@divineorder

Why did we bomb that hospital? Because ISIS fighters were shooting at coalition forces and it was legal to do so. We got to kill the people who we say we are protecting don't you know? This is how we will make their lives better. Or something.

U.S. warplanes bombed a hospital in the village of Al Shaafah late last month, killing patients and the families of medical personnel working there. The hospital was “reduced to only stones and a huge crater in the middle,” an ISIS fighter said in an interview.

Two senior U.S. diplomats with knowledge of the fight against ISIS who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity confirmed the airstrike on the hospital. One of them maintained that it was justified and legal. He said the ISIS soldiers were firing at coalition forces from the hospital, making it a legitimate target.

Remember Trump's campaign promise of killing ISIS and their families too? This is one promise that he has been keeping. The number of civilian deaths has gone up since Trump became president and he relaxed the rules against keeping civilian deaths down. I see we are still trying to win hearts and minds in our wars of terror.

Multiple sources have told us about recent airstrikes in eastern Syria that have killed the families of ISIS members, as well as a late-November bombing that killed Kurdish prisoners and dissidents being held by the group. In October 2017, when ISIS began to lose control of its de facto capital, Raqqa, multiple U.S. and British news organizations described the battle there as the group’s “last stand".

I can not begin to imagine what it has to be like living in countries where the USA doesn't think your life is worth anything. How can people make decisions about that and then just go on with their lives?

....

The increased intensity of the bombings belie claims by Trump and others that ISIS has been defeated or that the U.S. war in Syria, which has largely been carried out from the skies, is over. https://t.co/EuuJ49WbNC

— The Intercept (@theintercept) January 3, 2019

@dervish
of sticking in public discourse. Which the polls will reflect. Therefore, it is fake true. More are rejecting the fallacies presented by MSM. Which is good. The second line of offense is the googed social connect. Folks are starting to figure that one out too. Twit, Fbook, instant awareness comes with strings, as more are finding. Also, good.

ridiculous and unstable isotopes of crazy. The fact is though, that they are talking to themselves, and nobody is really paying attention like they used to. The MSM has minimal influence, and no amount of word salad from Haaretz, the NYT or WaPo is going to change that.

@gjohnsit Another hooker quits the brothel.

there was an anti-war reporter

A journalist with NBC has resigned from the network with a statement which highlights the immense resistance that ostensibly liberal mass media outlets have to antiwar narratives, skepticism of US military agendas, and any movement in the opposite direction of endless military expansionism.

“January 4 is my last day at NBC News and I’d like to say goodbye to my friends, hopefully not for good,” begins an email titled ‘My goodbye letter to NBC’ sent to various contacts by William M Arkin, an award-winning journalist who has been associated with the network for 30 years.
...
The lengthy email covers details about Arkin’s relationship with NBC and its staff, his opinions about the mainstream media’s refusal to adequately scrutinize and criticize the US war machine’s spectacular failures in the Middle East, how he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years”, the fact that his position as a civilian military analyst was unusual and “peculiar” in a media environment where that role is normally dominated by “THE GENERALS and former government officials,” and how he was “one of the few to report that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq” and remembers “fondly presenting that conclusion to an incredulous NBC editorial board.”

“A scholar at heart, I also found myself an often lone voice that was anti-nuclear and even anti-military, anti-military for me meaning opinionated but also highly knowledgeable, somewhat akin to a movie critic, loving my subject but also not shy about making judgements regarding the flops and the losers,” he writes.

Arkin makes clear that NBC is in no way the sole mass media offender in its refusal to question or criticize the normalization of endless warfare, but that he feels increasingly “out of sync” and “out of step” with the network’s unhesitating advancement of military interventionist narratives.

“I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?”

@dance you monster but they're doing the heavy lifting for Bibi, these pro-war positions come straight from him.

First, we're supposed to assume a law professor and a philosophy professor, both American, are the authorities to believe when it comes to discussing Syria. But let's look at what they wrote:

To begin with the endorsement by the self-styled progressives: It is simply fatuous to characterize a rump force of 2,000 American soldiers and advisors as an imperial "outpost."

Actually an outpost is exactly what such a small force is called. A big force is called Headquarters or just The Army.

Let's keep going:

But what all should be able to agree on are these three facts:

First, that the U.S. withdrawal will sharpen the religious civil war between the de facto Turkish and ISIS-backed Sunni, and the Iranian and Hezbollah-backed Shia, that is still underway in the Middle East.

Ah, so it's America's place in this world to separate Sunnis and Shi'ites anywhere in the world where we weren't invited? Let me look that up in the Constitution.

Second, that the same withdrawal will force the Kurds to seek protection from the Shia side in that conflict, or perish. (Indeed they are already reaching out to Syria’s Assad.)

So were the Kurds supposed to embrace the Sunnis? Or convert to Christianity? Who decides that? The Syrian Kurds chose the Shi'a, partly perhaps because they are Shi'a themselves. Should they not have a voice in this?

And third, that a U.S. withdrawal will not bring a "return to the international rule of law," as some progressives now proclaim. Removing the American tripwire will not induce a Turkish, Russian, Iranian, ISIS and Hezbollah withdrawal from Syria.

Partly true: it won't bring everyone on earth into compliance with international law (though as I recall Russia was not in violation of that in Syria). But it does bring the U.S. one step closer to that. Were we supposed to remain outlaws? Let me look that up in the Constitution, too.

Christ, the fucking hubris of Americans.

@pindar's revenge

Now that Warren emphatically supported Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria & Afghanistan - ignoring @Maddow's desperate bait to bash Trump & instead condemned Endless War - the silence on these issues of Sanders (&, to a lesser extent, @AOC) becomes harder to maintain: https://t.co/NU8RUhiKpx

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 3, 2019

They support pulling out of Syria. And others.
Plus, it remains to be seen what actually happens. Remember last time he said he was "pulling out".