The leader of the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist group fighting in Syria, has pledged allegiance to the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani said the group's behaviour in Syria would not change as a result.

Al-Nusra claims to have carried out many suicide bombings and guerrilla attacks against state targets.

On Tuesday, al-Qaeda in Iraq announced a merger with al-Nusra, but Mr Jawlani said he had not been consulted on this.

Al-Nusra has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the US.

Debates among Western leaders over whether to arm Syria's rebels have often raised the concern of weapons ending up in the hands of groups such as al-Nusra.

"The sons of al-Nusra Front pledge allegiance to Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri," Mr Jawlani said in a recording released on Wednesday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22095099

This is of course slightly annoying to the west's effort to remove Assad...  

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Blowback: Assad reaps jihadis he sowed
Almost exactly 10 years ago, a senior American diplomat looked out of his office window in Damascus and watched Syrian secret policemen ...


We might be running out of places to shit in...

From Robert Mane

...

Burchett’s supporters include some of Australia’s more prominent left-wing journalists, academics and filmmakers, such as John Pilger, Phillip Knightley, Ben Kiernan, Gavan McCormack and David Bradbury. They regard Burchett as one of the most brilliant and independent 20th-century reporters, whose greatness is found in his unfailing humanity and, in McCormack’s words, “uncommon moral passion”, and in the courage it took to report world affairs during the Cold War from what is customarily called “the other side”. They regard Burchett’s famous report of the conditions in Hiroshima after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and his ten or more years of reporting the Vietnam War from behind communist lines as his greatest achievements. And they regard the fact that Burchett was stripped of his Australian passport by the Menzies government after the Korean War as one of the most shameful abuses of human rights in the history of Australia.

Burchett’s enemies include (or included) some of Australia’s most influential postwar anti-communist or conservative activists, journalists and intellectuals – BA Santamaria, Denis Warner, Frank Knopfelmacher and Peter Coleman, editor of Quadrant. In the 1980s I was associated with this group. We regarded Burchett as a lifelong communist propagandist, who shamed himself in particular by his defence of the Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe; by his work on the enemy side during the Korean War where his journalism was directed and paid for by the Chinese government, where he visited prisoner-of-war camps holding Australian soldiers under atrocious conditions and where he was involved in the process of producing forced confessions from captured US air pilots on trumped-up charges of germ warfare; by his support for the Soviet Army’s brutal crushing of the anti-communist Hungarian uprising of 1956; and by his breathless enthusiasm for Maoist China in general and for the Great Leap Forward in particular, in which, it is now estimated, up to 40 million Chinese starved to death. 

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At this point, a personal explanation is necessary. In 1985 I wrote an article in Quadrant on the anti-Burchett side of the debate. In 2008, I returned to the question of Burchett in this magazine. Despite my political movement towards the left since the end of the Cold War, my view of Burchett was largely unchanged. Except for one issue. Under the influence of Tibor Meray’s scepticism, I abandoned the earlier case about Burchett as a KGB agent. Although he was, I argued, undoubtedly in the pay of several communist regimes and had connections with their intelligence services, the description of him as a KGB agent – commonly understood to be someone enjoying a long-term, covert relationship under the direction of the Soviet intelligence service – was probably misleading. As it now turns out, on this matter I was wrong. My (false) concession did not, however, save me from the wrath of Burchett’s supporters. 

The new documentary evidence about Burchett’s relations with the KGB places these supporters in an awkward position. They might resume their attack on the messenger of unpleasant tidings. They might claim that the document in the Bukovsky archive is a forgery. They might assert that there is nothing untoward in being a paid agent of a secret police force responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. They might simply try to ignore the evidence that has been presented in this article. Or they might, instead, re-think their position on the Burchett question. 

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Gus: A simple explanation could be that Burchett was in need of money to barely survive and money from the KGB was welcome since he was not getting much from the "West"... As well, there aren't many ways anyone — especially a "Western" journalist — could be behind "enemy lines" without being shot... Beyond this, Burchett's reports showed the results of the Western allies in wars — including the atrocities committed on behalf of the West... Burchett may not have exposed the ruthlessness of the "other side" — the Communists or the Japanese — but this was done with regularity in the Western press. At no stage, Burchett was a spy, though he may have been seen as a propagandist. He was more into exposing the death and damages caused by Western forces... Japan's atomic bomb devastation and Vietnam's Agent Orange being two of the way the West played with dirty hands. Agent Orange is still a major problem in Vietnam, many years later...

