This column provides a Rosetta Stone for you to decode news about Russia’s entry into the Syrian war.

You and yours face high risk from recent developments, including U.S.-allied reactions that include ramped-up U.S. shipments of advanced missiles to rebel fighters in Syria with minimal safeguards on use of the weapons. The New York Times reported this as a Syrian conflict “edging closer to an all-out proxy war between the United States and Russia.”

With announcements and reporting heavily influence by propaganda from all sides, any attempt to get at the facts on sensitive matters requires consumption of the prestige media and also academic and alternative sources, as well as reliance on common sense.

For such reasons, we note that the Washington Post — like the New York Times recently and many other mainstream media that advocate rebellion against Syria’s government — published an Associated Press story on Oct. 12 that quoted the anti-government Syrian Observatory on Human Rights as if it were a neutral, fact-finding body. Instead, the news outlets could have ignored that source or informed readers of its background. The “observatory” is a one-man, anti-government propaganda mill whose one-sided “human rights” factoids are part of a campaign to overthrow Syria’s government congruent with U.S. policy and that of the major U.S. news organizations.

We must also drop excessive loyalty to political parties and other movements whose leaders (many heavily influential with the media in ways seldom seen) protect their interests by shoehorning all information into partisan arguments. That doesn’t help in a disaster like Syria created in a bipartisan manner.

To broaden this discussion, we thus note that InfoWars radio host Alex Jones got to the heart of the problems in a three-hour show last week in McCain: Let’s Arm ISIS To Fight Russia. Jones is a gravel-voiced commentator who mixes primarily conservative themes with liberal ones, and often tackles elites and “globalists.” Regarding U.S. sabre-rattling over Syria, Jones said, appropriately enough, “I do not even have words to describe how dangerous this is, but I’ll do my best.”

Yet all major GOP candidates and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton blithely advocate a “No Fly Zone” among other warlike nostrums.

President Obama (shown in a September meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Secretary of State John Kerry) is one of the few major figures in American government resisting that escalation, which would be an illegal act of war because no relevant body has authorized it.

Aside from a legal basis, a shooting war with Russian, Syrian, and other opponents could easily arise if the United States or an ally shoots down one of their planes. They possess vastly greater firepower than the United States has faced in previous zones or indeed in any confrontations since the Vietnam War era. And intelligence sources inform us that Russian President Vladimir Putin specifically warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their meeting in Moscow not to interfere with Russian military actions in Syria, or else.

Some of these dangers are obvious even if the media seldom reports on them.

But what the mainstream media never discuss are the full backgrounds and motivations of Obama, other key officials, and the private institutions that exert hidden controls over them and supposed watchdog institutions.

Based on the years of research in our recently updated 2013 book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, here is what can help you understand the news and not just to watch it.

These revelations are likely to disrupt previous conceptions for readers, just as they did for this editor during the research. Party loyalists and others who follow current affairs primarily to support their preconceptions can stop reading now. For those open to new ideas supported by documented proof:

The Stakes: Western battlefield setbacks in the Middle East and Central Asia are making leaders increasingly desperate and reckless. The U.S. has been forced to admit that the CIA has been operating a secret war for four years against the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. Former CIA Director David Petraeus last week argued before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. should ally itself with Al Qaeda to overthrow Assad, whose coalition fights ISIS and Al Qaeda as near-indistinguishable. Indeed, U.S. allies are widely suspected of funding ISIS and Al Qaeda, and USAID insignia is seen on a tent of purported ISIS members at right. Turkey has emerged as a leading supporter of ISIS and suspect in the horrendous chemical attack that killed more than a thousand persons in 2013, including many children. Israel’s warmongering, interference in U.S. domestic politics, and increasingly cruel treatment of Palestinians have prompted widespread revulsion in the West, including among non-Zionist Jews in Israel and in the United States. Jihadists are threatening and killing Christians in Syria, who are fleeing in fear of their lives after living for generations under rule by Assad and his father. Refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries have brought chaos to the Middle East and now are creating massive migrations of not-vetted refugees destabilizing European nations. The 800,000 new immigrants in Germany, for example, are making many Europeans reappraise their support for U.S. policies. The ultimate risk, of course, is war. Saudi clerics and other radicals have ordered a fatwa against Russia, whose leaders suspect that the United States has organized jihadists to terrorize Russia.

The Players. Few Americans know that President Obama’s roots, like those of most of his family, are in the world of intelligence, banking, and prestigious foundations. Obama’s mother worked for the Ford Foundation, the top conduit in the world for laundered funds from the CIA, and his grandmother was vice president of a Rockefeller-controlled bank. Similarly, the attacks on Obama as a “community organizer” and radical are half-truths at best and are meant to deceive. The same kinds of half-truths limit public understanding of most of our other “leaders,” organizations, and their plutocrat controllers.

Pervasive Propaganda Presented As ‘News.’ The Middle Eastern wars are clarifying the media power of a hidden government or “Deep State” that manipulates constitutional safeguards to achieve autocratic goals benefiting elites. The mainstream media distort (often by omission) debate on such current topics as the Syrian war and presidential candidacies, or such historical topics as cover-ups of President Kennedy’s killers and the circumstances of other major assassinations. As one example, the media have thousands of times (as recently as the New York Times on Oct. 9) have relied on “the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” to inform audiences of basic facts about the Syrian war, but almost never provide the context that it is a one-main operation by an anti-government activist who has not been in his country for 15 years. As another example, the media self-censor and the CIA withholds information that President Kennedy was killed via a conspiracy of those who opposed his foreign policy. Obama, a product of the intelligence community, is frightened that the same thing might happen to him or his family. But Obama is nonetheless resisting his more extreme fellow war-mongers. That slant is never presented to you, except via the alternative media, as in a column Oct. 12 here by former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, now banned from the mainstream media.

Obama began his career as a recruit for the intelligence community who specialized in centrist-left role-playing. The facts have been well-documented since 2008 in alternative media, albeit in largely circumstantial ways too lengthy to repeat here. Books are for such documentation. Presidential Puppetry, for example, has nearly 1,300 endnotes, nearly all on the record.

The essence is that Obama’s first job out of college was with the CIA-front company Business International Corp. Thus, he was not a community organizer until later. His family on both sides was also involved in the wing of intelligence operations. Their goal was to penetrate on behalf of the power structure left-leaning organizations. Obama thus has functioned as a gatekeeper Democratic and other leftish criticisms of the power structure.