The seven countries that the U.S. continues to meddle with and antagonize have a shared history and connection: Israel and the Zionists who pushed for the Jewish state want them to be destabilized, weakened, or eliminated. Jeffrey Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of University Professor, the university’s highest academic rank. From 2001-18, Sachs served as Special Advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and António Guterres (2017-18). Alison Weir is the founder of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest, which works for “U.S. Middle East policies that represent the highest values of our founders and our citizens and that work to sustain a nation of honor, decency, security, and prosperity.” Weir is also author of the book, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all-but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The U.S. and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to- consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky U.S.-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false story line that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’sfailures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, is president emeritus of the FLCCC Alliance. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author.
Republican Senator Eric Schmitt has addressed the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, asking for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) to be cut off from temporary government funding that’s currently negotiated in Congress.
Schmitt – who was, as Missouri attorney-general, behind the Missouri v. Biden free speech lawsuit (that became Murthy v. Missouri) said in a post on X that GEC “must be excluded from any subsequent piece of legislation for the remainder of the 118th Congress.”
The senator added that Americans “deserve to know their First Amendment rights are being protected.”
This office has been the subject of scrutiny by legislators and the public for finding a way to flag social media posts for censorship, despite being a part of the government.
Critics say this rendered its activities, conducted with third parties and affecting speech on social media, unconstitutional.
Democrats had hoped to get the CR approved through mid-March (but would extend GEC for another year) – however, President Trump, and consequently Republicans dashed their hopes of reaching a quick, bipartisan deal.
Now Schmitt’s letter shows one of the many objections Republicans have to the proposed CR, slamming it as an example of backroom deals that fly in the face of “transparency, accountability, and responsible government.”
Schmitt notes that GEC was set up to combat foreign propaganda, but then “mutated” into a censorship-facilitating outfit suppressing speech at home on a mass scale.
The senator states that since the target of censorship were narratives which “questioned established thinking” and involved a number of powerful actors (the government, social media), this “risks creating a government-endorsed ‘truth’ immune to public scrutiny.”
And, essentially – there goes true democracy, starting with the First Amendment.
For these reasons, Schmitt urges Schumer to make sure that GEC “under no circumstances” continues to receive public money.
The Republican senator is severely critical of the “giant ‘Christmas tree’ spending bill” itself, not only for undermining trust in government and the country’s institutions but also, due to its size and the rush to adopt it, for “slipping into the text” policies that would have GEC renewed and funded.
Schmitt therefore demands to exclude GEC from any legislation considered by the current Congress.
“I will strongly oppose any end-of-year bills that include reauthorization or funding of the GEC and urge my colleagues to do the same,” Schmitt’s letter concludes.
Spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Lin Jian on Friday slammed Western media saying that chili pepper products sold in UK and US supermarkets contain ingredients from Xinjiang are probably produced using “forced labor” by citing a report by an anti-China academic Adrian Zenz, noting that the so-called report mentioned by certain media outlets is deeply flawed, and it pretentiously quotes some vague accounts by so-called anonymous witnesses, but does not provide any factual basis, and even lacks the most basic field investigation.
Lin said that, the fact is, the farming process of chili peppers in Xinjiang has largely been mechanized already in some major production areas, 100 percent of the chili peppers are now harvested by machines. “Is the report suggesting that there is ‘forced machine labor?'” he asked.
Earlier this week, an international symposium on employment and social security was held in Urumqi, said Lin, noting that more than 200 participants from over 40 countries, regions and international organizations attended the event, and many said the Xinjiang they saw is very much different from the false propaganda they had seen from sources outside China.
“They condemned the ‘forced labor’ narrative, calling it a lie that deprives people in Xinjiang of their right to work, subsistence and development,” Lin said.
Lin stated that from cotton to tomato and now to chili pepper, a handful of Western media and long-time disinformation manufacturers have concocted one lie after another about Xinjiang.
