On Friday, August 10th, CNN headlined “Saudi-led strike kills dozens of children on school field trip in Yemen” and reported as if the United States doesn’t have any important role to play in targeting and supplying the bombs and missiles for what the news-report refers to as “the Saudi-led coalition.” It even says at 0:15 in the video, “Saudi Arabia, through air strikes, leads the coalition, including the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and Sudan” and doesn’t even mention there the main party, other than the royal Saud family — the U.S. Government itself — which provides not only detailed authorization of each target but also the weapons and the training on how they’re used. The accompanying printed CNN news-article says nothing at all about the U.S. Government’s involvement until the very end of the article, where a U.S. propagandist is quoted:

After the strike, the United States, which largely supports the coalition’s campaign, issued a statement.

“US military support to our partners mitigates noncombatant casualties,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Rebecca Rebarich, according to the statement.

“Our support to the coalition consists of aerial refueling and intelligence support to assist our partners in securing their borders from cross-border attacks from the Houthis. Our noncombat support focuses on improving coalition processes and procedures, especially regarding compliance with the law of armed conflict and best practices for reducing the risk of civilian casualties,” the statement said.

Here are more photos and videos of the air-strike’s victims, as posted to twitter by opponents of the Saudi, and UAE, and American dictatorships.

The CNN report alleges that the war in Yemen is between “the internationally recognized government in Yemen and against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.”

However, on 3 February 2018 the Washington Post had headlined “Yemen’s war is so out of control, allies are turning on one another” and reported by burying, within their article, clear evidence that that from CNN is a rabidly deceptive representation of the reality — a lie. Here are the relevant excerpts:

The three-year-old Yemen conflict has largely been cast as a war that pits an internationally recognized government against Iranian-backed rebels who ousted it. … Said April Longley Alley, a senior Yemen analyst for the International Crisis Group, “The narrative of a ‘legitimate government’ fighting the ‘Iranian-backed Houthis’ obscures a complex local reality, and it hinders efforts to achieve peace.” … 

[The Sauds’ chosen leader of Yemen] Hadi … has presided mostly from the Saudi capital, Riyadh. …

Alley added, … “Now what we see is the UAE and [Saudi Arabia] scrambling to paper over differences between the two so that they can maintain, at least while the war with the Houthis continues, the myth of a unified front under an internationally recognized government.” …

“The Emirates [the 7 Emirs who collectively own UAE] has ambitions in the south, and one of its most important ambitions is [grabbing] the port of Aden,” said Hassan Aljalal, a Yemeni journalist. …

Hesham Alghannam, a Saudi researcher at the University of Exeter, said … “where did the money go?” … The coalition, he added, also needed to put more pressure on the government to “deliver for the people.”

That Washington Post article mentioned nothing, at all, about the U.S. Government’s role invading Yemen.

The owner of the Washington Post is Jeff Bezos, who also is the main owner of Amazon, whose web services division is the supplier of cloud computing services for the U.S. federal Government, which division — serving the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc., instead of consumers — is the only consistently profitable division of Amazon, and thus the key to Bezos’s having a net worth that’s already approximately 10% as large as is the Saudi King’s net worth. In the United States, conflict-of-interest laws don’t pertain to the ‘news’media. However, a landmark 26 June 2017 ruling by the state of California’s Supreme Court, in the case of People v. Superior Court (Sahlolbei), could lead to a transformation of America into a democracy (which it isn’t currently), and that would mean ending the U.S. empire, including NATO, which has no democratic but only an imperial reason for existing after the end in 1991 of the Soviet Union and of its communism and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance mirroring America’s NATO military alliance.

CNN’s news-report on the Yemeni schoolbus-bombing closes:

US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the United States did not have the “full details of what happened on the ground” but said “we’re concerned about these reports.”

“We call on the Saudi-led coalition to conduct … an investigation,” Nauert said.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani wasn’t mincing words as he directly called the Mueller special investigation a massive hoax:

“What do [sic] we need to know, that this is a totally illegitimate investigation, based on a report, a ‘dossier’, that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats; probably the biggest illegality so far, the biggest collusion so far… completely made up… led to nothing except several fraudulent FISA wires, and now we have Mueller, who doesn’t seem to care that he is sitting on top of a totally illegitimate investigation.”

This segment is interesting theatre, especially considering that Mr. Giuliani is acting as President Trump’s attorney on the Russiagate matter, and that he is going public about anything at all having to do with the investigation and its case, in full knowledge that anything he says publicly will be noted. Nevertheless, “America’s Mayor” made several very strong assertions:

• Mueller doesn’t need to ask a single question on obstruction; he has all the answers already and those answers are not going to change in a direct interview with President Trump.
• Mueller is trying to trap the President into perjury.
• The reason Mueller is trying to trap the President is simply because he does not have a case.
• According to Mr. Giuliani, the case will not fizzle; it is going to blow up on them
• This is because there is a lot more that they (meaning the Democrats) did, that no one knows yet.
• It will wind up with Mr. Mueller himself having a lot to answer for.

These and other points are included in Mr. Giuliani’s responses in his discussion with Sean Hannity.

The question that would logically arise with such a set of claims is “why would this investigation even be happening in the first place, if it is only guaranteed to lose?”

And this question is what gives lie to the massive conspiracy of the Deep State and various powerful figures such as Bill Browder, the neo-con establishment, and secular humanist liberals, all banded together to stop President Trump at any cost from changing America’s headlong plunge into the darkness of the soft tyranny of modern-day liberalism. Russia stands as the one great power in the world that declares with great strength that this group of people is wrong, and therefore, Russia, and anyone who wishes to grant her legitimacy – must be stopped.

