WELL PRIMED

Nivanh Chanthara

It could have been done in secret. But that was not the point.
Instead it was done with maximum impact.
Blocked off streets. Clogged airports. 
A government which had ignored all advice to make the nation's airports safer and wasted millions on prolonged inquiries was now deliberately inconveniencing millions of travellers.
Just to make themselves feel safer. Hold fast their own grip on power, now that the time was ripe. 
A madness gripped the planet. 
The old gods were at war.
The security agencies were at war. 
The politicians were beyond contempt. 
The Tables of Knowledge grew ever closer unto themselves.
The social divides drew greater.
It was a single step from fantasy to reality.
The populace had been well primed.
The warriors died for what they believed, sacrificing not just themselves but their wives and children. Allah Akbar. 
Australian bureaucrats worked their fat cat prescribed seven hours and 11 minutes; tormenting the less fortunate, those without government jobs.
The politicians were just the pimples on a puss ridden corpse; democracy a show trial, the heavily manipulated populace stricken with normality bias. They could not understand what they did not know.
The situation couldn't possibly be as bad as he sometimes thought.
"You have no idea. No idea how bad it is. How great the swindle. How horrific the compromise we are all being asked to make."
Step by terrible step.
Dripping stalagmites, of a substance not found on earth, reached down from the sky.
Transcendental, transformational, trans-dimensional, these were creatures breaking into a twilight space, a well-prepared field.
The covens which had spread through the suburbs watched his every move.
The Boschnian hummingbirds, having done their job, retreated; a hovering sound, frightening. 
The compromise is too great, one of the Watchers on the Watch decried in faux camp outrage; for in the end they did not care, they were paid. Forced to put down the ribald language for a time, they could find other things to do. Other ways to torment their targets. 
They knew too much. 
They would have their brains sucked out alive. 
Their own filthy traps had trapped themselves.
He had told them all along, surveillance was not just an abuse, but a two-way mirror wired with genuine evil. They could not emerge unscathed. 
The birds, mythical in their haunted character,  retreated just in time to spare the feeble consciousnesses on duty.
The AIs had no idea what to do but report, and cross-reference. Continue their silent observation.
They found enough to know that nothing normal was gong on here; the animal duties, the furry, funny, human creatures which they husbanded, which had been so seriously locked in their own diversions, mass entertainment, that they were gone for good. 
Dreams of the past gone for good.  
But it was all too late. Nothing would save the subjugated population, the country, or, more precisely, nothing could save the original emphasis of the country, freedom, self-reliance, hard work, compassionate care for one's own family. A participant democracy, where everyone had a say, where everyone was encouraged to be bold, to speak out.
The drift towards a totalitarian state was almost complete.
Almost no one would live to tell the tale. No one that knew the true story. 
The crowd crawled straight into the jaws of that crazed dog, the future.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Australian airportts

THE tip-off Australian police received over a conspiracy to bring down a passenger plane came from foreign intelligence sources on the verge of issuing a public travel warning, according to media reports.

It’s understood intelligence agencies in the UK and US tipped off Australian forces under the Five Eyes arrangement — which also includes New Zealand and Canada — about the plot that may have been carried out within days.

The ABC’s 7:30 reports Australian police had hoped to gather more evidence before taking people into custody however the UK government said it would issue a public security threat if the raids did not happen immediately.

A UK Home Office spokesman said: “We do not comment on intelligence matters.”

It’s been reported communications intercepted from Syria were the source of the intelligence.

One of the men in custody has been named as Bulldog’s supporter Khaled Khayat. He has not been charged but remains in police custody with three other men who are assisting inquiries.

Mosul, Iraq

Raqqa – Sick and injured civilians within and outside Raqqa city are facing major difficulties obtaining urgent lifesaving medical care due to the ongoing battle to control the northeastern Syrian city, says international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

MSF calls on all warring parties and their allies to ensure the protection of civilians and allow access to medical care and medical evacuation for the war-wounded. MSF also reiterates the importance of facilitating access to northeast Syria for international demining organisations to carry out their activities so that residents can return to their homes safely and aid organisations can provide urgently needed humanitarian assistance.

“Patients tell us large numbers of sick and wounded people are trapped inside Raqqa city with little or no access to medical care and scant chance of escaping the city,” says Vanessa Cramond, MSF medical coordinator for Turkey and north Syria.

CONFLICT ZONE

Central / Western desert Papunya

The street riots of the future were already breaking through into the present, a land of consequence.
Broken.
He could feel them even as he half-listened to football blather at the local Table of Knowledge, a strange curving stream, dark figures shouting in torment, fury. 
The days, at last, were growing longer, and, despite the intensity of tormenting imagery, a pallid light settled and then faded across the nesting suburb.
Not far off, the once magic lake. 
"This government mismanages absolutely everything, and it has badly mismanaged immigration," Old Alex said after the subject of the Sydney terror arrests, and their Muslim nature, was broached.
"I agree with you on that," Phil said, who seemed determined some days not to agree with him on anything, for whatever reason; and at other times was one of the only people to show kindness or understanding. 
Everything ran behind curtains. 
"You'll have me to deal with," he had heard in the ether one day, as Phil had risen to his defence. He did not deny it. Nothing was ever fully recounted. 
These people were entrenched in place. While he, as Ray Bradbury once put it, was clinging to the world by a single finger. Barely encased in flesh.
From the outside, there was nothing to see, a patrol officer moving on the crowd. "Nothing to see here, nothing to see."
External and internal landscapes.
"We're all friends here."
Nobody ever told the full truth. Perhaps it was best that way, although there was little to conceal except perhaps embarrassment, and in any case the years were fleeing towards a Vanishing Point, when these fleshly frames and false or inflamed, circuitous, self-confirming  gossip would mean nothing.
Old Alex, stranded in one place long enough to sort through some boxes, found an interview with a broken lover Ian Farr, whose blood from a suicide attempt, rising from under the blanket of a group orgy, still scarred; far far less than it had scarred Ian, who in later years had gone to the doctor with a stomach ache one day and been dead within the week. 
He had been an accomplished pianist who had destroyed his own ability to play. Old Alex, incensed by the emotional blackmail of the suicide attempt, had refused to visit him in hospital.
How hard would it have been, to show kindness?
It had been, once again, the wrong thing to do; and now, old men and their regrets, was a breach of decency which still cluttered conscience, detritus washed up on a distant shore, nothing.
Already most of those who had known Ian had passed on, and Old Alex couldn't even think who to share the interview with.
In the broader realm, the dreams of a Big Australian, first invoked up by the squattocracy of the so-call Liberal Party and then foisted on to the whole country, already lay in ruins, a victim of its own internal contradictions.
With their bloated dreams and a ballooning, inept bureaucracy metastasising across the social landscape, with the spiraling cost of everything, a broken democracy, they were witnessing first hand the march towards a totalitarian state.
On the evening news, the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull touted terror, as he had done all year. 