“But what’s made up will not hide the truth; and a lie is still a lie even if it’s told a thousand times. For those behind these same old clumsy theatrics, it is high time they quit this ‘creative’ business for good,” Lin said.
BEIJING – The Chinese Defense Ministry on Saturday denounced the Pentagon’s recent report on China’s rapid military development, saying that the United States itself had an increasingly confrontational military strategy that was turning it into the biggest threat to global security.
“The evidence shows that the US military strategy is becoming increasingly confrontational, offensive and adventurous. The US, addicted to war, has become the biggest destroyer of the international order and the biggest threat to global security,” Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Zhang Xiaogang said on WeChat.
Zhang accused the US of taking advantage of its military superiority to “preserve its unipolar hegemony, carry out forced power changes and provoke ‘color revolutions.'”
The Chinese defense spokesman pointed to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of how US military interventions have led to humanitarian disasters and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The US Department of Defense released on December 18 the congressionally mandated report, which alleged that China presented “a significant, persistent cyber-enabled espionage and attack threat.” It claimed that China’s stockpile of operational nuclear warheads surpassed 600 as of mid-2024 and was projected to top 1,000 by 2030. China is believed to be rapidly expanding its nuclear forces amid an intensifying strategic competition with the United States. At the same time, the Pentagon said it remained committed to maintaining open lines of communication with China to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict.
A contingent of 120 French soldiers has left Chad following the country’s decision to end its defense cooperation pact with Paris.
French troops were seen boarding their plane on Friday and departing from N’Djamena airport.
The withdrawal process formally began earlier this month with the departure of two French Mirage warplanes.
France still has about 1000 troops stationed in Chad, with the full drawdown expected to take several weeks.
The terms and conditions of the complete withdrawal, including whether any French troops will remain in Chad, are yet to be finalized between the two countries.
Chad announced on November 28 its decision to end a defense accord with Paris mainly dating from independence in 1960.
“At midday, 120 French soldiers took off from the military airport of N’Djamena on board an Airbus A330 Phoenix MRTT, headed for France,” the ministry said in a statement on Facebook.
The departure of French soldiers took place in the presence of Chadian military authorities, the statement said.
The move comes after France had already pulled its forces out of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in recent years.
This departure signals the end of decades of French military presence in the Sahel region as the anti-French sentiment continues to grow.
WEST BANK – A Palestinian child was killed on Saturday morning when a landmine left behind by the Israeli occupation army exploded in al-Rashayda area, east of Bethlehem in the West Bank.
The Palestinian health ministry said that seven-year-old Mohamed Rashayda was martyred when he stepped on a landmine left by the Israeli army in al-Rashayda area.
Unexploded ordnance left behind by the Israeli army is particularly concentrated in the southern West Bank areas and the northern Jordan Valley, where its military exercises take place.
The Israeli army routinely uses Palestinian land in the West Bank for training and live fire exercises, leaving behind unexploded shells and bombs, which pose a deadly threat to local residents.
In this regard, senior Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi mourned the seven-year-old boy from the family of al-Rashayda who was martyred in a landmine explosion in the West Bank.
In a statement, Mardawi accused the Israeli army of deliberately leaving landmines and explosive objects in certain West Bank areas as part of its efforts to displace the local populations and take over their lands.
Mardawi also stated that the West Bank people and youths would remain a thorn in the side of the Israeli occupation and its agents until the liberation of the Palestinian land.
The Hamas official described the repeated Israeli raids and acts of rampage and destruction in the West Bank as “barbaric practices reflecting the nature of the fascist and criminal occupation state.”
He expressed his belief that the systematic attacks that are carried out by government-backed settler groups in the West Bank would not succeed in displacing Palestinians from their land and rather would increase their determination to remain steadfast in the face of Israeli plans.
The Israeli occupation forces acknowledged their use of live ammunition against protesters in southern Syria, claiming the action targeted what they described as a “threat.”
