The United States must stop support for terrorism either through Turkey, Saudi Arabia or direct funding of Daesh, says an American lawmaker, returning from a secret meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard met with Assad during a covert, four-day trip to Syria, she told CNN’s Jake Tapper Wednesday.
“When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt that it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” the Hawaiian congresswoman said.
Gabbard told Tapper she decided to visit the country “really because of the suffering of the Syrian people that has been weighing heavily on my heart.”
“Originally, I had no intention of meeting with Assad, but when given the opportunity, I felt it was important to take it,” she said, yet breaking the taboo by adding, “I think we should be ready to meet with anyone if there’s a chance it can help bring about an end to this war, which is causing the Syrian people so much suffering.”
Gabbard also suggested that Assad is essential in bringing back calm to Syria, an idea rejected by mainstream Western politicians.
“Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria. In order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur, there has to be a conversation with him,” she told CNN.
Gabbard has been an outspoken critic of U.S. support for Syrian militias fighting Assad, some of which are Islamist, or fight alongside al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria. Gabbard has decried U.S. aid, which is sometimes routed covertly through countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as tantamount to “arming terrorists.” She has introduced legislation that would prohibit the federal government from providing “weapons, cash, intelligence or any support” not only to al-Qaeda, ISIS or other extremist groups, but other militias “cooperating” with them.
The 35-year-old member of the Hawaii National Guard, who has also served in Iraq, met the Syrian leader two weeks after GOP nominee Donald Trump won the US 2016 presidential election on Nov. 8, triggering speculations that she might be offered a position by the new administration to deal with the situation in Syria.
“We must stop directly and indirectly supporting terrorists — directly by providing weapons, training and logistical support to rebel groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS (Daesh); and indirectly through Saudi Arabia, the [Persian] Gulf states and Turkey, who in turn support these terrorist groups,” she noted.
“Regardless of the name of these groups, the strongest fighting force on the ground is al Nusra, or al Qaeda, and ISIS. That is a fact,” she claimed. “There are a number of different other groups. All of them are essentially fighting alongside, with or under the command of the strongest group that’s trying to overthrow Assad.”
Damascus has long been complaining that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar are the main supporters of the Takfiri militants fighting committing war crimes in Syria.
In September 2014, the US and some of its allies started conducting airstrikes inside Syria against Daesh terrorists, many of whom were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to fight against the Syrian government.
According to observers, the attacks have done little damage to the terrorists and instead are aimed at weakening the country’s infrastructure.
In November, Gabbard met with then-President-elect Donald Trump to discuss Syria and terrorism policy. Trump has also argued that keeping Assad in power may be better for U.S. interests than continuing to back opposition militias.
Alice Donovan is an independent writer, blogger, meme maker and activist who has been published in different alternative media outlets including Veterans Today and CounterPunch. She now works as a freelance journalist for WeAreChange.org.
President Trump is set to unveil executive actions on immigration—one of his central campaign promises—and could move to suspend some immigration from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, either temporarily or “indefinitely,” according to sources familiar with the plans that have been under consideration.
The sources also expect that any impending Trump action could also impact refugees from countries with Muslim populations. Trump proposed a ban on all Muslim immigration on a temporary basis early on in the campaign, but has since amended his position.
Although Trump could face legal challenges to these measures the orders will be well within his legal rights as President. Trump is expected to visit the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday as he prepares to unveil his first executive actions on immigration, according to congressional and administration sources.
After the visa suspension is in place, work on the vetting process will begin. But White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that the nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, would need to be installed first.
On Tuesday night, Trump tweeted that his plans for Wednesday centered on national security and one of his main campaign vows, building a wall on the southern border.
President Trump will begin cracking down on border security during a trip to the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday. He called it a “big day” for national security.
He is expected to sign an executive order to kick-start the construction of the border wall with Mexico. President Trump initially said Mexico would pay for the wall, before backtracking and saying the country would reimburse the US.
He is also likely to order America’s so-called sanctuary cities to cooperate with authorities to deport illegal immigrants if they want to protect their funding.
During the 2016 election, immigration became one of the Trump campaign’s major talking points, with the then-candidate proposing a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S.
“On Day One, I’m going to begin swiftly removing criminal illegal immigrants from this country,” Trump said at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, in August. “I promise you, from the first day in office — the first thing I’m going to do, the first piece of paper that I’m going to sign is we’re gonna get rid of these people … Day One.”
