33s of the Day

#1

"The US has about 3,300 troops in Iraq, where they are training Iraqi forces"

... from the article "Forever War!" "US could put boots on the ground in fight against Isis, says Ash Carter"

The US is to step up attacks on Isis and could escalate that to include raids by troops on the ground, according to Ash Carter, the US defence secretary. Addressing the Senate armed services committee, Carter said the US "won't hold back" from attacks alongside its allies or "directly, whether by strikes from the air or direct action on the ground".

#2

"The 33" is a 2015 English-language Chilean survival drama film, directed by Patricia Riggen and written by Mikko Alanne and Craig Borten and José Rivera. The film is based on the real events of the 2010 mining disaster, in which a group of thirty-three miners were trapped inside the San José Mine in Chile for more than two months. The film stars Antonio Banderas as Mario "Super Mario" Sepúlveda, who sent videos to the rescuers to notify them about the miners' condition.

Netanyahu Is a Holocaust Revisionist

Max Blumenthal explains how Netanyahu apologizes for Hitler and blames the holocaust on the Palestinians, to support his Zionist racist ends.




What's amusing is how fungible the holocaust story is... and here we have the leader of Israel saying that Hitler really didn't want to kill Jews.

Bizarre.

"What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?"

A surprisingly open-minded article from the NYTimes.

It reaches no strong conclusions but obviously questions the official story. It does a reasonable job of going through the logic of different stories about the raid.

It's a long piece with a long conclusion, but good stuff:

Where does the official bin Laden story stand now? For many, it exists in a kind of liminal state, floating somewhere between fact and mythology. The writing of history is a process, and this story still seems to have a long way to go before the government’s narrative can be accepted as true, or rejected as false. 

‘‘It’s all sort of hokey, the whole thing,’’ Robert Baer, a longtime C.I.A. case officer in the Middle East (and the inspiration for the George Clooney character in the movie ‘‘Syriana’’) told me of the government’s version of the events. ‘‘I’ve never seen a White House take that kind of risk. Did the president just wake up one morning and say, ‘Let’s put my presidency on the line right before an election?’ This guy is too smart to put 23 SEALs in harm’s way in a Hollywood-like assassination. He’s too smart.’’ Still, none of Baer’s old friends inside or outside the agency have challenged the administration’s account. 

Over time, many of Hersh’s claims could be proved right. What then? We may be justifiably outraged. Pakistan, our putative ally in the war on terror and the beneficiary of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer aid, would have provided refuge to our greatest enemy — the author of the very act that prompted us to invade Afghanistan. The audacious raid on bin Laden’s compound, our greatest victory in the war on terror, would have been little more than ‘‘a turkey shoot’’ (Hersh’s phrase). 

Above all, our government would have lied to us. But should we really be shocked by such a revelation? After all, it would barely register on a scale of government secrecy and deception that includes, in recent years alone, the N.S.A.’s covert wiretapping program and the C.I.A.’s off-the-books network of ‘‘black site’’ prisons. 

‘‘White House public-affairs people are not historians, they are not scholars, they are not even journalists,’’ Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told me. ‘‘They are representing a political entity inside the United States government. Telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not their job, and even if it were their job, they would not necessarily be able to do it.’’ 

Hersh’s version doesn’t require us to believe in the possibility of a governmentwide conspiracy. Myths can be projected through an uncoordinated effort with a variety of people really just doing their jobs. Of course, when enough people are obscuring the truth, the results can seem, well, conspiratorial. 

Hersh is fond of pointing out that thousands of government employees and contractors presumably knew about the N.S.A.’s wiretapping, but only one, Edward Snowden, came forward. We can go a step further: The more sensitive the subject, the more likely the government will be to feed us untruths. Consider our relationship with Pakistan, which Obama clearly had on his mind in the aftermath of the raid. In his address to the nation, Obama expressed his gratitude: ‘‘Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.’’ 

Either the line in Obama’s statement wasn’t truthful or the administration’s subsequent disavowal of it wasn’t. But in either case, it’s hard to imagine that telling the whole truth was more important to Obama, or should have been more important, than managing America’s relationship with this unstable ally. 

