People, Please Help Us! “I am Syrian… living in Syria in the middle of everything. We have seen horrors. It was never a revolution nor a civil war. The terrorists are sent by your goverment. They are al Qaeda Jabhat al Nusra Wahhabi Salafists Talibans etc and the like extremists jihadists sent by the West and the Saudis and Qatar and Turkey. Your Obama and whoever is behind him or above him are supporting al Qaeda and leading a proxy war on my country. We thought you are against al Qaeda and now you support them. The majority here loves Assad. He has never committed a crime against his own people…the chemical attack was staged by the terrorists helped by USA and UK etc.. everyone knows that here. American soldiers and people should not be supporting barbarian al Qaeda terrorists who are killing Christians, Muslims in my country and everyone. Every massacre has committed by them. We were all happy in Syria= we have free school and university education available for everyone, free healthcare, no GMO, no fluoride, no chemtrails, no Rothschild IMF- controlled bank, state owned central bank which gives 11% interest, we are self-sufficient and have no foreign debt to any country or bank.
An EU summit without the UK prime minister on 16 September in Bratislava will kick off the discussions on the EU’s future. The summit is «informal», because the UK has not yet left the Union, but its prime minister is not invited. Slovakia, whose positions on Europe’s migration policies have diverged sharply from those of the Commission and western European powers, holds the EU’s rotating Council presidency. The decision to meet outside Brussels is intended to send a signal that Eastern European countries will be given more of a say on issues that have traditionally been the domain of core European powers like the UK, France, Germany and Italy.
in Town. . … Not only has the Saudi-led Coalition slumped in its efforts to achieve even its most basic objectives but a second and much more imposing rival coalition have evolved, making the Saudi’s cultural war sword look more like wet spaghetti in comparison. The new coalition backed by Iran, Russia, China[ii], even India and now possibly Turkey are all lining up to join! China recently announced that it will up its involvement in the Syrian war by stepping up personnel training and humanitarian assistance to President Bashar al Assad’s Syrian government. Syrian President Assad, after meeting the Indian minister, said: “India has a role to play in meeting the challenge of terrorism”
We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be? It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up the war in Syria but then lost control of the process. When the US has a strong president, he can usually keep the military and intelligence agencies on a tight leash. But the Obama administration has had a weak secretary of defense and a bunch of lady strategists who are the worst military commanders since Louis XV, who put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, in charge of French military forces during the Seven Year’s War.
The next BRICS summit, in Goa, is less than two months away. Compared to only two years ago, the geopolitical tectonic plates have moved with astonishing speed. Most BRICS nations are mired in deep crisis; Brazil’s endless political/economic/institutional debacle may yield the Kafkaesque impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. BRICS is in a coma. What’s surviving is RC: the Russia/China strategic partnership. Yet even the partnership seems to be in trouble — with Russia still attacked by myriad metastases of Hybrid War. The — Exceptionalist — Hegemon remains powerful, and the opposition is dazed and confused. Or is it?
… in Turkey. While the Obama Administration and the CIA officially cling to the fig leaf lie that US intelligence was innocent of any involvement in the failed July 15 coup d’ etat attempt by the CIA-run Fethullah Gülen organization in Turkey, the truth is coming out from senior US intelligence insiders themselves. It reflects a huge internal faction struggle within US leading circles in what by all accounts is shaping to be the most bizarre Presidential election year in American history. The first admission that US intelligence had their hand in the anti-Erdogan coup, a coup launched just days after Erdogan announced a major strategic shift away from NATO and towards Russia, came from Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski is one of the most senior members of the US intelligence establishment, a former Obama Presidential adviser and former National Security Council architect of the Jimmy Carter 1979 Mujahideen Afghanistan terror operations against the Soviet forces in that country.
US-trained snr Tajik special forces commander defects to ISIS, swears jihad. The US State Department has offered a $3 million reward for any information leading to the arrest of Gulmurod Khalimov, a former Tajik police commander who is currently one of the main leaders of the Daesh terrorist group. While the press release labels him as a terrorist, it fails to mention that it was the US who actually trained him. “The US Department of State’s Rewards for Justice Program is offering a reward of up to $3 million for information leading to the location, arrest, and/or conviction of Gulmurod Khalimov (variant Halimov), a key leader of the terrorist group ISIL, also known in Arabic as Da’esh,” says the press release posted on the department’s website on Tuesday. The document also says that Khalimov is a former Tajik special operations colonel, police commander, and military sniper. He was the commander of a police special operations unit in the Ministry of Interior of Tajikistan, or OMON, used against militants in the Central Asian nation.