The compelling autobiography of one of the great and most committed newsmen of our time: full, frank, and occasionally very funny, Jon Snow's memoirs are as revealing about the great and the not-so-good as about his own passionate involvement in the reporting of world affairs qualities as a journalist and as a human being -- his passion, warmth, intelligence, frankness and humour -- are widely recognised and evident for all to see most nights on television [Channel 4 News] and now in the pages of his first book. and delightfully records his life and times since becoming a journalist in the early 1970s.

He reported widely on Cold War conflicts in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Angola and Central America before becoming a resident correspondent in Washington D.C. in the 1980s, and has met and interviewed most of the world's leaders.

The increasing world disorder came about following the fall of the Berlin Wall; how the West's constant search for an enemy has helped unhinge the world; and how and why the media have, in general, been less than helpful in drawing attention to key political and global developments.

Read more:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/395952.Shooting_History

JSSH

Many fear that the Alliance missile strikes on Syria on the weekend utilities will trigger another world war, however contributing editor-at-large Tess Lawrence says the first one never ended.

WORLD WAR THREE has started. On Saturday, I heard that said a number of times.

...

Both were shot at close range by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, triggering a sequence of events that led to the First World War, such is the power of the odd angry shot.

The hapless couple had already escaped a bombing in their motorcade earlier in the day and yet after their civic duties, with great trepidation, they got back into their open-hooded double phaeton, despite heightened concerns for their safety, only to become literal sitting targets for their killer.

They apparently died whilst sitting upright, maintaining a surreal regal decorum in the horrifying and bloodied dying seconds of their lives, in what was regarded as a true love match and marriage.

Wikipedia also has a very competent summary leading up to the assassination and subsequent events.

Achille Beltrame's vivid illustration of the assassination appeared in the Italian weekly, Domenica del Corriere, 12 July 1914, editon and bears an eerie echo to photos and footage of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas.

From Tess Lawrence at:

https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/has-world-war-iii-start...

-------------------------

Tess does good, then (I hope sarcastically) seem to takes the CIA/FBI reports on Lee Harvey Oswald at face value. I would not. The CIA lies. This is the main job of the CIA. Spread bullshit in order to blame someone else such as the Russians. This is common practice in the "intelligence industry". Remember the "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" mantra. It was a lie (not an "intelligence failure") like those of the former director of the CIA, William Casey.

During his tenure at the CIA, Casey played a large part in the shaping of Reagan's foreign policy, particularly its approach to Soviet international activity. Based on a book, The Terror Network, Casey "believed" that the Soviet Union was the source of most terrorist activity in the world, in spite of CIA analysts providing evidence that this was in fact black propaganda by the CIA itself. His famous quote: 

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false.

I can formulate from my own research on another subject which is not part of YD, though I have mentioned it here already, the 30 Year War in Europe ((1618-48) is at the origin of the "cascade" of our modern conflicts. Beforehand there were other conflicts, including the "crusades" that cascaded into the 30 Year War....

By 1911, some teachers in schools in Europe were telling their young pupils that "...a war will be started soon and you will be the one to finish it." quote/unquote. The assassination of the Archduke was only a "pretext" to begin what had already been planned for a long time.

If Lee Harvey Oswald was "under surveillance from the CIA", how did he manage to single-handedly kill JFK? My personal take on this from various psychological/historical assessment is that he was not in relations with the Soviets, but possibly with the "White Russians" (and the CIA), those Russians who opposed the Soviets (a bit like the exiled oligarchs are opposed to Putin and will do anything to sabotage Russia). JFK, having been part of the solution with Krutchev to the Cuban missile crisis wanted a "rapprochement" with the Soviets. This was not on on for the "white Russians", NOR for THE CIA. JFK had to be eliminated.

