We are a group of friends with a long and shared interest in the media and campaigning for greater balance and accuracy in reporting. Specifically we are fed up with poor quality news that falsely justifies war.

We believe in evidence-based investigative journalism that challenges presumptions and groupthink; Not kowtowing to special interest groups, such as governments, military or corporate interests.

We were totally appalled to see the narrow pro-war coverage by our media showing itself subservient to senior politicians and dismissive of opposing voices and peace campaigners, which we witnessed in the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, with ongoing consequences for the country and whole region.

We saw this happen too with the rapidly sanctioned lies for regime-change bombing of Libya in 2011 by US, UK and France, leading to the catastrophic destruction of Africa’s richest country and it becoming a shattered terrorist haven ‘failed state’, from which millions have fled, many drowning in the process, and where tens have thousands have been killed.

This from having been the envy of its neighbours with free modern health-care, grants for new families, a cutting-edge irrigation program … all lost. The pretext – ‘saving rebels from impending massacre’ – was a false concoption on a par with Iraq’s WMDs, as the British Parliament accepted years later. But the gross deceit used to enable the non-compliant and extremely rich country’s demolition to chaotic barbarism – now featuring terrorist-run black African slave markets – and the real reasons Gaddafi ‘had to go’, have never received (and probably never will) the coverage they deserve in the mainstream. After the ‘victory’ photo-shoot with Cameron and Sarkozy, mainstream news viewers were left conveniently uninformed of the horrific death and devastation Western regime change caused there.

Previously, after the stated ‘reasons’ for the Iraq war were categorically shown to be lies, we had felt hopeful in seeing many news providers and politicians across the board admitting their failure to check evidence handed down to them and their over-readiness to pass on this unverified information as fact. These were shown to be empty meaningless words as soon as Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy got to work spouting a false pretext for invading Libya, which was dutifully parroted by all state-corporate media.

Seeing the same style of pro-war unchallenged spin over Syria intensifying during 2013, we decided that we could not sit and watch the same process happening all over again and do nothing. Hence this site, created in spring 2013 amid growing pro-war propaganda, peaking perhaps with the surprisingly lost parliamentary vote for full-scale bombing at the end of August that year, but unceasing and with other ‘hot’ periods – tending to coincide with and impact negatively on negotiated settlements – continuing now.

On Syria we have seen consistently, and have tried to highlight here, incredibly tunnel-vision propaganda right across the state-corporate mainstream studiously ignoring the vast majority of Syrians supporting their government in the fight against foreign-backed jihadi proxy forces – ‘moderate rebels’. Totally unsurprisingly, Syrian citizens mostly want their leadership and national army to protect them and to maintain their secular religously tolerant society.

Perversely however – especially given the US’ so-called ‘global war on terror’ since 2001 – we have seen, and pointed out on the site, that mainstream news has been strongly supportive of the Western-backed Al-Qaeda dominated ‘rebels’ – these would be referred to as terrorists in any other context, but always ‘rebels’ or ‘moderate rebels’ by our official-line supporting ‘news’ providers.

We have been appalled by the mainstream constantly making extremely one-sided choices of which events to prioritise and imprint forever into our minds as an international iconic cause celebre, using almost exclusively ‘rebel’ sources, and in contrast, which events to studiously play down, give a token nod to and ignore when these go against the desired narrative.

We have also seen established trusted apparently independent NGOs co-opted to support the regime change propaganda. And we’ve been struck by a new ever-present eye-catching supposedly ‘independent’ group created by an ex (?) British intelligence officer with huge Western financial backing – even winning an Oscar – in order, it seems, to add a ‘moral-high-ground’ veneer to the shameful reality of the West supporting the most intolerant brutal terrorists against the democratic will of Syrians.

In 2014 the regime-change spin went overboard in Ukraine when we saw a US-backed violent coup against the probably corrupt but certainly democratically elected Russia-leaning leader. In this case, brutal neo-nazi thugs were the proxies effecting regime change, presented in only heroic terms by our media. Russia, in contrast, has been demonised as culpable, and even an aggressor, despite no evidence of military involvement, and an open democratic process leading the ethnic Russisn zones of Crimea to be annexed and Eastern Ukraine to split from the extreme right-wing coup government in Kiev (see Ukraine section for historical breakdown and reports).

Now in April 2017, we see the conflict in Syria ongoing, with another so far univestigated chemical gas incident recntly leading to a US missile attack on a Syrian airbase, despite only Washington’s evidentially untustworthy word as the only purported ‘evidence’ for the claims of Syrian government guilt – and major holes in the story according to experts. Once again, our media has shown us it’s not at all the truth that matters, but how emotionally impacting, loud and wide the message can be communicated – and you don’t get any louder and wider than the whole of Western corporate-state media skwawking emotionally-impacting official narrative in unison.

Along all of ‘aggressive’ Russia’s borders, we see an ongoing build-up of ‘defensive’ NATO forces to bolster the already present large number of US bases surrounding the country, in a domestic climate of heightened anti-Russian hysteria, with some experts openly predicting imminent war.

Syria and Ukraine also continue to risk escalating the US and Russia into direct confrontation and possibly a nuclear WW3 at any time.

And now North Korea – with the US acting under Trump’s / his handlers’ command, the American military giant has decided it’s time to push hard for a change there too and has assembled a task force of various ships, as well as already having many permanent bases nearby. There is a lot of very worrying dangerous talk, and presidential tweeting, including on the use of nuclear weapons.

Just a few days ago US forces dropped a MOAB (‘mother of all bombs’) in Afghanistan, perhaps intentionally as a frightening precedent to heighten tensions.

The aims of this site are twofold

1. To ask you to join and share a global wake-up call campaign on news creators and politicians at all levels against ‘war normalisation’ – urging them to fulfil their most crucial role of representing the unanimous worldwide opposition to the mass killing of other humans in war, especially nuclear; demanding instead that senior politicians, journalists and media-controllers properly Represent public compassion, and therefore abandon war, war-profiteering, and propagandising for war, and direct themselves instead to achieving peaceful conflict resolution. We don’t believe in sudden miracles but this needs to be shared and expressed as a step on the path.

2. To open debate on a wide range of often unasked questions, offering articles with alternative viewpoints and evidence that challenge the limited, largely war-accepting and loyal-to-government/military perspective of what we see as the tunnel vision of extremely narrowly-owned corporate-state media. And we never want to forget or become desensitized here to the devastating consequences if aggressive actions are not urgently exchanged for currently far too easily passed over ‘less profitable’ options for non-military negotiated resolution to conflict.

Website first launched July 2013 focussed on Syria; relaunch late March 2015 focussed on Ukraine. Re-relaunch April 2017 with wider focus, including on N Korea.