There’s simply no reason to expect the whole truth from the government about the killing of bin Laden. If a tipper led the United States to his compound in Abbottabad, the administration could never say so without putting that individual’s life at risk and making it virtually impossible for the C.I.A. to recruit informants in the future. 

If Pakistan didn’t want us to acknowledge its cooperation with the raid, we wouldn’t, for fear of igniting the militant backlash Gall mentioned. Hersh himself has written — in The New Yorker — that there is a credible danger of extremists inside Pakistan’s military staging a coup and taking control of its large stockpile of nuclear weapons. 

Reporters like to think of themselves as empiricists, but journalism is a soft science. Absent documentation, the grail of national-security reporting, they are only as good as their sources and their deductive reasoning. But what happens when different sources offer different accounts and deductive reasoning can be used to advance any number of contradictory arguments? How do we square Latif’s reporting in Abbottabad and Baer’s skepticism with the official story that Bowden and many others heard? 

‘‘As a reporter in this world,’’ Bowden told me, ‘‘you have to always allow for the possibility that you are being lied to, you hope for good reason.’’ We may already know far more about the bin Laden raid than we were ever supposed to. In his 2014 memoir ‘‘Duty,’’ the former secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, wrote that everyone who gathered in the White House Situation Room on the night of the raid had agreed to ‘‘keep mum on the details.’’ ‘‘That commitment lasted about five hours,’’ he added, pointing his finger directly at the White House and the C.I.A: ‘‘They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit.’’ 

The problem is that amid all of this bragging, it became impossible to know what was true and what wasn’t. Recall ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty,’’ which grossed $130 million at the box office and was in many ways the dominant narrative of the killing of bin Laden. The filmmakers, in numerous interviews, went out of their way to promote their access to government and military sources: The opening credits announced that the film was based on ‘‘firsthand accounts of actual events.’’ And, as a trove of documents made public via the Freedom of Information Act amply demonstrated, the C.I.A. eagerly cooperated with the filmmakers, arranging for the writer and director to meet with numerous analysts and officers who were identified as being involved in the hunt for bin Laden. 

The director, Kathryn Bigelow, has described the film as ‘‘the first rough cut of history.’’ This was a story that was so good it didn’t need to be fictionalized, or so it seemed. It began with a series of C.I.A.-led torture sessions, which the movie suggested provided the crucial break in the hunt for bin Laden. 

Only they didn’t, at least according to a report conducted over the course of many years by the Senate Intelligence Committee (and others with access to classified information). Senator Dianne Feinstein, who oversaw the report as the committee’s chairwoman, said she walked out of a screening of the film. ‘‘I couldn’t handle it,’’ she said. ‘‘Because it’s so false.’’ 

The filmmakers’ intent had presumably been to tell a nuanced story — the ugly truth of how we found bin Laden — but in so doing, they seem to have perpetuated a lie. It’s not that the truth about bin Laden’s death is unknowable; it’s that we don’t know it. And we can’t necessarily console ourselves with the hope that we will have more answers any time soon; to this day, the final volume of the C.I.A.’s official history of the Bay of Pigs remains classified. We don’t know what happened more than a half-century ago, much less in 2011. 

There are different ways to control a narrative. There’s the old-fashioned way: Classify documents that you don’t want seen and, as Gates said, ‘‘keep mum on the details.’’ But there’s also the more modern, social-media-savvy approach: Tell the story you want them to believe. Silence is one way to keep a secret. Talking is another. And they are not mutually exclusive. 

‘‘I love the notion that the government isn’t riddled with secrecy,’’ Hersh told me toward the end of our long day together. ‘‘Are you kidding me? They keep more secrets than you can possibly think. There’s stuff going on right now that I know about — amazing stuff that’s going on. I’ll write about it when I can. There’s stuff going out right now, amazing stuff in the Middle East. Are you kidding me? Of course there is. Of course there is.’’

Interestingly, there is this factoid, from a different story:

The inspector general's reports said the CIA's working relationship with the filmmakers began in 2010, a year before bin Laden was killed. 

"Based on a review of documentation and interviews, the inspector general's office determined the CIA's cooperation with filmmakers Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow began in 2010 when Panetta and Bigelow met at an event where Bigelow discussed her film project 'Tora Bora,' a film project involving the CIA's failure to capture [bin Laden], and Panetta offered the Agency's assistance."

