First up: Jeffrey St. Clair: “+ Someone recently asked me to describe what I mean by the Sputnik Left and I said you’ll know it when you see it. The best definition I could come up with was: political activists who rigorously apply Chomsky’s lens to the NYT, WashPost, and the Guardian, but regurgitate as gospel whatever they read or hear on RT or Sputnik.”, ‘Roaming Charges’, Aug. 24, 2018 (a big wd smile)
Next: ‘Bolton calls on Al-Qaeda to stage more chemical attacks in Syria’, Eva Bartlett, August 24, 2018, RT
“The latest script-reader to toe the chemical hoax line is President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, who on August 22, stated: “…if the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons we will respond very strongly and they really ought to think about this a long time.”
Beyond the tattered veil of moral superiority that is US war propaganda, Bolton’s words were clearly a very public command to Al-Qaeda and co-extremists to stage yet another fake chemical attack.
Bolton’s statement was preceded by an August 21 France-UK-US (FUKUS) joint statement, likewise threatening further illegal bombing of Syria if a chemical attack in Syria occurred (based on evidence the US never has nor needs to reveal).
Recall that the last time they acted on such a threat, in April 2018, the US and its interventionist allies didn’t even wait for the Douma lie to be exposed, let alone for any mythical evidence to materialize, before they illegally bombed Syria with 103 missiles. The bombings occurred before the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had a chance to visit the Douma sites in question.”
She proceeds to deconstruct the non-evidence of earlier ‘chemical attacks’ in Douma, including hospital staff testifying at the Hague that no patients exhibited symptoms of such, linking to the recent briefing report on the Douma allegations by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media that collectively analyzed ‘the facts around the Douma allegations’ (and previous ones), and the discrepancies around the official narratives, as well as:
“The OPCW’s July 2018 interim report on Douma noted that in samples taken from alleged sites, no chemicals that are prohibited in the Chemical Weapons Convention were detected. The OPCW found traces of “chlorinated organic chemicals”, but not Sarin, as alleged by supposed expert Eliot Higgins and the White House, among others.”
August 25, RT: “The attack would be used as a pretext for US, UK and French airstrikes on Syrian targets, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov said. USS ‘The Sullivans,’ an Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyer, was already deployed to the Persian Gulf a couple of days ago, he added.
The destroyer has 56 cruise missiles on board, according to data from the Russian Defence Ministry. A US Rockwell B-1 Lancer, a supersonic bomber equipped with 24 cruise missiles, has also been deployed at the Qatari Al Udeid Airbase.
The provocations are being prepared by militants from Al-Nusra Front (now known as Tahrir al-Sham) in Idlib province, northwestern Syria.
In order to stage the attack, some eight canisters of chlorine were delivered in to village near Jisr al-Shughur city for the terrorists’ use, he added. A separate group of militants, prepped by private British security company Olive, have also arrived in the area. The group will be disguised as volunteers from the White Helmets group and will simulate a rescue operation involving locals purportedly injured in the attack, according to the military official.
According to the Defense Ministry spokesman, recent statements by US National Security Advisor John Bolton – in which he threatened to bomb Syria – could be interpreted as an implicit confirmation of such airstrikes. On August 22, Bolton stated that “… if the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons, we will respond very strongly and they really ought to think about this a long time.”
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned Washington against new reckless moves in Syria, RIA Novosti reported. “We hear ultimatums from Washington, including those made in public,” the top official said, apparently referring to Bolton’s recent remarks.”
Ha; Jeffrey St. Clair had left out RIA Novosti; step up yer game, son!.
Sorry to feel the need to blast him at you, but you likely need to hear his threat and watch his accursed lips mustache move: August 22:
In her Aug. 16 ‘Eyes on Idlib: Syrian children robbed of innocence to act as mouthpieces for US coalition proxies’, Vanessa Beeley, via RT offers a compendium about the many children weaponized in the name of ‘regime change’ at best, and the dangerous, award-winning psyop of the stars of stage and screen the #White Helmets. It’s likely readers will know most of this already, and can offer even better videos that demonstrate their staged rescues.
“First there was Bana al-Abed, who, at only six-years-old, shot to fame depicting life under “Syrian and Russian bombs” in East Aleppo while ignoring the ravages of this enclave by the numerous US coalition-sponsored terrorist and extremist factions that included Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda) and an assortment of client sectarian militants who collectively punished Syrian civilians in both East and West Aleppo for almost five years
Bana [al-Abed] rose to prominence in the final months of the Syrian Arab Army campaign to finally liberate the Aleppo’s eastern suburbs from extremist mafia gangs and criminal parasites armed by NATO member states and Gulf States and promoted by the Western media as “moderate rebels” while they crucified, executed, tortured, raped and generally abused the Syrian civilians who did not submit to their version of “democracy and freedom”.
