Politics

Submitted by Tom Engelhardt via TomDispatch.com,

There are the news stories that genuinely surprise you, and then there are the ones that you could write in your sleep before they happen. Let me concoct an example for you:

“Top American and European military leaders are weighing options to step up the fight against the Islamic State in the Mideast, including possibly sending more U.S. forces into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as Washington confirmed the second American combat casualty in Iraq in as many months.”

The FBI have announced that they were forced to hide up to 80,266 classified papers from the official 9/11 report which strongly implicates Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 terror attacks.  A former Republican member of the 9/11 Commission said that the report contains smoking gun evidence that the Saudi regime were involved in the orchestration of the September 11 attacks.

The Conservative government in the UK have begun the process of privatising the BBC, by abolishing its governing body the BBC Trust.  Britain’s state broadcaster is to suffer a Tory shakeup which will see the Trust being replaced with a ‘unitary board of governors’, half of which will be government officials. RT.com reports: The overhaul will make the BBC more “accountable to its listeners,” Culture Secretary John Whittingdale said in a statement. However, Shadow Culture Secretary Maria Eagle said the reforms could be seen as a way of exerting government control over the broadcaster.

Turkey have threatened to send migrants back to Europe if the EU Parliament don’t grant visa-free travel to Turkish citizens.  The Erdogan regime issued a stern warning to EU officials, saying that “The European Parliament will discuss the report that will open up visa-free travel in Europe to Turkish citizens.

Russia have accused America of risking nuclear war by installing a long-awaited missile defense system in Europe.  Moscow have said that the American-built system put Russia’s security in danger, suggesting that the country hosting the system, Romania, could be reduced to “smoking ruins” as a result. Nytimes.com reports: “We have been saying right from when this story started that our experts are convinced that the deployment of the ABM system poses a certain threat to the Russian Federation,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters in a conference call.