A speculative question that next arises is this:

What happens when President Trump gets vindicated?

There is a massive power play in motion here, and the stakes are much higher than anyone cares to admit.

A new Reuters report confirms that social media censorship is taking a chilling geopolitical effect, as Facebook has been revealed as a top donor to the Atlantic Council, alongside Western governments, Gulf autocratic regimes, NATO, various branches of the US military, and a number of major defense contractors and corporations.

In May Facebook announced that it was outsourcing much of its political “fact-checking” to the Atlantic Council, the PR arm of NATO, and more specifically, four individuals within the Atlantic Council will form a “Digital Forensic Lab (DFR Lab)” so as to help the billion dollar tech giant spot those pesky Russian election meddling trolls…because God knows, Facebook simply does not have the money or know-how to hire its own team of “fact checkers”, something that a publisher platform of Facebook’s size would naturally do in house as it formulates its editorial position.

The team of four total individuals running the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR Lab) will be lead by a former National Security Council advisor for the last four years of the Obama administration, Graham Brookie, who is also its founder.

RT CrossTalk host Peter Lavelle and The Duran’s Alex Christoforou examine the dangerous partnership between the NATO military alliance and Facebook.

Remember to Please Subscribe to The Duran’s YouTube Channel.

Zerohedge reports…

This is not at all comforting: during a week that’s witnessed Alex Jones’ social media accounts taken down by Facebook, Apple, Spotify and Google, and what appears to be a growing crackdown against alternative media figures including several prominent Libertarians, notably the Ron Paul Institute director, and the Scott Horton Show, who found their Twitter accounts suspended — we learn that the Atlantic Council is directly advising Facebook on identifying and removing “foreign interference” on the popular platform. 

While the initiative was initially revealed last May through an official Facebook media release, more details of the controversial think tank’s role have been revealed.

Supposedly the whole partnership is aimed at bringing more objectivity and neutrality to the process of rooting out fake accounts that pose the threat of being operated by nefarious foreign states.

Apparently the four person NATO team advising Facebook on flagging “propaganda” has already pushed Facebook into taking action against over two dozen “suspicious pages” flagged potential foreign actors such as Russia.

Reuters reports…

Facebook is using the group to enhance its investigations of foreign interference. Last week, the company said it took down 32 suspicious pages and accounts that purported to be run by leftists and minority activists. While some U.S. officials said they were likely the work of Russian agents, Facebook said it did not know for sure.

Pages were removed even while Facebook, under its own admission stated “it did not know for sure” if the pages were the work of “Russian agents” (whatever that even means anymore).

The suspiciously simultaneous censorship of Infowars by Google, Apple, Facebook came just one week after U.S. Senate intelligence committee hawk Mark Warner (D) circulated this policy paper threatening new regulation against those same media companies: https://t.co/8kLI1GAedM pic.twitter.com/Qdo0frJbPJ

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 7, 2018

Via Zerohedge…

The Facebook-Atlantic Council alliance reportedly springs from the social media giant’s finding itself desperate for outside “neutral” help after a swell of public criticism, mostly issuing from congressional leaders and prominent media pundits, for supposedly allowing Russian propaganda accounts to operate ahead of the 2016 elections.

And in perhaps the most chilling line of the entire report, Reuters says, “But the lab and Atlantic Council bring geopolitical expertise and allow Facebook to distance itself from sensitive pronouncements.” This is ostensibly to defuse any potential conflict of interest arising as Facebook seems a bigger presence in emerging foreign markets.

Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos recently told reporters, “Companies like ours don’t have the necessary information to evaluate the relationship between political motivations that we infer about an adversary and the political goals of a nation-state.” He explained further that Facebook would collect suspicious digital evidence and submit it to “researchers and authorities”.

Since at least May when the relationship was first announced, the DFR Lab has been key to this process of verifying what constitutes foreign interference or nefarious state propaganda.

But here’s the kicker. Reuters writes of the DFR Lab’s funding in the following:

Facebook donated an undisclosed amount to the lab in May that was enough, said Graham Brookie, who runs the lab, to vault the company to the top of the Atlantic Council’s donor list, alongside the British government.

Facebook employees said privately over the past several months that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wants to outsource many of the most sensitive political decisions, leaving fact-checking to media groups and geopolitics to think tanks.

Facebook has defended the process as part of ensuring that it remains politically neutral, yet clearly the Atlantic Council itself is hardly neutral, as a quick perusal of its top donors indicates.

Among the DFR Labs partners include UK-based Bellingcat, which has in the past claimed “proof” that Assad gassed civilians based on analyzing YouTube videos and Google Earth. And top donors include various branches of the US military, Gulf sates like the UAE, and notably, NATO.

The Atlantic Council has frequently called for things like increased military engagement in Syria, militarily confronting the “Russian threat” in Eastern Europe, and now is advocating for Ukraine and Georgia to be allowed entry into NATO while calling for general territorial expansion of the Western military alliance.

Further it has advocated on behalf of one of its previous funders, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and gave a “Distinguished International Leadership” award to George W. Bush, to name but a few actions of the think tank that has been given authorization to flag citizens’ Facebook pages for possible foreign influence and propaganda.

Quite disturbingly, this is Mark Zuckerberg’s outside “geopolitical expertise” he’s been seeking