According to an IOF statement, one protester sustained a gunshot wound to the leg in the village of Maaria.
The incident unfolded during a demonstration against the Israeli military presence and its encroachment on agricultural lands in the area.
Syrians protest Israeli occupation of base in Yarmouk Basin
Residents of the multiple towns in the Yarmouk Basin, in the western Daraa countryside, in southern Syria, protested on Friday the presence of Israeli occupation forces in the area.
Locals demanded the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from the area, specifically the al-Jazeera barracks. Demonstrators demanded an immediate halt to Israeli incursions into Syrian territory, calling on the international community to intensify efforts and exert pressure on the Israeli entity to ensure compliance with international laws and sovereignty.
It is worth noting that the IOF recently occupied two villages in the Yarmouk Basin region of Daraa province in southern Syria. These actions are part of what appears to be an ongoing expansion of Israeli-occupied territories in Syria, particularly since the emergence of new regime forces in the country.
Elders protest Israeli occupation of Quneitra
Sources had previously told Al Mayadeen that Israeli forces were raiding, detaining residents, and arbitrarily searching homes in southern Quneitra and the western Daraa countryside. These actions have become a cause of widespread panic among civilians without a clear response from the current Syrian regime.
Moreover, elders of clans residing in the buffer zone east of the Golan Heights in the Quneitra District issued a statement demanding Israeli occupation forces withdraw beyond the buffer zone.
Razing areas, constructing roads
Sources also revealed that Israeli occupation forces are advancing toward the Al-Shahar Forest and the Al-Khashab Nature Reserve in northern Quneitra, while other forces are advancing into the nearby towns of Taranja and Ufaniya.
Moreover, occupation forces are razing agricultural lands and nature reserves to construct roads connecting Quneitra to Mount Hermon.
Additionally, a group of 30 Israeli soldiers, supported by bulldozers and armored vehicles, advanced into a military point west of al-Rafid town in the southern Quneitra countryside. These forces bulldozed structures and uprooted trees, destroying military fortifications in the area before withdrawing.
So far, the Israeli entity has occupied around 500 km² of Syrian territory, demolishing and razing Syrian military bases and other assets on the slopes of Mount Hermon, Quneitra, and Daraa.
Additionally, Israeli forces have expanded their incursion into southern Syria, advancing eastward from the town of Sayda, reaching three significant water bodies in the area, including Sheikh Hussein, Sahm al-Golan Dam, and al-Bakar al-Gharbi.
It’s been a bad few months for democracy. Election results offensive to the European Union were annulled in Romania; an attempted coup occurred in Georgia over elections that didn’t go the way the west wanted; the French government, widely hated, teetered over the abyss as president Emmanual Macron tried to ignore the last election; on December 16, Washington’s pet German government fell; lots of funny-business happened in the Moldovan referendum and election, amid widespread disenfranchisement of Moldovan voters living in Russia; elections were long ago cancelled in dictatorial Ukraine; and South Korea hosted an attempted coup. In short, western democracies’ storied enchantment with elections is over. As western populations grow sick and tired of their political class and vote against it, what are elites to do? Annul, cancel, overturn and ignore the elections, that’s what. The problem, for the west, is the voters.
What will happen if far-right Alternative for Deutschland sweeps the early German elections in February, or if far-left France Insoumise does the same in France? Will the U.S. through its NATO and EU tentacles annul those votes? Don’t think it won’t try. And Washington doesn’t even have to give the order, because its European puppets know exactly what’s expected of them. Granted, the Romanian front-runner, so feared by NATO, Calin Georgescu, was far right. But so what? Besides, I doubt that’s what led to the constitutional court vacating the vote. More likely it was his opposition to the Ukraine War – hence the court citing “foreign influence” (translation: Russian) via TikTok as its flimsy basis for negating the election. Incidentally, reports are coming in that the heat and internet to Georgescu’s house have been cut off, and, surprise! he can’t get anyone on the phone to help with this.