The exploitation of Bana by her own parents has been extensively documented and her father’s ties to Nusra Front and even ISIS have been explored. Bana herself has been instrumentalized and converted into a tool for Western military adventurism in Syria. She has been firmly placed on the treadmill of useful “victim” stardom where she will continue to provide the propaganda gymnastics required of her by her controllers and handlers working within the Western soft power complex.” [snip]
“Previously we had Omran Daqneesh, the “face of the suffering of Aleppo”. Unfortunately for the pro-regime-change cartel, Omran’s fame was short-lived when his father was interviewed in 2017, expressing his steadfast support for the Syrian government and his horror that his son had been so universally exploited. Those interviews exposed the story as fake on a number of levels and the media promulgators of the story as shallow, hypocritical narrative builders for empire.”
She spends a lot of time and Twitter videos showing the psyop stars of Eastern Gouta: Noor and Alaa, and features photos of the two snuggling up with Turkish Prez Erdogan post “… exit package for Noor and Alaa was similar to Bana’s – from Idlib they headed to Turkey, the country that was most active in nurturing and incubating the extremist entities that have infested Syria with their ideological hatred and racism.”
From this Tweetie of theirs:
“Today we are so happy to have @RaedAlSaleh3 the head of the Syrian Civil Defense @SyriaCivilDef in our home. He is very kind and he brought us some sweets.
The #WhiteHelmets are such a brave people.”
“Of the Idlib child pool, Marwa is the most eloquent and is once again promoting the White Helmets, another common thread that runs through the child chatter from inside areas that are “serviced” by this dubious search and rescue team that has been roundly discredited by Scott Ritter – a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq.
“First and foremost, as a “light” USAR team, the White Helmets are not trained or equipped to conduct rescues of entrapped victims. […] The techniques used by the White Helmets are not only technically wrong, but dangerous to anyone who might actually be trapped. […] In my opinion, the videos are pure theater, either staged to impress an unwitting audience, or actually conducted with total disregard for the wellbeing of any real victims.” Ritter said in an op-ed piece titled ‘Trump’s Sarin Claims Based on a Lie’.
She features other exploited by the war machine children who’ve seemingly swapped names, accounts, etc., and doesn’t wonder that readers will be confused. Her righteous rant calling out those who are harnessing the kids into the (fake) humanitarian war complex as unwitting pawns…that robs them of their innocence by way of their parents having chosen the lost cause side of mercenaries and extremists.
“The children are not to blame but one wonders what they will become.”
@GermanyDiplo “Germany has provided funding of 17 million euros to the #WhiteHelmets’ work since 2016 and will continue to do its utmost to support the organisation.”
The UK, US, and EU proudly funds them, as well. It gets seriously creepy seeing the same children being ‘rescued’ from the rubble; oddly their clothes are clean.
‘The condensed case against the White Helmets’
The Constellis Group website.
at about 2:16 comes the prelude to ‘take two!’
@GermanyDiplo “Germany has provided funding of 17 million euros to the #WhiteHelmets’ work since 2016 and will continue to do its utmost to support the organisation.”
December 8, 2015 ‘Syria: Ultimate Pipelineistan War’ by Pepe Escobar, Counterpunch, before they began pullin’ their punches
‘SYRIA: The Emerging Reality of the U.S Coalition Regime Change War – On the Ground Reporting’ August 20, 2018, David Macilwain,21stcenturywire.com
This is 21stcentury wire’s White Helmets tab.
(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
what to say about the people who devise this shitty theater? where “human rights” and child victims and the most fearsome weapons imaginable are just props in a game guaranteed to make more child victims & spread the same weapons? well, at least Nikki Haley & Co demonstrate that they are familiar w/notions like “the rights of the child” & etc. they are familiar w/the words, anyway.
let’s say this about them, these are the kind of people who own & run this country. they love them some Japanese war crimes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Instead of being tried for war crimes after the war, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation.[5] Other researchers that the Soviet forces managed to arrest first were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949. The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into the U.S. biological warfare program, as had happened with Nazi researchers in Operation Paperclip…Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as communist propaganda.
the words, yes, as is madeleine albright of the atlantic council, another funder of the the white helmets and…facebook fire eye or whatever algorithm deletions. and of course, The Constellis Group w/ erik prince’s mercenaries.
