This page includes materials on US relations with the world, with a special focus on Northeast Asia and, inevitably, the Middle East. And so Britain is brought into it. And sometimes I stray further afield, when something catches my eye. Prior to 2005 it was called 'US and the world'

• Bipartisan Bombers: Republican and Democratic Candidates Defend Killing Civilians in Terror War
  by Stephen Zunes There has been a lot of consternation expressed in the media at a series of statements by Republican presidential candidates during their most recent debate and elsewhere in which a number of them appeared to be advocating the large-scale killing of civilians through aerial bombardment as a legitimate means of defeating the so-called “Islamic State.” (ISIS or IS) These statements did not simply rationalize military operations that result in large numbers of civilian deaths, which politicians in both parties have supported for decades, but actually advocate the killing of civilians as a legitimate tactic in counter-terrorism warfare. Let’s put aside for a moment the irony of killing innocent people as a means of fighting a terrorist group that kills innocent people and the fact that it would result in blowback that would almost certainly increase the threat of terrorist attacks against the United States. Such operations would constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and other principles of international law to which the United States, like all governments and armed groups, is legally bound. Yet the three leading Republican candidates for president are not bothered about that. Donald Trump has called on killing families of terrorist suspects. Ted Cruz has called on “carpet bombing” Syrian cities controlled by IS and see if “sand can glow in the dark.” When moderator Hugh Hewitt asked Ben Carson, “So you are OK with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilians?” he responded, “You got it. You got it.” [Bombing] [Civilian]
• Why WWIII Is On The Horizon — Paul Craig Roberts
  Paul Craig Roberts December 28, 2015 The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave birth to a dangerous American ideology called neoconservativism. The Soviet Union had served as a constraint on US unilateral action. With the removal of this constraint on Washington, neoconservatives declared their agenda of US world hegemony. America was now the “sole superpower,” the “unipower,” that could act without restraint anywhere in the world. The Washington Post neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer summed up the “new reality” as follows: “We have overwheming global power. We are history’s designated custodians of the international system. When the Soviet Union fell, something new was born, something utterly new–a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe. This is a stagering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. Even Rome was no model for what America is today.” The staggering unipolar power that history has given to Washington has to be protected at all costs. In 1992 top Pentagon official Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz penned the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which became the basis for Washington’s foreign policy. [Neocon] [US global strategy] [Russia confrontation]
• Spy agencies resist push for expanded scrutiny of top employees
  Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., seen Dec. 17, was concerned about the workload, among other issues, that would have been generated by the original bill, officials said. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images) By Greg Miller December 29 ? U.S. intelligence agencies recently fought off a move by Congress to require the CIA and other spy services to disclose more details about high-ranking employees who have been promoted or fired, despite pledges to be more open and accountable. The disputed measure was designed to increase scrutiny of cases­ in which senior officers ascend to high-level positions despite problems ranging from abusive treatment of subordinates to involvement in botched operations overseas. The CIA in particular has come under sharp criticism in recent years for promoting operatives who faced investigations by the agency’s internal watchdog or the Justice Department for their roles in the brutal interrogations of prisoners or badly mishandled operations to capture terrorism suspects. [CIA] [Intelligence] [Governance]
• Leaked documents may reveal the inner workings of the Islamic State — but what if they are fake?
  By Adam Taylor December 30 at 1:57 PM This undated image posted on a militant website on Jan. 14, 2014, shows fighters from the Islamic State marching in Raqqa, Syria. (Militant website via AP) If you want to really understand the Islamic State and go beyond the propaganda, looking at the militant group's internal documents might be a good place to start. As the group expanded over the past year and attempted to turn into a functioning state, it released several internal orders and decrees that seek to organize this "caliphate." These documents offer a glimpse of not only the way the Islamic State organizes but also the anxiety and disorder in the group that lies under the surface. One example of this comes from documents that were recently revealed by Reuters and that appear to show the Islamic State decreeing who can have sex with captured enslaved women and who cannot. The documents showed that a bureaucracy appears to underpin even the most brutal acts committed by the group and hinted that some of the extreme behavior by its fighters led even the group's own religious authorities to balk. On the other hand, some experts believe that some purported Islamic State internal documents shared online are hoaxes, deliberately designed to deceive. These fakes are widespread enough that Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a young British analyst who has made a name for himself with his analysis of extremist activity, recently published his own "guide to Islamic State document hoaxes." [ISIS] [Disinformation]
• Foreign Ministry: Terrorism is outcome of generous support provided by countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia to terrorist organizations
  Foreign and Expatriates Ministry 28 December 2015 Damascus, SANA – Foreign and Expatriates Ministry on Monday sent two letters to the UN Secretary-General and President of UN Security Council regarding the persistence of ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other terrorist organizations in committing crimes against civilians in Syrian cities. The Ministry said that terrorist organizations are targeting Syrian cities with suicide bombing and arbitrary shelling in a bid to disturb the state of tranquility and stability which had prevailed in several Syrian cities that witnessed successful national reconciliation efforts in recent days. The letters asserted that this terrorism is the result of the open and generous support in funds, arms, and munitions provided to terrorists by states like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, who are complicit in the terrorist attacks carried out against the Syrian people. Foreign Ministry went on to say that on Monday, terrorist explosions took place in the cities of Aleppo and Homs, claiming the lives of many civilians, while the terrorist gangs of so- called “Jaish al-Islam”, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, targeted Damascus city with different forms of mortar and rocket shells. [Syria] [Outsourcing] [Saudi Arabia] [Turkey]
• The Dirty War on Syria: Washington Supports the Islamic State (ISIS)
  The Evidence By Prof. Tim Anderson Global Research, December 29, 2015 [Featured image: Head of US armed forces General Martin Dempsey, Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman Senator Lindsey Graham and US Vice President Joe Biden have all admitted that their close regional allies (especially the Saudis, Qatar and Turkey) finance ISIS.] “It is always difficult to play a double game: declaring a fight against terrorists and simultaneously trying to use some to place pieces on the Middle Eastern chess board to pursue their own interests … [but do the] so-called moderate bandits behead people moderately?” – Vladimir Putin (2015) Reports that US and British aircraft carrying arms to ISIS were shot down by Iraqi forces (Iraqi News 2015) were met with shock and denial in western countries. Yet few in the Middle East doubt that Washington is playing a ‘double game’ with its proxy armies in Syria. A Yemeni AnsarAllah leader says ‘Wherever there is U.S. interference, there is al Qaeda and ISIS. It’s to their advantage’ (al-Bukaiti 2015). However key myths remain important, especially to western audiences. Engaging with those myths calls for reason and evidence, not just assertion. [ISIS] [Outsourcing]
• Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2007-2014
  Catherine A. Theohary Specialist in National Security Policy and Information Operations Congressional Research Service December 21, 2015 This report provides Congress with official, unclassified, quantitative data on conventional arms transfers to developing nations by the United States and foreign countries for the preceding eight calendar years for use in its policy oversight functions. All agreement and delivery data in this report for the United States are government-to-government Foreign Military Sales (FMS) transactions. Similar data are provided on worldwide conventional arms transfers by all government suppliers, but the principal focus is the level of arms transfers by major weapons supplying governments to nations in the developing world. Developing nations continue to be the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by weapons suppliers. During the years 2007-2010, the value of arms transfer agreements with developing nations comprised 74.4% of all such agreements worldwide. More recently, arms transfer agreements with developing nations constituted 75.5% of all such agreements globally from 2011-2014, and 86.0% of these agreements in 2014. The value of all arms transfer agreements with developing nations in 2014 was $61.8 billion. In 2014, the value of all arms deliveries to developing nations was $20.6 billion. Recently, from 2011 to 2014, the United States and Russia have dominated the arms market in the developing world, with both nations either ranking first or second for each of these four years in the value of arms transfer agreements. From 2011 to 2014, the United States made nearly $115 billion in such agreements, 46.3% of all these agreements (expressed in current dollars). Russia made $41.7 billion, 16.8% of these agreements. During this same period, collectively, the United States and Russia made 63.1% of all arms transfer agreements with developing nations, ($156.4 billion in current dollars). In 2014, the United States ranked first in arms transfer agreements with developing nations with $29.8 billion or 48.2% of these agreements. In second place was Russia with $10.1 billion or 16.3% of such agreements. In 2014, Russia ranked first in the value of arms deliveries to developing nations at $8.4 billion, or 40.8% of all such deliveries. The United States ranked second in these deliveries at over $7.6 billion or 27.2%. In worldwide arms transfer agreements in 2014—to both developed and developing nations—the United States dominated, ranking first with $36.2 billion in such agreements or 50.4% of all such agreements. Russia ranked second in worldwide arms transfer agreements in 2014 with $10.2 billion in such global agreements or 14.2%. The value of all arms transfer agreements worldwide in 2014 was $71.8 billion. In 2014, South Korea ranked first concluding $7.8 billion in agreements. Brazil ranked third in the value of arms transfer agreements among all developing nations weapons purchasers, concluding $6.5 billion in such agreements. Iraq ranked second with $7.3 billion in such agreements. [Arms sales] [Military balance]
• U.S. Foreign Arms Deals Increased Nearly $10 Billion in 2014
  By Nicholas Fandos Dec. 25, 2015 A United States-South Korea joint military exercise in Yeoncheon, northeast of Seoul. South Korea, a key American ally, was the world’s top weapons buyer in 2014, completing $7.8 billion in contracts. Credit Yonhap, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images WASHINGTON — Foreign arms sales by the United States jumped by almost $10 billion in 2014, about 35 percent, even as the global weapons market remained flat and competition among suppliers increased, a new congressional study has found. American weapons receipts rose to $36.2 billion in 2014 from $26.7 billion the year before, bolstered by multibillion-dollar agreements with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. Those deals and others ensured that the United States remained the single largest provider of arms around the world last year, controlling just over 50 percent of the market. Russia followed the United States as the top weapons supplier, completing $10.2 billion in sales, compared with $10.3 billion in 2013. Sweden was third, with roughly $5.5 billion in sales, followed by France with $4.4 billion and China with $2.2 billion. South Korea, a key American ally, was the world’s top weapons buyer in 2014, completing $7.8 billion in contracts. It has faced continued tensions with neighboring North Korea in recent years over the North’s nuclear weapons program and other provocations. The bulk of South Korea’s purchases, worth more than $7 billion, were made with the United States and included transport helicopters and related support, as well as advanced unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles. [Arms sales] [Military balance]
• A year of Taliban gains shows that ‘we haven’t delivered,’ top Afghan official says
  The Washington Post traveled to the front lines of the fight against a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, the Marja district in Helmand province. (The Washington Post) By Sudarsan Raghavan December 27 at 4:43 PM ? MARJA, Afghanistan — As the Afghan convoy entered the battered village, Taliban fighters opened fire. U.S.-trained Afghan policemen poured out of their Humvees and began wildly shooting their AK-47 rifles in every direction. “The enemy is firing one bullet, and you are responding with dozens!” their commander, Col. Khalil Jawad, screamed into his radio in frustration. “Aim, then fire!” A minute later, the militants melted away. On this day in early December in the southern province of Helmand, they had delivered their message: The Taliban is back, its fighters showing a battle discipline and initiative far superior to the Afghan security forces trained and equipped by the United States. [Afghanistan] [Taliban]
• At least 60 people charged with terrorism-linked crimes this year — a record
  By Ellen Nakashima December 25 ? The Justice Department has charged at least 60 individuals this year with terrorism-related crimes, an unprecedented number that officials attribute to a heightened threat from the Islamic State and the influence of social media on potential recruits. Last week alone, prosecutors charged three people and convicted two others on terrorism-linked charges. One of those charged was Enrique Marquez Jr., a friend and neighbor of Syed Rizwan Farook, the male gunman who was killed in a firefight with police in the aftermath of the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting rampage this month. That terrorist attack killed 14 people. A second was Mohamed Elshinawy, a Maryland man accused of receiving at least $8,700 from the Islamic State overseas and planning to use the money to carry out attacks in the United States. He told prosecutors that a childhood friend had connected him through social media with an Islamic State operative. The third was Jalil Aziz, a Pennsylvania man who was arrested for allegedly providing material support to the Islamic State, by spreading its propaganda on social media and for seeking to help the group’s supporters travel to Syria to fight. Aziz also encouraged other Islamic State supporters he communicated with to use U.S.-based encrypted messaging applications, prosecutors said. [ISIS] [Blowback]
• Afghanistan's new phase
  Paul Rogers 23 December 2015 In the fourteenth year of Afghanistan's war, a resurging Taliban and expanding ISIS are forcing the west to react. The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan has come as a surprise only in those countries, such as Britain, where the country as a whole is rarely covered in detail in the media. This routine paucity of information also helps explain the publicity surrounding the news that a small group of UK advisers is joining 300 Nato personnel in Helmand province. This is part of an emergency response to a sudden threat of Taliban takeovers of the district centre of Sangin, and possibly even the provincial capital of Laskhar Gar. Sangin has already largely fallen to Taliban militias but Nato has reportedly despatched special-forces units, including some British, to try and hold on to at least part of the town. For the British army the Sangin district is especially symbolic because of the loss of 106 lives there from 2006-10. This is nearly a quarter of the entire UK losses in the thirteen-year deployment that ended in 2014, when David Cameron made his extraordinary “mission accomplished” claim. [Afghanistan]
• Veteran Intelligence Officials Call for Proof on Syria-Sarin Attack
  By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Global Research, December 23, 2015 Consortium News 22 December 2015 MEMORANDUM FOR: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and Foreign Minister of Russia Sergey Lavrov FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT: Sarin Attack at Ghouta on Aug. 21, 2013 In a Memorandum of Oct. 1, 2013, we asked each of you to make public the intelligence upon which you based your differing conclusions on who was responsible for the sarin chemical attack at Ghouta, outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. On Dec. 10, 2015, Eren Erdem, a member of parliament in Turkey, citing official documents, blamed Turkey for facilitating the delivery of sarin to rebels in Syria. Mr. Kerry, you had blamed the Syrian government. Mr. Lavrov, you had described the sarin as “homemade” and suggested anti-government rebels were responsible. Each of you claimed to have persuasive evidence to support your conclusion. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Aug. 30, 2013, claims to have proof that the Syrian government was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21, but that evidence failed to materialize or was later discredited. [State Department photo] Neither of you responded directly to our appeal to make such evidence available to the public, although, Mr. Lavrov, you came close to doing so. In a speech at the UN on Sept. 26, 2013, you made reference to the views we presented in our VIPS Memorandum, Is Syria a Trap?, sent to President Obama three weeks earlier. Pointing to strong doubt among chemical weapons experts regarding the evidence adduced to blame the government of Syria for the sarin attack, you also referred to the “open letter sent to President Obama by former operatives of the CIA and the Pentagon,” in which we expressed similar doubt. Mr. Kerry, on Aug. 30, 2013, you blamed the Syrian government, publicly and repeatedly, for the sarin attack. But you failed to produce the kind of “Intelligence Assessment” customarily used to back up such claims. We believe that this odd lack of a formal “Intelligence Assessment” is explained by the fact that our former colleagues did not believe the evidence justified your charges and that, accordingly, they resisted pressure to “fix the intelligence around the policy,” as was done to “justify” the attack on Iraq. Intelligence analysts were telling us privately (and we told the President in our Memorandum of Sept. 6, 2013) that, contrary to what you claimed, “the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21.” This principled dissent from these analysts apparently led the White House to create a new art form, a “Government Assessment,” to convey claims that the government in Damascus was behind the sarin attack. It was equally odd that the newly minted genre of report offered not one item of verifiable evidence. [Sarin] [False flag]
• Seymour Hersh report on Syria: White House knew US was arming Islamic State
  By Andrew V. Pestano Dec. 28, 2015 at 9:22 AM Journalist Seymour Hersh writes in the London Review of Books that the Obama administration's Syria policy has sparked dissent at the Pentagon. File photo by Giorgio Montersino/Flickr WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reports that the administration of President Barack Obama, in particular the CIA, has knowingly armed militant Islamists in Syria, including the Islamic State. "Barack Obama's repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office -- and that there are 'moderate' rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him -- has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon's Joint Staff," Hersh writes in the London Review of Books. "Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration's fixation on Assad's primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn't adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington's anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped." Hersh writes that a highly classified 2013 Defense Intelligence Agency/Joint Chiefs of Staff report on Syria forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to "chaos" and possibly to Islamist extremists taking over Syria. Hersh reports that Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, told him that his agency sent a "constant stream" of warnings to the "civilian leadership" about the dire consequences of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. [US Syria policy] [Civil-military]
• Sitrep Afghanistan: Bad, Getting Worse
  by Robert Fisk The news from Afghanistan is very bad. No one says that, of course. President Ghani has a “national unity government” that “supports a strong partnership with the United States”, according to Barack Obama two months ago. Sure, Kunduz was captured by the Taliban – but then the Afghans got it back (though minus one American-bombed hospital, along with most of its patients and doctors). Sure, Sangin was captured by the Taliban – but now the Afghan army is fighting to get it back. But didn’t more than a hundred British soldiers die to hold Sangin? Sure, but American troops in Iraq died to hold and keep Mosul – and Mosul is now the home of the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And US troops in Iraq died to capture Fallujah, then lost it, and died all over again to recapture it – and Fallujah is now in the hands of Isis. [Afghanistan]
• Seymour Hersh's Latest Bombshell: U.S. Military Undermined Obama on Syria with Tacit Help to Assad
  December 22, 2015 NEXT: Sy Hersh: Backing Assad's Ouster, Has Hillary Clinton Forgotten the Lessons of Iraq & Libya? Seymour Hersh Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist in Washington, D.C. His latest piece in the London Review of Books is titled "Military to Military: US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian War." Hersh is working on a book about Dick Cheney’s vice presidency. A new report by the Pulitzer-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh says the Joint Chiefs of Staff has indirectly supported Bashar al-Assad in an effort to help him defeat jihadist groups. Hersh reports the Joint Chiefs sent intelligence via Russia, Germany and Israel on the understanding it would be transmitted to help Assad push back Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State. Hersh also claims the military even undermined a U.S. effort to arm Syrian rebels in a bid to prove it was serious about helping Assad fight their common enemies. Hersh says the Joint Chiefs’ maneuvering was rooted in several concerns, including the U.S. arming of unvetted Syrian rebels with jihadist ties, a belief the administration was overly focused on confronting Assad’s ally in Moscow, and anger the White House was unwilling to challenge Turkey and Saudi Arabia over their support of extremist groups in Syria. Hersh joins us to detail his claims and respond to his critics. [US Syria Policy] [Pentagon] [Dissension] [Civil-military]
• Sy Hersh: Backing Assad's Ouster, Has Hillary Clinton Forgotten the Lessons of Iraq & Libya?
  December 22, 2015 Seymour Hersh Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist in Washington, D.C. His latest piece in the London Review of Books is titled "Military to Military: US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian War." Hersh is working on a book about Dick Cheney’s vice presidency. Links London Review of Books: Seymour Hersh, “Military to Military” At Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate, front-runner Hillary Clinton rejected what she called a "false choice" between defeating the Islamic State and overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. "We will not get the support on the ground in Syria to dislodge ISIS if the fighters there who are not associated with ISIS, but whose principal goal is getting rid of Assad, don’t believe there is a political, diplomatic channel that is ongoing," Clinton said. Rivals Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley disagreed, saying it is not for the U.S. to decide Assad’s fate. "I think there should be learning curves for people with that kind of power," Hersh says of Clinton. "I think what happened in Libya should have instructed anybody in the government, including the president, that when you depose a dictator, you have to be aware of what’s going to come next, and you have to think long and hard about what you’re doing. I think, by any standard, getting rid of Gaddafi has proven to be a horrible event. It was a terrible decision, and we seem not to have learned enough from it." [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing] [Hersh] [Liberal]
• ‘The Iran-Iraq War,’ by Pierre Razoux
  By Graeme Wood Dec. 29, 2015 The war between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran ended 27 years ago, before most of today’s Iraqis and Iranians were alive. Many of today’s Americans were pretty young then, too — certainly too young to remember the glee with which United States policy makers watched the war, an eight-year storm of steel that killed as many as a million people and exhausted two unsavory regimes. The most famous line about the war is also the most fatuous. Henry Kissinger is said to have remarked that it was “a shame there can only be one loser.” In fact, they both lost: Few modern wars have so thoroughly broken, traumatized and destroyed both sides, and few have turned out to have had such disfiguring effects on the region or on American foreign policy. The war started small. In September 1980, Saddam Hussein began invading and annexing Iranian territory, in a move that foreshadowed his annexation of Kuwait a decade later. Khomeini, still fresh in the role of Iran’s head of state, fought back and eventually seized bits of Iraq. For Hussein, the prizes included Iranian oil fields in the Arab southwest; for Khomeini, Shiite shrines in Iraq. At various points, the war became a duel of bombers trading sorties over Baghdad, Tehran and other cities; a naval battle over control of Persian Gulf tanker traffic and port access; and an old-school trench war, with exchanges of territory measured in hundreds of feet. [Iran Iraq war] [US Middle East policy]
• Special Report: Pentagon thwarts Obama's effort to close Guantanamo
  WASHINGTON | By Charles Levinson and David Rohde In September, U.S. State Department officials invited a foreign delegation to the Guantanamo Bay detention center to persuade the group to take detainee Tariq Ba Odah to their country. If they succeeded, the transfer would mark a small step toward realizing President Barack Obama's goal of closing the prison before he leaves office. The foreign officials told the administration they would first need to review Ba Odah's medical records, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the episode. The Yemeni has been on a hunger strike for seven years, dropping to 74 pounds from 148, and the foreign officials wanted to make sure they could care for him. For the next six weeks, Pentagon officials declined to release the records, citing patient privacy concerns, according to the U.S. officials. The delegation, from a country administration officials declined to identify, canceled its visit. After the administration promised to deliver the records, the delegation traveled to Guantanamo and appeared set to take the prisoner off U.S. hands, the officials said. The Pentagon again withheld Ba Odah's full medical file. Today, nearly 14 years since he was placed in the prison and five years since he was cleared for release by U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, Ba Odah remains in Guantanamo. In interviews with multiple current and former administration officials involved in the effort to close Guantanamo, Reuters found that the struggle over Ba Odah's medical records was part of a pattern. Since Obama took office in 2009, these people said, Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president's plan to close Guantanamo. [Dissension] [Civil-military]
• 2015 PacNet newsletter index
  Dec 28, 2015 The comprehensive 2015 index of each PacNet newsletter is listed below, with hyperlinks. The Pacific Forum CSIS will continue to publish timely insight and analysis in 2016.
• Turkish ‘traitor’ MP’s revelations on sarin transfers must be probed, reported to UNSC – Moscow
  Published time: 26 Dec, 2015 04:54 A U.N. chemical weapons expert, wearing a gas mask, holds a plastic bag containing samples from one of the sites of an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Ain Tarma neighbourhood of Damascus August 29, 2013. © Mohamed Abdullah / Reuters 1.5K Russia has expressed hope that a joint OPCW-UN investigation of deadly sarin attacks in Syria will not ignore reports from a Turkish MP, who faces charges of treason for exposing Ankara’s alleged role in hiding ISIS-bound shipments of gas precursors. TrendsIslamic State, Syria unrest The so-called Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) consolidated the efforts of the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) with a mandate to identify people involved in the use of chemicals weapons in Syria under the Security Council resolution 2118. “This specialized mechanism should thoroughly investigate the information provided by the Turkish parliamentarian in accordance with its mandate, and report back to the UN Security Council,” Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement The parliamentarian in question – Eren Erdem of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) – was accused of “betrayal” by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after telling the media that the Islamic State terrorists in Syria received all necessary materials to produce deadly sarin gas via Turkey. Erdem revived concerns regarding a possible cover-up following the sudden termination of a local criminal case in Adana into the illegal shipments. Furthermore, Erdem argued that the West purposefully blamed the government of Bashar Assad for the August 2013 chemical attack in Ghouta that was used as part of the pretext to make US military intervention in Syria possible. [Turkey] [Sarin] [cbw]
• What really happened to the U.S. train-and-equip program in Syria?
  Highlights Participants’ descriptions suggest trainees and trainers never agreed on mission Inserted back into Syria, trainees’ first act was to take two weeks off There were arguments and walkouts over goals, escorts, food supplies, expenses By Roy Gutman Reyhanli, Turkey — When the first group of Syrians from a U.S.-trained force intended to combat the Islamic State crossed into their country from Turkey in mid-July, they arrived in uniform carrying M16 rifles, mortars and flak vests. But they had no expense money, little food and no clear idea of how they, just 54 men, were to do battle against the extremists. Most had been in near-total isolation during their two months of training in Turkey and Jordan, and they wanted to see their families, many of whom had been under heavy government bombardment. And it was Ramadan, a month of fasting, so they voted to take a two-week break, according to their elected commander, a former Syrian army lieutenant colonel, Amin Ibrahim. Disaster struck when the break was over and they were headed back to their base. On July 29, a day after U.S. aircraft had attacked an outpost of the Nusra Front, al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, Nusra seized Col. Nedim Hassan – the commander of Division 30, the rebel unit in which the trainees were to be embedded – along with seven of his men. [US Syria policy] [Proxy] [Incompetence] [Strategic incoherence]
• Secret 2010 State Dept Report Warned of Turkey’s Neo-Ottoman Shift
  Alexander Tsukanov | 23.12.2015 State Dept Report from 2010 Predicted Turkey’s Dangerous Neo-Ottoman Shift In recent months, Ankara’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy has become the center of global attention. Looking back to the origins of the neo-Ottomanist ideology which drives Turkey’s risky foreign adventurism today, a classified US State Department cable from 2010 confirms that Washington saw President Erdogan’s dangerous shift in foreign policy coming, but couldn’t do anything about it – or worse, chose not to. From the provision of support to radical Islamist rebels in Syria, to the alleged trade in stolen ISIL oil, to the provocative downing of a Russian military plane, to the army’s incursion into Iraq, Ankara’s increasingly unhinged foreign policy decisions have become a mainstay on the front pages of the world’s press. Who could have predicted, only a few short years ago, that the ruling Justice and Development Party would pivot, so quickly and so drastically, from a foreign policy of ‘Western orientation’ and ‘zero conflicts with neighbors’, to one of confrontation and ‘neo-Ottomanism’? Well… the US State Department did, apparently. In a confidential diplomatic cable written in early 2010 and since published by WikiLeaks, Ambassador to Turkey James F. Jeffrey suggested, albeit in a somewhat muted manner, that Washington’s long-time allies in Ankara were becoming infatuated with a new, «more Islamic», «more independently activist» «neo-Ottoman» ideology – one which could present «major challenges» for US interests. The shift, the cable explained, was influenced by a number of political, economic and geopolitical factors, and was spearheaded by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) – the big-tent political coalition of Islamists, conservatives and nationalists formed in 2001 – which would come to dominate the country’s political system by the mid-2000s. According to the document, Ankara’s new ideology, epitomized by then-Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and his Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, was leading to a gradual partial shift away from Turkey’s ‘traditional Western’ and ‘zero conflicts’ trajectories, and toward ‘neo-Ottomanism’ – the desire to regain Turkey’s place in the sun as a great imperial power. [Turkey] [Erdogan] [Friction] [Neo-Ottomanism]
• False Flag Terror. A Historical Overview
  Never Forget … Your Country Admits to "False Flag Terror" By Washington's Blog Global Research, December 24, 2015 Washington's Blog 11 September 2015 Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos: [False flag]
• Saudi Arabia is killing the Russian economy in its fight to control oil prices
  Jim Edwards A year ago, Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi made it plain that he didn't care what happened to Russia if oil-producing countries failed to cooperate with Saudi-dominated OPEC on keeping prices high by restricting production. "We want to tell the world that high efficiency producing countries are the ones that deserve market share," he said, before singling out Russia's West Siberia as a region that wasn't very good at producing competitively priced oil. Since then Russia's oil-dependent economy has been decimated as the price of oil has plummeted. Here is the chart of the Russian economy from OPEC's most recent report on the state of the global oil market: [Oil] [Saudi Arabia] [Russia confrontation]
• Obama’s foreign policy goals get a boost from plunging oil prices
  An oil pump is seen in the state of Zulia, Venezuela, Falling crude prices around the world have fueled the country’s economic discontent. (Stringer/Venezuela/Reuters) By Steven Mufson December 23 at 8:48 PM ? Plunging crude oil prices are diverting hundreds of billions of dollars away from the treasure chests of oil-exporting nations, putting some of the United States’ adversaries under greater stress. After two years of falling prices, the effects have reverberated across the globe, fueling economic discontent in Venezuela, changing Russia’s economic and political calculations, and dampening Iranian leaders’ hopes of a financial windfall when sanctions linked to its nuclear program will be lifted next year. At a time of tension for U.S. international relations, cheap oil has dovetailed with some of the Obama administration’s foreign policy goals: pressuring Russian President Vladimir Putin, undermining the popularity of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and tempering the prospects for Iranian oil revenue. At the same time, it is pouring cash into the hands of consumers, boosting tepid economic recoveries in Europe, Japan and the United States. [Oil weapon] [US global strategy]
• U.S. keeps Disneyland-bound British Muslim family out of the country
  By Griff Witte, Lindsey Bever and Justin Wm. Moyer December 23 at 6:19 PM ? Muslim family barred from plane to Disneyland British Prime Minister David Cameron will look into claims that U.S. officials prevented a British Muslim family of 11 from flying to Disneyland. The father of the family is speaking out about what happened and says he would still like to visit. (AP) LONDON — As Mohammed Tariq Mahmood sat in the departure lounge of London’s Gatwick Airport last week, he was surrounded by giddy children, ecstatic for the 11-hour flight that would ferry them to Disneyland. “Mickey Mouse – I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow,” Mahmood’s 10-year-old niece scribbled in her diary, alongside a colorful illustration complete with oversized ears. “I’ve got to go now. We’re getting on the plane.” But they never did. A border control officer, on orders from Washington, intervened, Mahmood said, telling him and his brother that their family of 11 had been barred from the flight. What was supposed to be a dream vacation instead became on Wednesday just the latest flash-point in a debate over Islam and security that inflamed passions on both sides of the Atlantic. [Islamophobia] [Extraterritoriality]
• Fault line: Democrats divided on how to wage war on terrorism
  Highlights Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders disagree on the US role in world Divisions exposed following a pair of terrorist attacks in California, Paris Foreign policy dominates the third Democratic presidential debate By Anita Kumar Manchester, N.H. — The Democratic Party heads into its primaries sharply divided over how to wage war against terrorism, a rift magnified by Americans’ growing fears following recent terrorist attacks and laid bare in the newest debate between their presidential candidates. The party’s top two presidential candidates described starkly different philosophies on national security, sparking some of the liveliest exchanges in Saturday night’s debate just six weeks before the first nominating contest of the 2016 presidential election. Front-runner Hillary Clinton took the more hawkish and interventionist approach, advocating that the U.S. should be aggressive in helping to resolve disputes around the globe, even if that involves sending special forces or overthrowing dictators. “If the United States does not lead, there is not another leader,” she said. “There is a vacuum.” Her chief rival Bernie Sanders, who does not generally favor international intervention, touted his role in leading the effort against the war in Iraq, which he called one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the country’s history. “The United States of America cannot ... be thought of as the policeman of the world,” he said. [US global strategy] [[US_Election16] [Sanders] [Hillary Clinton]
• Bashar al-Assad: The Democratically Elected President of Syria
  Steven MacMillan “Butcher”; “thug”; “dictator”; “murderer”; “savage”; “tyrant”; “oppressor”; “despot”. These are just some of the words that many in the Western world associate with the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, after four years of incessant and hypnotic war propaganda. Democratically elected leader of a sovereign country however, is not a narrative the propagandists want to be circulated. The 2014 election in Syria is an event that the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in the West desperately wants to be memory-holed, as it runs in stark contrast to the narrative they are still trying to inculcate in the minds of the public. In June of last year, Assad won Syria’s Presidential election with 88.7 percent of the vote, in the country’s first multi-candidate election in almost five decades. In a country which had a population of 17,064,854 in July 2014 (according to an estimate from CIA World Factbook), over 10 million people voted for Assad. 73.42 percent of the Syrian population voted in the election, with voting only taking place in government controlled areas. A group of international observers emphasized that the election was a valid and democratic expression of the views of the Syrian people. Predictably, Western nations denounced the election as a sham and a fraud, with US Secretary of State, John Kerry, calling the election afarce a few months prior to the vote. Despite the efforts of the Western establishment to delegitimize the election, it is obvious that Assad has popular support in Syria. The Western narrative – which claims that Assad is an insane dictator who butchers his own people – is illogical, as if this was true, Assad would have been ousted years ago. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/12/20/bashar-al-assad-the-democratically-elected-president-of-syria/ [Bashar Assad]
• Washington's 'Plan B' in Syria: Renewed military intervention to oust Assad?
  By Finian Cunningham December 17, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "RT" - US top diplomat John Kerry appeared to offer cooperation during lengthy talks in Moscow this week with President Vladimir Putin. Kerry said that US policy was not trying to isolate Russia, neither was it seeking regime change in Syria. Rhetoric aside, Kerry’s expressions of goodwill simply do not cut it. During a walkabout in Moscow, the US Secretary of State chanced on a little Christmas shopping, with Kerry buying a Babushka stacking doll among other souvenirs. The iconic Russian doll containing six shelled figurines could serve as a metaphor for Washington’s elusive rhetoric. Following his three-hour discussion with Putin, Kerry said: “While we don’t see eye to eye on every aspect of Syria, we see Syria fundamentally similarly.” US government-owned media outlet Voice of America added: “He [Kerry] said the US and Russia identify the same challenges and dangers, and want the same outcomes [in Syria].” That, to put it bluntly, is simply not true. Washington and Moscow do not see Syria fundamentally similarly nor want the same outcomes. Washington wants regime change, no matter what Kerry may declare. From the outset of the conflict in Syria in March 2011, the Obama administration has been demanding that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “must go”. Indeed, it is well documented that Washington and its NATO partners have been seeking regime change against Russia’s long-time Syria ally going back to 2007 during the George W Bush presidency. The whole foreign-backed war in the Arab country – resulting in 250,000 deaths and millions of refugees over the past five years – has been orchestrated for the precise purpose of destabilizing Syria. Certainly, Kerry’s latest visit to Moscow marked a softening of the “Assad must go” line. Washington is now saying that the Syrian president may remain in office until a political transition is negotiated. But at the end of the so-called transition, the US still wants Assad gone, as Kerry again noted. That is regime change no matter how you slice it. Like Kerry’s coy claim that the US is not trying “to isolate Russia as a matter of policy,” the bottom line is that Washington has imposed unilateral economic sanctions on Russia as a result of provable US regime change in Ukraine in February 2014, and cajoled its European allies to follow suit. Withdrawing unilaterally from arms control treaties and expanding NATO forces on Russian territory are hardly the actions of a party “not seeking isolation” of Moscow. [US Syria policy] [Russia confrontation] [Kerry]
• US CENTCOM Bases
  US bases in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf
• Speaking the Unspeakable: Why the Establishment Wants to Silence Donald Trump
  Sam Husseini • December 17, 2015 The establishment so wants everyone else to unfriend Trump supporters on Facebook. There’s even an app to block them. That’ll teach them! Yes, Trump plays a bully boy and is appealing to populist (good), nativist, xenophobic, and racist sentiments (bad). Those things need to be meaningfully addressed and engaged, not for self-styled sophisticates to raise their noses, dismissing them. But focusing only on the negative aspects of Trump’s campaign has blinded people to the good — and I don’t mean good like, oh, the Democrat can beat this guy. I mean good like it’s good that some of these issues are finally getting aired. Trump appeals to nativist sentiments, but those same sentiments are skeptical of the militarized role of the U.S. in the world — as was the case during Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign. The New York Times recently purported to grade the veracity of presidential candidates. Of course by their accounting, Trump was off the scales lying. But he recently said the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State “killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity….The Middle East is a total disaster under her.” Now, I think that’s pretty accurate, though U.S. policy in my view may be more Machiavellian than stupid, but the remark is a breath of fresh air on the national stage. But I’ve not seen anyone fact-check that assertion, because that’s not an argument much of establishment media wants to debate. [Trump] [US global strategy]
• Most Smuggled ISIS Oil Goes to Turkey, Sold at Low Prices – Norwegian Report
  RT 20 December 2015 A newly-leaked report on illegal oil sales by Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS/ISIL), which was ordered to be compiled by Norway, has revealed that most of the IS-smuggled oil has been destined for Turkey, where it is sold off at bargain low prices. Norwegian daily Klassekampen leaked details of the report, which was put together by Rystad Energy, an independent oil and gas consulting firm, at the request of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. “Large amounts of oil have been smuggled across the border to Turkey from IS-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq,”Klassekampen cited the report as saying. “[The] oil is sent by tankers via smuggling routes across the border [and] is sold at greatly reduced prices, from $25 to $45 a barrel.” The crude is reportedly sold on the black market at greatly reduced prices, while the Brent benchmark is currently trading at $35-$50 per barrel. To compile the report, which is dated from July, Rystad Energy used its own database as well as sources in the region. “Exports happen in a well-established black market via Turkey,” the report concluded. “Many of the smugglers and corrupt border guards, who helped Saddam Hussein avoid international sanctions, are now helping IS export oil and import cash.” In the beginning of December, the Russian Defense Ministry released evidence which it said shows most of the illegal oil trade by IS going to Turkey. [Oil] [ISIS] [Turkey]
• Donald Trump on Putin: ‘Nobody has proven that he’s killed anyone’
  By Jose A. DelReal December 20 ? The Sunday after a contentious Republican debate, presidential candidates Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson and Rand Paul went after rival Donald Trump in television appearances. They attacked Trump's relationship with Putin, his proposed ban on allowing Muslims to enter the country and his seriousness as a candidate. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump defended Russian President Vladimir Putin against accusations that he has assassinated political adversaries and journalists, responding to criticism from his rivals over his embrace of praise from the Russian leader. "Nobody has proven that he's killed anyone. ... He's always denied it. It's never been proven that he's killed anybody,” Trump said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “You're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country. It has not been proven that he's killed reporters." On Thursday, Putin praised Trump during a wide-ranging news conference, calling him “talented without doubt" and "brilliant." Trump has embraced the remarks, drawing fire from critics such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who facetiously called the alliance “a match made in heaven.” Trump welcomed Putin's praise, citing it as proof that a Trump administration would be able to work well with the Russians. [Trump] [US_Election16] [Russia confrontation]
• The 239 Year Timeline Of America’s Involvement in Military Conflict
  . December 18, 2015 By Isaac Davis “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.” – President Theodore Roosevelt The American public and the world have long since been warned of the dangers of allowing the military industrial complex to become such an integral part of our economic survival. The United States is the self-proclaimed angel of democracy in the world, but just as George Orwell warned, war is the health of the state, and in the language of newspeak, democracy is the term we use to hide the reality of the nature of our warfare state. In truth, the United States of America has been engaged in some kind of war during 218 out of the nation’s total 239 years of existence. Put another way, in the entire span of US history, this country has only experienced 21 years without conflict. For a sense of perspective on this sobering statistic, consider these 4 facts about the history of US involvement in military conflict: ?Pick any year since 1776 and there is about a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year. ?No U.S. president truly qualifies as a peacetime president. Instead, all U.S. presidents can technically be considered “war presidents.” ?The U.S. has never gone a decade without war. ?The only time the U.S. went five years without war (1935-40) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression. As the world moves closer and closer to an official beginning to world war III, and as many people are seeking opportunities to de-escalate the situation in the Middle East, it is important to realize that the US state and the American people are simply not equipped or conditioned to pursue and realize peace. War is indeed the health of our state. US-War-Graph Here is a year-by-year timeline of America’s involvement in military conflict, as compiled by Danios of Loonwatch.com. It is noted that this list is not exhaustive, but rather a compilation of events that fit the definition of ‘war,’ excluding acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing such as were carried out against Native American populations during the establishment of the empire, and also excluding foreign interventions by America’s covert security agencies such as the CIA: Year-by-year Timeline of America’s Major Wars (1776-2011) [Militarisation] [US military] [History]
• Neocons Object to Syrian Democracy
  December 19, 2015 Exclusive: President Obama has infuriated Official Washington’s neocons by accepting the Russian stance that the Syrian people should select their own future leaders through free elections, rather than the neocon insistence on a foreign-imposed “regime change,” reports Robert Parry. By Robert Parry The Washington Post’s editorial board is livid that President Barack Obama appears to have accepted the Russian position that the Syrian people should decide for themselves who their future leaders should be – when the Post seems to prefer that the choice be made by neoconservative think tanks in Washington or other outsiders. So, in a furious editorial on Friday, the Post castigated Secretary of State John Kerry for saying – after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow – that the Obama administration and Russia see the political solution to Syria “in fundamentally the same way,” meaning that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could stand for election in the future. Russian President Vladimir Putin greets Secretary of State John Kerry before meetings at the Kremlin on Dec. 15, 2015. (State Department photo) Russian President Vladimir Putin greets Secretary of State John Kerry before meetings at the Kremlin on Dec. 15, 2015. (State Department photo) The Post wrote: “Unfortunately, that increasingly appears to be the case — and not because Mr. Putin has altered his position. For four years, President Obama demanded the departure of Mr. Assad, who has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people with chemical weapons, ‘barrel bombs,’ torture and other hideous acts. Yet in its zeal to come to terms with Mr. Putin, the Obama administration has been slowly retreating from that position.” The Russian position, which Obama finally seems to be accepting, is that the Syrian people should be allowed to choose their own leaders through fair, internationally organized elections, rather than have outside powers dictate who can and who can’t compete in a democratic process. Obama’s previous stance was that Assad must be prevented from running in an election. [US Syria policy] [Independence]
• Hate is As American As Apple Pie; So Is Trump
  On December 7, Donald Trump issued a statement calling for “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States…” A temporary ban? "… until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Well then, maybe never. Trump’s rabble-rousing is nothing new in American politics. It wasn’t even new last month. Remember the November Syrian refugee ban uproar after Paris? I know, a long time ago and many massacres away... Here’s a memory assist: Republicans…have called on congressional leaders to block the Obama administration from proceeding with plans to resettle thousands of refugees… In a letter to Ryan, Ben Carson … called for Congress to block funding for any programs "that seek to resettle refugees and/or migrants from Syria into the United States, effective immediately." "Until we can sort out the bad guys we must not be foolish," Carson said… Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee similarly heaped pressure on Ryan, saying in a statement: "Speaker Ryan needs to make it clear that if the President won't stand to protect America from wholesale open borders, then Republicans will." … In addition, Govs. John Kasich and Bobby Jindal of Ohio and Louisiana, respectively, said they would work to keep refugees out of their states. And Sen. Rand Paul… introduced legislation that would block the United States from issuing visas to refugees from countries with a high risk of terrorism in an effort to "stop terrorists from walking in our front door." Religious litmus tests didn’t start with The Donald either: [Cruz] has also said Christians from war-torn Syria are victims and do not pose a risk of terrorism, whereas letting in Muslim refugees would be "lunacy." Jeb Bush, supposedly the worthy heir to America’s premier terrorist-stomping dynasty, bumbled his way through his proposal for prioritizing Syrian orphans and Christians in his endearingly incompetent fashion. [Trump] [US_Election16] [Refugee] [Immigration] [Racism] [Islamophobia]
• Yes, the Press Might Do a Joe McCarthy on Trump; Just Not the Way You Think
  Wednesday, December 16, 2015 I am not particularly impressed with protestations that the Fourth Estate is going to solve our Donald Trump problem by speaking truth to power, exposing his low, dishonest, and inflammatory rhetoric, and the filthy bigotry in which he traffics. There’s a lot of people—a lot of voters—down in the sewer with Donald Trump. Apparently the smell doesn’t bother them. Nor do I hold out hope that elite opinion-makers like Thomas Friedman will lead the stampede of asses that will trample Trump into well-deserved oblivion. And I do not have much patience with the trope that all the media needs to do is put on its big-boy pants and stick it to Donald Trump in the name of decency just like the press did to Joe McCarthy in the glorious days of Ed Murrow in 1954. [Trump] [Media] [Myth]
• Moral Monsters: What al-Baghdadi and Hitler Do and Do Not Have in Common
  by Andrew Levine December 18, 2015 The Bush-Cheney war on terror or terrorism, launched after 9/11, was absurd; the idea behind it rested on what Gilbert Ryle, an influential mid-twentieth century English philosopher, called a “category mistake.” Terror is a state of mind, and terrorism is a tactic; these are not the kinds of things that wars can be waged against. Barack Obama had the good sense to drop the name, but he picked up the idea and has been running with it ever since. America’s allies have joined in too. None of this diminishes the absurdity one iota. It is not hard to see why war on terror talk is still flourishing: it is a useful public relations gimmick for politicians who want to sustain a permanent war regime. For many of them, it is also a good career move. Philosophers, political theorists, military strategists and others have been thinking and writing about terror and terrorism since before the French Revolution. Their reflections have yielded insights and merit consideration. But the way those words are used in political circles in Western countries nowadays, and in mainstream media, has little to do with any of that. Politicians and pundits use those words propagandistically, not analytically — to condemn politically motivated violence directed against the West or against Western interests. The violence in question is typically small-scale and its perpetrators are usually non-state actors. However, states that the West opposes are sometimes also said to sponsor or commit terrorist acts. In practice, this means that Muslim organizations and individuals, and some (out of favor) Muslim countries, are tarnished with the “terrorist” label, and that others are not. It is taken for granted in Western countries that terrorism is mainly, or only, a Muslim affair, and that Westerners, not Muslims, are its main victims. These are hard claims to justify, given the evidence. But, propaganda is all. In Western countries, war on terror talk helps mobilize support for police repression – mainly, but not only, in Muslim communities. And it generates support for military operations throughout the historically Muslim world. It is therefore good for the military-industrial-national security state complex. This is why its leading figures cannot get enough of it, and why they do all that they can to keep it going. They are as bad as broadcast and cable news executives on the prowl for advertising revenues. Politicians like it too because a terrorized public is easily manipulated and disinclined to stand up for its real interests. Also, it boosts their self-esteem. Macho warmongering helps otherwise feckless men and women feel important — as if they were doing something worthwhile. [Terrorism]
• “Left” propagandists for escalation of imperialist war
  15 December 2015 With the US political establishment roiled by an increasingly acrimonious debate over how to escalate the US military intervention in Iraq and Syria, and with one Western European power after another joining in the assault, the overwhelming sentiment of broad masses of people both in Europe and America remains decidedly hostile to war. Despite the frantic efforts of the political establishments in the US, Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere, along with the campaign of the media to whip up fear and hatred in response to recent terrorist attacks, millions of working people are conscious that, once again, they are being lied to about a military intervention in the Middle East. Amid the dizzying array of pretexts put forward for this war, from combating terrorism by bombing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), to supporting “human rights” by financing and arming similar Salafist jihadi militias in a war for regime-change, there remains the well-founded popular suspicion that the real aims have to do with the drive by US imperialism and its allies to secure hegemony over the Middle East and its vast oil reserves. It is under these conditions that a collection of pseudo-left organizations from Europe, the US and beyond have joined in issuing a statement that serves as propaganda for a dramatic widening of the imperialist campaign. The signatories of the statement include the French New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), the British Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative of Australia, the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) of Sri Lanka, and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) of the US. All of them have long and shameful records of providing “left” justifications for imperialist interventions and dressing up US-orchestrated wars for regime-change as “revolutions.” [Imperialism] [Disclaimer]
• Untangling Turkey’s Middle East allegiances
  Turkey, in a sticky web of allegiances, shares mutual enemies with the Islamic State. By Behlül Özkan 12/19/15, 12:41 PM CET Armed Kurdish militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) stand behind a barricade during clashes with Turkish forces on September 28, 2015, at Bismil, in Diyarbakir. | ILYAS AKENGIN/AFP/Getty ISTANBUL — The northwestern corner of Syria is home to a dizzying spectrum of anti-Assad forces. Weapons — and fighters — have amassed in the area in large part thanks to Turkey’s “open door” policy, which makes the passage relatively painless. When Turkey’s ethnic brethren, the Turkmen, recently became the targets of Russian air strikes — prompting, perhaps, Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian fighter jet on November 24 — the incident brought Turkey’s murky relationship with a tangled web of jihadist groups to the fore. Ankara’s ties with the extremists are anything but straightforward. What’s clear is that Turkey has taken clear sides in the civil war in Syria, took a laissez-faire approach to the frontier with Syria and more recently felt the terrorist blowback from Syria Turkey differs with its allies on which opposition forces to support in Syria, a thorny issue further complicated by the emergence of ISIL. Apart from ISIL, jihadist groups in Syria include al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch), Ahrar al-Sham, and various more loosely formed militias from the Caucasus and elsewhere. [Turkey] [Outsourcing] [ISIS]
• Guns are now killing as many people as cars in the U.S.
  By Christopher Ingraham December 17 ? For the first time in more than 60 years, firearms and automobiles are killing Americans at an identical rate, according to new mortality data released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2014, the age-adjusted death rate for both firearms (including homicides, suicides and accidental deaths) and motor vehicle events (car crashes, collisions between cars and pedestrians, etc) stood at 10.3 deaths per 100,000 people. The convergence of the trend lines above is driven primarily by a sharp drop in the rate of motor vehicle fatalities since 1950. In the late 1960s, for instance, there were well over 25 motor vehicle deaths for every 100,000 people in the United States. Since then, that rate has fallen by more than half. Over the same period, gun deaths rose, but by a considerably smaller amount. Gun homicide rates have actually fallen in recent years, but those gains have been offset by rising gun suicide rates. Today, suicides account for roughly two out of every three gun deaths.
• Imperialism and Capitalism: Rethinking an Intimate Relationship
  By Prof. James Petras and Prof. Henry Veltmeyer Global Research, December 16, 2015 The literature on imperialism suffers from a fundamental confusion about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. The aim of this paper is to remove this confusion. The paper is organised in three parts. In Part I we state our own position of the capitalism-imperialism relation. In part II we discuss some major points at issue in the Marxist debate on imperialism. And in Part III we review the changing forms that imperialism has taken in Latin America in the course of the capitalist development process. The main focus of the paper is on the form taken by imperialism in the current conjuncture of capitalist development, namely extractive capitalism. This conjuncture is characterised by the demise of neoliberalism as an economic model and a growing demand on the world market for energy, minerals and other “natural” resources—the political economy of natural resource development (large-scale investment in the acquisition of land and entailed resources, primary commodity exports). The fundamental dynamics of what we term “extractivist imperialism” are examined in the context of South America, which represents the most advanced but yet regressive form taken to date by capitalism in the new millennium. Our analysis of these dynamics is summarized in the form of twelve theses. [Imperialism] [Capitalism]
• Kerry: US No Longer Seeking “Regime Change” in Syria?
  By Jason Ditz Global Research, December 16, 2015 Anti-War 15 December 2015 U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Aug. 30, 2013, claims to have proof that the Syrian government was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21, but that evidence failed to materialize or was later discredited. [State Department photo] During his visit to Moscow, Secretary of State John Kerry talked at length with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and came out of those talks with a shocking declaration that “the United States and its partners are not seeking regime change in Syria.” The declaration is not only bizarre, in that many of America’s “partners” in Syria are rebel factions formed explicitly to oust the government, but because Kerry himself, as well as other high-ranking US officials, have been openly demanding unconditional regime change for several years now. Kerry went into his Moscow visit saying Assad’s future would be a topic of discussion with Russian officials, which itself raised eyebrows since US officials have long insisted Assad has no future. Kerry doubled down on this, however, insisting that the US and Russia see Syria’s future fundamentally the same way. [US Syria policy]
• Do Muslims and Christians worship the same god? College suspends professor who said yes.
  By Kirkland An December 17 Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical school in Illinois, has placed a professor on administrative leave after she posted on Facebook that Muslims and Christians “worship the same God.” The official school statement Tuesday about associate professor of political science Larycia Hawkins’s suspension said Wheaton professors should “engage in and speak about public issues in ways that faithfully represent the College’s evangelical Statement of Faith.” Following a protest and sit-in of about 100 people Wednesday afternoon on campus, President Philip Ryken and later Provost Stanton Jones said they would not be lifting the suspension. It wasn’t clear how long Hawkins was suspended for, but some of the student leaders who had been involved in talks with administrators said it was through the spring semester. [Bizarre] [Islamophobia]
• Anticipating Complex Northeast Asian Futures
  by Peter Hayes, Joan Diamond and Kiho Yi 16 December 2015 I. Introduction “Another way that civil society has tried to embrace the uncertainty posed by rising complexity is to envision possible shared futures and to develop robust, joint strategies that anticipate the inevitable surprises that lie in store… Just as we must create historical memory across generations and borders if former enemies are to reconcile, so must we imagine futures together to create “complex time” that embodies the universal values in regional and global community.” This chapter examines such scenarios and future roles of civil society. This Special Report is an extract (Chapter 7) to the book Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia, edited by Peter Hayes and Yi Kiho, published by Open Book Publishers in June 2015 (http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/326/).
• Fact checking the fifth round of GOP debates
  By Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee December 16 ? War, terrorism dominate GOP debate Here are highlights from CNN's Republican presidential debate on Dec. 15 in less than two minutes. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) CNN aired two GOP presidential debates on Dec. 15: a prime-time event starring nine candidates and an earlier debate featuring four second-tier contenders, based on an average of recent polls. Not every candidate uttered statements that are easily fact checked, but following is a list of 12 suspicious or interesting claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates. [US_Election16]
• Assad can stay, for now: Kerry accepts Russian stance
  . Associated Press By MATTHEW LEE and BRADLEY KLAPPER December 15, 2015 6:01 PM MOSCOW (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday accepted Russia's long-standing demand that President Bashar Assad's future be determined by his own people, as Washington and Moscow edged toward putting aside years of disagreement over how to end Syria's civil war. "The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change," Kerry told reporters in the Russian capital after meeting President Vladimir Putin. A major international conference on Syria would take place later this week in New York, Kerry announced. Kerry reiterated the U.S. position that Assad, accused by the West of massive human rights violations and chemical weapons attacks, won't be able to steer Syria out of more than four years of conflict. But after a day of discussions with Assad's key international backer, Kerry said the focus now is "not on our differences about what can or cannot be done immediately about Assad." Rather, it is on facilitating a peace process in which "Syrians will be making decisions for the future of Syria." Kerry's declarations crystallized the evolution in U.S. policy on Assad over the last several months, as the Islamic State group's growing influence in the Middle East has taken priority. President Barack Obama first called on Assad to leave power in the summer of 2011, with "Assad must go" being a consistent rallying cry. Later, American officials allowed that he wouldn't have to resign on "Day One" of a transition. Now, no one can say when Assad might step down. [US Syria policy]
• How the GOP looks more like Obama on war than it thinks
  Highlights Few new, sharply different ideas Criticism of Obama’s leadership style Widespread support for coalition to fight Islamic State By David Lightman Las Vegas — Sure, it was a Republican debate, but President Barack Obama might have fit right in much of the time. As they did in their latest debate Tuesday, Republican presidential candidates are eager to say they’ll be tougher on terrorists than Barack Obama. And they differ by degrees in emphasis. But as they grapple with the balance of national security and such things as civil liberties at home and Muslim alliances abroad, they mostly offer variations of the same policies as Obama. Send in special troops to target our airstrikes? Obama’s doing that. Keep our combat troops at home and get the Arabs to fight? That’s Obama’s plan. Stop the targeting of all Muslims lest that drive away potential allies? Obama again. “ The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it. President Barack Obama in Dec. 6 address Start with the idea of sending in U.S. combat troops. Obama won’t authorize large numbers of American ground troops against the Islamic State, saying his military advisers believe that would be a mistake. A larger American presence, Obama said, could wind up meaning an American occupation of Syria or Iraq, creating the sort of quagmire that dogged the United States in Iraq for years. When pressed, as in the debates, top Republicans also shy away from committing U.S. troops to defeat the Islamic State. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article50012315.html#storylink=cpy [US_Election16] [Continuity]
• Is Denmark as great as Bernie Sanders says?
  December 16, 2015 Highlights Danes are happier, don’t pay anything for health care and not much for college But they also pay a lot in taxes, 32 percent on average Some Danes worry their country may be becoming too much like the United States By Matthew Schofield Aarhus, Denmark — When Berit Seidelin recently heard reports that American presidential candidate Bernie Sanders thinks the United States could do with being a bit more like Denmark, she immediately wished Danish politicians were thinking the same thing. “Denmark should be more like Denmark these days,” the 53-year-old quipped. “In the last several years, we’ve become too much like the United States. I’m not happy about that.” She said it with a wink, while moving flower pots around outside the shop where she works near the center of Aarhus, Denmark’s oldest city. But her comment gets at a central point that the Democrat Sanders raises on the campaign trail and that Danes have been dealing with in recent years. Exactly what does it mean to be Danish? The political right describes the tiny Scandinavian nation as socialist, noting what by U.S. standards are luxurious unemployment and social benefits. But that’s not a universal characterization. Centrist politicians and Danish economists make the point that the country is entirely capitalist. They note that the Index of Economic Freedomby the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization in Washington, rates Denmark above the United States. That, they say, is evidence that Denmark’s political system is based on a very open economy. And there are many on the left who describe Denmark as a disappointment of late, a nation that recently has cut benefits and allowed irrational fears of migrants and refugees to lead it to considering even deeper cuts. This, they believe, leaves Denmark perhaps in line with other European nations, but not an example to follow. As for the typical Dane in the street, what they really want from life is “hyggeligt,” often shortened to “hygge,” meaning comfort, or the state of being cozy. They talk about the importance of having the ability to succeed, but the equal importance of knowing everything will be OK if they fail.
• The Ghouta chemical attack and the unraveling of Ankara's official story
  Neil Clark Published time: 16 Dec, 2015 13:52 It was the chemical weapons attack that so nearly led to direct war between the US, the UK, France and the Syrian government; a war which most likely would have delivered the whole of Syria to IS and Al-Qaeda extremists. The horrific Ghouta attack of August 21, 2013, which killed hundreds of civilians, including many children, was blamed on President Assad and his government by Western political leaders and elite media commentators. Those who dared to question this version of events were predictably denounced as ’conspiracy theorists’ and/or ’Assad apologists’. Today, however, new evidence has emerged that questions the ‘official’ narrative. Could it be that, as was the case with Iraqi WMDs, we were lied to again by those individuals desperate to launch another ‘regime change’ war in the Middle East? Interestingly, the US and its allies never publicly produced any hard evidence showing that Syrian government forces had carried out the attacks, but told us that it had to be them because no one else possessed or had the capability to use chemical weapons. But now Turkish MP Eren Erdem has told RT that Islamic State terrorists, then going under the name of Iraqi Al-Qaeda, received all the necessary materials to produce deadly sarin gas via Turkey. Erdem, who is now being charged with treason for his comments, revealed that an investigation by Turkish police was started but then the case was closed, and all the suspects were released near the Turkish/Syrian border. He accused the Turkish authorities of a high-level cover up. The Turkish MP says the evidence shows that IS, and not the Syrian government, was responsible for the Ghouta attacks. “This attack was conducted just days before the sarin operation in Turkey. It’s a high probability that this attack was carried out with those basic materials shipped through Turkey. It is said the regime forces are responsible, but the indictment says it’s ISIS. UN inspectors went to the site but they couldn’t find any evidence. But in this indictment, we’ve found the evidence. We know who used the sarin gas, and our government knows it too,” Erdem said. It’s not just Erdem’s testimony that challenges the official version of events. US experts do too. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report by former UN weapons inspector Richard Lloyd and Professor Theodor Postol challenged the intelligence on which US claims against the Syrian government were made. They revealed that the range of the rocket which was supposed to have carried the nerve gas was too short to have been launched from government-controlled areas. “The Syrian improvised chemical munitions that were used in the August 21 nerve gas attack in Damascus have a range of about two kilometers. This indicates that these munitions could not possibly have been fired at East Ghouta from the ‘heart’ or the eastern edge of the Syrian government controlled area in the intelligence map published by the White House on August 30th 2013,” the report concluded. The report pointed out that all the possible launching points for the rocket were in rebel-controlled areas. “My view when I started this process was that it couldn’t be anything but the Syrian government behind the attack,” said the report's co-author, Professor Postol. “But now I’m not sure of anything. The administration narrative was not even close to reality. Our intelligence cannot possibly be correct.” Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh also countered the ‘administration narrative’ in articles published in the London Review of Books. [False flag] [cbw] [Syria] [Jihadists] [Turkey
