Views, opinions and news from the Alternative Media ... week ending Jan 8

From DemocracyNow
Craig Holman: Trump Administration Gearing Up to Be 
"Most Scandal-Ridden in History"
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump refused to disclose his taxes, and now Public Citizen’s Craig Holman says the Trump administration is a scandal in waiting because of the vast number of conflicts of interest he brings. "If steps are not taken to manage these conflicts, the Trump administration is likely to become one of the most scandal-ridden in memory," Holman argues.

.....CRAIG HOLMAN: Donald Trump is setting the tone on this. You know, when I wrote about the Trump administration is likely to be the most scandal-ridden administration in history from top down, I was talking just about the executive branch. Now it looks like it’s spreading into Congress, as well. Donald Trump has shirked his ethics responsibilities. He has decided not to disclose his taxes. He is waffling on whether or not he’s going to set up a genuine blind trust and divest himself of the conflicts of interest that Richard Painter was just talking about. He is basically shunning his responsibility of complying with the ethics rules. And that tone has now reached into Congress.

You know, part of the reason why I’m so surprised that the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives repealed or have neutered the OCE is because they are going to receive a great deal of negative publicity on this. But clearly, they are looking at Donald Trump shirking his ethics responsibility, and thinking, if he can get away with it, they can get away with it. So, yes, we are likely to see the most scandal-ridden federal government, not just Trump administration, that we’ve seen, you know—the most scandal-ridden we’ve seen in history. This does not bode well for the next few years......

#cdnpoli #tcot #TOpoli Yup! PTSD! "He was deployed to Iraq in 2010 and spent a year there as a combat engineer... https://t.co/ffRb7I2bHp

— MariaS Nunes (@Dodocanspell) January 7, 2017

Matt Kennard at PulitzerCenter
The Cruel Experiments of Israel’s Arms Industry 

Round the back of Ramallah’s main hospital lies the house of Iyad Haddad, a 52-year-old human rights investigator. His home office is the shopfront of a decrepit building and at first glance it looks like a bric-a-brac shop. But the objects placed out on the tables are not household trinkets. The surfaces are, in fact, cluttered with spent ammunition, tear gas canisters, sponge bullets and shell casings.

Haddad has spent the past three decades documenting the violence of the Israeli forces occupying his people’s land. These ugly little pieces of memorabilia are his testament to that process.

Many of these weapons have been fired on peaceful demonstrators protesting against Israel’s wall and settlements in the occupied West Bank. The villages of Nilin, Bilin and Nabi Saleh have been organizing regular protests for years. To my surprise, Haddad does not approve of those demonstrations.

“Sometimes they are using us so they can know how to use each kind of weapon,” he said. “For me, these kinds of activities by the Palestinians become helpful to the Israelis because it makes this area into a laboratory to test their weapons, to develop them and make it a commercial industry in order to sell them to other countries.”....

#tcot #cdnpoli #TOpoli Ah hah! Was it set 2 Q McCain visits w jihadis in Syr/Tky n Nuland cookie giving in Ukraine? https://t.co/UhopFCfLbf

— MariaS Nunes (@Dodocanspell) January 3, 2017

Salman Rafi Sheikh at journal-Neo
NATO vs NATO: Turkey Lambasts US Role in Syria

While it may seem too much to say at this point of time that NATO, given the gravity of the situation triggered by the out-going US president’s nebulous foreign policy, is disintegrating, what is happening is that the Western military alliance is facing an unprecedented crisis. This crisis is certainly as unusual and dramatic as any Shakespearean tragedy. More than a strong military alliance, NATO is at its worst and looks like a house divided against itself. It looked like this when Turkey, second biggest military power in the western alliance, point-blank accused the Obama administration of covertly supporting ISIS and other terror outfits, which are bent upon destroying Iraq and Syria and are now likely to target Turkey too.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan alleged, giving the Obama administration a ‘new-year-surprise’, on last Wednesday, December 28 that Turkey is in possession of “confirmed evidence, with pictures, photos and videos” of the US’ support to ISIS.

While Erdogan had previously lambasted the US for supporting Gulen, Erdogan’s enemy number one and a potential terrorist according to Turkish officials, this time he took it to the next level and blamed the US, for the first time ever, for continuously supporting Daesh and Kurds.