Governments, when unpopular and concerned about their grip on power, perpetuate fear through the use of the media. Then fear becomes the ulcer of the masses that cripples their psyche and vanquishes their freedom, and incapacitates people and renders them impotent. Fear is conducive to regressive behaviours by responsible adults, where people become dependent on their government as a parent figure, to protect them from evildoers. So they become willing to relinquish their most intimate and sacred rights in order to feel safe.

Maud, commenting on The Australian website.

Terror raids across Sydney screamed headlines. 
Turnbull, that grey General of Stasi Australia, his pallid skin already peeling from the weight of the dead as they struggled to break through an appalling arrogance. Haunted by the ghosts of those he had been responsible for killing. The vainglory dreams of running the country, Il Duce, slamming into reality.  
Australia, one news report claimed, had just been responsible for dropping more than 800 bombs on Mosul in Iraq. 
What happened there was a war crime by any measure.
Now the attention had turned to Raqqa in Syria, the last redoubt, or so the propaganda claimed, of Islamic State.
There would be a very heavy price to pay for continued stupidity.

THE BIGGER STORY:







A family of suspected Islamist ­extremists allegedly plotted to bring down an Australian commercial jet by gassing the passengers, in what authorities believe was a major terrorist attack plan orchestrated by Islamic State milit­ants from within Syria.

Travellers were warned last night to expect major delays at the nation’s airports as authorities rolled out extra security measures to counter what sources said was a fast-moving, still unfolding terror conspiracy, the full extent of which was not yet known.

Four Lebanese Australians — two fathers and two sons — were in custody after police swooped on the cell and thwarted what they will allege was a sophisticated ­attempt to kill hundreds of people by crashing a civilian plane.

Airports around the country were on heightened alert as ­counter-terrorism police worked to learn all they could about the operation. It was only on Wednesday that police received intellig­ence about the alleged cell from authorities overseas.

Malcolm Turnbull described the alleged plot as “major’’ and “elaborate’’ and said the government would impose extra security on airports across the country.

ISIL militants are coming under further attack in the Syrian city of Raqqa by US-backed Kurdish-led forces.

American jets are carrying out airstrikes as fighters from an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias (SDF) advance further into the city, a stronghold of ISIL in Syria since 2014.

This as Syria’s army and its allies reached the edge of the last town held by ISIL in Homs province.

In Raqqa, fighters from the SDF alliance say they seized drones and ammunition from ISIL.

One fighter showed a reporter what they found. “We found these and took them. They would fly these and explore our areas, we took them. You can also see mortars, made by hand, and here are the planes and bombs they would make.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says ISIL fighters attacked the US-backed forces east of Raqqa on Friday, abducting a number of people.

CONFLICT ZONE

Central / Western desert Papunya

The street riots of the future were already breaking through into the present, a land of consequence.
Broken.
He could feel them even as he half-listened to football blather at the local Table of Knowledge, a strange curving stream, dark figures shouting in torment, fury. 
The days, at last, were growing longer, and, despite the intensity of tormenting imagery, a pallid light settled and then faded across the nesting suburb.
Not far off, the once magic lake. 
"This government mismanages absolutely everything, and it has badly mismanaged immigration," Old Alex said after the subject of the Sydney terror arrests, and their Muslim nature, was broached.
"I agree with you on that," Phil said, who seemed determined some days not to agree with him on anything, for whatever reason; and at other times was one of the only people to show kindness or understanding. 
Everything ran behind curtains. 
"You'll have me to deal with," he had heard in the ether one day, as Phil had risen to his defence. He did not deny it. Nothing was ever fully recounted. 
These people were entrenched in place. While he, as Ray Bradbury once put it, was clinging to the world by a single finger. Barely encased in flesh.
From the outside, there was nothing to see, a patrol officer moving on the crowd. "Nothing to see here, nothing to see."
External and internal landscapes.
"We're all friends here."
Nobody ever told the full truth. Perhaps it was best that way, although there was little to conceal except perhaps embarrassment, and in any case the years were fleeing towards a Vanishing Point, when these fleshly frames and false or inflamed, circuitous, self-confirming  gossip would mean nothing.
Old Alex, stranded in one place long enough to sort through some boxes, found an interview with a broken lover Ian Farr, whose blood from a suicide attempt, rising from under the blanket of a group orgy, still scarred; far far less than it had scarred Ian, who in later years had gone to the doctor with a stomach ache one day and been dead within the week. 
He had been an accomplished pianist who had destroyed his own ability to play. Old Alex, incensed by the emotional blackmail of the suicide attempt, had refused to visit him in hospital.
How hard would it have been, to show kindness?
It had been, once again, the wrong thing to do; and now, old men and their regrets, was a breach of decency which still cluttered conscience, detritus washed up on a distant shore, nothing.
Already most of those who had known Ian had passed on, and Old Alex couldn't even think who to share the interview with.
In the broader realm, the dreams of a Big Australian, first invoked up by the squattocracy of the so-call Liberal Party and then foisted on to the whole country, already lay in ruins, a victim of its own internal contradictions.
With their bloated dreams and a ballooning, inept bureaucracy metastasising across the social landscape, with the spiraling cost of everything, a broken democracy, they were witnessing first hand the march towards a totalitarian state.
On the evening news, the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull touted terror, as he had done all year. 