• Life in Daesh territory: an inside view
  Published December 21st, 2014 - 18:38 Jürgen Todenhöfer, who interviewed Assad in July 2012, will publish a piece on his Jürgen Todenhöfer, who interviewed Assad in July 2012, will publish a piece on his "10 days in the Islamic State" tomorrow. (AFP/File) Follow > al-Qaeda, Bashar al-Assad, Charlie Winter, Facebook, Hamid Karzai, ISIS, James Foley, Jürgen Todenhöfer, Mosul, RTL, Taliban The first Western journalist in the world to be allowed extensive access to Isis territories in Syria and Iraq has returned from the region with a warning: the group is “much stronger and much more dangerous” than anyone in the West realises. Jürgen Todenhöfer, 74, is a renowned German journalist and publicist who travelled through Turkey to Mosul, the largest city occupied by Isis, after months of negotiations with the group’s leaders. He plans to publish a summary of his “10 days in the Islamic State” on Monday, but in interviews with German-language media outlets has revealed his first impressions of what life is like under Isis. Speaking to the website Der tz, Todenhöfer revealed that he actually stayed in the same hotel in Benghazi as James Foley, the US journalist who was beheaded on camera by Isis in August. “Of course, I’ve seen the terrible, brutal video and it was one of my main concerns during the negotiations as to how I can avoid [the same fate],” he said. Once within Isis territory, Todenhöfer said his strongest impression was “that Isis is much stronger than we think here”. He said it now has “dimensions larger than the UK”, and is supported by “an almost ecstatic enthusiasm that I have never encountered in any other warzone”. “Each day, hundreds of willing fighters arrive from all over the world,” he told tz. “For me it is incomprehensible.” Todenhöfer claims to have been able to move among Isis fighters, observing their living conditions and equipment. On his Facebook page, he has posted images which he said show German Heckler & Koch MG3 machine guns in the hands of Isis. “Someday this German MG could be directed to us,” he said. Isis’s fighters themselves sleep, he said, in barracks formed from “the shells of bombed-out houses”. They number around 5,000 in Mosul, and are spread so widely that were the US to bomb them all “they would have to reduce the whole of Mosul to ruins”, he said. Todenhöfer says that this ultimately means Isis cannot be beaten by Western intervention or air strikes – despite US claims last week that they have proven effective. “With every bomb that is dropped and hits a civilian, the number of terrorists increases,” he said. [ISIS]
• Syria in 2016 Will be Like the Balkans in 1914
  Explosive violence breaks out on an international scale Patrick Cockburn • DECEMBER 12, 2015 The CIA analyst is confident about what is likely to happen in Syria. He says that “Assad is playing his last major card to keep his regime in power”. He believes that the Assad government will step up its efforts to prove that its enemies “are being manipulated by outsiders”. The probable outcome is a split within Syria’s ruling elite leading to Assad being ousted, though he admits that there is no obvious replacement for him. The reasoning in the CIA special analysis, entitled “Syria: Assad’s Prospects”, is sensible and convincing, though overconfident that Assad’s days are numbered. The extent of this overconfidence is highlighted by a glance at the date of the document, which is 17 March 1980, or 35 years ago, and the President Assad, whose imminent political demise is predicted as likely, is not Bashar al-Assad but his father, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000. The analysis was released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act in 2013. [CIA] [Intelligence] [US Syria policy]
• Turkey Smuggled Sarin Gas to Al Qaeda Terrorists in Syria? Turkish MP
  By Stephen Lendman Global Research, December 14, 2015 Turkey is allegedly complicit in the smuggled use of various types of banned chemical weapons for which the Assad government was wrongfully blamed. Turkish Republican People’s Party (CHP) opposition member Eren Erdem accused Ankara of covering up a major war crime, likely direct high-level involvement in smuggling materials used to make deadly sarin gas to ISIS and other terrorists – US proxy foot soldiers waging war on Syria. Various attacks occurred. The most notorious targeted the Damascus Ghouta suburb in August 2013, killing and injuring scores of civilians. [Turkey] [Jihadist] [cbw]
• Pentagon announces worldwide expansion of US military bases
  By Thomas Gaist 11 December 2015 The US Defense Department (DOD) is preparing to expand its global network of military bases by establishing a new “string” of bases in countries stretching from Africa to East Asia, unnamed Pentagon officials told the New York Times Wednesday. The enlarged US basing arrangements will include at least four new large-scale bases or “hubs,” including new facilities in East Africa and West Africa and Afghanistan, along with a greater number of smaller camps or “spokes,” sources told the Times . [Bases] [US military]
• “Humanitarian” Military Interventions: “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) and the Double Game
  By Prof. Tim Anderson Global Research, December 13, 2015 A new version of ‘humanitarian intervention’, known as the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), was developed at the turn of the 21st century. An invention of the big powers, with reference to the suggested humanitarian consequences of their supposed failures to intervene in the past, it became a tremendous moral argument for the 2011 intervention in Libya. That intervention, based on lies, was a disaster for the Libyan people. A similar course was attempted with Syria, but failed. Russia and China, in particular, were no longer prepared to play Washington’s game. However it may have sounded in theory, in practice this R2P emerged as a new tool of intervention. It carries great dangers, having helped incite ‘false flag’ massacres by armed groups in their search for greater foreign support. It has also helped undermine the international system which, since the 1940s, has been founded on principles of sovereignty and non-intervention. In some respects it is extraordinary that, so soon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq on a manifestly false pretext (see Kramer and Michalowski 2005), an earnest debate began over how to deepen and sanctify the reasons for military intervention. The debate was extraordinary, in that relatively little attention was paid to the long history of false pretexts for intervention. Yet in many respects it was logical, as it appeals to a naïve social conscience while opening new avenues for big power ambition. The ‘double game’ of mixing false pretext, political ambition and public benefit rationale is an age-old tradition. The recent debate has been mostly western referenced and often focussed on promotion of the R2P as ‘a new norm of customary international law’, even one of obligation (Loiselle 2013: 317-341). This has articulated a groundswell of western sentiment generally in favour of intervention, almost regardless of the detail. This was a reversal of trends established by the formal colonies in the post-colonial era. The Non-Aligned Movement of 118 nations, mostly former colonies, on the other hand, elevates non-intervention as a founding principle of nation-states (Köchler 1982). As an example of past debates, the major in-principle dispute between the United States and the Latin American states at all Pan-American conferences in the early twentieth century was Washington’s refusal to accept the principle of non-intervention. Finally, in 1933, the United States recognised that principle (Dreier 1963: 40-41). Of course, the US continued to intervene in Latin America after this, but that principle helped drive a search for new pretexts. [Humanitarian intervention] [R2P] [Pretext]
• Thai Man May Go to Prison for Insulting King’s Dog
  By Thomas Fuller Dec. 14, 2015 BANGKOK — Thailand’s strict laws making it a crime to insult the monarchy entered new territory on Monday when a factory worker was charged with disparaging the king’s dog. In a case brought in a Thai military court, the worker, Thanakorn Siripaiboon, was charged with making a “sarcastic” Internet post related to the king’s pet. He also faces separate charges of sedition and insulting the king. Mr. Thanakorn could face a total of 37 years in prison for his social media posts, highlighting what has become a feverish campaign to protect the monarchy and rebuff critics of the country’s military rulers. The precise insult toward the royal dog was not divulged by the military, according to the suspect’s lawyer, Anon Numpa. Mr. Anon said the boundaries of what has been considered lèse-majesté, as royal insults are known, had expanded drastically in recent years. Last year, a prominent scholar was accused of insulting a king who died 400 years ago. The list of people who have been investigated now includes the American ambassador to Thailand. The law applies to anyone who specifically defames the king, the queen, the heir apparent or the regent, but Mr. Anon said he was incredulous that it could be broadened to include a household pet. [Bizarre]
• Turkey's Dangerous Game: Turkey's duplicity threatens the entire region
  Philip Giraldi • December 15, 2015 Turkey borders several Middle Eastern countries that are either unstable or potentially hostile to it, sometimes both simultaneously. With a modern military of more than 600,000 underwritten by NATO membership it is regional superpower whose ability to dominate the politics of its neighbors is sometimes exercised. Turkey has a large and educated population, a vibrant diversified economy and is at the crossroads of east and west, Asia and Europe. Together with Egypt, it is truly the indispensable nation if anyone wants to seriously consider influencing developments in the Near East. It is perhaps Turkey’s indispensability that is part of the problem, as it has given its current government a hubristic sense of entitlement that has developed into a conceit that it can be the arbiter for all its neighbors while also transforming itself into an autocracy at home. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is attempting to turn the country’s traditionally fractious party politics into one party rule with himself at the helm. In so doing he has created what some call an “illiberal democracy” where dissent is systematically repressed and elections are rigged to favor his incumbency. Erdogan has largely destroyed his country’s independent media by imprisoning and intimidating journalists, has not hesitated to characterize protesters as “terrorists” before having them beaten and shot, has packed the military and intelligence services with his own supporters, and has hobbled the judiciary and police. In Turkey it is now a crime to “insult” a public official. The law is strictly enforced regarding Erdogan. A man was fired from his job and is facing two years in prison for comparing the president to Gollum, the character in Lord of the Rings. As president, Erdogan was not allowed to get involved in parliamentary elections in June and October, but he instead campaigned relentlessly on behalf of his Justice and Development Party (AKP). As the margin in parliament opposing him consisted of a Kurdish Party he unilaterally restarted a civil war with the Kurds and fear-mongered recklessly before calling for a snap election, resulting in AKP’s regaining its parliamentary majority. Erdogan has taken a largely secular republic and turned it into a state increasingly run on Islamic principles, funding religious schools, introducing religious curricula at universities, converting historic churches into mosques and also building hundreds of unneeded new mosques. He has supported legislation outlawing the drinking of alcohol in public and has instructed stewardesses on the state owned Turkish Airlines not to wear makeup. He has made religiosity a prerequisite for high office. One almost has the sense that there is nothing that he would not dare to do. Ankara’s recent shoot down of a Russian bomber that might or might not have strayed briefly into Turkish airspace was a very bad mistake as it made clear to all concerned that the Erdogan phenomenon has a very reckless side. [Turkey] [Erdogan] [Su24_151124]
• Saudi, Gulf states discussing sending special forces to Syria - Saudi foreign minister
  Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states are discussing sending special forces to Syria as part of U.S.-led efforts to fight Islamic State, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Tuesday. PARIS: Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states are discussing sending special forces to Syria as part of U.S.-led efforts to fight Islamic State, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Tuesday. "There are discussions, countries that are currently part of the coalition (like) Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain about sending in some special forces into Syria, and those discussions are ongoing. It's not excluded," Adel al-Jubeir told reporters. He said that the discussions were aimed at clarifying the needs and the objectives of such an operation, but that the picture should become clearer in the next few weeks. Jubeir was speaking in Paris after outlining a separate initiative by Riyadh to set up a coalition of Islamic countries for counter-terrorism operations especially in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan. [Saudi Arabia]
• America’s “Dirty War on Syria”: Bashar al Assad and Political Reform
  By Prof. Tim Anderson Global Research, December 04, 2015 It should go without saying that the internal political processes of a sovereign country belongs to the people of that country, and no-one else. Nevertheless, as Washington insists on a prerogative to determine who can or cannot lead another country, some background on Bashar al Assad and the political reform process in Syria might be useful. We find little reasonable discussion of either, in western circles, after the Islamist insurrection of 2011. Instead, the wartime discussion descended into caricatures, conditioned by ‘regime-change’ fervour and bloody war, of a bloodthirsty ‘brutal dictator’ mindlessly repressing and slaughtering his own people. None of this helps sensible or principled understandings. Fortunately, there are a range of Syrian and independent sources that allow us to put together a more realistic picture. If we believed most western media reports we would think President Assad had launched repeated and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, including the gassing of children. We might also think he heads an ‘Alawi regime’, where a 12% minority represses a Sunni Muslim majority, crushing a popular ‘revolution’ which, only in later years, was ‘hijacked’ by extremists. A key problem with that story is the President’s great popularity at home. The fact that there has been popular dissatisfaction with corruption and cronyism, fear of the secret police, and that an authoritarian state maintains a type of personality cult, does not negate the man’s genuine popularity. Even most of his enemies admit that. We have to look a bit deeper. A mild mannered eye doctor, with part of his training in Britain, Bashar al Assad was effectively conscripted to the Presidency by the Ba’ath Party after the death of his father Hafez, in 2000. He was expected on the one hand to maintain his father’s pluralist and nationalist legacy, yet on the other hand develop important elements of political and economic reform. President Hafez al Assad had brought three decades of internal stability to Syria, after the turmoil of the 1960s. This allowed important social advances. [Syria] [Bashar Assad]
• America vs ISIS: towards real war
  Paul Rogers 11 December 2015 The spreading influence of ISIS is forcing Washington into a strategic decision: escalate. Suddenly, and without almost anyone noticing, the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq is developing and growing rapidly. Some elements are already clear enough: they include the expansion of ISIS-controlled territory in Libya, the attacks in Paris and California, the increasing involvement of Russia, and the decision of the British parliament to authorise UK air-attacks in Syria. Those are all significant changes. But they are decidedly less important than another development, one that resonates with the experience in the early days of the Iraq war in April 2003. That war had started on 20-21 March. Within three weeks, United States marines and army units had got to Baghdad and the Saddam Hussein regime had collapsed; three more weeks, and President George W Bush could don a flying-jacket and jet out to the USS Abraham Lincoln to give his confident “mission accomplished” speech from the carrier’s flight-deck. True, there was at the time looting and disorder in Baghdad, and early indications of a revolt. But the expectation was that peace would be restored, Iraq would make a successful transition to a pro-western state, and most of the coalition troops would leave within months. Already, though, something different seemed to be happening, with reports in the US media that the Pentagon was planning to establish four large bases for airforce and army units, with every intention that these would at least be long-term projects and quite possibly permanent (see “Permanent occupation?”, 24 April 2003) Now it was becoming clear that what the Bush administration was about: a military operation that would determine US influence across the region for many years to come. The turning-point Fast forward to late 2015, and any talk of a major expansion of the US presence in the region is again quickly discounted. The main reason is the Obama administration’s evident caution about entering a ground war in Iraq and Syria. That judgment, though, needs a rethink – and at two quite different levels. [US Middle East Strategy] [ISIS]
• Libya’s Oil and ISIS
  by Vijay Prashad December 10, 2015 In the northern heart of Libya sits the town of Sirte. It is the hometown of Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed there by local militiamen after a NATO missile stopped his convoy on their behalf. A militia group from the western town of Misrata had taken control of the town, much to the annoyance of the local population. Local officials and elders complained about their fate. They had been delivered to what many saw as an occupying force. Older sympathies for Gaddafi went underground. Loyalty to Gaddafi had been declared a crime. That section of society muted itself for the time being. This year, in late summer, the Islamic State group appeared in Sirte and now flies its black flag from Sirte’s tall buildings. Not 400 miles south of Europe sits this branch of the caliphate. It is not to be easily dislodged. [ISIS] [Libya]
• Elephant in the Room: Terrorism and the U.S.-Gulf States Alliance
  by Hasan Hafidh When it comes to existing discourse on efforts to counter radicalization and the subsequent extremism that arises, it appears that Western policymakers and media outlets want to address everything but the actual long-term causes. The elephant in the room being Gulf States (namely Saudi Arabia and Qatar) whose state institutions have acted as an ideological incubator for extremist sentiment to flourish both domestically and abroad. It is rarely talked about in a sensible way since the Saudis continue to hire a spree of U.S. lobbyists and PR experts, one of which is the PR powerhouse Edelman. The largest privately owned PR agency in the world, Edelman is known for helping clients with favorable media coverage on mainstream outlets. Meanwhile, a Saudi-led coalition is continuing to bomb the poorest country in the Middle East (Yemen), violating international law in the process, which like many of their activities has Western approval due to lucrative arms deals, in turn, affording Gulf states impunity for any of their actions. This explains the notable media blackout and minimal coverage on events in Yemen across Western media outlets. [Saudi Arabia] [Qatar] [Outsourcing] [US Middle East strategy]
• Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception – Part I
  October 23, 2015 Vanessa Beeley 21st Century Wire “The Ivy League bourgeoisie who sit at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex will one day be known simply as charismatic architects of death. Funded by the ruling class oligarchy, the role they serve for their funders is not unlike that of corporate media. Yet, it appears that global society is paralyzed in a collective hypnosis – rejecting universal social interests, thus rejecting reason, to instead fall in line with the position of the powerful minority that has seized control, a minority that systematically favours corporate interests.” ~ Cory Morningstar In his recent speech Hezbollah leader, Sayyed Nasrallah, alluded to a multi-phase “soft war” which relies upon the mass media complex to disseminate propaganda and bias, propelling the Middle East into, primarily, a sectarian crisis before descending even further into regionalism and finally a devastating individualism. Cory Morningstar’s body of work does more than any other to expose the bare bones of the non-profit propaganda industry that governs both our reactions – and inactions, through a network of multi-layered and multi-faceted media manipulation campaigns, of which the end result is mass thought control. She explains: [NGO] [Softwar] [Covert]
• Part II – Syria’s White Helmets: War By Way of Deception ~ ‘Moderate Executioners’
  October 28, 2015 Vanessa Beeley 21st Century Wire “If there is any doubt concerning the nefarious undertones of subversiveness in these NGO dealings, [National Endowment for Democracy] NED founder reportedly said the following in the 1990s: ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’ What was once done at night under the cloak of ‘imperialism’ is now done during the day under the guise of ‘humanitarianism.’” ~ The Wrong Kind of Green Hindsight is a generous provider of absolution of the guilt from falling for the sophisticated western government or state propaganda and their media sleights of hand that so often deceive us into believing the narrative they present, one that’s so often designed to justify military intervention. [NGO] [Softwar]
• Assad: "I never thought about leaving Syria under any circumstances"
  Published December 11, 2015 By Jose Antonio Vera and Jose Manuel Sanz Full transcript of Agencia EFE's exclusive interview Thursday in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Assad: Question 1: Thank you very much, Mr. President, for your hospitality and for giving the Spanish News Agency EFE the opportunity to understand what is the situation in your country. Okay, on November 14th, the world powers, including Russia and Iran, agreed in Vienna on a timetable for a political solution for the Syria crisis. According to this timetable, the negotiations between your government and the moderate opposition should start on Jan. 1. Are you ready to start those negotiations? President Assad: You are most welcome in Syria. Since the very beginning of the conflict in Syria, we adopted the dialogue approach with every party that is involved in the Syrian conflict, and we dealt positively, responded positively, to every initiative that has been launched by different states around the world regardless of the real intention and the genuineness of the people or the officials who started those initiatives. So, we were ready, and we are ready today to start the negotiations with the opposition. But it depends on the definition of opposition. Opposition, for everyone in this world, doesn't mean militant. There's a big difference between militants, terrorists, and opposition. Opposition is a political term, not a military term. So, talking about the concept is different from the practice, because so far, we've been seeing that some countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United States, and some Western countries wanted the terrorist groups to join these negotiations. They want the Syrian government to negotiate with the terrorists, something I don't think anyone would accept in any country. [Syria] [Bashar Assad]
• Nightmare scenario for establishment: Trump or Cruz
  By Niall Stanage - 12/10/15 06:05 AM EST Three candidates for the Republican nomination have broken away from the rest of the pack, and two of them — businessman Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — give the GOP establishment nightmares. That leaves the third member of the trio, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, potentially well placed to pick up the support of center-right Republican voters who are looking for someone to stop Trump and Cruz at almost any cost But Rubio is behind both of his top-tier rivals in national polling averages and is even further back in Iowa, home to the first-in-the-nation caucuses, where he holds fourth place, albeit behind the fast-fading Ben Carson. An even deeper problem for the Florida senator is that other candidates who are competing for the same voters are unlikely to drop out before the New Hampshire primary. That means votes that might otherwise go to Rubio could instead be won by contenders such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Add all these factors together and it becomes clear why establishment Republicans are so concerned, especially in the wake of Trump’s inflammatory call to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Cruz, meanwhile, has been enjoying a rapid rise in the polls. [US_Election16]
• Empowering the Ugliness
  Paul Krugman Dec. 11, 2015 We live in an era of political news that is, all too often, shocking but not surprising. The rise of Donald Trump definitely falls into that category. And so does the electoral earthquake that struck France in Sunday’s regional elections, with the right-wing National Front winning more votes than either of the major mainstream parties. What do these events have in common? Both involved political figures tapping into the resentments of a bloc of xenophobic and/or racist voters who have been there all along. The good news is that such voters are a minority; the bad news is that it’s a pretty big minority, on both sides of the Atlantic. If you are wondering where the support for Mr. Trump or Marine Le Pen, the head of the National Front, is coming from, you just haven’t been paying attention.
• Is the U.S. Facilitating the Use of Mercenaries in Yemen?
  by William D. Hartung The recent New York Times report that the United Arab Emirates is paying, arming, and training retired soldiers from Colombia and other Latin American countries to fight in Yemen marks a troubling turning point in the evolution of the current generation of Mideast wars. The use of mercenaries to fight battles that a country’s own citizens are loathe to engage in lifts yet another barrier to the prosecution and escalation of wars in the region. One question for Congress and the Obama administration is whether U.S. arms and training programs have helped to facilitate these rogue activities. All of the parties to the transaction—including ex-Colombian, Panamanian, Chilean, and Salvadoran soldiers—come from countries that have received extensive U.S. military training programs for decades. According to data compiled by the Security Assistance Monitor (SAM), during the Obama years alone, the United States has trained a total of 30,000 military personnel from the four countries represented in the UAE’s mercenary force, with over two-thirds coming from Colombia. It would be useful to know how many of those 30,000 have sold their skills to the UAE to fight alongside their troops in Yemen. For example, the United States trained Oscar Garcia Batte, who runs the company that recruits ex-Colombian soldiers for the UAE. Batte is now fighting with the first Colombian unit to deploy to Yemen alongside UAE troops. The military of the United Arab Emirates, which is training the Latin American mercenary force, has also received training from the United States. U.S. personnel have trained over 4,000 Emirati troops since 2009. In addition, many of the weapons the mercenary force is being trained to use, including M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, night vision devices, and armored vehicles, have most likely come from the United States, given Washington’s central role in supplying the UAE’s military. [Mercenaries] [Outsourcing] [US Middle East Strategy]
• For Muslims in the U.S. military, a different U.S. than the one they swore to defend
  By Thomas Gibbons-Neff December 9 at 12:53 PM Ibrahim Hashi, a Muslim veteran of the U.S. military, is pictured in his American University dorm room on Dec. 2. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post) U.S. Marine Gunnery Sgt. Emir Hadzic was a Muslim refugee. “The way Americans welcomed us made such a huge impression on me that I felt like I owed something back,” said Hadzic, a Bosnian-Muslim who fled Sarajevo in 1995. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Hadzic joined the Marine Corps as an infantryman — hoping to help peacekeepers deploying to his homeland. “I thought I would sign up and pay my debt and on behalf of my family,” he added. Eight deployments later and still in the Marine Corps, Hadzic has become disturbed by the rising anti-Muslim sentiment in this country after the recent Islamic State attacks in Paris and last week’s San Bernardino shootings. GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, a candidate Hadzic used to support, has called for barring Muslims from entering the United States. [Islamophobia] [Dysfunction]
• Iraq: ‘Islamic State’ atrocities fuelled by decades of reckless arms trading
  8 December 2015, 00:01 UTC Decades of poorly regulated arms flows into Iraq as well as lax controls on the ground have provided the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS) with a large and lethal arsenal that is being used to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity on a massive scale in Iraq and Syria, Amnesty International said in a new report today. Drawing on expert analysis of thousands of verified videos and images, Taking Stock: The arming of Islamic State catalogues how IS fighters are using arms, mainly looted from Iraqi military stocks, which were manufactured and designed in more than two dozen countries, including Russia, China the USA and EU states. “The vast and varied weaponry being used by the armed group calling itself Islamic State is a textbook case of how reckless arms trading fuels atrocities on a massive scale,” said Patrick Wilcken, Researcher on Arms Control, Security Trade and Human Rights at Amnesty International [ISIS] [Arms sales] [False balance]
• 15 Blackwater foreign fighters killed in Yemen this week
  The chief of Blackwater mercenaries in Yemen has been killed in clashes with Houthi Ansarullah fighters and allied forces in the country’s southwest, reports say. Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah news website reported that the commander-in-chief of the private security firm in the country, a Mexican national, was slain in the al-Omari district of Taiz Province early on Wednesday. According to the report, the recent fatality has brought to 15 the number of foreign forces with the Blackwater killed in clashes in Yemen since Tuesday. Some Australian, British, and French advisors and commanders -- plus half a dozen Colombian soldiers -- were among the dead. The mercenaries are part of the UAE forces that help Saudi Arabia in its war against the impoverished country. [Mercenaries] [Saudi Arabia] [Yemen]
• Islamic State Uses Libya to Gain African Foothold
  By Christoph Reuter The Islamic State is using the same strategy it deployed in Syria in order to expand its territory in North Africa. Libya has become the center of its deadly activities in the region. The cinematic staging hinted very early on at the plan. As masked men with the Islamic State (IS) terrorist militia massacred 21 Egyptian Christians on a Libyan beach in February, the camera positions, lighting and editing were professional in a way that had only previously been seen in videos eminating from IS headquarters in Raqqa. Libya has become by far the Syrian-Iraqi caliphate's most important beachhead as it seeks to expand its footprint in North Africa, and there are numerous reasons for this development. Libya's disintegration into competing factions and regions provides fertile soil for the jihadists' creeping rise to power. More than 1,000 kilometers (612 miles) of coastline and uncontrolled borders in the south make for easy access to the country. Tunisians, who comprise the largest group of IS foreign fighters, established a broad network in Libya early on and often travel from here to the "caliphate." For months now, IS in Libya has been sticking eerily close to the blueprint it followed when conquering parts of Syria. First, IS units developed a wide network of spies and they are currently pursuing both long-term infiltration and conducting spectacular attacks as they expand the areas under their control. Some 2,000 IS fighters, including many Tunisians and other foreigners, are believed to be in the country. [ISIS] [Libya]
• Syrian insurgents say pull out of opposition talks, highlight rifts
  Riyadh | By Angus Mcdowall A powerful Islamist insurgent group said it pulled out of a Syrian opposition meeting in Riyadh on Thursday because rebel proposals had been ignored, in a move which highlighted the enduring divisions among President Bashar al-Assad's enemies. The conference of political activists and rebel groups in Saudi Arabia set up a joint body to prepare for proposed peace talks with Assad's government which world powers proposed at a meeting in Vienna last month. A statement at the end of the two-day conference said Assad should leave power at the start of a transitional period, and called for an all-inclusive, democratic civic state. It also committed to preserving state institutions. But the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group said it had pulled out of the talks, objecting to what it said was a prominent role given to the internal political opposition group, the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change (NCB). It said the NCB was considered to be a pro-Assad organization, not opposition. [Syria] [Saudi Arabia] [Jihadist]
• Playing Right Into ISIS’s Hands
  by Robert Fisk Now that we’re all supposedly involved in the world battle against the worst enemy since Hitler – not climate change, of course, but Isis – it’s time to understand just how the forces of law, order and security, who are supposed to protect us, can do more to recruit European Muslims to the Islamist cause than all the Isis videos combined. It’s a tale of how policemen, through ignorance and racism, provoked Isis into sending sneering messages to a young man who probably does more to prevent “terror” on the streets of Brussels than anyone else. Montasser al-De’emeh is a Palestinian academic and writer, a Belgian citizen and specialist in that one subject of which all policemen now regard themselves as experts: “radicalised” or “home grown” Isis “terrorists”. He runs a centre for returning “radicals” to try to wean them from their obsession with the Isis cult – important work in Belgium which has sent 350 fighters to Syria per capita, more than any other European nation – and has co-written a highly-acclaimed book on Isis called The Jihad Caravan: A Journey to the Roots of Hatred. [ISIS] [Hysteria]
• Questions to Ask Obama the Next (and Last) Time You’re Invited to One of His Press Conferences
  by William Blum Which is most important to you – destroying ISIS, overthrowing Syrian president Assad, or scoring points against Russia? Do you think that if you pointed out to the American people that Assad has done much more to aid and rescue Christians in the Middle East conflicts than any other area leader that this would lessen the hostility the United States public and media feel toward him? Or do you share the view of the State Department spokesperson who declared in September that “The Assad regime frankly is the root of all evil”? Why does the United States maintain crippling financial sanctions and a ban on military aid to Syria, Cuba, Iran and other countries but not to Saudi Arabia? What does Saudi Arabia have to do to lose its strong American support? Increase its torture, beheadings, amputations, whippings, stonings, punishment for blasphemy and apostasy, or forced marriages and other oppression of women and girls? Increase its financial support for ISIS and other jihadist groups? Confess to its role in 9-11? Attack Israel? [Obama] {US Middle East Strategy]
• Trump calls for banning entry to all Muslims
  Highlights Trump cites ‘great hatred’ toward Americans Obama has urged Americans not to scapegoat Muslims Proposal draws sharp criticism from some of Trump’s Republican rivals Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race on June 16, 2015. Find out where he stands on four of the biggest issues this election: immigration, ISIS, job growth and gay marriage. (Daniel Desrochers/McClatchy DC) By Lesley Clark WASHINGTON — - Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is calling for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States until lawmakers “can figure out what is going on” in the wake of attacks in Paris and California. Trump’s call for a halt to Muslim immigration comes just hours after President Barack Obama urged Americans not to scapegoat Muslims and as investigators continue to look for clues in the Islamic jihadist-inspired attack in San Bernardino, that killed 14 people. The real estate mogul’s latest blast at the Muslim community comes on the same day that a new Monmouth University poll showed Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had pulled ahead of Trump in Iowa, which holds the nation’s first caucus Feb. 1. Trump has been dogged by voter concerns that he lacks the temperament to be president, and the Republican party establishment has grown increasingly anxious about his hold on the polls. [Trump] [Islamophobia] [Governance]
• Syria calls US-led coalition air strike on Assad regime forces an 'act of aggression'
  But the US-led coalition denies carrying out the attack in which at least three Syrian soldiers were killed Adam Withnall | An air strike carried out by the US-led coalition in Syria is reported to have targeted regime forces for the first time, killing at least three soldiers and destroying a number of vehicles. The Syrian government said four warplanes bombed its Saega military camp in Deir al-Zor province, describing it as an "act of aggression" by coalition forces. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, 13 more military personnel were wounded in the strike, which it said took place near the town of Ayyash on Sunday evening. But while the Syrian foreign ministry said in a statement that it had written to the UN over the incident, a spokesman for the coalition denied it had carried out any air strikes on the area in question. [US Syria policy]
• What happens when you read people the Bible and tell them it's the Koran? Exactly what you expect
  Posted 2 days ago by Ellen Stewart in videos If you're not familiar with the Bible, there are some rather gory passages within its pages. For example: “ If you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, and if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength... I will send wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children, destroy your cattle and make you so few in number that your roads will be deserted... If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.„ So what happens when you take certain snippets from the holy text, read them aloud and tell people the words are from the Koran? That's what Dutch YouTube duo, Dit Is Normaal, wanted to know. So they wrapped up a copy of the Bible in a Koran cover, read out a bunch of the most shocking passages, asked people what they thought and what happened? Exactly what you'd expect, unfortunately. [Islam] [Religion]
• U.S. Strategy Seeks to Avoid ISIS Prophecy
  By Rukmini Callimachi Dec. 7, 2015 As the debate on how best to contain the Islamic State continues to rage in Western capitals, the militants themselves have made one point patently clear: They want the United States and its allies to be dragged into a ground war. In fact, when the United States first invaded Iraq, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the move was the man who founded the terrorist cell that would one day become the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He excitedly called the Americans’ 2003 intervention “the Blessed Invasion.” His reaction — ignored by some, and dismissed as rhetoric by others — points to one of the core beliefs motivating the terrorist group now holding large stretches of Iraq and Syria: The group bases its ideology on prophetic texts stating that Islam will be victorious after an apocalyptic battle to be set off once Western armies come to the region. Should that invasion happen, the Islamic State not only would be able to declare its prophecy fulfilled, but could also turn the occurrence into a new recruiting drive at the very moment the terrorist group appears to be losing volunteers. It is partly that theory that President Obama referred to in his speech on Sunday, when he said the United States should pursue a “sustainable victory” that involves airstrikes and supports local forces battling the Islamic State rather than sending a new generation of American soldiers into a ground offensive. [US middle East Strategy] [Spin] [Outsourcing]
• No Brake and No Disclosure on Media Owners’ Interests
  by craig on December 5, 2015 3:22 pm The Times today carries an article on ISIS’ oil interests, Syria and Turkey. Nowhere does it inform its readers that the owner of the newspaper, Rupert Murdoch, has a vested interest in this subject through his role and shares in Genie Energy, an Israeli company granted oil rights in Syria by the Israeli government. Dick Cheney and Lord Rothschild are also shareholders. No, they really are. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy. That Israel should grant oil rights within Syria is of course a striking example of contempt for international law, but then that is the basis on which Israel normally operates. Of course Genie’s share value will be substantially boosted by the installation of a neo-con puppet regime in Damascus which can be bought to underwrite the oil concession granted by Israel. Contempt for international law has been the single most important defining characteristic of neo-conservatism, and the need to uphold international law the recurring theme of this blog. I never thought the UK government would make the withdrawal of its support for the concept of international law explicit, as Cameron has done by removing the obligation to comply with international law from the Ministerial Code. That is truly, truly disgraceful. But to return to Murdoch’s oil interests in Syria, it seems to me a fundamental flaw that when Fox News, Sky News, the Times, the Sun and Murdoch’s numerous other media outlets bang the drum for Western military action in Syria, there is no requirement for the consumer of this propaganda to be told that the outlet is pushing a policy in line with the financial interests of its owner. Even for those actively seeking information, there is no register of the interests of media proprietors. [Media] [Legality]
• Obama tries to ease anxiety over terrorism with Oval Office address
  Obama's full speech on terrorism threat from Oval Office President Obama addressed the attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and overseas from the Oval Office. (Associated Press) By David Nakamura December 6 at 8:46 PM ? President Obama said Sunday that recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., show that the threat of terrorism to the United States has entered a new phase, but he vowed that the nation will ultimately defeat the Islamic State and other militant groups. “The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it,” Obama said during a 14-minute Oval Office address. Using an acronym for the group, he declared: “We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us.” Obama, who has struggled to calm public fears, hoped the rare prime-time address would help reassure an uneasy nation after a series of deadly attacks. Aides said he made the decision to speak directly to the nation — only the third time he has used the Oval Office for such a speech — last week and worked on his remarks through the weekend. In a rebuke to critics who have called his approach weak, Obama said the campaign to defeat terrorists will “not depend on tough talk or abandoning our values or giving in to fear. Instead, we will prevail by being strong and smart, resilient and relentless.” [Obama] [US Middle East Strategy] [ISIS] [Rhetoric]
• Are we being misguided about precision strike?
  By Chris Cole on 04/12/2015 • ( 0 ) In the run up to the House of Commons vote on air strikes against ISIS in Syria, there has been much hype in the media about ‘precision strikes’. In particular a new British missile, the Brimstone, has been lauded by the press and politicians with Defence Secretary Michael Fallon going so far as to suggest that it “eliminates civilian casualties.” The perception of ‘precision’ also underlies much of the support for drones targeted killing, with the phrase ‘pinpoint accuracy’ being deployed by the media almost as often as the weapons themselves. However the details and claims of such ‘precision’ deserve scrutiny. It is important to ask whether we are not in fact being misguided about ‘precision’. Not only in terms of the actual impact on the ground, but also in the permissiveness it engenders for further war. [UAV] [Spin] [Civilian]
• Killer Drone News Blackout Continues As Mainstream Media Ignore 4 Whistleblowers
  By John Hanrahan December 3, 2015 The polls show it and commentators of all political stripes often cite the figures: Killer drone attacks by the U.S. military and the CIA in the Greater Middle East and Africa have strong U.S. public support. According to the Pew Research Center’s most recent poll in May, 58 percent — up slightly from 56 percent in February 2013 — approve of “missile strikes from drones to target extremists in such countries as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.” The numbers of Americans disapproving of drone attacks actually increased from 26 percent to 35 percent over that two-year period — a hopeful sign, but still very much a minority view. But how well informed can U.S. citizens be on this subject when the major news media time and again ignore or under-report drone-strike stories — as we have discussed here and here in recent weeks? Stories — such as The Intercept’s October series based on a trove of classified materials provided by a national security whistleblower — that would likely raise serious questions about the drone program in many more Americans’ minds if they were actually given the information? And now, in the latest example of journalistic negligence, The New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream news organizations in late November continued their apparent policy of no-bad-news-reporting-about-drones. This time, the major media chose to ignore four former Air Force drone-war personnel who went public with an open letter to President Obama. The letter urged the President to reconsider a program that killed “innocent civilians,” and which “only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruiting tool [for extremists] similar to Guantanamo Bay.” [UAV] [Whistleblower] [Civilian] [Counterproductive]
• Israel the Main Buyer of ISIS Oil — Report
  Multiple reports claim that Israel is the top purchaser of smuggled ISIS oil Enrico Braun Thu, Dec 3 Citing multiple sources, the Israeli business press are now reporting that Israel is the main recipient of ISIS oil: Kurdish and Turkish smugglers are transporting oil from ISIS controlled territory in Syria and Iraq and selling it to Israel, according to several reports in the Arab and Russian media. An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto other ports, with Israel among the main destinations. In August, the “Financial Times” reported that Israel obtained 75% of its oil supplies from Iraqi Kurdistan. More than a third of such exports go through the port of Ceyhan, which the FT describe as a “potential gateway for ISIS-smuggled crude.” It's been well-established that Turkey is a major transportation hub for ISIS oil smuggling operations. But where is the oil sent? Someone has to buy it. The answer, apparently, is: Israel. [ISIS] [Oil] [Israel]
• U.S. struggling over what to do with Syrian rebels once tied to al Qaida
  Highlights Ahrar al Sham is one of the largest Syrian rebel factions Its new leaders are eager to distance the group from al Qaida Diplomats are skeptical about the group’s shift from militancy By Hannah Allam Washington — Last July, an ultraconservative Islamist rebel group made a splash by publicly offering to work with Western powers to resolve the Syrian civil war and build “a moderate future,” a surprising overture from a force that regularly fights alongside al Qaida loyalists. But the very next month, the same rebel group eulogized Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief who sheltered Osama bin Laden before and after the 9/11 attacks, as a steadfast warrior who embodied “the true meanings of jihad and sincerity.” The mixed messaging from Ahrar al Sham poses a serious dilemma for the Obama administration and its allies as they determine which rebel militias are acceptable partners in a revived diplomatic effort to resolve the Syrian conflict. Ahrar al Sham is one of Syria’s largest and most effective rebel forces, and its involvement in – or exclusion from – peace negotiations could determine the viability of any settlement hatched from a new series of negotiations in Vienna. The group is too important to exclude from talks on the country’s future, say officials and analysts who monitor the conflict. [US Middle East Strategy] [Outsourcing] [Al Qaeda]
• Beyond ISIS: The Folly of World War IV
  By Andrew J. Bacevich December 03, 2015 Assume that the hawks get their way -- that the United States does whatever it takes militarily to confront and destroy ISIS. Then what? Answering that question requires taking seriously the outcomes of other recent U.S. interventions in the Greater Middle East. In 1991, when the first President Bush ejected Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, Americans rejoiced, believing that they had won a decisive victory. A decade later, the younger Bush seemingly outdid his father by toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and then making short work of Saddam himself -- a liberation twofer achieved in less time than it takes Americans to choose a president. After the passage of another decade, Barack Obama got into the liberation act, overthrowing the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in what appeared to be a tidy air intervention with a clean outcome. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton memorably put it, “We came, we saw, he died.” End of story. In fact, subsequent events in each case mocked early claims of success or outright victory. Unanticipated consequences and complications abounded. “Liberation” turned out to be a prelude to chronic violence and upheaval. Indeed, the very existence of the Islamic State (ISIS) today renders a definitive verdict on the Iraq wars over which the Presidents Bush presided, each abetted by a Democratic successor. A de facto collaboration of four successive administrations succeeded in reducing Iraq to what it is today: a dysfunctional quasi-state unable to control its borders or territory while serving as a magnet and inspiration for terrorists. The United States bears a profound moral responsibility for having made such a hash of things there. Were it not for the reckless American decision to invade and occupy a nation that, whatever its crimes, had nothing to do with 9/11, the Islamic State would not exist. Per the famous Pottery Barn Rule attributed to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, having smashed Iraq to bits a decade ago, we can now hardly deny owning ISIS. That the United States possesses sufficient military power to make short work of that “caliphate” is also the case. True, in both Syria and Iraq the Islamic State has demonstrated a disturbing ability to capture and hold large stretches of desert, along with several population centers. It has, however, achieved these successes against poorly motivated local forces of, at best, indifferent quality. In that regard, the glibly bellicose editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, is surely correct in suggesting that a well-armed contingent of 50,000 U.S. troops, supported by ample quantities of air power, would make mincemeat of ISIS in a toe-to-toe contest. Liberation of the various ISIS strongholds like Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq and Palmyra and Raqqa, its “capital,” in Syria would undoubtedly follow in short order. In the wake of the recent attacks in Paris, the American mood is strongly trending in favor of this sort of escalation. Just about anyone who is anyone -- the current occupant of the Oval Office partially excepted -- favors intensifying the U.S. military campaign against ISIS. And why not? What could possibly go wrong? As Kristol puts it, "I don’t think there’s much in the way of unanticipated side effects that are going to be bad there." [US Middle East Strategy] [ISIS]
• ISIS Oil
  by Vijay Prashad December 3, 2015 On December 2, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Defense Anatoly Antonov made a strong statement about Turkish complicity with ISIS. The charge sheet is long and detailed. It mentions many aspects, but the most incendiary is the accusation about “ISIS oil.” ISIS controls Iraqi oil fields near Mosul. They have been making millions of dollars each day by selling oil from these fields. How does ISIS get the oil from the fields in Mosul to the market? What ISIS has done is to use the old networks that have smuggled oil from the Kurdish Regional Government without any consideration given to Baghdad’s sovereignty over that oil. This had been a point of contention for decades, since the Kurdish region began to exercise autonomous control of the north. Kurdish oil was sold to smugglers who would cart them in tankers across the border into Turkey. In Turkey the trucks would run the length of the country to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. From Ceyhan, which is a port run by the Turkish government, the oil is purchased by transporters whose ships go to Malta, where the oil is transshipped to destinations such as Ashdod (Israel). This has long been a bone of contention between the Iraqi government, the Kurdish Regional Government and the Turkish government. It was documented by Tolga Tanis in his book Potus ve Beyefendi (2015). Tanis accuses Berat Albayrak, son-in-law of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of involvement in this illegal scheme. ISIS has merely replaced the Kurdish Regional Government in the new arrangement. How does ISIS do it? ISIS sells the oil to smugglers who cart it to Ceyhan. But now the story gets interesting. Who is involved inside Turkey with the oil? The Russians have accused the BMZ Group of being a major agent for the transport of the oil. It turns out that one of the owners of BMZ is Bilal Erdogan, son of the president. BMZ Group has – according to the Financial Times – purchased two new tankers this last month. Its volume of oil has increased. Is this ISIS oil? What the Russians allege would need to be investigated further. In the UK parliament, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said, “We need to know which banks and countries are in on ISIS oil smuggling.” This is the most important question. It is being ignored. [ISIS] [Oil] [Erdogan]
• To Crush ISIS, John Kerry Urges Deft Removal of Syria’s Assad
  By David E. Sanger and Somini Sengupta Dec. 3, 2015 NICOSIA, Cyprus — Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday he believes that if an agreement can be reached to ease President Bashar al-Assad of Syria from power, a coalition of Americans, Russians and Syrian forces could wipe out the Islamic State “in a matter of literally months.” Mr. Kerry’s comments, in a speech to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Belgrade, Serbia, on Thursday morning, were the first in which he publicly offered an estimate of how quickly a well-organized effort might be able to defeat the radical Sunni group. He also said that “without the ability to find some ground forces that are prepared to take on Daesh,” using an Arabic acronym for the group, “this will not be won completely from the air, and we know that.” But he was not specific about where those ground troops would come from. His aides later said they would have to be indigenous. For weeks Mr. Kerry, who arrived in Cyprus later in the day to help advance the first real chance the island has had in decades to unify Greek and Turkish Cypriots under one flag, has argued that his diplomatic effort in Syria had to be matched with military pressure. Yet while American officials say they want to see Mr. Assad leave office, they clearly do not want to have that transition happen too quickly. An abrupt removal of Mr. Assad could create a vacuum in Damascus that the Islamic State would probably try to exploit. “Just imagine how quickly this scourge could be eliminated — in a matter of literally months — if we were able to secure that kind of political resolution,” Mr. Kerry said. [US Syria Policy] [Bizarre]
• Germany Rebukes Its Own Intelligence Agency for Criticizing Saudi Policy
  By Alison Smale Dec. 3, 2015 BERLIN — The German government issued an unusual public rebuke to its own foreign intelligence service on Thursday over a blunt memo saying that Saudi Arabia was playing an increasingly destabilizing role in the Middle East. The intelligence agency’s memo risked playing havoc with Berlin’s efforts to show solidarity with France in its military campaign against the Islamic State and to push forward the tentative talks on how to end the Syrian civil war. The Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament, is due to vote on Friday on whether to send reconnaissance planes, midair fueling capacity and a frigate to the Middle East to support the French. [Saudi Arabia] [Outsourcing] [Germany] [US dominance]
• It’s a $cam!
  Tom Engelhardt • November 12, 2015 Let’s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that’s just what happened as the starting gun went off. It’s never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed “as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security.” It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, “feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks” and that was only the beginning of its problems. When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid. A year later, a New York Timesreporter visited and found that “the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.” This seems to have been par for the course. Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished. And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq. Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to “standing up” a new security force in that country. Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out. And the police were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand. And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region’s booming drug trade in opium and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the “highway to nowhere,” was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter. And don’t think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it could point to “less than 100 miles of gravel road completed.” Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects. [Imperialism] [Corruption]
• After Paris and California attacks, U.S. Muslims feel intense backlash
  By Kevin Sullivan, Elahe Izadi and Sarah Pulliam Bailey December 3 at 8:01 PM Rabia Chaudry kept her 7-year-old daughter home from her private Islamic school in Maryland on Thursday, fearing anti-Muslim backlash from Wednesday’s massacre nearly 3,000 miles away in San Bernardino, Calif. “I think we are all feeling exhausted and very vulnerable,” said Chaudry, a lawyer and national security fellow at the New America Foundation. “I’m angry at those people who did this attack. And I’m angry at how this is being politicized. Everything boils down to, ‘We should fear Muslims. And they shouldn’t be here.’ ” American Muslims say they are living through an intensely painful moment and feel growing anti-Muslim sentiment after the recent Islamic State attacks in Paris and this week’s San Bernardino shootings, carried out by a Muslim husband and wife. The motivations of the California killers are still unclear, although authorities are investigating it as a potential act of terrorism. Muslims said they are bracing for an even more toxic climate in which Americans are increasingly suspicious of Muslims. [Islamophobia] [Terrorism]
• Opposition win in Venezuela on Sunday may not change much
  Highlights Polls predict opposition might take National Assembly for first time in 16 years But polls could be wrong; in any case, ruling party controls other parts of the government Ambassador: Whatever the outcome, Nicolás Maduro will still be president on Monday By Franco Ordoñez Washington — Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro might have a lot at stake in this weekend’s parliamentary elections. Or he might not. If national polls are correct, Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela stands to lose control of Venezuela’s National Assembly for the first time in 16 years. With the opposition gaining a bigger voice, the legislature might then become a place for democratic dialogue that has been missing in the country, said Jennifer McCoy, former director of the Americas Program at the Carter Center, the Atlanta-based human rights organization founded by former President Jimmy Carter. That dialogue could lead to a change in the country’s power dynamics and in Venezuela’s attitude toward the ruling party. But the stakes may be lower than they appear. The legislature is only one of five branches of power in the government. And Maduro has the ability to shift more power from the legislature to other branches under his party’s control, McCoy said. “Just because the opposition wins a majority in the legislature, it doesn’t mean it suddenly is going to have this major power,” said McCoy, who now is director of the Global Studies Institute at Georgia State University. Venezuela will hold legislative elections on Sunday. The date commemorates the first election of the late President Hugo Chávez, who launched the country’s socialist revolution when voters supported him on Dec. 6, 1998. The United Socialist Party currently holds a majority in the assembly, but polls indicate the leadership gavel could change hands amid growing discontent over shortages, rapid inflation and rising crime. [Venezuela]
• Panel casts doubt on U.S. propaganda efforts against ISIS
  America's most graphic anti-Islamic State video Hear from the man responsible for one of the most controversial counter-messaging videos produced by the U.S. State Department. “Welcome to ISIS Land” used footage straight from gruesome Islamic State propaganda videos and led to a backlash from officials in Washington. EDITOR’S NOTE: The Washington Post has blurred the graphic images from the State Department video. (The Washington Post) By Greg Miller December 2 at 7:27 PM ? The State Department is considering scaling back its direct involvement in online campaigns to discredit the Islamic State after a review by outside experts cast new doubt on the U.S. government’s ability to serve as a credible voice against the terrorist group’s propaganda, current and former U.S. officials said. The findings by the six-member panel, which included marketing experts from Silicon Valley and New York, have added to the uncertainty surrounding a State Department program that also faces another management shake-up with the departure of its second director in less than a year. [ISIS] [Propaganda]
• CIA runs shadow war with Afghan militia implicated in civilian killings
  By Sudarsan Raghavan December 3 at 12:30 AM ? Darwar Khan prays over the graves of relatives who were killed during a night raid conducted by the Khost Protection Force in the village of Gurbuz District, Khost province, on Nov. 4. (Andrew Quilty/For The Washington Post) TOR GHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Months after the Obama administration declared combat operations over in Afghanistan, the CIA continues to run a shadow war in the eastern part of the country, overseeing an Afghan proxy called the Khost Protection Force, according to local officials, former commanders of that militia and Western advisers. The highly secretive paramilitary unit has been implicated in civilian killings, torture, questionable detentions, arbitrary arrests and use of excessive force in controversial night raids, abuses that have mostly not been previously disclosed. The elite Afghan fighters and their American handlers came to Tor Ghar one night in September. Shortly after midnight, wearing tan camouflage and black masks, they entered a village in this remote mountainous area straddling the Pakistan border in search of militants with a Taliban-allied group, said local officials and tribal elders who later spoke with the force’s commanders. Within minutes, the armed men had arrived at Darwar Khan’s house. “When my father opened the gate, they shot him dead,” recalled Khan, who was inside the house at the time. “Then, they tossed a grenade into the compound, killing my mother.” [Proxy] [CIA] [Afghanistan]
• After Paris and Beirut, It’s Time to Rein in Saudi Arabia
  America's leading Sunni ally was propagating a violent, sectarian religious ideology long before ISIS came on the scene. By Inge Fryklund, November 20, 2015. After the carnage in Paris, Western governments turned immediately to debating the usual tactics for “bringing the terrorists to justice.” Should we employ drone strikes, they wonder? Boots on the ground? Police? The much more important matter, however, is identifying and stopping the source of the nihilism, misogyny, and sectarian animus that’s found fertile breeding grounds in the civil wars of the Middle East. Unless the source is addressed, there will be an endless supply of terrorists wreaking havoc. And we in the West will continue wringing our hands and responding impulsively rather than strategically. While virtually all Islamic scholars dispute the theological soundness of the ISIS ideology, the group’s roots lie in fundamentalist Sunni Islam, specifically the Wahhabi strain officially espoused by Saudi Arabia — our “ally” — which views Shiites as apostates and seeks to turn Islamic societies back to an intolerant (and imagined) medieval past where women are stoned for adultery and reporters are lashed. Since the 1970s, the Saudi government and its allied religious establishment have exported their extremist version of Sunni Islam around the world — all financed by their oil money. [Saudi Arabia] [Outsourcing] [Wahhabi] [Sunni] [Client]
• Argentina’s Election: Who Won What?
  Commentary No. 414, December 1, 2015 On Nov. 22, 2015, Mauricio Macri defeated Daniel Scioli in Argentina’s presidential election somewhat narrowly by just under three percentage points. Most analysts called this the triumph of the right over the left. This is not false but it is far too simple. Actually, the election reflected the very complex developments occurring throughout Latin America at the present time. Misreading what is going on can lead to major political errors in the decade to come. [Argentina]
• Dead, White, and Blue: The Great Die-Off of America's Blue Collar Whites
  By Barbara Ehrenreich The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.” This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.” It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevity -- 5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women -- though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction. There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more likely to be gun-owners, and white men favor gunshots as a means of suicide. For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting in part on stereotypes of non-whites as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opiate painkillers to whites than to people of color. (I’ve been offered enough oxycodone prescriptions over the years to stock a small illegal business.) Manual labor -- from waitressing to construction work -- tends to wear the body down quickly, from knees to back and rotator cuffs, and when Tylenol fails, the doctor may opt for an opiate just to get you through the day. The Wages of Despair But something more profound is going on here, too. [Labour]
• In intensified Islamic State effort, U.S. to send elite targeting force to Iraq
  By Missy Ryan December 1 at 12:05 PM ? U.S. will deploy special force to fight Islamic State in Iraq While testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on Dec. 1, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that the United States is deploying a specialized expeditionary targeting force to help Iraq put additional pressure on Islamic State. (Reuters) The Pentagon will send a new Special Operations force to Iraq to intensify U.S. and Iraqi operations against the Islamic State, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said Tuesday. Carter, providing the House Armed Services Committee an update on President Obama’s plan for countering the extremist group, said the United States was sending “a specialized expeditionary targeting force” to help Iraqi troops and to intensify direct action against the militants there. “These special operators will over time be able to conduct raids, free hostages, gather intelligence and capture ISIL leaders,” Carter said, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “That creates a virtuous cycle of better intelligence, which generates more targets, more raids and more momentum.” [Special forces]
• Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and it is hurting the war
  By Liz Sly December 1 at 9:24 PM ? BAIJI, Iraq — On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion. Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil. “It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army. The Islamic State is “almost finished,” he said. “They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.” [US Middle East strategy] [Outsourcing] [ISIS] [Media]
• ISIS Promise of Statehood Falling Far Short, Ex-Residents Say
  By Ben Hubbard Dec. 1, 2015 Sanliurfa, Turkey — After the Syrian government stopped paying him, a technician who had spent two decades pumping the country’s oil received an enticing offer: do the same work for the jihadists of the Islamic State — starting at three times the salary. He was soon helping to fill tanker trucks with crude oil to fund the Islamic State. But frequent executions of those suspected of spying and deadly airstrikes by government jets made life hard, and he grew angry that the country’s resources were financing the jihadists while schools and hospitals were being shut down. “We thought they wanted to get rid of the regime, but they turned out to be thieves,” the technician said after fleeing to this city in southern Turkey. The Islamic State claims to be more than a militant group, selling itself as a government for the world’s Muslims that provides a range of services in the territory it controls. But that statehood project is now in distress, perhaps more so than at any other time since the Islamic State began seizing territory in Iraq and Syria, according to a range of interviews with people who have recently fled. Under pressure from airstrikes by several countries, and new ground offensives by Kurdish and Shiite militias, the jihadists are beginning to show the strain. [ISIS]
• Confession of a CIA Agent: They gave us millions to dismember Yugoslavia
  November 26, 20152 We bribed parties and politicians who have enticed hate between the nations. Our ultimate goal was to enslave you! WebTribune publishes their interview with former CIA agent Robert Baer during his promotion tour in Quebec for upcoming book “Secrets of the White House” last week. My boss, who was formerly a US Senator, stressed repeatedly that some kind of scam would go down in Bosnia. A month before the alleged genocide in Srebrenica, he told me that the town would be headline news around the world and ordered us to call the media. Robert Baer, ??a former CIA officer, has authored many books which disclosed the secrets of both the CIA and the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He has been arrested and detained several times. Mitt Waspurh, a personal friend who worked at the Senate and shared information was killed at gunpoint. As a senior CIA operative, Baer worked in Yugoslavia during the 1991-94 period and in the Middle East. He has worked on several documentaries on National Geographic, accusing the Bush administration of waging war for oil. The interview was conducted live in Canada, during my trip a few days ago. Robert Baer is currently promoting his book “The Secrets of the White House” in Quebec, where we talked. In an interview we spoke of the background of the war in Yugoslavia [CIA] [Destabilisation] [Yugoslavia] [Fragmentation]
• Syrian Crisis Triggers Turkey’s Neo-Ottoman Ambitions
  Dmitry Minin | 30.11.2015 | 08:00 The Turkey’s treacherous attack against a Russian military aircraft dispelled the fog of dangerous illusions. First and foremost, it shows how phony was the assurances of the Turkish government about its readiness for special relationship and close cooperation with Russia. The desire to reap benefits is not the same thing as the implementation of long-term strategy. Everybody needs cooperation; there is no need to refuse it, but an in-depth analysis of the reasons that define the policy implemented by Turkey today shows the downing of the aircraft was not an accident. In a war on evil it is not possible to join efforts with someone who gave birth to it. Pan-Turkism, Neo-Ottomanism and radical Islamism constitute the basis of Turkey’s state ideology. The country that espouses it cannot be our ally, or an associate. Ankara has not been just pursuing the goal of providing protection to the countries that were parts of former Ottoman Empire. It wants to ultimately integrate them into Turkey. These ambitions enter in direct contradiction with the vital interests of Russia. One can easily see it is true – it’s enough to get acquainted with the Davutoglu Doctrine associated with the name of the current Prime Minister of Turkey. The county’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a devout supporter of this policy and is eager to bring it to life. George Friedman, the chairman of Stratfor private global intelligence company, is an expert in geopolitics who is known for his works of provocative nature. In his futuristic book titled The Next 100 Years he predicts with confidence that Poland and Turkey will become the main instruments used by the West to destroy Russia. He believes that these countries will incorporate big chunks of Russia’s territory. [Turkey] [Russia Syria]
• Former CIA Deputy Director Gives A Stunning Reason Why Obama Has Not Attacked ISIS' Oil Infrastructure
  Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/29/2015 12:42 -0500 As we pointed out a week ago, even before the downing of the Russian jet by a Turkish F-16, the most important question that nobody had asked about ISIS is where is the funding for the terrorist organization coming from, and more importantly, since everyone tacitly knows where said funding is coming from (as we have revealed in an ongoing series of posts "Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey's President", "How Turkey Exports ISIS Oil To The World: The Scientific Evidence" and "ISIS Oil Trade Full Frontal: "Raqqa's Rockefellers", Bilal Erdogan, KRG Crude, And The Israel Connection") few on the US-led Western Alliance have done anything to stop the hundreds of millions in oil sale proceeds from funding the world's best organized terrorist group. We concluded by asking "how long until someone finally asks the all important question regarding the Islamic State: who is the commodity trader breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various "western alliance" governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?" To be sure, the only party that actually did something to halt ISIS' oil infrastructure was Russia, whose bombing raids of Islamic State oil routes may not only have contributed to the fatal attack by Turkey of the Russian Su-24 (as the curtailment of ISIS' oil flows led to a big hit in the funds collected by the biggest middleman in the region, Turkey, its president and his son, Bilal not to mention Israel which may have been actively buying ISIS oil over the past year) but prompted questions why the bombing campaign by the US-led alliance had been so woefully incapable of hitting ISIS where it truly hurts: its funding. This past week, someone finally came up with a "reason" why the Obama administration had been so impotent at denting the Islamic State's well-greased oil machine. In an interview on PBS' Charlie Rose on Tuesday, Rose pointed out that before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the U.S. had not bombed ISIS-controlled oil tankers, to which the former CIA deputy director Michael Morell responded that Barack Obama didn’t order the bombing of ISIS’s oil transportation infrastructure until recently because he was concerned about environmental damage. Yes, he really said that: We didn’t go after oil wells, actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls, because we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure. [US Middle East strategy] [ISIS] [Spin] [Outsourcing]