it’s just such a hegemonic/silicon valley corporatist full-court press, isn’t it?
but arrrgh, i can’t say thanks for bringing unit 71, but then i didn’t really need to take a wiki refresher course on operation paperclip…and yet i did.
la luna bella is full tonight, but oddly, there are storms both to the north a south of us, neither will reach us, but oh…do i love the sound of rolling thunder.
since i’m in need of some chuckles and the twittersphere is a-twitter with dead john mccain, these are soooo great!
i’m too tired to fetch a recording of moonlight sonata; sorry. you’ll no doubt be able to hear it in your mind. g’ night.
i didn’t bother to read the wsws comment on that turd’s finally being flushed. someone reminded me that he opposed MLKj day being a national holiday. maverick, tough-talking, straight-shooting McCain! have they built a microscope that can parse the supersubtle, 11th dimensional chess kind of differences in substance b/n McCain and, oh, I don’t know, say…Herr Satan himself, Trump? He is a helpful prop for the ludicrous notion that this gov’t is something that might be worth enduring torture over. of course in my book that notion already gets him life’s dunce cap. maybe pops didn’t negotiate w/ McCain’s forever hated “gooks” cuz he knew what a p.o.s. his son was? and how about McCain as a test for what happens to people under torture? bearing in mind that he was already indifferent enough to human suffering to be a bomber pilot. and narcissistic enough not to stop flying even after he crashed 5 times due to incompetence. sounds like the makings of a POTUS to me.
death reveals all? thanks Bernie! ditto to you Alexandria. duck & cover w/your class mates, you two. your real class mates.
amen. max blumenthal (the revitalized version) has one at consortium news. once i’d checked to make sure his title: ‘the good side of john mcAH’ was facetious, i stopped reading. but lol. yeah, she’s been rehearsing:
never clicked in, another bridge too far.
tonight’s early lullaby:
A small history from Vanessa Beeley via her Twitter account, starting:
1. Staging of chemical attack in #Idlib reportedly prepped by Olive Grp who James Le Mesurier used to work for, founder of #WhiteHelmets, OG merged wth Constellis in 2015 who hve Blackwater in portfolio.
vanessa beeley
2. “In May 2015, Olive Group merged with Constellis Holdings, portfolio includes Academi, previously the notorious Blackwater Group. [..]Post 9/11, Bush enabled the CIA to subcontract assassinations allegedly targeting Al Qaeda operatives – Blackwater” .
ha; i’d missed this tidbit: “…James Le Mesurier used to work for”, ye-crikey, the incestuous nature of the regime change and worse…brutality complex. but constellis group really IS blackwater, xi, now acadamei.
thanks, greyson.
bill van auken at wsws.org has some interesting news this a.m.:
“Bolton followed up his trip to Israel with a meeting in Geneva with his Russian counterpart, Nicolai Patrushev, apparently in an attempt to enlist Russian assistance in Washington’s campaign against Iran. Publicly, at least, Moscow appeared to rebuff the approach. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov demanded that all military forces not invited into Syria by the government leave the country, a clear attempt to distinguish between Tehran and Washington.
US officials have made clear that while Washington’s objective in Syria remains the toppling of the Assad regime, it is also focused on the driving out of Iranian forces from the country as part of its strategy of rolling back Iranian influence throughout the Middle East and clearing the path for the assertion of US hegemony in the oil-rich region.
Iran has rejected US and Israeli demands that it abandon Syria, insisting its forces have been invited into the country by the government in Damascus, unlike the 2,200 US troops there, which have been deployed in direct violation of international law.
Iran’s Defense Minister Amir Hatami and his Syrian counterpart announced on Monday the signing of a “defense and technical agreement” that provides for the continued “presence and participation” of Iran in Syria.”
and this speculation:
“The timing of a US assault on Syria may be influenced by the announced plan for a September 7–8 summit in the northern Iranian city of Tabriz, bringing together Iranian President Hassan Rouhani with his Russian and Turkish counterparts, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for talks aimed at achieving a negotiated settlement of the Syrian conflict.
Turkey is opposed to a Russian-backed offensive against Idlib, where it has provided support to some of the “rebel” groups. At the same time, however, it has come into increasing conflict with the US, intensified by recent trade sanctions, and has drawn closer to Moscow and Tehran.”
b at MoA has a link saying that a hella lotta russian ships are in the eastern meditteranean.
on afternoon edit, FWIW: ‘White Helmets accompany large delivery of poisonous chemicals to militants in Syria – MoD’ 28 Aug, 2018 RT
“A large supply of chemicals has been delivered to the militants in Syria’s Idlib with the assistance of the White Helmets aid group in order to stage a provocation and blame the Syrian government, Russia’s Defense Ministry said.
