Turdshitt has his military hat and flak-jacket on... We are still training forces that have been unable to fight for themselves for the last 15 years... You're joking? (Nupe... Some of them have defected to Daesh as well...). Do you realise that since 9/11, Australia has been at war NON-STOP? Sure, it's piddley stuff compared to the WWII and the WWI, but this make us rather stupid like an extra handle on a wheelbarrow. Long-term? War made in America, with no end in sight. If it's not the Syrians, it's the North Koreans, then it will be the Chinese and possibly the Russians -- god's willing. 

Get a life, Malcolm. Go away and don't come back.

Malcolm Turnbull has long been a conservative, consistently overrated, and a man lacking loyalty, judgement and political nous, writes Ingrid Matthews.

In what has become a regular feature of the Australian mediascape, the obituaries for Malcolm "moderate" Turnbull flowed thick and fast last week.

As always, they came more in sorrow than in anger. Such a waste. So much potential. The disappointment. In the laziest cliché of Australian political commentary: the Prime Minister was – again – solemnly declared to be a captive of the conservative right. As though the Liberal Party is not an old boys club of conservative private school Burkeans to its bones.

The consensus narrative – again – is that the great white hope is lost. Multiple commentators signalled that they would not return to play the revival game on his behalf. But while it is de rigueur to proclaim Turnbull a once great man fallen on unpopular times, the trademarks of Turnbullism have been around as long as he has — and certainly from day one of his prime ministership.

This is not to imply that anyone missed the barking-not-whistling racism that Turnbull and Dutton trotted out last week, with their tired old rhetoric on migration, visas and citizenship. Those columns must write themselves, so compacted is the ground they cover. But the white-knight posturing to the women’s vote was largely overlooked, even though it is at least as prevalent and enduring as other forms of conservative bigotry.

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/alas-poor-mal...

See also: 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30824

The United States government is the world leader in purveying false flags and propaganda stunts. Or, more generally, downright, systematic lies. To justify the outrageous violation of international law, wars and aggression.

Current president and Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump, is himself the object of fraudulent US intelligence, accused of "collusion with Russian agents." In a rare admission, the Washington Times this week described the US intel dossier against Trump as "riddled with fiction."

Yet, ironically, Trump, in turn, serves as a shameless conduit for US propaganda to fuel conflict with Syria and North Korea.

In the latter case, a world war could break out at any moment as a result of insane American goading. The dispatch of a US nuclear-powered submarine to the Korean Peninsula this week is just another reckless provocation by Trump.

On Syria, the Trump administration has slapped on more economic sanctions over an alleged chemical weapons incident earlier this month. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the "sweeping sanctions" were because of "Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad's horrific chemical weapons attack on innocent men, women and children."

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said the latest US sanctions were "unfounded" since there is no proof that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in Idlib Province on April 4.

Indeed, several respected international authorities, such as American professor Theodore Postol, a weapons expert at MIT, have dismissed official US claims about the chemical incident. The only "proof" provided by the US government and Western media are videos of alleged victims. That is, videos supplied by al Qaeda-linked terrorists and their media agents known as the White Helmets. This terror nexus is a creation of US, British and French military intelligence, financed with Saudi and Qatari money.

Thus, the April 4 chemical incident in Idlib was plausibly a "false flag" staged by Western-sponsored terrorist proxies to elicit American military attack on Syria. In other words, innocent people, including children, were murdered with lethal chemicals, and the whole macabre spectacle videoed for dissemination by the Western news media. It would not be the first time. The August 2013 "chemical weapons" incident near Damascus was probably also another macabre set-up by the terror groups.

So, here we have an American president citing a false flag orchestrated by his own intelligence agencies to justify his subsequent order for a missile strike on Syria on April 7. And now we see the US government slapping punitive sanctions on Syria as a further warped response.

Of huge significance is the fact that the US, Britain and France have blocked Russian, Iranian and Syrian demands for an impartial on-site investigation to be carried out in the town of Khan Shaykhun where the chemical incident allegedly happened. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pointed out, the Western powers do not want to find out what really happened because that would interfere with their agenda for regime change in Syria.

