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Wednesday, 26 July

23:42

MSNBC leftist calls for post 9/11 style crackdown to prevent Americans becoming too patriotic "IndyWatch Feed World"

"A lot of Americans are up for grabs." A talking head on MSNBC has called for a post 9/11 style government crackdown as a means of winning "a battle for hearts and minds" of Americans who might turn against the leftist mindset and become overly patriotic. Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and Righteous Media compared the "threat" of such a scenario to the "number one threat" after 9/11, effectively suggesting conservatives and Trump supporters are akin to terrorists.

21:55

The War Crimes That Assange and WikiLeaks Exposed "IndyWatch Feed Economics"

The War Crimes That Assange and WikiLeaks Exposed

In 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided WikiLeaks with documents containing evidence of U.S. war crimes. They included the Iraq War Logs, which were 400,000 field reports describing 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, as well as systematic rape, torture and murder after U.S. forces handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad. They contained the Afghan War Diary, 90,000 reports of more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported. And they also included the Guantnamo Files 779 secret reports with evidence that 150 innocent people had been held at Guantnamo Bay for years, and 800 men and boys had been tortured and abused, which violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Manning also furnished WikiLeaks with the notorious 2007 Collateral Murder Video, which shows a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter targeting and killing 11 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists, as well as a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. The video reveals evidence of three violations of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.

This is the first time a publisher has been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for disclosing government secrets. In December 2022, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pas and Der Spiegel signed a joint open letter calling on the U.S. government to dismiss the Espionage Act charges against Assange for publishing classified military and diplomatic secrets. Publishing is not a crime, the letter says. This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine Americas First Amendment and the freedom of the press.

[If the media had made this argument years ago and stayed on it before the government set the official narrative in stone, Assange would be a free man giving us more truth in place of government lies. But the media totally failed in its responsibility to protect the 1st Amendment.]

https://truthout.org/articles/julian-assange-is-dangerously-close-to-extradition-for-revealing-us-war-crimes/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=75553d1810-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_3_20_2023_13_41_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-75553d1810-650280965&mc_cid=75553d1810&mc_eid=5071cc8f81

20:31

The International in Support the Troops "IndyWatch Feed War"

The second commentary in our ongoing symposium on Katharine Millars Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community. Pinar Bilgin is a professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara. She is the author of The International in Security, Security in the International (Routledge, 2016) and Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, 2^nd ed. (Routledge, 2019). www.pinarbilgin.me

Support has emerged as the new service following a moment of disconnect with the troops in the UK and the US, we learn from Kate Millars book, Support the Troops. How about other parts of the world that apparently experienced no such disconnect? Support the Troops makes no claim to explain what happens outside the US and UK cases. But I wonder if, by missing aspects of the international, were missing a part of the condition of possibility of all this? In what follows, I will consider the international that has allowed for support to emerge as the new service in some parts of the world, even as others continue to serve and support in some other parts of the world.

Millar acknowledges that StT discoursesalmost uniformlyfail to engage with the international in that Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan civilians killed by the wars are rarely mentioned (175). But then, inter-state wars do not exhaust the international. The author also considers the colonial background. These states the US, UK, and others with pervasive support the troops practices, notably Canada and Australiaare also unified by their status as colonial states, she notes (177). Indeed, following Tarak Barkawis argument in Soldiers of Empire, colonial military relations have shaped post-colonial military relations. Yet again, post-/colonial relations do not exhaust the international.

The international in Support the Troops can also be located in post-World War II relations between Europe and non-Europe. When I write Europe, I refer to Western Europe and North America as the geographies that are put at the centre by those who are carriers of this particular w...

10:15

Authoritarian Sadism in U.S. Foreign Policy "IndyWatch Feed War"

Freudian depth-psychology remains an under-utilized tool in interpreting motivation and personality of recent American leaders who have chosen to deploy massively destructive military force on large civilian populations in places like Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan. A president may deny (or repress) his own destructive hostility, projecting it onto the other. Splitting-and-projection readily enables a clear definition of an enemy nation, whose population as a whole may have to endure collateral damage. As psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has elucidated, in extreme situations (such as the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks), both leaders and followers may regress to such splitting mechanisms: we are all-good, blamelessand they, as one war president claimed, maliciously hate our freedom. Such group-regression, Volkan noted, occurs when the citizenry of a nation abandon mature, inductive rationality and succumb to such dangerously over-simplified, defensive emotional states.¹

Here I am focusing on the urge for, and exercise of, power-over as a manifestation of compensatory narcissism (a term I prefer, in this essay, to Volkans reparative narcissism). As to sadism, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm perceptively described the dominance-submission psychology of the authoritarian personality: the world is composed of people with power and those without it. The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to attack, dominate, and humiliate him.² Those individuals who single-mindedly attain such power-over may then successfully compensate for the childhood trauma of feeling insecure, under-valued or humiliated.³ Concurrently, the unconscious desire for revenge may be satisfied through displacement...