• Syria and Washington’s ‘New Middle East’
  By Prof. Tim Anderson Global Research, November 28, 2015 The following text is chapter two of professor Tim Anderson’s forthcoming book entitled “The Dirty War on Syria” After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the destruction of Libya, Syria was to be the next state overthrown. Washington and its regional allies had planned this for some time. After ‘regime change’ in Damascus, Syria’s ally Hezbollah, leader of the Lebanese Resistance to Israel, would be isolated. The Islamic Republic of Iran would remain the only Middle East country without US military bases. After Iran, Washington would control the entire region, excluding possible competitors such as Russia and China. Palestine would be lost. This was all part of Washington’s plan for a ‘New Middle East’; but it was not to be. Determined and coordinated resistance can never be discounted. Syria’s national army has resisted wave after wave of fanatical Islamist attacks, backed by NATO and the Gulf monarchies, and Russian and Iranian support remained solid. Importantly, Syria has built new forms of cooperation with a weak but emerging Iraq. Washington had worked for decades to divide Iran and Iraq, so the strengthening ties between Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine represent a regional challenge to the new ‘Great Game’ of our times. The Middle East is not just a big power playground. The US and its close regional collaborators (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Qatar and Jordan), we now know, have been behind every anti-Syrian extremist group since the beginning of the recent conflict. They have used the worst of reactionary and sectarian forces to pursue their ends. The Axis of Resistance, on the other hand, should not be misunderstood as a sectarian phenomenon. This group – the Islamic Republic of Iran, secular Syria, the Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah and the Palestinians – is deeply anti-imperial. Syria, the only remaining ‘secular’ state in the region has long allied itself with the Islamic Republic of Iran, including against Saddam Hussein’s secular Iraq. Saddam in turn was used by Washington to degrade Iran, after that country’s 1979 revolution. On the other hand, Iran never backed the sectarian Muslim Brotherhood in any of its insurrections against secular Syria. Iran does support the Shia Muslims of Hezbollah, but it is most demonised for arming Palestine, which has hardly any Shia. This plurality disproves any claims that the Axis of Resistance is sectarian. Promotion of sectarianism in the Middle East mostly comes from Washington’s key allies, Saudi Arabia, the other gulf monarchies, and the ethnic cleansers of Israel. They share the US aim of keeping the region weak and divided. [US Middle East policy]
• What really drives you crazy about waiting in line (it actually isn’t the wait at all)
  By Ana Swanson November 27 at 10:10 AM ? There's a better way to stand in Black Friday lines. But you won’t like it. When we stand in line, it's not just the length of time we hate, it's the anxiety, uncertainty and boredom that goes along with it. Some companies and researchers are looking for ways to make waiting in line a little less painful. (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post) If the people who study the psychology of waiting in line — yes, there is such a thing — have an origin story, it’s this: It was the 1950s, and a high-rise office building in Manhattan had a problem. The tenants complained of an excessively long wait for the elevator when people arrived in the morning, took their lunch break, and left at night. Engineers examined the building and determined that nothing could be done to speed up the service. Desperate to keep his tenants, the building manager turned to his staff for suggestions. One employee noted that people were probably just bored and recommended installing floor-to-ceiling mirrors near the elevators, so people could look at themselves and each other while waiting. This was done, and complaints dropped to nearly zero. It's a tale that appears in books and articles about organizational design, though it's not clear whether it's a real story or simply a parable. Regardless, the story offers a powerful insight into one of the most universal, and universally hated, things we do: waiting in line. It suggests that there are hidden and surprising factors that affect how we experience lines. In the case of elevators, it wasn't the wait that mattered. It was that we got bored while waiting.
• Raqqa's Rockefellers: How Islamic State oil flows to Israel
  By: Al-Araby al-Jadeed staff Date of publication: 26 November, 2015 Oil produced by the Islamic State group finances its bloodlust. But how is it extracted, transported and sold? Who is buying it, and how does it reach Israel? Oil produced from fields under the control of the Islamic State group is at the heart of a new investigation by al-Araby al-Jadeed. The black gold is extracted, transported and sold, providing the armed group with a vital financial lifeline.But who buys it? Who finances the murderous brutality that has taken over swathes of Iraq and Syria? How does it get from the ground to the petrol tank, and who profits along the way?The Islamic State group uses millions of dollars in oil revenues to expand and manage vast areas under its control, home to around five million civilians.IS sells Iraqi and Syrian oil for a very low price to Kurdish and Turkish smuggling networks and mafias, who label it and sell it on as barrels from the Kurdistan Regional Government.It is then most frequently transported from Turkey to Israel, via knowing or unknowing middlemen, according to al-Araby's investigation.The Islamic State group has told al-Araby that it did not intentionally sell oil to Israel, blaming agents along the route to international markets. - See more at: http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/features/2015/11/26/raqqas-rockefellers-how-islamic-state-oil-flows-to-israel/#sthash.wMoG5kS7.dpuf [ISIS] [Israel] [Oil]
• The Ideology of Humanitarian Imperialism
  by Jean Bricmont November 27, 2015 Àngel Ferrero: It has been 10 years since Humanitarian Imperialism appeared in Spanish. What made you write the book? It started as a reaction to the attitude of the Left during the 1999 Kosovo war, which was largely accepted on humanitarian grounds and to the rather weak opposition of the peace movement before the 2003 invasion of Iraq: for example, many “pacifists” have accepted the policy of sanctions at the time of the 1991 first Gulf war and even after it, and were favorable to inspections in the run-up to the war, without realizing that this was just a maneuver to prepare the public to accept the war (this became even public knowledge through later leaks, like the Downing Street memos). It seemed to me that the ideology of humanitarian intervention had totally destroyed, on the left, any notion of respect for international law, as well as any critical attitude with respect to the media. Àngel Ferrero: What do you think it has changed in this last 10 years? A lot of things have changed, although, I am afraid, not because of my book. It is rather reality that has asserted itself, first with the chaos in Iraq, then in Libya and now in Syria and Ukraine, leading to the refugee crisis and a near state of war with Russia, which would not be a “cakewalk”. The humanitarian imperialists are still busy pushing us towards more wars, but there is now a substantial fraction of public opinion that is against such policies; that fraction is probably more important on the right than on the left. [Imperialism]
• The Soothsayers of Eternal War
  by Robert Fisk
  November 25, 2015 Eisenhower famously sent some brusque advice to Anthony Eden in 1956 when he decided that Britain’s deceitful war in Egypt should come to an end. “Whoa, boy!” were his words. And they should be repeated now to the politicians, historians and other nincompoops who regard themselves as the soothsayers of eternal war. Each morning, I awake to find another Hollywood horror being concocted by our secret policemen or our public relations-inspired leaders. Germany’s top spy warns us of a “Terrorist World War” – I accept his expertise, of course, because Germany has itself proved rather efficient at starting world wars – while a perfectly sane and otherwise brilliant historian compares Europe’s agony to the fall of the Roman Empire. The Paris killings are now supposed to have “changed Paris for ever” or “changed France for ever”. I would accept that the collaboration of General Pétain with Nazi Germany changed France for ever – but the atrocities in Paris this month simply cannot be compared with the German occupation of 1940. That most tiresome of French philosophers, Bernard-Henri Lévy, tells us that Isis are “Fascislamists”. Oddly, I don’t remember the same Mr Lévy telling us that the avowedly Christian Lebanese killers of up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians in the Beirut Sabra-Shatila refugee camps of 1982 – Israel’s vicious Lebanese militia allies – were “Fascichristians”. This was a “terrorist” act with which I was all too familiar. With two journalist colleagues, I walked among the butchered and raped corpses of the dead. The American-armed and funded Israeli army watched the slaughter – and did nothing. Yet not a single Western politicians announced that this had “changed the Middle East for ever”. And if 1,700 innocents can be murdered in Beirut in 1982 without “world war” being declared, how can President François Hollande announce that France is “at war” after 130 innocents were massacred? Yet, now the poor and huddled masses of the Middle East, according to my friend Niall Ferguson, are the Goths flooding towards ancient Rome. Ferguson admits he doesn’t know enough about fifth century Roman history to be able to quote Romans on the subject. But the Romans endowed their newly conquered peoples with Roman citizenship; and Niall might at least have bothered to study the third century when the new Roman emperor, Caesar Marcus Julius Philippus Augustus, came from Syria. He was born about 30 miles from Damascus and was called “Philip the Arab”. But let’s not allow even modern history to get in the way of our desire for revenge. [US Middle East policy] [Israel] [Double standards]
• Results: Should the Administration halt the admittance of Syrian refugees into the U.S.?
  Yes. 5111 (83.2%) No. 921 (15%) I don't know. 45 (0.7%) Other (share your thoughts on my blog here). 63 (1%) [Refugee] [Republican]
• If you keep saying Saudi Arabia is like ISIS, you might get sued
  By Adam Taylor November 26 at 12:01 AM In this undated photo posted on the Instagram account of Ashraf Fayadh, the Palestinian artist poses for a picture. (Instagram account of Ashraf Fayadh via AP) Authorities in Saudi Arabia have long been annoyed that everyone keeps suggesting they are anything like the Islamic State. Sure, they say, perhaps some of the laws on the books may look similar to the punishments in the extremist organization, but the Saudi kingdom is a sovereign state that abides by the rule of law and uses these punishments with discretion. Now, reports in the Saudi press suggest that authorities have a new tactic for those who compare them to the Islamic State: taking them to court. According to a report in pro-government newspaper Al Riyadh, the Saudi justice ministry is planning to sue a Twitter user who suggested that a death sentence recently handed out to a Palestinian artist for apostasy was "ISIS-like." "Questioning the fairness of the courts is to question the justice of the Kingdom and its judicial system based on Islamic law, which guarantees rights and ensures human dignity," a source in the justice ministry told the newspaper, according to a translation by Reuters. The ministry would not hesitate to sue "any media that slandered the religious judiciary of the Kingdom," the source added. It is unclear who the Twitter user in question is, though his or her comments would have referred to the case of Ashraf Fayadh. According to Human Rights Watch, documents show that Fayadh was investigated for blasphemy, spreading atheism and having an illicit relationship with women, based on pictures found on his phone. After initially being sentenced to 800 lashes and four years in prison, he was retried and on Nov. 17 was sentenced to death. [Saudi Arabia] [Human rights]
• Anne Frank and her family were also denied entry as refugees to the U.S.
  By Elahe Izadi November 24 at 9:14 AM Portrait of Anne Frank at age 12, sitting at her desk at the Montessori school in Amsterdam. (Courtesy Anne Frank House, Amsterdam) Many have noted the historical parallels between the current debate over Syrians seeking refuge in the United States and the plight of European Jews fleeing German-occupied territories on the eve of World War II. Among the many who tried — and failed — to escape Nazi persecution: Otto Frank and his family, which included wife, Edith, and his daughters, Margot and Anne. And while the story of the family's desperate attempts ending in futility may seem remarkable today, it's emblematic of what a number of other Jews fleeing German-occupied territories experienced, American University history professor Richard Breitman wrote in 2007 upon the discovery of documents chronicling the Franks' struggle to get U.S. visas. "Otto Frank’s efforts to get his family to the United States ran afoul of restrictive American immigration policies designed to protect national security and guard against an influx of foreigners during time of war," Breitman wrote. The historian told NPR in 2007 that the documents suggest "Anne Frank could be a 77-year-old woman living in Boston today – a writer." Instead, she died at the age of 15 at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. [Refugee]
• Shocked by Trump? Churchill Wanted to “Collar Them All”
  by Barry Lando November 24, 2015 We’re outraged by Donald Trump’s demanding databases and I.D. cards to protect America from the super-hyped threat of Syrian refugees. We’re ashamed by the memory of Roosevelt’s interning more than 100,000 Japanese American residents and citizens during World War II. But Winston Churchill went even farther. He ordered the internment of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees in England, labeling them dangerous enemy aliens. It’s a “distant mirror” to the mounting hysteria in the United States today. Nationals from Germany and Austria who were living in England when World War II broke out, had already been assigned to different groupings based on their apparent threat to the UK. Category A were the “high security risks.” All 600 of them were immediately interned. Those deemed “no-security risk” in Class C, included 55,000 refugees from Nazi oppression. The great majority of them were Jewish. They were left free–at first. But then, in the Spring of 1940, with the fall of France, the fear of a German invasion, the entry of Italy into the war, there was an outbreak of spy fever in England, a demand that more be done about the thousands of “dangerous aliens” living there. Unwilling to consider which of those foreigners might actually be dangerous, Churchill commanded “Collar them all.” Brushed aside were objections that huge numbers of those ordered interned were Jews who had fled for their lives from the Nazis. The irrational fear was that they might still somehow become a dangerous Fifth Column, they could be blackmailed to engage in espionage or whatever. [Refugee]
• Huckabee: Obama ‘probably’ wants Americans to learn Koran verses
  Highlights GOP presidential candidate blasts Obama terrorism policy Huckabee slams White House for veto threat of House-passed refugees bill ‘Give up your guns & memorize a Koran verse,’ Huckabee says in a tweet By William Douglas WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee mocked the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism policy Monday in the wake of last week’s terrorist attack in Mali, saying the White House would rather espouse having Americans “memorize Koran verses” than deal with the problem head-on. The former Arkansas Republican governor, in an op-ed piece for FoxNews.com, asked, “Why does the Obama administration express more outrage at conservatives than at radical Islamic terrorists?” “President Obama seems more interested in protecting the reputation of Islam than protecting the American people,” Huckabee wrote. He added: “After this attack in West Africa, Obama’s new domestic terrorism plan probably requires Americans to memorize Koran verses.” The line was a variation of a Huckabee tweet Friday in which he said, “After today’s attack in #Mali, the Obama-approved domestic anti-terror plan: Give up your guns & memorize a Koran verse.” [Governance] [Republican]
• Texas teen Ahmed Mohamed seeks $15 million for homemade-clock arrest
  Highlights Mohamed was suspended from school in September He had brought a homemade clock to school School officials were suspicious of it By Ryan Osborne IRVING — Ahmed Mohamed, the Irving teenager who made national news after he was suspended for bringing a clock to school, is seeking $15 million in damages from the city of Irving and the Irving school district. Mohamed’s attorneys sent letters Monday to the city and the school district, claiming Mohamed’s “reputation in the global community is permanently scarred.” “One also would anticipate that Ahmed, quite reasonably, will have a lifelong fear of the law enforcement and educational establishments that have let him down so terribly,” Plainview-based attorney Kelly D. Hollingsworth said in both letters. Hollingsworth requested $10 million from the city of Irving and $5 million from the school district, and also demanded written apologies from the school district, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne and Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd. Mohamed was handcuffed and suspended from Irving MacArthur High School on Sept. 14 after administrators grew suspicious of a homemade clock he brought to class. “He showed it to a teacher, and it was suspicious in nature,” Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said in September. “The student told the teacher it was a clock, but he was not forthcoming with any other details about it.” Mohamed was suspended three days, and later withdrew from the school. The high-profile nature of his case, though, led to an invitation to the White House from President Barack Obama, an interview on Good Morning America, and attention from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/mcclatchys-america/article46048945.html#storylink=cpy [Islamophobia] [Hysteria]
• America’s Awesome Corruption — Especially in Military
  Eric Zuesse | 24.11.2015 | 00:00 On November 16th, the great journalist on international strategic and military issues, F. William Engdahl, headlined at journal-neo, «Do We Really Want a New World War With Russia?» and he documented that, with military expenditures one-tenth of America’s, Russia achieves at least parity with the U.S. in terms of war-fighting capability. It’s a remarkable article, even though it actually brings together into one place the recent disclosures in many media, regarding vital technologies where Russia far outpaces American capabilities. Of course, that’s what’s necessary to do in order to document the extent of Russia’s areas of clear military superiority. As to the question of whether the areas where the U.S. surpasses Russia’s military technologies might be more or fewer than Russia’s, the key point to consider is, I think, that Russia has now (as Engdahl makes clear) so greatly exceeded U.S. capabilities in certain vitally important respects, so that, at the very most, the U.S., even with all of its alliances etc., would be merely equal to Russia — the Russian military’s areas of excellence are that crucial. Engdahl quotes one high U.S. military official as saying that Russia’s technologies for disabling U.S. weapons are so shocking that it almost makes him cry. A recent article in Defense News went into even more depth about Russia’s superiority in that particular area — and this was published before the subsequent embarrassing U.S. military back-downs in Syria and elsewhere, which have more recently (especially since 30 September 2015) been necessitated by the uncompetitive U.S. position regarding those vitally important technologies. Of course, all of this pertains only to America’s corruptness in the expenditures of ‘defense’ dollars (how ironic to use the word «defense» to refer to the military in the world’s most-aggressive nation. Globally, «The US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%)». Honesty would surely dictate a name-change to «The U.S. Department of Aggression». But in official U.S. Newspeak, Russia is, instead, by far, the most «aggressive» nation on the planet.) According to other measures of corruption, the U.S. is probably less corrupt than Russia is. But everyone knows that that’s highly corrupt. America typically manages to hide its corruption more skillfully than Russia hides its — but that isn't important; the overall reality of corruption in the two countries might be not much different in degree, but only in the kinds of corruption: more high-end in America, more low-end in Russia. [Corruption] [Military balance]
• How the United States helped create the Islamic State
  The Bush administration's mistakes after the invasion of Iraq helped the militant group rise By Juan Cole November 23 at 11:56 AM Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. Did the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 lead to our current crisis over the Islamic State? The question has been posed baldly in this campaign season, as when a young woman at a campaign rally said to GOP candidate Jeb Bush (using an alternate name for the militant group), “Your brother created ISIL.” It was not so much the invasion itself, however, as the policies implemented afterward that are mainly to blame for Iraq and Syria lying in pieces. What President George W. Bush’s administration did was to foster sectarian divisions and create a long-lasting insurgency. At every point along the way, the Bush administration made choices that exacerbated sectarian tensions in Iraq and set the country on the path to break-up. The assertion by some observers that the country is riven by age-old hatreds, is ahistorical and incorrect. In previous decades, political passions centered on anti-colonialism or big landlordism and socialism. The vacuum of power created by the U.S. dissolution of the secular Baath Party encouraged Iraqi politicians to play on sectarian passions in unprecedented ways. Provoking a violent insurgency was likewise fateful. Once an insurgency comes into being, it typically does not subside for 10 to 15 years. [US Middle East Policy] [Blowback] [Iraq]
• Electric cars and the coal that runs them
  By Michael Birnbaum November 23 at 6:00 PM ? POWER PLAY | Cheap electricity, a changing climate This is part of a series exploring how the world’s hunger for cheap electricity is complicating efforts to combat climate change. ROTTERDAM — In this traffic-packed Dutch city, electric cars jostle for space at charging ­stations. The oldest exhaust-spewing vehicles will soon be banned from the city center. Thanks to generous tax incentives, the share of electric vehicles has grown faster in the Netherlands than in nearly any other country in the world. But behind the green growth is a filthy secret: In a nation famous for its windmills, electricity is coming from a far dirtier source. Three new coal-fired power plants, including two here on the Rotterdam harbor, are supplying much of the power to fuel the Netherlands’ electric-car boom. As the world tries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and combat climate change, policymakers have pinned hopes on electric cars, whose range and convenience are quickly improving. Alongside the boom has come a surging demand for power to charge the vehicles, which can consume as much electricity in a single charge as the average refrigerator does in a month and a half. The global shift to electric cars has a clear climate benefit in regions that get most of their power from clean sources, such as California or Norway. But in areas supplied by dirtier power, like China, India and even the Netherlands, which is on track to miss ambitious emissions targets set for 2020, the electric-car jump has slimmer payoffs. In some cases, it could even worsen the overall climate impact of driving, experts say. [Green]
• The Gulf Economies' Coming Meltdown? How to Prevent It
  By Adeel Malik Five years ago, the Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates shared a fiscal surplus of some $600 billion; by 2020, the International Monetary Fund predicts that they will have accumulated a combined deficit of $700 billion. Sustained low oil prices could make things even worse. This bad news is yet one more reminder of resource-rich Arab states’ need to build vibrant, diversified economies that can withstand the effects of oil price shocks. Although Arab governments have long recognized the need to shift away from an excessive dependence on hydrocarbons, they have had little success in doing so. Iraq, for example, set economic diversification as a core policy objective in one of its first five-year development plans in 1965—yet the country has only become more dependent on oil over time. In Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, too, diversification has been a central, yet largely unrealized, development goal since the 1970s. Even the United Arab Emirates’ economy, one of the most diversified in the Gulf, is highly dependent on oil exports. Stephanie McGehee / REUTERS Kuwaiti Oil Minister Ali Al-Omair (C) at the second Kuwait Oil and Gas Show and Conference in Mishref, Kuwait, October 2015. Why have Arab governments consistently failed to diversify their economies despite tall promises and grand plans? The answer has more to do with politics than economics. Indeed, if diversification were as simple as importing technical blueprints from states that have already diversified their economies, such as Botswana, Malaysia, and Norway, it would already have been accomplished. Economic diversification carries deep power implications for ruling elites. The trouble is that in many Arab economies, good economic policies rarely constitute good politics, especially for ruling elites. This is because the structural changes demanded by economic diversification—specifically, the production of a greater number and variety of high-value goods—promise to empower business constituencies that, flush with new income, could potentially challenge the ruler. In Kuwait, for example, the rise of an independent merchant class could undercut the power of the monarchy. If rulers in the United Arab Emirates have accepted diversification, meanwhile, it is partly because the Emirati private sector poses little political threat, since it is overwhelmingly reliant on foreign labor.
• Isis: In a borderless world, the days when we could fight foreign wars and be safe at home may be long gone
  Isis was quick to understand a truth the West must now confront: that the national borders imposed by colonial powers 100 years go are becoming meaningless, says Robert Fisk • Robert Fisk • @indyvoices Early in 2014, Isis released one of its first videos. Largely unseen in Europe, it had neither the slick, cutting-edge professionalism of its later execution tapes nor the haunting “nasheed” music that accompanies most of its propaganda. Instead, a hand-held camera showed a bulldozer pushing down a rampart of sand that had marked the border between Iraq and Syria. As the machine destroyed the dirt revetment, the camera panned down to a handwritten poster lying in the sand. “End of Sykes-Picot”, it said. Like many hundreds of thousands of Arabs in the Middle East, for whom Sykes-Picot was an almost cancerous expression, I watched this early Isis video in Beirut. The bloody repercussions of the borders that the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, drew in secret during the First World War – originally giving Syria, Mount Lebanon and northern Iraq to the French, and Palestine, Transjordan and the rest of Iraq to the British – are known to every Arab, Christian and Muslim and, indeed, every Jew in the region. They eviscerated the governorates of the old dying Ottoman empire and created artificial nations in which borders, watchtowers and hills of sand separated tribes, families and peoples. They were an Anglo-French colonial production. The same night that I saw the early Isis video, I happened to be visiting the Lebanese Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt. “The end of Sykes-Picot!” he roared at me. “Rubbish,” I snorted. But of course, I was wrong and Jumblatt was right. He had spotted at once how Isis captured symbolically – but with almost breathtaking speed – what so many Arabs had sought for almost exactly 100 years: the unravelling of the fake borders with which the victors of the First World War – largely the British and the French – had divided the Arab people. It was our colonial construction – not just the frontiers we imposed upon them, but the administrations and the false democracies that we fraudulently thrust upon them, the mandates and trusteeships which allowed us to rule them – that poisoned their lives. Colin Powell claimed just such a trusteeship for Iraq's oil prior to the illegal Anglo-American invasion of 2003. [US Middle East policy]
• Israeli Colonel Leading ISIL Terrorists Captured in Iraq
  TEHRAN (FNA)- Iraqi security and popular forces have caught an Israeli colonel from Golani Brigade along with a number of ISIL terrorists, a commander disclosed on Thursday. "The security and popular forces have held captive an Israeli colonel," a commander of Iraq's popular mobilization forces said on Thursday. "The Zionist officer is ranked colonel and had participated in the Takfiri ISIL group's terrorist operations," he added. Noting that he was arrested along with a number of ISIL terrorists, the commander said, "The Israeli colonel's name is Yusi Oulen Shahak and is ranked colonel in Golani Brigade of the Zionist regime's army with the security and military code of Re34356578765az231434." He said that the relevant bodies are now interrogating the Israeli colonel to understand the reasons behind his fighting alongside the ISIL forces and the presence of other Zionist officers among ISIL terrorists. The Iraqi security forces said the captured colonel has already made shocking confessions.
• Time to “Defund” the International Criminal Court, Should the ICC be Disbanded?
  By Dr. David Hoile Global Research, November 23, 2015 Africa Research Centre The Assembly of States Parties is meeting this month in The Hague to review the work of the International Criminal Court and to discuss the ICC’s budget. The ASP is the International Criminal Court’s management oversight and legislative body. The Assembly also elects the judges and prosecutors and decides the Court’s budget. The court’s proposed budget for 2016 amounts to €153.32 million, representing an increase of €22.66 million, or 17.3 per cent, over the 2015 approved budget. At face value, far from increasing the budget for the ICC, the Assembly of State Parties should be demanding a refund. Established in 2002, the ICC is an impotent billion euro white elephant. 2015 has been a particularly bad year for the court. It has botched the Kenyan cases it has undertaken and its continuing alienation from Africa was centre-stage internationally when South Africa, previously a keen member, publicly ignored ICC arrest warrants and appears on the verge of withdrawal from the organisation – something seen by observers as a death knell for the court. The International Criminal Court has self-evidently failed across the board. In 2010 the ICC-friendlyEconomist had already found it necessary to publish an article about the ICC entitled “International justice: Courting disaster?” Things have worsened considerably since then. The ICC has consumed more than a billion euros in its 13-year existence and has only secured two deeply questionable convictions. The ICC’s claims to international jurisdiction and judicial independence are institutionally flawed and the court’s reputation has been irretrievably damaged by its racism, blatant double standards, hypocrisy, corruption and serious judicial irregularities. The Assembly of State Parties should also accept that it has grotesquely neglected its responsibility to manage the court. The ASP has turned a blind eye to systemic failure on the part of the ICC. While the ICC pretends to be the world’s court this is simply not the case. Its members, however, represent under one-third of the world’s population: China, Russia, the United States, Pakistan and Indonesia are just some of the many countries that have remained outside the court’s jurisdiction. India, the world’s largest democracy, has chosen not to join the ICC because the court is subordinate to the United Nations Security Council and because it does not criminalise terrorism and the use of nuclear weapons. The United States has forcefully pointed out that the ICC is a kangaroo court, a travesty of justice open to political influence, and has said that no American citizen will ever come before it. That said, Washington is perfectly happy when it suits American foreign policy objectives to demand that black Africans appear before a deeply flawed court peddling sub-prime justice. [ICC] [Softwar] [Double standards] [UNUS]
• The ruins of Kobane: What one small town says about the destruction of Syria
  Story by Liz Sly ? Photos by Alice Martins Published on November 13, 2015 KOBANE, Syria — A heap of dust is all that remains of the house where Alan Kurdi was born and raised, before war sent his family fleeing and he drowned on the short sea crossing between Turkey and Greece. The image of the toddler’s lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach turned him into an instant symbol of the suffering of Syrians so desperate to reach Europe that they are prepared to risk their lives making the dangerous journey. His flattened home, destroyed in an American airstrike in the landmark battle for control of the Syrian town of Kobane last year, has not been so widely seen. It is just one of thousands of buildings leveled, among hundreds of thousands more that have been obliterated in Syria during the four-year-old war. As the conflict drags into a fifth year with no end in sight, little heed is being paid to the enormity of the havoc being wreaked on the country. Some 2.1 million homes, half the country’s hospitals and more than 7,000 schools have been destroyed, according to the United Nations. The cost of the damage so far is estimated at a staggering $270 billion — and rebuilding could run to more than $300 billion, according to Abdallah al-Dardari, a former Syrian government minister who heads the National Agenda for Syria program at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. That’s more than 10 times the amount spent by the United States on reconstruction in Iraq, with few discernible results. [US Syria policy] [Airpower] [Double standards]
• What Mali means to France
  By Adam Taylor November 20 at 1:01 PM ? French soldiers in a vehicle mounted with a machine gun leave a base camp in Sevare on Jan. 22, 2013. (Fred Dufour/AFP) Just a week after a series of attacks in Paris left at least 129 dead, another attack has occurred that seems designed to goad France deeper into a fight against Islamist extremists on a variety of fronts. In this case, at least 100 people were taken hostage Friday when gunmen stormed a hotel in Mali's capital of Bamako. Early reports suggest that at least 20 people have been killed. While the attacks on the French capital may seem more shocking, the strategic importance of Mali to France should not be understated. Bamako has served as a logistics hub for French forces who are aiding a regional fight against Islamist insurgents. [French imperialism] [Response]
• Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine
  By Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet November 20 at 10:30 AM ? CONFRONTING THE ‘CALIPHATE’ | This is part of an occasional series about the rise of the Islamic State militant group, its implications for the Middle East, and efforts by the U.S. government and others to undermine it. An image grab taken from a propaganda video uploaded on June 8, 2014, by the Islamic State allegedly shows militants driving in vehicles near the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. (AFP/Getty Images) RABAT, MOROCCO — The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of the Islamic State, the seal of the terrorist group’s media emir, and the site of that day’s shoot. “The paper just gives you the location,” never the details, said Abu Hajer al-Maghribi, who spent nearly a year as a cameraman for the Islamic State. Sometimes the job was to film prayers at a mosque, he said, or militants exchanging fire. But, inevitably, a slip would come with the coordinates to an unfolding bloodbath. For Abu Hajer, that card told him to drive two hours southwest of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the capital of the caliphate, or Islamic realm, declared by the militant group. There, he discovered that he was among 10 cameramen sent to record the final hours of more than 160 Syrian soldiers captured in 2014. “I held my Canon camera,” he said, as the soldiers were stripped to their underwear, marched into the desert, forced to their knees and massacred with automatic rifles. His footage quickly found a global audience, released online in an Islamic State video that spread on social media and appeared in mainstream news coverage on Al Jazeera and other networks. [ISIS] [Propaganda]
• Pause the Syrian Refugee Program – Here’s Why
  Friend – After yesterday's vote in the House of Representatives over whether to pause the Syrian refugee program, I want to be sure you know where I stand. I voted “yes” on H.R. 4038 to pause the Syrian refugee program, which passed by a vote of 289-137. Here’s why: Bottom-line: Our top priority must always be the safety and security of American citizens. Period. That means until the federal government can adequately ensure the safety of the American people, we must pause the refugee program. How we got here: The current refugee crisis is appalling and tragic. As our former Ambassador to Iraq and Syria told me in a hearing this Wednesday, “we had beaten back al Qaeda pretty soundly” when Obama took office. But, by prematurely withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq and scaling back political engagement, he created a vacuum which the Islamic State filled. Meanwhile, the Administration has allowed the situation in Syria to spiral into further chaos, constraining the U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS, failing to back up his “red line” on chemical weapons, and squandering millions of dollars on a “train and assist” program that only managed to arm a handful of moderate rebels. [US Middle East Policy] [Refugee]
• Turkey sends in jets as Syria’s agony spills over every border
  Turkish air strikes in Syria last week signalled a new phase in a conflict that has left its bloody mark on every country in the region. But will the Turks now agree to US demands to cease all clandestine dealings with Islamic State? Martin Chulov Sunday 26 July 2015 00.07 BST Last modified on Sunday 26 July 2015 16.45 BST When US special forces raided the compound of an Islamic State leader in eastern Syria in May, they made sure not to tell the neighbours. The target of that raid, the first of its kind since US jets returned to the skies over Iraq last August, was an Isis official responsible for oil smuggling, named Abu Sayyaf. He was almost unheard of outside the upper echelons of the terror group, but he was well known to Turkey. From mid-2013, the Tunisian fighter had been responsible for smuggling oil from Syria’s eastern fields, which the group had by then commandeered. Black market oil quickly became the main driver of Isis revenues – and Turkish buyers were its main clients. As a result, the oil trade between the jihadis and the Turks was held up as evidence of an alliance between the two. It led to protests from Washington and Europe – both already wary of Turkey’s 900-mile border with Syria being used as a gateway by would-be jihadis from around the world. The estimated $1m-$4m per day in oil revenues that was thought to have flowed into Isis coffers over at least six months from late 2013 helped to transform an ambitious force with limited means into a juggernaut that has been steadily drawing western forces back to the region and increasingly testing state borders [ISIS] [Turkey]
• Paris: Made in Libya, Not Syria
  To my many foreign policy friends, including terrorism experts, tonight is the night to mourn & #standwithfrance. Tomorrow we analyze.--Anne-Marie Slaughter on Twitter, November 13, 2015 I recently characterized the tsunami of analysis about the Paris attacks as a case of Orientalism. What isn't important is what may have happened. What's important is that we control the alien entity: we define the problem, we dictate the proper response and, natch, we get to declare victory—or at least what victory would look like if we stopped listening to the handwringers and had our spooks and soldiers build us an impregnable fortress of pure gold. I’m a cui bono guy to a fault; I’ll admit that. I don’t give enough weight and legitimacy to emotions and irrationality as drivers for actions. And I have to say I detected a distinct shortage of “bono” to IS in the Paris attacks, unless the thinking of the leadership runs to “It would be an excellent idea to focus the fury of the West upon us here in Iraq instead of laying low and letting the West go along with the GCC/Turkish plan of quagmiring Russia in Syria.” Doesn’t make too much sense. Which is why, in my opinion, is why you see a lot of metaphysical handwaving that the real motive for the attacks was to erase the Muslim “grey zone”, provoke a fatal over-reaction from the West, contribute to the agonies of the Syrian refugees in Europe, rend the time-space continuum and thereby bring the Crusaders to their knees, etc. Let me introduce some interesting factiness on the matter of the alleged mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Abaaoud was well known as a violent radical miscreant linked to an Islamic cell in Verviers, Belgium, that did all sorts of mean, murderous crap. [Paris15]
• Myanmar’s New Dictator: Aung San Suu Kyi
  Suu Kyi disenfranchised a million voters before elections, and has declared herself above the constitution afterwards. What about that seems “democratic?” The Western media is portraying Myanmar’s recent elections as historic. One commentator described Myanmar as an “exuberant nation prepared for a new era of democracy and political freedom.” But one wonders what sort of democracy and political freedom can be borne of elections in which nearly a million voters were banned from casting their ballots and with the apparent victor already declaring herself above the law. Sidestepping these inconvenient facts, the West is nonetheless excited about the prospect of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) taking power in Myanmar. This is in part due to the fact that Suu Kyi herself, along with the NLD she leads and a vast network of supporting “civil society” nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have all been created and sustained annually by billions of dollars worth of backing from the United States and United Kingdom for years. In exchange for this support, Suu Kyi’s long-standing proclivity toward “foreign investment” will lead to the wholesale feeding of Myanmar’s nationalized resources, industry, and infrastructure into the maw of the Wall Street corporations and institutions that have long underwritten Suu Kyi’s rise to power. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/11/21/myanmars-new-dictator-aung-san-suu-kyi/ [Myanmar]
• Donald Trump Sets Off a Furor With Call to Register Muslims in the U.S.
  By Maggie Haberman and Richard Pérez-Peñanov. 20, 2015 Under assault from Democrats and Republicans alike, Donald J. Trump on Friday drew back from his call for a mandatory registry of Muslims in the United States, trying to quell one of the ugliest controversies yet in a presidential campaign like few others. The daylong furor capped a week of one-upmanship among Republican presidential candidates as to who could sound toughest about preventing terrorism after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris. Polls show the national mood has soured on accepting refugees from Syria amid concerns about potential terrorist attacks within the United States. Mr. Trump’s talk of a national database of Muslims, first in an interview published on Thursday by Yahoo News and later in an exchange with an NBC News reporter, seemed the culmination of months of heated debate about illegal immigration as an urgent danger to Americans’ personal safety. [Islamophobia] [Trump]
• The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case
  August 20, 2014
  From the Archive: At the first anniversary of the Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, there is a concerted effort to reestablish the original conventional wisdom, blaming the Syrian government for the hundreds of deaths. The goal seems to be to bury the alternative narrative that later emerged, as Robert Parry wrote last April. By Robert Parry April 7, 2014 One shouldn’t be surprised, I guess, that some wannabe-journalist bloggers are auditioning before possible mainstream employers by attacking investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh for writing a groundbreaking article implicating Syrian jihadist rebels and Turkish intelligence in the lethal use of Sarin on Aug. 21 outside Damascus. [cbw] [False flag]
• Tangled Threads of US False Narratives
  By Robert Parry, Consortium News 20 November 15 Official Washington’s many false narratives about Russia and Syria have gotten so tangled that they have become a danger to the struggle against Sunni jihadist terrorism and conceivably a threat to the future of the planet, a risk that Robert Parry explores. ne way to view Official Washington is to envision a giant bubble that serves as a hothouse for growing genetically modified “group thinks.” Most inhabitants of the bubble praise these creations as glorious and beyond reproach, but a few dissenters note how strange and dangerous these products are. Those critics, however, are then banished from the bubble, leaving behind an evermore concentrated consensus. This process could be almost comical – as the many armchair warriors repeat What Everyone Knows to Be True as self-justifying proof that more and more wars and confrontations are needed – but the United States is the most powerful nation on earth and its fallacious “group thinks” are spreading a widening arc of chaos and death around the globe. We even have presidential candidates, especially among the Republicans but including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, competing to out-bellicose each other, treating an invasion of Syria as the least one can do and some even bragging about how they might like to shoot down a few Russian warplanes. [US Middle East policy] [Media]
• Why French airstrikes on ISIS’s ‘capital’ probably haven’t done much
  The French military launched more airstrikes against the Islamic State in Raqqa, Syria, on Nov. 17, 2015. The strikes involved 10 jets launched from Jordan and the Persian Gulf, and targeted training and command centers. (YouTube/France Forces) By Hugh Naylor November 18 at 5:15 PM BEIRUT — Despite heavy French bombardment of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa this week, damage to the extremist group appears to be minimal, according to analysts and Syrian activists. The airstrikes — retaliation for last Friday’s attacks in Paris claimed by the Islamic State — hit such targets as a command post and a militant-training center in and around the Syrian city, French officials said. [Live updates: 2 dead in French raid targeting alleged ringleader] But after more than a year of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, the ­Islamic State has learned to secure its weapons, communications systems and fighters in fortified bunkers or densely populated residential areas where bombing would inflict intolerably high civilian casualties, analysts and activists said. The French attacks highlight a limitation of air power, said Theodore Karasik, a Dubai-based expert on military issues in the Middle East. Rarely is that approach capable of subduing enemies, he said. What started out as simple protests in Syria has expanded to civil war and now an international crisis. View Graphic ? “The Islamic State, like any other terrorist group, has adapted and developed its own underground networks in order to safeguard their prized assets,” Karasik said. “Airstrikes can be effective, but you need a ground component to go along with them.” [ISIS] [France] [Airpower]
• Paris Attacks Highlight Jihadists’ Easy Path Between Europe and ISIS Territory
  By Katrin Bennhold Nov. 18, 2015 LONDON — One of the militants in the Paris attacks traveled to Syria from his hometown in France and back, officials said, even after his passport had been confiscated and he had been placed under judicial oversight. So did another, despite having been arrested eight times in petty crimes and having been listed as a national security risk in France. Even the man suspected of organizing the massacre on Friday, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a well-known figure in the Belgian jihadist scene, is believed to have traveled between Islamic State-controlled territory and Europe a number of times — including for an attack plot in Belgium in January. The Paris attacks, the deadliest in France to date, have sharpened the focus on the inability of security services to monitor the large and growing number of young European Muslims who have fought alongside the Islamic State or to spot terrorist plots in their early stages, even when the participants are well known to them. It appears so far that as many as six of the assailants who killed 129 people with guns, grenades and suicide bombs at six sites last Friday were Europeans who had traveled to Syria and returned to carry out attacks at home — precisely the nightmare scenario security officials have been warning about for the past two years. “This is the attack everyone was worried about, and it finally happened,” said Louis Caprioli, who was the deputy head of France’s domestic antiterrorism unit from 1998 to 2004. “A high-casualty attack on multiple soft targets executed with apparent military know-how.” [Outsourcing] [Blowback]
• Ben Carson: My plan to defeat the Islamic State
  By Ben Carson November 18 at 10:51 AM The writer is a 2016 Republican candidate for president. Twenty minutes. That was all it took for Islamic State terrorists to unleash a series of coordinated strikes that devastated a nation and shocked the conscience of the entire world. Glued to our television sets in the United States, we looked on in horror at scenes of chaos and bloodshed that shattered the lives of so many in Paris. Make no mistake about it: We are at war. It is not a war against an opposing nation. The Islamic State is not a sovereign in the territorial sense but is a sick and twisted ideology that seeks to engulf the region and turn back the clock to the Dark Ages. We must ask ourselves, how do we defeat an evil state of consciousness? What are the best approaches? The Obama administration has proposed a largely political, containment-based solution that is fraught with risks, including coordinating with the Russians and Iranians to win back Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq. The problem with this strategy is that neither of these nations is a trustworthy ally; legitimizing them would lead only to further destabilization. Empowering Russia would only embolden Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Doing business with the Iranians encourages their ambitions to control the territory from Iran’s eastern border to the Mediterranean, threatening our allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia. To lead this fight, the United States must dramatically increase its efforts to appeal directly to the moderate Kurds, Syrians and Iraqis. We must convince them that the Islamic State poses a fundamental threat to their existence. And we must equip them with the means to convey that message to their people. This will require a multi-pronged communications strategy that leverages our strengths in media production and messaging, combined with cutting off traditional access routes to social media for radical Islamist groups. [US Middle East policy] [Carson] [Bizarre] [Governance]
• Ben Carson Has Much to Learn on Foreign Policy, Say Ben Carson Advisers
  We need to “make him smart,” said one exasperated adviser. by Tina Nguyen, Thou shalt not criticize thine own candidate in print is one of the cardinal rules of working on a political campaign. So what does it mean for Ben Carson that two of his advisers have recently criticized his grasp of foreign policy? The New York Times spoke to several of Carson’s foreign-policy advisers this week in the wake of his recent public struggles on the matter. While they praised the former neurosurgeon’s intelligence, some also raised concerns about his grasp of international affairs. According to adviser Duane R. Clarridge, “Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.” Carson, who has never held a position in government but is currently one of the top contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, has relied upon a network of paid and unpaid consultants with ties to international intelligence to bolster his credentials—a network he once half-jokingly bragged were better than Barack Obama’s. [US Middle East policy] [Carson] [Bizarre] [Governance]
• If ISIS uses chemical weapons, the west will be partly responsible
  Bob Rigg 19 November 2015 How can the international community respond effectively and promptly to this growing threat, not just to the Middle East region, but to the world? Security forces simulate chemical attack outside Israeli Parliament. Demotix/ Yaniv Nadav. All rights reserved. Although the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was awarded the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize for the courage and inventiveness displayed in removing Syria’s chemical weapons (CW) from Syria for destruction elsewhere, it is now ineffectual and powerless in the face of the proliferation of CW by extremist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. Although the proliferation of this weapon of mass destruction is for the time being confined to the Middle East, the knowledge and experience already acquired by extremist groups with global connections will ensure that, sooner or later, CW will be used elsewhere. When the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was negotiated, during and immediately after the Cold War, the negotiators – all governments – could not anticipate the emergence of powerful, well-funded internationally-connected terrorist groups with the capacity to produce and use their own CW. The CWC negotiators also could not have anticipated the speed with which new production technologies would develop, making it possible for at least some CW to be produced with relative ease in backyard laboratories. US obstructs UN investigation of alleged CW use by Al Nusra In March 2013 the government of Syria angrily alleged that CW had been used by Al Nusra in the village of Khan Al Asal, formally requesting that the UN Security Council (UNSC) investigate just one day after the incident. The US was then supporting extremist ‘rebel’ groups in Syria in the hope that they would bring down President Assad, and did not want them to be discredited. The west was of the view that the Assad government was about to fall. In the absence of any supporting evidence, the US supported ‘rebel’ claims that Syria had itself used the CW. The aim of the US, a party to the CWC, was to delay a CW inspection by the UN, which could have discredited its extremist surrogates of the day. The UN inspection team report eventually presented nine months later, in December 2013, confirmed that CW had indeed been used at Khan Al Asal, although the team’s laughable UNSC mandate specifically prevented it from throwing light on the identity of the perpetrators, even if it had an informed opinion on this. [cbw] [US Middle East policy] [ISIS] [Al Nusra] [Turkey] [UNUS]
• Inside the $3 billion Clinton donor network
  A Washington Post investigation reveals how Bill and Hillary Clinton have methodically cultivated donors over 40 years, from Little Rock to Washington and then across the globe. Their fundraising methods have created a new blueprint for politicians and their donors. By Matea Gold, Tom Hamburger and Anu Narayanswamy Published on Nov. 19, 2015 41 years. $3 billion. Inside the Clinton donor network. By Matea Gold, Tom Hamburger and Anu Narayanswamy LITTLE ROCK — Over four decades of public life, Bill and Hillary Clinton have built an unrivaled global network of donors while pioneering fundraising techniques that have transformed modern politics and paved the way for them to potentially become the first husband and wife to win the White House. The grand total raised for all of their political campaigns and their family’s charitable foundation reaches at least $3 billion, according to a Washington Post investigation. Their fundraising haul, which began with $178,000 that Bill Clinton raised for his long-shot 1974 congressional bid, is on track to expand substantially with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House run, which has already drawn $110 million in support. [Bill Clinton] [Hillary Clinton] [Plutocracy] [Governance]
• Is the United States safe from a Paris-style Islamic State attack?
  President Obama made remarks and answered questions at the G-20 summit in Turkey on Nov. 13. Here's what he said about the path forward fighting the Islamic State, welcoming Muslims and protecting Syrian refugees. (AP) By Adam Goldman November 17 at 5:39 PM ? As France reels from a set of Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris last week that killed scores and wounded hundreds, Americans are wondering whether their own country is any safer. “That’s an easy one,” said a former senior FBI official who until recently was deeply involved in terrorism operations. “Safer here than there? Yes. We are separated by an ocean. Without a doubt, we are safer here than over there.” Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the war on terrorism, making border crossings more secure, detecting plots and expanding the no-fly list from about a dozen people to roughly 47,000. Tougher post-9/11 terrorism laws also ensure that the FBI and federal prosecutors can charge people with crimes that carry stiff sentences. In the past 18 months, the FBI has charged more than 60 people in connection with the Islamic State. Many could face years in prison if convicted, meaning the FBI won’t have to devote resources to tracking their movements. [ISIS] [Security] [Geography]
• What Americans thought of Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II
  By Ishaan Tharoor November 17 at 6:00 AM ? The results of the poll illustrated above by the useful Twitter account @HistOpinion were published in the pages of Fortune magazine in July 1938. Fewer than 5 percent of Americans surveyed at the time believed that the United States should raise its immigration quotas or encourage political refugees fleeing fascist states in Europe — the vast majority of whom were Jewish — to voyage across the Atlantic. Two-thirds of the respondents agreed with the proposition that "we should try to keep them To be sure, the United States was emerging from the Great Depression, hardly a climate in which ordinary folks would welcome immigrants and economic competition. The events of Kristallnacht — a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in areas controlled by the Nazis — had yet to take place. And the poll's use of the term "political refugees" could have conjured in the minds of the American public images of communists, anarchists and other perceived ideological threats. But look at the next chart, also tweeted by @HistOpinion. Two-thirds of Americans polled by Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion in January 1939 — well after the events of Kristallnacht — said they would not take in 10,000 German Jewish refugee children. [Refugees]
• France’s unresolved Algerian war sheds light on the Paris attack
  The French-Algerian identity of one of the attackers demonstrates how France’s savage 1956-62 war in Algeria continues to infect today’s atrocities. Robert Fisk | Tuesday 17 November 2015| It wasn’t just one of the attackers who vanished after the Paris massacre. Three nations whose history, action – and inaction – help to explain the slaughter by Isis have largely escaped attention in the near-hysterical response to the crimes against humanity in Paris: Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The French-Algerian identity of one of the attackers demonstrates how France’s savage 1956-62 war in Algeria continues to infect today’s atrocities. The absolute refusal to contemplate Saudi Arabia’s role as a purveyor of the most extreme Wahabi-Sunni form of Islam, in which Isis believes, shows how our leaders still decline to recognise the links between the kingdom and the organisation which struck Paris. And our total unwillingness to accept that the only regular military force in constant combat with Isis is the Syrian army – which fights for the regime that France also wants to destroy – means we cannot liaise with the ruthless soldiers who are in action against Isis even more ferociously than the Kurds. Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. [ISIS] [French colonialism] [Algeria] [Blowback]
• After Paris attacks, will U.S. and Russia find common cause in Syria?
  Highlights For first time, Pentagon hails Russian warplanes’ strikes against Islamic State France and Russia pledge soldarity to fight the Islamic State Moscow urges U.N. Security Council to establish international coalition BY JAMES ROSEN WASHINGTON — As Russia forms a new alliance with France and Russian warplanes rain down bombs on Islamic State targets in Syria, the Paris attacks may be nudging Moscow and Washington closer together. After Russia claimed Tuesday to have carried out 2,300 air strikes over two days against Islamic State targets near its headquarters in Raqqa, Syria, the Pentagon praised the Kremlin for the first time since its military aircraft began bombing in the war-torn country on Sept. 30. “Those airstrikes, at least from our vantage point, did appear to strike in ISIL-held territory,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook, using a common acronym for the Islamic State, told reporters. “We welcome any sincere effort on the part of the Russians to play a more constructive role in Syria,” he added. With Russian warplanes flying the same skies over Raqqa as U.S. aircraft, Moscow also provided Washington with advance notice of the recent bombing operation against the Islamic State, Cook said, as required under an aviation-safety agreement signed last month by the two countries. Under the Oct. 20 accord, Russia and the United States agreed to set up special radio frequencies over which their pilots could communicate with one another and to maintain a phone hotline between their military leaders to forestall a mid-air collision or other dangerous situations. The Pentagon has criticized the Kremlin for weeks, claiming Russian aircraft were targeting moderate opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad, including rebels trained and equipped by Washington, and were launching airstrikes in areas where no Islamic State fighters were present. On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry emphasized its solidarity with France, tweeting an image Tuesday of a French flag behind a peace sign altered to resemble the silhouette of a supersonic Tupolev TU-160, a key Russian bomber and the world’s largest combat aircraft [ISIS] [Russia confrontation] [US Syria policy]
• Aung San Suu Kyi, Long a Symbol of Dignified Defiance, Sounds a Provocative Note
  By Seth Mydans Nov. 17, 2015 Photo Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon on Nov. 8 to vote in Myanmar’s election, which her party won in a landslide. She has said she will be above the president. Credit Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — For two decades, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was a radiant symbol of dignified nonviolent resistance, most of that time confined to house arrest by the generals who have governed Myanmar for half a century. Today, she is at the pinnacle of adoration and power in the country, having led her party, the National League for Democracy, to a landslide victory this month in parliamentary elections that upended the country’s structure of power. She has put reconciliation with the generals high on her agenda, but as she has moved toward dominance, her words have become provocative. Her first sally came just before the Nov. 8 election, when she brushed aside a constitutional provision that bars her from serving as president because she is the widow of a foreigner and the mother of foreign-born children. Soldiers outside a military hospital in Yangon, Myanmar, on Friday. The military has been pursuing what the generals have called a road map to “discipline-flourishing democracy” over the past quarter-century. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi during talks with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing in June. News Analysis: With Aung San Suu Kyi’s Rise, China and Myanmar Face New RelationshipNOV. 12, 2015 “I will be above the president,” she declared in a phrase that has ricocheted around the political arena. “I will run the government, and we will have a president who will work with the policies of the N.L.D.” Continue reading the main story A Life in Politics June 19, 1945 Aung San Suu Kyi is born to Gen. Aung San, the leader of the military in Burma, now known as Myanmar, and Khin Kyi, a nurse. July 19, 1947Gen. Aung San, now premier, is assassinated in Rangoon, now known as Yangon, along with members of his cabinet. March 2, 1962She ?is studying abroad when a military coup overthrows ?the government. 1988Shortly after her return to Burma, protests against military rule are suppressed. She helps found the National League for Democracy. 1989She is placed under house arrest. The country's name is changed to Myanmar. May 27, 1990The N.L.D. wins general elections. The military rejects the results and keeps her under house arrest. 1991She is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Nov. 13, 2010She is released from house arrest. April 1, 2012She wins a seat in Parliament in by-elections. Nov. 8, 2015The N.L.D. wins a landslide victory in general elections. “Above the president,” she repeated. “I have already made plans.” This end run around the law was in keeping with her assertion that she would maintain “the good parts” of the Constitution, which was drawn up by the generals to protect their political and economic interests. It was nonetheless an audacious assertion by a woman who spent 15 years as a prisoner of the generals, and her peremptory manner surprised those who have viewed her as a caged bird at the mercy of her tormentors. Now, as she prepares at age 70 to take over the government she fought for so long, what some see as her domineering, imperious style has raised questions about her fealty to the rule of law and about the way she plans to exercise power. [Myanmar] [Suu Kyi]
• Strikes on Raqqa in Syria Lead to More Questions Than Results
  By Anne Barnard Nov. 17, 2015 BEIRUT, Lebanon — First France and then Russia answered Islamic State attacks on their citizens with a strategy of direct reprisal: intensified airstrike campaigns on Raqqa, the militants’ de facto capital within Syria, meant to eliminate the group’s leadership and resources. But on Tuesday in the early hours of those new campaigns, there seemed to be more questions than decisive results. Chief among them: Why, if there were confirmed Islamic State targets that could be hit without killing civilians, were they not hit more heavily long ago? And what, in fact, was being hit? More broadly, the Raqqa airstrikes are renewing a debate about how effective such attacks can be in defeating or containing the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, without more commitment to measures like drying up its financial support, combating its ideology or — what outside forces on all sides so far appear to have ruled out — conducting a ground assault. [France] [ISIS]
• ‘The Attacks Will Be Spectacular’
  An exclusive look at how the Bush administration ignored this warning from the CIA months before 9/11, along with others that were far more detailed than previously revealed. By Chris Whipple November 12, 2015 . “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming. By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.” The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm. [9/11] [CIA]
• instaPoll: Should the Administration halt the admittance of Syrian refugees into the U.S.?
  In the wake of deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday, which killed over 100 and injured over 300 others, reports surfaced that a Syrian passport had been found near the remains of a dead suicide bomber. U.S. officials on Sunday revealed that the attackers may also have had contact with ISIS in Syria. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the coordinated onslaught in Paris. This has reignited a heated debate over the security risks posed by the thousands of refugees from the region who are being accepted into the United States and whether the screening process is adequate. Congressman Forbes joined over 75 other Members of Congress in sending a letter to President Obama, demanding a halt to all Syrian and Iraqi refugee resettlement to the U.S. until an appropriate vetting process that ensures U.S. national security is identified and implemented. Citing similar security concerns, a growing, bipartisan group of state governors have threatened action — through executive order or other means — to prevent Syrian refugees from settling in their states. Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire urged the federal government to stop admitting refugees until more is known about the vetting process. The Administration has stated that it does not currently intend to change its plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year amidst ongoing conflict in the region. instaPoll: Should the Administration halt the admittance of Syrian refugees into the United States?* Yes. No. I don't know. Other (share your thoughts on my blog here). [Refugee] [US Middle East Policy] [Republican]
• UK daily slams west’s approach to recent Paris attacks
  Tehran, Nov 18, IRNA – The UK daily the Guardian slammed west’s approach to recent Paris attacks saying terror can only succeed with our cooperation. In an article by writer and journalist Sir Simon Jenkins, it said, 'The warlike response to the Paris massacre by western governments, the media and the rest of the world has answered the dreams of Islamic State.” He urged the west to “think what your enemy wants you to do, and do the opposite. No maxim of war is so ignored.” [Iran] [Wishful thinking] [UK Middle East policy] [Paris15] [ISIS]
• Terror can only succeed with our cooperation
  Simon Jenkins The warlike response to the Paris massacre by western governments, the media and the rest of the world has answered the dreams of Islamic State Tuesday 17 November 2015 09.41 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 18 November 2015 09.23 GMT Think what your enemy wants you to do, and do the opposite. No maxim of war is so ignored. Since last Friday’s killings in Paris, the world has answered the dreams of Islamic State. It has drenched their deeds in fame, glorified its perpetrators with vilification and defined them as warriors not murderers. Deeds of the most squalid horror have been “nationalised” then internationalised. The whole world has been drawn into Isis’s web of fear. Its wildest fantasies have been realised. [Wishful thinking] [UK Middle East policy] [Paris15] [ISIS]
• Turkey fans boo minute's silence for Paris victims
  Istanbul Turkish fans booed during the minute's silence for the victims of the Paris attacks before their national team drew 0-0 with Greece in a friendly international soccer game on Tuesday. The mark of respect was observed at matches across Europe, including at Wembley where France faced England, after Islamic State militants struck Paris on Friday killing 129 people. [Turkey] [Public opinion] [Paris15]
• Terrorist Attacks in Paris: Can Tragedy Bring Change?
  by Diana Johnstone November 16, 2015 Paris. The chaos is spreading from the Middle East into Europe. An endless stream of unidentifiable refugees and migrants trudge through the Balkans toward the promised lands of Germany and Sweden. Fights are breaking out in refugee camps between national groups. Both the migrants massed near Calais trying vainly to enter Britain and the exasperated citizens of Calais are increasingly impatient and angry. National leaders who, with the vision of happy European integration on their minds, embraced and advocated the ideals of open borders and multiculturalism, are rudely awakening to their inability to cope. And now Paris has suffered the sort of attacks that are familiar to Beirut or to Russia. Yes, as Chris Floyd wrote, the West is reaping the whirlwind of its support for extremist violence. But it is not time to tell the victims that they are to blame, especially when the main targets in Paris were young people relaxing on a Friday evening, too young to bear responsibility for the disastrous Western policies that have fostered madness in the Middle East for several decades. [Paris15]
• Syria: Dangerous Theatre of Absurd
  Michael Jabara Carley | 17.11.2015 | 00:00 When the Syrian war first escalated, I remember seeing the photograph of a grizzled, greying man shot dead inside an old pickup truck. The window is rolled down and he is slumped back; blood had dripped from his wounds down the outside of the door, dried out and turned brown in the hot sun. Apparently on his way to work this innocent victim of the early Syrian warwas caught in a sudden Jihadi attack on his town. For what reason did this man, like so many others, have to die? His death was absurd, pointless, tragic. For me, the image of the murdered man symbolises the dangerous theatre of the absurd that Syria has become, where its people are menaced by forces beyond their ability to control… except by armed resistance. It was during the summer of 2012 when a major attack was launched on Damascus to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad. His defence minister, Dawoud Abdallah Rajiha, along with other senior officials, were assassinated in a bomb attack in a supposedly secure government building. The situation looked bad. Assad’s government seemed on the brink of collapse. We learned what kind of a leader and a man President Assad was in that grim summer of 2012. He could easily have accepted western summons to leave Damascus. He is a physician, with a speciality in ophthalmology. He could have gone back to practicing medicine and left Syria to the tender mercies of Jihadists running amuck with foreign support. Assad did not take that easy way out. He stayed in Damascus, shared the dangers of his people and led the resistance against the foreign backed Takfiri foreign militias. Had Damascus fallen, he would surely have forfeited his life. He is now the main leader of the Syrian resistance against the Jihadists, which is why the United States and its satellites are so determined to drive him from power. The conflict in Syria, which is often called a civil war, is not a civil war at all. It is a proxy war of aggression, brokered, bankrolled, and led by the United States, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, amongst others, with the intention of destroying the Assad government and breaking up Syria. [Outsourcing] [Syria]
• Global terrorism in 2014: the most casualties ever
  The Global Terrorism Index shows that in 2014, more people died through terrorism than ever before. And five countries bear the brunt. Destroyed cars after a Boko Haram bomb attack in Nigeria in 2014. (Photo: EPA/STR) Terrorism - many, if not most, people right now will associate the attacks in Paris with this word after the horrific events that the French capital saw over the weekend. A new statistic puts these attacks into perspective: in 2014, the countries that have been affected most by terrorism are all in the Middle East and in Africa, according to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI). The index is compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace , a think tank based in Sydney, Australia. Chairman Steve Killelea and his researchers have found that the five countries with the most attacks and victims are Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria. 2014 saw the number of people killed by terrorists rise to 32,658, "the highest level ever," according to the GTI. That's a dramatic increase of 80 percent compared to 2013. Infographic: world map countries affected by terrorism. (Graphic: DW) "But even more troublesome is the number of countries that suffered more than 500 deaths," Killelea told DW. "That number increased from five countries to 11 countries. Some of the new countries are Cameroon, Ukraine or the Central African Republic." Terrorism is spreading across the world. To arrive at this result, the Institute for Economics and Peace worked with a clearly defined set of criteria. Two groups are especially lethal For the Global Terrorism Index, the researchers used a dataset provided by the University of Maryland in the US. The definition they worked with states that terrorism is an act of violence by a non-state actor with the aim of achieving a political, economic or religious outcome. [Terrorism] [NSA] [Spin] [Legality] [Context]
• Is it time for Israel to revisit its relationship with Sunni bloc?
  Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah gave yet another of his regular speeches on Nov. 14. This time, however, the timing was especially dramatic. It was just two days after the Islamic State’s (IS) deadly suicide attack in the Dahiyeh Quarter, a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut, and just a few hours after IS’ killing spree in Paris. After watching a live broadcast of the speech, a senior Israeli intelligence official made a remarkable comment, speaking on condition of anonymity: “[Nasrallah] sounds like he just joined [Israeli nongovernmental organization] Peace Now. How could we possibly have reached a point in which Nasrallah has become the responsible adult in the Middle East?” Summary? Print With Iran fighting against IS forces, and in view of IS’ latest terrorism attacks in Egypt, Lebanon and France, the Israeli security establishment is questioning its regional security doctrine. Author Ben Caspit Posted November 16, 2015 Translator Danny Wool This question is heard more and more in the corridors of Israel’s defense establishment. Nasrallah’s speech lasted several minutes, but this time it did not include attacks on Israel (even though Israel was mentioned more than once as the source of all troubles in the region). In contrast, it contained numerous attacks on IS. Nasrallah employed the same jargon used by the West to describe IS’ atrocities. [Israel] [Sectarianism] [Realignment] [ISIS] [Syria]
• Does Eleven Plus One Equal Sixty?
  AFRICOM’s New Math, the U.S. Base Bonanza, and “Scarier” Times Ahead in Africa By Nick Turse In the shadows of what was once called the “dark continent," a scramble has come and gone. If you heard nothing about it, that was by design. But look hard enough and -- north to south, east to west -- you’ll find the fruits of that effort: a network of bases, compounds, and other sites whose sum total exceeds the number of nations on the continent. For a military that has stumbled from Iraq to Afghanistan and suffered setbacks from Libya to Syria, it’s a rare can-do triumph. In remote locales, behind fences and beyond the gaze of prying eyes, the U.S. military has built an extensive archipelago of African outposts, transforming the continent, experts say, into a laboratory for a new kind of war. So how many U.S. military bases are there in Africa? It’s a simple question with a simple answer. For years, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) gave a stock response: one. Camp Lemonnier in the tiny, sun-bleached nation of Djibouti was America’s only acknowledged “base” on the continent. It wasn’t true, of course, because there were camps, compounds, installations, and facilities elsewhere, but the military leaned hard on semantics. Take a look at the Pentagon’s official list of bases, however, and the number grows. The 2015 report on the Department of Defense’s global property portfolio lists Camp Lemonnier and three other deep-rooted sites on or near the continent: U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit No. 3, a medical research facility in Cairo, Egypt, that was established in 1946; Ascension Auxiliary Airfield, a spacecraft tracking station and airfield located 1,000 miles off the coast of West Africa that has been used by the U.S. since 1957; and warehouses at the airport and seaport in Mombasa, Kenya, that were built in the 1980s. [Bases] [US Africa strategy]
• Bombing ISIS Into the Heart of Europe: the New Face War
  by Patrick Cockburn The Islamic State (ISIS) has always massacred civilians in large numbers to show its strength and instill fear in its opponents. In the West, people notice these atrocities only when they take place on their own streets, though ISIS suicide bombers killed 43 people in Beirut on 12 November and 26 more in Baghdad on 13 November. These attacks are almost impossible to stop because they are directed against civilians, who cannot all be defended, and the bombers are willing to die in order to destroy their targets. ISIS has claimed the Paris attacks, saying that France was targeted because of its air strikes in Syria [ISIS] [Paris15]
• The Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence
  by Chris Floyd We, the West, overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gaddafi by violence. We are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year. Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations, there would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight. Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades [Outsourcing] [Blowback] [Paris15]
• France: A la Guerre Comme a la Guerre!
  Dmitriy Sedov | 15.11.2015 | 21:30 A human tragedy has taken place. On November 14, terrorists killed over 100 people in Paris. More than 200 were injured. Even now, after the tragedy has happened, the leadership of France has no courage to face the reality. French politicians, including President François Hollande, keep on harping on the same string expressing their readiness to fight for European values and ideals like if they were attacked for some unknown reason by aliens. A healer in the Middle Ages knew only one way to fight smallpox – to plunge a patient into boiling water. French politicians behave the same way. They call for tougher police measures, closed borders and prolongation of the state of emergency. The introduction of these measures may be expedient, but it’s not clear how it’s going to work without «barbarians» crossing the borders. The crime had planned been perpetrated by the criminals mixed with local Muslim diaspora. Is François Hollande aware of the fact that the «death industry» is an established business that the Islamic State leaders and some circles in Saudi Arabia and Qatar have interest in? Does he not know that there are financial flows coming to provide funds for imams-practiced ideological brainwashing, recruitment and operations of suicide bombers? Does he not know this evil could be eradicated only by cutting off financial flows coming to the Islamic State? Does the French President know that only the United States can put an end to this deadly cycle as the actor capable of influencing Turkey used by the Islamic State as a transition country for oil exports? Does he not know that the United States is the only country to bring to reason the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Qatar? [Paris15] [Outsourcing] [Agency]
• Utah judge removes lesbian couple’s foster child, says she’ll be better off with heterosexuals
  By Justin Wm. Moyer November 12 at 2:19 AM ? Last year, Utah couple Beckie Peirce and April Hoagland decided to get married. Last summer, in a decision legalizing gay marriage across the nation, the Supreme Court confirmed that this was okay. Then, Peirce and Hoagland wanted to take in a foster child. So, since the Supreme Court had signed off on gay marriage, Utah child services officials licensed the couple earlier this year. And, in August, Peirce and Hoagland welcomed a 1-year-old girl into their home, where she joined the couple’s two biological children. Plans for adoption, approved by the infant’s biological mother, were in place — soon, this would be a family of five. But Wednesday, a Utah judge decided to end this plan, ordering the girl removed from her foster home because the child would be better off with heterosexual parents, he said. Hoagland said the decision was “heartbreaking.” “I was kind of caught off guard because I didn’t think anything like that would happen anymore,” Hoagland told KUTV. “… It’s not fair, and it’s not right, and it hurts me really badly because I haven’t done anything wrong.” [Human rights]
• The Paris atrocity, and after
  Paul Rogers 14 November 2015 ISIS's violent assaults in France's capital should lead to a political rethink among western leaders. But will they? The ISIS assaults in Paris on the evening of November 13 were carefully planned by a large team of three groups with at least eight men prepared to die. Some internal French involvement, perhaps limited, is possible. The operation had three components, each with a distinct target. The Stade de France attack was small-scale but large impact – its ingredients a modern national sporting icon, the occasion of a match with Germany, and the French president's presence among the fans. The Bataclan theatre was hosting a popular American rock band, thus ensuring a very international audience. The café and bar attacks would result in persistent fear across a popular district of Paris and well beyond. Indeed the global impact is already huge, probably more than London’s bombs in July 2005, Madrid’s Atocha rail terminal bombs in March 2004, and even the Sari nightclub attack in Bali in October 2002. Paris is on a similar scale to the even more complex and long-lasting Mumbai operation in November 2008, which had a profound impact in India (but less so outside). Among western states, the effect is the biggest since 9/11, which was of course much greater still. A blowback war
  Will Paris lead to a rethink? No, that is highly unlikely. There is simply neither the wisdom nor the independent and able leadership anywhere across the western world for that to happen. Instead, and at least for now, further tragedies will unfold. [ISIS] [Terrorism]
• IMF: Saudi Arabia running on empty in five years
  Gulf kingdom could deplete financial assets within five years as it struggles with slumping oil prices. Abid Ali | 22 Oct 2015 23:02 GMT The fall in oil prices has led to the Middle East facing export revenue losses amounting to $360bn this year alone [Mosaab Elshamy/AP] Saudi Arabia could burn through its financial assets within five years, as the country grapples with slumping oil prices. The Middle East’s biggest economy is expected to run budget deficits of 21.6 percent in 2015 and 19.4 percent in 2016, according the IMF’s latest regional outlook. That means Riyadh needs to find money to meet its spending plans. Just like its oil exporting neighbours, it plans to make substantial cuts to its budgets. [Saudi Arabia] [Oil]
• Paris attacks were carried out by three groups tied to Islamic State, official says
  What the attacks in Paris tell us about the Islamic State Peter Finn, The Washington Post's national security editor, explains how the Paris attacks illustrate how the Islamic State has evolved as a terror organization. (Thomas Johnson, Monica Akhtar and Julio Negron/The Washington Post) By Anthony Faiola and Souad Mekhennet November 15 at 6:20 AM ? PARIS — French police took seven people in for questioning Sunday in connection with the deadly siege that killed at least 129 people on Friday night, expanding an international dragnet and investigation that is now spanning from the Aegean Sea to the teeming Paris suburbs. The seven people taken into custody were relatives of Omar Ismail Mostefai, a 29-year old French national with a criminal record and one of seven assailants who died during Friday night’s deadly siege, according to a French police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A petty criminal of Algerian descent, Mostefai was picked up for eight minor offenses including driving without a license between 2004 and 2010. In 2010, however, Mostefai came on the radar screen of French intelligence because of his associations with radical Islamists at a mosque near Chartres, a city 56 miles west of Paris. [Paris15] [ISIS]
• Trump: Paris massacre would have been 'much different' if people had guns
  By Jeremy Diamond, CNN • "When you look at Paris ... nobody had guns but the bad guys. Nobody had guns. Nobody," Trump said • Trump made a similar comment earlier this year on the heels of the terrorist attack in Paris in January Beaumont, Texas (CNN)Donald Trump said Saturday that the terrorist attacks in Paris "would've been a much different situation" if the city had looser gun laws. "When you look at Paris -- you know the toughest gun laws in the world, Paris -- nobody had guns but the bad guys. Nobody had guns. Nobody," Trump said at a rally here. "They were just shooting them one by one and then they (security forces) broke in and had a big shootout and ultimately killed the terrorists." "You can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry --" Trump said, pausing as the crowd erupted into raucous applause, "-- it would've been a much, much different situation." [Trump]
• Time for GOP panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win.
  By Philip Rucker and Robert Costa November 13 ? Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them. Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands. The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet. [US_election16] [Trump] [Carson]
• WHO Director-General asks think tanks to explore health challenges under the Sustainable Development Goals
  Dr Margaret Chan Director-General of the World Health Organization
  The sustainable development goals and their implications for global health: how can think tanks help meet the challenge? Address at a meeting of global health policy think tanks and academic institutions Geneva, Switzerland 12 November 2015 Experts and colleagues in public health, ladies and gentlemen, I was asked to challenge you. I can ask for your help with issues that keep me awake at night. Some are politically contentious, as we see every time they are raised during the World Health Assembly. The world has changed dramatically since the 8 Millennium Development Goals were agreed at the start of this century. The results of that sharp focus, and all the energy, resources, and innovations it released, exceeded the wildest dreams of many. This was an instrument for global health governance that demonstrated the power of international solidarity and brought out the best in human nature.
  Leaving no one behind, ending epidemics, and ending preventable deaths require a massive scaling up of interventions. Who will implement? Who will pay? Intellectual property rights and the patent system continue to raise questions about fairness. I have been hearing some serious concerns that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the biggest trade agreement ever, may adversely affect the market for generics and biosimilars and increase the cost of medicines. [TPP]
• Surprise! The New Trade Deal Is Written for and By Corporations
  Excessive copyright and investor protections? Check. A company can sue a country for raising its minimum wage? Check.
  By Charles P. Pierce Nov 11, 2015 @ 4:48 PM There probably is no more (occasionally overly) judicious voice on the world economy than Jeffrey Sachs. He has taken a look at the soft spots in the monstrous Trans-Pacific Partnership and he has found them to be bad enough to vote down the bill as a whole. The third is a set of regulations governing investor rights, intellectual property, and regulations in key service sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, e-commerce, and pharmaceuticals. These chapters are a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Their common denominator is that they enshrine the power of corporate capital above all other parts of society, including labor and even governments. The fourth is a set of standards on labor and the environment that purport to advance the cause of social fairness and environmental sustainability. But the agreements are thin, unenforceable, and generally unimaginative. For example, climate change is not even mentioned, much less addressed boldly and creatively. That sounds really bad. But, according to Sachs, there is worse to come. The most egregious parts of the agreement are the exorbitant investor powers implicit in the Investor-State Dispute Settlement system as well as the unjustified expansion of copyright and patent coverage. We've seen this show before. Corporations are already using ISDS provisions in existing trade and investment agreements to harass governments in order to frustrate regulations and judicial decisions that negatively impact the companies' interests. The system proposed in the TPP is a dangerous and unnecessary grant of power to investors and a blow to the judicial systems of all the signatory countries. And, as in earlier trade agreements, the United States has pushed through overly strong intellectual property rights that strengthen the aggressive pricing practices of big pharma and unnecessarily extend the copyright protections far beyond their social usefulness. [TPP]
• Germany to Send Many Afghan Asylum Seekers Back Home
  The country is taking a tougher stance on its refugee crisis. By Felicity Capon 10/29/15 at 11:18 AM Afghan Refugees To Be Sent Home Afghan refugee Ali Reza (C) sits in front of Brandenburg Gate during a hunger strike in Berlin October 25. Some 20 refugees, mainly from Iran and Afghanistan, went on hunger strike on October 24 demanding an end to deportations, obligatory camp accommodation to be abolished and restrictions on their movements be lifted, the refugees said. Thomas Peter/Reuters The majority of Afghan asylum seekers in Germany will be sent back home, the German interior minister announced this week, marking a hardening of government attitudes towards those entering the country. Afghan asylum seekers not fleeing areas held by the Taliban or affected by fighting will be sent back to the country, Thomas de Maiziere announced at a news conference held in Berlin on Tuesday, according to AFP. The move will not affect asylum seekers who are at risk from the Taliban, who will still be granted asylum. Afghans made up more than 20 percent of the 560,000-plus people who have arrived in Europe by sea in 2015, according to the UN Refugee Agency, something de Maziere described as "unacceptable." He said talks had been held with the government in Kabul to put a halt to the influx, saying Afghans should "stay in their country." [Refugees] [Pawns] [Afghanistan]
• Life Under Helicopters: Dispatch From Kabul
  by Brian Terrell When I arrived at the Kabul International Airport on November 4, I was unaware that the same day the New York Times published an article, “Life Pulls Back in Afghan Capital, as Danger Rises and Troops Recede.” My friends Abdulhai and Ali, 17 years old, young men I have known since my first visit five years ago, greeted me with smiles and hugs and took my bags. Disregarded by soldiers and police armed with automatic weapons, we caught up on old times as we walked past concrete blast walls, sand bag fortifications, check points and razor wire to the public road and hailed a cab. [Afghanistan] [Refugees]
• Saudi Funding of ISIS
  Lori Plotkin Boghardt PolicyWatch 2275Also available in ??????? June 23, 2014 Significantly undermining ISIS's financial base would require rolling back the group's access to local Syrian and Iraqi income sources. On June 13, U.S. Treasury Department officials stated that Saudi Arabia sees "eye to eye" with the United States on the importance of halting activities by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the former al-Qaeda affiliate currently waging jihad in Iraq and Syria. Yet questions continue to arise about Saudi financial support to the group. Addressing these questions requires a better understanding of three issues: the scope of official Saudi government support to ISIS, if any; government allowance of private donations to the group; and the relative importance of Saudi donations compared to the group's other sources of income. GOVERNMENT FUNDING? At present, there is no credible evidence that the Saudi government is financially supporting ISIS. Riyadh views the group as a terrorist organization that poses a direct threat to the kingdom's security. The Interior Ministry formally designated ISIS as a terrorist entity in March, along with Jabhat al-Nusra, the Muslim Brotherhood, Yemen's Houthi rebels, and Saudi Hezbollah. The designation outlawed various forms of support to the group by residents of the kingdom. To be sure, many governments in the region and beyond sometimes fund inimical parties to help achieve particular policy objectives. Riyadh has taken pleasure in recent ISIS-led Sunni advances against Iraq's Shiite government, and in jihadist gains in Syria at Bashar al-Assad's expense. Nevertheless, official financing of the group may be precluded by Riyadh's perception that the ISIS terrorist threat is immediate and serious (though it would not be surprising to learn of limited, perhaps indirect contact, logistical coordination to further Sunni positions in Syria and beyond, or leaking of funds and materiel from Saudi-supported rebels to ISIS). An Interior Ministry statement in early May underscored Saudi perceptions of the ISIS threat at home. In it, officials accused Saudi ISIS members in Syria of encouraging fellow citizens to assassinate leading religious figures and security officials inside the kingdom and plot attacks against government installations and foreign interests. Some of the individuals involved in these domestic plots allegedly had contacts with ISIS and the Yemen-based group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) -- the kingdom's most acute terrorist threat. At the time of the announcement, police had arrested fifty-nine Saudi citizens and three foreign nationals in the case and were still searching for forty-four additional suspects. PRIVATE DONATIONS There is a misconception that the kingdom does not get in the way of private Saudi financing of terrorist groups operating in Syria, including ISIS. Yet one of Riyadh's most observable counter-terrorism financing activities is its monitoring of the country's formal financial sector in order to block suspect donations. Indeed, social media fundraising campaigns highlight the challenges of sending such funds from Saudi Arabia to Syria. To ensure that their contributions actually reach Syria, Saudi donors are encouraged to send their money to Kuwait, long considered one of the most permissive terrorism financing environments in the Persian Gulf. [ISIS] [Saudi Arabia]
• Who Are the Supporters of International Terrorism?
  The highly effective Russian operation in Syria has clearly exposed the real position of the West, along with the ties it has with international terrorist groups. As is already known, the so-called Western coalition, created by Washington more than a year ago has been “effectively fighting” terrorism in Syria and Iraq. What are the results? Desert areas with no terrorists to be found anywhere have been heavily bombed, at the same time, terrorists are regularly acquiring weapon due to “mistakenly” air-dropped crates. In any case, the terrorists are fighting with modern American weapons and they are wearing US army BDUs (battle-dress uniforms). And it seems that this outcome fully satisfies the sitting US administration, since Washington was leading the charge against international terrorism, or at least it claimed it did. However, the year of bombing nonexistent terrorist positions produced at least some results – the Islamic State has significantly increased the territory it controlled in Syria. It seems that the US could have been supporting extremists, while pretending that it fights them, until the Russian military campaign in Syria began. Since the first days of Russian airstrikes in Syria, when militants got a taste of real bombs falling on their heads, and while fortifications, equipment, and command bunkers were being obliterated, Washington suddenly became quite vocal in claiming that the wrong terrorists were under fire. A whole new media campaign has been started with the money provided by the regimes of the Persian Gulf and the West, in a desperate attempt to convince the world that Russian air strikes are having no military success, and that they are killing civilians in droves. The major advancement launched by the Syrian Arab Army is now portrayed as a sort of a deal between the Islamic State and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, so, we are being told, terrorists are not running for their lives, and instead are just handing over their positions to the Syrian army. Such publications are usually published with unclear “open source” pictures and videos, so that nobody can confirm or deny this evidence. Under these circumstances, it’s only natural for any honest analyst to conclude that Washington and some of its Arab allies are closely linked to terrorist groups and it doesn’t take long to locate those militants. There’s not a lot of people left today who would try deny the fact that Al-Qaeda was created, financed and armed by Washington and its allied reactionary regimes of the Persian Gulf. Al-Qaeda then gave birth to the Islamic State, which has now seized vast territories in Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State or “ISIL” is a Wahhabi organization and it was created by Washington during the days of the Iraq occupation, for them to fight against Iraq’s Shia’a instead of against their Western and Persian Gulf sponsors. [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• New Front of Syrian War: White House vs State Department
  Dmitry Minin | 10.11.2015 | 08:03 US State Secretary John Kerry admitted at the Vienna press-conference that he had not been informed about the decision of President Obama to deploy Special Operations Forces (SOF) in Syria. This fact confirms the rumors that have been circulating in Washington for a long time. There are serious contradictions turning into a struggle between the US National Security Council and the Pentagon on one side and the State Department on the other. There is a wide gap between “hawks”, mainly coming from the military ranks, and “moderate” diplomats. The Middle East policy is the best example to illustrate this fact. Obama is balancing between the two camps. He is often rebuked for lack of will power while facing rough times. He is inclined to side more often with those who call for a tougher stand. The President seems to be unaware of the fact that by taking the decision to send SOF to Syria without consulting the State Department he puts the State Secretary into an awkward position and undermines the US international standing. The decision to deploy 50 special operations troops to Syria provides one more reason to doubt the US readiness to really change the situation. The precedent is important. The decision to deploy SOF is not based on the request of Syria’s legal government, or a corresponding resolution of the United Nations Security Council. Actually, it’s an act of aggression. The presence of US ground forces may provoke further escalation, no matter what initial intention was. Obama deviates from his own statements. The President has sworn there will be no boots on the ground in Syria. Many experts are inclined to explain this behavior by the pressure exerted by the military, in particular Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [US Syria policy] [Dissension]
• France won’t dine with Iran unless wine is served
  By Anthony Faiola November 10 at 3:03 PM ? BERLIN — Guess who’s not coming to dinner — or even breakfast or lunch? Ahead of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s landmark European trip kicking off this weekend, French officials reportedly nixed plans for a formal meal in Paris with President François Hollande following a dispute over the menu. The Iranians, according to France’s RTL Radio, insisted on a wine-free meal with halal meat — a request based on Islamic codes that amounted to culinary sacrilege in France, a nation that puts the secular ideals of the Republic above all else. The French, RTL said, counter offered with a presumably alcohol-free breakfast — which the Iranians promptly rejected because it appeared too “cheap.” The two leaders will now reportedly settle for a face-to-face chat next Tuesday. [Culture war] [Islam] [Wine]
• Islanders Unite to Resist a New Pacific War
  November 7, 2015 By Koohan Paik | November 7, 2015 Originally published in Common Dreams Last September, I attended a remarkable gathering in Okinawa of impassioned young people from all over the Asia-Pacific. They convened at a critical moment to urgently discuss ramped-up militarism in their region. Thousands of hectares of exquisitely wild marine environments, peaceful communities and local democracy are now under extreme threat. Participants hailed from: Taiwan; Jeju (South Korea); the Japanese Ryukyu islands; Indonesia; New Zealand; and the Japanese Ogasawara islands. I was invited to represent Hawaii, where the headquarters for the U.S. Pacific Command (PACCOM) are located, and where decisions are made that have profound consequences for these young activists, and the rest of the world. These include missile base-building on pristine islands, rampant navy war games that destroy coastlines, reefs and other vital ecosystems, not to mention adding to climate change, pursued with no regard for local opinion. It’s all a result of the “Pacific Pivot,” announced by President Obama in 2011, to move 60% of U.S. Navy and Air Force resources from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific. The stated goal is to maintain “balance” in the ongoing battle with China for regional military and economic hegemony. A particularly dangerous expression in this effort came a few weeks ago, when a U.S. missile-carrying warship challenged China by passing through disputed waters surrounding China’s artificial island bases in the South China Sea. It is the latest example of brinkmanship after years of provocative moves by the U.S. in the so-called interest of balance. But, the grim fact is there is no balance in the Pacific. The little publicized reality is that the United States, located thousands of miles from China’s coast, already maintains over 400 military installations and 155,000 troops in that part of the world. Meanwhile China, even with its newest artificial island-bases in the South China Sea, will have a grand total fewer than ten. [Pivot] [China confrontation] [Okinawa]
• Appeals court rules against Obama’s immigration plan
  By David Nakamura November 9 at 11:23 PM ? A federal appeals court on Monday ruled against President Obama’s plan to shield up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, dealing another blow to the administration’s effort to remake immigration laws and likely setting up a final battle in the Supreme Court next year. The 2-to-1 ruling from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans — to uphold a lower court’s injunction that blocks the administration from implementing a ­deferred-action program — was not unexpected. It came several months after the same court had denied an emergency stay request from the Justice Department. The decision means that one of Obama’s signature immigration initiatives remains on hold nearly a year after he announced it through executive action and leaves in doubt whether the program will begin before his term expires in January 2017. Republican presidential candidates have pledged to dismantle the program, creating additional urgency within the Obama administration to get it started. [Governance] [Migration]
• Rosen: Is Obama wondering: What would Cheney do?
  By James Rosen ·Published November 02, 2015 · FoxNews.com Editor's note: Fox News Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen's new book “Cheney One on One: A Candid Conversation with America's Most Controversial Statesman” (Regnery, 2015) was released on November 2. When President Obama dropped in on “The Daily Show” in July, to pay farewell respects to Jon Stewart, the commander-in-chief was busily engaged in selling his signature foreign policy initiative. Unlike the national desire to retire Jon Stewart properly, support for the Iran nuclear deal was hardly unanimous. Critics of the deal advanced a variety of specific arguments: whether more dismantlement should have been sought; the validity of projected breakout times; the viability of “snap-back” sanctions; the reliability of our negotiating partners; the advisability of sunset provisions; and even whether the accord, as negotiated, violates U.S. law. Although most of these had already been aired, on Stewart’s set the president-- a skilled performer on comedy shows-- used humor to argue that no substantive criticisms had been aired at all. [Iran deal] [Cheney] [Neocon]
• Reaper Madness: Obama’s Whack-a-Mole Killing Machine
  by Doug Noble “Our entire Middle East policy seems to be based on firing drones,” Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Intercept. “They’re enamored by the ability of special operations and the CIA to find a guy in the middle of the desert in some shitty little village and drop a bomb on his head and kill him.” Targeted killing by drones remains the US weapon of choice, famously called “the only game in town,” by former CIA director Leon Panetta. This despite a decade of worldwide moral outrage over its overwhelming civilian casualties, violations of international law, disregard for national sovereignty, dismissal of due process, and continuing secrecy. The Obama administration recently announced that the drone killing program will in fact be increased by 50 % in the coming two years. [UAV] [Assassination] [Counterproductive] [Efficacy]
• Kissinger, the Bombardier: How Diplomacy by Air Power Became an All-American Tradition
  Greg Grandin • November 8, 2015 In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener. In fleece jackets on a crisp spring day, they were visibly enjoying each other’s company, looking for all the world like a twenty-first-century geopolitical version of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The subtext of their banter, however, wasn’t about sex, but death. As a journalist, Power had made her name as a defender of human rights, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Having served on the National Security Council before moving on to the U.N., she was considered an influential “liberal hawk” of the Obama era. She was also a leading light among a set of policymakers and intellectuals who believe that American diplomacy should be driven not just by national security and economic concerns but by humanitarian ideals, especially the advancement of democracy and the defense of human rights. The United States, Power long held, has a responsibility to protect the world’s most vulnerable people. In 2011 she played a crucial role in convincing President Obama to send in American air power to prevent troops loyal to Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi from massacring civilians. That campaign led to his death, the violent overthrow of his regime, and in the end, a failed state and growing stronghold for ISIS and other terror groups. In contrast, Kissinger is identified with a school of “political realism,” which holds that American power should service American interests, even if that means sacrificing the human rights of others. According to ESPN, Power teasingly asked Kissinger if his allegiance to the Yankees was “in keeping with a realist’s perspective on the world.” Power, an avid Red Sox fan, had only recently failed to convince the United Nations to endorse a U.S. bombing campaign in Syria, so Kissinger couldn’t resist responding with a gibe of his own. “You might,” he said, “end up doing more realistic things.” It was his way of suggesting that she drop the Red Sox for the Yankees. “The human rights advocate,” Power retorted, referring to herself in the third person, “falls in love with the Red Sox, the downtrodden, the people who can’t win the World Series.” “Now,” replied Kissinger, “we are the downtrodden” — a reference to the Yankees’ poor performance the previous season. During his time in office, Kissinger had been involved in three of the genocides Power mentions in her book: Pol Pot’s “killing fields” in Cambodia, which would never have occurred had he not infamously ordered an illegal four-and-a-half-year bombing campaign in that country; Indonesia’s massacre in East Timor; and Pakistan’s in Bangladesh, both of which he expedited. [Kissinger] [Samantha Power] [Humanitarian intervention]
• Tourists of Empire: America’s Peculiar Brand of Global Imperialism
  William J. Astore • October 27, 2015 The United States is a peculiar sort of empire. As a start, Americans have been in what might be called imperial denial since the Spanish-American War of 1898, if not before. Empire — us? We denied its existence even while our soldiers were administering “water cures” (aka waterboarding) to recalcitrant Filipinos more than a century ago. Heck, we even told ourselves we were liberating those same Filipinos, which leads to a second point: the U.S. not only denies its imperial ambitions, but shrouds them in a curiously American brand of Christianized liberation theology. In it, American troops are never seen as conquerors or oppressors, always as liberators and freedom-bringers, or at least helpers and trainers. There’s just enough substance to this myth (World War II and the Marshall Plan, for example) to hide uglier imperial realities. [Imperialism] [In denial] [Strategic incoherence]
• Black Swans and Pink Flamingos: Five Principles for Force Design
  Frank Hoffman August 19, 2015 American strategists would benefit from a longer-range view of history to better inform force design. Thinking historically about the future means dealing openly with those things we want to avoid or are in denial about. What key lessons should U.S. policymakers and defense planners take away from the last 14 years of conflict? How relevant is the recent past? What does our strategic and operational performance suggest we need to retain as core competencies? These are critical questions for the design of tomorrow’s U.S. military. Being rigorously critical about our campaigns is a healthy and necessary intellectual exercise. We should not deceive ourselves, nor should we hide from a painful evaluation about the last 14 years and deficiencies in the American way of strategy. Without looking critically at the past, our own wars and others, all of the arguments about AirSea Battle, disruptive technologies, and offset strategies will be largely premature, if not largely uninformed. Drawing upon the last several wars for insights or major principles for force design is useful, but to draw the right insights requires more than merely thinking about the recent past. We must look forward to a more complex world, one in which technological, social, and economic change produce new contexts. In his most famous essay on the abuse of history, Michael Howard noted that the military must strive to explore history to acquire lessons, but also to be able to recognize when changes in context have made doctrine and past practice obsolete. American policymakers and strategists would benefit from a longer-range view of history to better inform defense policy and joint force design. There are calls by some for limited interventions under ideal conditions of lower cost and scale, “more El Salvadors” than Vietnams or more short wars like Operation Desert Storm instead of the protracted Operation Iraqi Freedom. Certainly, this desire is understandable, but strategists cannot plan for ideal conditions or convenient enemies. More importantly politicians cannot dictate the terms of future conflicts. The future does not bend to our illusions or our preferences. History’s furies do not respond to presidential pronouncements about the tides of war. Recent defense policy statements suggest that the “technology optimists” are alive and well again. We must be wary of claims about disruptive breakthroughs, as a premature shift to autonomous robotic systems or unbalanced approach can generate a lot of risk without benefit. We should definitely seek advantages in all dimensions of war, and while we may be forced to consider offsets, we need not rush for silver bullets. As former RAND analyst Russ Glenn once noted, lessons from the past are of value only if molded to the needs of the future. A military that does not balance looking backward with constant glances at the future risks preparing only for the war last fought. We examine the past in order to illuminate the future, not to relive past success. Richard Danzig’s widely cited CNAS paper, Driving in the Dark, recommended that the “defense community should also design processes, programs and equipment on the premise that predictions will often be incorrect. While trying better to illuminate the road, analysts should recognize that sudden twists and turns in areas of darkness demand special driving techniques.” Danzig’s driving metaphor is appropriate for steering into a future that, by its nature, is uncertain. From that metaphor I have derived a set of five force planning principles: [US Global strategy] [US military]
• Leadership at home and abroad
  By Rorry Daniels Nov 5, 2015 The diffusion of global power was a major theme at this year’s Xiangshan Forum, a track 1.5 defense dialogue on Asia-Pacific security organized by the China Association of Military Sciences and the China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS). A multipolar world in which the United States is in relative decline against a backdrop of many rising powers is less stable than the bipolar Cold War system or the US-led international order that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fortunately, there is a strong will among states to avoid the conflict that has historically characterized a period of transition between rising and established powers – the so-called “Thucydides Trap.” China has proposed a “New Type of Major Power Relations” to support peace and stability and promote strategic trust. Do current strategies promote stability? And what if mutual trust takes decades to grow between historic opponents? [China confrontation] [Thucydides trap]
• New book spells more family drama for Jeb Bush
  By Ed O'Keefe November 5 ? Bush 41 book critical of son's administration ?Play Video1:49 In a blistering critique, former president George H.W. Bush says Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld "served the president badly" when his son George W. Bush was in the White House. (AP) A former president is rarely publicly critical of another former president — especially by way of a tell-all book. Even more rarely has one president been the father of another. And those categories have never intersected. Until now. And so begins another round of Bush family drama tied mostly to foreign policy, this time in the pages of an authorized biography of former president George H.W. Bush. While generally supportive of his son's presidency, he criticizes former president George W. Bush, former vice president Richard B. Cheney and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for how they responded to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The 41st president suggests that the 43rd president's 2002 speech describing Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an “Axis of Evil” included comments "that might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything." He calls Cheney's reaction to the attacks "just iron-ass" and says that Rumsfeld displayed a "lack of humility" and "was an arrogant fellow." [George H Bush] [9/11] [George W Bush]
• EXCLUSIVE: HW Bush jabs at Cheney, Rumsfeld in new book
  Published November 05, 2015 ·FoxNews.com As an ex-president, George H.W. Bush has generally maintained a respectful silence regarding later administrations. But now he's speaking out, criticizing some big names, and not in ways you might expect. As revealed in the new Jon Meacham biography, "Destiny And Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush," the 41st president has some harsh words for the actions of his son's administration. In particular, he objects to how Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reacted to 9/11. He feels they were too hawkish, taking a harsh, inflexible stance that tarnished America's reputation around the world. [George H Bush] [George W Bush]
• President Obama: Steve Kroft questions President Obama on topics including Russia's incursion in Syria, ISIS and the 2016 presidential race
  2015 Oct 11 . The following is a script from "President Obama" which aired on October 11, 2015. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. L. Franklin Devine, Michael Karzis and Maria Gavrilovic, producers. It's been a week of rising tensions in Syria with Russia stepping up airstrikes and naval bombardments in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and in some cases against rebel groups supported by the United States. It's complicated an already precarious situation and aggravated an already contentious relationship between President Obama and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Add to that the presidential primary campaigns underway at home, and it seemed like a good time to talk about all of it with the president which we did on Tuesday in the Roosevelt Room at the White House; a lively, spirited discussion that began with ISIS. [Russia confrontation] [Obama]
• Public Private Partnerships? They’re as old as Christopher Columbus
  Keston K. Perry 9 November 2015 Private companies are encouraged to latch onto every potentially-profitable public investment. What’s new or good about that? As the global economy limps along with low expected growth rates or recession in major emerging economies, the World Bank and other donor agencies have embraced a new cure-all for poverty reduction and development called ‘Public-Private Partnerships’ or ‘PPPs.’ Though the term is still ambiguous, these arrangements are basically long-term contracts between a government and a private entity for the provision of a public service. In principle, PPPs are meant to transfer risk from governments, while businesses gain through revenue generation and the receipt of assets or guarantees from the state [Privatisation] [Corporate power] [UNUS]
• Why the TPP Must be Opposed at All Costs: It’s Worse Than You Think
  by K.J. Noh The TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the corporate Mega-deal on “free trade” has been concluded between the partner states, and is now in the final stages of its ratification. This deal involves the US and 11 other countries (Canada, US, Mexico, Chile, Peru; Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Brunei, Japan) of the Pacific Rim, representing 40% of global economic activity. The text was secretly negotiated by hundreds of corporate lobbyists. It has now been released, and Congress will have 90 days to examine the 6000 page text before approving, which will allow the President to sign it in to law. For six years, this corporate-drafted legislation was a pig in a poke. Nobody knew what was in it– except the hundreds (550) of corporate lobbyists that had been drafting it for years in total secrecy. They wouldn’t say what was in it. They would only say it was good for you. They just wanted you to support it. Critics were told to shut up on the grounds that they knew nothing about it. But the outline that people had been able to discern through leaks were monstrous. The text has been just released—by the orders of a New Zealand court–and it is, as anticipated, monstrous, explaining the Manhattan-Project-level secrecy. It’s a total corporate giveaway, and despite some pathetic attempts to put lipstick on it, it’s every bit as bad as we had anticipated, and a little bit worse. Here are some of the key issues: [TPP]
• Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
  The text of the TPP was released by TPP Parties on 5 November 2015 and can be accessed by Chapter below. Legal verification of the text will continue in the coming weeks. The Agreement will also be translated into French and Spanish language versions. The Government is preparing a legal synopsis of the Agreement and this will be available below in the coming days. Preamble Preamble [external link, PDF] 1. Initial Provisions and General Definitions 2. National Treatment and Market Access for Goods 3. Rules of Origin and Origin Procedures 4. Textiles and Apparel 5. Customs Administration and Trade Facilitation 6. Trade Remedies 7. Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures 8. Technical Barriers to Trade 9. Investment 10. Cross-Border Trade in Services 11. Financial Services 12. Temporary Entry for Business Persons 13. Telecommunications 14. Electronic Commerce 15. Government Procurement 16. Competition Policy 17. State-Owned Enterprises and Designated Monopolies 18. Intellectual Property 19. Labour 20. Environment 21. Cooperation and Capacity Building 22. Competitiveness and Business Facilitation 23. Development 24. Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises 25. Regulatory Coherence 26. Transparency and Anti-Corruption 27. Administrative and Institutional Provisions 28. Dispute Settlement 29. Exceptions and General Provisions 30. Final Provisions [TPP]
• Secret TPP Text Unveiled: It’s Worse Than We Thought
  Pact’s Fate in Congress Uncertain at Best; Long-Awaited Text Reveals Gaps Between Administration Claims and Actual TPP Terms On Key Congressional, Public Concerns By Public Citizen Global Research, November 06, 2015 Public Citizen 5 November 2015 Theme: Global Economy, Law and Justice Today’s long-awaited release of the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) reveals that the pact replicates many of the most controversial terms of past pacts that promote job offshoring and push down U.S wages while further expanding the scope of the controversial investor-state system and rolling back improvements on access to affordable medicines and environmental standards that congressional Democrats forced on the George W. Bush administration in 2007. “Apparently, the TPP’s proponents resorted to such extreme secrecy during negotiations because the text shows TPP would offshore more American jobs, lower our wages, flood us with unsafe imported food and expose our laws to attack in foreign tribunals,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “When the administration says it used the TPP to renegotiate NAFTA, few expected that meant doubling down on the worst job-killing, wage-suppressing NAFTA terms, expanding limits on food safety and rolling back past reforms on environmental standards and access to affordable drugs.” On some key issues, the text reveals provisions that will cost TPP support from members of Congress who supported the narrow passage of Fast Track trade authority this summer, and affirm for the many members of Congress who backed past trade deals but opposed Fast Track that the TPP must be stopped. “Many in Congress said they would support the TPP only if, at a minimum, it included past reforms made to trade pact intellectual property rules affecting access to affordable medicines. But the TPP rolls back that past progress by requiring new marketing exclusivities and patent term extensions, and provides pharmaceutical firms with new monopoly rights for biotech drugs, including many new and forthcoming cancer treatments,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “The terms in this final TPP text will contribute to preventable suffering and death abroad, and may constrain the reforms that Congress can consider to reduce Americans’ medicine prices at home.” The text also confirms that demands made by Congress and key constituencies were not fulfilled. [TPP]
• Prospect that bomb destroyed plane raises specter of expanding ISIS threat
  By Ellen Nakashima November 6 at 7:40 PM ? The hardening prospect that a Russian airliner was brought down over the Sinai Peninsula by a terrorist bomb is raising concerns that the threat from the Islamic State has dramatically expanded, and it points to the potentially deadly role of insurgents around the world who have allied themselves with the militant group. Rising fear that a Russian plane packed with tourists was targeted by terrorists deepened Friday with French reports that the flight’s black boxes contained the sound of an explosion. That news followed Russia’s suspension of all flights into Egypt, a clear signal that the Kremlin, which had been reluctant to countenance a terrorist attack, now fears a bomb was behind last weekend’s Metrojet crash, which killed all 224 people aboard. If the Islamic State indeed destroyed the plane, it would shatter whatever expectation there was that the group could be confined and ultimately defeated within Iraq and Syria — the region where it has seized territory and declared a caliphate. [Russia’s military moves in Syria send ripples through White House] And, analysts say, it would show that the Islamic State has learned how to turn its affiliates into operational arms. Islamic State celebrates Russian jet crash, passes out candy ?Play Video0:35 An excerpt from an Islamic-State propaganda video shows members handing out candy to celebrate the news of the Russian plane crash in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. (Excerpt from an Islamic-State propaganda video) There have been arrests of Islamic State operatives in Kosovo and Albania in recent months for allegedly planning attacks in Europe, said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “But this is the first time that ISIL has crossed the threshold and burst onto the international terror scene,” he said. [ISIS]
• Why does the government of the United States hate Syrian president Bashar al-Assad
  By William Blum November 04, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Is it because, as we’re told, he’s a brutal dictator? But how can that be the reason for the hatred? It would be difficult indeed to name a brutal dictatorship of the second half of the 20th Century or of the 21st century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported, but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the population; at present the list would include Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Indonesia, Egypt, Colombia, Qatar, and Israel. The United States, I suggest, is hostile to the Syrian government for the same reason it has been hostile to Cuba for more than half a century; and hostile to Venezuela for the past 15 years; and earlier to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; and to Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Chile; and so on continuing through the world atlas and history books. [US Syria policy] [Imperialism] [Pipeline]
• The World's Most Powerful People 2015
  David M. Ewalt , Contributor Forget about the 1%. The men and women who are featured on Forbes’ annual ranking of the World’s Most Powerful People are the 0.00000001% –the global elite whose actions move the planet. These heads of state, financiers, philanthropists and entrepreneurs truly run the world. To compile the list, we considered hundreds of candidates from various walks of life all around the globe, and measured their power along four dimensions. First, we asked whether the candidate has power over lots of people. Pope Francis, ranked #4 on our list, is the spiritual leader of more than a billion Catholics. Doug McMillon (#32), CEO of Wal-Mart Stores WMT +0.00%, employs 2.2 million workers. Next we assessed the financial resources controlled by each person. Are they relatively large compared to their peers? For heads of state we used GDP, while for CEOs, we looked at measures like their company’s assets and revenues. When candidates have a high personal net worth, like the world’s richest man, Bill Gates (#6), we also took that into consideration. In certain instances, like the King of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (#14), we considered other valuable resources at the candidate’s disposal –like 20% of the world’s known oil reserves.
• Most powerful people list
  Rank Name Organization Age
  #1 Vladimir Putin Russia 63 #2 Angela Merkel Germany 61 #3 Barack Obama United States 54 #4 Pope Francis Roman Catholic Church 78 #5 Xi Jinping China 62 #6 Bill Gates Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 60 #7 Janet Yellen Washington, United States 69 #8 David Cameron United Kingdom 49 #9 Narendra Modi India 65 #10 Larry Page Google 42
• The Indonesian Massacre: What Did the US Know?
  Margaret Scott Indonesian soldiers near the burning wreckage of a vehicle, following the assassination of six army generals, Jakarta, October 1965 President Barack Obama has several things in common with Joko Widodo, the president of Indonesia, whom he welcomed to the Oval Office last week. The two men are the exact same age, and Widodo, whom everyone calls Jokowi, looks like a shorter and skinnier version of Obama. They also share something else: a personal connection to one of the worst massacres anywhere since World War II. In the late 1960s, Obama lived in Jakarta with his mother, in the years just after the killings of hundreds of thousands of suspected Indonesian Communists, a carefully orchestrated purge that brought the US-backed New Order regime to power; Jokowi grew up in poverty in Central Java, near a river that was filled with corpses in 1965. As it happens, a cache of intelligence documents declassified by the CIA this fall offers a new opportunity to revisit those events, and the US’s involvement in them. Moreover, Jokowi took office last year as the first president from outside the tight circle of oligarchs and political elite that flourished for decades under the New Order and even after its collapse in 1998. He promised to bring open, pluralist rule to Indonesia’s 250 million people, who are spread across 17,000 islands and who make up the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. Many hoped Jokowi’s reforms would include a full reckoning with the fifty-year-old killings. The question is whether Obama is prepared to support Jokowi, whose troubled administration faces stiff resistance to addressing what happened in 1965. The Indonesian massacre was a critical moment in the cold war. [Indonesia] [Massacre]
• U.S. POLICY IN NORTH AFRICA
  Statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee A Testimony by: Haim Malka Deputy Director and Senior Fellow, Middle East Program Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) November 4, 2015 419 Dirksen Senate Office Buildi [US North Africa policy] [Libya] [Agency]
• Racism? By whom? This video of Texas cops stopping a black professor is a racial ‘Rorschach test’
  By Michael E. Miller November 4 at 5:21 AM ? Dashcam video shows two Corinth, Texas, police officers stop and question University of North Texas journalism dean Dorothy Bland on Oct. 24 while she was exercising in her neighborhood. (Corinth Police Department) University of North Texas professor Dorothy Bland was walking around Corinth, her affluent Dallas suburb, on Oct. 14 when she was stopped by police. Bland, who is African American, had been exercising in the street. The officers, who are both white, asked her to walk on the opposite side so she could see traffic or, even better, to use the sidewalk. Roughly three minutes later, she was on her way. The short and seemingly simple interaction has proved anything but, however. Several days later, Bland, who is the dean of UNT’s Mayborn School of Journalism, wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News claiming that she had been racially profiled. “Walking while black is a crime in many jurisdictions,” she wrote. “May God have mercy on our nation.” Corinth police responded by releasing the officers’ dashcam video of the interaction and asserting that Bland had turned a “cordial” stop into a “racial issue.” “If we didn’t have the video, these officers would have serious allegations against them,” Police Chief Debra Walthall told Fox News. “Every white officer that stops an African American does not constitute racial profiling.” Now it is Bland, not the officers, who is facing pressure as more than 3,500 people have signed a petition urging UNT to fire her. Although disciplinary action against either the professor or the police officers appears unlikely, the video is generating a heated debate about law enforcement and race relations in the United States. Like Bland, many Americans see the stop as a subtle but significant instance of racial prejudice by police. “If officers were concerned only about Bland’s safety and her impeding traffic, why did they ask her for her ID? Why did they need her birth date? Why did they radio in a ‘name check’?” Dallas Morning News writer Leona Allen, who is African American, said in an opinion piece. “We’re not fools,” Allen added. “Sure looks like they’re calling to check to see if she had outstanding warrants.” Many others were equally angry — but with Bland. [Racism]
• Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO
  Sarah Boseley, health editor Monday 21 April 2003 09.33 The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday. The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby. In a letter to Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO's director general, the Sugar Association says it will "exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature" of the WHO's report on diet and nutrition, including challenging its $406m (£260m) funding from the US. The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar. [Corporate power] [UNUS] [Health]
• The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual: Part two
  A recipe for total war and military dictatorship By Tom Carter 4 November 2015 This is the second of four articles analyzing the new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual. The first article was posted November 3. The most menacing passages of the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual concern its relationship to other areas of law. According to the manual, the law of war is separate from and supersedes all other bodies of law, including international human rights treaties and the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights. This is nothing less than a formula for martial law, military dictatorship and the suspension of the Constitution. Citing a legal treatise entitled “Military Law and Precedents,” the manual states that the law of war can supersede the Constitution: “‘On the actual theatre of military operations,’ as is remarked by a learned judge, ‘the ordinary laws of the land are superseded by the laws of war. The jurisdiction of the civil magistrate is there suspended, and military authority and force are substituted.’ Finding indeed its original authority in the war powers of Congress and the Executive, and thus constitutional in its source, the Law of War may, in its exercise, substantially supersede for the time even the Constitution itself …” (p. 10, emphasis added). With the entire world declared to be the “battlefield” in the “war on terror,” this is a formula for the Pentagon to impose military dictatorship on all of Planet Earth [Pentagon] [Legality]
• Northeast Eurasia as Historical Center: Exploration of a Joint Frontier
  The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue. 43, No. 1, November 2, 2015 Nianshen Song Summary: In this paper I use a transborder lens to investigate the region encompassed by the Russian Far East, northeast China, eastern Mongolia, northern Korea, and the Sea of Japan. We need to transcend the framework of nation-states and restore the region’s historical agency in a broader geographic, geopolitical, and economic context. We also need to view the socioeconomic development of the area in terms of a protracted process in which various indigenous groups played crucial roles. Recognizing the historical dynamic of this region helps to reconceptualize its present and future development. Key Words: Northeast Eurasia, Russian Far East, the greater Amur River region, Hunchun, Greater Tumen Initiative (GTI) Since 2000, Russia has increasingly turned its gaze eastward emphasizing the economic potential of Siberia and the Far East. From 2014, international tensions in the wake of the Ukraine crisis have further reinforced Russia’s “pivot to Asia,” a policy that emphasizes cooperation between its Far East and the East Asian countries.1 This move brought world attention to the northeast part of the Eurasian continent, a long overlooked region that is a substantial and conceptual “frontier” for both Russia and Asia.2 This paper focuses on the transborder region encompassed by the Russian Far East, northeast China, eastern Mongolia, northern Korea, and the Sea of Japan. I call it a “joint frontier” in that it is viewed as an outer and peripheral region in political, economic, and social terms by all surrounding nation states. To understand the historical dynamics of this frontier, I argue, we should view it not as an isolated and divided space at the margins of nation states but restore its historical agency in a broader geographic, geopolitical, and economic context. We also need to view the socioeconomic transformation of the area as a process encompassing at least 500 years, if not more, with multiple indigenous groups, state and nonstate actors alike, playing crucial roles in local development and interchanges. Realizing the historical dynamic of this region will help us reconsider its contemporary and future development and its place in the geopolitics of the wider region. Boundaries and Nation-Centered Narratives The geographic area I am focusing on encompasses the Russian Far East (including Sakhalin Island), northeast China, eastern Mongolia, northern Korea, and the Japanese island of Hokkaido. We have no common name to refer to this vast borderland in the northeastern part of the Eurasian Continent. The modern phrase “Far East,” which was popularly used before the 1960s, typically referred to Eastern Asia (including northeast Asia and sometimes southeast Asia). Today, “Far East” as a fixed geopolitical term is arguably only officially used in Russia (Dal’niy Vostok), referring to the eastern territory comprising the Far Eastern Federal District. Since Russia is not normally considered an Asian nation, few scholars discuss the Russian Far East within the framework of Asia (and vice versa).3 By the same token, none of the indigenous terms used in Asian countries captures this vast land stretching from the Tumen River region all the way to the Chukchi Peninsula. [Northeast Asia] [History]
• Exclusive: Chemical weapons used by rebels in Syria - sources
  The Hague | By Anthony Deutsch Chemical weapons experts have determined that mustard gas was used in a Syrian town where Islamic State insurgents were battling another rebel group, according to a report by an international watchdog seen by Reuters. A confidential Oct. 29 report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a summary of which was shown to Reuters, concluded "with the utmost confidence that at least two people were exposed to sulfur mustard" in the town of Marea, north of Aleppo, on Aug. 21. "It is very likely that the effects of sulfur mustard resulted in the death of a baby," it said. [cbw] [Syria] [Jihadist]
• After vowing to end two wars, Obama may leave three behind
  By Greg Jaffe October 31 President Obama’s decision to expand the U.S. war effort in Iraq and Syria is a reflection of the conflicting pressures on a commander in chief who doubts that military force alone can end the conflicts in those countries, but who also feels compelled to act in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe and a growing threat to the United States. The president on Friday said that he was sending about 50 Special Operations troops to northern Syria to work with Kurdish and Arab fighters battling the Islamic State. The deployment, though small, marks the first full-time deployment of U.S. forces to the dangerous and chaotic country. The troops will be accompanied by more U.S. attack planes, based across the border in Turkey, and plans for more joint raids — led by Iraqi counterterrorism forces — to capture and kill Islamic State leaders. The troops, planes and plans for more raids represent an “intensification” of the president’s existing strategy, said senior administration officials. Few of those officials, however, suggested that the moves would be enough to break open the stalemated conflict or produce sudden battlefield gains. “This is a very complex battle space, and we’re not directly involved in the way we’ve been in the past,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. [US Middle East policy] [Obama]
• Seeking America’s ‘lost’ greatness and finding Trump most appealing
  By Marc Fisher October 31 The way Joe McCoy sees it, the last time America was great was when Ronald Reagan was president, when people played by the rules. No, it was in the ’70s, Holly Martin says, when you could depend on Americans to work hard. No, to find true American greatness, Steve Trivett contends, you need to go back to before the Vietnam War, “when you could still own a home and have a good job even if you didn’t have a college education.” Even if they don’t have “Make America Great Again” campaign caps, Donald Trump’s supporters easily recite the signature slogan of the real estate developer’s insurgent presidential bid. And even if they don’t agree on exactly why the country lost its way, they do accept — give or take a few degrees of hyperbole — Trump’s contention that the United States has become, as he has put it, “an economic wasteland” that is “committing cultural suicide.” The premise behind “Make America Great Again” is that the country is no longer great. It can be great again, and the campaign has a certain can-do billionaire in mind as the guy to make that happen, but at the moment, the leading contender for the nomination of the party that regularly touts the notion of American exceptionalism is arguing that the country ain’t what it used to be. Interviews with Trump supporters across the country find a profusion of perspectives on how and when America lost its mojo; what bonds them is a sense of frustration so abiding that they’re willing to take a chance on a man they readily admit is anything but presidential, at least the way the term has historically been defined. [Decline] [Trump]
• How the Pentagon spent $43 million on a single gas station
  By Christian Davenport November 2 at 11:55 AM The compressed natural gas station in Afghanistan that cost $43 million. (Source: SIGAR) John Sopko’s team of investigators has uncovered all kinds of wasteful spending in Afghanistan through its work as a U.S. government watchdog. Now the group has uncovered a $43 million gas station, which Sopko calls “gratuitous and extreme”—and possibly criminal. In a scathing report, Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, wrote that a similar compressed natural gas station in Pakistan cost $500,000, or about $306,000 at current exchange rates, meaning the Afghanistan station cost 140 times as much. He wrote that the Pentagon’s program had “several troubling aspects,” including $30 million in overhead costs, and the lack of a feasibility study before the project began. Sopko said that that the Pentagon essentially shut down when pressed about the program, saying: “One of the most troubling aspects of this project is that the Department of Defense claims that it is unable to provide and explanation for the high cost of the project or to answer any other questions concerning its planning, implementation or outcome.” The department that was in charge of it, the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations, has closed and so the Pentagon said it couldn’t comment on its activities, Sopko’s letter said. He wrote that he found it “both shocking and incredible that DOD asserts that it no longer has any knowledge about TFBSO, an $800 million program that reported directly to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and only shut down a little over six months ago.” [Pentagon] [Incompetence] [Corruption] [Bizarre]
• A reporter remembers Ahmad Chalabi, the man who never ruled Iraq
  Highlights Perhaps no one is more responsible for persuading the U.S. to invade Iraq Colorful figure, he died Tuesday of a heart attack at his Baghdad home ‘One of the greatest con men of modern times’ By Hannah Allam WASHINGTON — The day after Christmas in 2006, Iraq War mastermind Ahmad Chalabi and I were at his compound in Baghdad squabbling over which insurgents were nastier: Sunni Muslim jihadists who blew up markets full of civilians or Shiite Muslim militiamen who were known for torturing innocents to death with power drills? I was McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau chief and had known Chalabi for years. We frequently had such debates, and it was easy to back down against such a formidable personality, but this time I held firm in my argument that the militants were equally dangerous because of their shared habit of slaughtering civilians. He disagreed. “I’ll believe that when Shiites start chopping off heads!” said Chalabi, a secular Shiite [Iraq] [Client] [Chalabi]
• Charlatan or hero: Ahmed Chalabi’s death and the lessons of Iraq
  By Greg Jaffe November 3 at 7:12 PM ? Few figures have been more loved and loathed in Washington than Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi expatriate who charmed American politicians and built the case for the war in Iraq. His death in Baghdad at age 71 has laid bare the deep divisions that remain regarding the causes of the U.S. failure there, the lessons that have yet to be learned from it and the raw anger it still provokes. To a handful of true believers, Chalabi remains a battle-tested hero who toppled a dictator and sought to bring Western-style democracy to the Middle East. “I was at his house for hours and hours,” said Richard Perle, a former head of the Defense Policy Board in the George W. Bush administration and one of the architects of the Iraq war. “We talked about art, we talked about history, we talked about poetry. Did he share our values? You’re damn right he did.” Those who opposed the invasion describe Chalabi as a charlatan who deceived the world’s most powerful nation into launching a disastrous war at a cost of trillions of dollars and nearly 5,000 American lives. “He was a scam artist who conned many members of Congress, an administration, the neocons and some members of the military,” said Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who served as commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East. “We tried to warn people, but it fell on deaf ears, and they vilified us as messengers. We all paid the price.” [Iraq] [Client] [Chalabi]
• Six Reasons Why China and Russia Are Catching Up with the U.S. Military
  Why the Gap In Military Superiority Is Closing By Washington's Blog Global Research, October 29, 2015 Washington's Blog 28 October 2015 China and Russia are still behind the U.S. militarily. But they are both showing surprising breakthroughs that – sometime down the road in the future – could threaten U.S. hegemony. The Washington Times reported last month: Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on Wednesday warned Russia and China are quickly closing the military technology gap with the U.S. as inconsistent military budgets and slower innovation threaten America’s lead in the military world. *** “It’s evident that nations like Russia and China have been pursuing military modernization programs to close the technology gap with the United States,” he continued. “They’re developing platforms designed to thwart our traditional advantages of power projection and freedom of movement. They’re developing and fielding new and advanced aircraft and ballistic, cruise, anti-ship and anti-air missiles that are longer-range and more accurate.” The SecDef issued this warning before Russia stunned the U.S. with its long-range missile and electronic communications-jamming capacities. How could this be happening, when U.S. military spending dwarfs that from the rest of the world? There are six reasons … [Military balance]
• They freed a Syrian town from ISIS. Now they have to govern it.
  By Liz Sly October 30 at 4:12 PM ? A cage in which Islamic State militants temporarily held people caught smoking while the militants held control of Tal Abyad, in Raqqa province. (Alice Martins/For The Washington Post) TAL ABYAD, Syria — When Islamic State fighters fled this northern Syrian town in June, they took with them the electricity generators, the water pumps, the hospital equipment and pretty much everything else that had helped sustain the semblance that they ran a functioning state. They left behind their graffiti, their instruments of torture, the block of wood on which they beheaded their victims, the cage in which they punished smokers — and a community riven with suspicion and distrust. Today, Tal Abyad is a tense and troubled place. Its new Kurdish masters are seeking to assert their control over a mixed town that, at least until recently, had an Arab majority — some of whom were not entirely unhappy to be governed by the Islamic State. “As long as you didn’t bother them, they didn’t bother you,” said Sarkis Kaorkian, 60, who is one of the town’s few Christians who remained behind and is now deeply relieved the Islamic State is gone. He claims he drank and smoked his way through the group’s 17-month rule by staying out of their way and paying on time the $100 tax, or jizya, leveled twice a year on Christian residents. These days, Islamic State sympathies abound among local Arabs in the town, say residents who close up their shops by nightfall, just in case. The assassination of a local imam outside his mosque this month reinforced their concerns. [Plans by U.S. to capture Islamic State’s capital already go awry] Occasional suicide bombings keep Tal Abyad on edge, and recent attacks by Turkey underscore the kind of complications likely to arise as the U.S.-led effort to defeat the Islamic State liberates territory in Iraq and Syria — absent a wider settlement to the many rivalries fueling the region’s wars. [ISIS] [Kurds] [US Syria policy]
• Why were no Syrians invited to the peace talks in Vienna?
  Highlights The United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, even Iran were in Vienna on Friday The Syrian opposition, and the government, both were not invited For all the talk, still unclear who would replace Assad – if he were to go Nineteen foreign ministers and other senior dignitaries attended U.N.-sponsored talks on Syria Friday. Missing: anyone from Syria. By Hannah Allam Washington — Secretary of State John Kerry and other top international diplomats were just sitting down to dinner in Istanbul after a long day of talks on the war in Syria when the then-leader of the main Syrian opposition coalition decided to make his stand. Ahmed Moaz Khatib rose before the dinner guests – members of the so-called Friends of Syria group – and declared that he couldn’t eat because all he could see was the blood of his compatriots, according to diplomats who were present as well as his own account of that evening in April 2013. Khatib accused the deal makers in the room of selling out Syrians’ fight against the government of President Bashar Assad. He resigned on the spot and stormed out of the dining hall, dealing one more blow – a big one – to the Obama administration’s search for reliable partners in the conflict. “Kerry said, ‘These people are not serious,’” recalled a Western diplomat who witnessed the scene and who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “He said, ‘I’m done.’ He was just done with them.” [US Syria policy]

