By Brandon Turbeville

A month after the last ceasefire in Syria fell apart as a result of the failure of the United States and its terrorist proxies to adhere to just one of their obligations under the agreement, the United States government is still claiming that the reason there is no ceasefire ongoing in Syria is entirely the fault of President Bashar al-Assad and, of course, the scary Russians.

In fact, on October 20, infamous narcissist, State Department Spokesman John Kirby openly stated that the “only thing” standing in the way of a “permanent ceasefire” in Syria is the “regime” of Bashar al-Assad.

“The only thing that stands between where we are now and a permanent and enduring ceasefire in Syria is Bashar al-Assad and his supporters,” he said.

In other words, “If Assad would just step down and let us have our way with his country, we wouldn’t have to keep killing civilians, funding proxy terrorists, and bombing Syrian infrastructure.” Doesn’t Assad understand that the U.S. owns his country and that he is supposed to follow the dictates of Washington regardless of what the Syrian people desire? The nerve of Assad, trying to defeat terrorists and maintain the sovereignty of his nation!

Kirby did, at least, acknowledge the presence of al-Nusra, but only tepidly. “We recognize Al-Nusra as a spoiler, we have concerns about co-mingling, I’ve talked about this ad nauseam,” he said.

Of course, al-Nusra is more than just a mere “spoiler,” it is open terrorist organization that the United States armed, funded, and trained to act as a proxy force that is no ideologically (or even physically) different than ISIS, Ahrar al-Sham, or the “moderates” of the Free Syrian Army. It is also an organization that the United States was supposed to separate from the groups of these shadowy “moderates” we have heard so much about over the course of the last five years but who are apparently phantoms lurking about in the rafters of the Syrian theatre.

The very fact that the United States blamed Russia (along with Assad) for the collapse of the ceasefire and argued that the U.S. was not supposed to separate the “moderates” from the “extremists” until after seven days is thus an admission that, without the requirements of the ceasefire in place, the U.S. would never have separated them at all. But this was the crux of the U.S. position; essentially that it knew who the “moderate” cannibals were and that they were different from the extremist cannibals. If that is the case, then wouldn’t separating the two be the goal all along? Why did the United States need to be required by a ceasefire agreement (as a concession no less) to separate the two different elements of the “opposition” if it was truly in support of defeating the “extremists?”

As Joseph Thomas writes for New Eastern Outlook,

It also appears to be no coincidence that this scenario now openly unfolding in Syria fulfils warnings published by Western journalists as early as 2007 (Seymour Hersh, The Redirection) in which it was revealed that the US was already at that time providing material support to extremist organisations “sympathetic to Al Qaeda” toward the end goal of overthrowing the governments of both Iran and Syria.

While the US now claims Russia has sabotaged US efforts to bring an end to hostilities in Syria, Washington is also illogically attempting to argue that the failure of its feigned “peace talks” has also somehow prevented the US from targeting terrorists organisations in Syria, the alleged pretext of America’s presence in Syria to begin with.

Despite strained relations with Russia, the US is still cooperating with Moscow regarding the use of Syrian airspace to avoid unintentional confrontations. While the cessation of hostilities may have collapsed, is there really any excuse as to why separating designated terrorist organisations from militant groups the US and its allies are providing billions in weapons and equipment to is still not an absolute and urgent priority?

The answer is, no — there is no excuse. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, it is simply an excuse for the US to continue funnelling men and materiel into Syria Washington knows with absolute certainty will end up in the ranks of Al Qaeda, whom the US admittedly intended to use as early as 2007 to overthrow the Syrian government with.

As a result, the State Department’s ridiculous leveling of the blame for the failure of the ceasefire on Assad can be chalked up to yet another statement based in absolute falsehood and intentional deception. Indeed, this is the type of statement the U.S. State Department is becoming renowned for the world over, from blaming Russia for bombing a convoy even if it didn’t bomb the convoy, claiming Russian aggression in Ukraine, asserting that Assad is “killing his own people,” “barrel bombing civilians,” and attacking hospitals, what little shred of credibility the State Department may have left outside of American borders is rapidly disappearing.

This article may be freely shared in part or in full with author attribution and source link.

(activistpost.com)

By Brandon Turbeville

As the United States squanders the enormous good will and respect it once had by marching forward on the tired legs of a dying empire, the U.S.’ enemies-of-its-own-making are beginning to forge new alliances that might not have been a reality had the U.S. at the very least pursued a strategy of positive reinforcement and cooperation as opposed to a policy of tension, pillage, and war.

The first major crack in the iron curtain of the Anglo-American world hegemon started becoming apparent with the emergence of the U.S. destabilization and proxy war against Syria. While the NATO/American proxy war has left hundreds of thousands of Syrians dead, hundreds of thousands more displaced, and destroyed much of the Syrian infrastructure as well as crippled the Syrian economy, another result of American policy in Syria is that it has strengthened and even created alliances that otherwise may not have existed not only between Middle Eastern countries but European, Asian, and African nations as well.