Governments, when unpopular and concerned about their grip on power, perpetuate fear through the use of the media. Then fear becomes the ulcer of the masses that cripples their psyche and vanquishes their freedom, and incapacitates people and renders them impotent. Fear is conducive to regressive behaviours by responsible adults, where people become dependent on their government as a parent figure, to protect them from evildoers. So they become willing to relinquish their most intimate and sacred rights in order to feel safe.

Maud, commenting on The Australian website.

Terror raids across Sydney screamed headlines. 
Turnbull, that grey General of Stasi Australia, his pallid skin already peeling from the weight of the dead as they struggled to break through an appalling arrogance. Haunted by the ghosts of those he had been responsible for killing. The vainglory dreams of running the country, Il Duce, slamming into reality.  
Australia, one news report claimed, had just been responsible for dropping more than 800 bombs on Mosul in Iraq. 
What happened there was a war crime by any measure.
Now the attention had turned to Raqqa in Syria, the last redoubt, or so the propaganda claimed, of Islamic State.
There would be a very heavy price to pay for continued stupidity.

THE BIGGER STORY:







A family of suspected Islamist ­extremists allegedly plotted to bring down an Australian commercial jet by gassing the passengers, in what authorities believe was a major terrorist attack plan orchestrated by Islamic State milit­ants from within Syria.

Travellers were warned last night to expect major delays at the nation’s airports as authorities rolled out extra security measures to counter what sources said was a fast-moving, still unfolding terror conspiracy, the full extent of which was not yet known.

Four Lebanese Australians — two fathers and two sons — were in custody after police swooped on the cell and thwarted what they will allege was a sophisticated ­attempt to kill hundreds of people by crashing a civilian plane.

Airports around the country were on heightened alert as ­counter-terrorism police worked to learn all they could about the operation. It was only on Wednesday that police received intellig­ence about the alleged cell from authorities overseas.

Malcolm Turnbull described the alleged plot as “major’’ and “elaborate’’ and said the government would impose extra security on airports across the country.

ISIL militants are coming under further attack in the Syrian city of Raqqa by US-backed Kurdish-led forces.

American jets are carrying out airstrikes as fighters from an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias (SDF) advance further into the city, a stronghold of ISIL in Syria since 2014.

This as Syria’s army and its allies reached the edge of the last town held by ISIL in Homs province.

In Raqqa, fighters from the SDF alliance say they seized drones and ammunition from ISIL.

One fighter showed a reporter what they found. “We found these and took them. They would fly these and explore our areas, we took them. You can also see mortars, made by hand, and here are the planes and bombs they would make.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says ISIL fighters attacked the US-backed forces east of Raqqa on Friday, abducting a number of people.

PATCHWORK RAVINES A FREEZING WIND

Raqqa, Syria

"How's the new book going?" someone asked.
"The central event hasn't happened yet," Old Alex replied, and the thread disappeared into ordinary concerns as quickly as it came. 
There's no way you're going to fit in anywhere here. 
That night terror raids on Cleveland Street in Surrey Hills, Sydney, where he had spent so much time.
Life took place behind closed doors.
A cartoonist lived down the road.
They were up to no good, always. 
An old, moldy grey blanket was blown vertical in the wind, every rumple, every movement, coruscating ravines. 
There was treachery everywhere. 
The experts came. The experts went. Everyone was on a government payroll. There had been days when he had longed to sellout, if only someone was buying. 
Forgive me. Why hast thou forsaken? 
The landscape was undulating.
For he so loved. 
And became trapped.
The gig is up. 
We know you're not human. 
"What's the answer," a querulous old man demanded of him.
"To make democracy more attractive, to return to the original ideal of a participatory democracy, which is not what we have now."
As far as the querulous old man was concerned, bombing Muslims back to the stone age was the only solution. Teach them a lesson.
He watched a slavering crowd in Afghanistan kill a woman accused of burning a Koran. 
He thought briefly of intimate times on Cleveland Street, an unlovely traffic thoroughfare full of dust and decay, until renovation mania and soaring prices from overpopulation gripped the real estate market.
Operation Mockingbird. 
The manipulation of the mainstream media by the CIA.
Their experts had come to Australia to train the locals, and achieved very well. The Australian media had become so remarkably anodyne, so entirely non-controversial, so reliant on the spewing verbiage of the political class there was no answer. It made no sense. It could not have devolved this quickly without gross manipulation. Interference. 
We abandoned our sovereignty for no good reason. 
Destroyed public discourse. 
Surrendered to the bureaucracy's inane anti-capitalist orthodoxies. Manned, as they were, by the battalions of useful fools which had spewed forth from the institutions of "higher" learning, those preening tax payer funded centres of excess where the long march through the institutions was complete, and self-serving lecturers purported to shock their bourgeois students from the clasp of their middle class upbringings. It was all so tired. In a darkening, muffled clime. Where the shadows of the emissaries flickered around a circular horizon. The past destroyed, the future born. 
Indeed, the landscape undulated, the populace, or those that still remained cognisant, thrown into a freezing wind. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

A TERRORIST plot to bring down a domestic flight with a bomb was at the centre of a series of raids across ­Sydney yesterday targeting an alleged Islamic extremist cell.

Wearing gas masks and ballistic ­armour, backed by fire crews and specially trained paramedics, officers from the Joint Counter Terrorism Team stormed three properties in Sydney’s west — at Sproule St, Lakemba, Renown Ave, Wiley Park, and Victoria Rd, Punchbowl — and a terrace on Goodlet Lne, Surry Hills, in the inner city.