But you can’t blame European honchos for ditching elections. They’re just following Washington’s lead. After all, the post-2016 phony Russiagate hysteria may not have succeeded in ousting Trump, as was intended, but it did provide the template for American vassals. The four years of lawfare against Trump (and then another four after he left office) blazed the trail for Europe, so that now, if a candidate not favored by political bigwigs wins, all they have to do is scream “Russian influence!” to dump the election. In other words, democracy is dying in the west. It’s kicking the bucket in Europe – and if Trump ends the Ukraine War (provided Biden doesn’t utterly sabotage his peace efforts before he takes office) or gets us out of the NATO sinkhole, you can bet your paycheck the 2028 establishment campaign will dust off the 2016 playbook and get right to work.
In western media, Georgescu has been portrayed as an unknown. This is false. He is well-known in Romania and had a diplomatic career. But he is also a religious nationalist, and that’s verboten in the EU; worse yet, the U.S., aka NATO, built its biggest military airbase in Europe – where? You got it, Romania. So Washington can’t have just anybody running that country. It must be someone who will keep everything copacetic with the U.S. A nationalist opposed to Washington’s pet proxy war in Ukraine is not that someone.
As for Georgia, there the electorate proved itself most unreliable to the Exceptional Empire. It voted in a government that actually dares to require foreign NGOs to register as such – you know, the way we do, here in the United States. But here, those NGOs don’t aim to overthrow the government, like they do in Georgia, in order for Tbilisi to open a second front against Moscow. Indeed, the vast majority of rioters against the Georgian government, who were arrested, were – I’m shocked! Shocked! – foreign, i.e. European. The icing on the cake is that the French president of Georgia refused to leave office when her term expired – a president with French and Georgian passports, who boasts Nazis in her family tree.
The EU finagled things more successfully in Moldova. That nation’s October 20 referendum on joining the EU won – kinda. In country, the Moldovan government only snagged 50 percent of the vote, but Moldovan expats in Europe gave it a boost, while the 400,000 Moldovans living in Russia found, to their dismay, only two polling stations open for them, by their government, in Moscow. That meant as few as 10,000 of them got to vote. And as East European expert and political scientist Ivan Katchanovski tweeted October 21, many pro-Russian citizens in Transdniestria could not vote. So all in all, the Moldovan referendum was a sorry excuse for a democratic exercise. Then there was also Moldova’s presidential election, equally compromised. But hey, Washington’s EU vassal got to lure a country out of Russia’s orbit, and that’s all that counts, not mere democracy, right? After all, Washington doesn’t stand for democracy. It stands for and has long stood for something quite different – power. Just look at it backing a terrorist takeover of Syria, among them a ruler on whose head Washington has a $10,000,000 bounty. Let that sink in. One American hand posts a huge reward for a terrorist, while the other hand paves his way to power. The obvious conclusion (also obvious to any student of American-backed coups and regime changes abroad going back at least 70 years) is that U.S. doesn’t stand for anything besides power (certainly not anything as antiquated and nettlesome as international law). That’s the definition of a gangster state.
If you doubt that, just peek at South Korea, where the CIA’s man, president Yoon Suk Yeol, faced a grim electoral future. The voters were unlikely to support him in the next election, given that they mostly back the opposition. And that opposition, per Col. Douglas Macgregor, wants a Korean four-star general, not an American one, to head the roughly 500,000 Korean armed forces and also wants to boot the 30,000 U.S. troops off the peninsula. This, of course, goes over in Washington with all the joy of a root canal.
So what to do? Yoon took the bull by the horns December 3 with martial law. During the few hours when it looked like our man in Seoul had pulled off a coup, the Biden gang was coyly silent. But there is nothing enduring in this world, as Gogol noted, and even the most brazen attempts at subverting democracy occasionally fail. The opposition gathered and voted against Yoon. His defense minister was deposed, jailed and attempted suicide, and Yoon’s own tenure came now, ahem, under a cloud, to say the least, as insurrection charges loomed, and he was impeached and suspended from office.