This begs the question-- is it possible that Boal and Bigelow, in collaboration with the CIA, actually helped write the script for a fake bin Laden raid? Surely seems plausible to me...

The Drone War Is a War Crime

The Drone papers at the Intercept.

In short, it is automated evil, an extra-judicial assassination program that is ridiculously flawed: abused by our allies and creates more terrorism.

Democracy Now has had good coverage of this.

Part 1

Part 2

It's really hard to figure what is a more evil and horrible aftermath of 9/11--

The Iraq war disaster and ISIS clusterfuck

The never-ending bullshit of Afghanistan

The fucking inhuman killing of the drone program

The hundreds of thousands of lives ruined by these wars, including totally fucked up US veterans

The insanely HUGE amounts of money diverted into these sick, fucked up policies, that could have been used to help Americans.

Lesser evils but still bad--

The endless lies of our politicians about these wars and the desensitization of the US populace to the wars

The constant demonization of Muslims

Blowback terrorism

Allen Dulles, the CIA and the JFK Assassination

An amazingly good interview with David Talbot on Democracy Now, where he makes several important points, including the case for the CIA in assassinating JFK.



Key part on JFK:

DAVID TALBOT: Well, as I was saying, after he was fired by Kennedy, Dulles went to his home. He continued— 

AMY GOODMAN: And why was he fired? 

DAVID TALBOT: Well, he was fired after the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy realized he shouldn’t have kept Dulles on from the Eisenhower years. They were philosophically too different. And the Bay of Pigs was the final straw for him. So he was pushed out after that. And—but Dulles, as I say, continued to sort of set up an anti-Kennedy government in exile in his home in Georgetown. Many of the people he was meeting with, several of the people, including Howard Hunt and others, later became figures of suspicion during the House Select Committee on Assassination hearings in Washington in the 1970s. You know, most Americans don’t know that that was the last official statement, the last official report, on the Kennedy assassination, not the Warren Report back in 1964. But the Congress reopened the investigation into John Kennedy’s assassination, and they did determine he was killed as the result of a conspiracy. So a number of the people who came up during this investigation by Congress were figures of interest who were meeting with Allen Dulles. They had no, you know, obvious reason to be meeting with a "retired" CIA official. The weekend of Kennedy’s assassination, Allen Dulles is not at home watching television like the rest of America. He’s at a remote CIA facility, two years after being pushed out of the agency by Kennedy, called The Farm, in northern Virginia, that he used when he was director of the CIA as a kind of an alternate command post. Well, he’s there while Kennedy is killed, after Kennedy is killed, when Jack Ruby then kills Lee Harvey Oswald. That whole fateful weekend, he’s hunkered down in a CIA command post. So, there are many odd circumstances like this. I also found out from interviewing the children of another former CIA official that one of the key figures of interest in the Kennedy assassination, a guy named William Harvey, who was head of the CIA-Mafia plot against Castro and hated the Kennedys, thought that they were weak and so on, he was seen leaving his Rome station and flying to Dallas, by his own deputy, on an airplane early in November 1963. This is a remarkable sighting, because to place someone like William Harvey, the head of the CIA’s assassination unit, put there by Allen Dulles, in Dallas in November of '63 before the assassination is a very important fact. The CIA, by the way, refuses, even at this late date, to release the travel vouchers for people like William Harvey. Under the JFK Records Act, that was passed back in the 1990s, they are compelled by federal law to release all documents related to the Kennedy assassination, but they're still withholding over 1,100 of these documents, including—and I— 

AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen seconds. 

DAVID TALBOT: I used the Freedom of Information Act to try and get the travel vouchers for William Harvey. They’re still holding onto them. 

AMY GOODMAN: How many calls are you getting in the mainstream media to do interviews? 

DAVID TALBOT: Well, thank God, I was saying earlier, for alternative media, like this, Amy, because there is resistance to this book. First of all, I call out the mainstream media. I say that New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, they were all under his thumb. They did his bidding. 

AMY GOODMAN: Whose thumb? 