Unfortunately for the United States, these new alliances of its targets were created out of a political, economic, and military necessity by which to survive the Western onslaught of destabilization, sanctions, and war aimed at these respective nations. Thus, if the West wanted to break resistance to its hegemonic system, it has managed instead to encourage the opposite.

While already an axis of mutual interest, the crisis in Syria has resulted in the strengthening of ties between Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Not only a strategic alliance, this arc of resistance has solidified ties that are slowly pulling Iraq away from the influence of the United States. Indeed, the Iraqis are still tethered to the United States due largely to bribery, deception, economic threats, and the decreasing dependency on the United States for military assistance to combat ISIS.

Syria itself is spreading its wings as it mops up America’s terrorists. Reaching out to not only the nations of the resistance axis and Russia, it is reaching out and solidifying relationships with Russia and China as well as with other European and African nations like the Czech Republic and Egypt.

Likewise, if the ties between Iran and the Houthis were not strong enough before the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition, they certainly are now. Despite no credible evidence that Iran is providing weapons to the Houthis, there is little doubt that the Iranians are providing whatever support they can in whatever form that can take and that they will do so in the future.

Russia, of course, factors in as the biggest and most important player in the strategic realignment with its insistence (which has come as a result of the U.S. aggression across the planet) in the emergence of a “multi-polar” world. Russia’s reunification with Crimea, support of the Ukrainian rebels, as well as its support of Syria is only the tip of the iceberg. A growing cooperation with China and with a host of other nations throughout the world – by virtue of the carrot as opposed to the stick – is rapidly drawing more and more nations into the Russian fold.

Iran, too, having not expressed a desire for empire, nonetheless is now beginning to express interest in stretching its muscles and expanding its own influence. How much of this newly expressed desire is innate and how much is simply a necessary act of self-defense against and encroaching war machine that sees Iran as next in line for destruction is unclear. The fact that it is happening, however, is not in doubt.

These new alliances may not have ever taken shape and solidified had the United States not insisted on acting as the battering ram for the Anglo-American system across the world and squandered all the respect and good will that existed for it in so many nations. The U.S. could easily have won many nations over by using positive reinforcement and enticement such as development, higher living standards, and peace. Instead, it has bombed, burned, bribed, and destabilized itself across the globe to the point that it has become the number one threat to world peace, a reality that is being acknowledged by more and more countries by the day.

What could have been the greatest force for peace, stability, democracy, and high living standards has been utterly squandered into being the greatest force for the opposite. If the United States continues down this path of imperialism, it will soon find itself not only hated the world over, but collapsed, weak, and bitter while the nations it has targeted in the final days of its war push have united against it. We can only hope that they have more restraint, good will, and compassion than what the U.S. has shown to them.

This article may be freely shared in part or in full with author attribution and source link.

Image Credit: Anthony Freda Art

(activistpost.com)

By Justin Gardner

While mainstream media has dutifully echoed the U.S. government narrative that Russia is to blame for increasing tensions, we at the Free Thought Project have reported on the numerous ways in which the U.S. has actually been the provocateur.

Earlier in 2016, a U.S. military official said the U.S. “needs and wants Russia as an enemy,” which was followed by a litany of falsehoods about Russian threats from elected and appointed officials. A hacked email showed a NATO general plotting conflict with Russia, as American and NATO military forces amass along Russia’s borders.

U.S. intervention in Syria has provided the perfect context for escalating tensions. In its effort to topple the Assad government, the U.S. nurtured the Salafist fundamentalist sect in Syria, which went on to become a major part of ISIS. As U.S. military operations get dangerously close to Syrian or Russian forces (invited there by Assad), any “accidental” strike could be the spark for World War III.

If this were not disturbing enough, the reality in the homeland is downright frightening. Since 9/11, the U.S. military/surveillance state has been able to use – and perpetuate – the specter of terrorism to dismantle the rights of its citizens.

In order to sustain public support for its war-making, the State must suppress dissent. If it cannot achieve this through media control and other subtle means, it is prepared to take more forceful measures.

According to retired Army Major Todd Pierce, the U.S. government has everything in place to round up antiwar dissenters and put them in military detention.

In an interview with Mondoweiss, Pierce – who served in the 349th Psychological Operations Company and the 205th Infantry Brigade as a senior NCO, then as Judge Advocate General until 2012 – said:

Well let’s say we do ramp up a war with Russia and we do get a more active antiwar movement. Say a Donald Trump who’s already let everybody know what he thinks of the constitution, or Hillary Clinton.… And Obama has said he can kill American citizens. The military goes to them and says hey, these dissenters are going to cause us to lose a war, like the Vietnam war. Let’s put them in military detention, let’s impose censorship. Everything’s in place right now.

Pierce is a self-professed former neoconservative until the Gulf War began opening his eyes to the folly of U.S. imperialism, and then he personally witnessed how government began using 9/11 to assume totalitarian control in the name of fighting the tactic of terrorism. He now works as a Guantanamo defense attorney.