Same with Trump. He is not allowed to have a rapprochement with Russia. Being the flip-con-artist of the whatever deal, he goes with the "deep State" and bomb Syria instead, carefully avoiding Russian positions because after he did not hesitate to tweet to Russia "that he was going to fire missiles of a new generation on its soldiers in Syria", the Russian ambassador, Alexander Zasypkine, immediately responded that these missiles would be intercepted and the planes and ships that fired them would be destroyed. And the Russians meant it AND they have the technology to do so. WW3 was on the cards from a single tweet. At present, the "deep State" does not want to get rid of Donald, just contain him.

I am not saying the Russians are clean, but the boffins at the CIA (and its precursor the OSS) were experts at lying and at manipulating "world events". MI6 (UK) and the SCEDE (France) were experts at "lying" as well. ASIO does not understand anything of these manipulations. Our PM in London is like a dumb lap dog to Theresa May. 

See: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33845

and : http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34144

More can be said...

Official Washington and those associated with it have misrepresented the facts numerous times in the service of military actions that might not otherwise have taken place. In the Middle East, these interventions have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Arab civilians, brought chaos to Iraq and Libya, and led to the expulsion of a million Christians from communities where they have lived since biblical times. 

The most famous of these episodes, of course, was the U.S. government’s assurance to the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which formed the basis for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The government also insisted Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda, bolstering the call to war. Of course neither was true. 

But even before that there was the first Iraq war in 1991, justified in part by the story of Iraqi soldiers reportedly dumping babies out of incubators to die in a Kuwaiti hospital. The 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador cleverly lied to a set-up congressional committee. The Christian Science Monitor detailed this bizarre episode in 2002.

There were also the lies about the Iraqi army being poised to invade Saudi Arabia. That was the ostensible reason for the U.S. sending troops to Kuwait—to defend Saudi Arabia. Writing in the the Los Angeles Times in 2003, Independent Institute fellow Victor Marshall pointed out that neither the CIA nor the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency viewed an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia as probable, and said the administration’s Iraqi troop estimates were “grossly exaggerated.” In fact, the administration’s claim that it had aerial photographs proving its assertions was never verified because, as we later learned, the photos never existed. The Christian Science Monitor also reported on this in 2002 ahead of the second Iraq war.

America attacked Iraq in 1991, bombing and destroying that nation’s irrigation, sanitation, and electricity plants. (See here regarding Washington’s knowledge of and planning for the horrific mass contamination of Iraqi drinking water.) Then we blockaded reconstruction supplies for nine years while some half-million children died of disease and starvation. We blamed it all on Saddam, although we controlled Iraq’s money flows through the UN food-for-oil program. Fortunately, we have a rare admission by Madeleine Albright on 60 Minutes about what was done.

Before that, there was the Kosovo war when America attacked Serbia on the basis of lies that 100,000 Kosovans had been massacred by Serbs in suppressing their civil war. This led to massive American bombing, brutally destroying much of that nation’s civilian infrastructure and factories, including most of the bridges in the country, and all but one of those over the Danube River. The Americans imposed peace, then expelled most Serbs out of their former province. Subsequently there was the mass destruction of hundreds of ancient Christian churches and the creation of a European enclave now filled with Saudi money that sponsors Wahhabi education, with its rote memorization of the Koran and its 13th-century hatred of Christians.

More recently there was the British, French, and American attack on Libya in response to lies that Moammar Gaddafi was planning to massacre civilians in Benghazi. The U.S. destroyed his armed forces and helped to overthrow him. Widespread looting of his weaponry subsequently filled black markets in Asia and Africa and contributed to the ability of Boko Haram terrorists to sow chaos in Nigeria and parts of Northern Africa. Masses of African refugees have been flooding Western Europe ever since, traveling through Libya. Some of those weapons also made their way into the hands of the Islamic State, which overran parts of Iraq and Syria.