And don’t forget France, where Macron, affronted by an EU parliament vote last summer that installed many anti-Ukraine War representatives, totally lost it and, quite idiotically and hubristically, called snap elections. He promptly lost those to the left, but then snubbed the voters by breaking with tradition and refusing to appoint a left-wing prime minister. Surprising no one, the center-rightist he chose received a vote of no confidence, and Macron’s government looked likely to fall. That was temporarily forestalled by the appointment, December 13, of a centrist prime minister. But if his government does ultimately crash, expect Macron to do something really stupid, like suspend the legislature, call a national emergency or, a la Yoon, declare martial law.
Lastly of course we have Ukraine, that shining example of democracy, where its president rules illegally, having cancelled elections, banned the opposition, throttled the press, exiled the church, jailed anyone he doesn’t like and press-ganged thousands of vehemently objecting Ukrainian men into the military. All this while ferociously lining his pockets with western, mainly American, funds. This is the tyranny upon which Biden bestows hundreds of billions of our hard-earned tax dollars. It’s not even supported by Ukrainians, most of whom, according to recent polls, want the war over. But Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden, in his crazed enthusiasm for Ukrainian combat, just won’t stop. On December 11, Ukraine fired six ATACAMS into Russia. We can all thank God they did little damage, since the Russians shot two down and diverted four with electronic warfare. Had they inflicted real harm, we in the west might very well have had worse troubles than the death of democracy, namely death itself. Biden appears oblivious to this reality. For us, what’s at stake is life itself, and the whole, wondrous human and natural world. For him, it appears to be just another step on the path of endless war, another day, another dollar.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.
The day after the ceasefire with Hezbollah was announced on 26 November the so-called Syrian rebels launched their offensive.
But this was not just an isolated coincidence. Not only were fighters attacking Syria from the North, but two other fronts were opened at the same time showing clear co-ordination.
And from the South, there is a relatively new grouping called the Southern Operations Room.
Who were these groups and who is backing them?
First, in the North, were two groups. The first is the Syrian National Army the rebranded name for former constituents of the Free Syria Army, a collection of militias most of which have been supported directly in the past by the US.
Then there is Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham the rebranded name of the Nusra Front, the former Al Qaeda franchise. It is reportedly the strongest and largest so-called rebel group in Syria. Its leader Abou Mohammed al Jolani, has been successively the deputy leader of Islamic State in Iraq, the founder of the Nusra Front in Syria, a defector to Al-Qaeda who then rebranded HTS as something separate from Al-Qaeda. This is even admitted by the mainstream media as in this report from NBC:
When Syria’s vicious civil war erupted in 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), sent Jolani to Syria to establish the Al-Nusra Front, a branch of Al Qaeda. Their conflict escalated two years later. Jolani rejected Baghdadi’s calls to dissolve the Nusra Front and merge it with ISI to form ISIS. Instead, he pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, which later disassociated itself from ISIS. The Nusra Front then became Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate and later battled ISIS for supremacy in the battle against Assad.
Both HTS and the SNA are being supported directly by Turkiye.
Turkiye obviously has its own interests but as a NATO member, it is under the leadership of the US. Jolani is himself effectively a US asset as well. Here is Aaron Zelin the chronicler of Takfiri groups for Zionist regime asset WINEP:
HTS and its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, have sought to garner support from the United States and other Western governments over the past years in a bid to get themselves removed from terrorist lists. Although that has yet to occur, their overtures did not fall on deaf ears, at least during the Trump administration.
Zelin quotes a spring 2021 interview with Frontline by former US special representative James Jeffrey, which noted that he had “engaged with the group via backchannels while serving in President Trump’s State Department. He also noted that Washington had stopped targeting Jolani in August 2018.” In his view, “HTS was the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East.”