DAVID TALBOT: Allen Dulles’s thumb. So, when the Warren Report came out, I was saying that one of the editors, top editors, at Newsweek wrote to him and said, "Thank you so much, Mr. Dulles, for helping shape our coverage of the Warren Report." Well, of course, Allen Dulles was on the Warren Commission. In fact, some people thought it should have been called the Dulles Commission, because he dominated it so much. So, you know, it’s way too cozy, the relationship between Washington power and the media. And— 

AMY GOODMAN: What was the relationship between Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA? 

DAVID TALBOT: Well, they were social friends, not just him, but other members of the Sulzberger family. I found, you know, cozy correspondence between them, congratulating him when he was inaugurated, Dulles, as CIA director. They called him "Ally," one of the Sulzberger families, in one letter. They would get together, you know, every year. Dulles would hold these media sort of drink fests for New Year’s. And these were, you know, top reporters, top editors, would get together with the CIA guys and rub elbows and get a little drunk. And, you know, when Allen Dulles didn’t want a reporter, because he felt he was being overly aggressive, covering, say, Guatemala—Sydney Gruson, the reporter—in the run-up to the coup there in 1954, he had—he made a call to The New York Times and had him removed. That was because of his relationship with Sulzberger, the publisher. So, that was the kind of pull that Allen Dulles had. 

AMY GOODMAN: How did that work? 

DAVID TALBOT: Well, they just took him out. They removed Gruson. They transferred him, I think to Mexico, at that point. 

AMY GOODMAN: Can you compare Smedley Butler, the general, who was—called himself, what? A racketeer for capitalism, when he was asked to overthrow countries and said no— 

DAVID TALBOT: Yeah. 

AMY GOODMAN: —to Allen Dulles? 

DAVID TALBOT: Well, one’s a hero, and one’s a villain, to put it pure and simple. Smedley Darlington Butler, who I’ve also written about—I wrote an illustrated history, for readers of all ages, called Devil Dog. Smedley was an American hero. He was a guy who joined the Marines at 16, didn’t know any better, ran off all around the world fighting America’s imperial wars from China to throughout Latin America, ended up in France during World War I. And by the time he was a middle-aged man, he had seen the kind of dirty work that was done by America’s soldiers in the name of American business interests. And he said he was like Al Capone. He said, "We marines were like Al Capone, except that Al Capone couldn’t even measure up to us, the kind of thuggery that we were capable of, that we committed in America’s name throughout Latin America, particularly." 

AMY GOODMAN: And wasn’t it just not through Latin America, like overthrowing Árbenz, but wasn’t the Pitcairn family in the United States involved with attempting a coup against FDR and wanted to recruit Smedley Butler to do it? 

DAVID TALBOT: Well, that’s what—as I write in my book, that it was his great moment of heroism, because he was a hero to soldiers, to the rank and file. He had spoken to the famous Bonus Army March, where World War I veterans were demanding pay for the time they had lost when they were overseas. He spoke before them. It was a very controversial thing he did as a retired officer, retired general from the Marines. And so, because he was so popular with the rank and file, when a number of corporate families like the DuPonts and others became furious at FDR for being a class traitor, as they called him, and pushing through these Wall Street reforms and other things that were infuriating them, they went to—representatives of theirs went to Smedley Butler and said, "Would you lead a march again, like the Bonus Army March on Washington? But this time we want them to be armed, the soldiers to be armed." Essentially, "Will you lead a coup against Franklin Roosevelt?" And instead of going along with this, he went before Congress and outed this plot. 

AMY GOODMAN: And who were the families? Who were the— 

DAVID TALBOT: Well, DuPonts were one of them. The family that owned Remington, the arms factory, was also involved. A number of these people were clients of the Dulleses. Foster Dulles, by the way, John Foster Dulles, who later became secretary of state, ran the Wall Street firm Sullivan & Cromwell. When FDR starts to push through some of these reforms, like the Security Exchange Commission and others, Glass-Steagall, he convenes all his wealthy clients in his office on Wall Street and says, "Just ignore this. We’ll resist this. We won’t go along with these reforms." 

AMY GOODMAN: The Nazis? Very quickly. 

DAVID TALBOT: The Nazis, well, they have a very tight relationship, many Nazi businessmen, with the Dulles brothers. And when Allen Dulles was in Switzerland, supposedly working for our side, the OSS, during the war, he was actually using that to meet with a lot of Nazis and to cut separate deals with them. He did indeed finally cut a separate peace deal with the Nazi forces in Italy against FDR’s wishes. FDR had a policy of unconditional surrender. Don’t— 

AMY GOODMAN: This was Operation Paperclip? 