Alice Donovan is an independent writer, blogger, meme maker and activist who has been published in different alternative media outlets including Veterans Today and CounterPunch. She now works as a freelance journalist for WeAreChange.org.
While it can be easy to dismiss some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories floating around on the Internet, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that the U.S. government has conspired against its own citizens on more than one occasion.
It’s well known that the U.S. government has targeted its own citizens for assassination with drones in recent years, yet it’s far from the only time Americans have suffered at the hands of their leaders, elected or otherwise. Here are seven actual, documented conspiracies created by the government or its agencies:
Alcohol Poisoning
The U.S. government hoped to scare people away from drinking by deliberately poisoning industrial alcohol supplies, which were frequently stolen and resold by bootleggers. Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But Christmas Eve 1926 outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
According to TIME, Seymour M Lowman, assistant secretary of the treasury in charge of Prohibition, even said 1927, that drunks were “dying off fast from poison ‘hooch’” and “a good job will have been done” if America became sober because of it.
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
The Tuskegee Study was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service studying the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government.
After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men they would never be treated. None of the men infected were ever told they had the disease, and none were treated with penicillin even after the antibiotic became proven for the treatment of syphilis.
By the early 1970s, 128 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis and syphilis-related complications, 40 of their wives had the disease and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.
Revelation in 1972 of study failures by a whistleblower led to major changes in U.S. law and regulation on the protection of participants in clinical studies.
Proposed Top Secret plan from 1962 stating intent among the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage terrorist attacks, including killing innocent civilians, to provoke war with Cuba
Proposals include use of drone aircraft to stage foreign attacks, staging hijackings, staging attacks on U.S. vessels and facilities, staging riots, as well as the creation of “terror campaigns” on U.S. soil
MK Ultra
In the 1950s to the 1970s, the CIA ran a mind-control project aimed at finding a “truth serum” to use on communist spies. It’s so true that in 1995 President Clinton actually issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government.
Afraid of being left in the enemy’s pseudo-scientific dust, the CIA quickly jumped on the mind control bandwagon. However, they got their procedures wrong in one crucial aspect; instead of experimenting on enemy prisoners that the national media wouldn’t miss, they decided to go ahead and start jamming probes and shooting drugs into unwitting United States citizens.
Essentially, MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people’s mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of psychological torture. The program subcontracted hundreds of these projects to over 80 different institutions, including universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.
During Operation Midnight Climax, agents dosed sex workers and their clients with LSD to observe their reactions, but government agents also frequently dosed each other. While the agents were certainly able to effectively disturb a target — an Army doctor named Dr. Frank Olson committed suicide a week after he was served a drink laced with the potent psychedelic — useful intelligence was another matter, and the program was canceled in the 1970s.
Most of this was uncovered in 1977 when a Freedom of Information Act exposed 20,000 previously classified documents and triggered a series of Senate hearings. However, in 1973, with the government-wide panic caused by Watergate, the CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed.
Given the CIA’s purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, may never be known.
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations. The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971.
FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti-colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left.
The acts committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and, according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” the activities of these movements and especially their leaders Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of these programs. Although Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King’s phones “on a trial basis, for a month or so”, Hoover extended the clearance so his men were “unshackled” to look for evidence in any areas of King’s life they deemed worthy.
Government Spies on Us
Conspiracy theories are often considered to the span from paranoia: the idea that an omnipotent shadowy organising is watching your every move is a common theme, and, of course, a feature of countless dystopian tales. The theory has been easy to dismiss: how could governments possibly have the resources to monitor so many people so much of the time?
It’s the reason why the leaks by Edward Snowden, a former US security contractor, had such resonance across the globe. His disclosures in 2013 revealed that over 60 countries were targeted by the US’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ. That European leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, were spied on became one of the headline stories, but the mass vacuuming of citizens’ data was the more important point.
Thanks to revelations about the NSA and their Prism project, we know that the scope of the NSA’s eavesdropping is even beyond what we originally believed.
In early June of 2014, the Washington Post reported that almost 90% of the data being collected by NSA surveillance programs is from Internet users with no connection to terrorist activities. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, this is in clear violation of the constitution.
Operation Fast and Furious
Obama-administration scandals never resolve. They just vanish — usually, under a new scandal. So it was with one of this president’s earliest embarrassments, “Operation Fast and Furious,” designed to help the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) dismantle drug cartels operating inside the United States and disrupt drug-trafficking routes. Instead, it put into the hands of criminals south of the border some 2,000 weapons, which have been used to kill hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
In November 2009, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives launched an operation in which guns bought by drug-cartel straw purchasers in the U.S. were allowed to “walk” across the border into Mexico. ATF agents would then track the guns as they made their way through the ranks of the cartel. At least, that was the theory. In reality, once the guns walked across the border, they were gone. Whistleblowers reported, and investigators later confirmed, that the ATF made no effort to trace the guns.