The Russian military has received information from several sources in Idlib Province that “a large supply of poisonous agents has been brought to the city of Saraqib on two trucks from the village of Afs,” Major-General Aleksey Tsygankov, head of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the opposing sides in Syria, said in a statement.
The chemicals were delivered to an arms depot, used by the militant group Ahrar al-Sham, “accompanied by the eight members of the White Helmets organization,” Tsygankov said, adding that the cargo was met by two high-ranked Ahrar al-Sham commanders.
Later, a part of the load was put in unmarked plastic barrels and transported to another militant base in the southern Idlib in order to stage the use of chemical weapons and subsequently blame the government forces of employing poisonous substances against civilians,” the statement read.”
poisonous agents is pretty vague…
Consortium News: Moscow Has Upped the Ante in Syria, September 9
As Syrian forces backed by Russia launch the final showdown in Syria against jihadist extremists in Idlib province, the potential for a U.S.-Russia confrontation has never been greater, as VIPS warns in this memo to the president. September 9, 2018
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Moscow Has Upped the Ante in Syria
Mr. President:
We are concerned that you may not have been adequately briefed on the upsurge of hostilities in northwestern Syria, where Syrian armed forces with Russian support have launched a full-out campaign to take back the al-Nusra/al-Qaeda/ISIS-infested province of Idlib. The Syrians will almost certainly succeed, as they did in late 2016 in Aleppo. As in Aleppo, it will mean unspeakable carnage, unless someone finally tells the insurgents theirs is a lost cause.
That someone is you. The Israelis, Saudis, and others who want unrest to endure are egging on the insurgents, assuring them that you, Mr. President, will use US forces to protect the insurgents in Idlib, and perhaps also rain hell down on Damascus. We believe that your senior advisers are encouraging the insurgents to think in those terms, and that your most senior aides are taking credit for your recent policy shift from troop withdrawal from Syria to indefinite war.
From the comments: Reply to Paul Craig Roberts’ crucial question
the Q: ” Andrei Martyanov, whose book I recently reviewed on my website, recently defended Putin, as The Saker and I have done in the past, from claims that Putin is too passive in the face of assaults. https://russia-insider.com/en/russia-playing-long-game-no-room-instant-gratification-strategies-super-patriots/ri24561 As I have made the same points, I can only applaud Martyanov and The Saker. Where we might differ is in recognizing that endlessly accepting insults and provocations encourages their increase until the only alternative is surrender or war.
So, the questions for Andrei Martyanov, The Saker, and for Putin and the Russian government is: How long does turning your other cheek work? Do you turn your other cheek so long as to allow your opponent to neutralize your advantage in a confrontation? Do you turn your other cheek so long that you lose the support of the patriotic population for your failure to defend the country’s honor? Do you turn your other cheek so long that you are eventually forced into war or submission? Do you turn your other cheek so long that the result is nuclear war?”
thanks, i’d missed that third part of your comments. i’ll try to read it later at the unz review version, but i also have sooo many other things to take care of, and mainly good things this time.
‘upped the ante’ is an odd way of putting it, but for the most part, good on them. their Qs are on target, arren’t they? ‘who’s running this show, you or bolton?’
i dunno about the al jazeera piece given that the testimonies are coming from the white helmets al nushra (sp?) offshoots and the ‘syrian observatory of human rights’. but thank you; hope you’re doin’ okay…or better. ;-)
russia and the sryrian army want it over. b at moa had said that the tri-party talks in tehran decisions were bullshit, as turkey is unreliable.
Al Jazeera, Syria: Rebel-held areas bombed as Turkey reinforces outposts, September 10
Syrian and its Russian ally pound rebel-held Idlib and Hama provinces in second day of escalation.
Antakya, Turkey – Syrian government forces have pounded rebel-held areas in northwest Syria, killing at least five people in a second day of heavy bombardment, according to rescuers, as Turkey sent more troops to the region.
The intensified strikes on Sunday, including air attacks, shelling and helicopter-dropped barrel bombs, targeted villages in southern Idlib and northern Hama provinces.
The escalation comes amid growing fears over a seemingly imminent all-out offensive against the densely populated Idlib province, the last rebel bastion in Syria.