Russia unknowingly bombed secret US base in Syria

When Russian aircraft bombed a remote garrison in southeastern Syria last month, alarm bells sounded at the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense in London.
The Russians weren’t bombarding a run-of-the-mill rebel outpost, according to U.S. officials. Their target was a secret base of operations for elite American and British forces. In fact, a contingent of about 20 British special forces had pulled out of the garrison 24 hours earlier. British officials declined to comment.
The risk that U.S. and British forces could have been killed at the border garrison hardened opposition at the Pentagon and the CIA to accommodating the Russians. But White House and State Department officials, wary of an escalation in U.S. military involvement in Syria, decided to pursue a compromise.

Bring Tony Blair to Justice

Families of British troops killed in Iraq have raised more than £80,000 in less than two days after launching a public appeal to fund legal action against Tony Blair.
More than 3,000 people dipped into their pockets after the Daily Mail announced that bereaved relatives were building a fighting fund to ‘hold to account’ the former Prime Minister.
Loved ones believe Mr Blair committed ‘misfeasance in public office’ by misleading Parliament to justify the disastrous 2003 war, which cost the lives of 179 UK servicemen and women.

Iraq milestone

In August, 2014, the US-led “coalition” began bombing Iraq and Syria to, in the words of President Obama, “degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIS.” For nearly two years – despite President Obama announcing last November that ISIS was “contained” – the bombing has continued unabated.
A milestone was reached this month, however, as the US coalition dropped its 50,000th bomb against Iraq and Syria. With each bomb costing on average somewhere around $50,000, those bombs have cost US (for the most part) taxpayers at least two and a half billion dollars. Factor in the cost of keeping the bombers in the air, the cost of training the pilots, maintenance, etc. and the cost skyrockets upward from there.
In fact, as of February of this year, the US “war on ISIS” has cost more than $6 billion, to the boundless delight of the Beltway defense contractors.

Libya's government condemns France

Libya's UN-backed government has reacted strongly following France's confirmation that its special forces have been operating in the country, which also sparked angry protests in the capital Tripoli against French military intervention.
The French government announced on Wednesday that three of its soldiers had been killed in a helicopter crash in eastern Libya during an intelligence-gathering operation - the first time Paris acknowledged its presence in the oil-rich country.
In a strongly worded statement late on Wednesday, the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) said that it had asked France to explain the presence of its forces in the country.
At the centre of the controversy is General Khalifa Haftar, an opponent of the UN-backed government who leads a large army fighting armed groups in eastern Libya.
If it is proved that the French government is backing him, then tensions could escalate amid increasing questions about the western role in Libya.

US War In Afghanistan Is Fueling Global Heroin Epidemic

The “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” are more intertwined than that media and our elected officials would like us to think.
And this became full front and center when the U.S.-led global crusades overlapped in Afghanistan, leaving in their wake a legacy of death, addiction and government corruption tainting Afghan and American soil.
In the U.S., the War in Afghanistan is among the major contributing factors to the country’s devastating heroin epidemic.
Over 10,000 people in America died of heroin-related overdoses in 2014 alone– an epidemic fuelled partly by the low cost and availability of one of the world’s most addictive, and most deadly, drugs....
Prior to the War in Afghanistan, the Taliban actually offered subsidies to farmers to grow food crops not drugs.
In the summer of 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar announced a total ban on the cultivation of opium poppy, the plant from which heroin is made. Those caught planting poppies in Taliban-controlled parts of the country were beaten and marched through villages with motor oil on their faces.
The only opium harvest the following spring was in the northeast, in an area controlled by the Taliban’s rivals, the Northern Alliance. That year, as Matthieu Aikins reported for Rolling Stone in 2012, “Opium production fell from an estimated 3,276 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.”
But then 9/11 hit and the Bush administration pushed into Afghanistan once again, carrying the banner of the “War on Terror.”
“When the Taliban fled or went into hiding, the farmers lost their financial support to grow food, and returned to growing heroin, a crop that thrives in regions of Afghanistan,” as Dr. Steven Kassels noted in a 2015 piece for Social Justice Solutions.
Seeking a “light footprint” in Afghanistan, the U.S. and our allies teamed up with what Aikins describes as “anti-Taliban warlords.” Aikins reported: “Within six months of the U.S. invasion, the warlords we backed were running the opium trade, and the spring of 2002 saw a bumper harvest of 3,400 tons.”
That’s right: The War in Afghanistan saw the country’s practically dead opium industry expanded dramatically. By 2014, Afghanistan was producing twice as much opium as it did in 2000. By 2015, Afghanistan was the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium....
Between 2002 and 2013, heroin-related overdose deaths quadrupled. In 2014, more than 10,000 people died of heroin overdoses in America.