We got Mike Pompeo to issue a waiver to allow us to give aid to HTS
I received and sent messages to HTS
Messages from HTS: “We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad.”
The US was “supporting indirectly the armed opposition”
“It was important to us that HTS not disintegrate”
It was important “to ensure that nobody somewhere in the terrorist bureaucracy would decide to take a shot at [Jolani]… that would have been bad.”
“Our policy was, … to leave HTS alone.”
“Syria, … is the pivot point for whether [there can be] an American-managed security system in the region.”
[The] Abraham Accords, … was, … encouraged by what we were doing in Syria and elsewhere.”
And the fact that we haven’t targeted [HTS] ever, the fact that we have never raised our voice to the Turks about their cohabitation with them … “It’s just like [Turkiye] in Idlib. We want [Turkiye] to be in Idlib, but you can’t be in Idlib without having a platform, and that platform is largely HTS. Now, … HTS is a U.N.-designated official terrorist organization. Have I ever or has any American official ever complained to [Turkiye] about what [they’re] doing there with HTS? No.”
HTS “are the least bad option”
In the North East of Syria, Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces are a proxy for the US, which is in occupation of Syrian oil fields there. US officials refer to this part of Syria as being “owned” by the US with its “local partner” the SDF. The US has a smallish number of troops there and appears to depend on the roughly 100,000 Kurdish forces who enable them to steal almost all of Syria’s oil.
In the south of Syria, a seemingly new grouping emerged. The Southern Operations Room, reportedly a merger of a coalition of Sunni and Druze groups, announced its creation on December 6. Staggeringly they were reportedly the first to reach Damascus. According to reports, these fighters would appear to be related to the previous Southern Operations groupings created by Jordanian & US intelligence agencies.
The CIA covert operation Timber Sycamore was run out of Amman in Jordan and involved the transfer of weapons, including from Saudi Arabia to the Jordanian intelligence agency for onward transmission to Syrian rebel groups. The agency is known as the General Intelligence Directorate. In fact, as Salon reported in 2016, “the CIA essentially created the GID to help shield the Jordanian monarchy from internal and external threats.” Fighters from the Southern Operations Room were the first to reach Damascus on the 7th of December and may have been involved in the widely seen footage of armed rebels removing large numbers of boxes from the Syrian Central Bank.
So, all four of the supposedly disparate “rebel” forces would appear to be backed directly or indirectly, by the US, even though some (especially HTS/SNA and the Kurdish SDF) seem to have contending interests in some areas.
The HTS forces are famously murderously sectarian, and more evidence of this quickly emerged. At a geopolitical level, they are directly helping the Zionists to continue the genocide. Let’s remember that the Zionists have been undertaking continuous strikes on Syria over the last year. The “rebels” even appeared to credit the Zionists with successfully supporting their march on Damascus, Inadvance of the ceasefire announcement they carried out further attacks, which are continuing. The Zionists themselves werequite open about how useful the alleged ‘uprising’ is.
“From Israel’s perspective, the rebel advance in northern Syria further isolates Iran and Hezbollah”, said Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official and Arab affairs adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Many of the weapons Hezbollah used against “Israel” in the recent war were transferred to them via Syria, according to Marco Moreno, a former senior officer in the IOF’s Human Intelligence Unit 504.
The rapid advance of HTS and the SNA has been enabled by Israeli strikes against Resistance groups that support the Syrian government.
According to Melamed: “This ongoing Israeli pressure, coupled with the rebel offensive, weakens the ‘Axis of Resistance’ and challenges Iran’s hegemonic ambitions.”
The extraordinary speed of the ending of the Assad government begs all sorts of questions about what happened and the significance of the events.
It is no surprise that “Israel”, the US, Turkiye and other supporters of Western power should celebrate, but the significant outpouring of positive sentiment from Muslims was perhaps more surprising.