The raids had been planned for ­several days and are understood to have been brought forward for ­operational reasons.

At Surry Hills, where parts of Cleveland St were shut down from 1pm to create an exclusion zone, a man shrouded under a bed sheet was ­escorted into an ambulance by police before being taken into custody.

As the arrest unfolded, paramedics attended to the man, who had a bandage covering his head, and a woman whose wrists had been cable-tied.

An elderly woman was also escorted from the scene by police, her head covered by a leopard-skin print jacket.

Several women wearing hijabs were also at the scene, as was a young boy.

When asked why he’d been ­arrested, the man said “No idea”, then added: “They bashed me.”

Neighbours described the man’s parents as a “lovely couple” who held barbecues every Sunday.

Relatives of two of the men arrested told media last night that they “love Australia”.

Neighbour Kate Harrison said: “There must have been at least 40 riot squad police with huge guns.”

Witnesses reported hearing a lot of screaming and dogs barking as police raided the property.

Islamic State fighters have now essentially been defeated in Mosul after a nine-month, US-backed campaign that destroyed significant parts of Iraq’s second largest city, killing up to 40,000 civilians and forcing as many as one million more people from their homes. Now, the United States is focusing its energies—and warplanes—on the ISIS-occupied areas of eastern Syria in an offensive dubbed “Wrath of the Euphrates.”

The Islamic State’s brutal treatment of civilians in Syria has been well reported and publicized. And according to Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, the commander of the US-led war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the battle to “liberate” these regions from ISIS is the “most precise campaign in the history of warfare.”

But reports and photographs from Syrian journalists and activists, as well as first-person accounts from those with family members living in areas under US bombardment, detail a strikingly different tale of the American offensive—one that looks a lot less like a battle against the Islamic State and a lot more like a war on civilians.

These human rights groups and local reporters say that, across Syria in recent months, the US-led coalition and US Marines have bombed or shelled at least 12 schools, including primary schools and a girls’ high school; a health clinic and an obstetrics hospital; Raqqa’s Science College; residential neighborhoods; bakeries; post offices; a car wash; at least 15 mosques; a cultural center; a gas station; cars carrying civilians to the hospital; a funeral; water tanks; at least 15 bridges; a makeshift refugee camp; the ancient Rafiqah Wall that dates back to the 8th century; and an Internet cafe in Raqqa, where a Syrian media activist was killed as he was trying to smuggle news out of the besieged city.

The United States is now one of the deadliest warring parties in Syria. In May and June combined, the US-led coalition killed more civilians than the Assad regime, the Russians, or ISIS, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization that has been monitoring the death toll and human rights violations in Syria since 2011.

“This administration wants to achieve a quick victory,” Dr. Fadel Abdul Ghany, chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights recently told me. “What we are noticing is that the US is targeting and killing without taking into consideration the benefits for the military and the collateral damage for the civilians. This, of course, amounts to war crimes.”

And nowhere is this war against civilians more acute than in ISIS-occupied Raqqa, where trapped families are living under dozens of airstrikes every day.

PATCHWORK RAVINES A FREEZING WIND

Raqqa, Syria

"How's the new book going?" someone asked.
"The central event hasn't happened yet," Old Alex replied, and the thread disappeared into ordinary concerns as quickly as it came. 
There's no way you're going to fit in anywhere here. 
That night terror raids on Cleveland Street in Surrey Hills, Sydney, where he had spent so much time.
Life took place behind closed doors.
A cartoonist lived down the road.
They were up to no good, always. 
An old, moldy grey blanket was blown vertical in the wind, every rumple, every movement, coruscating ravines. 
There was treachery everywhere. 
The experts came. The experts went. Everyone was on a government payroll. There had been days when he had longed to sellout, if only someone was buying. 
Forgive me. Why hast thou forsaken? 
The landscape was undulating.
For he so loved. 
And became trapped.
The gig is up. 
We know you're not human. 
"What's the answer," a querulous old man demanded of him.
"To make democracy more attractive, to return to the original ideal of a participatory democracy, which is not what we have now."
As far as the querulous old man was concerned, bombing Muslims back to the stone age was the only solution. Teach them a lesson.
He watched a slavering crowd in Afghanistan kill a woman accused of burning a Koran. 
He thought briefly of intimate times on Cleveland Street, an unlovely traffic thoroughfare full of dust and decay, until renovation mania and soaring prices from overpopulation gripped the real estate market.
Operation Mockingbird. 
The manipulation of the mainstream media by the CIA.
Their experts had come to Australia to train the locals, and achieved very well. The Australian media had become so remarkably anodyne, so entirely non-controversial, so reliant on the spewing verbiage of the political class there was no answer. It made no sense. It could not have devolved this quickly without gross manipulation. Interference. 
We abandoned our sovereignty for no good reason. 
Destroyed public discourse. 
Surrendered to the bureaucracy's inane anti-capitalist orthodoxies. Manned, as they were, by the battalions of useful fools which had spewed forth from the institutions of "higher" learning, those preening tax payer funded centres of excess where the long march through the institutions was complete, and self-serving lecturers purported to shock their bourgeois students from the clasp of their middle class upbringings. It was all so tired. In a darkening, muffled clime. Where the shadows of the emissaries flickered around a circular horizon. The past destroyed, the future born. 
Indeed, the landscape undulated, the populace, or those that still remained cognisant, thrown into a freezing wind. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

A TERRORIST plot to bring down a domestic flight with a bomb was at the centre of a series of raids across ­Sydney yesterday targeting an alleged Islamic extremist cell.

Wearing gas masks and ballistic ­armour, backed by fire crews and specially trained paramedics, officers from the Joint Counter Terrorism Team stormed three properties in Sydney’s west — at Sproule St, Lakemba, Renown Ave, Wiley Park, and Victoria Rd, Punchbowl — and a terrace on Goodlet Lne, Surry Hills, in the inner city.

The raids had been planned for ­several days and are understood to have been brought forward for ­operational reasons.