Tuesday, 25 July

21:49

Cover up: The Australian Governments Secret List of U.S. Bases "IndyWatch Feed War"

By Richard Tanter, Pearls and Irritations, July25, 2023

What do the governments of other US allies, including Hungary, Norway, the Philippines, and the former puppet government of Afghanistan, possess that Australian governments do not? The answer is a conception of genuine sovereignty, and obligations to transparency that are foreign to Australian governments, particularly the incumbent Albanese government.

In November 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and President Barack Obama announced plans for annual deployment of a US Marine Rotational Force to Darwin and US Air Force aircraft to Australian bases in the Northern Territory, commencing in April 2012.

The United States Australia Force Posture Agreement signed on 12 August 2014 formalised a much larger strategic upgrade of alliance arrangements initiated by the two leaders. Over the past decade both governments have made very large budgetary commitments to infrastructure developments at Australian defence facilities in northern Australia under various headings, including the Australian Defence Departments continually evolving United States Force Posture Initiative.

A key feature of the Force Posture Agreement is the concept of Agreed Facilities and Areas, defined in Article I of the Agreement as follows:

Agreed Facilities and Areas means the facilities and areas in the territory of Australia provided by Australia which may be listed in Annex A appended to this Agreement, and such other facilities and areas in the territory of Australia as may be provided by Australia in the future, to which United States Forces, United States Contractors, dependants, and other United States Government personnel as mutually agreed, shall have the right to access and use pursuant to this Agreement.

Yet, in the nine...

21:03

Nigel Farage: UK Muslim charities criticise lack of interest in their bank account closures "IndyWatch Feed War"

Nigel Farage: UK Muslim charities criticise lack of interest in their bank account closures

Islamic faith-based charities have long faced arbitrary bank closures, which they say hampers efforts in providing aid, but receives little media coverage

Nadda Osman Tue, 07/25/2023 - 12:03

Afghan women sit next to food aid distributed by a charity foundation during the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan in Kandahar on March 28, 2023 (AFP)

Afghan women sit next to food aid distributed by a charity foundation during the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan in Kandahar on 28 March 2023 (AFP)

Muslim faith-based charities in the UK are calling out the double standard when it comes to their bank accounts being closed, in the wake of the ongoing media furore over the closure of Nigel Farage's Coutts bank account.

Earlier this month, the closure of the former UK Independence Party leader's bank account was widely covered in the media, with the high net-worth private bank Coutts apologising to the Brexit campaigner for closing his account over his views that the bank said did not "align" with its values.

On Monday the BBC and its business correspondent Simon Jack also apologised to Farage after reporting that his account was closed for financial, not political, reasons, and correcting those reports.

However, k...

18:00

America welcomed this refugee who fled the Taliban; now hes a founding CEO opening doors for job seekers facing adversity "IndyWatch Feed World"

The third in a series examining how professional gatekeepers can change the careers of those without traditional connections. Cyrus Jaffery, a former Afghan refugee faced a string of professional rejections until his future father in law Tom Rivera saw his potential.

This article is the third in a series about gatekeepers in the professional world taking a chance on those with non-traditional backgrounds. Read the full series here.

Read Full Story

14:09

Link "IndyWatch Feed World"

COMMENT: Mr. Armstrong, At first, I questioned why you were more pro-Putin than the media. But given your reliable forecasting and being renowned for your sources, I kept an open mind. Whilst it is becoming clear that Putin has been going after the people who wanted to nuke and totally invade Ukraine, the media seems to overlook that agenda of invading all of Ukraine. Yevgeny Prigozhin disagreed with Putin on only protecting the Donbas. Igor Girkin, who advocated the invasion of Ukraine, was also arrested. The press even tried to pretend that Chinas Xi warned Putin not to use nuclear arms in Ukraine when he was against it. Putin did tell the leader of Chentna that a nuclear on Kyiv was off the table. I can see what you have been pointing out. Putin has been the moderate.

Now the British press is admitting that Ukraine is a disaster. The WSJ also just came out and said the United States knew Ukraine was not up to this offensive. I must say, you and your sources are better than anyone out there. Your comments that you had dinner at Trumps place when he was president and wanted to exit Afghanistan because he was anti-war were very interesting. You actually have the contacts, not conspiracy theories.

I just wanted to say that now I value your comments more than anyone else.

Keep up the good fight. I hope Scotty does not beam you up just yet.

Paul

REPLY: Thank you. My sources are renowned because they all share the same passion for truth. We all work together, sharing information that is off the grid so-to-speak. We all understand how we are being manipulated by the media, which I am so disappointed in for not being independent. The mainstream media was supposed to protect our liberty not sell it to the highest bidder. News to them has become opinion not fact.

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