News, views and opinions from the Alternative Media ... week ending Dec 25

Paul R Pillar at ConsortiumNews
Danger from Trump’s Distrust of CIA
“I don’t have to be told—you know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.”

That’s how President-elect Trump explained in an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News his intention not to receive daily intelligence briefings as president. He evidently has a major misconception about the content of such briefings. Obviously it would be a waste of the president’s, and everyone else’s, time if the briefings consisted of the same thing in the same words every single day. But they don’t.

Trump has largely declined the opportunities for intelligence briefings that most every other president-elect has taken advantage of, so the “same thing, same words” misconception evidently is a preconceived notion that he somehow arrived at, rather than anything based on experience.

Part of Trump’s explanation is that he delegates to subordinates the role of receiving briefings. He told Wallace that “my generals” — an interesting formulation — are receiving briefings, as is Mike Pence. Perhaps the flow of not just information but decision-making in the Trump White House will lead the intelligence agencies to conclude that Prime Minister Pence is the customer most worth meeting with anyway. But the most important bucks will still have to stop at the president’s desk.

Although keeping the president up-to-date on current developments is certainly a central aspect of intelligence briefings to the president, it is by no means the only important function they serve. Another one concerns what they communicate to the intelligence agencies about the president’s concerns, objectives, questions, and knowledge gaps. What the agencies learn from those interactions constitutes valuable guidance in keeping their work relevant to the needs of the president and his administration.....
 
Chris Hedges on multi-Billion$s arms industry in Israel.  Israel, the nation that is hell-bent on destroying Planet Earth and creating discord in various corners of our world ... while at the same time screaming at the top of its lungs that its neighbors want to destroy it.

 From TheNewAtlas
Welcome to Idlib: America's Model Syrian City 
A report published by The Century Foundation (TCF), a US-based policy think tank, helps shed light on the inner workings of the small northern city of Idlib, Syria.
Idlib is to US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization Jabhat Al Nusra (also known as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham or Al Qaeda in Syria) as the eastern Syrian city of Al Raqqa is to the self-proclaimed "Islamic State" (IS).

It is also home to a wide range of other militant groups cooperating with the terrorist organization, as well as a myriad of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) funded and directed by the US, Europe, Turkey and the Gulf states.

And while great hope resides within statements of US, European and Gulf state politicians, echoed across their respective media platforms for this city's possible role as an alternative "capital" for an alternative "government," opposed to the current Syrian nation-state, TCF's report dumps a cold bucket of water on what was but a spark, not even a flame of hope........


From CorbettReport
Why Would People Lie About Climate Change?
 – Questions For Corbett #033
In this edition of Questions For Corbett James (and Sibel Edmonds of Newsbud.com) answer your questions on Iran/CIA connections, climate change duplicity, whether the conspirators think they can survive their own conspiracy and much more. Also, James answers that age-old question: why do Hollywood movies suck so much these days?...


 From DailySabah
NATO Chief Auditor Yves Chandelon found dead in suspicious incident
Yves Chandelon, the chief auditor of NATO relating to terrorism financing and money laundering, has been found dead in his car in an incident that raises suspicions.

62-year-old Chandelon's death, resembling a suicide with a shot fired to his head, occurred on Dec. 16 and the body was found in his car the same day although the incident was largely kept away from the media. Belgian press started covering the incident on Dec. 21 as his family raised suspicions about his death.

Despite Chandelon being left-handed, a gun was found in his right hand, and the gun was not one of Chandelon's three registered guns. These details raised suspicions about an assassination rather than a suicide....
 
Many analysts of WW2 are now slowly but surely coming to the real and truthful reason behind the nuclear bombing  of Japan's two cities.   
James Perloff at his blog
To 9/11 and Beyond: The Rothschild-Israeli Obsession with Nuclear Weapons
Ever since writing a cover story on the Kennedy assassination for the November 21, 1988 New American, I have avoided addressing that topic. Kennedy assassination theories form a labyrinth littered with rabbit holes and red herrings.

However, the Internet has turned a computer into a Millennium Falcon that can access information at lightspeed.

It is increasingly clear that the Rothschilds have long been the world’s foremost “Power that Be,” and that Israel, the Rothschilds’ proxy state, has been the world’s leading generator of terrorism, despite mainstream media’s interminable parroting of Israel’s self-portrayal as “victim.”