At Surry Hills, where parts of Cleveland St were shut down from 1pm to create an exclusion zone, a man shrouded under a bed sheet was ­escorted into an ambulance by police before being taken into custody.

As the arrest unfolded, paramedics attended to the man, who had a bandage covering his head, and a woman whose wrists had been cable-tied.

An elderly woman was also escorted from the scene by police, her head covered by a leopard-skin print jacket.

Several women wearing hijabs were also at the scene, as was a young boy.

When asked why he’d been ­arrested, the man said “No idea”, then added: “They bashed me.”

Neighbours described the man’s parents as a “lovely couple” who held barbecues every Sunday.

Relatives of two of the men arrested told media last night that they “love Australia”.

Neighbour Kate Harrison said: “There must have been at least 40 riot squad police with huge guns.”

Witnesses reported hearing a lot of screaming and dogs barking as police raided the property.

Islamic State fighters have now essentially been defeated in Mosul after a nine-month, US-backed campaign that destroyed significant parts of Iraq’s second largest city, killing up to 40,000 civilians and forcing as many as one million more people from their homes. Now, the United States is focusing its energies—and warplanes—on the ISIS-occupied areas of eastern Syria in an offensive dubbed “Wrath of the Euphrates.”

The Islamic State’s brutal treatment of civilians in Syria has been well reported and publicized. And according to Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, the commander of the US-led war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the battle to “liberate” these regions from ISIS is the “most precise campaign in the history of warfare.”

But reports and photographs from Syrian journalists and activists, as well as first-person accounts from those with family members living in areas under US bombardment, detail a strikingly different tale of the American offensive—one that looks a lot less like a battle against the Islamic State and a lot more like a war on civilians.

These human rights groups and local reporters say that, across Syria in recent months, the US-led coalition and US Marines have bombed or shelled at least 12 schools, including primary schools and a girls’ high school; a health clinic and an obstetrics hospital; Raqqa’s Science College; residential neighborhoods; bakeries; post offices; a car wash; at least 15 mosques; a cultural center; a gas station; cars carrying civilians to the hospital; a funeral; water tanks; at least 15 bridges; a makeshift refugee camp; the ancient Rafiqah Wall that dates back to the 8th century; and an Internet cafe in Raqqa, where a Syrian media activist was killed as he was trying to smuggle news out of the besieged city.

The United States is now one of the deadliest warring parties in Syria. In May and June combined, the US-led coalition killed more civilians than the Assad regime, the Russians, or ISIS, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization that has been monitoring the death toll and human rights violations in Syria since 2011.

“This administration wants to achieve a quick victory,” Dr. Fadel Abdul Ghany, chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights recently told me. “What we are noticing is that the US is targeting and killing without taking into consideration the benefits for the military and the collateral damage for the civilians. This, of course, amounts to war crimes.”

And nowhere is this war against civilians more acute than in ISIS-occupied Raqqa, where trapped families are living under dozens of airstrikes every day.

MULTIPLE INCOMPETENCIES: MALICIOUS INSIDERS

He shut his eyes and was immediately in the sky.
Below lava flows, ice on a frigid surface, treachery everywhere.
They were back.
"It's far worse than you know," they told him constantly. 
He already knew it was bad.
"Far worse."
"Name one thing in this country that works," an old contact queried, voice dripping with exasperated, almost amused irony. He had made his millions. He was safe in the hills. Old Alex was not. "Name one thing this government is doing right."
The country had the most expensive electricity in the world. The slowest, most expensive internet. Standards of living were falling. The cost of everything was rising. Wages, where there was work, were static.
Best in the world, best in the world, the Prime Minister blathered. For now there was nothing but blather everywhere. 
The NSW police killed a man at Central Station in Sydney, mimicking their American counterparts, who were notorious f***ups.
The Americans were offering training programs across the security realm; perhaps they had trained this lot. 
The truth was met in a prevailing cynicism, the blizzard storms at the end of time. 
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation grew worse, the public more detached. 
They wanted him out of here, his not-so-benign pursuers. 
In all their blather and bluster, he knew from personal experience just how truly incompetent they were. 
Here in a darkening clime. The wheels falling off. A truck tilting sideways as it slid off the highway, the driver slung free, but seriously winded. 
Australia, Australia. Land of the free. 
"It's democracy," he heard them whisper in wonder. "Free speech."
But there was no free speech. There was chronic, gross manipulation of content. There was an anodyne fairy tale at the bottom of the garden. There was extinguishing hope. There were even darker forces at play than the greatest conspiracy theorist could imagine. They had been betrayed more completely than even the greatest skeptic could imagine.
In an instant realm. Where the protecting sheaves had come down. The ring of fire doused. The mechanical arms of heaven creaking aside. They would reveal much. 
We want to talk to you, but cannot. There was disarray. No course of action but accreted bureaucratic insanity. 
"It's political. It's political."
Of course it's political.
Everyone has been betrayed.
The most striking feature of Stasi Germany, the greatest example of The Surveillance State: Everybody Spied On Everybody. Cousins on cousins.  Brothers on brothers. Neighbours on neighbours. 
"That's a good analogy," one of the Watchers whispered.
What were they looking for, the authorities? 
Incorrect thought. Betrayal of the state. 
Already, blasphemy laws were being introduced. 
Man, ultimately malleable, fell straight into line. 
Until it all collapsed. 
They had destroyed the country in order to save it, or so they believed, those in power, rewritten its past and its future, destroyed the present, thumped down on a once freewheeling culture. 
They were remaking the country. 
In a twinkling Australia had become one of the most oppressive and dispiriting places on Earth. All in the name of diversity, intolerance ruled.
Stasi Australia. Is that how the future would see the present?

THE BIGGER STORY:

26 July 2017 – Witnessing “complete devastation” in districts of Mosul, a senior United Nations relief official visiting Iraq lauded the massive humanitarian effort under way while indicating that the crisis is “far from over,” including for millions of Iraqis displaced throughout the country.