The failure to appreciate the geopolitics of it all and to apparently blithely accept the victory of takfiri terrorists is disturbing for those who see the importance of Muslim unity.
More will likely become clear in the future, but for now, we can say that it appears that an agreement was reached between Russia, Iran, some Gulf states and the US. This allowed the Assad family to exit with some apparent guarantees on an orderly transition, including an order from the Syrian government side for the Army to stand down, and commitments from some of the opposition about avoiding looting and attacks on minorities, desecration of religious shrines and the like. The deal will alsoreportedly allow Russia to maintain its air and Naval base in Syria, but it is not clear how that will turn out.
The apparent support for the so called “revolution” in sections of the Muslim community in the UK and elsewhere is an indication of the success of propaganda and misinformation much of it from the West and the Zionist entity.
Despite myriad assertions, it is not true that the Palestinian armed factions opposed Assad. With the exception of the Hamas Political Bureau between 2012 and 2020, every Palestinian Resistance faction supported Assad including the PFLP, PFLP-GC, DFLP, PIJ, PLA, Liwa Al Quds, and Fatah al-Intifada. It is true that elements of the Hamas politburo (in Qatar – particularly Khaled Mesh’aal), was always closer to the Qatari/Turkish line and broke with Assad from 2012-20.
However, the targeting of Hamas leaders by the Zionist entity has been based particularly on those who support the Axis of Resistance, because they are the ones perceived as a threat. The most obvious example is Yahya Sinwar. Some of them still remain. Those at the sharp end of confronting the Zionist genocide knew more than anyone, how much their supplies of weapons and other equipment depended on Assad’s support.
From the other side, it’s also true that Bashar al-Assad, was made repeated offers by King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia and others to accrue huge personal benefits if he gave up on Palestine and Lebanon, and cut ties with the Resistance. He refused. Even up until the last days of his rule, the UAE’s Islamophobic Zionist dictator Mohammed bin Zayed made Bashar an offer on behalf of the US to cut the Axis of Resistance in return for the US keeping him in power. He refused.
He was made such offers because Syria was the backbone of Palestine and the Lebanese Resistance, without which both will find it very difficult to recover from a logistical perspective. The arms, money, and intelligence that are essential to fighting guerrilla warfare on a serious scale require state support, and Syria under Bashar was the land bridge for all of those supplies reaching Lebanon and Palestine. Which is why they were assiduously bombed by the Zionists.
David Miller is an investigative researcher, broadcaster, and academic. He is the founder and co-director of the lobbying watchdog Spinwatch and editor of Powerbase.info.
Two Iranian nationals have been recently arrested in the United States and Italy on allegations of involvement in equipping drones allegedly used in attacks on American forces—a claim Iran has strongly rejected as baseless.
On the evening of December 16, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, 38, a mechanical engineering graduate from Sharif University of Technology, was detained by Italian police at Milan Airport while preparing to travel to Switzerland. The arrest, carried out at the request of the United States, has cut off all direct contact with him.
Meanwhile, Mahdi Mohammadsadeghi, 42, a US resident, was arrested in Massachusetts around the same time.
According to reports, the arrests of the two individuals are allegedly linked to a January 28 drone attack carried out by Iraqi armed groups against a US military outpost in Jordan known as Tower 22.
The attack killed three American soldiers and injured 47 others. The FBI claims that the equipment used in the drone attack was supplied by these two individuals.
A university peer of Mohammad Abedini told Tasnim News Agency that Abedini is an Iranian national and the CEO of Sanat Danesh Rahpooyan Aflak (SDRA), a company in Iran specializing in precision measurement equipment.
The company’s products have diverse applications, including medical and sports technologies.
Abedini also headed a Swiss-based company, Illumove SA, which focused on motion capture equipment manufacturing. All activities of these companies were conducted under the legal and financial oversight of the Swiss government.
The unnamed source explained that due to their advanced technology, the equipment produced by these companies has multipurpose uses. Once legally sold in Iranian markets, the products can be purchased and utilized by any individual or entity.