We already know that the US has been officially supporting certain ‘moderate groups’ in Syria and that this support has directly contributed to the intensification of the conflict in Syria. What we know now is the support US has been providing to the most devastating terror groups the world has ever seen.

Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the US Defence Intelligence Agency (and National Security Advisor-designate in the Trump administration), had himself claimed last year in a TV interview that the rise of the IS was a “wilful decision” by the Obama administration in furtherance of its agenda to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad....

Diana Buttu & Gideon Levy


Philip Ragner at TacticalInvestor
Philip Ragner at TacticalInvestor
Seven Most Discrediting Media Screw ups of 2016
Before we get to the article at hand many might ask why we cover political and health issues when our main focus in the stock markets and the financial arena.  The short and simple answer is that all these fields are connected; we don’t have free market forces anymore. Everything is manipulated; from the food, you eat to data you are provided.
If you are aware of this you can plan accordingly. Identifying the problem is over 80% of the solution and this is why most people don’t know what to do because they don’t really understand the problem. Now you know why we are the only financial website that covers such a wide array of topics that on the surface appear to be unrelated but are in fact, deeply interwoven.  Mass psychology is a very powerful tool and if employed correctly can help you spot the grotesque levels of manipulation the masses are subjected to. We strongly suggest that you view or read or view Plato’s allegory of the cave.  You might also find the following article to be of interest:......




From ZeroHedge
Ron Paul Sums Up Nobel-Peace-Prize-Winning 
President Obama In One Short Sentence

Following our discussion of the unprecedented bombing-fest that has been undertaken during President Obama's reign...

Seven years after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," despite having been in office for less than one year and having pretty much no actual, tangible foreign diplomacy accomplishments at the time, President Obama will depart the White House having dropped 26,171 bombs on foreign countries around the world in 2016, 3,027 more than 2015.

According to an analysis of Defense Department data from the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan think tank, the majority of Obama's 2016 bombs were dropped on Syria and Iraq.  Meanwhile, Afghanistan, a country President Obama vowed U.S. troops would evacuate completely by the end of his Presidency, was also bombed over 1,300 times, a 40% increase over 2015.  Per McClatchy DC:........

Turkey...


From MishTalk
McCain has Blood on his Hands
If there was ever any doubt who perpetual warmonger, Senator John McCain, wanted for US president, this headline explains: Russian cyberintrusions an ‘act of war’

Today, CCN writer Frida Ghitis repeats McCain’s claim with Putin’s ‘act of war’ against American democracy.

    “Moscow’s influence campaign,” as the intelligence report calls it, blended a variety of means, including covert cyberactivity by Russian intelligence operatives, along with “with overt state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls’.”

Hysteria Continues

It would behoove fools like Ghitis to stop and think. Anyone who takes CIA allegations as facts has mush for brains.

The CIA Liars, Torturers, Murderers are worse than useless.

Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham want tougher sanctions against Russia following the hacking scandal.

In a show of solidarity, McCain Visited Frontline Ukraine Troops in Anti-Putin Gesture on New Year’s Eve.

“We stand w/them in their fight against #Putin’s aggression,” McCain wrote in one tweet.

The irony is staggering. Ukraine is a mess because of US meddling.It’s not Russia than started or was responsible for Crimea and the war in Ukraine that ensued, it was the US.

On April 30, 2014, the Guardian reported It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war.........

From Ingaza
Aleppo: How US & Saudi-Backed Rebels Target ‘Every Syrian’:
 War diary by Western journalist Eva Bartlett on the truth about Aleppo
In early November, Fares Shehabi, a member of the Syrian parliament from Aleppo, organized a trip to Aleppo for 13 Western journalists, including myself, with security provided by forces in the Syrian Arab Army.While I had traveled to Aleppo independently as recently as July and August, for many others in the delegation, it was their first visit to the city or their first visit since the war on Syria began in 2011.

On previous visits to Aleppo, I met with the Aleppo Medical Association and saw a maternity hospital hit twice by rocket and mortar attacks by militants under Jaysh al-Fatah (the Army of Conquest), a loose alliance of anti-government terrorist groups. I met with members of a branch of the Syria Civil Defense and Christian and Muslim religious leaders. Just north of the city, I visited Nubl and Zahraa, towns besieged for more than three years by the Free Syrian Army, the Nusra Front, and other affiliated terrorist factions before the Syrian Arab Army drove them out in February of this year. I saw the liberated region of Bani Zaid and the al-Layramoun industrial district. I interacted with civilians in public parks, streets, and markets.