“I commend the achievements of the humanitarian operation in Iraq and wish to highlight the impressive national response,” said Ursula Mueller, Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator in a press statement.

“One of the things that impressed me the most was the exceptional level of cooperation between national counterparts, UN agencies and front-line NGOs [non-governmental organizations],” she added.

From 24 and 26 July, Ms. Mueller met with senior officials and ministers from the Iraqi Government and the Kurdistan Regional Government, as well as members of the international and humanitarian communities.

She saw first-hand the complete devastation of districts in western Mosul's old city. “I saw homes and entire neighbourhoods destroyed; no doubt, countless tragedies remain untold among the rubble,” she explained.

With almost one million people fleeing Mosul, humanitarians' “worst-case” estimates were surpassed.




THE man who attacked a Sydney florist outside Central station on Wednesday night and was then shot dead by police has been named as Danukul Mokmool.

He was 30 years old and understood to have been a Thai national.

The half-brother of Mookmol said his sibling was suffering paranoid delusions before he left their western Sydney home last night, reported the Daily Telegraph.

His half-brother Charlie Huynh, 19, said Mr Mokmool had battled illicit drugs and the law for many years.

Four hours before his death Mr Mokmool left his home in Green Valley, fearing his family wanted to harm him.

MULTIPLE INCOMPETENCIES: MALICIOUS INSIDERS

He shut his eyes and was immediately in the sky.
Below lava flows, ice on a frigid surface, treachery everywhere.
They were back.
"It's far worse than you know," they told him constantly. 
He already knew it was bad.
"Far worse."
"Name one thing in this country that works," an old contact queried, voice dripping with exasperated, almost amused irony. He had made his millions. He was safe in the hills. Old Alex was not. "Name one thing this government is doing right."
The country had the most expensive electricity in the world. The slowest, most expensive internet. Standards of living were falling. The cost of everything was rising. Wages, where there was work, were static.
Best in the world, best in the world, the Prime Minister blathered. For now there was nothing but blather everywhere. 
The NSW police killed a man at Central Station in Sydney, mimicking their American counterparts, who were notorious f***ups.
The Americans were offering training programs across the security realm; perhaps they had trained this lot. 
The truth was met in a prevailing cynicism, the blizzard storms at the end of time. 
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation grew worse, the public more detached. 
They wanted him out of here, his not-so-benign pursuers. 
In all their blather and bluster, he knew from personal experience just how truly incompetent they were. 
Here in a darkening clime. The wheels falling off. A truck tilting sideways as it slid off the highway, the driver slung free, but seriously winded. 
Australia, Australia. Land of the free. 
"It's democracy," he heard them whisper in wonder. "Free speech."
But there was no free speech. There was chronic, gross manipulation of content. There was an anodyne fairy tale at the bottom of the garden. There was extinguishing hope. There were even darker forces at play than the greatest conspiracy theorist could imagine. They had been betrayed more completely than even the greatest skeptic could imagine.
In an instant realm. Where the protecting sheaves had come down. The ring of fire doused. The mechanical arms of heaven creaking aside. They would reveal much. 
We want to talk to you, but cannot. There was disarray. No course of action but accreted bureaucratic insanity. 
"It's political. It's political."
Of course it's political.
Everyone has been betrayed.
The most striking feature of Stasi Germany, the greatest example of The Surveillance State: Everybody Spied On Everybody. Cousins on cousins.  Brothers on brothers. Neighbours on neighbours. 
"That's a good analogy," one of the Watchers whispered.
What were they looking for, the authorities? 
Incorrect thought. Betrayal of the state. 
Already, blasphemy laws were being introduced. 
Man, ultimately malleable, fell straight into line. 
Until it all collapsed. 
They had destroyed the country in order to save it, or so they believed, those in power, rewritten its past and its future, destroyed the present, thumped down on a once freewheeling culture. 
They were remaking the country. 
In a twinkling Australia had become one of the most oppressive and dispiriting places on Earth. All in the name of diversity, intolerance ruled.
Stasi Australia. Is that how the future would see the present?

THE BIGGER STORY:

26 July 2017 – Witnessing “complete devastation” in districts of Mosul, a senior United Nations relief official visiting Iraq lauded the massive humanitarian effort under way while indicating that the crisis is “far from over,” including for millions of Iraqis displaced throughout the country.

“I commend the achievements of the humanitarian operation in Iraq and wish to highlight the impressive national response,” said Ursula Mueller, Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator in a press statement.

“One of the things that impressed me the most was the exceptional level of cooperation between national counterparts, UN agencies and front-line NGOs [non-governmental organizations],” she added.

From 24 and 26 July, Ms. Mueller met with senior officials and ministers from the Iraqi Government and the Kurdistan Regional Government, as well as members of the international and humanitarian communities.

She saw first-hand the complete devastation of districts in western Mosul's old city. “I saw homes and entire neighbourhoods destroyed; no doubt, countless tragedies remain untold among the rubble,” she explained.

With almost one million people fleeing Mosul, humanitarians' “worst-case” estimates were surpassed.




THE man who attacked a Sydney florist outside Central station on Wednesday night and was then shot dead by police has been named as Danukul Mokmool.

He was 30 years old and understood to have been a Thai national.

The half-brother of Mookmol said his sibling was suffering paranoid delusions before he left their western Sydney home last night, reported the Daily Telegraph.

His half-brother Charlie Huynh, 19, said Mr Mokmool had battled illicit drugs and the law for many years.

Four hours before his death Mr Mokmool left his home in Green Valley, fearing his family wanted to harm him.

