Opening up of defence files from more than 50 years ago may also shed light on 1968 Air France crash

So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the U.S. invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force. And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.

In 2019, Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater and a prominent Donald Trump supporter, aided a plot to move U.S.-made attack helicopters, weapons, and other military equipment from Jordan to a renegade commander fighting for control of war-torn Libya. A team of mercenaries planned to use the aircraft to help the commander, Khalifa Hifter, a U.S. citizen and former CIA asset, defeat Libya’s U.N.-recognized and U.S.-backed government. While the U.N. has alleged that Prince helped facilitate the mercenary effort, sources with knowledge of the chain of events, as well as documents obtained by The Intercept, reveal new details about the scheme as well as Prince’s yearslong campaign to support Hifter in his bid to take power in Libya.

Yesterday, the Biden administration took two long-overdue steps toward potentially ending the Saudi war on Yemen. But the president has to provide more clarity on what exactly his administration is willing to do to halt Saudi Arabia’s brutality and remove the boot from the neck of Yemenis.

Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly a fraud, a fabulist, a fantasist, a liar.

It was never about Iran.

"The United Arab Emirates, unlike Saudi Arabia, has backed the STC, so the move has the potential to pit two close Gulf allies against one another, complicate the task of securing a national agreement to end to the five-year civil war, and possibly restore the geographical division that existed in the former British colony before unification of Yemen in 1990."