Ahead of my trip earlier this month, I was interested to see what might have changed following the liberation of still more areas by the SAA. I also hoped to speak with civilians who had fled the terrorist-held areas of Aleppo’s eastern districts since I had last visited, during which time eight humanitarian corridors had been established for civilians and members of terrorist factions willing to relinquish their arms or to accept safe passage to areas in Idlib and government-secured parts of western Aleppo.

However, on Nov. 4, no one fled terrorist-held areas of Aleppo. Family members of .....

From ZeroHedge
"We Regret The Error": CNN Apologizes 
To Assange For Pedophilia Accusation, Issues Retraction
It didn't take much for CNN to fold after Wikileaks threatened to sue it for defamation.

As reported on Wednesday, the whistleblowing organization threatened to sue CNN after the biased, pro-Clinton news organization aired an interview with Phil Mudd, in which the paid analyst and ex-Deputy-Director of the CIA called Julian Assange a pedophile. CNN’s counterterrorism "analyst" made the on-air statement on Wednesday while discussing WikiLeaks. Mudd boldly declared that “there's an effort to protect WikiLeaks (and) a pedophile who lives in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.”

Shortly after the lawsuit threat, CNN promptly apologized for the segment and conceded that “CNN has no evidence to support that assertion." ....

CrossTalk


From RT
Germany sued in US for massacring over 100K people
in Namibia in early 1900s
 In the US, descendants of Namibia’s Herero and Nama tribes have reportedly filed a compensation lawsuit against Berlin over the tens of thousands of people slaughtered by German troops in the African state early last century.

The legal complaint was filed Thursday with the US District Court in New York over an “incalculable damages” that were caused, Reuters reports. The plaintiffs claim that even if any reparation will be paid to Namibia, there’s no guarantee of any compensation to the victims.
“There is no assurance that any of the proposed foreign aid by Germany will actually reach or assist the minority indigenous communities that were directly harmed,” the descendants’ lawyer Ken McCallion wrote in an email as quoted by Reuters. The exact amount of proposed financial compensation for the plaintiffs has not been published by the news agency.

Over 100,000 Herero and Hama are estimated to have been killed between 1904 and 1908 during the uprising against German colonial rule in South-West Africa as the territory was called at the time. The unrest was started by the Herero who were joined by the Hama tribe a year later. The rebellion was viciously suppressed by German troops. After facing massive resistance from both tribes, German commander Lothar von Trotha called on his soldiers “to shoot every Herero with or without weapon within the German [colonial] borders.” ....

From 21stCenturyWire
‘Ghost Banning’ on Facebook & Twitter? 
Dangers of Corporate Censorship
For anyone who has been active on social media platforms, especially in the controversial field of trying to get the truth out, stories of being banned, posts disappearing, and selective censorship are nothing new. The only difference this year is that certain social media gatekeepers might genuinely believe they have been given some sort political mandate, or social license to carry out the routine task of shutting-up or disappearing political speech or challenging information which they believe is either ‘fake news,’ or ” Russian propaganda.”

Anyone who thinks this is OK just because it suits their present partisan or ideological agenda – is really endorsing a new type of corporate tyranny. By definition, this is fascism.

Here’s one pundit’s take on what seems to be an ever more common occurrence in 2016 and 2017…..

Peter Lavelle
The Duran

We are told it is called “ghost banning” – meaning you are present, though invisible in plain sight, and the user is completely unaware. The goal is frighteningly obvious: deny an “offending” website traffic to the point that it disappears from public view. We suspect The Duran is among the many sites targeted in this new form of censorship.

This is the new business model of the old art of controlling what is considered acceptable speech by the power-that-be. As a result, legacy news outlets that comprise of the world of corporate mainstream media are propped, crowding out alternative views and dissent. Freedom of speech faces an existential threat.

Craig Murray comments on personally being ‘ghost banned’:

“I had never heard of ghost banning until I was ghost banned by Twitter. That of course is the idea – they censor you without realising you are censored. People no longer get notifications when I post, and the tweet only turns up in the twitter line of followers who happen to be logged in at the time my tweet goes out. Those logging in later will no longer see tweets I issued while they were away. Most of my tweets no longer show up on twitter searches, and further restrictions are applied when people retweet my tweets.....

