Pretty much the whole point of the Afghanistan conflict. Wars like this have never been about fighting for any moral or even political cause. It’s always been commercial for the most part.

“Blood drenched war criminals like Blair, Bush, Cheney, Howard and all the rest get to walk round scot free, living a very comfortable existence.
Truthtellers and whistle blowers like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond sit in jail cells.”

That’s what happens when you have criminals running the system. Of course, they’ll never be in harms way if they’re the ones ruling the roost. Same reason for why Hillary Clinton never faced any incarceration for reportedly mishandling state secrets despite Trump promising to “lock her up” (they’re friends, after all), or for her alleged body count spanning decades.

I doubt, however, that agents like Assange and Manning are spending a second behind bars. If they truly were genuine threats to the system, we wouldn’t have even heard of them. They would’ve suffered a complete media blackout from the onset and immediately disappeared or bumped off. You wouldn’t see them give interviews with the controlled media and even have movies be made about them. Genuine whistleblowers aren’t nearly as lucky.

Plus, it’s not like as though we needed Assange et al. to inform us about Bush & Co.’s war crimes. The MSM and their academic hacks, for example, aren’t hiding the millions allegedly killed and displaced from the War on Terror, even though they might be lying about the stats or the reasons why the war happened.

Perhaps competing drug suppliers were getting in their way of making obscenely more money from drugging the masses, so they had to send in their military Gestapo from NATO to excise their competitors under the guises of “fighting terrorism” and “curbing the opium trade.” Hence why opium production increased after 2001 despite the Taliban allegedly reducing it to historic lows. I guess the Taliban didn’t get the memo; therefore, they had to be punished for it.

Same with their flagrant abuse or neglect of “Anti-Trust” laws and their equally fraudulent and costly War on Drugs – both of which were never what they’ve been sold as, either.

Also, try StormCloudsGathering, Antiwar, The Anti-Media and the Anti-neocon Report, as well as the Unz Review.

Also try Wikispooks and the great Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/ is a good one.

Me too! I’m mostly a lurker there and probably will be here too. James gave such a glowing report of this piece I had to hop over. I always assumed Off-Guardian was just a reaction channel for the Guardian. Incredibly pleasantly surprised at the depth and spectrum of articles presented here. Early Christmas present!

I think there’s been some sort of takeover of a lot of the older alternative media in just the last few months. The ones really saying the challenging stuff are getting fewer. So many have just gone off the boil and started putting out a lot of the same stuff you see in the mainstream but with slightly different wording.

I don’t read Consortium News any more. Likewise the Canary due you their completely Gatekeeper stance on some of the most important issues of our time. And I’ve recently added Caitlin Johnstone to the questionable pile.

This place is just what I needed. Like James said, the only outfit that had anything real to say about the Afghanistan papers. At least one more source apart from Corbettreport.com where genuine alternatives analysis can still be found.

Any others? Suggestions would be welcome for some good Christmas alt media reading.