THE GHOST WHO WALKS

Raqqa, aerial strikes

He could focus on the janitor, who had always been there.
Wise soul.
Or he could listen to the elaborate stories in his head, of an ornate, large sarcophagus, a lost tomb in the north of the country. An English lord who's skeleton was encased in a fine ceramic. How it was possible, in this remote place, he knew not. But the Lord just wanted to go home, and would move every kind of trickery and connivance through human affairs to get there, no matter how obtuse, unlikely or apparently unrelated it seemed. 
He wanted to go back to his shores, to his birthplace. As so many, a common instinct, he just wanted to go home.
The ghost emerged from the sarcophagus when he was alone in the cave.
"It's true," he said.
The Lord smiled, almost amused.
"Yes."
It was a jinn infested world.
Now the tomb was found, it was only a matter of process before he would be returned to his ancestral lands.
"I wanted to thank you," the Lord said, before promptly vanishing. 
Out in the real world, a shambolic mishmash of adopted ideologies, multiple incompetencies characterised Australian governance across the country. 
Old Alex had become victim, in his own anguished away, to exactly that incompetence, the blind brutality of secretive security agencies, the prejudices of thugs, the lies of self-serving bureaucrats.
"It's been an honour."
They were all decamping.
"It's official, then?"
"Yes."
What, that commonsense had prevailed? That the counterproductive effects of the surveillance and harassment he had endured for years had finally become so self-evident that even the thick headed thugs in their smart suits could see that.
Or the tasks would just be handed over to AIs, far more difficult to detect.
Trust no one.
The question would become, soon enough, as psychic wounds healed, what next? 
When not afraid, unable or unwilling to overcome mammalian fear of being watched, he had hoovered their brains. No wonder there were so many of them. They thought about sex incessantly, even when they were pretending they weren't. But he also listened to their bitches about their bosses, was told, repeatedly, of mind boggling malfeasance, the secretive trails of venal incompetence and self serving thuggery. Of the palace of fools they served. 
The country was dying.
Democracy was already dead.
The people had been betrayed, betrayed and betrayed again. 
And it was all due to the overlords. 
Populations were easily manipulated. It was the venality of the overlords, and the cruelties of the forces they served, that had to be brought to account. 
Killed.

THE BIGGER STORY:

YUNUPINGU PASSES



The soulful, high tenor voice of the singer and guitarist Dr G Yunupingu, who has died aged 46, brought him international celebrity, even though he mostly sang in the Australian Aboriginal languages of Gumatj, Galpu and Djambarrpuynu. He performed at concert halls around the world, sang for the Queen and for Barack Obama, and was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as “Australia’s most important voice”. His bestselling albums achieved triple platinum status.

Yunupingu showed his unique appeal at his debut solo London concert in May 2009, when he was still little known in the UK. He sat motionless throughout, singing and playing the acoustic guitar, backed by a string quartet and the double bass work of his friend, producer and manager Michael Hohnen. He said nothing, apart from a final “Thank you”, but dominated the hall with his gently powerful and heartfelt singing. His melodies were straightforward, powerful and accessible, with their blend of folk, soul and gospel influences, along with a dash of reggae, and his poetic lyrics dealt with nature or his ancestors.

He started the performance with Wiyathul, a song that explaining the importance of the orange-footed scrubfowl to the Gumatj nation, and ended with a highly personal song in English, I Was Born Blind. Afterwards, he sat in the dressing room, still not speaking. “He won’t talk,” explained Hohnen, “but I can feel that he’s happy.” It was clear that he would become a world music celebrity.

Yunupingu was born blind, in Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island, off the coast of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, and was a member of the Gumatj clan of the Yolngu people. The first of four sons born to Ganyinurra (Daisy) and Nyambi (Terry) Yunupingu, he became fascinated by music as a child. Following local custom, his aunts Dorothy, Anne and Susan all played a major role in looking after him, and sang him hymns they had learned at the local Methodist mission.

Later, Yunupingu joined the mission choir, and began singing standard hymns – Amazing Grace, The Old Rugged Cross or To Be a Pilgrim. He was a fan of western pop, particularly the songs of Dire Straits, Cliff Richard and Stevie Wonder, but these were matched against other, more ancient influences – the beliefs, customs and songs of his people. In later life his often spiritual compositions would blend western musical influences with lyrics that dealt with clan traditions and beliefs.

He never learned braille but was naturally skilful as a musician, playing the guitar, keyboards and drums, and he soon became celebrated far beyond Elcho Island. He first learned to make music when his mother and aunts arranged empty tin cans on the beach for him to hit with sticks. Then he was given a toy piano accordion, capable of playing 12 notes, by his parents, and his uncle gave him a guitar...

The Australian understands the 46-year-old from Elcho Island, off the Arnhem Land coast, was found in a beach drinking camp last week, just metres from a popular cafe, before being taken to the Royal Darwin Hospital, where he died on Tuesday.

Vaughan Williams, a musician and homeless services worker who has long worked with Darwin’s population of itinerant, mainly indigeno­us “long-grassers”, said he was horrified to discover his lifelong friend among a group of “f..khead” drinkers.

“These weren’t your usual drinkers — they were serious drinkers. Every indication was wrong and bad,’’ he said.

“I just don’t know how it could have happened without someone saying (Dr Yunupingu) has missed a bunch of renal visits. It’s un­believable. It shouldn’t have happened. He should still be alive, and if people had put simple processes in place, he would still be alive.”

Dr Yunupingu’s manager, the head of Skinnyfish records Mark Grose, called his client a “genius” and a “national treasure”.

Public debate in Darwin is commonly about the “anti-social behaviour” long-grassers attract, rather than about their wellbeing.

Domestic violence on public streets and intoxicated people ­falling onto — and sometimes sleeping upon — the roads are not unfamiliar sights for locals. Williams said he had found the singer at Casuarina Beach on ­Darwin’s northeast coast last Wednesday but been forced to return the following day with three other men to persuade him to be carried to a car and taken hospital.

“He couldn’t walk … he was so skinny,” he said. “I wanted to help him as soon as I saw him, but I couldn’t force him.”

