Toronto "Hot Docs Festival" hot with US Empire propaganda

What with all the buzz around that fabulous eye-opener about Jose Andres' NGO, World Central Kitchen, you can be forgiven for forgetting it's the product of the Hollywood branch of the American Esceptionalism cult. So here’s why I ended up flushing most of the day down the "We Feed People" rabbit hole. CBC had an interview with Jose Andres this morning, founder of NGO World Central Kitchen. Host Matt Galloway greeted him with the same credulous enthusiasm with which he greets debunked shills for Empire like Bill Browder and Elliot Higgins. Matt is a nice guy, but geopolitics is clearly not his bag. Jose was on to promote a new doc about World Central Kitchen. WCK is quick off the mark in bringing food relief to disaster zones. They had a team on the ground in Ukraine the day after the war started. In the course of the interview, Jose meandered into a little more ant-Putin editorialising than I would have expected of a non-biased humanitarian. The CEO of WCK is none other than Nate Mook, the very guy Bill Clinton tapped for a puff-doc on his humanitarianism. Not only that, he is also the executive producer of the documentary under discussion. Nate Mook has been a Dem party fave for ages. WCK is an extraordinarily well financed NGO, although you’ll be hard pressed to find details on specific donors in their financials. It’s a matter of public record that some authentic grass-roots NGOs have disassociated themselves from WCK on account of its proximity to the Department of Homeland Security and other US government entities. Looks like at least two of hottest docs at Hot Docs are straight out of the Empire's propaganda machine

Why the US Navy ships Russian ammo

Here's a link to documentation from the US Navy Surface Warfare Center at Crane, Indiana, summarizing the testing the Navy did on the shipping containers used for moving ammunition for the ubiquitous AK-47.

The AK-47 and its many variations are not issued to the fighting forces of the US or any of her NATO allies.

So why would the US need to ship this ammunition?

Here's one reason.

And it's not the only reason by any stretch of the imagination. But Elliot Higgins unwittingly draws a few loose ends together for us. The ammo for those Croatian AK-47s that Higgins correctly spots in his Syrian action videos obviously comes from somewhere.

My guess is it's coming in shipping containers painstakingly tested and approved by Kerry Libbert and his team twenty years ago, and it's coming in US Navy ships docking in Bahrain and Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

So the question posed here well over a year ago has at least a partial answer.

Not-so-Brown Moses proves Syrian military uses cluster bombs!

CNN has a lovely hagiography on view of Elliot Higgins, aka Brown Moses, who has irrefutable evidence that the Assad regime has used cluster bombs. He also has evidence that some of the rebel armaments come from Croatia.

Actually, Elliot has shed some light on a question posed right here at Falling Downs; why does US navy ship Russian ammo?

As for the cluster bomb business, a quick scan of the Wikipedia page for "cluster munitions" reveals that the top four users of cluster bombs over the past twenty years are the US, UK, France, and Israel, in roughly that order.

So cluster bombs are hunky dory when used by the Nations of Virtue but a war crime when used by Assad?

Perhaps Elliot should spend more time parenting his wee daughter.