• The International Dictatorship of the United States, Its Friends (Amnesty International, ISIS and the Nusra Front) and Enemies (Hassan Nasrallah, Cuba and Ana Montes)
  October 25, 2015 By Stephen Gowans In a speech delivered in the southern suburbs of Beirut on October 23, 2015, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, a resistance organization rooted in Lebanon’s Shia community, presented a description of US imperialism that largely comports with that of secular leftwing anti-imperialists in the West. Hezbollah was established in the early 1980s to end Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. With Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, and a subsequent Israeli incursion in 2006 repulsed by Hezbollah fighters, the resistance organization remains on the qui vive against future Israeli aggressions. It is now assisting the Syrian Arab Army in its death struggle against extreme sectarian Sunni Islamists, among them ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra. These al-Qaeda offshoots pose an existential threat to the Shia community in Lebanon, explaining why Hezbollah has chosen to enter the conflict. [Imperialism] [Amnesty International]
• IS has access to chemical warfare agents production — Russian Foreign Ministry
  Russian Politics & Diplomacy October 29, 10:01 UTC+3 The director of Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for non-proliferation and arms control called to investigate the use of chemical warfare agents in Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State terrorists ? © AP Photo/Petros Karadjias MOSCOW, October 29. /TASS/. The Islamic State terrorist group has taken possession of production of chemical warfare agents, Director of Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for non-proliferation and arms control Mikhail Ulyanov told TASS on Thursday. Ulyanov called to investigate the use of chemical warfare agents in Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State terrorists. "In the IS case, this is already not only the use of chlorine for military purposes, what Damascus is usually accused of, although there has been no proof yet," Mikhail Ulyanov said. "There are facts against the IS on the use of real chemical weapons - mustard agent, and possibly, lewisite the production of which demands use of rather complex technologies," the diplomat said. All data show that the IS group has indeed gained access to technologies of manufacturing chemical weapons, Ulyanov said. "A lot of facts of use of chemical weapons on the territory of Syria and Iraq by the IS gunmen have been already registered," he said. The diplomat said he regrets that the UN Security Council has not so far condemned these facts "first of all due to the position of our Western partners." Russia has repeatedly insisted on the respective response. [ISIS] [cbw] [UNUS]
• Sayyed Nasrallah : “We All Bear Responsibility of Facing Today’s ‘Soft War'”
  Al-Manar 16-10-2015 Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah said on Friday that the Middle-eastern region has been subjected to a multi-phase soft war which everyone of this area must shoulder the responsibility to face it. During his speech on the third eve of Muharram Hijri month, Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that the major cause of the soft war is the evolution of communication means that opens the opportunity for such an attack more than any time ever. “This soft war works in accordance with several stages regarding the general responsibility and the general affairs,” his eminence said. Sayyed Nasrallah elaborated that in the first stage, the enemies of the region started to exploit the geographical demarcation, by stressing that every national citizen should only tackle his country’s affair without interfering in other countries’, he elaborated. “This stage greatly managed to achieve its goal in the Arab and Muslim world, with the help of difficulties, frustration, limitations, and the feel of disability to obtain victory. This is how every state and every people started to think of themselves only.” [Softwar]
• New Strategic Bomber Contract Awarded After Millions Of Dollars Worth Of Lobbying
  The winning contractor has put money into the campaigns of 224 congressmen who control defense spending. Center for Public Integrity By Alexander Cohen Posted: 10/28/2015 02:06 PM EDT BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES The U.S. Air Force has awarded an initial $21.4 billion contract for a new stealth bomber to be equipped with nuclear weapons, following years of ardent lobbying and generous campaign donations by the victorious military contractor, Northrop Grumman, to 224 key members of Congress. [MISCOM]
• What Comes After Empire?
  Let's say the U.S. actually curbed its military adventurism, reeled in the Pentagon budget, and closed its global network of bases. Then what? By John Feffer, October 28, 2015. Let’s say the car stops and we get our teeth around the tire. Let’s say that we bite down hard enough to let out all the air from the U.S. empire. Now what? Those of us who have campaigned for a radical reduction of the U.S. military footprint overseas, for a major scaling back of U.S. interventionist capabilities, and for a shift of Pentagon funding toward necessary improvements on the home front have spent so much time detailing our objections to the status quo that we don’t have much time left over to consider what would happen if we succeed. Sure, it’s easy enough to talk about the distribution of the surplus here in the United States. We all have our favorite human needs to fund (infrastructure, education, green energy projects). And certainly some funds would be left over to address global problems as well. All of that falls into the category of “doing good.” The much more challenging issue is dealing with the other part of foreign policy: “countering bad.” If the United States were to close all of its military bases tomorrow, withdraw its troops and Special Forces from the 130-plus countries where they’ve been operating, and even stop arms exports, bad things would still happen around the world. Wars would still take place. Governments would still repress their citizens. And countries would still violate each other’s sovereignty. Those of a more isolationist bent will argue: It’s none of our business, and the United States usually ends up aggravating the problems we swoop in to solve. The usual progressive response is: Strengthen international institutions and empower civil society organizations. These answers contain some necessary insights, but they’re not sufficient. And because these alternatives are not sufficient, other options have gained an unacceptable credibility. [Imperialism] [Liberal]
• Examples of U.S. Foreign Policy Dysfunction
  by Rick Sterling If the U.S. is to ever change its foreign policy based on dominance and aggression to a foreign policy based on diplomacy and respect for international law, there needs to be foundation of realistic assessments. Foreign policy decisions need to be based on reality not fantasy and propaganda. Unfortunately, dysfunction, deception and propaganda extends across the spectrum from Congressional Republicans to Hillary Clinton to the White House to Bernie Sanders. The following are recent examples: Benghazi Hearings in Congress ignore important issues to focus on superficial. Congress recently held hearings on what happened in Benghazi Libya leading up to the death of Ambassador Stevens. The hearings focussed on what former Secy of State Clinton knew, when she knew it and whether she should have ordered more security. Before that, millions were spent exploring the email home server issue. Meanwhile the root cause of Stevens’ death and consequences of the US/Nato overthrow of the Gaddafi government have been ignored. The hearings were silent on the deaths of tens of thousands of Libyans, the eruption and expansion of terrorism within Libya and beyond and the massive numbers of refugees fleeing across the Meditarranean. Instead of evaluating the consequences of “regime change” in Libya, Congressional members focused on cheap political advantage. Mainstream media said nothing about the shallowness of the hearings; they were happy to report on political maneuvering and whether or not Clinton would lose her temper or be able to get “above the fray”. [Libya]
• New allies in northern Syria don’t seem to share U.S. goals
  Highlights Neither Kurdish YPG nor Arab Sanadid militia see Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa as a priority Sanadid leader instead sees dissolution of Saudi Arabia as a key goal Meanwhile, another Arab militia vows to take Raqqa but has been excluded by U.S. By Roy Gutman TEL ALO, Syria — After the failure of its $500 million program to stand up a Syrian volunteer force to battle Islamic State extremists, the Obama administration has begun an effort to enable Arab militias to fight alongside a Kurdish force that has gotten U.S. air support for the past year. The stated U.S. aim is to oust the Islamic State from its de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria. But if the Shammar tribal militia, the biggest in Hasaka province, is any example, many Arab forces on the ground have a different agenda. For that matter, so does the Kurdish People’s Protection Force, or YPG, which dominates this area and has worked closely with the United States since the siege last year of the border town of Kobani [US Syria policy] [Kurd] [Strategic incoherence}
• The Long War in Syria: The Trees, the Forest, and All the King’s Men
  By Anthony H. Cordesman Oct 1, 2015 Clichés are clichés, but sometimes it really is hard to see the forest for the trees. In the case of Syria, the “trees” include the UN debate between Obama and Putin over Syria and the fight against Islamic extremism, Russia’s sudden military intervention in Syria, the failure of the U.S. training and assist missions in both Syria and Iraq, and the developing scandal in USCENTCOM over exaggerated claims of success for the U.S.-led air campaign in Syria and Iraq. The most important “tree,” however, is trying to negotiate an end to the fighting from the outside, as if Assad was the key issue and as if it would be possible for some diplomatic elite or mix of power brokers to bring Syria back to some state of stability if only Assad would agree to leave and the United States and Russia could agree on how to approach the negotiations. Focusing on the Trees When the Forest is Burning The problem is that the “forest” is dying, burning, and occupied by four broad sets of fighters that have little reason to cooperate with any UN-led negotiating effort, outside agreement over Assad – with or without U.S. and Russian cooperation. To shift from one cliché to another, Syria presents far more problems than Humpty Dumpty. “All the king's horses and all the king's men” couldn’t put Syria back together by negotiating a solution from the outside even if there was one King instead of a divided mix of the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Iraq, the other states surrounding Syria, the Arabian Gulf states, Egypt, and France and the other interested European powers. It shouldn’t take a child’s nursery rhyme to point out the obvious –although it is one whose origins may date back to England’s civil wars and first appeared in print shortly after it became fully clear that there was no way English could ever bring the 13 colonies back under its control. To begin with, there is no equivalent of Humpty. [US Syria policy]
• The Arab Spring: Made in the USA
  Review of Ahmed Bensada's Book
  By Stuart Jeanne Bramhall Global Research, October 28, 2015 Dissident Voice 25 October 2015 Arabesque$: Enquête sur le rôle des États-Unis dans les révoltes arabes (Investigation into the US Role in the Arab Uprisings) is an update of Ahmed Bensaada’s 2011 book L’Arabesque Américaine. It concerns the US government role in instigating, funding and coordinating the Arab Spring “revolutions.” Most of this history has been carefully suppressed by the western media.The new book devotes much more attention to the personalities leading the 2011 uprisings. Some openly admitted to receiving CIA funding. Others had no idea because it was deliberately concealed from them. A few (in Egypt and Syria) were officially charged with espionage. In Egypt, seven sought refuge in the US embassy in Cairo and had to be evacuated by the State Department. arabesque-Democracy: America’s Biggest Export According to Bensaada, the MENA Arab Spring revolutions have four unique features in common: ?None were spontaneous – all required careful and lengthy (5+ years) planning, by the State Department, CIA pass through foundations, George Soros, and the pro-Israel lobby.1 ?All focused exclusively on removing reviled despots without replacing the autocratic power structure that kept them in power. ?No Arab Spring protests made any reference whatsoever to powerful anti-US sentiment over Palestine and Iraq. ?All the instigators of Arab Spring uprisings were middle class, well educated youth who mysteriously vanished after 2011. Nonviolent Regime Change Bensaada begins by introducing non-violent guru Gene Sharp (see The CIA and Nonviolence), his links with the Pentagon and US intelligence, and his role, as director of the Albert Einstein Institution, in the “color” revolutions.2in Eastern Europe and the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002.)) The US goal in the Arab Spring revolutions was to replace unpopular despotic dictators while taking care to maintain the autocratic US-friendly infrastructure that had brought them to power. All initially followed the nonviolent precepts Sharp outlines in his 1994 book From Dictatorship to Democracy. In Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US and their allies were clearly prepared to introduce paid mercenaries when their Sharpian “revolutions” failed to produce regime change. Follow the Money Relying mainly on Wikileaks cables and the websites of key CIA pass through foundations (which he reproduces in the appendix), Bensaada methodically lists every State Department conference and workshop the Arab Spring heroes attended, the dollar amounts spent on them by the State Department and key “democracy” promoting foundations3, the specific involvement of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Obama’s 2008 Internet campaign team in training Arab Spring cyperactivists in encryption technologies and social media skills, US embassy visits, and direct encounters with Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, Barack Obama and Serbian trainers from CANVAS (the CIA-backed organization that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000). Bensaada focuses most heavily on the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt. TheWashington Post has estimated approximately 10,000 Egyptians took part in NED and USAID training in social media and nonviolent organizing techniques. For me the most astonishing information in this chapter concerned the role of an Egyptian exile (a former Egyptian policeman named Omar Afifi Suleiman) in coordinating the Tahrir Square protests from his office in Washington DC. According to Wikileaks, NED paid Suleiman a yearly stipend of $200,000+ between 2008-2011. [NED] [Subversion] [Arab Spring] [US global strategy]
• Open Grave: Western Media Memory Hole Pre-Dug for Turkey
  Monday, October 26, 2015 Turkey would seem to have every element that makes the heart of an idealistic Western journo go pitty-pat: Democracy under attack, journalists getting detained and beaten up, fascism on the march, moderate, middle-class protesters getting shredded by Islamic suicide bombers with alleged government connivance, rampant skullduggery in the run-up to a crucial election on November 1, Turkish government backing ISIL and murdering Kurds in northern Iraq, the overall horror presided over by a sinister supervillain from a palace with the size and aesthetic of an Atlantic City casino… …add to that brave, eloquent and, most importantly, English-speaking local journalists desperate to get the word out. Whaddya get today with a Google search for Turkey? Turkey ‘shoot out with ISIS’ leaves police and suspects dead via the Beeb, with the Guardian, Reuters, ABC News & USA Today running the same story. This action, I suspect, was a PR op meant to deflect attention from Turkey’s “soft on ISIL” rep, solidified by the fact that one of the suicide bombers who been able to perpetrate the horror at the Ankara train station thanks to zero security provided by the Turkish police was the member of a “well-known” ISIL cell, “well known” because the cell had also harbored his brother, the suicide bomber who had killed 32 Kurdish activists at Suruc on July 20. [Turkey] [Erdogan] [Media]
• John Kerry Says Iran Is In on Syria Talks
  Officials: For first time, Iran invited to participate in international talks on Syria's future. Secretary of State John Kerry waves as he arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday to brief the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a closed session, on the Administration’s response to the Syrian conflict. Associated Press Oct. 27, 2015 | By Bradley Klapper and Matthew Lee, Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — Iran has been invited to participate for the first time in international talks over Syria's future, U.S. officials said Tuesday, a shift in strategy for the United States and its allies as they seek to halt the four-year civil war and eventually ease President Bashar Assad out of power. [US Syria policy] [Hubris]
• On Ex-Im Bank, GOP leadership allies launch rebellion of their own
  By Paul Kane October 27 at 8:34 AM ? A small but powerful band of House Republicans led a rebellion against party leadership this week — a near-constant theme of Speaker John A. Boehner’s tenure over the past five years. Except these rebels weren’t the usual 30 to 40 staunch conservatives who have agitated Boehner (R-Ohio) and helped prompt his decision a month ago to resign at the end of this week. This time an even larger bloc of Republicans who are reliable votes for the leadership team linked arms with Democrats for a highly unusual bid to revive an export-subsidy agency that conservatives shut down over the summer. Seething at the expiration of the Export-Import Bank, an agency once largely supported by pro-business conservatives, several dozen Republicans executed a rarely used procedure to force a vote to reopen the bank with some modest reforms. Once the mainstream conservatives got the legislation to a final vote, the far-right flank was routed as a majority of Republicans supported renewal of the bank, which passed on a vote of 313 to 118. “The passage of this bill marks a historic day in the House. This is a win for small businesses, hardworking Americans and for rank and file Members who want to get things done for their constituents,” Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher (Tenn.), the lead Republican pushing to force the vote, said in a statement. During debate over the past two days, Fincher complained that the Ex-Im Bank, which facilitates trade by guaranteeing new sales by U.S. corporations to overseas clients, had fallen prey to the ideological fever that has left the House’s leadership in limbo for a month. [Governance] [Trade] [Decline] [Tea Party]
• Obama's Gotten The U.S. Stuck In Yemen. Is He Looking For A Way Out?
  More than 2,500 civilian deaths later, the White House is being asked to account for the war it's supporting. Akbar Shahid Ahmed Foreign Affairs Reporter, The Huffington Post WASHINGTON -- Over the past six months, the Obama administration has quietly embroiled the U.S. in a Middle Eastern war that has left more than 20 million people in need of humanitarian aid and killed at least 5,000. U.S.-backed Sunni Arab nations, led by Saudi Arabia, have bombed weddings, left families to starve and looked the other way as an al Qaeda affiliate has used the confusion to seize significant territory. Civilian casualties are growing daily. The White House won't admit that the U.S. is even "in" Yemen. But it's refueling the planes bombing the country and providing intelligence to the Sunni states running the Yemen campaign. [US middle East Policy] [Saudi Arabia] [Yemen]
• United Nations votes 191-2 to condemn U.S. embargo against Cuba
  U.S. [and Israel] once again votes against resolution First vote on resolution since U.S., Cuba reestablished diplomatic ties By Mimi Whitefield In the first United Nations vote on a resolution condemning the U.S. embargo against Cuba since the two countries renewed diplomatic ties, the U.N. voted 191-2 in favor of the condemnation. The only drama was how the United States would vote. In its statement, the United States said that it couldn’t support the resolution because it failed to take into account “the significant steps in the spirit of engagement” undertaken by the United States, and it was disappointed that Cuba had chosen to bring forth a resolution “almost identical” to those of years past. [Cuba] [Sanctions cost]
• Nice No More: The End of the German Fairytale
  A Commentary By Markus Feldenkirchen REUTERS The shine has come off Franz Beckenbauer's halo The World Cup scandal brought to light by SPIEGEL serves as a reminder that Germany is nowhere near as perfect as it had started to look -- ironically, around the time of that historic "fairytale summer. The World Cup in the summer of 2006 was a turning point in German history. The country that brought the world the Holocaust had already taken many successful steps toward full rehabilitation -- it had matured into a stabile democracy and achieved peaceful reunification. Then, even more remarkably, Germany became something that might have been unimaginable to many: likeable. It organized a perfect football tournament and showed a warm and cosmopolitan side the world had never seen before. The German national team under then-coach Jürgen Klinsmann were even gracious in defeat to the Italians, who took the trophy home. The World Cup appeared to cement Germany's status as the kind of friendly country that people can identify with In Germany, people described the 2006 World Cup as the "fairytale summer." What followed was almost even more magical. Germany's image in the world continued to improve (with the exception, of course, of the Greek crisis). It wasn't just the Americans who found themselves inspired by the "German model" either -- it felt like the whole world had suddenly become enamored with Germany's way of doing things. With its economic power and its people, Germany joined the club of countries viewed as being good for the world. [FIFA] [Corruption] [Country image]
• Obama officials at odds over Saudi airstrikes
  As civilian casualties mount in Yemen, some worry the U.S. is abetting war crimes. By Nahal Toosi 10/26/15 06:28 PM EDT Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes in Yemen, conducted with U.S. assistance, are alleged to have killed at least 1,500 civilians, dividing members of the Obama administration over whether the U.S. risks being accused of abetting war crimes in a bombing campaign that could ultimately strengthen Islamist militants. Sources inside the administration say they are struggling to keep in check the opposing sides in Yemen, one of the clearest examples of the intensifying Saudi-Iran proxy war in the Middle East. But even as reports of civilian suffering and terrorist gains pile up, U.S. officials believe that reducing American support for the Saudis could make the situation even worse. The White House does not want to anger Saudi Arabia, a vital, oil-rich ally already unhappy with President Barack Obama’s decision to pursue a nuclear deal with Iran. At the same time, what many hoped would be a short Saudi-led campaign against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who overthrew Yemen’s government, is now entering its eighth month with no end in sight [US Middle East policy] [Hypocrisy] [Saudi Arabia] [False balance]
• From King Stork to King Log: America’s Negative Message Overseas
  By Anthony H. Cordesman Oct 26, 2015 There are so many different views of America overseas that any effort to generalize is dangerous, and at least partially misleading. It would be equally dangerous, however, to ignore the growing level of criticism of U.S. strategy, the degree to which Russia and other critics of the United States have made gains at the expense of the United States, and the extent to which both the Bush and Obama Administrations have contributed to a steadily more negative view of U.S. power, influence, and competence. Americans are used to listening largely to themselves, and to American criticism of America. [Country image] [Myopia]
• In the Syrian Deadlands
  Charles Glass October 22, 2015 Issue glass_1-102215.jpg A Syrian man carrying his daughters across rubble after a barrel bomb attack on the rebel-held neighborhood of Kalasa in Aleppo, September 2015 Folk memories endure, mothers’ and grandmothers’ sagas trumping documents in neglected archives. What will Syria’s youth, when they are old, tell their children? All will have stories of cowering in their flimsy houses while bombs fell, of the deadening existence of refugee camps, or of escapes through treacherous seas and perilous highways to uncertain lives in strange lands. My maternal grandmother left Mount Lebanon, then part of Syria, as a child in the late nineteenth century during a confrontation between the Christians of her village and their Ottoman rulers. Although her father was killed a few months before she was born, she told me many times how he faced Turkish troops on horseback as if she had witnessed it. I don’t know what really happened; but her stories, including of a river that was so cold it could crack a watermelon in two, remain undeniable truths to her descendants. Syrians today are enduring a brutal, unending ordeal that reenacts the drama of their ancestors during a prior war exactly one century ago that their families, novelists, and poets preserved for them [Syria] [False balance] [Agency]
• The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government
  Review of David Talbot’s book By Prof. Edward Curtin Global Research, October 26, 2015 This is a bold and profoundly important book, not only for the portrait of the evil spymaster Allen Dulles, but even more so for its examination of the legacy he spawned – the creation of a cabal hidden behind the public face of the United States government that secretly runs the country today on behalf of wealthy elites. The psychopathic Allen Dulles was the enforcer for this group, called “the power elite” by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. In recent years, especially since September 11, 2001, as its power has expanded, it has been given different names – the deep state, the national security state, deep politics,etc. – but that has not diminished its power one jot. Like a patient who goes to a doctor seeking a label for vague yet disturbing symptoms, people may feel relief from the naming, but the dis-ease continues until the root cause is eliminated. Aye, there’s the rub! [CIA]
• Deaths of Iranian generals in Syria a sign of commitment to Assad
  Highlights U.S. official: At least six Iranian generals have been killed in Syria, 3 in October Combat losses show depth of Iran’s effort to defend Syrian government For comparison: Only 1 American general has died in combat in 40 years The introduction of Russian aircraft into Syria has made coordination of pro-Syria fighting groups even more important. That job has fallen to Iranian generals, six of whom have been killed in combat in Syria. The introduction of Russian aircraft into Syria has made coordination of pro-Syria fighting groups even more important. That job has fallen to Iranian generals, six of whom have been killed in combat in Syria. Vladimir Isachenkov - AP By Jonathan S. Landay WASHINGTON — Presiding over a ceremony mourning the loss of his country’s top commander in Syria, Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Deqhan vowed the total extermination of the Sunni Muslim rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad. “We are witnessing the start of new developments in Syria (that) will pave the way for the full annihilation of the Takfiri groups,” Deqhan declared at the Oct. 14 memorial for the late Brig. Gen. Hossein Hamadani, according to the semi-official FARS news agency. Takfiri is a reference to radical Sunni groups. It wasn’t the first such funeral, and it likely won’t be the last. At least six generals from the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have been killed in Syria since 2013, according to an official of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Three of those, including Hamadani, who was killed Oct.9 in the embattled northern city of Aleppo, have died since the beginning of the month. A seventh Revolutionary Guard general was killed by an Islamic State sniper in Iraq last year. Experts say the deaths of so many senior officers in Syria underscore the Iranian commitment to preserving Assad’s government in a “rump” Syria that includes most of the country’s major cities and the coastal province of Latakia, the traditional center of Assad’s religious sect, the Alawites.
  It also is a reflection of the difference between Iran’s fighting tactics and those of Western militaries, whose senior officers usually direct operations from heavily protected command centers far in the rear. [Iran] [Syria] [US Military]
• Clinton, back in the Benghazi hot seat, withstands Republicans’ grilling
  By Anne Gearan, Karen Tumulty and Elise Viebeck October 22 at 9:26 PM ? Hillary Rodham Clinton easily parried barbed Republican questioning Thursday about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, emerging unscathed from a high-stakes congressional hearing with a smooth and sometimes poignant account of her role in the event that has loomed as among her largest political liabilities. Just over a year before the 2016 general election, the long-anticipated showdown was suffused with presidential politics — though neither Clinton nor members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi mentioned her position at the top of the Democratic field. Both she and her Republican questioners claimed the high ground, insisting that they were focused on learning what went wrong when militants overran two U.S. compounds in the restive Libyan city in September 2012, just months before Clinton left office as secretary of state. [Hillary Clinton] [Libya] [Diversion]
• What the Army’s top-secret commando unit Delta Force is doing back in Iraq
  Wesley Morgan October 23 at 1:31 PM Islamic State group’s flag is seen in an area after Kurdish troops known as peshmerga regained control of some villages west of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo) This morning, the Pentagon released the name of the first American serviceman to die in battle in the latest round of U.S. military involvement in Iraq: Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, age 39, killed during a raid by Kurdish and American commandos on an Islamic State prison near the town of Hawija that reportedly freed seventy hostages who were soon to be executed. Accompanying Wheeler’s name and age in the Pentagon’s release was a vague description of his unit: “Headquarters U.S. Army Special Operations Command.” That phrase is a euphemism, trotted out for the twelfth time since 2003 to describe a soldier killed in Iraq. The official biographies of the soldiers described in this way follow a pattern: They are old for combat soldiers, usually in their thirties. They are veterans of the Army’s elite special operations units, the Green Berets or, in Wheeler’s case, the 75th Ranger Regiment. And they die in known insurgent hotbeds: Qaim, Ramadi, and yesterday, Hawija. They are the fallen of the Army’s top-secret counterterrorist commando unit, Delta Force. [Special forces] [Media]
• Netanyahu says a Palestinian gave Hitler the idea for the Holocaust
  In an Oct. 20 speech to the World Zionist Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “mufti of Jerusalem,” Haj Amin al-Husseini, gave Adolf Hitler the idea to exterminate Jews during World War II. Netanyahu has come under fierce criticism from politicians and historians for the statement. (YouTube/IsraeliPM) By William Booth October 21 at 4:41 PM ? JERUSALEM — There is no Israeli orator tougher and more pugnacious than Benjamin Netanyahu, but even his allies expressed bewilderment — and shock — Wednesday after the prime minister asserted that a Palestinian religious leader gave Adolf Hitler the idea to annihilate the Jews. In a speech here Tuesday evening, Netanyahu sought to explain the surge in violence in Israel and the West Bank by reaching for historical antecedents. He said that Jews living in what was then British Palestine faced many attacks in 1920, 1921 and 1929 — all instigated by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who allied himself with the Nazis during World War II. Then Netanyahu dropped his bombshell. He said: “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.’ ” Netanyahu, the son of a historian, said the mufti played “a central role in fomenting the Final Solution,” as the Nazis termed their plan to exterminate the Jews. The remarks were made in a speech to the World Zionist Congress about “the 10 big lies” told by Palestinians and their backers. As supporters of the Israeli leader wondered what he was doing, his critics said that his claims were outrageous enough to give cover to Holocaust deniers. [Netanyahu] [Bizarre] [Holocaust]
• Why Should the U.S. Accept Syrian Refugees? Because It Helped Displace Them.
  Washington is one of the most active players in Syria's civil war, but it's accepted effectively 0 percent of the conflict's refugees. By Laith Shakir, October 18, 2015. When a viral photo of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi — a Kurdish boy who drowned while fleeing the ongoing civil war in Syria — captivated international audiences this summer, it became a symbol for the international community’s failure to address the millions of Syrians displaced by the country’s civil war. This crisis did not emerge in a vacuum. For nearly five years now, the UN’s refugee agency has warned of impending disaster, calling on rich countries to increase their support for the agency’s vastly underfunded humanitarian appeals — which, as of mid-October, had raised just 43 percent of the funds necessary to supply aid to Syrian refugees. The global failure to provide for Syria’s refugees is often cast as a humanitarian one — particularly in Europe, where hundreds of thousands have arrived in recent months. And it is. But it also reflects a greater failure by the parties fueling the conflict to accept the inevitable consequences of their own intervention in the region. That’s especially true for the United States, which has accepted scarcely 1,500 of the more than 4 million Syrians who’ve fled the country, even as Washington has steadily deepened its own participation in the war. The United States is far from the biggest perpetrator of human rights abuses in Syria. That particular “distinction” goes to the Assad regime, whose forces, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, have killed more civilians than every other armed group in the country combined. Though rebel groups and the Islamic State also bear immediate responsibility for this catastrophe, 70 percent of Syrian refugees surveyed in Germany recently reported fleeing specifically because of Assad’s regime. [Refugee] [Liberal] [Agency]
• U.S. plans to capture the Islamic State’s capital already go awry
  By Liz Sly October 22 at 12:37 PM Members of a Syrian armed group hold positions in the frontline against the Islamic State group outside Ain Issa, in the countryside of Raqqa province. (Alice Martins/The Washington Post) AIN ISSA, Syria — In this abandoned desert town on the front line of the war against the Islamic State in Raqqa, local fighters are fired up by announcements in Washington that the militants’ self-proclaimed capital is to be the next focus of the war. But there is still no sign of the help the United States has delivered ostensibly for the use of the Arab groups fighting the Islamic State, nor is there any indication it will imminently arrive, calling into question whether there can be an offensive to capture Raqqa anytime soon. Fifty tons of ammunition air-dropped by the U.S. military last week and intended for Arab groups has instead been claimed by the overall command of the Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG, which is fighting alongside Arab units but overwhelmingly dominates their uneasy alliance, according to Kurdish and Arab commanders. [US Syria policy] [Kurd] [Turkey] [Strategic incoherence]
• What If They Gave a War and Everyone Came?
  What Could Possibly Go Wrong (October 2015 Edition) By Peter Van Buren What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq in 2003? How would things be different in the Middle East today? Was Iraq, in the words of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the "worst foreign policy blunder" in American history? Let's take a big-picture tour of the Middle East and try to answer those questions. But first, a request: after each paragraph that follows, could you make sure to add the question “What could possibly go wrong?” [US Middle East policy]
• Qatar Threatens Military Intervention in Syria in Support of Al Qaeda Rebels
  By Sputnik Global Research, October 22, 2015 Sputnik news 21 October 2015 Qatar which has been a major sponsor of jihadist groups fighting in Syria for years, now is actively considering a direct military intervention in the country, according to its officials. Throughout Syria’s bloody civil war, the government of Qatar has been an active supporter of anti-government militants, providing arms and financial backing to so called “rebels.” Many of these, like the al-Nusra Front, were directly linked to al-Qaeda. That strategy has, of course, done little to put a dent in terrorist organizations in the region. But as Russia enters its fourth week of anti-terror airstrikes, Qatar has indicated that it may launch a military campaign of its own. “Anything that protects the Syrian people and Syria from partition, we will not spare any effort to carry it out with our Saudi and Turkish brothers, no matter what this is,” Qatar’s Foreign Minister Khalid al-Attiyah told CNN on Wednesday, when asked if he supported Saudi Arabia’s position of not ruling out a military option. [Qatar] [Syria] [Proxy] [Sectarianism]
• Faulty Analysis and Conclusions on Syria
  by Rick Sterling Recently CounterPunch published an article Obama’s Legacy: An Abyss Gazing Backwards by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad. It exemplifies the faulty analysis and conclusions of those advocating direct U.S. intervention in Syria, from far right wing neoconservatives to liberals and even some self-styled Marxists. Because of the dangerous consequences of these assumptions and conclusions, it is important that they be critically examined. We can use the above mentioned article as an example. The same article with different title was published one week earlier in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) paper “The National”. The title was “Obama’s legacy is tarnished as Putin fills the vacuum in Syria”. The Syrian “vacuum” is a popular myth promoted by those who want the U.S. to become more aggressive in Syria. In reality the U.S. has very actively aided and abetted the violent opposition in Syria from the start. The Defense Information Agency report from August 2012 confirms that weapons were flowing to the Syrian armed opposition after the overthrow of the Libyan government in Fall 2011. The claim that the U.S. was only supplying communications equipment and other non-lethal supplies in 2012 and 2013 was for public consumption and ‘plausible deniability’. In reality the U.S. was supplying great quantities of weapons. The ‘dark side’ included a huge budget for CIA operations including training and arming the Syrian armed opposition. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and UAE were spending billions annually in support of mercenaries and fanatics trying to overthrow the secular Damascus government. Contrary to what Ahmad says, the US-backed rebels were largely a fiction. Apart from the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), the most effective fighting force was the official Al Qaeda franchise, Jabhat al Nusra. Out of the public view, to the extent it existed, FSA was working closely with Nusra/Al Qaeda. In a confusing use of terms, Ahmad contrasts “counter-terrorism” with “counter-insurgency”. What he means by “counter-insurgency” is regime change via direct intervention or invasion. What he means by “counter-terrorism” is regime change via coup or proxy army. Pakistan-born Muhammad Idrees Ahmad suggests that Obama is spineless because he has opted for “counter-terrorism” (proxy armies, drone strikes, etc) instead of “counter-insurgency” (direct U.S. Attacks). This is short-sighted and ahistorical. There is no public desire for another US invasion of another country. This is partly because the Iraq invasion and disaster is still fresh in the public mind. It also follows a pattern from the past: after the defeat of the US invasion of Vietnam, the US reverted to using a proxy army (the Contras) against Nicaragua in the early 1980s. But warmongers in the media, such as Ahmad, are not the public. More often than not, they reflect the views of their sponsors. It’s no surprise that Ahmad’s article was first published by UAE’s “The National”. [US Syria policy] [MISCOM]
• Syrian Arab militias dispute they received U.S. airdrop of ammunition
  Highlights U.S. officials have said the Oct. 11 airdrop was destined for Syrian Arab fighters Two top Arab commanders say they didn’t receive any – and don’t know who did Question of whether Arabs or Kurds were recipients is key to Turkey By Roy Gutman TEL ALO, Syria — More than a week after the Pentagon announced that it had dropped 50 tons of ammunition to Syrian Arabs to support a new offensive against Islamic State extremists, it’s uncertain who exactly it reached. Leaders of two principal Arab militias said they hadn’t received any arms aid and doubted that any Arab forces had. “We didn’t get anything,” Sheikh Humaydi Daham al Hadi, the head of the Shammar tribe, told McClatchy in an interview at his palatial compound in Syria’s Hasaka province. “Maybe our partners, the Kurds did,” a reference to the People’s Protection Units, the YPG militia, which, with the help of U.S. air power, now dominates much of northeastern Syria. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/middle-east/article40532349.html#storylink=cpy [US Syria policy] [Kurds]
• At a cost of $500 million each month, Turkey staggers under growing refugee burden
  On July 9, during an address to foreign ambassadors in Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey had spent more than $6 billion to take in 2 million refugees, including 1.7 million Syrians and 300,000 Iraqis. Summary? Print Turkey’s spending on refugees has soared by an astonishing $1.5 billion in three months, and that figure doesn't include many other related costs. Author Mehmet Cetingulec Posted October 20, 2015 TranslatorSibel Utku Bila On Oct. 5, at a business gathering in Belgium, he noted Turkey’s spending for refugees has exceeded $7.5 billion. How did the refugee bill swell by $1.5 billion in three months? To better grasp this staggering increase in such a short time, it’s worth recalling that the $6 billion was spent over four years. Are the figures inaccurate, or has the number of refugees shot up beyond what is publicly known? There is nothing wrong with the financial figures. The main factor behind the skyrocketing sum is the abrupt increase in the number of refugees. In July, Erdogan had put the number of Syrian refugees at 1.7 million, while in his Brussels speech in early October he spoke of 2.2 million Syrians. This means another half-million Syrians have crossed into Turkey in the past three months. Metin Corabatir, head of the Ankara-based Research Center on Asylum and Migration, said the initial cost of newcomers is quite high. “They are being accommodated, undergoing medical checkups, etc. There are too many expense items. Even those arrested [while attempting to cross] the Aegean create expenses,” he told Al-Monitor. [Turkey] [Refugee] [Unintended consequences]
• Vietnamization 2.0
  Andrew Bacevich and Nick Turse 21 October 2015 The US history of military intervention is shocking. It should be learnt from, rather than continued. The head of the statue of Saddam Hussein, donated by the US military to Kuwait. Stefan Krasowski/Flickr. Some rights reserved. After the United States toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian official in occupied Iraq, took a bold step. He dissolved Iraq’s military, deciding to replace Saddam’s 350,000-man army with a lightly-armed border protection force that would start with 12,000 troops and eventually peak at around 40,000 soldiers, supplemented by various police and civil defense forces. Bremer’s best-laid plans imploded as an insurgency blossomed from the roiling mass of well-trained Iraqi military veterans he had ushered to the unemployment line and a civil war soon wracked the country. A bloodbath ensued and never ended, even as the US surged in more troops and pumped in tens of billions of dollars to build what eventually became the 930,000-man strong Iraqi security forces. (That’s not much smaller than the South Vietnamese Army the US built up in the late 1960s!) Along the way, there was plenty of progress. “Every single day, the Iraqi security forces are getting bigger and better and better trained and better equipped and more experienced,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. “You know, the one thing – the one thing we have seen is that Iraq has developed a very good capability to be able to defend itself,” said Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta six years later. “And I think that's a reflection of the fact that the Iraqis have developed a very important capability here to be able to respond to security threats within their own country.” And yet by 2014, the Iraqi military had (and was paying) more ghost soldiers – troops who existed only on paper – than the number of real soldiers Bremer had envisioned to secure the whole country back in 2003. As it happened, Iraq was anything but secure. Today, it’s a half-failed state, riven by sectarian strife, and has lost a significant portion of its territory to an extremist group incubated in US prison camps. The country is now far worse off than the one the US invaded in 2003. The US military is great at a lot of things, just not things like winning wars or effectively training foreign forces. TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich takes on the how-and-why of this latter failure, tracing the sorry history of US nation/army-building from the battlefields of Vietnam – which he knew intimately – to the festering wars of today. Buckle up for a long, strange trip. Nick Turse [Iraq] [Pacification]
• OPEC Is About to Crush the U.S. Oil Boom
  by Grant Smith October 21, 2015 — 1:01 AM CEST After a year suffering the economic consequences of the oil price slump, OPEC is finally on the cusp of choking off growth in U.S. crude output. The nation’s production is almost back down to the level pumped in November 2014, when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries switched its strategy to focus on battering competitors and reclaiming market share. As the U.S. wilts, demand for OPEC’s crude will grow in 2015, ending two years of retreat, the International Energy Agency estimates. While cratering prices and historic cutbacks in drilling have taken their toll on the U.S., OPEC members have also paid a heavy price. A year of plunging government revenues, growing budget deficits and slumping currencies has left several members grappling with severe economic problems. The fact that the U.S. oil boom kept going for about six months after the group’s November decision also means OPEC has so far succeeded only in bringing the market back to where it started. [Oil] [OPEC]
• Turkish Whistleblowers Corroborate Seymour Hersh Report of False Flag Sarin Gas Attack in Syria
  Wednesday, October 21, 2015 This is quite the bombshell delivered by two CHP deputies in the Turkish parliament and reported by Today's Zaman, one of the top dailies in Turkey. It supports Seymour Hersh's reporting that the notorious sarin gas attack at Ghouta was a false flag orchestrated by Turkish intelligence in order to cross President Obama's chemical weapons "red line" and draw the United States into the Syria war to topple Assad. If so, President Obama deserves credit for "holding the line" against the attack despite the grumbling and incitement of the Syria hawks at home and abroad. And it also presents the unsavory picture of an al-Qaeda operative colluding with ISIL in a war crime that killed 1300 civilians. I find the report credible, taking into full account the fact that the CHP (the rival left-center Kemalist party) and Today's Zaman (whose editor-in-chief, Bulent Kenes was recently detained on live TV for insulting Erdogan in a tweet) are on the outs with Erdogan. Considering the furious reaction it can be expected to elicit from Erdogan and the Turkish government, the temerity of CHP and Today's Zaman in running with this story is a sign of how desperate their struggle against Erdogan has become. Note that the author is shown only as "Columnist: Today's Zaman". [False flag] [Syria] [Turkey] [cbw]
• CHP deputies: Gov’t rejects probe into Turkey’s role in Syrian chemical attack
  October 21, 2015, Wednesday/ 18:39:29/ TODAY'S ZAMAN / ISTANBUL Two deputies from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) have claimed that the government is against investigating Turkey's role in sending toxic sarin gas which was used in an attack on civilians in Syria in 2013 and in which over 1,300 Syrians were killed. CHP deputies Eren Erdem and Ali Seker held a press conference in Istanbul on Wednesday in which they claimed the investigation into allegations regarding Turkey's involvement in the procurement of sarin gas which was used in the chemical attack on a civil population and delivered to the terrorist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to enable the attack was derailed. Taking the floor first, Erdem stated that the Adana Chief Prosecutor's Office launched an investigation into allegations that sarin was sent to Syria from Turkey via several businessmen. An indictment followed regarding the accusations targeting the government. [Turkey] [False flag] [Syria] [cbw]
• The Predators Behind the TPP
  Karel van Wolferen • October 19, 2015 A major cause of contemporary political ills in the world is the misnomers that help hide what the strong and rich aspire to and already control. A perfect example of this is the ubiquitous term ‘trade’ in what the media are telling us these days about the TPP and the TTIP – the transpacific and transatlantic treaties that seek to organize business activity under one monumental umbrella of new rules. These have been peddled as trade treaties, and hence as being great for growth and jobs, happiness and social well-being. But neither the TPP, tying the United States, a bit of Latin America and a series of East Asian countries together, nor its TTIP companion that is meant to shape American-European business relations, is primarily about trade, if stimulating genuine trade comes into it at all. It is primarily about power. Two kinds of it. One is aimed at creating global disadvantages for China’s industrial power and putting brakes on what the two formerly communist giants on the Eurasian continent are developing together. The other is power of a collectivity of large politically well-connected corporations to engage in conduct unchecked by national rules, which seen by eyes unaffected by neoliberal dogma would be recognized as predation. [TPP]
• Bernie Sanders has morphed into a serious contender
  Bob Rigg
  19 October 2015 Democratic socialism does not resonate positively in an America still overshadowed by decades of anti-communism, but Sanders is tapping into deeply-rooted popular frustration with inauthentic politicians. The first Democratic Party presidential debate on CNN on Wednesday 14 October broke the Republican Party’s monopoly, not simply on presidential campaigning, but on discussion related to the 2016 elections for half of all seats in Congress. The Republican goals are clearly to win the Presidency, and also to strengthen their majority in both houses of Congress. In the event that the Democrats should once again secure the presidency, the Republicans at the very least want to be better placed to override a presidential veto. Has anyone noticed the Grand Old Party (GOP) is no more? Undercut by a coterie of prodigiously wealthy mega-billionaires with hard-right agendas, and deconstructed by Fox News, the Grand Old Party has been quietly laid to rest. It has been transformed into a vehicle for fantasies nurtured in a political hothouse made in the USA. The Republican Party which has superseded the GOP embodies all the myopia and dementia of a culture remarkably out of touch with the world which it has dominated and largely controlled since World War II. It is now desperately trying to compensate for its declining power and influence worldwide by becoming a fortress dedicated to battling forces of change inside and outside of its territory. We must make America great again, in the words of Donald Trump. [Sanders] [US_election16]
• U.S. delivers 50 tons of ammunition to Syria rebel groups
  By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspondent Updated 2331 GMT (0631 HKT) October 12, 2015 | Video Source: CNN (CNN)—U.S. military cargo planes gave 50 tons of ammunition to rebel groups overnight in northern Syria, using an air drop of 112 pallets as the first step in the Obama Administration's urgent effort to find new ways to support those groups. Details of the air mission over Syria were confirmed by a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly because the details have not yet been formally announced. C-17s, accompanied by fighter escort aircraft, dropped small arms ammunition and other items like hand grenades in Hasakah province in northern Syria to a coalition of rebels groups vetted by the US, known as the Syrian Arab Coalition. All pallets successfully were recovered by friendly forces, a U.S. official said. [Outsourcing] [US Syria policy] [Jihadist]
• Comprehensive Military Power: World's Top 10 Militaries of 2015
  Anatoly Karlin • October 18, 2015 Luke 14:31-32 31 “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.* It is in some ways remarkable that there is still no commonly agreed method on quantifying and ranking national military power. There is one such for economics, for instance. It is called the GDP. You can make somewhat different arguments on relative economic size or living standards based on various ways of measuring GDP – e.g., the eternal debates over whether nominal or PPP is best – but it does make these discussions factually “grounded” in a way that military discussions (at least as they are carried out in the popular press and comments sections) are not. This may even extend to some extent to the US military itself. For instance, here is a short quote from an article by Adrian Bonenberger, who spent 7 years as an infantry officer in the US Army: This is the greatest risk we face for World War III. Not that Russia defeats Ukraine and moves toward Poland and Estonia, but that Ukraine wipes out the Russians currently in Ukraine, and Putin is forced to take some drastic action to prevent further losses. After all, why should Ukraine not feel entitled to take some of Russia’s territory in return for their lost Crimea? And who will be there to stop them, save demoralized and confused Russian conscripts? The chances of that happening in the foreseeable future are precisely zero, so awesome is the current size of the military gap between Russia and Ukraine (it approximately doubled from a factor of 4.5 in 1992 at the time of the Soviet collapse, to a peak of 9 by 2013). Even cursory examinations of force structure would confirm it; just the Russian Southern Military District by itself is considerably more powerful than the entire Ukrainian military. Tall tales of Donetsk airport “cyborgs” mowing down thousands of elite Pskov paratroopers to the contrary, on the one occasion in the Donbass War that the Ukrainian military engaged directly with the Russian military resulted in a resounding defeat for the Ukraiians at Ilovaysk – and that despite the Russian military having to maintain plausible deniability and thus forego the use of its fancier toys. [Military balance]
• ‘Assad must go’: These 3 little words are huge obstacle for Obama on Syria
  By Steven Mufson October 19 at 11:30 AM ? Assad must go. Three short words — one protracted policy debate. Back in the summer of 2011, those words, or their equivalent, became known among makers of U.S. Middle East policy as “the magic words” — words that President Obama, cautious about the consequences, had not yet decided to utter about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. For five months there was mounting domestic political pressure on Obama to do so, as the Arab Spring protests demanding greater freedom and an end to corruption spread, triggering a harsh crackdown. Finally, on Aug. 18, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “The transition to democracy in Syria has begun and it’s time for Assad to get out of the way.” Obama simply issued a statement: “For the sake of the Syrian people,” he said, “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” The route Obama took to that declaration says a lot about where he is today. The president’s insistence that Assad must go has been his only true red line in the Syrian conflict. The red line he drew, and then withdrew, about repercussions of Syria’s use of chemical weapons didn’t happen for more than a year. But Obama’s determination to topple Assad remains one of the main points of friction between the United States and Russia in Syria. [US Syria policy]
• Donald Trump Is Much Derided – But He Is Right About the Middle East
  The candidate is demonised as an exotic celebrity but he knows more about Iraq and Syria than his critics Patrick Cockburn • October 17, 2015 • 1,200 Words • 8 Comments • Reply In 1989 I met Donald Trump several times in Palm Beach in Florida where he was trying to stop jets from a newly expanded Palm Beach International Airport from roaring over his enormous mansion. This was Mar-a-Lago, a magnificent house with 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms which Trump had bought four years earlier without realising it was under the flight path. I learned about Trump’s problem because I knew a Canadian paper and pulp magnate who had bought a house near Mar-a-Lago and was also suffering from the airport noise. He was bitter that the people who had arranged for him to visit his new home prior to purchase had carefully chosen a brief moment when there were no planes passing overhead. The two multi-millionaires had set up an organisation that aimed to unite the less well-off people living in West Palm Beach and the plutocrats of Palm Beach, who were not natural allies, in order to get something done about the planes. There was plenty to complain of because, after an airport expansion the year before, there were 200 planes taking off every day. I had mentioned what was happening in Palm Beach to a friend on a magazine in New York who promptly asked me to write a piece about it. I suspect that the idea was that I would produce a knock-about account of the farcical failure of Trump’s self-serving efforts to unite mansion owners, who lived there irregularly, and the less well-heeled but permanent population. In the event, the article was never published, possibly because I wrote that Trump’s campaign to reduce the noise level, involving a curfew on night-time flying, a ban on the noisier aircraft and the enforcement of existing airport noise restrictions, seemed perfectly sensible. [US Middle East Policy] [Trump] [Media] [Self delusion]
• How the Iran deal might change the Middle East
  What the calculations are behind the nuclear pact and where it could lead. By Andrew J. Bacevich, Contributor October 18, 2015 • Andrew J. Bacevich is professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, 'America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,' will appear next year. Boston — The nuclear deal hat the United States and five other world powers signed with Iran is a means to an end, not the end in itself. In that regard, the pact, scheduled for formal adoption on Oct. 19, necessarily rates as a high-risk proposition. If the agreement succeeds, it may mark a first step toward restoring some semblance of stability to the Greater Middle East, thereby allowing the US to lower its profile there. If it fails, the current disorder may in retrospect seem tame. [Iran deal] [US Middle East policy]
• Are We Really at War Against Islamic Extremism?
  by Thomas S. Harrington October 16, 2015 Imagine going to your doctor and being told that, based on an initial examination, you may very well have a serious and fast-moving form of cancer, and then being a handed a referral to see a heart specialist first thing the next morning. I think you’d agree that a doctor acting in this way is either deeply incompetent or flat out crazy. Either that, or she has bigger plans on her mind than actually curing you, like say, pumping up the profits at a cardiology practice where she is a silent partner. I am reminded of this fictional doctor when I consider the actions undertaken in the Middle East by the US and its allies over the last 14 years. We are told again and again, in both explicit and implicit ways, that we are locked in an existential struggle with Islamic extremists in that region and the rest of the world. Assuming that this is, in fact, the case, a number of strategic emphases in that battle are—or at least should be—axiomatic. The first would be a clear priority on attacking those places in the Islamic world where Islamic fundamentalism is most powerful and well financed. The second would be to actively prop up those governments where the cultures of secularism, and from there, inter-group tolerance, are most highly developed. So, which country in the Islamic world is the place where aggressive and repressive fundamentalism is most well-financed and well-institutionalized? The answer is absolutely crystal clear: Saudi Arabia. No other country even comes close. [US Middle East policy] [Spin]
• Why Today’s GOP Crackup Is the Final Unraveling of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’
  Tea Party rebels are exposing the deep rifts between country-club elites and social-issue hard-liners. By William Greider October 12, 2015 Fresh chatter among Washington insiders is not about whether the Republican Party will win in 2016 but whether it will survive. Donald Trump—the fear that he might actually become the GOP nominee—is the ultimate nightmare. Some gleeful Democrats are rooting (sotto voce) for the Donald, though many expect he will self-destruct. Nevertheless, Republicans face a larger problem. The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition Richard Nixon put together in 1968—welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln—is now devouring itself in ugly, spiteful recriminations. The abrupt resignation of House Speaker John Boehner was his capitulation to this new reality. His downfall was loudly cheered by many of his own troops—the angry right-wingers in the House who have turned upon the party establishment. Chaos followed. The discontented accuse party leaders of weakness and betraying their promises to the loyal rank and file. At the heart of this intramural conflict is the fact that society has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the GOP has refused to change with it. Americans are rapidly shifting toward more tolerant understandings of personal behavior and social values, but the Republican Party sticks with retrograde social taboos and hard-edged prejudices about race, gender, sexual freedom, immigration, and religion. Plus, it wants to do away with big government (or so it claims). [Republicans]
• Is it time for a surge in Syria?
  WASHINGTON — A gathering of 50 current and former US officials plus regional and security experts concluded Oct. 14 that the United States should intensify both its diplomatic and military involvement in Syria to degrade and ultimately defeat the group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). A group of current and former US officials concludes that current US policy toward the Islamic State is not working, and that more needs to be done in both the diplomatic and military spheres to end the Syrian civil war. Author Barbara Slavin Posted October 15, 2015 The third and final phase of a war game, organized by the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council, examined three scenarios for dealing with IS: stay the course, diplomatic surge and heavy military intervention. The consensus was that the United States should adopt a hybrid of the last two options, including an effort to revive the stalled Geneva process, this time with Iranian participation. There was also talk of creating a haven for displaced Syrians near the Turkish border, although some participants worried that this would be complicated by Russia’s recent military escalation and Turkey’s anxiety about steps that could strengthen Syrian Kurds. “We need big-ticket items,” Bilal Saab, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center, said Oct. 15 at a public event that disclosed some of the findings of the game. In response to a question from Al-Monitor, Saab said he would brief the results to the Barack Obama administration and others. Seven currently serving US officials were among those who participated in the exercise. Their identities could not be revealed under the ground rules of the game. [US Syria policy]
• Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target
  U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Marina Fang Associate Politics Editor, The Huffington Post Posted: 10/15/2015 11:52 AM EDT | Edited: 10/15/2015 05:52 PM EDT The controversial U.S. drone strike program in the Middle East aims to pinpoint and kill terrorist leaders, but new documents indicate that a staggering number of these "targeted killings" affect far more people than just their targets. According to a new report from The Intercept, nearly 90 percent of people killed in recent drone strikes in Afghanistan "were not the intended targets" of the attacks. Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse. The report, compiled from classified documents released by a source in the intelligence community, corroborates the many news accounts of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes. U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2009. In December 2013, a drone strike in Yemen killed 14 people returning from a wedding. Government officials mistook their vehicles for those of al Qaeda militants. Parents in Pakistan have reported taking their children out of school to protect them from possible strikes. The U.S. government has implemented targeted killings since the Sept. 11 attacks as a counterterrorism measure and as retribution against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Under the Obama administration, many of these targeted killings have been carried out using unmanned drones. Despite the high number of civilian casualties and criticism that the program lacks transparency, President Barack Obama has repeatedly defended the strikes. [UAV] [Civilian] [Moral confusion] [Assassination]
• The Assassination Complex: Secret military documents expose the inner workings of Obama’s drone wars
  The Drone Papers 01. The Assassination Complex 02. A Visual Glossary 03. The Kill Chain 04. Find, Fix, Finish 05. Manhunting in the Hindu Kush 06. Firing Blind 07. The Life and Death of Objective Peckham 08. Target Africa Article 1 of 8 The Drone Papers Jeremy Scahill Oct. 15 2015, 1:57 p.m. From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death. [UAV] [Assassination]
• How the White House Got Silicon Valley to Take On the Refugee Crisis
  After the president's request, Silicon Valley code writers went to work at record pace. by Phil Mattingly Sarah Svoboda October 16, 2015 — 11:00 AM CEST Even Jason Goldman, a former senior technology executive at companies including Twitter, Medium, and Google, was surprised by how quickly some of his former Silicon Valley colleagues were able to answer the call. Goldman, now sitting in Washington as the first-ever White House chief digital officer, and his colleague Joshua Miller, a former Facebook employee overseeing the Obama administration's digital products, had gone to work lining up allies for a push to aid the waves of Syrian refugees flooding out of the country a little over a week prior. Now they were staring at donation platforms, crafted from scratch, that were ready to roll out. “That's a pretty fast turnaround time to actually build and ship code out into the wild,” Goldman says. [Refugee] [Privatisation] [Agency] [US Syria]
• The Kissinger Diaries: What He Really Thought About Vietnam
  By Niall Ferguson | October 10, 2015 . It has long been assumed that Henry Kissinger “supported” the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s—and that this was one of the reasons Richard Nixon offered him the job of national security adviser. This view is incorrect. As his private papers and diaries make clear, Kissinger realized by 1966 at the latest that the U.S. intervention in defense of South Vietnam was a doomed enterprise and that only a diplomatic solution would end the conflict. From a very early stage, Kissinger understood the nature of the problem the United States faced. “All history proves that there is no cheap and easy way to defeat guerrilla movements,” he wrote in February 1962. “South Vietnam has been plagued by Communist Viet Cong attacks ever since it became independent in 1954. Their defeat can only be accomplished by adequate military force. ... However, merely physical security will not solve the problem. The people of South Vietnam must develop a long-term commitment to their government if they wish to attain political and economic stability.” . . But how could that happen if the United States undermined the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government, as happened in 1963, when the Kennedy administration approved a bloody coup against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem? When the news broke of Diem’s murder, Kissinger denounced U.S. policy as “shameful.” “Conditions in Vietnam will, in my judgment, get worse,” he warned. In October 1965 Kissinger flew to Saigon at the invitation of the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. An expert on European history and nuclear strategy, Kissinger had never previously been to Vietnam. He knew little if anything about the country’s history and not a word of its language. But he already knew one thing: This was a war that could not be won by military means. [Kissinger] [Vietnam] [Coup] [Client]
• Why the US Is Eternally Caught Off Guard in the Middle East
  The national security state and the military seem to have created an un-intelligence system. By Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch October 15, 2015 To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. 1,500. That figure stunned me. I found it in the 12th paragraph of a front-page New York Times story about “senior commanders” at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) playing fast and loose with intelligence reports to give their air war against ISIS an unjustified sheen of success: “CENTCOM’s mammoth intelligence operation, with some 1,500 civilian, military, and contract analysts, is housed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, in a bay front building that has the look of a sterile government facility posing as a Spanish hacienda.” Think about that. CENTCOM, one of six U.S. military commands that divide the planet up like a pie, has at least 1,500 intelligence analysts (military, civilian, and private contractors) all to itself. Let me repeat that: 1,500 of them. CENTCOM is essentially the country’s war command, responsible for most of the Greater Middle East, that expanse of now-chaotic territory filled with strife-torn and failing states that runs from Pakistan’s border to Egypt. That’s no small task and about it there is much to be known. Still, that figure should act like a flash of lightning, illuminating for a second an otherwise dark and stormy landscape. [US military] [Intelligence]
• Statement by the President on Afghanistan
  Roosevelt Room 11:04 A.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Last December -- more than 13 years after our nation was attacked by al Qaeda on 9/11 -- America’s combat mission in Afghanistan came to a responsible end. That milestone was achieved thanks to the courage and the skill of our military, our intelligence, and civilian personnel. They served there with extraordinary skill and valor, and it’s worth remembering especially the more than 2,200 American patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan. I visited our troops in Afghanistan last year to thank them on behalf of a grateful nation. I told them they could take great pride in the progress that they helped achieve. They struck devastating blows against the al Qaeda leadership in the tribal regions, delivered justice to Osama bin Laden, prevented terrorist attacks, and saved American lives. They pushed the Taliban back so the Afghan people could reclaim their communities, send their daughters to school, and improve their lives. Our troops trained Afghan forces so they could take the lead for their own security and protect Afghans as they voted in historic elections, leading to the first democratic transfer of power in their country’s history. Today, American forces no longer patrol Afghan villages or valleys. Our troops are not engaged in major ground combat against the Taliban. Those missions now belong to Afghans, who are fully responsible for securing their country. [Afghanistan] [US Middle East policy]
• Obama outlines plan to keep 5,500 troops in Afghanistan
  President Obama will keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016 President Obama says the U.S. will maintain 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016 and will not go down to a normal embassy presence by the end of 2016. (AP) By Greg Jaffe and Missy Ryan October 15 at 5:24 PM ? President Obama said Thursday that he will keep 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan into 2017, ending his ambitions to bring home most American forces from that war-torn country before he leaves office. The president’s decision came after an extensive months-long review that included regular discussions with Afghanistan’s leaders, his national security team and U.S. commanders in the field. The move reflected a painful, if predictable, reality on the ground in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has seized new territory over the past year as Afghan troops have taken over the vast majority of the fighting. “Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be,” Obama said Thursday morning from the White House, explaining his decision. “.?.?. Meanwhile, the Taliban has made gains, particularly in rural areas, and can still launch deadly attacks in cities, including Kabul.” [The Islamic State is making these Afghans long for the Taliban] Obama said he will also dramatically slow the pace of the reduction of American forces and plans to maintain the current U.S. force of 9,800 through “most of 2016.” The post-2016 force will still be focused on training and advising the Afghan army, with a special emphasis on its elite counter­terrorism forces. The United States will also maintain a significant counterterrorism capability of drones and Special Operations forces to strike al-Qaeda and other militants who may be plotting attacks against the United States. [US Middle East policy] [Afghanistan]
• When Peace Activists Met With the U.S. Institute of Peace
  By David Swanson I was part of a debate on Tuesday that involved a larger disagreement than any exhibited at the Democratic presidential candidates debate that evening. A group of peace activists met with the president, a board member, some vice presidents, and a senior fellow of the so-called U.S. Institute of Peace, a U.S. government institution that spends tens of millions of public dollars every year on things tangentially related to peace (including promoting wars) but has yet to oppose a single U.S. war in its 30-year history. Without CNN’s Anderson Cooper there to steer us away from the issues into name calling and triviality, we dove right into the substance. The gap between the culture of peace activists and that of the U.S. Institute of “Peace” (USIP) is immense. We had created and took the occasion to deliver a petition which you should sign if you haven’t, urging USIP to remove from its board prominent war mongers and members of the boards of weapons companies. The petition also recommends numerous ideas for useful projects USIP could work on. I blogged about this earlier here and here. We showed up Tuesday at USIP’s fancy new building next to the Lincoln Memorial. Carved in the marble are the names of USIP’s sponsors, from Lockheed Martin on down through many of the major weapons and oil corporations. [Peace] [Pacification] [Orwell] [USIP]
• A Brief History of U.S. Gun Worship
  by Gary Leupp Practically every nation on the planet has been established through violence. The state itself, as Friedrich Engels explained, emerged as a result of primordial class division. The ruling classes have throughout history maintained their control over their subjects (beginning with the exaction of taxes from them) through the use of armed men at their disposal: their military and police. Those running the state use the threat if not the constant use of violence to maintain “law and order” on their terms. Witness the north American inner city, where the police are perceived as a kind of armed occupation force. The country of France as we know it emerged from the conquest of the Gauls by the Franks in the 5th and 6th centuries. England was produced out of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of the Britons at the same time. There is nothing historically unusual about some peoples experiencing invasion, conquest, and displacement, even annihilation in the process of state formation. The rise of European colonialism after Columbus merely made foreign conquest more universal. [Guns] [Japan] [Tokugawa]
• Bernie Sanders' night: Authenticity wins the Democratic debate
  Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Hillary Clinton take part in a presidential debate sponsored by CNN and Facebook at Wynn Las Vegas on Oct. 13, 2015. (Joe Raedle, Getty Images) Editorial Board Hillary Clinton looked prepared. Bernie Sanders, though, looked genuine. Democrats have a surprisingly competitive race for their presidential nomination, and if you watched their announced candidates debate Tuesday night, you saw why. Not because the candidates, like their Republican counterparts, spent much time and effort attacking one another; they didn't. And not because Hillary Rodham Clinton suffered grievous wounds or damaged her standing; she didn't. No, what came closest to electrifying the night was a Vermont senator, a self-described democratic socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and who probably can't get elected president. Bernie Sanders demonstrated time and again Tuesday night why he's the force vector in this race. If you watched, you now know why he attracts the huge crowds, the money, the energy of rank-and-file Democrats — a party to which he doesn't even belong. You also know why he gives Clinton conniptions. While she behaved like the front-runner — confident, competent, comfortable — Sanders was connecting with the audience. He even managed to profit from a Clinton problem while tacitly excusing her from it: "The American people," he said, "are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!" Sanders wanted to talk about issues that trouble Americans. Clinton surely believes she had a good night. But her answer to the first question — essentially, given her flip-flops, would she say anything to get elected? — betrayed her agenda: the cautious politics of addition. She first pivoted to an earnest non sequitur; she would, she said, heal an America riven by economic inequality, racial divides, gender inequities. Pressed on whether she would commit to being a progressive or a moderate, she straddled: "I'm a progressive, but I'm a progressive who likes to get things done." Sanders, though, had a better night. Much as Republican debates showcased Donald Trump, this debate showcased Sanders' authenticity. The notion of anyone asking if he would change positions to win votes is preposterous. [US_Election16] [Sanders] [Hillary Clinton]
• Iranian MPs arrive in Damascus before joint offensive
  DUBAI A delegation of Iranian lawmakers arrived in Damascus on Wednesday in the build-up to a joint operation against insurgents in northwest Syria, and said U.S.-led efforts to fight rebels had failed. The visit, led by the chairman of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, came as Iranian troops prepared to bolster a Syrian army offensive that two senior officials told Reuters would target rebels in Aleppo. The attack, which the officials said would be backed by Russian air strikes, underlined the growing involvement in the civil war of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's two main allies, which has alarmed a U.S.-led coalition opposed to the president that is bombing Islamic State militants. "The international coalition led by America has failed in the fight against terrorism. The cooperation between Syria, Iraq, Iran and Russia has been positive and successful," Boroujerdi was quoted as saying by Iran's state broadcaster IRIB as he arrived at Damascus airport. The delegation was due to meet Assad, said officials. Iran has sent thousands of troops into Syria in recent days to bolster the planned ground offensive in Aleppo, the two officials told Reuters. [Syria] [Iran] [Russia Syria]
• The security outlook in the Asia Pacific: uncertain
  By Ron Huisken Ron Huisken (Ron.Huisken@anu.edu.au) is an adjunct associate professor, Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. This is an extract from the introduction to Regional Security Outlook 2016, prepared for the Council on Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific and edited by the author. The complete Outlook can be viewed or downloaded at www.cscap.org The Asia Pacific continued over the past year to squander its most precious asset: the confident expectation that the region could preserve order and stability while managing a strategic transformation of historic proportions. The states of the region are still spending a lot of time in dialogue but along critical channels the degree of engagement, communication, and understanding appears to have encountered sharply diminishing returns. This trend in attitudes is not confined to the media but extends to political circles in most states of the region. For the first time in 10 years, the 2015 risk assessment prepared for the World Economic Forum listed „interstate war? as the most likely of the risks that could have a significant negative impact on the global economic outlook. Further, some of the world?s most respected academics are expressing concern, most recently Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. Writing in The Atlantic (September 2015) Allison suggested that war between the US and China is “more likely than is recognized at the moment.” The sense one has is not of imminent war but of a wearing down of the margin of safety, the room for error and the capacity to absorb shocks that we could regret in the future. The United States and China are at the core of this adverse trend and the US, in particular, appears to have become more resigned to the likelihood that achieving a stable co-existence with a powerful China [China Confrontation] [Allegiance]
• Top 1 Percent Own More Than Half of World’s Wealth
  By Patrick Martin Global Research, October 14, 2015 World Socialist Web Site A new report issued by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse finds that global wealth inequality continues to worsen and has reached a new milestone, with the top 1 percent owning more of the world’s assets than the bottom 99 percent combined. Of the estimated $250 trillion in global assets, the top 1 percent owned almost exactly 50 percent, while the bottom 50 percent of humanity owned collectively less than 1 percent. The richest 10 percent owned 87.7 percent of the world’s wealth, leaving 12.3 percent for the bottom 90 percent of the population. The Credit Suisse report focused not on the top 1 percent, but on a slightly smaller group, the 0.7 percent of adults with assets of more than 1 million US dollars. This figure includes both financial assets and real assets, such as homes, small businesses and other physical property. [Inequality]
• On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail: Why Washington Can’t “Stand Up” Foreign Militaries
  By Andrew J. Bacevich October 13, 2015 First came Fallujah, then Mosul, and later Ramadi in Iraq. Now, there is Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. In all four places, the same story has played out: in cities that newspaper reporters like to call “strategically important,” security forces trained and equipped by the U.S. military at great expense simply folded, abandoning their posts (and much of their U.S.-supplied weaponry) without even mounting serious resistance. Called upon to fight, they fled. In each case, the defending forces gave way before substantially outnumbered attackers, making the outcomes all the more ignominious. Together, these setbacks have rendered a verdict on the now more-or-less nameless Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Successive blitzkriegs by ISIS and the Taliban respectively did more than simply breach Iraqi and Afghan defenses. They also punched gaping holes in the strategy to which the United States had reverted in hopes of stemming the further erosion of its position in the Greater Middle East. [US Middle East Policy] [Pacification] [Client]
• US Reluctant over Possibility of Hiroshima Hosting 2016 G-7 Summit, Official Says
  KYODO – japan times OCT 11, 2015 WASHINGTON – The United States told Japan that it is reluctant about the possibility of Hiroshima hosting next year’s Group of Seven summit out of concern about reactions by Americans, a U.S. government official said Sunday. Some in Japan hope U.S. President Barack Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who seeks a world free of nuclear weapons, will visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki when he visits Japan for the 2016 G-7 summit. The story revealed by a U.S. official indicated, however, that it is harder than generally thought in Japan for such a trip to take place. Hiroshima, which along with Nagasaki was destroyed by a U.S. atomic bomb near the end of World War II, was among eight candidate cities to host the annual G-7 summit, to be held on May 26-27. The U.S. side has concerns Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is seeking to possibly pick the city as the summit host venue, according to the official, who wished to remain anonymous. The official said Washington warned it would be “perceived pretty badly” in the United States if an American president visits an atomic-bombed city under a plan dictated by Japan. [Hiroshima] [Bizarre]
• Psychologists accused of ‘criminal enterprise’ with CIA over torture
  Highlights Suit is first to rely on Senate’s $40 million investigation of the CIA’s program Two psychologists made $80 million to set up what is described as an “experimental torture program” One died and the other two were mentally traumatized after undergoing the techniques, the suit says By Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Washington Bureau WASHINGTON — Two former detainees and the family of a third who died in custody filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the American psychologists who designed the CIA’s torture techniques in the first legal action to rely on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the government’s interrogation program. The plaintiffs accused James Elmer Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen of torture, cruel and degrading punishment, war crimes and conducting an “experimental torture program” as part of a “joint criminal enterprise” with the nation’s top intelligence agency. The pair earned more than $80 million for developing a set of brutal interrogation methods, including simulated drowning known as water-boarding, beatings, starvation and confinement in “coffin-like boxes,” for supervising their use on detainees in secret overseas CIA prisons and for personally applying them to detainees, according to the suit. [Torture] [CIA]
• White House alarmed as Iraq uses intelligence center operated by Russia, Iran, Syria
  The intelligence center has been operational for about a week and already has provided intelligence for airstrikes on a gathering of middle-level Islamic State figures, Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Iraqi parliament’s defense and security committee, told Reuters on ... more >\ By Dave Boyer and Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Updated: 7:13 p.m. on Tuesday, October 13, 2015 Iraq has begun bombing Islamic State fighters with the help of a new intelligence center operated by Russia, Iran and Syria, a cooperation that is raising concerns in Washington about the threat to U.S. interests in the region. The center has been operational for about a week and already has provided intelligence for airstrikes on a gathering of middle-level Islamic State figures, Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Iraqi parliament’s defense and security committee, told Reuters on Tuesday. The White House reacted with obvious concern to the development, just two weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light for a bombing campaign that has largely targeted anti-government militants in neighboring Syria, including Islamic State fighters and U.S.-backed rebel groups battling Syrian President Bashar Assad, a longtime ally of Moscow. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the U.S.-led coalition that was launched in Iraq more than one year ago “has worked effectively with the Iraqis to make progress against ISIL inside of Iraq.” [Russia Iraq] [Decline] [ISIS] [Intelligence]
• Military official says Riyadh used chemical weapons in Yemen
  Tue Oct 13, 2015 Military officials in Yemen say Saudi Arabia has carried out a chemical attack in eastern Yemen, as Riyadh continues its military aggression against the impoverished Arab country. Yemen’s army spokesman Sharaf Luqman said on Tuesday that Saudi warplanes have bombarded areas in Ma’rib Province using chemical and biological agents. Luqman, who was speaking to Lebanon’s al-Mayadin TV, would not elaborate on further details, but said the attacks have failed to assist “terrorists” and militants loyal to the fugitive former Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, to retake territory in Ma’rib and advance toward the capital, Sana’a. The provincial capital city of Ma’rib is located about 195 kilometers (121 miles) east of the capital. [cbw] [Saudi Arabia] [Canard]
• Syrian Kurds 'razing entire villages captured from IS'
  Image caption YPG fighters have captured a string of towns and villages from Islamic State militants this year Kurdish forces have carried out a wave of forced displacement and mass house demolitions - amounting to war crimes - in northern Syria, a rights group says. A report by Amnesty International accuses the Popular Protection Units (YPG) of razing entire villages after capturing them from Islamic State (IS). This appeared to be in retaliation for residents' perceived sympathies with or links to the jihadist group, it says. The YPG is a key ally of the US-led international coalition against IS. Coalition air strikes, as well as air drops of weapons and ammunition, have helped the militia to drive IS out of large parts of northern Syria this year. [Syria] [Kurds] [War crimes] [AI]
• Blasts kill scores at peace rally in Turkey in sign of worsening instability
  By Erin Cunningham October 10 at 6:17 PM ? BEIRUT — Two bomb blasts ripped through crowds at a rally of peace activists in the Turkish capital Saturday, killing scores, in a reminder of the growing conflicts Turkey faces both at home and across the border in war-torn Syria. The explosions in Ankara, which occurred just minutes and yards apart, killed 97 people and injured 246 more as they gathered to call for an end to the violence that has flared between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatists in recent months. Turkey, a NATO member and key U.S. ally, shares borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran — all of which are embroiled in the conflict with the Islamic State. Turkish officials have confronted Russia over the latter’s violation of Turkey’s airspace in recent days, as Russian warplanes launch strikes against Syrian rebels, heightening tensions. [Media] [Diversion]
• Hundreds of thousands protest in Berlin against EU-U.S. trade deal
  BERLIN Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch At least 150,000 people marched in Berlin on Saturday in protest against a planned free trade deal between Europe and the United States that they say is anti-democratic and will lower food safety, labor and environmental standards. Organizers - an alliance of environmental groups, charities and opposition parties - said 250,000 people had taken part in the rally against free trade deals with both the United States and Canada, far more than they had anticipated. "This is the biggest protest that this country has seen for many, many years," Christoph Bautz, director of citizens' movement Campact told protesters in a speech. Police said 150,000 people had taken part in the demonstration which was trouble free. There were 1,000 police officers on duty at the march. Opposition to the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has risen over the past year in Germany, with critics fearing the pact will hand too much power to big multinationals at the expense of consumers and workers. [TTIP] [Protest]
• Carson suggests that gun rights might have changed history for Jews in WWII
  Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson defended comments that the Holocaust would have been "greatly diminished" if the Jewish people had been armed. (Reuters) By Vanessa Williams October 8 ? Ben Carson said Thursday that Adolf Hitler’s mass murder of Jews “would have been greatly diminished” if German citizens had not been disarmed by the Nazi regime. The comment, which came during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, was similar to arguments Carson made following last week’s mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., in which he defended the Second Amendment and suggested that the victims should have fought the gunman. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, has generated headlines repeatedly for speaking his mind. His string of comments on hot-button issues includes stating that homosexuality is “absolutely” a choice, saying he would not support a Muslim for U.S. president and declaring last week that he would “not just stand there and let him shoot me” — a reference to the Oregon gunman. [Governance] [Bizarre] [US_Election16]
• US to Give Arms, Air Support to Islamist Militias in Syria
  By Bill Van Auken Global Research, October 11, 2015 World Socialist Web Site 10 October 2015 Washington's Arms Deal With Taiwan Threatens US-China Relations The Obama administration Friday announced an “operational pause” of the disastrously failed Pentagon program for arming and training “vetted rebels” in Turkey and sending them back across the border into Syria. Instead, Pentagon and White House officials indicated, the focus will now shift to cementing ties with leaders of existing “rebel” militias, consisting overwhelmingly of Sunni Islamist forces with connections to Al Qaeda. US backing to these groups will apparently include both arms and ammunition as well as close air support from warplanes deployed by the US and its so-called coalition. The policy shift follows the revelation last month by General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US Central Command, that only “four or five” individual US-trained fighters were then on the ground in Syria, and barely 100 more were undergoing training. This, after the allocation of $500 million for the Pentagon to train over 5,000 such fighters within the first year. Austin’s revelation was followed within weeks by the Pentagon being forced to retract its initial denial of verified reports that a group of US-trained fighters sent into Syria had immediately turned over its vehicles and weaponry to the al-Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• Iran’s ‘Non-Zero-Sum Game’ In Syria
  By Kaveh L. Afrasiabi Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon met Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and urged Iran to find a political solution for the conflict in Syria. Zarif has recently unveiled a 4-point peace plan and has been actively search for regional and extra-regional partners to form a viable coalition for peace in troubled Syria. But, the military developments on the ground appear to be moving faster than the diplomatic track, in light of Russia’s new “game-changer” air campaign that has come at a critical juncture in the bloody conflict that has seen serious setbacks for Damascus this year. Although in his UN speech, Russian President Putin called for a WWII-style anti-terrorism front, that is unlikely to happen given the depth of current US-Russia hostilities and, instead, we are likely to witness US’s continued support for the Syrian rebels, who are now targeted by Russia’s sophisticated war planes. In other words, the upper hand belongs to the possibility of proxy wars rather than collective action in Syria. Much depends, however, on the political and diplomatic events and developments as well. Presently, the inking of a Russia-Iran-Iraq intelligence-sharing agreement on ISIS, followed immediately by the Russian military intervention in Syria, has been widely interpreted in the West as an ominous development that will “alter the balance of forces in the Middle East” in favor of the anti-West alliance that includes Syria and Lebanon’s Hizbollah. Some Iraqi officials are now openly pondering asking for Russia’s extension of their air campaign to Iraq, given their criticisms of the “ineffective” and or “decorative” US air raids on terrorists, thus raising the prospect of a substantial new Russian influence in the Middle East, much to the chagrin of US policy-makers. In Syria, air campaign will not suffice, which is why there are unconfirmed reports of an imminent ground offensive by the Syrian government in northern parts of the country with much assistance by Iranian (and perhaps Russia) forces. This air and ground campaign will likely succeed in stabilizing the situation in the government-held territories and turning the tide against the rebels in the areas adjacent to Lebanon, considered as vital strategic link between Iran and Hizbollah. A successful Russian campaign in Syria acting as stimulant for Iraq’s invitation of Russian air support can only be interpreted in Washington as a net geostrategic minus with Russians stepping in the “vacuum of American power.” This “power vacuum” is, however, the result of several inter-related factors, including war fatigue, overstretch, and ambiguous policies that respond to contradictory interests, such as the Sunni Arabs’ push to cause the disintegration of Iraq and Syria through proxy wars. The US has as a result exhibited contradictory behavior that in the final analysis does not satisfy anyone and contributes to a credibility problem. If this pattern of US policy in the Middle East continues, there will be a “credibility vacuum” alongside “power vacuum” to the detriment of US’s strategic interests in the region, benefiting its Russian rival. [US Middle East strategy] [Strategic incoherence]
• Trump’s repeated claim that Obama is accepting 200,000 Syrian refugees
  By Glenn Kessler October 8 “You have the migration because Syria is such a disaster. And now I hear we want to take in 200,000 Syrians, right? And they could be, listen, they could be ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria]. I don’t know.” — Donald Trump, campaign rally, Keene, N.H., Sept, 30, 2015 “So when I heard 10,000 and 3,000, a number, you know, from one of you — I’d say all right. But now we’re talking about 200,000. Obama is getting carried away again with this whole thing about immigration. And now we hear 200,000 and it could very well be ISIS.” — Trump, interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,”, Oct. 1 “Obama wants to — listen to this — he wants to take in 200,000. You know, 200,000. That’s like an army. Now I’m looking the other day. It’s all men. Like, where are the women? They’re very strong men. Why aren’t they back there fighting for their country?” — Trump, campaign event in Franklin, Tenn., Oct. 3 “Now I hear we want to take in 200,000. We don’t know where they’re coming from. We don’t know who they are. They could be ISIS. It could be the great Trojan Horse…. And I’m saying we’re going to take in 200,000 people that we have no idea where they come from?” — Trump, interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Oct. 4 Like a broken record, businessman Donald J. Trump keeps repeating a statistic with little basis in fact — that the Obama administration wants to accept 200,000 refugees from Syria. Our colleagues at FactCheck.org and PolitiFact have already weighed in with fact checks, but given that Trump keeps saying this, we figured it was worth putting the question to the Pinocchio test.
  The Facts We do not know where Trump gets his numbers — his campaign rarely responds to fact check queries — but the only thing close to a 200,000 figure is an announcement by Secretary of State John Kerry that the United States was prepared to boost the number of total refugees accepted in 2016, from 70,000 to 85,000. Then, in 2017, Kerry said that 100,000 would be accepted. That adds up to 185,000 over two years. But this would be the total number of refugees, not the number of refugees from Syria. [Refugees] [Trump]
• Saudi opposition clerics make sectarian call to jihad in Syria
  Riyadh | By Angus McDowall Dozens of Islamist Saudi Arabian clerics have called on Arab and Muslim countries to "give all moral, material, political and military" support to what they term a jihad, or holy war, against Syria's government and its Iranian and Russian backers. Although the clerics who signed the online statement are not affiliated with the government, their strong sectarian and anti-Christian language reflects mounting anger among many Saudis over Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria's civil war. [Jihad] [Saudi Arabia]
• Why is the US Aiding and Enabling Saudi Arabia’s Genocidal War in Yemen?
  by Michael Horton October 8, 2015 The humanitarian crisis in Yemen rivals the crisis in Syria. After six months of war and the imposition of a naval blockade designed to starve the country into submission, 90% of Yemen’s population of more than 24 million are in urgent need of humanitarian aid. More than 6000 people, nearly 90% of which are civilians, are dead and most of Yemen’s already limited infrastructure is in ruins. Sana’a, the capital of Yemen and home to 3 million, is under continuous aerial bombardment by Saudi Arabia and its partners who have targeted schools, hospitals, and homes in densely populated urban areas. The US, along with the UK, is providing intelligence and logistical support to Saudi Arabia and its partners. Both countries are also supplying Saudi Arabia with weapons. The US is equipping the Saudis with internationally banned cluster munitions which now litter large swaths of the Yemeni countryside where they will kill and maim for years to come. Beyond arms manufacturers, the only real beneficiary of this bloody war are takfiri groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic State (IS) which is making inroads in Yemen. So why is the US supporting a war that has achieved little beyond further empowering groups like AQAP and IS? Yemen and its people are being offered up as a kind of sacrifice for Saudi Arabia’s and the Gulf Cooperation Council’s support for the nuclear arms deal with Iran. Most importantly US support for Saudi Arabia’s war has ensured a steady stream of new weapons orders. US-based arms manufacturers have sold 8 billion USD worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia since it launched ‘Operation Decisive Storm’ six months ago. This is a figure that adds almost ten percent to the 90.4 billion USD worth of weapons that US arms manufacturers have sold to Saudi Arabia since President Obama was elected. [Saudi Arabia] [US Middle East policy] [War crimes] [Iran deal] [Arms sales]
• The devil is in the details: An investigation of the relationships between conflict, food price and climate across Africa ?
  Clionadh Raleigha, , , Hyun Jin Choib, Dominic Knivetona Open Access funded by European Research Council Under a Creative Commons license Show more doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.03.005 • Across Africa, conflict increases the price of commodities, which, in turn, increase the rate of political violence. • Climate change has a weak direct effect on political violence rates. • Climate change indirectly affects conflict rates through the effect of increased food prices. • Governments and stable markets play a key role in mitigating the negative effects of climate change. • Studies of how climate change will affect social, economic and political conditions should be conducted on the local level. Abstract This study investigates the relationship between violent conflict, food price, and climate variability at the subnational level. Using disaggregated data on 113 African markets from January 1997 to April 2010, interrelationships between the three variables are analyzed in simultaneous equation models. We find that: (i) a positive feedback exists between food price and violence – higher food prices increase conflict rates within markets and conflict increases food prices; (ii) anomalously dry conditions are associated with increased frequencies of conflict; and (iii) decreased rainfall exerts an indirect effect on conflict through its impact on food prices. These findings suggest that the negative effects of climate variability on conflict can be mitigated by interventions and effective price management in local markets. Creating environments in which food prices are stable and reliable, and markets are accessible and safe, can lower the impacts of both climate change and conflict feedbacks.
• Lies and Truth: Obama’s UN General Assembly Speech Dissected
  By F. William Engdahl Global Research, October 08, 2015 New Eastern Outlook 6 October 2015 To those who bothered to listen to President Obama’s UN General Assembly speech without falling asleep like Secretary John Kerry clearly wished to do, there was a stark contrast to that speech which followed from the Russian President. First before Barack Obama completed his first sentence we could feel his emotion. It was projecting a contempt and arrogance of a special variety: “We have the biggest, baddest military; we call the shots, you peons of the nations of the world.” Going through the official Obama text it’s difficult to find even one sentence where he speaks honestly. It’s an example not of grey propaganda but black. I cite several of the most egregious instances. Near the start after the usual pious homage to the 70-year history of the United Nations, Mr. Obama says, “the United States has worked with many nations in this Assembly to prevent a third world war — by forging alliances with old adversaries; by supporting the steady emergence of strong democracies accountable to their people instead of any foreign power.” I am challenged to think of one single strong democracy accountable to their people that US interventions of the past years have supported. [Obama] [Rhetoric]
• Were missing Iranians arrested in Saudi Arabia?
  After a hajj stampede that killed 464 Iranians near the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia on Sept. 24, rumors have begun to circulate as to why, after two weeks, 69 Iranians are still unaccounted for. Some Iranian officials are speculating that the Iranians still missing after the hajj disaster may have been arrested as Iran continues to watch the Saudi investigation with distrust. Author Arash Karami Posted October 8, 2015 On Oct. 6, Iran’s Health Minister Hassan Ghazizadeh Hashemi said, “Some of the missing may be among the arrested, or in detention centers or prisons of Saudi Arabia, or in hospitals.” Foreign Ministry official Hassan Ghashghavi said, “We do not know if these dear ones have joined God or if they have been detained somewhere. Until their bodies have been returned we can’t speak with certainty about this matter.” The comments by the two officials made headlines in Iranian media. A number of high-ranking scientists and diplomats were among the hajj pilgrims, and their possible detention or interrogation would expose Iran to security or intelligence risks. However, today, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the hajj pilgrimage, Hojat al-Islam Seyed Ali Ghazi Asghar, asked officials not to speculate about the missing Iranians. “News in recent days based on the arrest of a number of Iranian pilgrims is not true,” he said. “All of the hospitals in Saudi Arabia and possible locations that were given where the bodies are held have been searched.” Ghazi Asghar asked Iranians to “not pay attention to rumors.” There have been conflicting reports about the numbers missing and dead from the stampede. Saudi Arabia claims that a total of 769 were killed. As of its latest count, the Associated Press has put this number at over 1,360. Indonesia, Pakistan and India also claimed that the pictures offered to them by Saudi Arabia to identity the dead puts their number at 1,100. Saudi authorities said that those countries were shown pictures of those who also died from natural causes while on the hajj. The tragedy has pushed Iran-Saudi tensions to new levels, given that Iran suffered the most casualties from the stampede. Khamenei, in one of his strongest speeches yet against Saudi Arabia, warned that Iran’s “self-restraint” was coming to an end and if the Saudi authorities do not resolve the issue satisfactorily, Iran’s response will be “tough and harsh.” Despite comments by Ghazi Asghar meant to lower tensions and put an end to rumors, other Iranian officials continued to make harsh statements Oct. 8. Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/10/iranians-missing-hajj-stampede.html#ixzz3o5osHruy [Saudi Arabia] [Iran] [Hajj]
• ISIS driving Toyotas a little too often, US Treasury wonders why
  Published time: 7 Oct, 2015 16:23 ISIS has many faults, but it sure knows a good car when it sees one. The US Treasury is now pressing Toyota about why so many of its vehicles are being driven around by the terrorist group, as evidenced in their propaganda videos. Toyota has issued a statement to explain that this is part of a wider probe into terrorist supply chains and capital flow, according to ABC. The company also says it does not know how its trucks ended up in ISIS hands in such a quantity, and is “supporting” the inquiry. The model most popular with Islamic State drivers seems to be the Hilux, similar to Tacomas and Land Cruisers. This overseas version is a mainstay in ISIS propaganda videos, often loaded to the brim with heavy weapons. The company says the cars in the videos aren’t recent models, but ABC spoke to the Iraqi ambassador to the US, Lukman Faily, who said that in addition to re-purposing old vehicles, the terrorist group has been acquiring “hundreds” of “brand new” ones in recent years. “This is a question we’ve been asking our neighbors,” the ambassador said. "How could these brand new trucks... these four-wheel drives, hundreds of them - where are they coming from?” Some of the other cars paraded in victory parade videos include Mitsubishi, Hyundai and Isuzu. “Regrettably, the Toyota Land Cruiser and Hilux have effectively become almost part of the ISIS brand,” said Mark Wallace, a former US ambassador to the United Nations. Wallace is CEO of the Counter Extremism Project, a group specializing in tracking terrorist finance channels. “ISIS has used these vehicles in order to engage in military-type activities, terror activities, and the like,” he said. “But in nearly every ISIS video, they show a fleet - a convoy of Toyota vehicles and that’s very concerning to us.” But according to Lewis, “It is impossible for Toyota to completely control indirect or illegal channels through which our vehicles could be misappropriated.” The current inquiry isn’t the first time somebody’s asked about Toyota popping up frequently in IS hands. A report last year by Public Radio International exposed a delivery by the US State Department of 43 Toyota trucks to Syrian rebels – the “moderate” ones, as has been the Western line since the start of the Syrian war in 2011. Australian media has also this year been circulating reports of some 800 vehicles stolen, and authorities believing they may have been shipped to war zones in the Middle East. [Outsourcing] [Jihadists]
• Saudi woman posts video of husband sexually abusing maid – and now faces jail
  Published time: 8 Oct, 2015 17:42 A woman in Saudi Arabia has secretly filmed her husband cheating on her at their home by groping a housemaid. The vengeful wife published the video online, but now faces up to one year in prison according to the kingdom’s laws against revenge videos. In the scandalous video, a man in traditional Saudi white robes is seen apparently putting his hands all over a female maid in a room that looks like a kitchen. At one point, when the woman's hands are busy as she's holding a tray or a plate, the man tries to kiss her, while she attempts to pull away. READ MORE: Saudi diplomat accused of rape in India claims immunity, files complaint The alleged encounter of the husband with his domestic staff was apparently secretly filmed by the man's wife with a phone camera. She then posted it online, local media reported this week, saying that before the original clip was taken down from the internet it had gone viral in the Arab state. "The minimum punishment for this husband is to scandalize him," the unnamed wife wrote in her caption to the video, Emirates 24/7 News reported. Her public revenge has divided social media users in Saudi Arabia, Gulf News reported, saying that her actions have been both condemned and supported by people in the devout Muslim society. "What she did in fact was to expose her private life and problems for everyone to see," the media cited one blogger as saying. "She has to live with the consequences of what she did.” "I salute you warmly for your valiant courage," another blogger reportedly wrote, adding that "there was an urgent need for revenge and your revenge is the best." But in what might come as a surprise to a western audience, the revenge is now upon the Saudi woman herself, as according to the Gulf state’s laws she might be jailed for up to a year. According to Saudi lawyer Majid Qaroob, cited by Emirates 24/7, the man’s wife "faces up to one year in prison or a fine of SR [Saudi Riyal] 500,000 [around $133,000] for defaming her husband." The law "on information technology crimes" stipulates "stiff punishment" for anyone who films others with various devices, including smartphones with cameras, in order to "defame them," the Saudi lawyer said. [Saudi Arabia] [Victim]
• Pentagon plans major shift in effort to counter the Islamic State in Syria
  Carter speaks of new U.S. approach to support Syrian rebels President Obama is set to overhaul Washington's approach to supporting Syrian rebel forces following this year's deeply troubled launch of a U.S. military training program, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said. (Reuters) By Missy Ryan, Karen DeYoung and Craig Whitlock October 9 at 5:08 PM ? The Obama administration backed away Friday from a blighted effort to train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, as the Pentagon announced plans instead to provide direct aid to existing rebel units it believes have better odds of succeeding against the militants. The decision is a recognition of the repeated failures of a program begun early this year. Most recently, newly trained fighters were attacked by rival forces ­engaged in a largely separate fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. One U.S.-trained unit decided to hand over ­Washington-provided equipment to the local al-Qaeda affiliate. U.S. officials hope the revised plan will help Arab forces, allied with Syrian Kurdish fighters, replicate the success that the Kurds have had against the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and eventually isolate the group in Raqqa, its de facto Syrian capital. “What we’re really trying to do here is build on what has worked for us and learn from some of the things that have been a lot more challenging,” Christine E. Wormuth, undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters. Wormuth said the training program launched earlier this year has not been canceled but was put on “operational pause” and might be resumed in the future. [US Middle East policy] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• Over 1,000 ISIS and Al Nusra Militants Surrender To Syrian Army In Last 24 Hours
  By Fars News Agency Global Research, October 09, 2015 The development came after President Bashar al-Assad in a televised address in July pardoned all soldiers who have fled the army, saying that his words served as a general decree to relevant officials. Hundreds of gunmen have been laying down their weapons and turning themselves in to authorities in areas across the country. This number seems to be on the rise as the army has been making steady gains in the battlefield against the terrorist groups, recapturing an increasing number of regions, including strategic sites, which helped cut off many of the militants’ supply routes and forced them to surrender or run away. Also in the past 24 hours, the Syrian air raids destroyed concentration centers of the ISIL, al-Nusra Front and other terrorist groups in Hama and Idlib. [Syria]
• Why the US Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster
  by Gareth Porter
  Published on Friday, October 09, 2015 by TruthDig Pundits and politicians are already looking for a convenient explanation for the twin Middle East disasters of the rise of Islamic State and the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. The genuine answer is politically unpalatable, because the primary cause of both calamities is U.S. war and covert operations in the Middle East, followed by the abdication of U.S. power and responsibility for Syria policy to Saudi Arabia and other Sunni allies. The emergence of a new state always involves a complex of factors. But over the past three decades, U.S. covert operations and war have entered repeatedly and powerfully into the chain of causality leading to Islamic State’s present position. [US Middle East policy] [Outsourcing] [Agency]
• Summary of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
  Office of the United States Trade Representative – Oct. 5, 2015
  Summary of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement On October 4, 2015, Ministers of the 12 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries – Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam – announced conclusion of their negotiations. The result is a high-standard, ambitious, comprehensive, and balanced agreement that will promote economic growth; support the creation and retention of jobs; enhance innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raise living standards; reduce poverty in our countries; and promote transparency, good governance, and enhanced labor and environmental protections. We envision conclusion of this agreement, with its new and high standards for trade and investment in the Asia Pacific, as an important step toward our ultimate goal of open trade and regional integration across the region. [TPP]
• For decades, the government steered millions away from whole milk. Was that wrong?
  By Peter Whoriskey October 6 at 6:36 PM ? U.S. dietary guidelines have long recommended that people steer clear of whole milk, and for decades, Americans have obeyed. Whole milk sales shrunk. It was banned from school lunch programs. Purchases of low-fat dairy climbed. “Replace whole milk and full-fat milk products with fat-free or low-fat choices,” says the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal government's influential advice book, citing the role of dairy fat in heart disease. Whether this massive shift in eating habits has made anyone healthier is an open question among scientists, however. In fact, research published in recent years indicates that the opposite might be true: millions might have been better off had they stuck with whole milk. Scientists who tallied diet and health records for several thousand patients over ten years found, for example, that contrary to the government advice, people who consumed more milk fat had lower incidence of heart disease.
• Rand Paul: No-fly zone in Syria ‘could lead to World War III’
  By David Weigel October 7 at 8:15 PM Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul makes a point to a group of supporters in Las Vegas on Sept. 17, 2015. (LE Baskow/Las Vegas Sun via AP) Next week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) will barnstorm Iowa's college campuses to build on the 15 "Students for Rand" chapters that his campaign has painstakingly built. Doing so will mean an even greater emphasis on the libertarian issues that Paul's tried to focus on since the second presidential debate. "College kids are a natural constituency for us," Paul said in an interview. I think they gravitate to my message of the right to privacy, the right to be left alone, the right not to have the government collecting all your phone records... young people fight our wars, and they tend to be not as excited about fighting civil wars in which, oftentimes, both sides represent various forms of evil." The crisis in Syria was exhibit A. Paul called a no-fly zone over the country, an idea floated by several Republican presidential candidates and by Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, a "terrible idea" that could "lead to World War III" if anyone was stupid enough to follow through. "That's drawing a red line in the sky," Paul said. Once you draw a red line, and people cross it, what happens? Now we're talking about an incident that could lead to World War III. We went 70 years having open channels of communication with the Russians, trying to avoid having one side shoot down the opposite side's plane. I think the people who call for a no-fly zone are naive. Right now, Russia's actually being invited by two of the neighboring countries, by Iraq and Syria. We're going to say we're going to stop Russia from flying in the area when two of the countries being flown over have invited that country in? This gets back to whether we want to diplomatically isolate ourselves, or whether we want to diplomatically engage." [Russia confrontation] [Rand Paul]
• Hillary Clinton comes out against Obama’s Pacific trade deal
  By Anne Gearan and David Nakamura October 7 at 5:15 PM ? Clinton says she does not support new Pacific trade pact Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tell PBS she does not support the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership. (Reuters) This story has been updated. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Wednesday that she opposes an expansive 12-nation Pacific Rim free-trade accord finalized by the Obama administration this week, breaking sharply with the president over a deal she had championed while serving as secretary of state. Clinton said in an interview with PBS that she would not support the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) based on what she knows of the deal. The 30-chapter text of the agreement, which negotiators concluded Monday, has not been made public. "As of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it," Clinton said in the interview. "I have said from the very beginning that we had to have a trade agreement that would create good American jobs, raise wages and advance our national security. I still believe that's the high bar we have to meet. I've been trying to learn as much as I can about the agreement, but I'm worried." "I appreciate the hard work that President Obama and his team put into this process and recognize the strides they made," Clinton said in a statement released to reporters traveling with her in Iowa. "But the bar here is very high and, based on what I have seen, I don't believe this agreement has met it." The trade-preference deal is a key component of the Obama administration's Pacific Rim engagement strategy, which Clinton promoted heavily as secretary of state. While in office, Clinton had called the proposed deal the "gold standard" of modern trade pacts. Long wary of Chinese economic and military expansion, Clinton backed the pact both for its potential trade benefits and for its potential to knit together Southeast Asian and neighboring nations in an economic alliance that, at least initially, would exclude China. [TPP] [Hillary Clinton] [Opportunist]
• Republicans Sour on Obama's Trade Pact
  GOP lawmakers insisted that the president have the power to negotiate the Trans Pacific Partnership, and now they’re criticizing the deal he struck. Senator Orrin Hatch, a top Republican, said the Trans Pacific Partnership appeared to fall "woefully short." Jacquelyn Martin / Having secured a landmark trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim nations, President Obama is now relying on trade-loving Republicans to ratify it in Congress. But as details of the pact emerge, the chances of widespread GOP support are dicier than they once were. Senior Republicans have long been the loudest cheerleaders for the Trans Pacific Partnership. In a reversal of the usual political dynamic, it was the GOP that carried the president’s request for “fast-track” negotiating authority earlier this year and saved him from an embarrassing defeat at the hands of his own party. Yet on Monday those same Republicans criticized the very deal that they gave Obama the power to strike, raising concerns that negotiators for the administration had sold out major U.S. industries in a final rush to finish the agreement. “While the details are still emerging, unfortunately I am afraid this deal appears to fall woefully short,” complained Senator Orrin Hatch, a pro-trade Republican who, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, will be key to passing the agreement. Of particular concern to Hatch and other Republicans is a provision excluding tobacco companies from being able to sue governments over regulations seen as targeting their industry. Another Republican, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said that change from past trade agreements, which was cheered as a victory for public-health advocates, could lead him to vote against the TPP. [TPP] [Lobby]
• Indonesia’s maritime strategy: Jokowi’s gamble
  By Michael R. Calistro Oct 5, 2015 President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) announced his maritime strategy during a speech at the East Asia Summit in Myanmar last November. The strategy is Jokowi’s response to one of Indonesia’s most pressing economic problems: the high cost of moving goods through the islands. His plan is to turn Indonesia into a maritime nexus allowing the nation’s ports and sea routes to be better utilized by the world’s leading economic powers. But, the strategy’s emphasis on the Indonesian Navy risks alienating and antagonizing the Army, which could have serious political consequences. [Indonesia] [Jokowi]
• The Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations Conclude
  By Matthew P. Goodman, Scott Miller Oct 5, 2015 Late last night, trade ministers from twelve Asia-Pacific countries concluded negotiations on the twelve-party Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). TPP is a regional trade agreement of broad scope and comprehensive coverage that combines trade and investment liberalization among its members with high-standard rules and disciplines in areas like state-owned enterprises, labor, and intellectual property rights. President Obama has made TPP a key part of his economic and foreign policy agenda, and today marks the culmination of more than five years of negotiations. Q1: What was achieved in Atlanta? A1: Trade ministers meeting in Atlanta settled the final points of the agreement. The most prominent issues, automobiles and biopharmaceuticals, were resolved, although negotiators worked well into the early hours of the morning to finish the final details. The agreement summary now available via the United States Trade Representative includes 30 chapters covering a wide swath of trade issues, from trade in goods to government procurement and intellectual property. It also incorporates several issues not covered by traditional trade agreements, notably issues related to the digital economy and the participation of state-owned enterprises. The agreement also provides for transitional periods to help member states develop capacity to implement new obligations. [TPP]
• The Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Accord Explained
  By Kevin Granville Oct. 5, 2015 The largest regional trade accord in history, the Trans-Pacific Partnership would set new terms for trade and business investment among the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations — a far-flung group with an annual gross domestic product of nearly $28 trillion that represents roughly 40 percent of global G.D.P. and one-third of world trade. The agreement reached by trade ministers on Monday in Atlanta, the result of five days of round-the-clock talks, came after a dispiriting failure to reach consensus in Hawaii in late July. The product of 10 years of negotiations, the agreement is a hallmark victory for President Obama who has pushed for a foreign-policy “pivot” to the Pacific rim. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership now takes center stage on Capitol Hill, where it remains politically divisive. [TPP]
• Why Afghanistan Is Going To Fall To The Taliban Again. And It's Not Why You Think.
  "I'm afraid I don't see how the U.S. can helpfully respond in Afghanistan, at this point." Ryan Grim Washington Bureau Chief, The Huffington Post Posted: 10/03/2015 07:04 PM EDT | Edited: 10/05/2015 01:22 PM EDT Last week, the Taliban began the process of retaking Afghanistan, starting with the northern city of Kunduz. The U.S. and Afghan governments have since been battling to recapture it -- a fight that included the U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital that killed at least 12 medical staff, along with at least seven patients, on Saturday. The Taliban has since charged that Afghan intelligence purposely gave the U.S. the hospital's coordinates. Even the possibility that such an accusation is true -- and the duration of the sustained attack suggests that something unusual happened -- points toward the reason that Afghanistan is headed back toward Taliban control: The government is thoroughly corrupt, and the U.S. has been unwilling to take measures to address the situation. While a handful of civilian and military leaders identified corruption as an existential threat to the country, the problem remains unsolved. After covering the invasion of Afghanistan, former NPR journalist Sarah Chayes decided to stay in the country to try to help turn it around. She opened a business in Kandahar and probably spent more time living directly with the Afghan people -- without security guards -- than any other American since 2001. Chayes ultimately went to work for coalition forces in the region, sharing the fundamental insight she'd gained: Corruption was eroding public support of the government. She won audiences with all the right people, and even made some converts, but ultimately, her counsel wasn't taken by the U.S. government as a whole. [Afghanistan] [Corruption] [Agency]
• Chinese warplanes to join Russian air strikes in Syria. Russia gains Iraqi air base
  DEBKAfile Exclusive Report October 2, 2015, 1:27 PM (IDT) Russia’s military intervention in Syria has expanded radically in two directions. debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report that China sent word to Moscow Friday, Oct. 2, that J-15 fighter bombers would shortly join the Russian air campaign that was launched Wednesday, Sept. 30. Baghdad has moreover offered Moscow an air base for targeting the Islamic State now occupying large swathes of Iraqi territory Russia’s military intervention in Syria has five additional participants: China, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hizballah. The J-15 warplanes will take off from the Chinese Liaoning-CV-16 aircraft carrier, which reached Syrian shores on Sept. 26 (as debkafile exclusively reported at the time). This will be a landmark event for Beijing: its first military operation in the Middle East as well the carrier’s first taste of action in conditions of real combat. Thursday night, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, made this comment on the Syrian crisis at a UN Security Council session in New York: “The world cannot afford to stand by and look on with folded arms, but must also not arbitrarily interfere (in the crisis).” [China Middle East] [Chechnya] [Jihadist] [Russia Iraq] [Decline]
• Syria’s ‘moderates’ have disappeared... and there are no good guys
  Western confusion reigns while the Russians go for the jugular
  Robert Fisk
  Syrian civil defence members mourn the death of their comrade, who was killed during what rebel activists said were air strikes carried out by the Russian air force Reuters The Russian air force in Syria has flown straight into the West’s fantasy air space. The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the “moderates” in Syria – “moderates” whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed. It’s rather like the Isis fighters who left Europe to fight for the “Caliphate”.Remember them? Scarcely two months ago, our political leaders – and leader writers – were warning us all of the enormous danger posed by “home-grown” Islamists who were leaving Britain and other European countries and America to fight for the monsters of Isis. Then the hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees began trekking up the Balkans towards Europe after risking death in the Mediterranean – and we were all told by the same political leaders to be fearful that Isis killers were among them. [US Syria policy] [Proxy] [Unique]
• Afghan response to hospital bombing is muted, even sympathetic
  Possible U.S. airstrike hits Doctors Without Borders hospital Photos from social media show the aftermath of an incident in Kunduz, Afghanistan where U.S. forces may have mistakenly bombed a hospital, killing at least 16 people. Officials warned the death toll could rise as dozens of people remain unaccounted for. (Médecins Sans Frontières Global) By Tim Craig and Craig Whitlock October 4 at 10:09 PM ? KABUL — Over the past five years, suspected U.S. airstrikes that killed civilians in Afghanistan often played out like this: Then-President Hamid Karzai would fire off biting statements accusing the U.S. military of incompetence. Protesters would then pour into the streets, spewing even more pointed words for the United States. And Afghan news outlets would report the fallout in wall-to-wall coverage. But on Sunday — after a suspected U.S. airstrike killed 22 people at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz over the weekend and horrified humanitarian groups around the world — the response in Afghanistan was surprisingly muted. Instead of harsh criticism aimed at the U.S. military, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani stayed silent except to convey his “sorrow” over the deaths of civilians. No large protests were reported. And Afghanistan’s leading news outlet, Tolo News, had largely dropped its coverage of the hospital bombing by Sunday evening. It instead aired several stories about Afghan troops battling the Taliban fighters who seized control of Kunduz a week ago. The tempered tone here comes as Afghan politicians and military leaders are growing increasingly anxious over President Obama’s pending decision about whether he will stick to his pledge to withdraw all remaining 9,800 U.S. troops from the country by the end of 2016. [Wishful thinking] [Afghanistan]
• Cuban Government Describes Devastating Effects of U. S. Economic Blockade
  by W. T. Whitney Meeting with reporters on September 17, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez discussed his ministry’s recent report on the U. S. economic blockade against Cuba. The 36 – page document presents Cuba’s case in advance of an October 27 vote in the United Nations General Assembly on a Cuban resolution calling for the blockade’s end. This will be the 24th consecutive year for such a vote. The Assembly has recently approved the resolution overwhelmingly – 188 nations in favor last year, two opposed. This year is different. Cuba and the United States recently re-established diplomatic relations. The Obama administration has eased some embargo rules through executive action. And the President has urged the U. S. Congress to exercise powers it gained through the 1996 Helms – Burton Law and lift the blockade. Nevertheless, Rodriguez pointed out, “The blockade continues[s] to be tightened with notable, increased extra-territorial application, in particular in the financial arena.” It’s the “principal obstacle to our development” and “leads to unmet needs and deprivations for all Cuban families.” According to the report, the blockade has deprived Cuba of $834 billion (allowing for inflation) over the 50 years of its existence. [Cuba] [Sanctions]
• REPORT BY CUBA: [on sanctions]
  On Resolution 69/5 of the United Nations General Assembly entitled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” June 2015 [Cuba] [Sanctions]
• Conflicts and Kissinger: A Tale of Two Book Reviews
  By Margaret Sullivan October 2, 2015 8:00 am October 2, 2015 8:00 am In the italic identification line appearing with his review of a new biography of Henry Kissinger, Andrew Roberts is described only as “the Lehrman Institute distinguished fellow at the New-York Historical Society.” And that is true. But Mr. Roberts also seems to have what many reasonable people would consider a conflict of interest as a reviewer: He was Mr. Kissinger’s earlier choice to write his authorized biography, according to an interview with a United Kingdom newspaper, The Scotsman. The Times Book Review editor, Pamela Paul, told me Thursday that she was unaware of this before the publication of a Gawker piece that makes much of that relationship and of Mr. Roberts’s acquaintance with the book’s author, Niall Ferguson. Gawker’s headline: “Kissinger Biography Is Great, Says Pal of Author and Kissinger in New York Times.” Indeed, the review is kind to Mr. Kissinger and to Mr. Ferguson; it calls the book “comprehensive, well-written and riveting.” [Kissinger] [Media]
• The Trans-Pacific Free-Trade Charade
  Joseph E Stiglitz and Adam S Hersh
  NEW YORK – As negotiators and ministers from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries meet in Atlanta in an effort to finalize the details of the sweeping new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), some sober analysis is warranted. The biggest regional trade and investment agreement in history is not what it seems. You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for “free trade.” The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about “free” trade. New Zealand has threatened to walk away from the agreement over the way Canada and the US manage trade in dairy products. Australia is not happy with how the US and Mexico manage trade in sugar. And the US is not happy with how Japan manages trade in rice. These industries are backed by significant voting blocs in their respective countries. And they represent just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the TPP would advance an agenda that actually runs counter to free trade. For starters, consider what the agreement would do to expand intellectual property rights for big pharmaceutical companies, as we learned from leaked versions of the negotiating text. Economic research clearly shows the argument that such intellectual property rights promote research to be weak at best. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary: When the Supreme Court invalidated Myriad’s patent on the BRCA gene, it led to a burst of innovation that resulted in better tests at lower costs. Indeed, provisions in the TPP would restrain open competition and raise prices for consumers in the US and around the world – anathema to free trade Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trans-pacific-partnership-charade-by-joseph-e--stiglitz-and-adam-s--hersh-2015-10#mPa0gKmSrZk2cgAu.99 [TPP]
• The Record U.S. Military Budget. Spiralling Growth of America’s War Economy
  By Nicolas Davies War Is A Crime 1 October 2015 To listen to the Republican candidates’ debate last week, one would think that President Obama had slashed the U.S. military budget and left our country defenseless. Nothing could be farther off the mark. There are real weaknesses in Obama’s foreign policy, but a lack of funding for weapons and war is not one of them. President Obama has in fact been responsible for the largest U.S. military budget since the Second World War, as is well documented in the U.S. Department of Defense’s annual “Green Book.” The table below compares average annual Pentagon budgets under every president since Truman, using “constant dollar” figures from the FY2016 Green Book. I’ll use these same inflation-adjusted figures throughout this article, to make sure I’m always comparing “apples to apples”. These figures do not include additional military-related spending by the VA, CIA, Homeland Security, Energy, Justice or State Departments, nor interest payments on past military spending, which combine to raise the true cost of U.S. militarism to about $1.3 trillion per year, or one thirteenth of the U.S. economy.
  U.S. Military Budgets 1948-2015
  