DAVID TALBOT: This was Operation Sunrise, was this deal that he made. And then he set up these rat-lines, so-called, where Nazis, leading Nazi war criminals, escaped after the war through the Alps in Switzerland, down into Italy and then overseas to Latin America and even in the United States. One of the key Nazis he saved was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s former chief of intelligence, who he installed, Dulles, as head of West German intelligence after the war, a man who should have stood trial at Nuremberg. 

AMY GOODMAN: Who turned you down? 

DAVID TALBOT: You know, well, Politico was one. Politico, you know, one of the leading publications, online publications and a print publication, you know, had—I was supposed to write something for them there. Instead, they went with a piece by, as I say, a former New York Times guy named Phil Shenon, based on leaked CIA documents that basically pin the Kennedy assassination on Fidel Castro. This is absurd. Fidel Castro, when he heard about Kennedy’s assassination, crumpled. He knew that Kennedy was trying to open back channels with him to establish peace between Cuba and the United States, years before Obama finally did. In fact, Jean Daniel, who was a French reporter, was with Fidel, at Kennedy’s behest, in Havana, basically carrying this olive branch to Fidel from Kennedy, when they got the terrible news from Dallas. 

AMY GOODMAN: Who do you think killed John Kennedy? 

DAVID TALBOT: Well, I believe what Robert Kennedy believed. Robert Kennedy, as I showed in my book earlier, Brothers, and in this book, looked immediately at the killing team that was put together by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro. That CIA killing team, I think, was responsible for killing President Kennedy, as well. That team that was killing foreign leaders, that was targeting foreign leaders, that Dulles had assembled, including men like William Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Morales—these were all key figures of suspicion by Congress during the House Assassinations Committee investigation in the ’70s. That was the team that was brought to Dallas. I now identify those men. A couple of them admitted—Howard Hunt, on his death bed, admitted that he was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and the mainstream media completely overlooked this shocking— 

AMY GOODMAN: Howard Hunt, who was Watergate. 

DAVID TALBOT: He was the leader of the Watergate break-in and a legendary CIA action officer, and very close to Allen Dulles, revered Allen Dulles. On his death bed, he revealed that he was part of that plot. Again, 60 Minutes looked at it and then walked away. I know a lot about this story. But the media has been, I think, shockingly remiss in not looking into this investigation. It’s a taboo subject. But it’s clear—I think I present overwhelming evidence that Allen Dulles was complicit in this, in the assassination of the president. And he conveniently ran the investigation into the president’s murder, because he strong-armed President Johnson into appointing him to the Warren Commission, where he became the dominant figure. 

AMY GOODMAN: David Talbot, author of the new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.

US Drops 50 Tons of Ammo in Syria

This is pure insane fucking evil, sick beyond words and you KNOW it will get to ISIS/ISIL.

Fucking, fucking bullshit sick evil fucks.

The Secret Space Program

Pure bullshit?

A limited hangout to cloak  the dark truth about ETs visiting the earth and controlling us?

The truth?

Weird stuff.

Q1. You say there are five secret space programs developed by our current human civilization, and that the oldest of them, Solar Warden, was approached by the Blue Avians/Sphere Alliance. Can you describe why Solar Warden was chosen as a more suitable partner? 

A majority of the “Solar Warden” factions had already been involved in a “Shadow Civil War” or “Shadow Cold War” with the other “SSP Groups” for some time. They had been “accidentally” appearing in front of “NASA ISS Live Feeds” as well as causing “other” incidents to allow people to see their technologies. There is a strict schedule of “When and Where to BE” in various parts of our Sol System to prevent the satellites of various nations and corporations from accidentally capturing telemetry of classified technology. The Solar Warden Group was the more “Aging” of the SSP Groups with much of their fleet being produced in the 1980’s and 1990’s with continuous upgrades. They had shown a willingness to take a stand in a “David vs Goliath” type battle that was selfless and one that showed the cloth they were cut from. They also had broken off alliances with more negative oriented off-world beings. They had allied themselves with some more positive off-world beings and a group that was an Ancient Earth Breakaway that had made some changes in a positive direction. Even though these Non-Solar Warden Allies were considered “Good Guys” the Sphere Alliance stated that they had their own agendas and as much as they wanted to help Humanity they were still considered “Service-To-Self”. There was a lot of frustration prior to the Sphere Alliance making contact with Solar Warden. The Sphere Alliance had began to arrive (or at least their “Spheres” had began to arrive”) in the late 1990’s and cloaking. No matter who tried to communicate or hail them there was absolutely no response. They to this day refuse to interact with any of the beings or Human groups that are “Service-To-Self” directly and use an “intermediary” to communicate between these two groups. 