Hidden history


Rania Khalek  at Fair
In Syria, Western Media Cheer Al Qaeda
The Syrian government—a dictatorship known for imprisoning, torturing and disappearing dissidents—is easy to vilify. And over the last five years of Syria’s civil war, it has committed its share of atrocities. But there is more than one side to every story, and US media coverage has mainly reflected one side—that of the rebels—without regard for accuracy or basic context.

As the Syrian government recaptured East Aleppo from rebels in recent weeks, media outlets from across the political spectrum became rebel mouthpieces, unquestioningly relaying rebel claims while omitting crucial details about who the rebels were.

Almost always overlooked in the US (and UK) media narrative is the fact that the rebels in East Aleppo were a patchwork of Western- and Gulf-backed jihadist groups dominated by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra)—Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria—along with its ally, Ahrar al-Sham (Daily Beast, 8/8/16; Foreign Policy, 9/1/16). These groups are explicitly anti-democratic and have been implicated in human rights violations, from mass execution and child beheadings to using caged religious minorities as human shields.

In the absence of any desire to evoke a political response, US media would surely have identified East Aleppo’s rebels by the name of the most famous militant group in the world—Al Qaeda. Yet press reports regularly referred to the militant forces dominating East Aleppo simply as “rebels.”

“Women in Aleppo Choose Suicide Over Rape,” declared a headline at the Daily Beast (12/12/16). The source of this very serious claim was Abdullah Othman, a member of Jabhat Al-Shamiya, or the Levant Front, an umbrella group whose membership consists of several jihadist rebel factions. So far no evidence has been presented, at least not publicly, to substantiate Othman’s claim. But that didn’t stop his story from spreading like wildfire across social media and being picked up by Commentary (12/13/16), Mic (12/16/16), Elle (12/13/16) and Foreign Policy (12/16/16), among others.....

#cdnpoli #tcot #TOpoli It looks like US/UK employees r blocking water supply 2 Damascus's 5M citizens https://t.co/MlTLO6H2MH

— MariaS Nunes (@Dodocanspell) January 3, 2017

From Yenisafak
Additional footage of gunman behind Istanbul attack released
New footage of the gunman responsible for Istanbul's New Year's Eve terror attack emerges
New footage of the gunman responsible for Istanbul's New Year's Eve terror attack at the Reina nightclub in Ortaköy has emerged.

In footage obtained by Yeni Safak daily, it has been revealed that the gunman left his house at 10:49 p.m.

The identity of the gunman has not been made known to the public. The gunman is allegedly Uyghur, and moved to Konya with his family in November 2016. His family has been taken into custody.....

Canada stands firmly with Israel in condemning today's horrific terrorist attack. Our thoughts are with the victims' families & the injured.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 8, 2017

From GlobalResearch
U.S./UK Paid “White Helmets” Help Al Qaeda Blocking Water To 5 Million 
Thirsty Syrians
The blockade of water from Wadi Barada to 5 million people in Damascus is taking an interesting turn. The U.S. and UK financed White Helmet organization seems to be directly involved in it. This increases the suspicion that the illegal blockade of water to civilians in Damascus is part of a organized campaign under U.S. command. The campaign is designed to block utilities to government held areas as revenge for the liberation of east Aleppo.

As we described it yesterday:

    After the eastern part of the city of Aleppo was liberated by Syrian government forces, the local rebels and inhabitants in the Barada river valley were willing to reconcile with the Syrian government. But the al-Qaeda Takfiris disagreed and took over. The area is since under full al-Qaeda control and thereby outside of the recent ceasefire agreement.On December 22 the water supply to Damascus was suddenly contaminated with diesel fuel and no longer consumable. A day later Syrian government forces started an operation to regain the area and to reconstitute the water supplies.

    Photos and a video on social media (since inaccessible but I saw them when they appeared) showed the water treatment facility rigged with explosives. On Dec 27th the facility was blown up and partly destroyed.

The Syrian government is ready to send repair teams to rehabilitate the water flow to the millions of civilians in Damascus. But access to the site is denied and the Syrian army is now trying to push al-Qaeda and its allies away from it.....