  Obama FY2010-15 $663.4 billion per year
  
  Bush Jr FY2002-09* $634.9 “ ” “
  
  Clinton FY1994-2001 $418.0 “ ” “
  
  Bush Sr FY1990-93 $513.4 “ ” “
  
  Reagan FY1982-89 $565.0 “ ” “
  
  Carter FY1978-81 $428.1 ” ” “
  
  Ford FY1976-77 $406.7 ” “ ”
  
  Nixon FY1970-75 $441.7 ” “ ”
  
  Johnson FY1965-69 $527.3 ” “ ”
  
  Kennedy FY1962-64 $457.2 ” “ ”
  
  Eisenhower FY1954-61 $416.3 ” “ “
  
  Truman FY1948-53 $375.7 ” “ “
  [Military expenditure]
• The Memory of Savage Anticommunist Killings Still Haunts Indonesia, 50 Years On
  • Yenni Kwok @yennikwok Sept. 30, 2015 A million or perhaps even more people were killed by some estimates, but half a century later, Indonesia has still to achieve any kind of reconciliation with one of the darkest episodes of its history Joshua Oppenheimer’s award-winning film The Look of Silence, a companion to his Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing, will be screened semiclandestinely in different cities in Indonesia Wednesday and Thursday. It is a poignant viewing for those days: Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the anticommunist massacre in Indonesia — a bloodbath considered to be one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. While The Act of Killing focuses on the perpetrators of the bloody orgy, The Look of Silence follows a man who searches for an apology from those who killed his brother. It is a wish shared by all survivors and all the victims’ families. “The crucial step that they are hoping for is a national apology,” Oppenheimer says. “It is not the final goal, but it is the first and fundamental step.” But a formal apology is unlikely because, despite an increasing willingness by some to confront the topic, the 1965 tragedy remains a highly controversial issue in Indonesia. Attempts to discuss and investigate the 1965 killings, from screening the two documentaries to exhuming mass graves, are often met with intimidation from authorities and militia groups. [Indonesia] [Massacre] [Suharto] [Agency]
• US wants Britain, Germany and France excluded from Syria peace talks
  European countries lobby US over plan to limit Syria talks to US, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey Secretary of State John Kerry, Britain's Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, European Union High Representative Catherine Ashton, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi Photo: AFP By AP Nine nations or five? In speeches at this year's UN gathering of world leaders, major powers are increasing calls for multilateral negotiations to end the war in Syria. But Europe and the United States are split on who should be at the table. The Europeans invoke the success of the Iran nuclear talks in arguing for a similar format - with key additions. • Russia launches more air strikes, targeting rebel alliance in Syria: latest There, Iran negotiated with the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany to reach their July 14 agreement. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Wednesday called for a similar arrangement "enlarged with regional partners." The Americans, in contrast, want a tighter group, without the Europeans. [US Middle East policy] [EU]
• How Elizabeth Warren picked a fight with Brookings — and won
  By Tom Hamburger September 29 at 8:13 PM ? The hero of the country’s liberal movement launched a surprise attack Tuesday against Washington’s most revered Democratic-leaning think tanks — and drew blood. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, stepping up her crusade against the power of wealthy interests, accused a Brookings Institution scholar of writing a research paper to benefit his corporate patrons. Warren’s charge prompted a swift response, with Brookings seeking and receiving the resignation of the economist, Robert Litan, whose report criticized a Warren-backed consumer-protection rule targeting the financial services industry. The episode underscored the growing clout of Warren (D-Mass.), who has resisted calls for a presidential run but is positioning herself as a leading critic of corporate interests and their power over the Washington establishment. And it marked the most dramatic response yet from Brookings, an icon of that establishment, amid criticism and internal debate over the influence of corporate sponsors. [Corporate power] [Think tanks]
• The Realpolitik of President Jimmy Carter
  by Jamie Davidson September 30, 2015 “I speak of Senator Mansfield precisely because he is not a breast-beating superpatriot who wants America to rule the world, but is rather an American intellectual in the best sense, a scholarly and reasonable man — the kind of man who is the terror of our age.” – Noam Chomsky, The New York Review of Books, December 1967 Former President of the United States Jimmy Carter has cancer, metastasised to his brain and liver. He is undergoing treatment which may prolong his already long life, but sooner or later death will come to the former president. Having kept himself in the public eye more successfully and having done more meaningful work after leaving the office than any other president, his passing will produce much comment from the press and the American public. [Jimmy Carter]