Q2. In what way is Solar Warden more capable of representing humanity’s interests in negotiations with the Sphere Alliance? 

As stated above they had already formed an infrastructure for an “SSP Alliance” and were already engaged in a “Stealth Cold War” or “Stealth Civil War” with the “Cabal” controlled groups that vastly outnumbered and out-gunned them. This was an incredible show of valor and service to others even though their agenda or operational plans to achieve that agenda was more of a warlike or violent nature. There is something else to note. The Cabal Groups who look for certain children to bring into “MILAB” programs are looking for “Star Seeds” who have gifts that can be corrupted and used for “The Dark Side”. Many of these “Star Seeds” on Earth and in the “SSP’s” are beginning to realize that they are “Alive Here Now, During This Time for a Reason”… a Mission… This too has something to do with it IMHO. When I was contacted by the Blue Avians I was “Told” that the “Cabal” groups were incredibly worried about what the “Star Seeds” may contribute in a movement against them. They have put people and programs out there to locate and try to “Target Star Seeds” to traumatize them, cause “Entity Attachments” (discussed further down) and to derail them from any missions they may have on this Planet and Time line. 

Q3. Does the U.S. Navy play a major role in Solar Warden’s operations and world view?Alex Collier claims that the Navy is more aligned with Constitutional values than the other military services, especially the USAF. Do you agree? 

Most of how the Navy, Air Force and militaries of other nations play into the SSP’s are from an Earthly based support role. An example would be the Air Force Space Command’s old (soon to be replaced) Space Fence program. Those there were briefed and told they were at the top of the “Intel Totem Pole” and that yes, there were a certain amount of Aliens but what they were tracking were ALL ADVANCED US CRAFT. So, if you were to meet one they would argue until they were red in the face that all that is flying in space is secret government projects. Many that aren’t read in to there being any aliens at all are told “You are at the top of the Intelligence Totem Pole and there are No Aliens”, they believe it and will argue with you until they are ready to come to blows that there are NO ALIENS! This is one of the most compartmentalized and complicated subjects as you will see below than most researchers EVER DREAMED! Those who are asking “Did Roswell Really Happen” or “Are there 4 or 58 Alien Groups Visiting Us” are barely on a kindergarten level of what is really going on. This is far more pervasive and woven into the fabric of our daily lives than we realize as well. There is a constant ridicule and denial of any and all material related to ET’s as a secret U.S. Policy that has been in place since the early 1950’s. Intel groups have mastered infiltration of disclosure groups, causing infighting or leading people into situations where they can become blackmailed or compromised. Usually they just have to plant a seed or two and let “Human Nature” take its course. It has been a very effective program to prevent researchers and disclosure groups from making an real progress. I will explain more about how more and more of the SSP Personnel are people who were brought up inside secret programs since they were children (MILAB’s) and then later “drafted” into the Secret Space Programs and Secret Earth Government Syndicates and Sub-Programs.

Why does someone go about inventing this stuff, if it's bullshit? They are not getting fame, or selling anything. Are they just mentally delusional? Doesn't sound like it, really. But who knows.

I don't believe this is the "truth", but it's hard to believe it's pure bullshit.

Keep in mind there's TONS more stuff at the link.

US War Crimes in Afghanistan and the Fucking MSM

A US-led NATO military coalition bombed a hospital run by international humanitarian aid organization Doctors Without Borders (known internationally as Medecins Sans Frontières, MSF) in Afghanistan, killing at least 22 people—12 staff members and 10 patients, including three children—and wounding 37 more. AFP, the first network to report the story, in the early hours of October 3, quoted NATO saying, “US forces conducted an air strike in Kunduz city…. The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” MSF promptly issued a statement (10/3/15), revealing that it had been “hit several times during sustained bombing and was very badly damaged.” 