Most recently we had cable news inundating us with stories of a new poison gas attack in Syria. The “news” came from rebel sources. The American Conservative has published a detailed analysis by former arms inspector Scott Ritter questioning the evidence, or lack of it, that the Assad regime initiated the attack. The former British ambassador to Syria also cast doubts on the poison gas attack and its sources from rebel organizations.

It doesn’t make sense that Assad would use poison gas just as Trump was saying that he wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. It does make sense for the rebels to have staged a set up to get America to stay and attack Assad. This happened before in the summer of 2014 when President Obama nearly went to war over similar accusations. Only after asking Congress to vote on the matter did he decide against the attack because Congress wasn’t interested. Some congressmen’s mail was running 100-to-one against bombing. It was a welcome reminder of why Washington doesn’t want actual votes on starting wars: because most Americans don’t want more Washington wars.

Investigative journalists Seymour Hersh and Robert Parry expertly poked holes in the veracity of that 2013 attack. Other reports suggested that Syrian bombs unleashed poison gas the rebels had been storing in civilian areas. The New York Times finally published in December 2013 a detailed report that expressed doubts about its earlier conclusion that the 2013 “red line” gassing was carried out definitively by the Syrian military. False flag operations to goad America into war, it seems, can be successful.

After all the hundreds of thousands of innocents abroad killed by America and the human misery caused because of clever U.S. and foreign manipulations, one would think we might pause before attacking Syria and running the risk of killing Russians who are advising the Syrians. That could ignite an entirely new kind of war with a nuclear-armed Russia—all without congressional approval.

Obama, whose policies were predicated on the view that Assad must go, seemed to think Syrians would live happily after in some magically sprouting democracy. To believe this one would have to ignore the prior examples of Iraq and Libya. Nor do these war party advocates seem in the least concerned about the 10 percent of Syria’s population who are Christians, many of whom would surely by massacred after any overthrow of Assad.  

Further, the so-called Free Syrian Army is a hodgepodge of rebel groups that include many Islamist radicals. With funding from fundamentalist Saudis and Turkey, they took over from more liberal forces early on. It’s worth noting also that Turkey provided the black market for ISIS to sell Syria’s captured oil.

Going back a hundred years there were the clever British lies that helped coax America into joining the Allies in World War I. England controlled the trans-Atlantic cables and most of our “news” about the war. That intervention resulted in the Treaty of Versailles instead of a compromise peace between Germany and England/France that would have prevented the wreckage of Europe out of which came the rise of communism and Nazism.

For an analysis of the risks of accidental nuclear war, see my 2017 January Publisher’s Report, in which I once wrote about how Osama bin Laden’s ultimate aim was to get Russia and America to destroy each other. It still could happen, triggered by false atrocity stories, cable TV’s 24-hour hyping of any and every threat, and Washington’s propensity to believe lies—and sometimes perpetrate them—to promote wars.

Jon Basil Utley is publisher of The American Conservative.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-pretty-little-lies-b...

So how was this possible, is possible and will continue to be possible in the future? The answer is simple: our media has given up on reality. It's easier to suck arseholes than to dig for the truth. At the root of this, is advertising. It's not innocuous. Advertising is designed to make you buy stuff, including wars. And if you don't buy the war, you loose your comforts. That's the drill. That's the propaganda — including the "liberal" "free" press which supposed to be on the side of the left and the truth, but is still a mouthpiece for the warriors and cannon merchants.

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276.

Please note that using swear words shows a lack of respect (see macron, the deal-mother-fucker...). How can one respect Macron, May and Trump, and Blair and Howard and Bush, and Obama? and... the Clintons? Geez! And Trump!... They all should be in front of a war tribunal for damage to humanity. But they get a picture on the ABC with a note saying how sweet of them to show up for BB (Barbara Bush, not Brigitte Bardot)'s funereal. I spell it it this way because the show is surreal... See: the club of US war criminals... It's worse than a bad bad bad Greek tragedy.

We are at the mercy of bullshit and we beg for submission in order to be accepted. Pathetic... Read from top.