Some ATF agents became concerned the weapons were being used for crimes. On Dec. 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed during a gunfight. Two of the guns involved in the shootout were traced back to Fast and Furious, which continued for another six weeks.
The operation started to fall apart inside as U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, who headed the Phoenix office, became angry with Special Agent John Dodson for reporting on the bungled program before Congress. Burke, who was later forced to resign in 2011, leaked information about Dodson’s activities in the operation to Fox News. An inspector general’s report cited Burke’s actions in violation of Justice Department policy.
It is difficult to overstate both how stupid and how incompetent were the whole host of federal officials involved in this fiasco, who first thought it was a swell idea to traffic thousands of guns to Mexican criminals, then blithely forgot about them. Under “Operation Fast & Furious,” the U.S. government became a de facto arms dealer to Mexican drug cartels and Islamist criminals.
It remains to be seen what will happen if Trump release all the Operation Fast and Furious documents.
Foreign Countries Involved in US elections
As the numerous Democratic supporters yelling about the unfair 2016 election results Hillary Clinton herself, Obama Administration and even CIA blame a foreign country for interfering in the elections process. And you know what? We totally agree with them.
It is illegal in the United States for foreign countries to try to influence the outcome of elections by funding candidates.
Sounds good. However, that appears not to have stopped the… Saudis.
In June 2016, the Petra News Agency published what it described as exclusive comments from Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman which included a claim that Riyadh has provided 20 percent of the total funding to the prospective Democratic candidate’s campaign. The report was later deleted and the news agency has not responded to requests for comment from Middle East Eye. However, the deletion took place too late, as the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs managed to capture the report and has re-published the original Arabic Petra report, which quoted Prince Mohammed as having said Saudi Arabia had provided with “full enthusiasm” an undisclosed amount of money to Clinton.
“Saudi Arabia always has sponsored both Republican and Democratic Party of America and in America current election also provide with full enthusiasm 20 percent of the cost of Hillary Clinton’s election even though some events in the country don’t have a positive look to support the king of a woman (sic) for presidency,” the report quoted Prince Mohammed as having said.
According to the US Federal Election commission, over the past two years Clinton has raised a little more than $211.8 million. 20% of this sum is $42.4 million.
Saudi Arabia is not the only country to put money in Hillary Clinton’s hands either, with the best selling book Clinton Cash detailing several companies that “payed to play” – or bribed – the Clintons.
As result, we can say that yes, a foreign country interfered in the US election process. But the only criminal that ran for president is Hillary Clinton and this is one more reason to put her behind bars.
Alice Donovan is an independent writer, blogger, meme maker and activist who has been published in different alternative media outlets including Veterans Today and CounterPunch. She now works as a freelance journalist for WeAreChange.org.
The US Coalition reportedly carried out a lethal series of airstrikes over the Idlib countryside, killing and wounding dozens of civilians near the Turkish border-crossing in Syrian Province of Idlib.
On Tuesday’s midday at 03:55 PM the B52 warplane have bombarded Sarmada town’s outskirts over a prison followed to Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham (JFS) which led to dozens of casualties and injuries amid the civilians and prisoners in addition to mass destruction.
Moreover, the US warplanes have bombarded Sarmada square and killed 12 civilians while carrying out an airstrike over a vehicle followed to JFS.
According to local activists and reports of the Syrian government, the US-led coalition regularly carries out strikes to support ground anti-terror operations in Iraq and Syria, some of which results in civilian casualties.
At the same time, media sources of JFS denied the circulating data talking about the international coalition targeting a prison belonging to JFS, saying that the bombing targeted the major headquarters of the region and contains several branch offices as well as a new-formed police station which caused the killing of all who were in the headqurters about 25 members.
Meanwhile, the US military has acknowledged that at least 188 civilians have been killed in US-led strikes in Iraq and Syria since its campaign began against the Islamic State in August 2014.
The coalition airstrikes against Daesh targets which together resulted in the unintended death of 15 civilians occurred in the Iraqi cities of Shahid-Yunis As Sab on November 6, Mosul on November 26 and 29, and in Syrian Salahiyah on November 21 and Raqqa on November 26, according to the statement.