• McNasty
  by Douglas Valentine If you have no idea what war is about, thank your gods. It is not what you see in Mel Gibson movies, nor is it hidden within the Big Lie Big Brother tells you about Pat Tillman’s heroic “Army of One” in Iraq and Afghanistan. When my father was in New Guinea with the 32nd Division in 1942, his fellow American soldiers would point their long Springfield rifles skywards and shoot at American pilots flying overhead. “Glory Boys,” the long-suffering ground troops called them. The pilots had comfortable quarters beside the airstrip in Port Moresby. When orders for a mission came down, they’d climb in their planes, rattle down the runway, and soar over the Owen Stanley Mountains with the clouds in spotless uniforms, breathing fresh clean air. The Glory Boys weren’t trapped in the broiling jungle, in the mud and pouring rain, their skin rotting away, chewed by ghastly insects, bitten by poisonous snakes, stricken with cerebral malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and a host of unknown diseases delivered by unknown parasites. If the Fly Boys perished, it was in a blaze of glory, not from a landmine, or a misdirected American mortar, or a Japanese bayonet in the brain. One day my father and his last remaining friend, Charlie Ferguson, were walking through the jungle up to the front line. One the way they passed a group of bare-chested Aussies in khaki shorts sitting round a grindstone sharpening their knives. Every once in a while one of the Aussies would hoist his rife and casually put a bullet into a Japanese sniper who had tied himself into the top of a nearby tree. Not in any place that would outright kill him, but some place painful enough to make the point. A little further toward the front line, my father and Charlie came upon Master Sergeant Harry Blackman, an adult man in his forties, regular army, a grizzled combat veteran. A few days earlier in a fight with the Japanese, a young lieutenant, a “90-Day Wonder,” had curled up in a fetal position when he should have been directing mortar fire. As a result, US mortar rounds landed on several US soldiers. Blackman, in front of everyone, took the lieutenant behind a tree and blew his brains out. As my father and Charlie waked through the jungle they saw Harry Blackman perched on the lower limb of a huge tropical tree, babbling incoherently among the butterflies and flowering vines, driven stark raving mad by sorrow and jungle war with the Japanese. Several days later my father was sent on a patrol into Japanese held territory. He was the last man in a formation moving single file through the jungle. Plagued by malaria and exhaustion, he kept falling behind. Around noon, a group of Japanese soldiers sitting high up in trees dropped concussion grenades on the patrol. As he lay on the ground, unable to move, my father watched the Japanese slide down the trees. Starting with the point man on patrol, they pulled down the pants and castrated each man, before clubbing him to death with their rifle butts or running a bayonet into his gut. War. If you’re a Glory Boy like John Sidney McCain III, you really have no idea what it is. You drop bombs on cities, on civilians, maybe on enemy forces, maybe on your own troops. Glory Boys like John McCain rarely get a taste of the horror they inflict on others. Their suffering rarely extends beyond the high anxiety that they might get shot down and that some bombarded mob on the ground might take its revenge. [McCain] [Vietnam]
• John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President
  What Was John McCain's True Wartime Record in Vietnam?
  Ron Unz • March 9, 2015 [The recent remarks of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have triggered a political media firestorm regarding the Vietnam War record of Sen. John McCain, resulting in a surge of renewed traffic to my "Tokyo Rose" piece, which I am now republishing below. An even greater flood of attention has gone to Sydney Schanberg's original 8,000 word article, which I had published as a cover story for The American Conservative several years ago. I urge people to read that remarkable expose. As a Pulitzer Prize winning former top editor at The New York Times, there are few living Americans who can match Schanberg's journalistic authority in this subject, and the fact that our entire American media has spent years entirely ignoring the explosive and massively-documented charges of one of its most distinguished members demonstrates to all of us that we are indeed living in the world of "American Pravda." I also include a link to my own discussion of Schanberg's remarkable findings] [McCain]
• Afghanistan and the Defeat in Kunduz: The Crisis in Transition
  By Anthony H. Cordesman Sep 29, 2015 The Taliban’s capture of Kunduz does mark its first major capture of a major urban area, but it is only a symptom of a much broader crisis in the Transition process in what has begun to approach a forgotten war. The Broader Crisis in Afghanistan and a Failed Transition Plan Afghanistan is now caught up in a much broader series of crises: political, governance, economics, security, and Afghan force development. In each case, the “Transition” since U.S. combat forces left at the end of 2014 is failing. This failure is only partly the fault of the Obama administration. The Afghan government has failed to provide effective leadership in each critical dimension. Many of the problems involved also have their origins in the UN’s failure to play a meaningful role in coordinating any aspect of the civil aid effort, and the erratic politics and programs the Bush Administration pursued – partly because of its focus on the Iraq conflict. . The fact remains, however, that it is the Obama administration that is now in charge and that created a fundamentally unworkable set of transition policies and deadlines. It is the Obama administration that set transition deadlines for the political purpose of ending the war before the president left office, rather than created plans based on the conditions in Afghanistan and real world level of civil and military development in the country. [Afghanistan] [Decline] [Obama] [Domestic] [US global strategy]
• Missed opportunities in the Pentagon’s new maritime strategy
  By Dennis Blair and Jeffrey W. Hornung Aug 31, 2015 The Department of Defense recently released its Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy. Because of rapid security changes in the maritime realm, the document is a welcome declaration, providing much greater clarity on Washington’s strategy in the region. While concentrating on the military elements of US policies and actions in the region, the paper is set in the large context of overall US strategy, and includes frequent references to the complementary actions of the Department of State and the Coast Guard. While not detracting from the strength of the document, there are a number of key areas receiving little-to-no mention, resulting in missed opportunities. The Strategy lays out Washington’s three maritime objectives in the Asia-Pacific region. These include safeguarding the freedom of the seas; deterring conflict and coercion; and promoting adherence to international law and standards. To achieve these objectives, a detailed strategy follows that includes strengthening US military capacity and stationing more of it in the Asia-Pacific region, working together with US allies and partners to build their military capacities, levering military diplomacy, strengthening regional security institutions, and developing regional security architecture. The strategy is sound. The comprehensive listing of US actions in the region leaves no question as to Washington’s commitment. This is welcome given the concerns about whether the US rebalance strategy – first unveiled in 2011 – has been overshadowed by Washington’s focus on ISIS, Iran, and Russia. [US global strategy] [Seapower]
• CIA Admits to Congress the Agency Uses Mainstream Media to Distribute Disinformation: 1975 Video
  By Melissa Dykes Global Research, August 30, 2015 Truthstream Media 14 January 2015 It has been verified by a source who claims she was there that then-CIA Director William Casey did in fact say the controversial and often-disputed line “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” reportedly in 1981. Despite Casey being under investigation by Congress for being involved in a major disinformation plot involving the overthrow of Libya’s Qaddafi in 1981, and despite Casey arguing on the record that the CIA should have a legal right to spread disinformation via the mainstream news that same year, this quote continues to be argued by people who weren’t there and apparently cannot believe a CIA Director would ever say such a thing. But spreading disinfo is precisely what the CIA would — and did — do. This 1975 clip of testimony given during a House Intelligence Committee hearing has the agency admitting on record that the CIA creates and uses disinformation against the American people. Question: “Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation — American journal?” Answer: “We do have people who submit pieces to American journals.” Question: “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?” Answer: “This I think gets into the kind of uh, getting into the details Mr. Chairman that I’d like to get into in executive session.” (later) Question: “Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to the national news services — AP and UPI?” Answer: “Well again, I think we’re getting into the kind of detail Mr. Chairman that I’d prefer to handle at executive session.” It’s easy enough to read between the lines on the stuff that was saved for the executive session. Then-CBS President Sig Mickelson goes on to say that the relationships at CBS with the CIA were long established before he ever became president — and that’s just one example. Considering 90% of our media today has been consolidated into six major corporations over the past decade, it’s not hard to see that you shouldn’t readily believe everything you see, hear or read in the “news.” “I thought that it was a matter of real concern that planted stories intended to serve a national purpose abroad came home and were circulated here and believed here because this would mean that the CIA could manipulate the news in the United States by channeling it through some foreign country,” Democratic Idaho Senator Frank Church said at a press conference surrounding the hearing. Church chaired the Church Committee, a precursor to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was responsible for investigating illegal intelligence gathering by the NSA, CIA and FBI. This exact tactic — planting disinformation in foreign media outlets so the disinfo would knowingly surface in the United States as a way of circumventing the rules on domestic operations — was specifically argued for as being legal simply because it did not originate on U.S. soil by none other than CIA Director William Casey in 1981. [Media] [CIA] [Disinformation] [IO]
• The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know
  By Prof. James F. Tracy Global Research, August 28, 2015 Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine. Kennedy_CIAWhen seriously practiced, the journalistic profession involves gathering information concerning individuals, locales, events, and issues. In theory such information informs people about their world, thereby strengthening “democracy.” This is exactly the reason why news organizations and individual journalists are tapped as assets by intelligence agencies and, as the experiences of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte (entry 47 below) suggest, this practice is at least as widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War. [CIA] [Media] [IO]
• Iran’s Rouhani says will release Americans if U.S. frees Iranians
  Iran's president has suggested Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who has been imprisoned in Iran for more than a year, could be released in a prisoner exchange. Here's a look at Rezaian's life, work, and his unjust arrest. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post) By Carol Morello September 27 at 8:58 PM ? NEW YORK — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Sunday that he would work for the release of three Americans imprisoned in Tehran if the United States would free Iranians held in U.S. prisons for sanctions violations. “If we can help free folks who are detained there and they can take reciprocal steps, we’d welcome that approach,” he said through an interpreter at a reception that the Iranian mission to the United Nations held for scholars who specialize in the Middle East as well as some journalists. Rouhani mentioned the jailed Americans after he had spent almost 90 minutes answering questions submitted in writing and then posed by the interpreter. He said the United States is holding people who are not guilty of any crime except working to get around sanctions the United States imposed to prevent corporations and individuals from doing business with Iran. The sanctions will start to be lifted soon as part of a landmark deal forged between Iran and six world powers, including the United States, to get Iran to curtail its nuclear program. Those who broke the sanctions, Rouhani said, “tried to do something which they won’t be punished for now.” Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. They are spending part of their time meeting with officials to discuss steps being taken as outlined in the nuclear agreement reached in July. In several interviews Rouhani has granted recently, he has repeatedly raised the issue of a prisoner exchange — three Americans for 19 Iranians. [Prisoners]
• Cuba: Notes on a History of Best Intentions
  by Robert Sandels - Nelson P. Valdés September 28, 2015 The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship….every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. -Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester D. Mallory. In his Dec. 17, 2014 statement calling for normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba, President Barak Obama paused to speak directly to the Cuban people. “We believe that you should be empowered to live with dignity and self-determination,” he said. No mention was made of Lester D. Mallory. [1] Even while strenuously working to destroy the Cuban revolution, US presidents like to say that Cubans should decide their own future. But what if the Cuban people decided to choose communism? Alluding to the sordid history of US efforts to dissuade Cubans from choosing communism, Obama said that it was all “rooted in the best of intentions.” Here is an example of one of those best intentions. [Cuba] [Sanctions' [Destabilisation]
• The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why
  Tony Cartalucci
  Seymour Hersh has risked much over his decades of journalism. He is a true journalist who has been attacked, slandered, and shunned by all sides simply because he seems to resist taking any side. When he reported on US atrocities in Vietnam, he was first attacked and denounced as a traitor or worse. In time, both the truth and Hersh were vindicated and the importance of what he did as a journalist to both inform the public and serve as a check and balance against the special interests of ruling power were recognized with a Pultizer Prize. In 2007, when he exposed the then Bush-administration’s plans to use the Muslim Brotherhood and militant groups linked to Al Qaeda to overthrow the government of Syria – the result of which is unfolding today – the New Yorker gladly welcomed his work as a message they perceived would resonate well with liberal audiences. But then in 2013, when Hersh brought forward information contradicting the West’s official narrative regarding a chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus, the New Yorker decided not to publish it. His report, “Whose Sarin?” instead found itself published in the London Review of Books. The story of Hersh bringing this information forward to the public and how the Western media attempted to first discourage it, then bury it, before attempting to discredit both the report and Hersh himself is a microcosm of the dying Western media. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/09/28/the-western-media-is-dying-and-heres-why/ [Media] [Hersh] [Shill]
• Syria civil war: Kurdish leader says collapse of Assad regime 'would be a disaster' despite its treatment of his people
  Saleh Muslim tells Patrick Cockburn he is no supporter of President Bashar al-Assad, but is fearful of the dangers Islamist groups close to Damascus pose
  Patrick Cockburn | Thursday 24 September 2015 18:32 BST| A family in their destroyed home in Kobani, where Kurdish YPG forces helped to defeat Isis The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad by Isis and rebel groups that are affiliated to al-Qaeda would be a calamity for the world, says the Syrian Kurdish leader Saleh Muslim. In an interview with The Independent he warned that “if the regime collapses because of the salafis [fundamentalist Islamic militants] it would be a disaster for everyone.” Mr Muslim said he was fully in favour of Mr Assad and his government being replaced by a more acceptable alternative. But he is concerned that Isis and other extreme Islamist groups are now close to Damascus on several sides, saying that “this is dangerous”. During a recent Isis offensive in the north eastern city of Hasaka, the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) militia and the Syrian Army both came under attack from Isis, but Mr Muslim denied that there was any collaboration between the two. The Syrian Kurds, previously marginalised and discriminated against by the Damascus government, have become crucial players in the country’s civil war over the last year. In January, they defeated Isis at Kobani with the aid of US airstrikes after a four-and-a-half month siege and their forces are still advancing. While Mr Muslim said that he wants an end to rule by Mr Assad, he makes clear that he considers Isis to be the main enemy. [Syria] [Kurds]
• Taliban storms into northern Afghan city in major blow for security forces
  Stunned by a dawn attack from three sides, Afghan troops are engaged in a desperate counter offensive to regain control of the city of Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan. (Reuters) By Tim Craig and Sayed Salahuddin September 28 at 3:06 PM ? KABUL — Taliban insurgents seized control of key facilities across a major city in northern Afghanistan on Monday, driving back stunned security forces in a multi-pronged attack that also sent Afghan officials and U.N. personnel fleeing for safety. The fall of Kunduz would be a huge blow to the Western-backed government in Kabul and give Taliban insurgents a critical base of operations beyond their traditional strongholds in Afghanistan’s south. For the moment, Afghan officials acknowledged, much of the city was in Taliban hands, and Afghan authorities were left struggling over how to turn the tide. Kunduz has “collapsed” into Taliban control, Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told the Associated Press. [Decline] [Afghanistan] [Taliban]
• Debacle, Inc.: How Henry Kissinger Helped Create Our “Proliferated” World
  By Greg Grandin September 28, 2015 The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger’s move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon’s national security adviser and, after 1973, secretary of state, Kissinger’s job was to pump up the Shah, to make him feel like he truly was the “king of kings.” Reading the diplomatic record, it’s hard not to imagine his weariness as he prepared for his sessions with the Shah, considering just what gestures and words would be needed to make it clear that his majesty truly mattered to Washington, that he was valued beyond compare. “Let’s see,” an aide who was helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, “the Shah will want to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and Brezhnev.” During another prep, Kissinger was told that “the Shah wants to ride in an F-14.” Silence ensued. Then Kissinger began to think aloud about how to flatter the monarch into abandoning the idea. “We can say,” he began, “that if he has his heart set on it, okay, but the President would feel easier if he didn’t have that one worry in 10,000 [that the plane might crash]. The Shah will be flattered.” Once, Nixon asked Kissinger to book the entertainer Danny Kaye for a private performance for the Shah and his wife. The 92-year-old Kissinger has a long history of involvement in Iran and his recent opposition to Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, while relatively subdued by present Washington standards, matters. [Kissinger] [Iran] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• Rethinking the Wars Against ISIS and the U.S. Strategy for Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Insurgency
  By Anthony H. Cordesman SEP 28, 2015 By the time a new President takes office, the United States will have been at war for roughly a decade and a half. What began as a limited war against terrorism has become a major counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan, and U.S. military involvement in Syria and Yemen, while the United States largely stands by after having played a major role in the defeat of Gaddafi in Libya. Violent Islamic extremism is a serious threat in all five cases, as it is more broadly throughout much of the Islamic world. At the same time, in every case, the nation involved has been the equivalent of a failed state. The insurgency did not come from some foreign source and the country had a long history of violent politics, failed governance, and failed economic development. The rise of extremism came after the failure of secularism, and because of deep religious, ethnic, regional, and other internal tensions and violence. The result was not simply insurgency, but civil war. These conflicts were sometimes triggered and fed by the actions of outside states, including the U.S. and former Soviet Union, but they escalated because of massive civil failures as well as growing violent incidents and military clashes. The Burke Chair in Strategy has recently updated a series of reports that show the linkages between the escalation of violence and the level of failed politics, governance, and economic development in Iraq and Syria. These reports show that the civil causes of violence are so deep that no defeat of extremist movements alone can hope to bring any lasting form of security and stability. They also raise fundamental questions about the way in which the United States has approached the struggle against major terrorist movements and fought counterinsurgency campaigns. They suggest that the fundamental threat in each case where the United States has found itself involved in long conflicts has not been the terrorist or extremist movement, but the failure of the host country government to create a political structure, level of governance, and progress toward economic stability that could win and sustain popular support, and develop effective host country security forces. In practice, the four threats that allow extremism to create serious insurgencies, and lead to what are really lasting civil wars, have the following priority: [US Middle East strategy]
• Syrian War-Islamic State (ISIS) Creation Timeline
  By Kevin Borge Global Research, August 29, 2015 This document is meant for all those interested in the lead up and current events surrounding the war in Syria and the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS). Below is a timeline ranging from 1992-2015 with related articles to the war in Syria, ISIS and geopolitical events that tie them all together. Purposely the author of this document provides No commentary. You will notice that each citation is met with origin of the article, date published and key quotations. Also, the author attempted to find sources that many “Westerners” would consider “mainstream”, with the exception of a few. Lastly, at the end of the timeline, one can find longer articles and videos that the reader can dive into if interested. -Kevin Borge [ISIS] [US Middle East Policy] [Israel]
• The War on Syria: The Major Political Players, Humanitarian Crisis
  By Patrick Higgins Global Research, September 01, 2015 Jacobin 27 August 2015 Foreign intervention has only worsened the situation in Syria. In May 2014, the Syria Centre for Policy Research in Damascus released a report on the economic and social conditions in Syria. Its findings were staggering. More than half the country’s population lives in extreme poverty. Most school-age children no longer attend school, and 45 percent of its public hospitals are out of service. By the time the report was published, almost 3 percent of the Syrian population had already been wounded or killed in the conflict. The carnage has only increased since. As the human toll of the Syrian catastrophe spirals ever higher, one detail on which everyone can agree is that the situation is an ongoing tragedy. And the specter of humanitarian crisis has compelled every stripe of policymaker and pundit to call for some form of action — the need to do something. But far too often the demand to “do something” sidesteps what has already been done — there is a foundational assumption that the ruin and bloodshed of this terrible war have been produced by inaction. Take as an examphttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/syria-civil-war-nato-military-intervention/le Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, heads of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. Their edited collection, The Syria Dilemma, hopes to present an “array of contending perspectives [reflecting] the profound dilemma that Syria confronts us with.” What perspectives have they set into contention with one another? Most are united by a call for some projection of American power. Familiar interventionist tropes are presented. Responsibility to Protect (R2P) receives frequent mention. The book cites the Bosnia example at least eight times, along with mentions of Rwanda. [US Syria policy]
• Ask the U.S. Institute of Peace to Work for Peace
  Campaign created by David Swanson To: The U.S. Institute of Peace We urge you to oppose U.S. militarism and begin working for an end to U.S. war-making by providing to Congress and the public information on the disastrous results of recent U.S. wars and the superior results of nonviolence and diplomacy. We ask that you recommend to the President of the United States the removal from your board of Stephen Hadley, Eric Edelman, and Frederick M. Padilla, and their replacement by three seasoned peace activists, along with a recommendation to maintain at least three seasoned peace activists on your board at all times -- right now there are none. Appropriate events that USIP could host: How to Finally End the Korean War, Abolition of Armed Drones, A Plan to Close Overseas Bases, Why Does NATO Still Exist?, [Softwar] [Front]
• Papal Blessing for Washington’s Global Terrorism
  Finian Cunningham | 27.09.2015 | 11:04 Roman Catholic Pope Francis was hailed for his courage in challenging the United States Congress on a range of «leftwing» issues. The pontiff can take some credit for raising issues of social justice, reducing poverty and homelessness, averting deleterious environmental impacts, and calling for more humane immigration policies. But there was a flagrant omission in his address to the American lawmakers, as there was in his earlier audience with President Barack Obama. Where was his forthright condemnation of Washington’s rampant war-making and sponsorship of global terrorism? The Bishop of Rome made no mention of US war-making and conflict. Silence is tacit acceptance, or even complicity. And when one of the world’s foremost religious leaders keeps silent, that is as good as a blessing for the warmongers. Washington is, by far, the world’s greatest war-maker, having conducted wars, subversions, coups, covert insurgency and counterinsurgency operations in almost every year over the seven decades since the end of the Second World War, as documented by American historian William Blum. Yet Pope Francis – Argentinian-born and from a continent that has been ravaged by Washington state-sponsored violence – did not speak truth to power while addressing the US Capitol. If Francis had excoriated the US rulers for their habitual warmongering, he may not have received applause and standing ovations, but the Pope would have at least spoken the truth at a critical juncture. [Pope]
• France says Iran can help facilitate Syria political solution
  UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iran can be a facilitator in a political solution in Syria but President Bashar al-Assad cannot be part of it, President Francois Hollande told his Iranian counterpart in a meeting on Sunday, according to a French official. "Iran is a player (in the region), but also a facilitator," the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. "(Hollande) said that the question of Assad could not be offered as an answer." [France] [Syria] [Hubris]
• U.S.-trained fighters in Syria gave equipment to al-Qaeda affiliate
  Rebel fighters fire a heavy machine gun during clashes with Syrian pro-government forces in the northwestern Idlib province, on August 31, 2015. (Omar Haj Kadour/AFP/Getty Images) By Karen DeYoung September 25 at 8:26 PM ? American-trained Syrian fighters gave at least a quarter of their U.S.-provided equipment to al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria early this week, the U.S. Central Command said late Friday. In a statement correcting earlier assertions that reports of the turnover were a “lie” and a militant propaganda ploy, the command said it was subsequently notified that the Syrian unit had “surrendered” some of its equipment — including six pickup trucks and a portion of its ammunition — to Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s arm in Syria. The acknowledgment is the latest discouraging report regarding the $500 million train-and-equip program, which Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, head of Central Command, said last week had only “four or five” trained Syrian fighters active in Syria. Since then, the military has said approximately 70 fighters have been added. The Centcom statement called the new information on the equipment, “if accurate .?.?. very concerning and a violation of the Syria train and equip program guidelines.” It said the equipment had been turned over voluntarily, adding that the New Syrian Force had indicated that on Monday and Tuesday, it “gave” the equipment to a suspected Jabhat al-Nusra “intermediary.” [US Syria policy] [Jihadists] [Outsourcing]
• Assad’s position strengthens in Syria with renewed Russian and Iranian support
  By Ishaan Tharoor September 25 at 3:30 PM Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, shakes hands with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on Sept. 23. (Alexei Druginin/Ria Novosti via EPA) On Wednesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a one-day visit to Russia to attend the unveiling of the new Cathedral Mosque in Moscow, described as one of the largest Muslim prayer halls in Europe. He also met with his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir Putin, and announced the lofty goal of reaching $100 billion in trade between their two countries by 2023. Russia's importance to Turkey's economy — particularly its energy sector — perhaps shadowed the comments Erdogan made on his return. When asked about a solution to Syria's brutal civil war, the Turkish president gestured to a long-mooted, potential "process" of political transition. He spoke directly for the first time of the possible role that could be played by the embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. [How Turkey's Erdogan and Russia's Putin were made for each other.] "The process could possibly be without Assad, or the transitional process could be with him," Erdogan told reporters after Eid prayers in Istanbul. Erdogan, perhaps more than any major world leader, has been consistent and adamant about the need for Assad to step down before anything else is settled in Syria. "A Syria without Assad has been a slogan for a number of Western governments," notes Murat Yetkin, editor of Hurriyet Daily News, an Istanbul-based English newspaper, "but Turkey has insisted that the timing of Assad’s removal should come at the beginning of the 'transition' period, not at the end of it." Erdogan's admission here that Assad could be part of some "transitional process" is a big one. He's also not alone in tacitly acknowledging the need to dialogue with Assad. German Chancellor Angela Merkel made similar remarks this week when discussing the need for a resolution to a war that has sparked the current refugee crisis gripping Europe. "We have to speak with many actors. This includes Assad, but others as well," Merkel said. Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry also indicated that while "Assad has to go," the U.S. would be flexible about the circumstances and timing of his future departure. "We're prepared to negotiate," said Kerry. The backdrop to all this is Russia's renewed defense of the Assad regime, a longstanding ally. The Russian military escalation in Syria includes a new airfield and a squadron of fighter jets near the coastal city of Latakia, as well as the possibility of Russian-led airstrikes against the Islamic State. The deployment has raised fears in Washington and Ankara that the conflict will become even more intractable [Us Syria policy] [Turkey] [Bashar Assad] [Resurgence]
• In about-face, Pentagon says U.S.-trained Syrians gave trucks, weapons to al Qaida
  Highlights Admissions comes just two days after U.S. officials denied reports Second time Pentagon has seemed out of touch with what trainees were up to Training program is budgeted to spend $500 million BY JAMES ROSEN In another embarrassing setback for one of President Barack Obama’s centerpiece strategies for defeating the Islamic State, the Pentagon said Friday that the commander of U.S.-trained Syrians appears to have turned over his pickup trucks and weapons to al Qaeda militants in exchange for protection within days of re-entering his homeland. The Pentagon admission represented an abrupt reversal of its position as recently as Wednesday, when American military officials firmly denied social media reports that a U.S.-backed commander had defected to Nusra Front, Syria’s al Qaida affiliate, and provided trucks and weapons to the radical Islamic group. “Unfortunately, we learned today that the New Syrian Force unit now says it did in fact provide six pick-up trucks and a portion of their ammunition to a suspected al-Nusra Front (representative),” Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said Friday evening. Two days earlier, Davis had stated: “The folks that are part of the New Syrian Force are accounted for, as are their weapons.” The new revelations angered American military leaders Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article36632097.html#storylink=cpy [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist] [Incompetence]
• 15% of U.S. Marines Now Deployed in Pacific
  Some 15 percent of U.S. Marines are now deployed in Hawaii, Guam and elsewhere in the Pacific as part of Washington's "pivot to Asia" strategy to assert its dominance in the region. "Our evolving partnerships demonstrate our relevance and commitment to the region," Lt. Gen. John Toolan, the head of Marine Corps Forces Pacific, told the Marine Corps Times on Wednesday. "My Marines are postured... to ensure rapid response throughout the Asia-Pacific across the full range of military operations." Toolan is keen to expand military cooperation with Japan. "Next year, Marines will work alongside troops from Mongolia, South Korea and Japan in the northern Pacific to Australia and New Zealand in the south," he said. "Future opportunities may include third-country ships," he added, referring to the transport of U.S. Marines aboard vessels owned by other countries. Washington is increasingly worried about China's rising military and economic might and eager to enlist regional allies in containing it. [Pivot] [Marines] [Japanese remilitarisation]
• Why advocates for clergy sex abuse victims call Pope Francis’s remarks a ‘slap in the face’
  By Abby Ohlheiser, Michelle Boorstein and Terrence McCoy September 23 at 9:15 PM ? Speculation began almost as soon as Pope Francis’s first visit to the United States was announced months ago. Would the popular pontiff – who has spoken boldly on so many controversial topics – address the clergy sexual abuse scandals that have caused many American Catholics to fall away from the church and detracted from his optimistic message of renewal? Would he take time to meet with survivors? [Activists urge Pope Francis to address clergy sexual abuse during U.S. visit] In his address to U.S. bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, he at least partially answered that question. Francis lauded the bishops for their “courage” in the face of what he called “self-criticism and at the cost of mortification and great sacrifice.” “I realize how much the pain of recent years has weighed upon you and I have supported your generous commitment to bring healing to victims – in the knowledge that in healing we, too, are healed – and to work to ensure that such crimes will never be repeated,” Francis said. But it wasn’t the answer that many victims’ advocates had hoped to hear. They criticized Francis for offering comfort and sympathy to the bishops and praising their bravery while saying little to address the suffering of clergy sex abuse survivors. “To characterize the response of American Bishops to clergy abuse victims as ‘generous’ and ‘courageous’ is bizarre,” said John Salveson, president of the Philadelphia-based Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse and a survivor of clergy sex abuse.
• Colombian president, rebels announce major breakthrough in peace talks
  Cuban President Raul Castro, center, brokered talks between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, left, and the head of the FARC guerrilla Timoleon Jimenez, aka Timochenko. (Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images) By Nick Miroff September 23 at 8:30 PM ? HAVANA — Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the leader of the FARC rebel group announced a major breakthrough Wednesday in peace talks, bringing the country to the verge of ending one of the world’s longest-running wars. The dramatic announcement came in Havana, where the two sides began formal negotiations in 2012 on ending the 50-year-old conflict. Wednesday’s ceremony marked the first time Santos has appeared beside Timoleón Jiménez, alias “Timochenko,” the elusive FARC commander who previously surfaced in videos recorded from his jungle hideouts. With Cuban President Raúl Castro seated between them, Santos said he and Timochenko had told their negotiating teams to reach a final agreement within six months. The guerrilla commander remains an adversary, Santos said, but “today we are making progress in the same direction, toward the most noble goal a society can have: peace.” “We must break once and for all any link between politics and weapons,” he told a room packed with Colombian journalists and politicians at Havana’s convention center. More than 220,000 people have been killed in the three-way violence between the left-wing guerrillas, the government and right-wing paramilitary groups. At least 6 million Colombians have been forced to flee their homes. Only Syria has more “internally displaced persons,” according to U.N. data. The agreement announced Wednesday breaks an impasse over the most sensitive element of the talks, namely whether guerrillas who lay down their weapons would be subject to criminal prosecution, prison terms and potential extradition to the United States. [Columbia] [Extraterritoriality] [Cuba]
• Syrian Kurd offensive against Islamic State has stalled
  Highlights Turkey’s objection and Kurdish reluctance to go further behind slowdown U.S. officials cite the offensive as great success against Islamist radicals U.S. tallies of airstrikes show dramatic drop since July in northern Syria By Mitchell Prothero and Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Foreign Staff A Syrian Kurdish offensive described last week by U.S. officials as the most effective assault to date on the Islamic State has ground to a virtual halt because of Turkey’s opposition to the advance and Kurdish commanders’ reluctance to extend their frontlines beyond Kurdish areas, Syrian Kurdish and Arab militants say. The stalling of the offensive, which was aided by U.S. airstrikes that were coordinated with Syrian Kurdish fighters on the ground, deals a new setback to the Obama administration’s efforts to build an anti-Islamic State coalition among Syrian opposition forces, and it comes amidst a buildup of Russian jet fighters, armored vehicles and personnel near Syria’s coast. “The Kurdish forces are important because they are America’s boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq,” said Soner Cagaptay, an expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article36317793.html#storylink=cpy [US Syria policy] [Kurd] [Proxy]
• Most Agree With Trump on America's Lost Greatness, Bloomberg Poll Finds
  A national survey finds that 72 percent of Americans say their country isn't as great as it once was—a central theme of front-runner Donald Trump's campaign. by John McCormick September 24, 2015 — 11:00 AM CEST Americans are “fed up” with politics, suspect the wealthy are getting an unfair edge, and think the country is going in the wrong direction, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll that lays bare the depth and breadth of the discontents propelling outsider candidates in the Republican presidential field. The survey shows that 72 percent of Americans think their country isn't as great as it once was—a central theme of front-runner Donald Trump's campaign. More than a third prefer a presidential candidate without experience in public office. [Decline] [Public opinion] [Governance]
• Migrants are disguising themselves as Syrians to enter Europe
  By Souad Mekhennet and William Booth September 23 at 10:09 AM ? VIENNA — Moving among the tens of thousands of Syrian war refugees passing through the train stations of Europe are many who are neither Syrian nor refugees, but hoping to blend into the mass migration and find a back door to the West. There are well-dressed Iranians speaking Farsi who insist they are members of the persecuted Yazidis of Iraq. There are Indians who don’t speak Arabic but say they are from Damascus. There are Pakistanis, Albanians, Egyptians, Kosovars, Somalis and Tunisians from countries with plenty of poverty and violence, but no war. It should come as no surprise that many migrants seem to be pretending they are someone else. The prize, after all, is the possibility of benefits, residency and work in Europe. [Refugee]
• Former French Foreign Minister Dumas Blows the Whistle on Western War Plans against Syria
  Jul 3rd, 2013 Christof Lehmann (nsnbc),- The Former French Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas continues blowing the whistle about Western war plans against Syria, long before the first protests in 2011. After Dumas made a short statement in an interview on French television, he has now added shocking detail in an interview with the Syrian news agency SANA. Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. I was approached at a party in Britain, two years before the Arab Spring, and asked if I wanted to take part in toppling the Syrian government with the help of rebels". Photo, courtesy of SANA Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas.” I was approached at a party in Britain, two years before the Arab Spring, and asked if I wanted to take part in toppling the Syrian government with the help of rebels”. Photo, courtesy of SANA In June, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, created a scandal, when he admitted, that the war on Syria was planned two years before “The Arab Spring”. During an appearance on the French TV channel LPC, Dumas made a short remark, saying that top British officials were preparing the subversion of Syria with the help of “rebels” two years before the first protests in 2011, and that he was asked, whether he wanted to participate. During the TV appearance on LPC, in June, Dumas said: “I am going to tell you something. I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me, that they were preparing something in Syria”. “This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister of Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate. Naturally, I refused, I said I am French, that does not interest me” On 1 July, the former French top diplomat continued blowing the whistle and added astonishing detail to his initial statement, when he gave an interview with the Syrian Arab News Agency SANA. The statement of the former French Foreign Minister deconstructs any notion that the so-called “crisis in Syria” is anything but an illegal, unconventional war of aggression against a sovereign nation and its people, supported, by an apparently centrally organized propaganda effort. Speaking to a SANA correspondent in Paris, Roland Dumas added chilling detail to his former statement. While Dumas was on official business in Britain, two years before the first protests in 2011, he was invited to a party. [Syria] [France] [UK]
• Bloody Sunday: the Combined Attack on Jeremy Corbyn
  by Tariq Ali ?Last Sunday [20 September] a serving General in the British Army publicly threatened mutiny and a possible coup if Jeremy Corbyn were to be elected Prime Minister and attempted to carry through his policies. He was mildly rebuked by the Ministry of Defence. ?The General is being effectively backed by Hilary Benn, reappointed Shadow Foreign Secretary by Corbyn. Benn junior is threatening to vote for bombing Syria and is strongly opposed to ditching nuclear weapons. He said thgis on a Sunday morning TV show. (poor Tony who, in the course of a discussion on the Miliband sons, confessed: ‘I have a similar problem’. He wasn’t referring to his radical daughter Melissa). As if this was not bad enough, on that same day, Sadiq Khan, Labour’s venal candidate for Mayor of London has accused Corbyn/ McDonnell of inciting anti-semitism and racism. According to the Daily Mail:’ “New Labour Party leaders Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were last night sensationally accused of risking inciting terrorist and anti-Semitic attacks in London. The claim was made by the Labour candidate for London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, in a devastating assault on Corbyn and the man he has made Shadow Chancellor. Khan, who is Muslim, suggested that Corbyn’s refusal to sing the National Anthem showed he was unfit to be Prime Minister.’ For further details, see this from the Daily Mai. Khan has, till now, not issued a rebuttal or threatened action against the Mail. ?The Tory press, the Blairites in The Guardian (where, incidentally, there is a situation not unlike that confronting Corbyn, an elected radical Editor surrounded by an old guard desperate to keep her isolated). Meanwhile the campaign to get rid of the elected leader has begun. There are two ways to deal with this combined assault. [Corbyn] [Media] [Guardian]
• Manufacturing Neoliberalism: How the Council of Foreign Relations Marketed Global Capitalism
  by Joan Roelofs There are conspiracies! Some are secret and others overt. The most important of them usually have a public and a private aspect. Yet even those with plenty of data in the full light of day are secret in one sense: they are barely known by the general public and mostly ignored by those who are supposed to be telling us what is going on and what makes things happen: scholars, journalists, and pundits. Thus the obscurity of the Council on Foreign Relations. It may surface as a tagline for the wise men and women of NPR and PBS forums, but its workings and impact remain largely unexamined. [Think tanks]
• Who is twitter-luring refugees to Germany?
  Mon, Sep 21, 2015 By Oriental Review Content-analysis of a great number of tweets that triggered the ongoing wave of migration from Turkey to Germany since August this year suggests that these human streams were inspired and channeled from outside of the continental Europe. According to Vladimir Shalak from the Russian Academy of Science who developed the Internet Content-Analysis System for Twitter ( Scai4Twi), his study of over 19000 refugees-related original tweets (retweets discounted) demonstrates that the vast majority of them mention Germany and Austria as the most refugee-welcoming countries in Europe:
  The next step is to study the source twitter accounts where the hashtag #RefugeesWelcome + Germany originate. Next diagram shows the countries of origin of the relevant twitter accounts (where they could be idenfitied): As you see, only 6,4% of all tweets with “#RefugeesWelcome”+Germany came from Germany itself. Almost half of them were originated from UK, USA and Australia! Looks like your remote planetmates are blushlessly inviting guests to visit your home without inquiring your opinion beforehand! [Refugee] [Refugee encouragement] [Social media]
• With fight against the Islamic State in Iraq stalled, U.S. looks to Syria for gains
  By Missy Ryan and Greg Jaffe September 21 ? With the offensive to reclaim territory from the Islamic State largely stalled in Iraq, the Obama administration is laying plans for a more aggressive military campaign in Syria, where U.S.-backed Kurdish forces have made surprising gains in recent months. The effort, which would begin by increasing pressure on the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa, marks an important shift in an administration strategy that for most of the past year has prioritized defeating the militant group in Iraq and viewed Syria as a place where there were few real prospects for battlefield success. The White House’s top national security officials met last week and will convene again in the next few days to discuss ways to capi­tal­ize on recent and unexpected gains made by Syrian irregular forces. The administration is considering providing arms and ammunition to a wider array of rebel groups in Syria and relaxing vetting standards, effectively deepening America’s involvement in the ongoing civil war. [US Middle East policy] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist] [Kurd]
• As tragedies shock Europe, a bigger refugee crisis looms in the Middle East
  By Liz Sly August 29 EXODUS | An occasional series examining the causes and impact of a global wave of migration driven by war, oppression and poverty. AL-MINYA, Lebanon — While the world’s attention is fixed on the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees swarming into Europe, a potentially far more profound crisis is unfolding in the countries of the Middle East that have borne the brunt of the world’s failure to resolve the Syrian war. Those reaching Europe represent a small percentage of the 4 million Syrians who have fled into Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, making Syria the biggest single source of refugees in the world and the worst humanitarian emergency in more than four decades. [Refugee]
• As tragedies shock Europe, a bigger refugee crisis looms in the Middle East
  By Liz Sly August 29 EXODUS | An occasional series examining the causes and impact of a global wave of migration driven by war, oppression and poverty. AL-MINYA, Lebanon — While the world’s attention is fixed on the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees swarming into Europe, a potentially far more profound crisis is unfolding in the countries of the Middle East that have borne the brunt of the world’s failure to resolve the Syrian war. Those reaching Europe represent a small percentage of the 4 million Syrians who have fled into Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, making Syria the biggest single source of refugees in the world and the worst humanitarian emergency in more than four decades. [Refugee]
• Saudi Arabia may go broke before the US oil industry buckles
  Date August 6, 2015 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard If the oil futures market is correct, Saudi Arabia will start running into trouble within two years. It will be in existential crisis by the end of the decade. The contract price of US crude oil for delivery in December 2020 is currently $US62.05, implying a drastic change in the economic landscape for the Middle East and the petro-rentier states. The Saudis took a huge gamble last November when they stopped supporting prices and opted instead to flood the market and drive out rivals, boosting their own output to 10.6 million barrels a day (b/d) into the teeth of the downturn. Illustration: Kerrie leishman Bank of America says OPEC is now "effectively dissolved". The cartel might as well shut down its offices in Vienna to save money. If the aim was to choke the US shale industry, the Saudis have misjudged badly, just as they misjudged the growing shale threat at every stage for eight years. "It is becoming apparent that non-OPEC producers are not as responsive to low oil prices as had been thought, at least in the short-run," said the Saudi central bank in its latest stability report. "The main impact has been to cut back on developmental drilling of new oil wells, rather than slowing the flow of oil from existing wells. This requires more patience," it said. One Saudi expert was blunter. "The policy hasn't worked and it will never work," he said. By causing the oil price to crash, the Saudis and their Gulf allies have certainly killed off prospects for a raft of high-cost ventures in the Russian Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic, and the Canadian tar sands. [Oil] [Saudi Arabia] [Shale]
• The US Grand Strategy is Taking a U-turn
  Dmitry Mosyakov
  While analyzing the ongoing events of today, one can get a strong impression that Washington’s “puppeteers” have decided to abandon the existing model of international relations and attempt to build a completely new one. The concept of globalization that has been pivotal for decades is now finally left aside, instead we are being presented with the concept of global instability, that would allow the US to preserve its domination over the world by destroying the stability of political formations, which will ultimately become the breeding ground for numerous conflicts. In the meantime, Washington will be manipulating opposing regional parties in different parts of the world to make them confront each other. The globalization strategy, which was being implemented after the Cold War and aimed at ensuring American dominance in the developing world, has ultimately failed. The concept of this strategy lied in an attempt to achieve the re-orientation of Eastern countries toward the US by manipulating local political regimes into opening their markets to private investments, while forcing governments to minimize the role they played in the private sector. At the end of the process the US would have shaped the world in accordance with its political, economic, spiritual and cultural preferences, it would have created a new American international order in which the US would have been a recognized leader for decades to come. [US Global strategy] [Controlled chaos] [Fragmentation]
• Carly Fiorina’s defense proposals ignore the facts on the ground
  By Walter Pincus September 21 at 7:41 PM Although Carly Fiorina may have appeared well prepared for the Republican presidential candidate debate Wednesday, most of what she said about defense matters was fact-free or misleading. Having proposed major steps to make the U.S. military “the strongest military on the face of the planet” — which it already is — she never said how the government would pay for her proposals. Ignore her childish response to the question of how she would deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin: “I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him.” Focus instead on her next point: “What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the 6th Fleet.” As Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon’s newspaper, diplomatically put it the day after Fiorina spoke: “Her meaning wasn’t immediately clear — the U.S. 6th Fleet is less a collection of ships than a command structure for operating American warships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Moreover, the fleet is one of the few growing military commands in Europe.” [Republican] [Russia confrontation] [Fiorina] [US_Election16] [Governance]
• Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases CIA’s Efforts to Overthrow Syria’s Government
  By Adam Johnson Global Research, September 21, 2015 FAIR 20 September 2015 FAIR has noted before how America’s well-documented clandestine activities in Syria have been routinely ignored when the corporate media discuss the Obama administration’s “hands-off” approach to the four-and-a-half-year-long conflict. This past week, two pieces—one in the New York Times detailing the “finger pointing” over Obama’s “failed” Syria policy, and a Vox “explainer” of the Syrian civil war—did one better: They didn’t just omit the fact that the CIA has been arming, training and funding rebels since 2012, they heavily implied they had never done so. First, let’s establish what we do know. Based on multiple reports over the past three-and-a-half years, we know that the Central Intelligence Agency set up a secret program of arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces. This has been reported by major outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian,Der Spiegel and, most recently, the Washington Post, which—partly thanks to the Snowden revelations—detailed a program that trained approximately 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year, or roughly 1/15th of the CIA’s official annual budget. In addition to the CIA’s efforts, there is a much more scrutinized and far more publicized program by the Department of Defense to train “moderate rebels,” of which only a few dozen actually saw battle. The Pentagon program, which began earlier this year and is charged with fighting ISIS (rather than Syrian government forces), is separate from the covert CIA operation. It has, by all accounts, been an abysmal failure. One thing the DoD’s rebel training program hasn’t been a failure at, however, is helping credulous reporters rewrite history by treating the Pentagon program as the only US effort to train Syrian rebels–now or in the past. As the US’s strategy in Syria is publicly debated, the CIA’s years-long program has vanished from many popular accounts, giving the average reader the impression the US has sat idly by while foreign actors, Iranian and Russian, have interfered in the internal matters of Syria. While the White House, Congress and the Pentagon can’t legally acknowledge the CIA training program, because it’s still technically classified, there’s little reason why our media need to entertain a similar charade. [US Syria policy] [Media] [CIA] [Outsourcing]
• Noam Chomsky on the Iran Deal
  by Noam Chomsky Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the U.S. Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.” [Iran deal]
• Neoliberalism: Whatever happened to critical intellectuals?
  Neoliberalism combined with the disappearance of critical intellectuals spell a bleak future for Western democracy. 04 Sep 2015 08:09 C J Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in Europe and the US. A time not so long ago, public intellectuals in Western democracies loudly denounced war and imperialism, oppression and the violation of universal values (truth, justice, etc) whenever and wherever they occurred. True, critical/oppositional intellectuals were always few and far between in the modern Western era, but there were always giants in our midst whose voice and status were not only revered by a fair chunk of the citizenry, but, in some cases, produced fear and even awe among the members of the ruling class. In this context, well known 20th-century names like John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus easily pop to mind. They were thinkers of immense intellectual prowess, independent of those in power, who spoke out against social evils and abuses of power. Equally important, the stance they took on public issues mattered because it mobilised thousands of ordinary citizens to participate in political advocacy. 'The right side of history' Scientists and artists like Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, respectively, can easily be included in the above list as they were also public figures who were interested in issues of common concern and did not hesitate to stand on what they believed to be "the right side of history": Einstein consistently supported anti-war movements and highlighted the dangers of nuclear war while Picasso was a committed anti-fascist. Much closer to our own time, the list of names of world-renowned critical/oppositional intellectuals that stand out has been getting worriedly smaller and smaller, especially since most of them have passed away (Harold Pinter, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu).
• Flies in the ointment of Germany's refugee policy
  Angela Merkel has won praise in the international press after showing moral leadership in the refugee crisis. But this has masked the German government's efforts to reduce the number of asylum seekers. Angela Merkel is enjoying a resurgence of popularity in the international press for her stance on refugees, which effectively canceled out all the "EU dictator" headlines her government attracted during the Greek debt crisis. And yet the same European Union countries - especially in Eastern Europe - that supported Germany's hard-line leadership on Greece are now griping about her demands for uniform rules on refugee policy throughout the bloc. Against the attitudes of the UK and Hungarian governments, Germany's reception of refugees this week - and the spontaneous public generosity displayed at Munich's railway station - has looked incomparably humane. The decision not to deport anyone from Syria back to any EU country - effectively disabling the Dublin agreement - was hailed by many as an urgent and necessary signal to other European countries, while on social media, the estimate that Germany will receive some 800,000 asylum applications this year has been used by people to campaign for similar action at home: Likewise, images of refugees chanting "Germany, Germany!" at Budapest station, carrying pictures of Merkel, or even naming their children after the German chancellor, have all left a glow around the German government. Flaws in the plan But the overwhelming positivity has masked flaws in Germany's refugee system and the overall situation for refugees in Germany. Local councils throughout Germany remain overburdened, sometimes resulting in health crises last month when asylum seekers were forced to wait in extreme summer heat. [Refugee]
• Making a State by Iron and Blood
  Britain built an empire on the slave trade. Germany perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history. Who says the Islamic State won’t be a U.S. ally someday? • By Rosa Brooks • August 19, 2015 • The self-styled Islamic State has killed thousands in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, and states and media outlets around the world continue to decry its brutal tactics, which include a penchant for public decapitations, the mass slaughter of unarmed prisoners, and the sexual enslavement of women and girls. Still, if Western history is any guide, the Islamic State could well be on its way to global legitimacy. History assures us that the commission of mass atrocities is no bar to future success. During the “reign of terror” that followed the French Revolution, France’s revolutionary government publicly beheaded an estimated 30,000-40,000 people — all in the name of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In the early 1790s, at least 150,000 other unfortunate French citoyens were shot, burned to death, hacked to pieces, or deliberately drowned in France’s Vendée region. “I crushed the children under the feet of the horses,” French Gen. François Joseph Westermann is said to have written after one particularly brutal campaign. “[I] massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands…. I have exterminated all. The roads are sown with corpses.” Well, tant pis! “Mercy,” Westermann concluded, “is not a revolutionary sentiment.” [ISIS] [Double standards] [Realpolitik]
• Getting 10,000 Syrian Refugees Into the U.S. Won't Be Easy
  Sep 18, 2015 11:00 AM CEST by Justin Sink t @justinsink by Dave Merrill Pictures of a toddler who drowned fleeing Syria’s bloody civil war have galvanized the world to the country’s refugee crisis. Last week, President Barack Obama opened America’s doors to more Syrian refugees, ordering his administration to admit at least 10,000 in the 2016 fiscal year. It will be neither fast or simple to meet that goal. [Refugee] [US Syria policy] [Agency]
• Obama’s Fateful Syrian Choice
  By Robert Parry Global Research, September 18, 2015 Consortium News There is an obvious course that President Barack Obama could follow if he wants to lessen the crises stemming from the Syrian war and other U.S. “regime change” strategies of the past several decades, but it would require him to admit that recent interventions (including his own) have represented a strategic disaster. Obama also would have to alter some longstanding alliances – including those with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel – and correct some of the false narratives that have been established during his administration, such as storylines accusing the Syrian government of using sarin gas on Aug. 21, 2013, and blaming the Russians for everything that’s gone wrong in Ukraine. In retracting false allegations and releasing current U.S. intelligence assessments on those issues, the President would have to repudiate the trendy concept of “strategic communications,” an approach that mixes psychological operations, propaganda and P.R. into a “soft power” concoction to use against countries identified as U.S. foes. “Stratcom” also serves to manage the perceptions of the American people, an assault on the fundamental democratic precept of an informed electorate. Instead of honestly informing the citizenry, the government systematically manipulates us. Obama would have to learn to trust the people with the truth. Whether Obama recognizes how imperative it is that he make these course corrections, whether he has the political courage to take on entrenched foreign-policy lobbies (especially after the bruising battle over the Iran nuclear agreement), and whether he can overcome his own elitism toward the public are the big questions – and there are plenty of reasons to doubt that Obama will do what’s necessary. But his failure to act decisively could have devastating consequences for the United States and the world. In a way, this late-in-his-presidency course correction should be obvious (or at least it would be if there weren’t so many layers of “strategic communications” to peel away). It would include embracing Russia’s willingness to help stabilize the political-military situation in Syria, rather than the Obama administration fuming about it and trying to obstruct it. For instance, Obama could join with Russia in stabilizing Syria by making it clear to putative U.S. “allies” in the Mideast that they will face American wrath if they don’t do all that’s possible to cut off the terrorists of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda from money, weapons and recruits. That would mean facing down Turkey over its covert support for the Sunni extremists as well as confronting Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms over secret funding and arming of these jihadists. If Obama made it clear that the United States would take stern action – such as inflicting severe financial punishments – against any country caught helping these terrorist groups, he could begin shutting down the jihadists’ support pipelines. He could also coordinate with the Russians and Iranians in cracking down on the Islamic State and Al Qaeda strongholds inside Syria. On the political front, Obama could inform Syria’s Sunni “moderates” who have been living off American largesse that they must sit down with President Bashar al-Assad’s representatives and work out a power-sharing arrangement and make plans for democratic elections after a reasonable level of stability has been restored. Obama would have to ditch his mantra: “Assad must go!” Given the severity of the crisis – as the refugee chaos now spreads into Europe – Obama doesn’t have the luxury anymore of pandering to the neocons and liberal interventionists. Instead of talking tough, he needs to act realistically. Putin’s Clarity In a sense, Russian President Vladimir Putin has clarified the situation for President Obama. With Russia stepping up its military support for Assad’s regime with the goal of defeating the Islamic State’s head-choppers and Al Qaeda’s terrorism plotters, Obama’s options have narrowed. He can either cooperate with the Russians in a joint campaign against the terrorists or he can risk World War III by taking direct action against Russian forces in pursuit of “regime change” in Damascus. Though some of Official Washington’s neocons and liberal war hawks are eager for the latter – insisting that Putin must be taught a lesson about Russia’s subservience to American power – Obama’s sense of caution would be inclined toward the former. The underlying problem, however, is that Official Washington’s foreign policy “elite” has lost any sense of reality. Almost across the board, these “important people” lined up behind President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, arguably the worst blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy. But virtually no one was held accountable. Indeed, the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks strengthened their grip on the major think tanks, the op-ed pages and the political parties. Instead of dialing back on the “regime change” model, they dialed up more “regime change” schemes. Although historically the U.S. government – like many other imperial powers – has engaged in coups and other meddling to oust troublesome foreign leaders, the current chapter on “regime change” strategies can be dated back to the late 1970s and early 1980s with what most American pundits rate a success: the destruction of a secular regime in Afghanistan that was allied with the Soviet Union. Starting modestly with President Jimmy Carter’s administration and expanding rapidly under President Ronald Reagan, the CIA mounted its most ambitious “covert” operation ever – funding, recruiting and arming Islamic extremists to wage a brutal, even barbaric, war in Afghanistan. Ultimately, the operation “succeeded” by forcing a humiliating withdrawal of Soviet troops and driving the Moscow-backed leader Najibullah from power, but the cost turned out to be extraordinary, creating conditions that gave rise to both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. [US global strategy] [Outsourcing] [Obama]
• Chemical Weapons and Ceasefires: Reflections on a Trip to Damascus, Syria
  by Karim Makdisi I had long postponed a trip from Beirut to Damascus that I needed to do for research purposes. The research study, written with a colleague of mine at the American University of Beirut and in the process of being finalized, analyzes the high visibility Joint Mission established between the United Nations (UN) and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to verify the elimination of all declared chemical weapons in Syria. The OPCW is the secretariat that administers the Chemical Weapons Convention that Syria signed in September 2013 following a US-Russian agreement that averted a potential US attack on Syria. In an August 2012 response to a media question about US military intervention in the Syria war, President Obama had famously responded, apparently unscripted: “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.” This red line appeared to be crossed when chemical weapons were utilized in an attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on 21 August 2013. The images of the civilians caught up in this attack were seared into the minds of all who pay attention to this continuing war. [Syria] [cbw] [EWA]
• Hopeful signs of US course correction on Syria
  By M.K. Bhadrakumar on September 19, 2015 Amidst nascent signs that the United States is making a course correction on Syria, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian is scheduled to travel to Moscow on Monday. In remarks on Tuesday, President Hassan Rouhani had underscored that Iran’s priority will be to put an end to the insecurity and bloodshed in Syria. “Once this goal is achieved, it will be time to discuss political issues such as democracy and opposition in the Arab country,” he added. Broadly speaking, Iran and Russia’s approaches are similar and the two countries echo the Syrian government’s willingness to hold elections that would pave the way for creating an inclusive, broad-based government in Damascus. The Supreme Leader’s military advisor Gen. Yahya Rahim-Safavi said on Thursday that the Iranian regime has lined up behind Russia’s proposal to form an international coalition in Syria against the Islamic State. He said Syria and Iraq constitute Iran’s “strategic defence depth… Our material and spiritual support as well as military consultations given to Iraqis and Syrians are based on wisdom and logic”. Moscow and Tehran are closely coordinating on Syria. The Iranian media widely reported the statement by the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in Moscow on Friday that if Syria sought the help of Russian combat troops, the request will be “discussed and considered”. But then, Tehran also highlighted the remarks by the Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Muallem, which prompted Peskov’s reaction: •But until now, I (Muallem) believe that the Syrian Army is capable and what we frankly need is more ammunition and qualitative weapons to face the qualitative armament of terrorist groups…Up until now there’s no joint fight on the ground with Russian forces, but if we sense the need for it, we will consider and ask. Muallem went on to acknowledge that Russia has “stepped up the pace” of supplying weapons and ammunition”. [US Syria policy] [Russia]
• Media Now Offering ‘ISIS Plots’ That Are 100% ISIS-Free!
  By Adam Johnson Contrary to Fox News, these suspects were not lured by ISIS, but by the FBI. On March 26, the FBI announced another harrowing, 11th-hour capture of Americans plotting to join “ISIS” and launch attacks within the United States. The case of two Illinois men, Army National Guard Specialist Hasan Edmonds and his cousin Jonas Edmonds, ostensibly involved the former going to Syria to join ISIS there while the latter stayed in the US, plotting to attack “scores” at a military base. Right on cue, the American media published dressed-up FBI press releases about the “disrupted” plot; “FBI Disrupts Plot to Kill Scores at Military Base on Behalf of Islamic State” was the Washington Post‘s headline (3/26/15). These outlets, as usual, omitted the rather awkward fact that this “ISIS plot” did not actually involve anyone in ISIS. At no point was there any material contact between anyone in ISIS and the Edmond cousins. There was, as the criminal complaint lays out, lots of contact between the Edmond cousins and what they thought was ISIS, but were actually FBI agents pretending to be ISIS. At no point was there any contact with ISIS—the designated terror organization that the US is currently launching airstrikes against. [Entrapment] [FBI] [Media] [ISIS] [Hysteria]
• Rogue States And Diplomacy: A Conversation With Noam Chomsky – OpEd
  By Vijay Prashad Saturday, September 19th, 2015 On September 2, the United States’ support for the Iran nuclear deal was secured. President Barack Obama’s team negotiated the deal along with other countries of the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Germany). The Republicans in the U.S. Congress had threatened to pass a resolution that would block Obama’s signature on such a deal. Obama had said he would veto any Bill that constrained his hand to sign that deal. He needed 34 Senators to back him in order to secure his veto. When Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland said she would support the President, the deal was safe. Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., told me that Barbara Mikulski’s vote was “a big relief”. She said that the Iran deal was “a huge victory for diplomacy over the real threat of war with Iran”. Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi of the National Iranian American Council agreed. Obama, they said, “has proven to the U.S. that security is better achieved through diplomacy than through militarism”. Emad Kiyaei of the American Iranian Council told me just after Barbara Mikulski’s announcement: “There is no ‘better’ deal and the opposition has not introduced a viable alternative, except more coercive policies that to date have not slowed—rather accelerated—Iran’s nuclear programme.” [Iran deal]
• Ex Schröder Aide on 9/11: 'We Thought the Americans Would Overreact'
  Interview Conducted by René Pfister and Gordon Repinski Televisions showing then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's response to US President George W. Bush's Iraq ultimatum. Schröder's former foreign policy advisor Michael Steiner said the US had plans for the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Michael Steiner was in Prague in 1989 and at Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's side on Sept. 11, 2001. In an interview, he tells SPIEGEL how the US considered a nuclear attack on Afghanistan and about finding a bug in his phone at the Chancellery Michael Steiner, 65, had a long diplomatic career, though many remember him primarily for the scandal that cost him his job as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's foreign policy advisor. On a trip home from China, his plane got held up in Moscow and he got into an argument with a German military officer, ultimately calling the official an "asshole," according to media accounts of the incident. He also demanded caviar -- as a joke, Steiner continues to insist to this day. Nonetheless, he was run out of office by the tabloid press a short time later. Still, he can look back on a long career as a German diplomat. He was at Schröder's side on Sept. 11, 2001, he served as Germany's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was head of the United Nations mission in Kosovo and, early on in his career, he was press attaché at the German Embassy in Prague in the fall of 1989, as the communist bloc was crumbling. Other postings include an extended stint as deputy high representative in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. SPIEGEL spoke with him about his long diplomatic career. The following are excerpts from that interview. [9/11] [Nuclear weapons] [Afghanistan]
• A New Class of Ship — 'Expeditionary Support'
  By Christopher P. Cavas 2:09 p.m. EDT September 4, 2015 WASHINGTON — There are different kinds of submarines, of destroyers and amphibious ships, of patrol and support ships. The US Navy’s unique designation system defines all of them, starting with a root type, like SS for submarine, adding an N for nuclear, adding a G for guided missiles or a B for ballistic missiles. Now there’s a new root designator — E for expeditionary support. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, working with Adm. Jon Greenert, chief of naval operations, signed off on the E plan and changed the designations of three kinds of ships to the new category: •JHSV joint high-speed vessels will become EPF, for expeditionary fast transport. •MLP mobile landing platforms are now ESD, expeditionary transfer docks. •And AFSB afloat forward staging bases — currently included as MLPs — will become ESB, for expeditionary base mobile. The changes, announced Thursday by Mabus’ office, are in line with an effort begun by the secretary in 2013 to streamline some of the Navy’s ship designations, which some feel have become too disparate. The topic has been debated within the Navy’s command structure, where some argue the designators should reflect an acquisition program, while others think more traditional terms should apply. E is not a new designation, but has been used as a prefix — sometimes unofficially — to denote a vessel in experimental use. The Paul F. Foster, for example, is a former Spruance-class destroyer, hull number DD 964, that was reclassed in 2005 as experimental destroyer EDD 964. She remains in use as the self-defense test ship [US military] [Amphibious]
• Smuggling refugees into Europe is a new growth industry
  By Michael Birnbaum September 3 ? BRUSSELS — Amid the biggest wave of migration to Europe in decades, fast-growing smuggling networks are spiriting Syrians and others to the continent, law enforcement officials say — and there are few limits to the sophistication of their efforts. The 71 corpses discovered in a truck on an Austrian roadside last week are only a grim glimpse of a fast-expanding wave of human smuggling seizing Europe, said officials who are charged with hunting the smugglers. Vans that once may have been used to smuggle cigarettes are being used for the much more fragile cargo of humans. On social networks and in person, migrants can pick from a menu of services, ranging from a slippery seat on a rubber dinghy to Greece all the way to a chartered business jet straight to the refugee haven of Sweden. [As tragedies shock Europe, a bigger refugee crisis looms in Middle East] The long trek across the Western Balkans has taken fresh prominence in recent months after years in which Syrians and Iraqis fleeing war favored a perilous sea route from Libya. Now thousands of migrants set out every day to make the long journey from refugee camps neighboring Syria to the Western European nations that have offered them safe harbor. They do so hand-in-hand with smugglers, who often advertise their services openly on Facebook and other social media sites. “There is a growing number of networks that we saw in the past were dealing in the trafficking of illegal drugs and are now shifting to people smuggling,” said Robert Crepinko, the head of the organized crime unit at Europol, the European Union’s policing arm. “The number of criminal activities is growing with the same speed as the number of illegal migrants.” [Refugee]
• After Obama: Clinton vs. Sanders
  Hillary Clinton just laid out a hawkish foreign policy vision in a major speech. How do her views stack up against those of Bernie Sanders, her challenger from the left? By John Feffer, September 16, 2015. Last week, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton gave a major foreign policy speech that provided a glimpse of one possible post-Obama future. In many ways, it was not a pretty picture. But let’s first look at the good points. Clinton endorsed the Iran deal that just squeaked through Congress despite unanimous Republican opposition. “Either we move forward on the path of diplomacy and seize this chance to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon or we turn down a more dangerous path leading to a far less certain and riskier future,” she said at the outset. This was not exactly news. Clinton had earlier endorsed the deal. Nor is her support a big surprise: She played an important role as secretary of state setting up the backchannel discussions that eventually produced the agreement. Clinton also called for a stronger U.S. response to the refugee crisis. And she acknowledged the Saudi role in promoting extremism. The rest of the speech, however, was a throwback to her 2008 run for the president, when she presented herself as the adult alternative to Obama’s innocent abroad who would naively coddle U.S. adversaries. As it turned out, of course, Obama’s gambles have largely paid off. He initiated spectacular breakthroughs with Iran and Cuba, plus a semi-success with Burma (though these achievements have been offset somewhat by failures with Russia and North Korea). Clinton, however, prefers to talk tough, as if to dispel all the demeaning stereotypes of wishy-washy women, Democrats, and liberals. In her bid to win the squishy middle, she’s betting that a more hawkish foreign policy can appeal to that segment of the electorate that remains skeptical of Iran’s intentions (and the intentions of, frankly, any country, including U.S. allies like France). The U.S. electorate may well be anti-war, in the sense of not wanting U.S. boots on the ground overseas. But that doesn’t mean it’s actively pro-peace. Between these positions, Clinton has pitched her tent of “smart power.” Will Clinton’s more muscular alternative be the future of U.S. foreign policy if the Democrats hold on to the Oval Office in 2016? Or would Bernie Sanders, if he grabs the Democratic nomination and triumphs in the general election, guide the United States in a different direction? Clinton’s Worldview After giving the Iran deal some cautious praise, Hillary Clinton hastened to emphasize that the United States should treat Iran like a juvenile delinquent that is genetically disposed to engage in “bad behavior.” “We need to be prepared for three scenarios,” Clinton said. “First, Iran tries to cheat, something it’s been quite willing to do in the past; second, Iran tries to wait us out — perhaps it waits to move for 15 years when some, but not all, restrictions expire; and, third, Iran ramps up its dangerous behavior in the region, including its support for terrorist groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah.” For these and other reasons, Clinton concluded, “I don’t see Iran as our partner in implementing the agreement.” This is a curious formulation for a former diplomat to make. Contrast Clinton’s approach with the EU’s response. Coincidentally, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini gave a speech on Iran at the European Parliament on the same day that Clinton was speaking to the foreign policy establishment at Brookings. Mogherini laid out the post-deal tasks for the EU — including economic cooperation, addressing environmental issues, and dealing with drugs and terrorism — that treat Iran precisely as a partner. [Hillary Clinton] [Sanders] [US global strategy] [Liberal]
• Juncker’s Quotas: Requiem for Baltics
  Vladimir Nesterov | 17.09.2015 | 00:26 Under the EU’s exacting standards, several sectors of the Baltic economies were placed on the chopping block. Most factories that the EU deemed uncompetitive were either shut down or converted. The list of industries decimated in Latvia, for example, included fishing and fish processing, textiles, shoes, and electronics. The sugar industry was also completely gutted. And now the policies of sanctions, plus Russia’s countermeasures, are adding to the economic woes in the Baltics. For example, the Baltic News Service reports that between January and July of 2015, Lithuania exported 54.7% fewer goods to Russia than during the same period in 2014. Lithuanian exports of milk and dairy products fell by 94.2%, and no meat or meat products have been exported to Russia this year at all. The Lithuanian Ministry of Finance stated that they had failed to find an alternative to the Russian market. And we might add: they will continue to fail. Rising unemployment has resulted in a massive exodus, especially among younger generation. Latvia and Lithuania have lost about 20% of their populations. The Estonian population has decreased by 5.5%.
  And that’s when it began... Kristiina Ojuland, an MEP and the former foreign minister of Estonia, criticized the “politically correct drivel” coming from the European Union and proclaimed a “threat to the white race.” Latvian society launched into a debate about who is worse – Africans or Russians. Latvia’s former minister of defense, Artis Pabriks, who is also an MEP, explained that Latvia cannot accept Africans, as his country suffered so cruelly when it was violently colonized by the Russians. The Baltics have been beset with nationalist protests. Refugees arriving at a reception site in the Estonian village of Vao were met by a demonstration of protesting local residents, a motorcycle rally consisting of hundreds of bikers, and proud Estonians wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the image of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. The refugee reception center itself was set on fire by some of the villagers. Juncker’s quotas are merely the first step on a long staircase that goes nowhere but down. These “young Europeans” from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will also have to answer for their part in America’s military adventures, for “Atlantic solidarity,” and for the devastation of the Middle East. They thought Russia was an Asian interloper in Europe. But now they’ll get a real taste of Asia, in addition to Africa, right where they live. [Refugee] [EU]
• Bombing raids in Syria would be illegal and disastrous, former ADF General Peter Gration warns
  The World Today By David Mark Updated 4 Sep 2015, 8:17am Super Hornet over Iraq Photo: Australia is considering a request by the US to join its bombing campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria. (Australian Defence Force: Sgt Pete) The former head of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Retired General Peter Gration, has signed an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Abbott opposing bombing raids in Syria. Australia is considering a request by the US to join its bombing campaign against the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria. The open letter suggests bombing IS targets would potentially be illegal, could strengthen the organisation and divide the Australian community. Retired General Gration, who was the Commander of the ADF from 1987 to 1993, told The World Today the move would be "inviting disaster". "I believe this would be a strategically bad decision; in fact I would call this strategically dumb," he said. "To commit us to what is complex and confused war with a centuries old religious conflict between the Sunnis and the [Shiites], the underlying issue, I think is really inviting disaster." Retired General Gration said the US air strikes in Syria had not stopped IS and Australia's contribution would be "at best a marginal increase". He said it would inevitably lead to a ground war. [Australia] [Airpower] [US Syria policy]
• Congress rethinks anti-Assad stance
  A growing number of Democratic lawmakers are openly questioning whether toppling Syria's Bashar al-Assad should still be a priority amid steady gains by the Islamic State. Senate Democrats are beginning to question regime-change goals amid Islamic State gains. Author Julian Pecquet Posted September 16, 2015 The issue came to a head Sept. 16 as a key Senate panel held its first IS hearing since the first batch of 54 US-trained rebels was routed in late July by al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra as soon as it entered Syria. Reports that Russia is beefing up Assad's forces with tanks, troops and artillery has only added to the calls of some Democrats for a new strategy. "I don't know that it helps for us to keep banging the table about Assad," panel member Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., told Al-Monitor. "I think it would be better for us to be as effective as possible in fighting [IS] and restoring some kind of security environment that shifts back the flow of refugees." Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., shared similar misgivings. "I think we've come to a point where we should be reassessing what our strategy [should be] with respect to Assad and Syria and the conflict there," she said. "I don't have the answer on me about what I think that should be, but I really think we're at a point where we need to reassess, because what we've been doing is not working." Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said he's worried about the "void" left by Assad's removal in the absence of any viable moderate opposition. "Who are you going to replace him with? What are you going to do? Leave a void?" he told Al-Monitor. "That hasn't worked with Saddam [Hussein] or with [Moammar] Gadhafi. It's a royal, royal mess, and we're just throwing more money at it and making it messier." And Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., cautioned against open calls for toppling Assad. Instead, he has backed the creation of humanitarian safe zones for civilians brutalized by the regime's barrel bombs as well as Islamist extremists. "I don't think regime change should be an official policy of the United States," Kaine said. "Our batting record is very poor." The growing angst follows repeated assurances by the Barack Obama administration that Assad "must go" and that his days were "numbered." Four years and more than 200,000 deaths later, the only groups making much progress on the ground appear to be IS and other extremist militant groups. [US Syria policy] [ISIS]
• Administration searches for new approach to aiding rebels in Syria
  Gen. Lloyd Austin III, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress on Wednesday that only “four or five” trainees from a U.S. program have actually ended up “in the fight” against the Islamic State in Syria. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) By Karen DeYoung September 16 ? The Obama administration is moving toward major changes in its military train-and-equip program for the Syrian opposition after the acknowledged failure of efforts to create a new force of rebel fighters to combat the Islamic State there. In comments that appeared to shock even many of those involved in Syria policy elsewhere in the government, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress on Wednesday that only “four or five” trainees from the program, a $500 million plan officially launched in December to prepare as many as 5,400 fighters this year, have ended up “in the fight” inside Syria. The course correction would mark the first significant alteration in the Obama administration’s year-old strategy of defeating the militants with air power, along with training and supplies for indigenous forces fighting them on the ground. It comes as critics have drawn a direct line between Obama’s long-standing reluctance to more directly intervene in the fight and the growing flood of Syrian refugees fleeing to the West. Defense officials who described the proposed changes said the yearly goal would be substantially lower, perhaps as few as 500. Rather than front-line forces, fighters would be trained as enablers and liaisons between U.S. forces outside the country — particularly those directing U.S. airstrikes — and groups such as Syrian Kurds and Sunni Arabs that the Pentagon thinks have been effective against the militants. Vetting rules would be eased to allow training for members of groups previously barred from training, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe the changes. Obama’s senior national security officials discussed the Syria situation in a principals meeting at the White House early this week. [US Syria Policy] [ISIS] [Proxy]
• Hidden History of Syria Regime Collapse Strategy Begins to Emerge
  …though, to be accurate, loyal readers of China Matters knew the skinny as it happened, three years ago and the Western media is now playin’ ketchup. From today’s Guardian: Russia proposed more than three years ago that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could step down as part of a peace deal, according to a senior negotiator involved in back-channel discussions at the time.g Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari said western powers failed to seize on the proposal. Since it was made, in 2012, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions uprooted, causing the world’s gravest refugee crisis since the second world war. … But he said that the US, Britain and France were so convinced that the Syrian dictator was about to fall, they ignored the proposal. As the Guardian ruefully points out, most of the quarter-million fatalities and millions of refugees were generated after early 2012. The total death toll in early 2012 was…less than 10,000. Also consider this an instance of neoliberal ass-covering, as if the Western allies were just waiting for Assad "to fall." [US Syria Strategy] [Outsourcing]
• West 'ignored Russian offer in 2012 to have Syria's Assad step aside'
  Exclusive: Senior negotiator describes rejection of alleged proposal – since which time tens of thousands have been killed and millions displaced A man walks among the rubble of collapsed buildings in Douma after what activists said were airstrikes by forces loyal to Assad earlier this year. A man walks among the rubble of collapsed buildings in Douma after what activists said were airstrikes by forces loyal to Assad earlier this year. Photograph: Mohammed Badra/Reuters Julian Borger and Bastien Inzaurralde Tuesday 15 September 2015 09.20 BST Last modified on Wednesday 16 September 2015 01.05 BST Russia proposed more than three years ago that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could step down as part of a peace deal, according to a senior negotiator involved in back-channel discussions at the time. Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari said western powers failed to seize on the proposal. Since it was made, in 2012, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions uprooted, causing the world’s gravest refugee crisis since the second world war. Ahtisaari held talks with envoys from the five permanent members of the UN security council in February 2012. He said that during those discussions, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, laid out a three-point plan, which included a proposal for Assad to cede power at some point after peace talks had started between the regime and the opposition. But he said that the US, Britain and France were so convinced that the Syrian dictator was about to fall, they ignored the proposal. “It was an opportunity lost in 2012,” Ahtisaari said in an interview. [US Syria policy] [Russia]
• Yemen crisis: How bad is the humanitarian situation?
  24 August 2015 UN officials have been warning for months that Yemen is facing a dire humanitarian situation. How bad has the situation become? The country is experiencing 'a humanitarian catastrophe'. A Yemeni man looks on as a team of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegates inspects the scene of a Saudi-led coalition air strike in Sanaa's Old City (9 August 2015)Image copyright EPA That was the frank assessment of the UN's Humanitarian Co-ordinator, Johannes Van Der Klaauw, on 19 August. Almost 4,500 people have been killed and a further 23,000 have been wounded since the escalation in March of the conflict between forces loyal to the exiled President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and those allied to the Houthi rebel movement. The destruction of infrastructure and restrictions on imports imposed by a Saudi-led coalition carrying out air strikes against the rebels have led to 21 million people being deprived of life-sustaining commodities and basic services. [Yemen] [Saudi Arabia] [Casualties]
• Bernie Sanders should stop ducking foreign policy
  The progressive favorite has views on foreign affairs but has avoided articulating them to voters August 5, 2015 2:00AM ET by Norman Solomon - Senator Bernie Sanders has sparked a strong grassroots response in his run for the Democratic presidential nomination on social and economic issues. At the same time, he has given short shrift to foreign policy, military spending and war. That approach should change. I’m among millions of supporters who are enthusiastic about the clarity of his positions in taking on Wall Street, corporate power and economic inequality. But we also need Sanders to be clear about what he would do as commander in chief of the world’s leading military power.
  After a question about “the military establishment” and “perpetual war” from a man who identified himself as a veteran for peace at a recent town hall gathering in Iowa City, Sanders’ reply was tepid Democratic boilerplate. He blamed Republican hawks for getting the U.S. into Iraq. He called for progress against waste and cost overruns at the Pentagon. And he said that in the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the U.S. government should act jointly with regional allies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey. (“Those countries are going to have to get their hands dirty, it cannot just be the United States alone.”)
  Sanders has also urged confronting Russian leader Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. (“You totally isolate him politically, you totally isolate him economically,” Sanders said on Fox News last year.) [Sanders] [Liberal] [US Middle East Policy] [US_Election16]
• The Yemen Tragedy and the Ongoing Crisis of the Left in the United States
  by Ajamu Baraka After months of horrific scenes of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean where literally thousands of human beings were dying at sea, European public opinion was finally mobilized to respond to this movement of people. However, the anguished expressions of concern from the general public and government leaders in Europe was a far cry from the response that met the first wave of migrants that was largely African. In response to that migration, European authorities openly talked of launching military attacks on the boats in Libya to stop the “flood” of these “illegal” immigrants into Europe, even after experts cautioned them that military attacks would result in even more deaths at sea. What changed? The racial composition of the majority of the migrants shifting away from Sub-Saharan Africans to refugees from the various conflict zones of Iraq and Syria, captured in the image of the globally disseminated image of Aylan Kurdi, the Kurdish child from the devastated city of Kabani. But even more importantly, European and U.S. propaganda could exploit this flow of humanity from Syria politically. This example is pertinent to the discussion here because it raises two issues related to Yemen: first, the ease in which public opinion is influenced by Western propagandists (I include both the official state entities responsible for psy-ops directed at the public and the corporate media that largely collaborates with these efforts because of shared ideological positions and worldviews), and secondly, how humanitarian concerns are selectively manipulated to prepare and justify military attacks from the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination. [Yemen] [Imperialism] [Liberals]
• Have We Really Entered the Age of Post-Capitalism?
  by Jacob Hjortsberg Bergen, Norway. Not least for it’s sheer optimism, I was happy to read Paul Mason’s new book, Postcapitalism. In it, Mason makes two broad and largely commonsensical observations regarding the rapid development of information technologies – first, that as our information technology is getting increasingly more sophisticated, it is possible to automate away more and more jobs; second, that as this happens, more and more people will spend their time producing information of different kind – suggesting that these two development will together force capitalism to evolve, largely without any violence or class struggle, into a “postcapitalist” world order. Is he right? Probably not. Mason’s main suggestion is that the more our economy is organized around the production of information and knowledge, the less will it make sense for this economy to take the form of capitalism. Why? Because, as Mason puts it himself, “markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant”. Imagine here the difference between sharing an apple and sharing an idea. If I have an apple and share it with you, I end up having only half an apple. If on the other hand I share an idea with you, I get to keep the whole idea only now you have it too. Thus, while ideas are inherently abundant, apples are inherently scarce – and capitalism, Mason points out, is really only equipped to deal with the production and circulation of the latter category of things. In economics, this difference between scarce and abundant goods is known as a difference between rival and non-rival goods, and the main reason why our current economic system is so bad at dealing with the latter is because money is itself a rival good. If I share twenty dollars with you, we both have ten and not twenty each. The problem is that, when the exchange of information (as well as other non-rival goods) is mediated by money, we will all have to act as if information is also a rival good, and that sharing it for free consequently diminishes it’s value – which, of course, is true in terms of the money that we use to measure its exchange-value, but horribly misleading in terms of the actual use-value of the information. To quote open source pioneer Aaron Swartz, when we do treat information as a non-rival good, “It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral – it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy”. Popular wisdom notwithstanding, then, while it is no real problem to equate apples with oranges, we run into serious troubles when the equation is made between apples and information. This, I would say, is the gist of Masons diagnosis. Let me now suggest why I don’t think it will lead to “postcapitalism”. [Capitalism]
• U.S. training helped mold top Islamic State military commander
  Highlights Tarkhan Batirashvili was a natural military star when he joined Georgia’s military Fought the Russians during 2008 war, but left Georgia for Turkey in 2012 In Syria, he’s known as Abu Omar al Shishani, commander in several major victories By Mitchell Prothero KILLIS, Turkey — The 15 Chechens looking to cross the border from Turkey to Syria didn’t strike Abdullah as particularly important or unusual. It was early summer in 2012, and as a smuggler based in the Turkish border town of Killis, Abdullah, who’d fled his home village in Syria because of fighting on the outskirts of Aleppo, was used to secretive groups of foreigners – journalists, aid workers and many recently aspiring jihadists – hiring him to cross Turkish military lines at the border while avoiding what was then still a significant Syrian government presence in northern Syrian. “In 2012, everyone was coming to Syria and we had too much work leading all kinds of people across the border,” he explained over lunch in Killis, a Turkish town just a few miles from the rebel-held Syrian city of Azzaz. “A lot were Muslims who had come to support the revolution against Bashar Assad from every country. So many from Europe, Russia, Germany, France. . . .” The 15 men had reached Abdullah through a network of contacts that were funneling new fighters to northern Syria, and Abdullah recalled they said they were going to Syria to assist in the fight against Assad. They were quiet, disciplined and for the most part spoke only a bit of crude formal Arabic. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/middle-east/article35322882.html#storylink=cpy [ISIS] [Outsourcing] [Georgia] [Jihadist] [Russia confrontation] [Turkey]
• Exclusive: New Emails on Secret Benghazi Weapons
  By Catherine Herridge, Pamela Browne Published September 11, 2015 On the third anniversary of the Benghazi terrorist attack, emails reviewed by Fox News raise significant questions about US government support for the secret shipment of weapons to the Libyan opposition. During the Spring of 2011, as the Obama administration ramped up efforts to topple the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, a licensed American arms dealer, Marc Turi, his business partner formerly with the CIA, senior US military officials in Europe and Africa as well as a former staffer for republican Senator John McCain considered logistics for arming the rebels, according to the emails exclusively obtained by Fox Business and Fox News. Turi is facing federal trial this December on two counts that he allegedly violated the arms export control act by making false statements. Turi denies the charges, and alleges there was a rogue weapons operation run with the knowledge of Mrs. Clinton's state department. The email dated March 22, 2011 was sent by Admiral James Stavridis, when he was the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, from his government email account to Turi's business partner David Manners. The email was also copied to General Carter Ham, then head of the defense department's Africa command. Stavridis vouches for Manners as a United States Naval Academy classmate and "former CIA Officer with deep connections throughout the near Middle East." [Outsourcing] [Libya] [Hillary Clinton]
• Household Income Falls, Poverty Rate Ticks Up
  Published September 16, 2015 Reuters American household incomes lost ground last year and the poverty rate ticked up, a sign the U.S. economic expansion had yet to lead to gains for many Americans five years after the 2007-2009 recession. The data released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Wednesday, which showed the inflation-adjusted median income slipping to $53,657 last year from $54,462 in 2013, offered a reminder of the tepid nature of the economy's recovery. "In 2014, real median household income was 6.5 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession," Census researchers wrote. At the same time, the poverty rate ticked up to 14.8 percent from 14.5 percent in 2013, the data showed. Census researchers said the changes in both the median income and poverty rate were not statistically significant. The Census Bureau also said the number of people in the United States without health insurance coverage fell to 33 million last year, or 10.4 percent of the population, from 41.8 million, or 13.3 percent, in 2013. [Poverty]
• Trump Seriously: On the Trail With the GOP's Tough Guy
  "I'm owned by the people. I'm no angel, but I'm going to do right by them." By Paul Solotaroff September 9, 2015 Hey, ya made it, great to see ya!" says Donald Trump, having just stepped aboard his throne room of a plane and stopping by my seat to extend his hand. "You get the big tour yet? No? What the hell? C'mon, I'll show you myself." Sidebar Timeline: Donald Trump's Life and Career » I follow him into the stateroom of the 757, past three rows of sleeper seats wrapped in eggshell calfskin, with seat-belt buckles of plated gold and the family crest stitched in every headrest; past the conference center, with its mahogany table and a dozen executive high-backs snugged around it; past the in-plane theater, with its oyster-shape couches and the 57-inch flatscreen tuned to Fox; past the bumped-out bulkhead and the first of two bedrooms, this one fitted with mohair couches that convert to a full-size bed; and then the master bedroom, with its silk-spun walls and bathroom fixtures finished in rosy gold. "Not bad, you agree?" calls Trump over his shoulder, leading me down the corridor to the cockpit. "I bought this from Paul Allen and gutted it top to bottom. It's bigger than Air Force One, which is a step down from this in every way. Rolls-Royce engines; seats 43. Didja know it was featured on the Discovery Channel as the world's most luxurious jetliner?" (Fact-check: It isn't bigger than Air Force One, and it was featured on the Smithsonian Channel. But in this, as in much of what Trump says, it's more about the broad strokes than the details.) [Trump]
• America's Oligarch Problem: How the Super-Rich Threaten US Democracy
  An Essay By Markus Feldenkirchen AFP Poking fun at the über-oligarch: Donald Trump pinatas are displayed in the window of a store in San Francisco's Mission District. The sky's the limit when it comes to the United States' campaign finance system. Increasingly, the country's richest sector is gaining influence and control over America's politicals. The development threatens the country's once proud democracy The two candidates currently attracting the most attention in the American presidential primaries seem to be polar opposites. First, there's self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders, who can pack entire arenas with as many as 20,000 supporters. And then there's a man who claims to possess $10 billion, Donald Trump, who is leading in the broad field of Republicans. The two do, however, have one thing in common: They reject the US campaign finance system. One out of conviction; the other because he has the resources to finance his own campaign. One, Bernie Sanders, takes pride in stating that he doesn't want rich people's money. Some 400,000 largely middle class Americans have contributed to his campaign so far, donating $31.20 on average. The other, Donald Trump, proudly announced recently that he had rejected a $5 million donation from a hedge fund manager. And that he is prepared to pump $1 billion of his own wealth into the campaign. One of Trump's most popular arguments so far is that his rival Jeb Bush has managed to raise over $150 million. "Jeb Bush is a puppet to his donors," Trump says disparagingly. Sooner or later, he argues, they will call in their favors. "I don't owe anyone any favors." It's a message that is proving popular with potential voters. But is it really any more democratic that a billionaire can buy his own election instead of allowing himself to be bought by others? [Plutocracy] [US_Election16] [Oligarch]
• How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Undermine National Security and Harm Us All
  By David Vine With the U.S. military having withdrawn many of its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans would be forgiven for being unaware that hundreds of U.S. bases and hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops still encircle the globe. Although few know it, the United States garrisons the planet unlike any country in history, and the evidence is on view from Honduras to Oman, Japan to Germany, Singapore to Djibouti. Like most Americans, for most of my life, I rarely thought about military bases. Scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson described me well when he wrote in 2004, “As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet.” To the extent that Americans think about these bases at all, we generally assume they’re essential to national security and global peace. Our leaders have claimed as much since most of them were established during World War II and the early days of the Cold War. As a result, we consider the situation normal and accept that U.S. military installations exist in staggering numbers in other countries, on other peoples’ land. On the other hand, the idea that there would be foreign bases on U.S. soil is unthinkable. While there are no freestanding foreign bases permanently located in the United States, there are now around 800 U.S. bases in foreign countries. Seventy years after World War II and 62 years after the Korean War, there are still 174 U.S. “base sites” in Germany, 113 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea, according to the Pentagon. Hundreds more dot the planet in around 80 countries, including Aruba and Australia, Bahrain and Bulgaria, Colombia, Kenya, and Qatar, among many other places. Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history. [Bases] [Imperialism]
• Value of Anti-IS Airstrikes in Syria Debated as France Joins
  • By sylvie corbet and lori hinnant, associated press PARIS — Sep 15, 2015, 2:40 PM ET French lawmakers are debating the decision to join a military air campaign over Syria, raising new questions about what a year of U.S.-led bombing of the Islamic State group has accomplished. British, Australian and Belgian leaders are also considering expanding ongoing airstrikes in Iraq to Syria — but critics in all countries are questioning the point of widening a campaign that has failed to stem advances by the extremist organization. French reconnaissance flights in Syria began last week, and President Francois Hollande said airstrikes there would follow soon. Tuesday's parliamentary debate is not a request for permission — the government needs none — but rather an opportunity to explain its decision before a skeptical audience. Prime Minister Manuel Valls told Parliament that France will decide "alone" on it targets. He justified the decision to intervene in Syria as "self-defense" against terrorism. France has seen deadly attacks this year linked to Islamic extremists abroad. The United States, Canada and Middle Eastern allies Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have been striking targets in Syria for months and were recently joined by Turkey. Until now, France, Britain, Australia, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands have only conducted airstrikes in Iraq, where the government has requested help dealing with the IS onslaught, fearing that hitting at IS in Syria would ultimately help the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. For France, the influx of Syrian and Iraqi refugees into Europe has shifted the equation. "The government wants to be seen as being decisive and doing something," said Francois Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "The beauty of airstrikes is you can decide them readily, you can implement them very quickly and easily, and in media terms they're quite spectacular." [France] [Refugee] [Strategic incoherence]
• Why Does Malaysia Have an Islamic State Problem?
  With the country long hailed as an oasis of moderate Islam, authorities in Kuala Lumpur are alarmed that so many young Malaysians are answering the call to jihad. • By John Hudson • September 9, 2015 -problem/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=*Situation%20Report KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Sitting cross-legged outside Kuala Lumpur’s oldest mosque during afternoon prayers last week, Imam Mohd Faisal bin Tan Mutallib was resolute: Anyone considering joining the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria is “not a true follower of Islam.” But despite the best efforts of U.S. officials to combat extremism in Malaysia and partner with religious leaders like Mutallib, the gravitational pull of the Islamic State in this multiethnic country of 30 million remains stubbornly strong. That is baffling to regional analysts and has muddied Malaysia’s reputation as an anchor of moderate Islam in Southeast Asia. Malaysian authorities have arrested more than 122 individuals since 2013 who either joined the Islamic State and returned home or were stopped while attempting to leave the country, according to government data given to Foreign Policy. That figure indicates an almost doubling of Islamic State-related arrests by Malaysian authorities between 2014 and 2015. Authorities have also identified between 100 and 200 people currently inside Malaysia who support the Islamic State. “The involvement of Malaysians in militant activities in the name of Islam has tarnished the country’s image and affected the purity of Islam,” Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told parliament last year. [Jihadist] [Myopia] [Malaysia]
• Want to Know What’s Really Going on in Syria? Warning: It’ll Take You More Than 5 Minutes
  by Louis Allday September 11, 2015 “Wars are complex. They come out of nowhere and all of a sudden, people you’ve never heard of are killing each other on the evening news.” So begins this rather patronising piece on Upworthy that attempts to explain in a digestible format what is happening in Syria. Entitled ‘Trying to follow what is going on in Syria and why? This comic will get you there in 5 minutes’, the article presents a neat, but ultimately misleading and reductive narrative, which argues that drought caused by climate change is primarily responsible for the war in Syria. Somewhat regrettably, it has been shared widely over the internet since it was published last week. Presumably it is being read (and shared) by people who are confused by events in Syria and want to find an easy framework with which to understand them. Even for a piece that is explicitly intended for the layman, it is highly simplistic, misleadingly so. There is no doubt that the major drought witnessed in Syria between 2006 and 2011 had a catastrophic environmental and societal impact on the country, but it is not the over-arching cause of the war. The article is also littered with inaccuracies and has many glaring omissions, including the central role of foreign powers in the war, notably the US. For instance, there is no mention of the US’ long-standing effort (in co-ordination with Saudi Arabia) to encourage Islamic fundamentalism and sectarianism in Syria in order to weaken the Syrian Government at any cost (as revealed by WikiLeaks) and no mention of the CIA’s enormous Syria operation that has cost at least $1bn and trained and armed nearly 10,000 fighters sent to fight in Syria since the war began. But it is something else in the piece that – due to personal experience – I found especially problematic. The piece claims that in response to the drought crisis, “Bashar Al Assad’s Government offered little help” (the word Government is omitted in the article itself, this appears to be an editorial oversight). In 2009, when the enormous scale of the drought in Syria was becoming clear, I was a research intern at the British Embassy in Damascus. [Media] [US Syria policy] [Personalisation] [Agency]
• A Choice of Billionaires: Politics for the One-Percent
  by Serge Halimi Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both spent around $1bn on their 2012 presidential campaigns. Rather than fund a candidate in 2016, New York billionaire Donald Trump decided to stand himself. “My income is $400m a year,” he claimed. “Sure, I would spend it [on campaigning].” In 1992 billionaire Ross Perot promised to “buy the White House to give it back to Americans who can no longer afford it.” Like Perot, Trump will probably fail, while shedding his own light on how the US political system works: “I gave to many people before this … two months ago I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.” Hillary Clinton, former senator for New York and candidate in the Democratic primaries, was “there” too: “For Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice because I gave to a foundation that frankly … is supposed to do good.” If you want an incorruptible president, Trump suggests, choose a corrupter. A 2010 Supreme Court ruling removed most restrictions on political donations from individuals and private companies (1). Since then, the super-rich have been able to distribute their largesse unimpeded. [Plutocracy] [US_Election16]
• Is U.S. pledge to take 10,000 Syrians too few to make a difference?
  Highlights Advocates recall years when U.S. took in hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cubans Processing is slowed by security concerns raised since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Administration bristles at idea effort is ‘insignificant’ These Syrian refugees who crowded Presevo in Serbia on Friday waiting to be registered by police are among the tens of thousands of people who are pressing to get into Europe. The United States has promised to take 10,000 this year, a number that will put barely a dent in the hundreds of thousands displaced by Syria’s civil war. These Syrian refugees who crowded Presevo in Serbia on Friday waiting to be registered by police are among the tens of thousands of people who are pressing to get into Europe. The United States has promised to take 10,000 this year, a number that will put barely a dent in the hundreds of thousands displaced by Syria’s civil war. Santi Palacios - AP By Hannah Allam WASHINGTON — Advocacy groups are expressing disdain for the Obama administration’s promise to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees during the next fiscal year, saying the number is too low and voicing skepticism that the thousands of Syrians currently in the resettlement pipeline will reach the United States anytime soon. The Obama administration acknowledged Friday that it will be difficult to resettle 10,000 refugees in the next. But officials called the goal “achievable” and defended the U.S. response. While traditionally a world leader in refugee resettlement, the United States has faced criticism for its response to the Syrian conflict; only about 1,600 Syrians have been resettled since the beginning of the ongoing civil war that’s killed more than 200,000 and displaced millions in what advocates call the worst such crisis since World World II. “It’s a good signal that we’re responding to the crisis but, functionally, it’s not a meaningful dent given the scope of the crisis,” said Katherine Reisner of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project at the New York-based Urban Justice Center. “It’s also not meaningful relative to historical precedent. After Vietnam, we were able to have over 200,000 South Vietnamese come to the United States within a year.” [US Syria policy] [Refugee] [Blowback] [Jihadist]
• Who’s to Blame for Syria Mess? Putin!
  September 13, 2015 Exclusive: Official Washington’s new “group think” is to blame Russia’s President Putin for the Syrian crisis, although it was the neocons and President George W. Bush who started the current Mideast mess by invading Iraq, the Saudis who funded Al Qaeda, and the Israelis who plotted “regime change,” says Robert Parry. By Robert Parry Sen. Lindsey Graham may have been wrong about pretty much everything related to the Middle East, but at least he has the honesty to tell Americans that the current trajectory of the wars in Syria and Iraq will require a U.S. re-invasion of the region and an open-ended military occupation of Syria, draining American wealth, killing countless Syrians and Iraqis, and dooming thousands, if not tens of thousands, of U.S. troops. Graham’s grim prognostication of endless war may be a factor in his poll numbers below one percent, a sign that even tough-talking Republicans aren’t eager to relive the disastrous Iraq War. Regarding the mess in Syria, there are, of course, other options, such as cooperation with Russia and Iran to resist the gains of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda and a negotiated power-sharing arrangement in Damascus. But those practical ideas are still being ruled out. [US Syria policy] [Propaganda] [Blame]
• Mike Huckabee: Some Syrian refugees may have ‘nefarious purposes’
  By David Weigel September 14 at 10:23 AM ? Huckabee told conservatives they should be wary of refugees. (AP Photo/John Locher) Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, whose presidential campaign has become a crusade for "religious liberty" and the rights of the unborn, told social conservatives this weekend that they should be skeptical of allowing more Syrian refugees into the United States. "Are they really escaping tyranny, are they escaping poverty, or are they really just coming because we've got cable TV?" Huckabee asked, in an audience question-and-answer session at the conservative Eagle Forum conference in St. Louis. "I don't meant to be trite. I'm just saying: We don't know." [Refugee] [Republican]
• Syria conflict: No sign of Assad regime crumbling
  By Jeremy Bowen BBC Middle East editor, Damascus 14 September 2015 Smoke rises from what activists said was a military position of forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad after clashes with Army of Islam fighters near the town of Douma (13 September 2015)Image copyright Reuters Predictions of the imminent, or even medium-term fall of Damascus are wrong. It does not feel like the capital of a regime that is about to crumble. The government-held areas that I have visited seem calm and functional. The ministry of defence, behind heavy layers of security, moves at a stately pace. The regime has deployed some of its strongest units in Damascus because keeping the capital is so important to it. The troops I met seemed to have good morale, in cohesive units. Their kit and weapons were well looked after; so were their positions. [Syria] [EWA]
• One party system: What total Republican control of a state really means
  By Herman Schwartz August 19, 2015 The U.S. Constitution gives the states almost total control over how Americans live and vote. Republicans appear to have grasped the importance of this, but most Democrats have not. Since losing the White House and Congress in 2008, the GOP has focused time, money and talent on gaining control of state governments. Their efforts have paid off. In the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, older, white and upper-income voters, including many Tea Party supporters, turned out in force, while Democratic constituencies, including many young and minority voters, stayed home. The result is that Republicans control both the governor’s mansion and legislature in 24 states, 70 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers, both chambers in 30 states, plus Nebraska’s single chamber, and 31 governor’s mansions. Nearly 90 percent of the Republicans in the House of Representatives are on the far right of the conservative spectrum, described by Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution as “a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime [and] scornful of compromise.” This is also true of GOP state legislators. Republicans hold super-majorities in many states and have wasted no time in adopting radical elements of the Republican agenda. What they’ve done so far provides a telling picture of what a red America could look like. North Carolina is a poster child for how far a red state can go. [Governance]
• Flow of Refugees to Europe set to increase. Iraqis among those joining as they abandon hope.
  By Liz Sly September 6 at 8:14 PM ? BODRUM, TURKEY — The influx of refugees and migrants overwhelming Europe seems destined to intensify as the welcome extended by Germany encourages more people from the world’s most violent and impoverished countries to travel in search of new lives. Iraqis formed the largest number of people descending from buses in the upscale Turkish seaside town of Bodrum on Sunday to attempt the short but perilous sea crossing to Greece, where two-thirds of those seeking asylum in Europe have arrived this year. A little more than half of the arrivals in Greece this year have been Syrians fleeing their country’s brutal and unending war — and by August the proportion of Syrians had climbed to 78 percent, according to the most recent figures provided by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. But the Syrians are being joined by Iraqis, as they, too, abandon hope that their country’s conflict will be resolved, said Mohammed Hamed, 33, an Iraqi policeman who left his wife and three children in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala three days ago. “Many Iraqis are coming now and many more will come in the future if they can get the money,” he said as he mingled with other Iraqis newly arriving at the bus station in Bodrum. He plans to head for Germany, and then secure access for the rest of his family. [Migration] [Refugee] [Syria] [Iraq]
• ‘Refugees’ Arrive in Munich – What’s The Endgame?
  Daniel McAdams ANTI-STATE•ANTI-WAR•PRO-MARKET Watching live footage of the “refugees” arriving in Munich, it is difficult not to be struck by how non refugee-like they look. Many are well shod in expensive-looking western sneakers, wearing Adidas and other western name-brand clothing, fingering their smart phones. Mostly men of, as they say, fighting age. What few women we do see appear mostly fashionably dressed with healthy and happy looking babies. It is de rigueur at the moment to express unconditional sympathy for those currently streaming in to Europe from, we are told, mostly Syria, to the point where it is probably risky to even entertain questions about the “rest of the story.” Indeed, I have been among the first to write sympathetically about their plight and to lay the blame on the disastrous US-and-allies foreign policy of regime change. But it is hard to avoid this strange feeling that on many fronts this story is not exactly as it is being covered in the western mainstream media. When one thinks of desperate refugees seeking a safe exit from a war zone, pictures like this and this and this generally come to mind. This is not to say that those landing in Germany are not legitimately fleeing a disaster area, but only that there is something that seems odd about the whole thing. But of course to suggest such is to tip-toe into the dangerous waters of “conspiracy.” Nevertheless, let’s delve into several of the narratives… German Chancellor Angela Merkel is risking a shoulder injury so vigorously is she patting herself on the back over accepting limitless numbers of these people. As quoted in the NY Times: Merkel told the Funke consortium of newspapers that ‘the right to political asylum has no limits on the number of asylum seekers.’ ‘As a strong, economically healthy country we have the strength to do what is necessary’ and ensure that every asylum seeker gets a fair hearing, she was quoted as saying. Meanwhile the Hungarian government is being relentlessly demonized for initially refusing to allow the thousands who landed in Budapest to immediately continue on to Austria and Germany — even though Hungary held up transportation at the insistence of the same German government that is now singing its own praises over its about-face decision to begin accepting them! According to EU law, the first EU landing country is responsible for registering the migrants and is forbidden from allowing them transit without proper authorization. Of course you would never know this if you relied on mainstream media reporting for information. [Refugee]
• Combat Boots and the Price of Freedom
  By Congressman Randy Forbes September 12, 2015 A pair of old combat boots from the Korean War sit on display at the National Museum of American History. The half-century old boots are made of brown leather with a double strap and buckles. The toes are faded, dirt and wear etched into the leather. An army of eyelets run up and down the boots showing signs where the laces once cinched them tight. They bear the signs of years of hard work – difficult training, daily sacrifices, and combat. What experiences they must have seen as the person who wore these shoes stepped out onto foreign soil to defend the causes of freedom. There is something powerful about seeing old shoes like these on display. Maybe it’s the journey motif. Maybe it’s the empathy it evokes (walk a mile in another man’s shoes, as the proverb goes). I think it’s because they hold a story. These shoes have been places. They’ve followed a path, been on a journey; the shoe is symbolic of the individual’s contribution to a larger purpose. Physical hardship, camaraderie, sacrifice, peace, bravery, loyalty and pain. The path of our nation is tread by people who have worn many different shoes, but some stand out above the rest. Like the old combat boots at the National Museum of American History that once belonged to an American soldier, our military men and women put a lot of miles into their boots, from the rolling grassland of Gettysburg, to the beaches of Normandy, to the jungles of Vietnam, to the deserts of the Middle East. We are overcome with gratitude when we see shoes worn by those, for instance, behind the scenes like the Army Nurse Corps in World War II as they cared for wounded warriors. This weekend, we remember the attacks of September 11, 2001. We will see pictures of the gear the firefighters wore - the boots, the helmets, the jackets - as they stormed head-first into the towers. [Hawk] [Militarisation]
• Syria and Iraq Are Disintegrating, US Defense Intel Chief Says
  By VICE News September 11, 2015 | 7:15 pm The head of America's Defense Intelligence Agency said Friday that under the shadow of longstanding and deadly sectarian wars with multiple, conflicting actors, the nation states of Syria and Iraq as we known them may be irreparably fractured. "I'm having a tough time seeing it come back together," Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart said at a conference Thursday, in a statement inconsistent with the official White House line, which holds that both Iraq and Syria should remain as nation states in the eyes of the international community. Stewart said he is "wrestling with the idea that the Kurds will come back to a central government of Iraq." He also predicted that in the future, Syria will be "fractured into two or three parts," the Associated Press reported. At the same conference, CIA Director John Brennan said that many Iraqis and Syrians are increasingly self-identifying along religious or ethnic lines, as opposed to their nationality. "I think the Middle East is going to be seeing change over the coming decade or two that is going to make it look unlike it did," Brennan said. Related: Obama Announces Plans for the US to Take in 10,000 Syrian Refugees Next Year? Iraq and Syria were shaped when the British and French Empire partitioned the Ottoman Empire following its defeat in World War I. Iraq's central government is currently Shiite dominated, while the Kurdish population has chiseled out a significant semi-autonomous region for itself in the north. Both are fighting IS, which is Sunni. Syria is effectively split into three pieces: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government and military controls about a third of the country: Syria's capital, the country's border region with Lebanon, including the important towns of Hama and Homs, and the country's western coastal region. Islamic State controls another third of Syria, and a variety of rebel groups — ranging from moderate and pro-democracy to the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front — control the other third. Assad is being helped out by Shiite Iran and their Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, and his security forces are dominated by his Allawite co-religionists. He can count among his supporters some of the country's middle class and upper middle class Sunnis and other minorities, including Christians and Druze, although the latter have attempted to take a position of neutrality due to their geographic proximity to rebel-dominated areas in southern Syria. [Fragmentation] [US Middle East Policy] [Agency]
• Maritime Autonomous Systems Driving the Biggest Advancement in Maritime Security in Over a Century
  Wednesday, September 09, 2015 by QinetiQ The growing importance of Maritime Autonomous Systems will characterise naval activity of the future, according to the Global Marine Trends 2030 (GMT 2030) report launched today. Written and researched jointly by Lloyd's Register, QinetiQ and Southampton University, the report looks at how future naval operations will be conducted, considering the application and integration of emerging technologies over the next two decades across maritime security, warfighting and humanitarian operations. Networks of unmanned surface and underwater vessels are set to radically change the nature of maritime operations, and will become integral to naval capability programmes from mine hunting and augmenting submarine operations to supporting humanitarian efforts by delivering vital aid safely; however, many of the naval vessels in service in 2030 have already been commissioned, and were designed without these concepts in mind. The principal challenge will therefore be the integration of these autonomous systems into current force structures and vessels. [Seapower]
• U.S. State Department Watchdog Critiques Tokyo Embassy
  Wall Street Journal – August 26, 2015 In a report released Tuesday, the U.S. State Department’s internal watchdog rapped Caroline Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to Japan, for using a personal email account for official business. But it didn’t stop there. The inspector general also criticized the embassy’s analysis of Japanese affairs as often lacking depth and sufficient sourcing. The political affairs section’s reporting on foreign policy, regional issues and bilateral relations “consisted largely of spot reports based primarily on contacts with Japanese Government counterparts,” it said. In the nine months prior to the inspector general’s visit, the section had produced only five analytical reports, it said. “Apart from scene-setters for senior visits, the section had not produced in-depth analyses of U.S.-Japan relations,” it said. The economic section, on the other hand, “relies heavily on media sources” to produce its reports, sometimes failing to add value to more timely articles by the international press, the inspector general said. A review of nine months of cables found a “limited range of Japanese contacts–primarily government officials in a few ministries” and lacked evidence of a “range of contacts among Japanese business leaders, legislators or staff, political parties, academia, or other economic leaders or decision makers.” [Intelligence]
• President Obama directs administration to accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next fiscal year
  By Juliet Eilperin and Carol Morello September 10 ? How the U.S. is responding to the Syrian refugee crisis ?Play Video1:10 As the number of refugees streaming out of Syria grows, the U.S. is under increased pressure to act. (The Washington Post) President Obama has directed the U.S. government to accept at least 10,000 refugees from Syria in the next fiscal year, White House press secretary Josh Earnest announced Thursday, a six-fold increase over the number admitted this year to the United States. The new figure, which Earnest described as an “ambitious goal,” reflected the growing pressure the administration faces to develop a more robust response to the spiraling humanitarian crisis that has grown out of armed conflict in Syria as well as neighboring countries. Earnest also urged other nations in Europe and the Mideast—including some that don’t typically welcome asylum seekers—to “ramp up” their willingness to take in Syrian refugees. The administration’s response comes as a top European Union official earlier this week proposed spreading about 160,000 refugees across nearly two dozen countries. [Refugee] [US Syria policy] [Agency]
• Europe’s bearing the cost of Washington’s Middle Eastern policy
  By AT Editor on August 29, 2015 By Alexander Casella GENEVA — Four years after having brought about the fall of the Gadhafi regime in Libya, Europe is having to come to terms with the law of unintended consequences. Removing Gadhafi was essentially the Obama’s administration doing, acting through NATO with the support of France and the UK and was supposed to usher in Libya an era of freedom and democracy. That it would lead to the collapse of the Libyan state and bring about a fragmentation of the country was something that the planners in Washington visibly overlooked. And so was the fact that Libya, after having been a country of immigration would become one of the main avenues for illegal immigration to Europe. With the US shielded by geography, it is now America’s allies that are left carrying the baby namely a massive wave of illegal immigrants coming through Libya, which they are proving increasingly unable to address. High oil revenues, a visa-free regime and a low population level, had made of Libya a preferred destination for sub-Saharan Africans seeking employment and it was estimated that, at any given time some 2 million foreigners were working in the country. That some, among this number, would want to move illegally to Italy was a given, albeit one that was under control. Over the years the Italian authorities had worked out several arrangements with Gadhafi, some formal and some informal which provided that he would keep the lid on transit migration through Libya. Moreover, since 2009 Gadhafi accepted to take back illegal migrants intercepted by the Italian on the high sea, a move which while not quite consonant with the Refugee Conventions acted as a further deterrent to irregular movement. All these arrangements collapsed with the fall of Gadhafi and literarily overnight the country became the preferred access route for illegal migration to Italy. With the number of boats, all heading to Italy and more specifically to the island of Lampedusa, increasing, so did the number of sinkings. By 2012 loss of life was estimated in the thousands and the rescue by the Italian Coast Guard of drifting, overloaded migrant boats became a daily occurrence. With Italian public opinion becoming increasingly concerned the Italian government launched, in October 2013 operation “Mare Nostrum”, a massive rescue at sea effort which is credited with having saved, in one year, over 120 000 lives, all of whom were landed in Italy. By comparison, in the years prior to the fall of Gadhafi, the number of those intercepted by the Italian Coast Guard was below 40 000 practically all of whom were returned to Libya [US Middle East policy] [Libya] [Europe]