If anyone would have had the power to assassinate the President of the United States, it was the Rothschild Zionist Establishment. Michael Collins Piper’s book Final Judgment, linking Israel to the Kennedy assassination, got a strong boost in 2004 when Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu stated that Kennedy was assassinated over his opposition to Israel’s nuclear weapons program.....

#cdnpoli #TOpoli #tcot Isn't it amazing how  modus operandi of terrorists is 2 leave their iidentity papers behind https://t.co/9pqTvpSDbN

— MariaS Nunes (@Dodocanspell) December 21, 2016

Brendan O'Neill at SpikedOnline
The Western media: the propaganda wing of al-Qaeda?
Western coverage of Aleppo has been disturbingly shallow and biased.
he British press is morphing into a mouthpiece for al-Qaeda. Consider its coverage of yesterday’s assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey. It is borderline sympathetic. The killer’s words — or rather, certain of the killer’s words — have been turned into emotional headlines, into condemnations of Russia’s actions in Syria. That the killer’s first and loudest cry was ‘Allahu Akbar’ — the holler of the modern terrorist — has been downplayed, and in the case of at least one newspaper, the Express, completely ignored. Instead the papers upfront the killer’s other cries, about Aleppo. ‘This is for Aleppo’, says The Times. ‘Remember Aleppo’, says the Mirror’s headline, but with no quote marks, because these were not the exact words spoken by the gunman — they’re more like the Mirror’s own sympathetic echo of the killer’s sentiment.

To get a sense of how disturbing, or at least unusual, this coverage is, imagine if the 2013 murder of British soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamists had led to headlines like ‘This is for Afghanistan’ or ‘Remember Basra’ (those two knifemen, like Karlov’s killer, justified their action as a response to militarism overseas). Or if the 7/7 bombings had not given rise to front pages saying ‘Terror bombs explode across London’ or ‘BASTARDS’ but rather ‘While you kill us in Iraq, we will kill you here’. Reading the early coverage of Karlov’s killing, and noting how different it is to British press coverage of other acts of Islamist terror, one gets the impression that the media think this killing is justified, or at least understandable. ‘Remember Aleppo’: they’re saying this as much as the killer is — a perverse union of terrorist and editorial intent.

But the killer said, first, ‘Allahu Akbar’. Which perhaps suggests that his sympathy was not with Syria as such but with certain forces in Syria. Forces likely to shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they kill people. Islamist forces...

#cdnpoli #tcot #TOpoli Nitwits back in the news. It's a Christmas miracle they r alive. https://t.co/hGks08G8HF

— MariaS Nunes (@Dodocanspell) December 20, 2016

From SouthFront
Government buses en route to evacuate the sick and injured
from two government-held villages in the province of Idlib were burned by the so-called “moderate opposition” on December 18. The villages of Foah and Kefraya are encircled by a coalition of militant groups led by Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda). The Aleppo evacuation agreement included the demand to militants to allow people to evacuate from these villages. However, all buses sent for this were attacked and torched. The so-called “opposition” denied this fact despite video and photo evidence confirming that its fighters were involved in the crime. Some Turkish media even reported that “Shia militias” and “pro-Assad terrorist groups” burned the buses....


 Dr John Andrew Morrow at GlobalResearch
Welcome Home ISIS! The Obama Administration’s Plan to 
Reintegrate Foreign Terrorist Fighters

Allegations of US-support for pseudo-Islamist terrorists around the world often fall on deaf ears and are dismissed as the mad ramblings of conspiracy theorists.

According to numerous scholars, including Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, and many others, the United States has a long and well-documented history of supporting mass murderers around the world, both covertly and overtly.
As many researchers have reported, the Government of the United States has supported genocidal military dictators around the globe as well as violent extremists, ranging from death-squads in Latin America to MKO terrorists in Iran as well as acts of aggression in other parts of the world.

US-support for the Mujahidin, al-Qaeda, and the early Taliban has been widely reported as has American support for the internationalist terrorists who overthrew Qaddafi and those who have exceeded all bounds in their attempt to annihilate Iraq and Syria.

Despite the clear and present danger that so-called Radical Islamist terrorists pose to the Western world, political and intelligence analysists report that the US administration has continued to use them as “useful geopolitical tools” to weaken and destabilize nation-states.