In an update hours later, MSF said it “condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific bombing of its hospital in Kunduz, which was full of staff and patients.” The humanitarian organization also indicated multiple times—and in bold capital letters—that “all parties to the conflict, including in Kabul and Washington, were clearly informed of the precise location (GPS Coordinates) of the MSF facilities in Kunduz, including the hospital, guesthouse, office and an outreach stabilization unit.” 

MSF says the US “repeatedly and precisely” hit the hospital. Morever, the aid group explained that the “bombing in Kunduz continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed by MSF that its hospital was struck.” That is to say, the US persisted in bombing a hospital that it explicitly knew before and during the attack was a hospital. 

If you read US corporate media coverage of this incident, however, US culpability would likely not be evident. Instead, readers would learn that a hospital was bombed in Afghanistan, and that people died. Who exactly carried out the bombing would not be clear.

(snip)

The New York Times completely rewrote and changed the title of its report on the bombing seven times. Early on, the Times published an article headlined “Airstrike Hits Hospital in Afghanistan, Killing at Least 9.” Minutes later, it changed the headline to “Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan.” Two hours after, it became “Afghan Hospital Hit by Airstrike, Pentagon Says.” Then “US Investigates After Bombs Hit Afghan Hospital,” before finalizing as “US Is Blamed After Bombs Hit Afghan Hospital.”

The New York Times completely rewrote and changed the title of its report on the bombing seven times. Early on October 3, the Times published an article headlined “Airstrike Hits Hospital in Afghanistan, Killing at Least 9.” Minutes later, it changed the headline to “Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan.” Two hours after, it became “Afghan Hospital Hit by Airstrike, Pentagon Says.” Then “US Investigates After Bombs Hit Afghan Hospital,” before finalizing as “US Is Blamed After Bombs Hit Afghan Hospital.” The over 20 versions of the article published in the Times‘ website can be seen at the website NewsDiffs, which monitors edits to pieces published in large new outlets. Because the Times changed the web URL for the article when changing the headlines, there are three separate entries on NewsDiffs.

(snip)

Striking, too, are the similarities to US reporting on Israeli airstrikes. In order to justify bombing hospitals in Gaza, the US-backed Israeli government often claims Palestinian militants use the medical facilities as bases. Israel’s military—which has itself used human shields many times—then says it is justified to bomb hospitals, UN shelters and other civilians areas. US ally and NATO member Turkey borrowed Israel’s hasbara (public relations) tactic and claimed the same about leftist Kurdish militants in order to justify its killing of Kurdish civilians. The Wall Street Journal (10/4/15) boldly steered clear of any posturing and openly justified the US bombing of the hospital. The unsigned editorial justified the mass killing of MSF aid workers by shifting the blame onto the Taliban insurgents. It even brought up the specter of Hamas, writing, “Like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the terrorists hide near civilians. These Taliban tactics put the medical personnel and patients at risk.” The piece waxes poetic, and hagiographic; in a moment of undiluted American exceptionalism on blast, the Journal claimed that “no force in the history of warfare has done more to avoid civilian casualties than the American military.”  

Oy... ugh.

Fuck.

UPDATE:

There isn’t actually any question that the U.S. military intentionally targeted what it knew to be a hospital. The only mystery is really how colorful, blood-thirsty, and racist the language was in the cockpit. Left in the dark, we will tend to assume the worst, since past revelations have usually measured up to that standard. 

For those of you working to compel police officers in the United States to wear body cameras, it’s worth noting that the U.S. military already has them. The planes record their acts of murder. Even the unmanned planes, the drones, record video of their victims before, during, and after murdering them. These videos are not turned over to any grand juries or legislators or the people of the “democracy” for which so many people and places are being blown into little bits. 

Law professors that measure up to the standards of Congressional hearings on kill lists never seem to ask for the videos; they always ask for the legal memos that make the drone murders around the world part of a war and therefore acceptable. Because in wars, they imply, all is fair. Doctors Without Borders, on the other hand, declares that even in wars there are rules. Actually, in life there are rules, and one of them is that war is a crime. It’s a crime under the U.N. Charter and under the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and when one mass-murder out of millions makes the news, we ought to seize that opportunity to draw attention, outrage, and criminal prosecution to all the others.