THE GHOST WHO WALKS

Raqqa, aerial strikes

He could focus on the janitor, who had always been there.
Wise soul.
Or he could listen to the elaborate stories in his head, of an ornate, large sarcophagus, a lost tomb in the north of the country. An English lord who's skeleton was encased in a fine ceramic. How it was possible, in this remote place, he knew not. But the Lord just wanted to go home, and would move every kind of trickery and connivance through human affairs to get there, no matter how obtuse, unlikely or apparently unrelated it seemed. 
He wanted to go back to his shores, to his birthplace. As so many, a common instinct, he just wanted to go home.
The ghost emerged from the sarcophagus when he was alone in the cave.
"It's true," he said.
The Lord smiled, almost amused.
"Yes."
It was a jinn infested world.
Now the tomb was found, it was only a matter of process before he would be returned to his ancestral lands.
"I wanted to thank you," the Lord said, before promptly vanishing. 
Out in the real world, a shambolic mishmash of adopted ideologies, multiple incompetencies characterised Australian governance across the country. 
Old Alex had become victim, in his own anguished away, to exactly that incompetence, the blind brutality of secretive security agencies, the prejudices of thugs, the lies of self-serving bureaucrats.
"It's been an honour."
They were all decamping.
"It's official, then?"
"Yes."
What, that commonsense had prevailed? That the counterproductive effects of the surveillance and harassment he had endured for years had finally become so self-evident that even the thick headed thugs in their smart suits could see that.
Or the tasks would just be handed over to AIs, far more difficult to detect.
Trust no one.
The question would become, soon enough, as psychic wounds healed, what next? 
When not afraid, unable or unwilling to overcome mammalian fear of being watched, he had hoovered their brains. No wonder there were so many of them. They thought about sex incessantly, even when they were pretending they weren't. But he also listened to their bitches about their bosses, was told, repeatedly, of mind boggling malfeasance, the secretive trails of venal incompetence and self serving thuggery. Of the palace of fools they served. 
The country was dying.
Democracy was already dead.
The people had been betrayed, betrayed and betrayed again. 
And it was all due to the overlords. 
Populations were easily manipulated. It was the venality of the overlords, and the cruelties of the forces they served, that had to be brought to account. 
Killed.

THE BIGGER STORY:

YUNUPINGU PASSES



The soulful, high tenor voice of the singer and guitarist Dr G Yunupingu, who has died aged 46, brought him international celebrity, even though he mostly sang in the Australian Aboriginal languages of Gumatj, Galpu and Djambarrpuynu. He performed at concert halls around the world, sang for the Queen and for Barack Obama, and was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as “Australia’s most important voice”. His bestselling albums achieved triple platinum status.

Yunupingu showed his unique appeal at his debut solo London concert in May 2009, when he was still little known in the UK. He sat motionless throughout, singing and playing the acoustic guitar, backed by a string quartet and the double bass work of his friend, producer and manager Michael Hohnen. He said nothing, apart from a final “Thank you”, but dominated the hall with his gently powerful and heartfelt singing. His melodies were straightforward, powerful and accessible, with their blend of folk, soul and gospel influences, along with a dash of reggae, and his poetic lyrics dealt with nature or his ancestors.

He started the performance with Wiyathul, a song that explaining the importance of the orange-footed scrubfowl to the Gumatj nation, and ended with a highly personal song in English, I Was Born Blind. Afterwards, he sat in the dressing room, still not speaking. “He won’t talk,” explained Hohnen, “but I can feel that he’s happy.” It was clear that he would become a world music celebrity.

Yunupingu was born blind, in Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island, off the coast of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, and was a member of the Gumatj clan of the Yolngu people. The first of four sons born to Ganyinurra (Daisy) and Nyambi (Terry) Yunupingu, he became fascinated by music as a child. Following local custom, his aunts Dorothy, Anne and Susan all played a major role in looking after him, and sang him hymns they had learned at the local Methodist mission.

Later, Yunupingu joined the mission choir, and began singing standard hymns – Amazing Grace, The Old Rugged Cross or To Be a Pilgrim. He was a fan of western pop, particularly the songs of Dire Straits, Cliff Richard and Stevie Wonder, but these were matched against other, more ancient influences – the beliefs, customs and songs of his people. In later life his often spiritual compositions would blend western musical influences with lyrics that dealt with clan traditions and beliefs.

He never learned braille but was naturally skilful as a musician, playing the guitar, keyboards and drums, and he soon became celebrated far beyond Elcho Island. He first learned to make music when his mother and aunts arranged empty tin cans on the beach for him to hit with sticks. Then he was given a toy piano accordion, capable of playing 12 notes, by his parents, and his uncle gave him a guitar...

The Australian understands the 46-year-old from Elcho Island, off the Arnhem Land coast, was found in a beach drinking camp last week, just metres from a popular cafe, before being taken to the Royal Darwin Hospital, where he died on Tuesday.

Vaughan Williams, a musician and homeless services worker who has long worked with Darwin’s population of itinerant, mainly indigeno­us “long-grassers”, said he was horrified to discover his lifelong friend among a group of “f..khead” drinkers.

“These weren’t your usual drinkers — they were serious drinkers. Every indication was wrong and bad,’’ he said.

“I just don’t know how it could have happened without someone saying (Dr Yunupingu) has missed a bunch of renal visits. It’s un­believable. It shouldn’t have happened. He should still be alive, and if people had put simple processes in place, he would still be alive.”

Dr Yunupingu’s manager, the head of Skinnyfish records Mark Grose, called his client a “genius” and a “national treasure”.

Public debate in Darwin is commonly about the “anti-social behaviour” long-grassers attract, rather than about their wellbeing.

Domestic violence on public streets and intoxicated people ­falling onto — and sometimes sleeping upon — the roads are not unfamiliar sights for locals. Williams said he had found the singer at Casuarina Beach on ­Darwin’s northeast coast last Wednesday but been forced to return the following day with three other men to persuade him to be carried to a car and taken hospital.

“He couldn’t walk … he was so skinny,” he said. “I wanted to help him as soon as I saw him, but I couldn’t force him.”