And while the United States government finally appeared to take a moral stance against ISIS by passing the Fortenberry Resolution on March 15, 2016, and holding the terrorist group responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, it has no intention of actually prosecuting any returning terrorists, and never had the intention of bringing any of them to justice.

As FBI Director James Comey indicated in an interview with “60 Minutes” on October 7, 2014, American citizens who are fighting with ISIS are ....

From CorbettReport


From TheSaker
The disaster of the Russian military Tu-154 – a few short first thoughts
It is too early to conclude what happened with this aircraft, but since I have been asked about this by email, here are my own, personal and provisional, thoughts:

    Mechanical failure: unlikely.  The Tu-154 is a three engine aircraft and an extremely strong beast.  It’s safety record is comparable to most aircraft of its time, even though it was often used in extreme conditions other aircraft types did not have to operate in. The Tu-154 had already taken enough altitude to attempt a return to base or even a water landing.  The weather that day was good.  Besides, the crew did not communicate any problem.  Thus the disaster had to be instantaneous.
    Fuel problem: unlikely.  Fuel problems are always a prime suspect when a crash occurs, but even if the engines had suddenly experienced problems or even a full shutdown, the pilots would have had the time to report this.  Also, like any other aircraft, the Tu-154 can glide and maneuver without power.
    Bird strike: unlikely.  I am not even sure that there have ever been a triple engine failure due to a bird strike but even if there has been, they crew could have reported it which it did not.  And, again, the case of US Airways flight 1549 has shown that even a catastrophic birdstrike does not prevent a fully loaded airliner from attempting to land.
    Pilot error: highly unlikely.  The guys flying this aircraft where extremely experienced and while human error is always possible, it mostly results in situation were it can be reported.  The Tu-154 was a very complex aircraft to operate and it had its weaknesses – but these were all very well known to the Russian crews and this crew was a very experienced one.....

#cdnpoli #tcot #TOpoli Sharia in Ottawa, Canada! "Honour" killing of 2  sisters by brother. https://t.co/PsEMhuTjdF

— MariaS Nunes (@Dodocanspell) December 19, 2016

From MoonOfAlabama
False News By Omission Misinforms - Pointing Such Out May Soon Be Censored

Some Israeli military official claim that Hizbullah is using Armored Personal Carriers in Syria, a correct claim, which it received from the Lebanese Armed Forces, a lie. The carriers in question are way out of date tracked vehicles and the LAF once received some upgraded ones from the United States. Israel makes these claims every once a while.

But as was reported when these claims were made on earlier occasions Hizbullah actually took such APCs from the Southern Lebanese Army which was an Israeli proxy force used during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. When in 2000 Hizbullah finally kicked Israel out of Lebanon, the SLA dissolved and all the weapons Israel had delivered to it were taken into Hizbullah's stocks. They have since been used to fight Israel and various Gulf states proxy Jihadis in Lebanon and Syria.

But you would not learn that from the main Israeli news organization in the United States, the New York Times. Its report makes no mention of the original source of the APCs:........




From ParsToday
Egypt arrests 5 over Aleppo photo hoax
The Egyptian Interior Ministry has arrested a group of five people caught producing fake pictures of people suffering in Syria’s Aleppo.
On Tuesday, the ministry said that the five residents of Port Said, on the Suez Canal, were apprehended while a 12-year-old girl named Ragd was posing for 21-year-old Mustafa, who said that he “normally photographed weddings and ceremonies, but had an idea for something else.”  

“In a conversation with them, the suspects revealed that they had shot a series of scenes to be spread on social media, as actual pictures from Aleppo,” said the ministry.

It added that the house in the pictures had been slated for demolition by the authorities and that the blood was actually red paint smeared on the girl, her fake bandages, and her toy....



Michael Krieger at LibertyBlitzkrieg
The U.S. Interfered in Foreign Presidential Elections 81 Times from 1946-2000
Something we should all be aware of.

From the LA Times:
The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries
The CIA has accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election by hacking into Democratic and Republican computer networks and selectively releasing  emails. But critics might point out the U.S. has done similar things.

The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it’s done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to a database amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University.

That number doesn’t include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as election monitoring.....