To date, based on information available, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve has assessed that, it is more likely than not, at least 188 civilians have been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve. CJTF-OIR regrets the unintentional loss of civilian lives resulting from coalition efforts to defeat ISIL [Daesh] in Iraq and Syria and express our deepest sympathies to the families and others affected by these strikes.
However, the military’s overall estimate is far below that of groups monitoring the civilian casualties. Airwars puts the number at 2,100.
The majority of the reports labelled “non-credible” shows an alarming lack of intelligence available to the US-led coalition, believes former Pentagon official Michael Maloof. According to his statement, “the United States is supposed to double check and triple check, make sure that there’s no such thing as civilians in harm’s way. But, given the reality on the ground there, it’s the case.”
When they talk about not-credible sourcing, basically means they don’t have enough information to determine whether or not there was actual collateral damage of civilians being killed. And that really means that we don’t have intelligence on the ground and we shouldn’t be bombing in areas where we lack intelligence good intelligence on the ground.
Alice Donovan is an independent writer, blogger, meme maker and activist who has been published in different alternative media outlets including Veterans Today and CounterPunch. She now works as a freelance journalist for WeAreChange.org.
Federal judge John Primomo had some strong words in San Antonio for the immigrants he was swearing in to become U.S. citizens.
Judge Primomo was filmed at a citizenship ceremony saying that people “need” to leave the United States if they don’t like the fact the next president will be Donald Trump.
Primomo made the remark when he presided over the naturalization ceremony at the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, Texas, on Thursday.
The room at the Institute was a melting pot, a collection of hopeful faces now bound together under one flag. During the ceremony, the federal judge presiding over the ceremony talked about Donald Trump’s election.
“I can assure you that whether you voted for [Trump] or you did not vote for him, if you are a citizen of the United States, he is your president and he will be your president,” the judge said. “And if you do not like that, you need to go to another country.”
The federal judge also told that he did not vote for the Republican and former reality show star.
The judge reportedly also went on to criticize professional football players who refuse to stand for the national anthem, saying, “I detest that, because you can protest things that happen in this country; you have every right to…You don’t do that by offending national symbols like the national anthem and the flag of the United States.”
Asked later about his comments in San Antonio, U.S. District Judge John Primomo said he meant the words to be unifying and respectful of the office of president, not political.
Protests have flared nationwide repudiating Trump’s victory in the presidential election. At one rally at American University in Washington, D.C., students burned U.S. flags and shouted “[Expletive] white America!”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the desecration of the American flag is “symbolic speech” protected under the First Amendment. The decision originated from a case in Dallas, where a man burned a U.S. flag outside the 1984 Republican National Convention to protest then-President Ronald Reagan.
Still, his words set off a controversy in pro-Hillary mainstream media, with people calling for him to be removed from office. Critics started a petition to censure the judge, who was appointed in 1988.
Primomo himself is the son of immigrants from Italy and Germany, according to a profile of the judge published two years ago in the San Antonio Express-News.
The U.S. magistrate judge has administered the citizenship oath to more than 93,000 immigrants since 1989. Many of those new Americans wait in line to get their photo taken with Primomo after they take the oath. He told the Express-News in 2014 that there’s no extra pay involved in presiding over the ceremonies.
“I know it never gets old,” Primomo told the newspaper. “I mean, every time I pronounce that ‘You’re a citizen of the United States’ — which, that’s not really a requirement, it’s just kind of a little emphasis I like to add to it — I get a chill every single time.”
Primomo’s remarks make more sense in context. Last week, President Obama actuallysupported anti-Trump riots and urged protesters not to be silent.
Alice Donovan is an independent writer, blogger, meme maker and activist who has been published in different alternative media outlets including Veterans Today and CounterPunch. She now works as a freelance journalist for WeAreChange.org.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti-colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left.
It’s the reason why the leaks by Edward Snowden, a former US security contractor, had such resonance across the globe. His disclosures in 2013 revealed that over 60 countries were targeted by the US’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ. That European leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, were spied on became one of the headline stories, but the mass vacuuming of citizens’ data was the more important point.
Some ATF agents became concerned the weapons were being used for crimes. On Dec. 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed during a gunfight. Two of the guns involved in the shootout were traced back to Fast and Furious, which continued for another six weeks.
The federal judge also told that he did not vote for the Republican and former reality show star.
Primomo himself is the son of immigrants from Italy and Germany, according to a profile of the judge published two years ago in the 
@Lukewearechange