By way of shoring up the false narrative on Syria, this week US media carried"reports" alleging that North Korea has been supplying the Syrian government with chemical weapons technology. As usual, no verifiable evidence is presented, just more bombastic assertions and concocted claims.

But we can see where this is going. US intelligence, mouthed by its president and controlled media, are laying down dots to entice the Western public to join up with false logic and prejudice, all so that the US authorities can give themselves a legal, moral mandate to justify aggression. Conveniently, the contrived North Korea-Syria connection allows for two birds to be hit with one stone.

The pattern of deception here by the US government, aided and abetted by propagandizing "news services," is classic modus operandi. Time and again, down through history, the US ruling class have used false flags, distortion and outright lies to promote their hegemonic desires of inciting war, conflict and aggression.

For a country like the United States, which has been waging war on other foreign nations for over 95 per cent of its history since its foundation as a modern state in 1776, it only stands to reason that such an astounding record of belligerence, decade-after-decade, must inevitably require a concomitant warmongering propaganda system in order to make it all possible.

We could mention, for example, the deliberate sinking of one of its own warships, the USS Maine, in Havana Harbor in 1898, which was used to instigate the Spanish-American War. That war was key to the US emerging as an imperial power in the Western Hemisphere.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201704251052983749-the-united-states-...

"Foolish Western attempts" to reshape the Middle East have brought nothing but "waves of chaos and violence", the Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service director said.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The Middle East has fallen hostage to a Western geopolitical game, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergei Naryshkin said at the VI Moscow Conference on International Security on Thursday.

"This region has never been stable, but it has recently become a hostage to someone else's geopolitical game. Foolish Western attempts to reshape the particularities of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Iran based on their own templates have not led to anything but waves of chaos and violence," Naryshkin said.

Hopes for improved anti-terrorism cooperation between countries are not yet coming true, Naryshkin said.

"Many believed that common sense would finally prevail and the countries would together, on the basis of mutual respect and trust, move toward resolving regional conflicts and seek answers to such challenges as international terrorism. These hopes are not yet met," he said.

Afghanistan is in a state of political and social turmoil, with government forces fighting the continuing Taliban insurgency. The instability has persisted in the country since the 2001 US-led invasion to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the wake of the 9/11 attacksin the United States.

The lack of control and instability turned the country into home to the largest opium poppy production and distribution network in the world.

The US deployment of a mass ordnance bomb in Afghanistan is an example of Washington's uncoordinated show of force, Naryshkin said.

"Everything we are witnessing is a fact of a show of force not coordinated with anyone, like the explosion of a heavy-duty bomb in Afghanistan," he said.

Libya has been in a state of turmoil since 2011, when a civil war broke out in the country and long-standing leader Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, and the country was contested by two rival governments: the internationally-recognized Council of Deputies based in Tobruk and the Tripoli-based General National Congress.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201704271053051490-west-middle-east-c...

Donald Trump’s election strategy relied to a degree on the image of an anti-establishment billionaire who could fix a broken DC. Instead, his actions in office have been aligned with the policies of the same special interests he used to speak out against.

Some of Trump’s critics say he was dishonest from the start. Others, like Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, believe he has been "broken" by the US establishment, which would not tolerate a president that wanted to improve relations with Moscow or stop America’s perpetual wars.

Either way, the 45th US president has proven himself consistently inconsistent during his first 100 days in office. Here are some of the issues Trump has done a 180 flip-flop on since taking the Oval Office.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/386537-trump-100-days-president-promises/

President Donald Trump kicked off his presidency with two alarming phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia—longtime allies of the United States—in which he threatened to invade Mexico unless the country acted to stop the “bad hombres down there” and accused Australia of sending the “next Boston bombers” to the United States. The confrontations immediately deepened anxieties over how the president conducts himself with world leaders and carries out foreign policy.

Nearly four months after some details of the calls were first reported, the Washington Post on Thursday obtained the full transcripts of both conversations, with Trump emerging even more unhinged in his interactions with the two leaders than previously known. The transcripts also reveal the president to be obsessed with the public perception of his policies, all but ignoring the actual substance of them.