Today, Japan shut its remaining nuclear power station "for maintenance" after the unfortunate accident of Fukushima was shown to be far more catastrophic than previously declared and which will have repercussions for thousands of years to come.  This is a real deal that is very difficult to avoid.

The point that Robert Mane is possibly missing here, is that Burchett gave the views from the other side whether we like them or not, seen from our high "moral" ground in which we were using nuclear weapons, chemicals weapons, phosphorus shells, depleted uranium shells and cluster bombs... 

And now we have narrowed the focus of war with murderous drones and list of people we wish to kill... with collateral damage that includes children nonetheless...

See article at top... Note that A B Santamaria was the pits of Christian bigotry... Santamaria tried to destroy the Labor Party in this country and was one of the inspirations for Tony Abbott. Rudd did a similar thing (with less zeal than Santamaria) in this last election...

A month after the bombings, two reporters defied MacArthur and struck out on their own. Weller, of the Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima.

Both men encountered nightmare worlds. Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: "In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague."

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: "Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world."

read more: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/08/hiroshima-cover

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Independent journalism is a far more reliable source of news than the mainstream media's biased coverage of events, with emerging sources of critical thinking banding together to keep the spirit alive, writes John Pilger.

THE DEATH OF ROBERT PARRY (see also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34622) earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was ‘a trailblazer for independent journalism’ according to Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.

Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia — Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad Government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

Driven from the mainstream, Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website, Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism’s veneration of ‘approved opinions’ while ‘unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality’.

Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent that was tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.

Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the wilful abandonment by the #MeToo zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign, and the suppression of a warning of world war.

With many, if not most, independent journalists barred or ejected from the mainstream, a corner of the internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis — true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org,

counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously, while political and economic life in the fearful “democracies” regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.

In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens — remarkable partly because its founders and editors, as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, The Guardian, Channel 4 News.

Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths.

The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.

I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media's power.

What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards is a former teacher, David Cromwell is an oceanographer. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism – a term rarely used; let's call it true objectivity – is a bracing quality of their online Media Lensdispatches.

I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just-published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do.

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/hold-the-fron...

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The total destruction of that city, and the instant incineration of 40,000 mostly civilian people, occurred just three days after the destruction of Hiroshima by a 15-kiloton uranium bomb, which instantly killed 70,000. This criminal one-two punch by the US launched the atomic age.

The bombings have always been presented to young Americans in school history texts, and to Americans in general by government propaganda, as having been “necessary” to end the war quickly and to avoid American ground troops having to battle their way through the Japanese archipelago. But later evidence – such as frantic efforts made in vain by the Japanese government to surrender through the Swiss embassy, and later reports that Japan’s real concern was not the destruction of its cities, but rather fear that Soviet forces, victorious in Europe, had joined the Pacific war and were advancing on Japan from the north and into Japanese-occupied Korea – has undermined that US mythology.

In fact, it would appear that President Truman and his war cabinet didn’t really want a Japanese surrender until the two bombs that the Manhattan Project had produced had been demonstrated on two Japanese cities. The target audience of those two mushroom clouds were not Japanese leaders in Tokyo, but rather Stalin and the Soviet government. 

At the war’s end, the US government was almost giddy, feeling that it had come out on top – its industry humming, its homeland unscathed, its military now built up and hardened by battle experience, and a super weapon that no other nation had in its arsenal. Germany and Japan were vanquished and it was felt that the Soviet Union, which had suffered heavy human and infrastructural damage during the war, was a good 10 years away from developing its own bomb. The Soviet spy network inside and around the Manhattan Project had not yet been discovered.

There was talk in the Pentagon and President Truman’s war room of taking advantage of America’s monopoly on nuclear weapons to attack the USSR and make sure it could never develop a bomb. In fact, there was talk of using atom bombs to destroy Russia as an industrial nation.

The problem, as physicists Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod wrote in a well-researched and documented book called ‘To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans’ (South End Press, 1987), was that Pentagon strategists felt 300 A-bombs would be required to destroy Russia, but as of December 1945, the US atomic stockpile was two bombs.

Production was painfully slow and even by 1948, there were only 50 bombs. But the pace of construction was accelerating and, by January 1949, there were 133 bombs. It was looking like there would be the needed 300 bombs to launch what was called “Operation Dropshot” – an all-out first-strike on 200 Soviet targets – by the end of the year.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/466173-nagasaki-nuclear-bomb-soviet/

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