However, the US government has fabricated charges, claiming the equipment was used in drones involved in the aforementioned attack, leading to the arrest and prosecution of these individuals.
He emphasized that the lack of formal communication with the Iranian embassy and the denial of access to Abedini constitutes a clear case of abduction.
“Even if the allegations were proven, the appropriate course of action would have been to prevent his entry into Europe or the United States, not to detain him based on unsubstantiated claims,” he said.
Since two days ago, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through its consulate in Italy, has launched extensive efforts to secure Mohammad Abedini’s release or at least obtain information about his condition. It is hoped that these efforts will yield results before any judicial action is taken against him.
The F-35 Lightning II “Joint Strike Fighter” is destined to go down in military history as arguably the most ill-conceived, incompetently engineered, and combat-ineffectual large-scale production aircraft of the jet propulsion era.
It is notoriously under-powered, cripplingly frail, and fatally under-armed.
Its maintenance requirements are so onerous as to render it a net liability in the context of a major air campaign against a peer adversary. For every hour of flight, it requires at least 20 hours of maintenance, including frequent engine swap outs because its feeble powerplant basically fries itself after a few hours of high-demand conditions.
With a full weapons and fuel load, the F-35 struggles to achieve Mach 1 speeds.
Its internal weapons bay can carry only FOUR units.
Fewer than 450 of all types have been delivered to the US military (~300 F-35A to the US Air Force; ~100 F-35B to the US Marine Corps; ~30 F-35C to the US Navy).
This means that the entire global US air fleet could launch fewer than 130 F-35s at any given time. Under high-intensity conflict conditions, the “full mission capable” rates would likely be reduced by half or more after just a single combat sortie.
In the context of an air campaign against Russia in eastern Europe, it must also be understood that the US simply does not have sufficient basing and maintenance capabilities in the region. In order to supply the logistical requirements of a major air fleet at war, it would be necessary to transfer the equivalent of a half-dozen fully staffed and equipped Hill Air Force Bases to the vicinity of the battlefield – this is of course an impossibility.
So people who talk about the US humiliating the Russians with overwhelming “5th Generation Air Power” are spouting ridiculous nonsense. The reality is that any US air campaign against Russia would be fought almost exclusively with decades-old 4th generation platforms going up against best-in-class Russian air defenses and a significantly upgraded Russian Air Force that would outnumber and outrange US air frames in the theater.
And those aircraft that survived the initial strike mission would discover their bases had been blasted to pieces in their absence.
As I have written on several occasions over the past few years: The US could not win an overseas war in a non-permissive environment against a peer-adversary – least of all against the Russians. It would be a logistical power projection challenge well beyond the current capabilities of the American military.
The so-called “rules-based international order” aims to facilitate a hegemonic world, which entails displacing international law. While international law is based on equal sovereignty for all states, the rules-based international order upholds hegemony on the principle of sovereign inequality.
The rules-based international order is commonly presented as international law plus international human rights law, which appears benign and progressive. However, this entails introducing contradictory principles and rules. The consequence is a system devoid of uniform rules, in which “might makes right”. International human rights law introduces a set of rules to elevate the rights of the individual, yet human-centric security often contradicts state-centric security as the foundation of international law.
The US as the hegemonic state can then choose between human-centric security and state-centric security, while adversaries must abide strictly by state-centric security due to their alleged lack of liberal democratic credentials. For example, state-centric security as the foundation of international law insists on the territorial integrity of states, while human-centric security allows for secession under the principle of self-determination. The US will thus insist on territorial integrity in allied countries such as Ukraine, Georgia or Spain, while supporting self-determination within adversarial states such as Serbia, China, Russia and Syria. The US can interfere in the domestic affairs of adversaries to promote liberal democratic values, yet the US adversaries do not have the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US. To facilitate a hegemonic international order, there cannot be equal sovereignty for all states. … continue
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