We have total surveillance of the US population through the NSA. That’s what these huge data storage facilities are about, to store all the data that they’ve gathered. They’ve gone to the public and say, We’re not listening to your phone calls. But what they are doing is storing it. It’s all there, just like a huge data file. Like the Stasi– they would go look at their file on someone, and go use that against them. Well, we have all that data collected, including people’s attitudes. So if the day comes, which if people like Vermeule and Posner have said, we may have to impose censorship and have military detention.

Pierce’s fears were further confirmed when West Point began hiring constitutional law teachers who openly professed that “we are going to have to start putting law professors into military detention, and take other legal measures because they are subverting our will to fight.”

Other professors at Harvard and University of Chicago were saying it’s time to revisit the writings of Carl Schmitt, who wrote actively to justify the Nazis and cement their power in Germany, and“spoke of the need for a dictatorship in 1922.” The professors even wrote their own book about centralized military authority, called The Executive Unbound.

Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act was perhaps the crowning achievement of the totalitarian U.S. State, which removed the right of habeus corpus during this never-ending war on terror – meaning that American citizens suspected as “belligerents” can be subject to military law and indefinite detention.

This is not the only possible fate that awaits American citizens should major war break out and government essentially becomes a military junta.

Pierce explains how he was in the court when the Obama administration argued they have the power to kill American citizens, as part of a sweeping authoritarianism granted unto itself to take “any means necessary” in the war on terror.

Obama demonstrated this power in 2011 by assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen in Yemen, and then his 16-year-old son “for good measure.”

Pierce is not alone in his well-informed, deep concerns for the proto-fascist trajectory of the U.S. government. He is part of a Veteran Intelligence group that includes four NSA whistleblowers, who were all arrested by the FBI at gunpoint but were able to avoid prison by “turning the tables and showing that the government was making things up.”

We’re a more sophisticated form of what I think has to be called fascism. The term fascism was applied to the way the communists and Stalin got on as well. You bring the term fascist to what it really means, and that ultimately is, ultramilitarism and authoritarianism combined with an expansionist foreign policy. And that’s us—what you can see us becoming.

The fascist path is being subtly applied at home, but is already the guiding principle of foreign policy. Doctrine is now in place that says the U.S. can kill any non-U.S. person who it deems to be the enemy, and this is already being carried out with targeted drone strikes in numerous countries where no war has been declared.

One of the people [unnamed colleague] I disagree with most is very supportive of what we have been doing. But he sort of slipped one time and said, this military commissions act, it’s almost like we are exercising martial law over the whole world. We are. We are taking those precedents from our own martial law period over our own territory and applying it to the world. Someone who may be anti drone warfare in Afghanistan or Pakistan is guilty of a war crime, and gets targeted with a drone attack.

So we are doing to the Mideast and other parts what the Germans did to Europe in World War 2. They held that any anti-German opinion was basically a war crime. And putting aside the Jewish issue—but non Jewish people who might be opposed to the Nazis invasion, before the Germans invaded, they would be put into military detention.

That’s the problem with the idea that you’re at war, because you adopt the most extreme understanding of who the enemy is and then justify killing them or putting them in military detention because they’re the enemy.”

And, as Pierce notes, “when you wage a totalitarian foreign policy like that it eventually spills over more and more into your domestic system, and we’re seeing this in Section 1021…”

Essential to this creeping fascism is the State’s mastery of propaganda, while sustaining the illusion that democracy is a meaningful protection against government abuse of power.

After the antiwar movement ended the Vietnam War, the military machine ramped up its effort to control the narrative, building on Cointelpro to identify and neutralize subversive elements. At the same time, it looked for ways to glorify the military, such as the Defense Department’s collaboration with Hollywood on the movieTop Gun and the infusion of militarism with American football.

Fascism’s founding principle is how to manipulate the masses. So propaganda was always central to fascism.

Totalitarian democracy allows for the form of democracy, but it requires the fascist principle that all the people must be driven to the same ideas. And of course militaristic and authoritarian because you can’t have dissenters in a fascist state, or not too strong of a dissident movement.

As Pierce notes, American generals would have bankrupted the country pursuing their crusade in Vietnam, had it not been for the antiwar movement. He said that we now face a situation like Communist Russia, which bankrupted itself through perpetual war, or Nazi Germany’s failure at Stalingrad, which caused Germans to reconsider their ongoing conquest of Europe.

Only, things are more subtle for the United States. “We’ll just slowly erode our economy and– again, we’re doing it already, but we can conceal it,” said Pierce.

In Nazi Germany, the White Rose antiwar dissenters managed to have a significant influence before and after their execution – helping to expose the atrocities Germany was carrying out in Eastern Europe and contributing to the end of Nazi reign.

Today, the U.S. government does not need to execute dissenters; it can simply make them disappear through indefinite military detention, using a vast surveillance empire, while the “war on terror” goes on endlessly.

“It’s those people who see what’s wrong that have to try and change the dominant narrative to one of truth, to what is truthfully taking place,” said Pierce.

Now more than ever, we must expose the truth of U.S. foreign policy – the fascist, violent political machinations that are bringing the country to the brink of collapse and the world to the brink of war.

Justin Gardner writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.

(activistpost.com)