Here are some of the key moments:

Trump pressuring Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to stop publicly saying Mexico wouldn’t pay for a border wall:

“You cannot say that to the press. The press is going to go with that, and I cannot live with that.”

Trump called the border wall “the least important thing we are talking about, but politically this might be the most important.”

“On the wall, you and I both have a political problem. My people stand up and say, ‘Mexico will pay for the wall,’ and your people probably say something in a similar but slightly different language.”

 “I have to have Mexico pay for the wall—I have to. I have been talking about it for a two-year period.”

Trump arguing with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee agreement:

“This is going to kill me. I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country. It makes me look so bad and I have only been here a week.”

“Does anybody know who these people are? Who are they? Where do they come from? Are they going to become the Boston bomber in five years?”

“I hate taking these people. I guarantee you they are bad. That is why they are in prison right now. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.”

Trump threatening tariffs on Mexico over drug-trafficking:

“We have a massive drug problem where kids are becoming addicted to drugs because the drugs are being sold for less money than candy. I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den.”

Trump ending his call with Turnbull by praising Vladimir Putin:

 “Putin was a pleasant call. This is ridiculous.”

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/trumps-calls-with-world-leaders-were-way-more-bonkers-than-previously-reported/

See image at top...

There is also a fascinating peep behind the curtain of his own personality.

Trump presents only one way to the world – as master of the universe – as a person so entirely ego-driven and unreflective that he would push another world leader out of the way to be at the front of the pack for the television cameras.

But in this conversation we see another person – a human being in fact, not a brand – an outsider upstart who has just won an election against the odds, and with a clear sense that the whole caper may slip from his grasp, or that so-called friends such as Australia might create problems he doesn’t need.

Listening in on this conversation pitches us into that Wizard of Oz moment when Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals the ordinary middle-aged man pulling the levers on the oversized character of his own creation.

Trump whines to Turnbull that he really doesn’t need this stinker of a refugee swap deal. Why is this so important, he asks Turnbull. “I do not understand. This is going to kill me.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/aug/04/turnbulls-call-wi...

About a week after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States, he had a phone conversation with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. The call focused on the deal earlier done with the Obama administration, under which the US would take a number of refugees currently held in Australian offshore detention centres on Papua New Guinea’s Manus island and Nauru, and Australia would receive a corresponding number of people the US wanted to resettle elsewhere.

At the time the deal was disclosed, its terms were very vague. In particular, no numbers were given: no one could tell just how many people from Nauru or Manus would be resettled in the US.

The transcript of the phone call, released by the Washington Post, discloses several uncomfortable things. Firstly, the number to be resettled in the US is entirely up to them (according to Turnbull). More fundamentally, Turnbull’s discussion with Trump is troubling because it shows that Turnbull has so little understanding of refugee issues and so little concern for the Christian faith he claims to follow.

Trump was obviously confused about the number of refugees covered by the deal. Turnbull made it clear that the US could, if they wished, take none at all. He said:

“…The obligation is for the United States to look and examine and take up to and only if they so choose – 1,250 to 2,000. Every individual is subject to your vetting. You can decide to take them or to not take them after vetting. You can decide to take 1,000 or 100. It is entirely up to you. The obligation is to only go through the process….”

So, Turnbull told the president of the United States that all the deal required was that the Americans go through the vetting process, and if eventually they took no refugees at all, that would be consistent with the deal. Of course, it was not consistent with the way the deal had been described to Australians when it was first made public. In November 2016, Turnbull refused to say how many people would be resettled under the deal, but gave the impression that America was committed to taking a non-trivial number.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/05/the-leaked-transcr...

The “absolutely horrific” leak of Donald Trump’s contentious 2017 phone call with Malcolm Turnbull could lead to criminal charges.

Devin Nunes, the highest-ranking Republican member on the US House of Representatives intelligence committee, announced on Sunday he was sending eight criminal referrals to the US attorney general, William Barr.

One is aimed at finding out who leaked transcripts of the US president’s phone call with Turnbull on 28 January 2017, a call with the then Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with a Russian ambassador.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/08/leak-of-call-between-don...

Read from top.

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33064

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33052