UPDATE 2 (10/16/15):

A US tank has forced its way into the shell of the Afghanistan hospital destroyed in an airstrike 11 days ago, prompting warnings that the US military may have destroyed evidence in a potential war crimes investigation. 

Kunduz hospital patients 'burned in beds … even wars have rules', says MSF chief The 3 October attack on the Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz killed 10 patients and 12 staff members of the group. In a statement on Thursday, the medical charity, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said they were informed after Thursday’s “intrusion” that the tank was carrying investigators from a US-Nato-Afghan team which is investigating the attack. “Their unannounced and forced entry damaged property, destroyed potential evidence and caused stress and fear,” MSF said. 

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported intrusion, which came as new evidence emerged that US forces operating in the area at the time of the attack knew that the facility was a hospital. US special operations analysts were gathering intelligence on the hospital days before the attack, because they believed a Pakistani operative was using it as his base, according to areport by the Associated Press citing an unnamed former intelligence official. The analysts had mapped the area and drawn a circle around the hospital, the official was quoted as saying. The Pakistani man, described both as a Taliban suspect and as a worker for the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence directorate, was killed in the attack, the official told the AP. 

"The bombardment of a hospital is a too-frequent 'accident'. It's also a war crime"-- Bernard Kouchner 

Of the nearly 200 patients and staff inside the hospital at the time of the attack, more than three dozen were wounded, said MSF, which has called the attack a violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime. The group has said some patients burned to death in their beds. 

Several investigations of the attack are considering whether the separate American teams involved – special operations analysts, intelligence community officers, the military command that ordered the strike – knew the facility was a hospital, whether they gave warning of a strike and what was happening on the ground at the time. 

It is unclear whether the analysts’ knowledge that the facility was a hospital was shared by the command that launched the attack. MSF said GPS coordinates identifying the hospital had been shared with US, coalition and Afghan military officers and civilian officials “as recently as Tuesday 29 September”.

The Never-Ending Crime of Israel...

Having studied enough American Indian Tribes over the years, I have grown accustomed to creation myths that each Tribe assigns itself as its reason for being. And the definition of “chutzpah” that I’ve been taught is that of a young man on trial for murdering his parents, who throws himself on the mercy of the Court on grounds that he is an orphan. That, as Alison Weir has made clear, is Israel’s situation.  In Against Our Better Judgment, Ms. Weir writes with great clarity how the Zionist movement was able to move politicians, both in America and in England, to legalize a most illegal act–that of stealing an entire nation, and crying foul when those from whom it was stolen complained, then  tried to retake the land. Ms. Weir’s in depth research to expose Zionist actions in earlier times provides a solid basis for her conclusions about creating Israel from a land called Palestine.  And she documents the intense lobbying done by Israel’s Zionist creators in order to legalize an action that was clearly illegal. We are now living with the consequences of that bit of grand theft, i.e., the continuing violence in the Middle East, affecting everything America might want to do in the Middle East.  We only recently have witnessed Bibi Netanyahu’s so far failed effort to have America invade and conquer Iran, a country that obviously is too much of a mouthful for Israel to bite off.  Suddenly, even Barak Obama recognizes the danger in following Israel’s advice on how to conduct itself in the Middle East.  The President tiptoed to the edge of the abyss but backed away when Israel’s trained seals in the U.S. Congress tried to push the nation over the edge. We saw Congressional supporters of Israel shamefully initiating the dozens of applauses by the Joint Session of Congress when they entertained Prime Minister Netanyahu, who obliged the assembled mass with aggressive applause lines, designed to favor those who have a liking of violence and to show how Israel is “America’s staunchest ally” in the Middle East.

Please read the whole thing-- "How the United States Was Used to Create Israel"

"Always a Big Rush After a Shooting"

So fucked UP.

Freeeeeeedumb!!!!!

But seriously, Cui Bono?

Who really benefits from the endless gun violence in the US?

Good, Short Video on WTC Twin Tower Structure and Problems in the Official Collapse Story

Always good to look at this stuff, and thankfully they didn't talk about thermite...