• Air war vs Islamic State: myth and reality
  Paul Rogers 28 August 2015 The intense United States-led bombardment in Syria-Iraq is escalating. But how effective is it? During the last decade's Iraq war, the Pentagon practised “embedding” media personnel with United States armed forces in order to give the American public something approaching a frontline picture of their efforts. The great majority of the journalists involved came to identify with the troops they were living with, and in the main the Pentagon’s media managers were pleased with the result. After all, if a reporter filed what the Pentagon considered to be an unflattering view, then it would take steps not to repeat that particular “embedding” experience, perhaps making it near impossible for the professional concerned to work in the field without official access. A few journalists were independent from the start, Patrick Cockburn being a noted example. Their reports often turned out to have given a much truer picture of the war, and how it was going wrong. In other cases, good reporting by embedded correspondents produced results that seemed reasonable to the Pentagon, but which in hindsight took on a different cast. One example was when Pamela Constable, a highly experienced correspondent for the Washington Post, reported on a US marines' operation in the city of Fallujah in April 2004. [Airpower] [Casualties] [ISIS] [Media]
• Cause For Concern Hundreds of civilian non-combatants credibly reported killed in first year of Coalition airstrikes against Islamic State
  Aftermath of a devastating Coalition airstrike at Hawijah, Iraq on June 3 2015, which reportedly killed up to 70 civilians (picture via Iraqi Spring) August 2015 Cause For Concern: Civilians Killed in Coalition Strikes 2 Acknowledgements This Report is the result of a six-month study begun in February 2015, with the aim of building as clear a picture as possible of alleged civilian fatalities from Coalition airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria. The project has been made possible thanks to generous funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which enabled us to employ two highly-skilled experts. Research into civilian and ‘friendly fire’ deaths in Iraq has been conducted by our Baghdad-based researcher Latif Habib, while our London-based researcher Kinda Haddad has pursued claims of civilian deaths in Syria. [Airpower] [Casualties] [ISIS]
• Lessons From the Virginia Shooting
  By Nicholas Kristof for the New York Times The slaying of two journalists Wednesday as they broadcast live to a television audience in Virginia is still seared on our screens and our minds, but it’s a moment not only to mourn but also to learn lessons. The horror isn’t just one macabre double-murder, but the unrelenting toll of gun violence that claims one life every 16 minutes on average in the United States. Three quick data points: ¦ More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides every six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. ¦ More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history. ¦ American children are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway, a Harvard professor and author of an excellent book on firearm safety. Whether or not Williams was insane, our policies on guns are demented — not least in that we don’t even have universal background checks to keep weapons out of the hands of people waiting to go boom. The lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern prohibition (that would raise constitutional issues and be impossible politically), but that we should address gun deaths as a public health crisis. To protect the public, we regulate toys and mutual funds, ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we regulate guns as seriously as we regulate toys? If someone steals an iPhone, it requires a PIN; guns don’t.
• This map shows how enormous US military spending really is
  Updated by Matthew Yglesias on August 24, 2015, It's no surprise that the US military is a mighty organization, but this map, found in Bank of America's "Transforming World" atlas, dramatizes exactly how enormous our defense budget is in context:
  Not only does the US defense budget equal about half the world's total military spending, but a huge chunk of the rest of the total is spent by close American allies. Russia's military spending, for example, is dwarfed by the combined commitments of the UK, France, and Germany. North Korea's military spending looks like a tiny pimple sitting on the top of South Korea's head. [Military expenditure] [Military balance]
• Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman
  Greg Grandin Metropolitan Books A new account of America's most controversial diplomat that moves beyond praise or condemnation to reveal Kissinger as the architect of America's current imperial stance In his fascinating new book, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin argues that to understand the crisis of contemporary America--its never-ending wars abroad and political polarization at home--we have to understand Henry Kissinger. Examining Kissinger's own writings, as well as a wealth of newly declassified documents, Grandin reveals how Richard Nixon's top foreign policy advisor, even as he was presiding over defeat in Vietnam and a disastrous, secret, and illegal war in Cambodia, was helping to revive a militarized version of American exceptionalism centered on an imperial presidency. Believing that reality could be bent to his will, insisting that intuition is more important in determining policy than hard facts, and vowing that past mistakes should never hinder future bold action, Kissinger anticipated, even enabled, the ascendance of the neoconservative idealists who took America into crippling wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Going beyond accounts focusing either on Kissinger's crimes or accomplishments, Grandin offers a compelling new interpretation of the diplomat's continuing influence on how the United States views its role in the world. [Kissinger] [US global strategy]
• The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?
  by Alan Nasser One of the most firmly entrenched myths of the American Ideology is that the U.S. is a “middle class society,” a “land of opportunity” where anyone who works hard has the opportunity to achieve the standard of living which has made America “the envy of the world.” A common, and spot on, rejoinder has been to remind us that America has always had a sizable class of permanently poor people and that it is just factually false that those ready, willing and able to work are on the path to middle class status. But does this reply concede too much? Has there ever been a substantial middle class in America? Or has a poor working class been able to mask its condition by accessing an institution that has disguised a large portion of a poor working class as a middle class? The best place to start is with the history of the modern American middle class. The First Working-Class Middle Class: the Roaring Twenties Of course not everyone can get rich, for roughly the same reason that not everyone can be very tall. But most of us are supposed to be able to enjoy the comforts that many Americans enjoyed after the Second World War and earlier, in economically pubescent form, during the Roaring Twenties. That decade was the first in history when any population enjoyed the comforts of a “consumer society.” The remarkable growth rates of that decade were driven entirely by Americans’ purchases of automobiles, ranges, radios, phonographs, toasters, refrigerators, electric fans and more. The whole world saw the miracle of the first genuine non-professional middle class. These new luxuries were not restricted to the very rich and doctors and lawyers; wage workers were the majority consumers of these “consumer durables.” But during the Great Depression many radical Leftists argued that the short-lived prosperity (for white people) of the 1920s was a fluke, a temporary aberration from capitalism’s default condition in which the working class was flat-out poor. Sure, the war ended the Depression, but if that was so, it was feared that once the war ended, the economy would revert to normal, with high unemployment and widespread poverty once again the order of the day. This was a major concern in the mid-forties of a great many economists of every political stripe. [Capitalism] [Middle class] [Inequality] [Debt]
• Behind the Congressional Disagreements Over the Iran Nuclear Deal
  by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh The hysterical campaign launched against the Iran nuclear deal by the flag-waving militarist partisans in and around the US congress has terribly obfuscated the issues included in the deal. Not surprisingly, the campaign has created a number of misconceptions regarding both the actual contents of the deal and the main disagreements between the advocates and opponents of the deal. One such misconception is that the deal is, or must be, more advantageous to Iran than the US and Israel; otherwise, the simple logic goes, there would not be so much opposition to it. Such impressions, created simply by all the hue and cry on the part of the opponents of the deal are patently false. Even a cursory reading of the nuclear agreement reveals that, as I pointed out in a recent article on the issue, it is highly skewed against Iran. Not only does the agreement downgrade and freeze Iran’s peaceful nuclear technology, it also limit the scope of the county’s scientific research and development, jeopardize its national security or defense capabilities and, perhaps most importantly, undermine its national sovereignty. So, considering the fact the deal represents a big win for the US and its allies and, by the same token, a major loss for Iran, why all the uproar against it? [Iran deal]
• Gore Vidal Was Right: What Best of Enemies Leaves Out
  by Ben Burgis August 28, 2015 The documentary Best of Enemies covers a series of televised face-offs between archconservative William F. Buckley and left-wing novelist Gore Vidal in 1968. Watching it, you learn very little about the political content of those debates. Then again, that’s not the point. Co-director Gordon is affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, but the message of the film is a congenial one for many liberals. Jon Stewart spent much of his tenure on The Daily Show making similar points. The liberals who cheered on Stewart’s take-down of Crossfire and showed up to D.C. for his fairly insipid rally to “restore sanity” will see the same analysis of the media in Best of Enemies. We’re told that ABC was, in 1968, third among the networks in ratings. “If there had been another, it would have been fourth.” In what’s portrayed as a desperate and tacky bid for viewers, they promised “unconventional coverage” of the Republican and Democratic Conventions. What follows is a fairly simple morality tale. In an era where television is reliably “centrist” and free from controversy, Vidal and Buckley shock viewers with their bitter clash. Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley calls Vidal a “queer” and threatening to punch the novelist in the face. In later years, Buckley is shown to be troubled by his own uncouth behavior, while Vidal is unrepentant. The larger point is that the theatrical snarling match between the two set the pattern for the degeneration of political coverage into vapid shouting matches in the ensuing decades. For the most part, Gordon and Neville tell the story in an understated way. The message is left implied until the end, when a long montage—which includes Stewart on Crossfire, various pundits shouting at each other, and an old SNL skit satirizing shouting pundits—beats the viewer over the head with the moral of the story. [Media]
• Myanmar Democracy Icon Finds Herself Assailed as Authoritarian
  By Thomas Fuller Aug. 28, 2015 Aung San Suu Kyi delivered a speech in Thanlyin, outskirts of Yangon, Myanmar, this month. Credit Lynn Bo Bo/European Pressphoto Agency YANGON, Myanmar — Framed photographs of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate, cover the walls of his small living room, but U Myo Khin, a longtime democracy activist, has harsh words for the woman he idolized for years as a crusader against dictatorship. “The goal is still democracy, but her behavior is authoritarian,” said Mr. Myo Khin, whose credentials in the democracy movement include 12 years as a political prisoner. “She is losing people like us who have been strong supporters for a very long time.” It was taboo for many years among democracy activists in Myanmar to speak ill of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who became a global icon of democracy and a symbol of resistance against oppression when Myanmar was ruled by a brutal military junta. Any criticism of The Lady, as she is known here, was seen as strengthening the hand of the generals. But as landmark elections approach — a contest described by some as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for democratic forces — Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is being openly criticized by activists, commentators and intellectuals. They accuse her of a my-way-or-the-highway approach to managing her party. They question her decision to ally herself with a now marginalized former general. And they say she is missing an opportunity to build a grand coalition of democratic forces, including minority ethnic groups whose support may be crucial after the election. [Suu Kyi]
• The danger of ‘Foreign Policy by Bumper Sticker’
  By Katrina vanden Heuvel August 25 at 8:00 AM Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, George F. Kennan, the legendary Cold War diplomat often called “the father of containment,” criticized the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The United States, he said, should not “jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse.” Kennan’s “frightened elephant” is a strangely apt metaphor for the situation in which we find ourselves nearly a half-century later. In the GOP primary, the candidates are calling for a foreign policy defined by fear-mongering and senseless aggression. Their agenda includes plans to reverse President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, abandon renewed diplomatic ties with Cuba, escalate tensions with Russia and deploy U.S. troops in Syria. Much like Kennan’s agitated elephant, the Republicans candidates see threats in Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and in the Islamic State and other Islamic extremist groups that are far out of proportion to any real harm they could ever inflict on U.S. interests. They are so out of touch with reality that even admitting the folly of the Iraq war has become a sign of weakness. The far greater danger, though, is the combination of paranoia and hubris that characterizes the foreign policies of the Republican candidates leading us into yet another self-inflicted foreign policy disaster. Once again, they would have us rush to embrace unnecessarily militaristic responses to otherwise manageable foreign policy challenges, bringing yet more chaos to the Middle East and Eastern Europe while costing the nation even more in lost lives and treasure. [US global strategy] [Republicans] [Military balance] [Threat] [Liberal]
• Anarchism, Marxism and Victor Serge
  by Staughton Lynd A Review Essay of Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908-1938, ed. and translated by Mitchell Abidor (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015) Andrej Grubacic and I have suggested the importance of synthesizing two radical traditions, anarchism and Marxism. (Wobblies and Zapatistas, pp. 11-12, 98-99.) In search of efforts in this direction in the United States, we called attention to the “Chicago idea” of two of the Haymarket anarchists, Albert Parsons and August Spies. Speaking to the jury and a packed courtroom before he was sentenced to death, Parsons distinguished two forms of socialism: state socialism, which meant government control of everything, and anarchism, an egalitarian society without a controlling authority. (James Green, Death in the Haymarket, p. 238.) Twenty years later, the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, presented their own rich mixture of ideas, practices, and songs, drawn from these two traditions. This essay presents the lifelong efforts to synthesize anarchism and Marxism by a man who wrote under the name “Victor Serge.” A New Book Victor Serge was born in Brussels in 1890. His given name was Victor Kibalchich; he adopted “Serge” as a pen name. His parents had left Tsarist Russia after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. A distant relative, N. J. Kibalchich, a chemist, made the bombs that killed the tsar, and was executed. Thus Serge shared a biological connection to the terrorist act with Lenin, whose older brother was executed also. In his best-known book, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Serge recalled: “On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings there were always the portraits of men who had been hanged.” All political differences aside, the martyrs of the People’s Will movement set a standard for self-sacrificial conduct to which later Russian revolutionaries aspired. In a history of the first year of the Russian Revolution, Serge would say of the Narodniks and Social Revolutionaries of the previous generation that they “gave heroes and martyrs in hundreds to the cause of revolution.” Serge wrote primarily in French. About twenty of his books, divided more or less equally between fiction and non-fiction, have been translated into English. Twenty-seven boxes of documents, mostly unpublished, are housed (improbably) at the Beinecke rare books library of Yale University. [Anarchism] [Lenin] [Trotsky] [Socialism]
• British grandfather describes how he helped overpower gunman
  Angelique Chrisafis in Paris Monday 24 August 2015 16.47 BST Last modified on Monday 24 August 2015 18.39 BST When British IT consultant Chris Norman boarded a train at Amsterdam airport on his way back to France last Friday, he did not expect to find himself, just over an hour later, splattered with blood and pinning down a gunman as he tried to fasten a cable tie around the man’s hands with his teeth. After president François Hollande on Monday awarded Norman with France’s highest distinction, the Légion d’honneur, for helping to avert a massacre on the high-speed Amsterdam-to-Paris train, the 62-year-old grandfather of three said the events were still sinking in. [Media]
• U.S. train heroes receive French Legion of Honor for ‘lesson in courage’
  Highlights France’s highest honor awarded to 3 Americans French president says they gave the world hope Off-duty airman credited with saving life of wounded passenger From the left, British businessman Chris Norman, Anthony Sadler, a senior at Sacramento University in California, French President Francois Hollande, U.S. Airman Spencer Stone, and Alek Skarlatos a U.S. National Guardsman from Roseburg, Oregon, pose at the Elysee Palace on Monday in Paris, after receiving the Legion of Honor medal. By Matthew Schofield BERLIN — French President Francois Hollande awarded three Americans credited with stopping a possible terror attack on a high speed train with France’s highest honor Monday morning. [Media]
• Trump Pulled the Strings of Political Puppets
  Submitted by Bud Meyers on July 24, 2015 - 2:12pm Not everything Donald Trump has to say should be swept under the rug; some things deserve to be heard. Many people might think he's a "bad guy", but he does know how politics work. According to the Washington Post, Trump either sits on the board of — or holds executive positions in, more than 500 separate companies and partnerships. So he of all people would know how to manipulate and game the political system by buying off our politicians. And as a businessman, he's admitted to being a "part of that game". Now that he's running for President of the United States, "The Donald" — without any need to beg for campaign donations — is boldly talking about that political corruption, and how it’s ruining our country. Here is a short edited transcript (from the 2 minute video below) of Donald Trump's recent interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN from July 22, 2015: TRUMP: "The politicians are going to destroy this country. They're weak and they're ineffective and they're controlled by the lobbyists and special interests...They will do whatever I want ... I've had lobbyists and I've had some very good ones. They could do anything. They could take a politician and have them jump off this ledge. " COOPER: "Can you actually change that culture of corruption?" TRUMP: "Well, you can in the sense that the top person can't be bought [indicating himself] ... but these lobbyists totally control these politicians ... I see Bush [Jeb] with the lobbyists ... they're totally telling him what to do, like a little puppet. And the same with Hillary and everybody else. Now, when I'm in business, I'm part of that game ... these guys are desperate for money. I don't need it." Since running for President, is it possible that Trump is no longer a puppet master? And can lobbyists pull Jeb Bush's strings? The New York Times has an article titled: "Jeb Bush Vows to Curb Lobbying and Trim Government". Oops! It turns out that Jeb Bush's speech denouncing lobbyists was organized by a corporate lobbying group. [Governance]
• Exploring the 'other Syria'
  Syria’s regime-controlled cities defy the image that outside observers paint of the country and the Assad government. ALEPPO, Syria — During a recent trip to Aleppo, which self-styled pundits like to call a “Sunni” city, I stopped by the stall of a street vendor, a woman covered in black attire, to see what she had to offer. Filled with Syrian army badges and pins with the Syrian flag along with images of President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the stall reflected the spirit at the fore – or being brought to the fore — in regime-controlled areas. Author Fehim Tastekin Posted August 21, 2015 Translator Sibel Utku Bila Nasrallah posters are not unusual in Homs, a city with a large Shiite population, but in Aleppo, his image adorning walls next to posters of Assad is a sight that defies comprehension. In the “other Syria,” the one we don't hear about, Hezbollah’s support on the battlefield, from Qusair to Qalamoun, has earned Nasrallah a reputation that transcends sectarian boundaries. This was exemplified by my Christian guide, a native of Homs, who sang along enthusiastically when our Alawite driver played a song in praise of Nasrallah while driving us from Homs to Tartus. I also saw it in Baqdash, the famous ice cream parlor in the old city of Damascus whose walls were once covered with photos of famous visitors, including Turkish first lady Emine Erdogan and Jordan’s King Abdullah. Today, the only frame left on the wall holds a thank you letter from Nasrallah for the financial support the establishment has provided to “the resistance.” Asked why the celebrity photos were gone, the shop owner replied, “No one who undermines this country can have their picture on this wall.” [Syria] [EWA] [Public opinion]
• Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran with lies, lies, lies
  Pepe Escobar
  Published time: 21 Aug, 2015 11:52 The Associated Press – with great fanfare - ran an “exclusive” story masquerading what was in fact a glaring propaganda piece, according to which, under the P5+1, UN-ratified nuclear deal with Iran, the country would carry out some of the inspections of its own “sensitive sites.” There was nothing specific in the piece. The crucial document AP alleges to have “seen” was not even the final signed agreement between Iran and the IAEA. AP did not quote any passage from the document. The bombastic “exclusive” tag relied just on the opening paragraph’s sensationalist language: "Iran will be allowed to use its own inspectors to investigate a site it has been accused of using to develop nuclear arms, operating under a secret agreement with the UN agency that normally carries out such work, according to a document seen by The Associated Press." The article states nothing specifically. “Own inspectors” – in this context - means that Iran, according to the agreement, is allowed to exclude “inspectors” from states which have their own confrontational agenda. Everyone knows who the usual suspect s are. [Iran deal] [Media]
• The Interview: Henry Kissinger
  As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, TNI Editor Jacob Heilbrunn sits down with the former Secretary of State. Henry Kissinger August 19, 2015 The National Interest’s editor, Jacob Heilbrunn, spoke with Henry Kissinger in early July in New York. Jacob Heilbrunn: Why is realism today an embattled approach to foreign affairs, or perhaps not as significant as it was when you had figures such as Hans Morgenthau, George F. Kennan, Dean Acheson, then yourself in the 1970s—what has changed? Henry Kissinger: I don’t think that I have changed my view on this subject very much since the seventies. I have always had an expansive view of national interest, and much of the debate about realism as against idealism is artificial. The way the debate is conventionally presented pits a group that believes in power as the determining element of international politics against idealists who believe that the values of society are decisive. Kennan, Acheson or any of the people you mentioned did not have such a simplistic view. The view of the various realists is that, in an analysis of foreign policy, you have to start with an assessment of the elements that are relevant to the situation. And obviously, values are included as an important element. The real debate is over relative priority and balance. [US global strategy] [Russia confrontation] [Kissinger] [Realist]
• Arkansas Rejects Request for Hindu Statue at Capitol
  By The Associated Press Aug. 22, 2015 LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The Arkansas secretary of state’s office has denied a request from the Universal Society of Hinduism to place a privately funded Hindu statue on Capitol grounds. The Hindu society and a slew of other organizations have floated the possibility of putting their own monuments on the Capitol grounds since the Arkansas General Assembly passed a law this year to erect a Ten Commandments statue. The Hindu society released a statement Friday saying it was considering sending its request to Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who signed the Ten Commandments statue law in April. The society’s president, Rajan Zed, said on Friday that the group had asked in an Aug. 6 letter to place a statue of the Hindu Lord Hanuman, known for his strength and correct grammar, on the Capitol grounds. The statue would have been privately designed, built and funded. “If permitted, we planned to make it big and weatherproof,” Mr. Zed wrote in a statement. “Besides honoring the Arkansas Hindus, this statue would raise awareness of Arkansans about Hinduism, oldest and third-largest religion of the world with about one billion adherents and a rich philosophical thought.” [Religion] [Double standards]
• The great Labour purge is underway
  Michael Chessum 20 August 2015 The UK Labour party is cancelling the memberships of significant numbers of people who joined in order to vote in its leadership election - and even some who joined before. Labour is rejecting reams of legitimate membership and supporter applications. Is this a desperate purge aimed at tipping the leadership result? It sounds like a murder mystery. Everyone had a reason for promoting the idea that the Labour leadership ballot was being undermined by Tory infiltrators and ‘entryists’. Anything that could destabilise the ballot and make it look like a mess is good news for the right and much of the press. It suits some groups on the hard left to seem bigger than they are. Once it became clear that Corbyn might win, anything that de-legitimised his victory was music to the ears of the Labour Right. And some knew, deep down, that if enough of a storm was created about infiltration, this would provide cover for the party apparatus to deny more leftwing activists a vote, and that this could, just about, influence a close result. Now, after a lot of noise about weeding out infiltrators, and one batch of more obvious candidates for expulsion which included Ken Loach and other prominent figures from other parties, there is a clear drip-drip of new rejections. Many are young left wing activists from the student movement and other social movements who joined Labour, enthused by the Corbyn campaign, and had every intention of remaining in the Party. The reasoning behind these new rejections looks, at least at first sight, murky.
• Even without sanctions, Iranian aviation faces turbulent future
  TEHRAN — Other than Iran’s energy, auto, finance and tourism sectors, the country’s aviation industry — one of the hardest hit by Western sanctions — is seen as a major beneficiary of the July 14 nuclear deal with six world powers. Summary? Print Iranian aviation is faced with multiple challenges, even in the aftermath of long-sought sanctions relief. Author Maysam Bizær Posted August 19, 2015 Decades-long restrictions on Iranian imports of Western-made planes and spare parts have left the Islamic Republic with an aging fleet. With an average age of 23 years, Iranian passenger aircraft are nearly twice as old as the international average. This has had a grave impact on flight safety. According to the International Flight Safety Foundation, 1,672 people have lost their lives in airplane-related disasters in Iran since the country’s 1979 revolution. The most recent crash, in August 2014, claimed 39 lives. Given the current state of Iranian aviation, it is hard to imagine that four decades ago, Iran Air — the flag carrier — was ranked as the world’s second safest for having been accident-free for at least 10 consecutive years. Strikingly, Iran Air was also the region’s leading airline, and by the late 1970s, the fastest-growing carrier in the world. To keep its fleet operational, Iran launched the Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company (HESA) in 1997. However, major maintenance problems still exist. Of the 250 planes reportedly in the Iranian fleet, a whopping 110 are grounded due to an urgent need of repair and spare parts. [Iran] [Sanctions] [casualties] [Tourism]
• Islamic State beheads leading antiquities scholar in Syria
  Khaled al-Asaad (82) had worked on the excavation of Palmyra’s 2,000-year-old ruins Islamic State (IS) fighters have beheaded an 82-year old archaeologist in the ancient city of Palmyra and displayed his body on a column in the main square of of the Graeco-Roman ruins. Syrian antiquities director Maamoun Abdulkarim said the family of Khaled al-Asaad had informed him that the scholar, who had worked for half a century as the head of antiquities in Palmyra, was executed on Tuesday after being detained and interrogated for more than a month. IS accused Mr Asaad of preserving “idols”, attending “infidel” conferences, and contacting officials following the jihadi takeover. He was “one of the most important pioneers in Syrian archaeology in the 20th century”, Dr Abdulkarim stated.“The continued presence of these criminals in this city is a curse on [Palmyra] . . . and every column and every archaeological piece in it.” He said Mr Asaad was well-known in his field as he had published articles on Palmyra in scholarly journals and had worked with US, French, German and Swiss teams excavating Palmyra’s extensive 2,000-year-old ruins, a Unesco world heritage site. In a recent interview, Dr Abdulkarim told The Irish Times that most of the antiquities in Syria’s provincial museums, including the one in Palmyra, had been transported to Damascus and stored in secret bunkers while locally based museum staff had continued to protect heritage sites that had fallen under insurgent control. Mr Asaad’s execution may have been a warning to other scholars and museum staff to cease their activities and collaborate in IS looting of Syria’s remaining treasures. Palmyra fell to Islamic State on May 21st, 2015. A first-century AD statue of a lion, other statues and two historic tombs were promptly destroyed and six days later 20 prisoners were shot dead by teenage fighters in Palmyra’s ancient theatre.
  Islamic State appears to be under pressure in the Palmyra area as Syrian troops have advanced to positions near the ruins but IS has threatened to slaughter 230 Christians captured in the nearby town of al-Qariatain if the army advances.
  There is a similar stand-off in the western resort town of Zabadani, where al-Qaeda- linked Jabhat al-Nusra fighters are surrounded by Lebanese Hizbullah forces. Nusra has threatened to massacre Shia inhabitants of the besieged northern villages of Kifraya and Foaa if Zabadani falls. [Syria] [ISIS]
• Ankara: the New Capital of Jihad
  by Mike Whitney “The US and it’s allies want to keep this monster (ISIS) in check, but they don’t want to destroy it. All their military, political and media campaigns are smokescreens. What the West has done so far has strengthened terrorism not ended it. The proof of this is the fact that terrorism has spread everywhere, its material resources have increased, and its ranks have swollen.” — Syrian President Bashar al Assad Has US policy in Syria fallen prey to the political ambitions of one man, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Certainly not. Washington has its own malignant agenda in Syria, which is to topple Syrian President Bashar al Assad, split the country into pieces, lock-down critical pipeline corridors, and establish a “Salafist principality” that will justify continued US intervention across the Middle East for the foreseeable future. These are the objectives of US policy and they haven’t changed because of anything Erdogan has done. [Turkey] [US Syria policy]
• Islamists risk rupture in Turkey’s ties with Germany
  The main challenge the Islamists in the Turkish government and their ringmaster President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have in recent years brought upon bilateral ties with Germany -- the powerhouse of the European Union and Turkey's largest trading partner -- is their promotion through state-sponsored activities of a hostile brand of political Islamist ideology amid the Turkish and Muslim diaspora. Turkish-German ties have never been problem-free, but somehow both countries have been able to manage sensitive issues, including religious matters, in their relations. In fact, working in close cooperation with the German government, successive Turkish governments have all tried to address legitimate demands of the Turkish population by dispatching imams to lead prayers and provide services in German mosques. As part of preventive measures to stop Turks from falling prey to fanatical religious groups, both governments were determined to take measures to prevent radicalization of the diaspora. However, Germans have on occasion not hesitated to raise the difficulties facing the Christian minority in Turkey. These international relations grew rocky after Islamists secretly launched a project to turn the diaspora into a bastion of Islamist support to encourage Erdogan's dream of leading all Muslims in Europe, reportedly part of his undeclared goal of becoming a caliph in his self-perceived image to appeal to all the world's Muslims. [Turkey] [Erdogan]
• Conquering Aleppo?
  Selin Nasi After weeks of intense negotiations, Ankara and Washington have finally finalized a deal to open the Incirlik Airbase to planes in the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Following the agreement reached last month, Turkey and the United States - for the first time - launched manned airstrikes against ISIL in Syria last Wednesday. However, on the issue of a “safe zone,” which Turkey has been insistently seeking since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the allies still seem to be far from agreeing to a clear framework. Contradictory statements from both sides with respect to details indicate that despite Turkey’s decision to join the anti-ISIL coalition, the U.S. and Turkey are still pursuing conflicting goals and strategies in Syria. The U.S. administration’s consistent refusal to establish a safe zone contradicts the recent mobilization of rebel groups in the area. Turkish authorities either seem to have negotiated a deal behind the scenes or appear to be going it alone on the plan. Either way, the establishment of a buffer zone along its border – whether defined as a demilitarized safe zone or framed as an ISIL-free zone – presents the real risk that Turkey may also get sucked into the Syrian mire. [Turkey] [Syria]
• “The Iranian Threat”: Who Is the Gravest Danger to World Peace?
  By Noam Chomsky August 20, 2015 Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the U.S. Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.” There are, however, striking exceptions to the general enthusiasm: the United States and its closest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. [Iran deal]
• The Death of God and the War on Terror
  August 13, 2015 by Jan Rivers Summary This article attempts to give a flavour of a videoed talk by Terry Eagleton “The Death of God and the War on Terror” which was made at the How the Light Gets In festival in Wales in May this year and which is taken from ideas in his 2014 book Culture and the death of God. To start at the conclusion Eagleton believes that the free market West has to bear some responsibility for the rise of fundamentalist terror perpetrated by people who claim Christianity or Islam as their ideology. Argument However his thesis requires some scene setting. Eagleton describes the move away from faith traditions and he makes the observation that atheism has always been difficult – not for individuals but for whole populations. As hard as you might try, he says, religious belief has come in through the back door even as it is being pushed out through the front door. He elaborates this by saying that history is littered with the rubble of failed alternatives to God and added that religion is the most popular cultural symbolic system in the history of the world. Although it’s not studied in courses on popular culture, religious belief has surpassed all of the alternatives. He lists these as the arts, science, culture, philosophy, the government and ‘the people’. [Religion]
• Untold Suffering in Foua and Kafarya: Two Northwestern Syrian Villages Under Siege and Assault by NATO’s Terrorists
  by Eva Bartlett Part One of Two Infant Rimas Al-Nayef was one of at least 5 children killed by NATO-backed terrorists’ shelling on August 10, 2015 in the northwestern Syrian village of Foua. Another 25 residents were killed by the up to 1,500 rockets and mortars which Jebhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria) and other terrorist factions rained down on Foua and neighbouring Kafarya village, just north of Idlib. Scores more were injured on that day alone. Yet, scarcely a peep in the corporate media, as massacres committed by western-backed “moderates” do not merit media coverage, do not suit the war agenda. The attack was waged by a number of different factions, primarily al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Fattah (the so-called “Army of Conquest”), and Ahrar al-Sham (Liberation of the Levant Movement) along with other “moderates” of the umbrella organization Jabhat al-Islamiyah (the Islamic Front). Crescent International reported: “The barrage of rockets has intensified; Western, Saudi and Turkish-supplied 500 kg rockets are fired at the villages accompanied by incursions with the clear aim to capture them.” The villages, less than 10 km northeast of Idlib, had already been suffering an over 4 year long siege by al-Nusra and affiliates. Until late March, residents—although surrounded by militant factions—still had an access road, thus supplies for their survival. With the militants’ occupation of Idlib at the end of March, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) had to withdraw forces from bases in the province. Foua and Kafarya became utterly isolated. [Syria]
• Carly Fiorina’s Business Record: Not So Sterling
  Aug. 17, 2015 “I come from a world outside of politics, where track records and accomplishments count.” Those were the words of Carly Fiorina, a Republican candidate for president, earlier this year. Readers of the business pages know her as the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. For much of this early campaign season, in the crowded field of Republican candidates, Mrs. Fiorina didn’t look as if she had much of a chance at the White House. But recently, in the afterglow of her impressive performance in the first Republican debate, Mrs. Fiorina has begun to make significant gains in the polls that have made her a more formidable candidate. She has attracted attention for her sharply articulated pro-market policies and broadsides against both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Many Republicans are looking anew at Carly Fiorina, who rose from being a secretary to running the giant technology company Hewlett-Packard. And so it is curious to those of us who have reported on her business career that there has not been a greater focus in recent days on her “track records and accomplishments,” as she suggested she should be measured by. Even more striking, Mrs. Fiorina, the only former female chief executive among the candidates, continues to promote her business experience on the trail, yet she was fired by Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock dropped by half in 2005. She has long blamed her failings at running the technology giant on the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the deepening recession in Silicon Valley after the Sept. 11 attacks. In an essay published late last week, Mrs. Fiorina also said she lost her job because of her maverick management style. “When you lead and when you challenge the status quo, you make enemies,” she wrote in the essay published on CNN’s website. “It’s why Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney and Mike Bloomberg have all been fired.” While those four business icons all received pink slips at some point in their careers (as a young man, Mr. Disney was fired from a Missouri newspaper for lacking imagination), none presided over such a sharp decline in one of America’s great companies. “Experience can be a badge of honor or a badge of shame,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, who wrote a recent essay about Mrs. Fiorina’s travails. In an interview, he compared Mrs. Fiorina to the captain who caused the shipwreck of Carnival’s Costa Concordia in 2012. “He will never be trusted with a public leadership role. Captains of industry must also be accountable.” [US_Election16]
• When Bahrain Says You’re Not Bahraini Anymore
  Afraid of losing its grip on power, the Sunni regime is using citizenship as a weapon. • By Natasha Bowler • August 18, 2015 - 12:39 pm “I was asleep when I found out,” recalls former Bahraini citizen Taimoor Karimi. “My kids came in and woke me up. All they could say was ‘Dad, we’ve got bad news. You’re on the list.’” His nationality had just been revoked. Karimi is one of 159 people made stateless by the Bahraini government since 2012. On three separate occasions, with no prior warning, the state has published lists of people whose citizenship has been annulled. “If you lose your citizenship in Bahrain, you may as well be dead,” explains Abnulnabi Hasan Al Ekry, president of the Bahrain Transparency Society. “You can’t do anything if you’re stateless. You can’t buy or sell anything, you can’t use state services like health or education. Your private finances are done for. You’re told to leave the country and, if you disobey them, they’ll arrest you for being an illegal immigrant.” Stateless people no longer possess identity papers and become invisible in the eyes of the law. Without these documents, simple day-to-day tasks become impossible. For instance, a person is unable to work legally or open a bank account. Likewise, without ID, a person cannot register to get married, see a local doctor, or attend a school. Before he lost his citizenship, Karimi was a well-respected lawyer. “After they took my citizenship, they took my law license so I had to close my firm,” he says. “Since then I’ve been jobless, I can’t work and I have three kids that I’m unable to support. They’ve forced all the banks in Bahrain to close our accounts. We’re suffering a lot.” The Bahraini government began revoking citizenships shortly after the Arab Spring engulfed large sections of the Middle East, Bahrain included, in 2011. On February 14 of that year both Shiite and Sunni Bahrainis took to the streets to demand the same rights and political freedoms for the majority Shiite population as for their Sunni compatriots. The regime of the ruling Al-Khalifa family, who are Sunnis, sent in troops to put down the movement. But four years later, demonstrators still protest every night on the streets of the country’s Shiite villages. “The regime is running out of options. It has tortured people, starved thousands to death, openly killed hundreds of people in the street, and yet Bahrainis are still adamant on achieving change,” says doctor and activist Saeed Al-Shehabi, who was made stateless in 2012. “Revoking citizenship is just yet another tool to scare people and deter them from asking for their rights.” [Bahrain] [Human rights] [Sectarianism] [Double standards]
• Iran’s perspective on Syria: U.S. allies to blame for rise of Islamic State
  Highlights If Iran joins talks on Syria’s future, it will bring a different perspective Assad is defending himself, hasn’t committed war crimes Hezbollah was acting in Lebanon’s defense when it sent fighters to help Assad By Roy Gutman rgutman@mcclatchydc.com TEHRAN — If, as many expect, Iran will soon be invited to play a bigger role in combating the Islamic State and in any future talks over the future of Syria, its clerical regime will arrive with an entirely different perspective from other participants’. Iran has sent hundreds of advisers and thousands of volunteers to Syria in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and few in Tehran would dispute that that support has been has been indispensable for Assad’s survival to date. “If Iran didn’t support Assad, he would be gone by now,” said Ali Bigdeli, an international relations professor at the National University of Iran. But Iran takes no responsibility for Assad’s war tactics, including the alleged use of chemical weapons against rebels in 2013 and the use of “barrel bombs” that have killed thousands of civilians. Although Iran’s influence is on the upswing following the July agreement on its nuclear program, there are major questions about its ability to manage crises in Syria and Iraq. Some 12 million Syrians have been forced from their homes by what a U.N panel says are government crimes against humanity. But Iran remains adamant that Assad remains the legitimate ruler in Syria, and that it is opposed to the establishment of a no-fly zone, something Turkey has demanded, but that the United States also opposes. “The security of Syria as our strategic ally is very important,” Hossein Amir-Abdollahlan, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, told McClatchy. “We do not support the establishing a no-fly zone or a protected one in Syria. We believe this will complicate the situation more.” [Iran Syria]
• What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices
  Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 8:00am, August 11, 2015. Where Did the Antiwar Movement Go? War, Sunny Side Up, and the Summer of Slaughter (Vietnam and Today) By Tom Engelhardt Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I’m not likely to forget even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy. It involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come closer as time passed. My best guess: it was the summer of 1969. I had dropped out of graduate school where I had been studying to become a China scholar and was then working as a “movement” printer -- that is, in a print shop that produced radical literature, strike posters, and other materials for activists. It was, of course, “the Sixties,” though I didn’t know it then. Still, I had somehow been swept into a new world remarkably unrelated to my expected life trajectory -- and a large part of the reason for that was the Vietnam War. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t particularly early to protest it. I think I signed my first antiwar petition in 1965 while still in college, but as late as 1968 -- people forget the confusion of that era -- while I had become firmly antiwar, I still wanted to serve my country abroad. Being a diplomat had been a dream of mine, the kind of citizenly duty I had been taught to admire, and the urge to act in such a fashion, to be of service, was deeply embedded in me. (That I was already doing so in protesting the grim war my government was prosecuting in Southeast Asia didn’t cross my mind.) I actually applied to the State Department, but it turned out to have no dreams of Tom Engelhardt. On the other hand, the U.S. Information Agency, a propaganda outfit, couldn’t have been more interested. Only one problem: they weren’t about to guarantee that they wouldn’t send a guy who had studied Chinese, knew something of Asia, and could read French to Saigon. However, by the time they had vetted me -- it took government-issue months and months to do so -- I had grown far angrier about the war, so when they offered me a job, I didn’t think twice about saying no. [Imperialism]
• MIA ‘leaders’ fiddle as society falls apart
  By Greg Mello / Los Alamos Study Group PUBLISHED: Sunday, August 16, 2015 at 12:02 am New Mexico consistently ranks nearly last among states in almost every important social and economic indicator. There has been no improvement, which is only to be expected since there have been no serious attempts to improve. Of course the U.S. polity and society as a whole grossly underachieves, so comparing New Mexico to other states uses a low standard. The U.S. does however outrank all other countries in incarceration, military spending, nations attacked, school shootings, teen pregnancies, obesity, and climate denialism, to pick a few measures of U.S. decline. These outcomes are to be expected, given that our democracy is gone. No less a figure than former President Jimmy Carter recently described the U.S. as an “oligarchy” with “unlimited political bribery” that is “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Politicians of both parties “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.” [Decline] [Democracy] [Governance]
• Former US national security adviser endorses Iran deal
  Bipartisanship, which has been in short supply since the Iran nuclear agreement was announced in July, is showing tentative signs of life as Congress nears an important vote on the issue. Summary? Print Brent Scowcroft, former Republican US national security adviser, tells Al-Monitor that US failure to implement the nuclear agreement with Iran “would be an abdication of America’s unique role and responsibility, incurring justified dismay among our allies and friends.” Author Barbara Slavin Posted August 14, 2015 In a draft op-ed that was shared in part with Al-Monitor on Aug. 13, Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and a trusted confident of many of Bush’s successors, said that in his view the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran “meets the key objective, shared by recent administrations of both parties, that Iran limit itself to a strictly civilian nuclear program with unprecedented verification and monitoring by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and the UN Security Council.” “To turn our back on [the JCPOA] would be an abdication of America’s unique role and responsibility, incurring justified dismay among our allies and friends,” Scowcroft wrote. Earlier, on Aug. 13, former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) published an op-ed with another former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), supporting the deal reached between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany on July 14. Taking a different tack than Scowcroft, Warner and Levin argued that US failure to implement the JCPOA would undercut any potential US military deterrent against Iran. “It’s highly unlikely that our traditional European allies, let alone China and Russia, would support the use of the military option since we had undermined the diplomatic path,” the veteran former legislators wrote. “Iran surely would know this, and so from the start, would have less fear of a military option than if it faced a unified coalition.” Other moderate Republicans have indicated in the past that they would likely support the Iran agreement but have been reluctant to say so publicly since the deal was announced. Recent queries to former George W. Bush national security adviser Stephen Hadley went unanswered, even though Hadley praised the interim deal reached with Iran in 2013 and in 2014 told Al-Monitor he was “optimistic” about achieving a long-term comprehensive accord. Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/scowcroft-republican-endorses-iran-nuclear-deal.html#ixzz3j3LStNc8 [Iran Deal] [Scowcroft] [Realist]
• Mikhail Gorbachev: US Military an 'Insurmountable Obstacle to a Nuclear-Free World'
  Interview Conducted by Joachim Mohr and Matthias Schepp An American nuclear missile facility in Montana: "This country would enjoy total military supremacy if nuclear weapons were abolished." In a SPIEGEL interview, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discusses morals and politics in the nuclear age, the crisis in Russian-American relations and his fear that an atomic weapon will some day be used. SPIEGEL: Mikhail Sergeyevich, during your inaugural speech as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, you warned of nuclear war and called for the "complete destruction of nuclear weapons and a permanent ban on them." Did you mean that seriously? Gorbachev: The discussion about disarmament had already been going on for too long -- far too long. I wanted to finally see words followed by action because the arms race was not only continuing, it was growing ever more dangerous in terms of the number of weapons and their destructive capacity. There were tens of thousands of nuclear warheads on different delivery systems like aircraft, missiles and submarines. [Nuclear weapons] [US military] [Military balance]
• Republican and former treasury secretary Paulson slams naysayers of Iran deal
  By Karoun Demirjian August 14 at 6:51 PM Not many high-profile Republicans have anything nice to say about the Iran deal. But former treasury secretary Hank Paulson – the guy who was in charge of the government’s sanctions operation under President George W. Bush, when the international community was just setting up this regime of punitive measures over Iran’s nuclear ambitions – thinks at this point, it would be pretty ill-advised to back away. “It’s somewhere in between naive and unrealistic to assume that after we’ve, the United States of America, has negotiated something like this with the five other, you know, parties and with the whole world community watching, that we could back away from that – and that the others would go with us, or even that our allies would go with us,” Paulson said during a forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute on Thursday night to discuss his new book on China. “And unilateral sanctions don’t work, okay?” Paulson continued. “They really have to be multilateral.” Paulson was responding to a question from the moderator of the event, who had asked what Paulson thought about the viability of maintaining sanctions against Iran, should the United States walk away from the agreement struck in Vienna last month. Congress will vote on that very question next month, but naysayers need a veto-proof, two-thirds majority in both houses to kill the deal – a formidable hurdle to clear. In Congress and on the campaign trail, the critics of the deal – many, though not all of them Republicans – have been advocating ripping up the agreement and either leaving the U.S. sanctions in place or stepping them up to make the point to Iran and the international community that the United States means business. Some lawmakers, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and candidates have even suggested that the United States could force other nations into lockstep on a more hardline approach to Iran by threatening them with secondary sanctions. Paulson thinks that idea is farfetched. “I think it’s totally unrealistic to believe that if we backed out of this deal that the multilateral sanctions would stay in place,” Paulson said. “I’m just trying to envision us sanctioning European banks or enforcing them, or Japanese banks, or big Chinese banks.” [Iran deal] [Sanctions] [Renege]
• Military Spending in the United States
  In fiscal year 2015, military spending is projected to account for 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending, a total of $598.5 billion. Military spending includes: all regular activities of the Department of Defense; war spending; nuclear weapons spending; international military assistance; and other Pentagon-related spending. [Military expenditure]
• Assad's days have been "numbered" for a very long, long time.
  The U.S. government, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama and spokespeople for the State Department, has been saying that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's "days are numbered" since 2011. As many journalists have pointed out in State Department briefings, it's become a very long number. video by Natalie Fertig Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article30710028.html#storylink=cpy [US Syria policy]
• Air Force wants UAV swarms
  Michael Peck, Contributing Writer 1:54 p.m. EDT June 11, 2015 The Air Force wants to pummel the enemy with massed swarms of small, armed UAVs. The vision: hordes of UAVs so cheap that attrition isn't an issue, according to the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) broad agency announcement. Resource: Read the broad agency announcement The swarms would "provide long range, high speed strike capability in remote regions where forward basing is difficult or prohibited," according to the BAA. The Low Cost Attritable UAS Flight Demonstration concept focuses on quantity even at the expense of quality. "UAS performance and design life/reliability drive the cost of today's systems," AFRL noted. "Performance, design life, reliability, and maintainability with their associated cost need to be traded to achieve the cost imposing strategy." The Air Force eventually plans to release a $7.5 million, 30-month contract. [Military balance]
• The Plunder of Africa: How Everybody Holds the Continent Back
  By Howard W. French Discussions about the fate of Africa have long had a cyclical quality. That is especially the case when it comes to the question of how to explain the region’s persistent underdevelopment. At times, the dominant view has stressed the importance of centuries of exploitation by outsiders, from the distant past all the way to the present. Scholars such as the economist William Easterly, for example, have argued that even now, the effects of the African slave trade can be measured on the continent, with areas that experienced intensive slaving still showing greater instability, a lack of social trust, and lower growth. Others observers have focused on different external factors, such as the support that powerful countries offered corrupt African dictatorships during the Cold War and the structural-adjustment policies imposed by Western-led institutions in the 1980s—which, some argue, favored disinvestment in national education, health care, and other vital services. At other times, a consensus has formed around arguments that pin the blame on poor African leadership in the decades since most of the continent achieved independence in the 1960s. According to this view, the outside world has been generous to Africa, providing substantial aid in recent decades, leaving no excuse for the continent’s debility. There’s little wrong with African countries that an end to the corruption and thievery of their leaders wouldn’t fix, voices from this camp say. Western media coverage of Africa has tended to provide fodder for that argument, highlighting the shortcomings and excesses of the region’s leaders while saying little about the influence of powerful international institutions and corporations. It’s easy to understand why: Africa’s supply of incompetent or colorful villains has been so plentiful over the years, and reading about them is perversely comforting for many Westerners who, like audiences everywhere, would rather not dwell on their own complicity in the world’s problems. Reading about African villains is perversely comforting for many Westerners who, like audiences everywhere, would rather not dwell on their own complicity in the world’s problems. [Africa] [FDI]
• It’s not just Trump: Voter anger fuels outsider candidates
  By Philip Rucker August 12 at 5:54 PM ? This has become the summer of the political outsider, as a cast of interlopers upend and dominate the presidential nominating process in both parties. The surging candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fueled by people’s anger with the status quo and desire for authenticity in political leaders. Across the ideological spectrum, candidates are gaining traction by separating themselves from the political and economic system that many everyday Americans view as rigged against them. “There are a lot of voters who are exceptionally frustrated with traditional politics and politicians and who quite simply feel failed by the system,” said pollster Geoff Garin, who advises Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton. “A lot of this anger crosses party lines in the sense that it is directed at what people see as a concentration of wealth and power that leaves them holding the short end of the stick.” [US_Election16] [Trump] [Alienation]
• Former US ambassador: There won't be peace in Syria without prosecution of Assad
  The expression “no justice, no peace” is usually associated these days with US demonstrations against police killings of African-Americans. But it also applies to Syria, according to Stephen Rapp, who has just stepped down as US ambassador-at-large and chief of the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. In Stephen Rapp's first interview since leaving office, the recently resigned US ambassador-at-large and chief of the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice says progress is being made on amassing documentation of the "hell" in Syria. Author Barbara SlavinPosted August 12, 2015 In his first interview since leaving office Aug. 7, Rapp told Al-Monitor that any diplomatic effort to end the civil war in Syria would fail unless accompanied by a process of transitional justice that targets the worst offenders, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “You can’t even get to peace unless a justice process is developed that’s going to give people confidence that the authors of mass rape and killing are going to be held to account,” Rapp said in the Aug. 11 interview. “Anything else won’t last.” In the job for six years, Rapp said that “a great deal has been accomplished” in collecting and organizing evidence of crimes in Syria, even though no officials have been prosecuted so far. He pointed to the work of a UN commission whose mandate has repeatedly been renewed, the creation with US support of the Syrian Justice and Accountability Center and work by grantees of that body including the Commission on International Justice and Accountability. The latter group, headquartered in Brussels but with 135 field workers primarily in southern Turkey, has amassed more than 600,000 documents showing crimes by the Assad regime, he said. Rapp said the only bright spot in the civil war, which has now gone on for more than four years and killed a quarter of a million people and displaced half of Syria’s population, is the way the regime generated so many “documents with stamps on them” that have fallen into the hands of the opposition. Even now, Rapp said, such documentation “can be purchased by the kilogram from one group or another in various parts of the country.” Rapp was also instrumental in publicizing more than 50,000 photos taken by a Syrian defector code-named Caesar of torture and murder of detainees in military hospitals Mezzeh and Tishreen. Rapp said Caesar, a former police photographer, “didn’t expect the impact the photos had” in dramatizing the abuses of the Syrian government. [US Syria policy] [Hawks]
• Islamic State tightens grip on Libya
  During a June-July visit to Libya, I arrived to find that daily life in my home country has become even more depressing than it had been the year before. Tripoli no longer has an airport. It was destroyed in August 2014 during the battle for control of the capital between Islamist-backed Misrata militias and fighters from Zintan militias. Summary? Print An Al-Monitor correspondent recently visited Libya and found his homeland sinking deeper into despair and dysfunction and possibly sliding toward disintegration. Author Mustafa Fetouri Posted August 12, 2015 An alternative airport, Mitiga, carved out of a former military base, serves direct flights from Algeria, Jordan and Turkey, but their unreliability makes the better option to fly into Djerba, the tourist resort in southern Tunisia, and then continue the journey overland. During this most recent visit, unlike previously, there were few tourists in Tunis because of this year's terror attacks in Tunis at the Bardo National Museum and Sousse, a beach town. In the past, the drive from Djerba to Tripoli usually took less than three hours, including the time wasted at the notorious security checkpoints inside Tunisia. Now, it can take up to 10 hours, so I was lucky to have made it in only seven. Taxi drivers in Djerba will no longer drive all the way to Tripoli. One Tunisian driver, Zubir, told Al-Monitor, “It is not safe anymore. I have not been to Tripoli since January 2011.” Because of the security situation in Libya, no Tunisian or even Libyan dares risk driving the entire distance. As a result, travelers have to take three different taxis to reach the Libyan border. Right before the border checkpoint, passengers must get out of the vehicle and walk into Libya. Power outages are chronic in Tripoli, on some days lasting for 12 hours. They have become part of the daily struggle, one among the many other difficulties Libyans must endure. [Libya]
• Inside the secret US-Iran diplomacy that sealed nuke deal
  When Hassan Rouhani was elected Iran’s president in June 2013 on a campaign platform of engaging with the West to reach a nuclear deal and improve Iran’s economy, he apparently didn't know that Iran and the United States had already opened a secret diplomatic channel and held bilateral talks in Oman on the nuclear issue in March 2013. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei authorized direct talks with the United States on the nuclear issue as early as 2011, but real progress was not made until Hassan Rouhani, unaware of the talks, came into office in August 2013, US and Iranian officials say. Author Laura RozenPosted August 11, 2015 “The first time I informed Rouhani of the secret negotiations with the United States was after his election to office,” former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in an interview Aug. 4 with Iran Daily, adding that the incoming president and former Iranian nuclear negotiator was shocked when Salehi briefed him on the consultations ahead of his inauguration: “Rouhani was in disbelief.” That is among the revelations that have emerged from interviews with senior Iranian and US officials in the wake of reaching of a final Iran nuclear accord by Iran and six world powers on July 14. The final deal — formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — is currently under a 60-day review by the US Congress. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some pro-Israel lobby groups are pressing members of Congress to kill the deal by voting next month on a resolution of disapproval that seeks to block President Barack Obama from providing the US sanctions relief promised in the accord in exchange for significant steps Iran agreed to take to limit its nuclear program. Obama has vowed to veto any such resolution, and Democrats currently believe they have enough support to sustain his veto, if required. The new insights offer deeper perspective on the critical role that the US-Iran diplomacy played in reaching the nuclear deal. They also suggest that the national interests that drove both countries to pursue bilateral talks are more far-reaching than the ideological predilections of any one political administration, even as they show that individual political leaders — in this case, Rouhani and Obama — were crucial in bringing the competence, internal government consensus and determination to reach a deal. While nuclear negotiations only made rapid progress after Rouhani came into office in August 2013 and tapped Mohammad Javad Zarif as his foreign minister and top nuclear negotiator, it is perhaps less well known that Iran’s hard-line Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei authorized secret talks with the United States on the nuclear issue two years earlier, in 2011, at the urging of Oman’s Sultan Qaboos as well as Salehi. Khamenei himself publicly revealed how the talks began with the Americans in a major speech on June 23, which was held as the last round of final deal nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 — the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany — was getting underway in Vienna. “I would like to present a short history of these negotiations,” Khamenei said in the speech to Iranian government workers June 23. “Our negotiations with the Americans are, in fact, different from our negotiations with the P5+1. The Americans themselves asked for these negotiations and their proposals date back to the time of the tenth [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] administration.” “So the negotiations with the Americans began before the arrival of the current administration,” Khamenei continued. “They made a request and chose an intermediary. One of the honorable personalities in the region [Qaboos] came to Iran and met with me. He said that the American president had called him, asking him to help. The American president said to him that they want to resolve the nuclear matter with Iran and that they would lift the sanctions.” [Iran Deal]
• Iran nuclear deal: Why Empire blinked first
  Sharmine Narwani Published time: 5 Aug, 2015 15:14 We’ve now spent three weeks watching American politicians argue needlessly over the Iran nuclear deal. For or against, they all miss this one salient point: It is the US that needed to end this standoff with Iran – not the other way around. For years we have been hearing that US sanctions “were biting” and had “teeth.” Sanctions, it was said, would “change Iranian behaviors,” whether in regards to the Islamic Republic’s “support of terrorism,” its “calculations” over its nuclear program, or by turning popular Iranian sentiment against its government. Here is US President Obama spinning the fairytale at full volume: “We put in place an unprecedented regime of sanctions that has crippled Iran’s economy…And it is precisely because of the international sanctions and the coalition that we were able to build internationally that the Iranian people responded by saying, we need a new direction in how we interact with the international community and how we deal with this sanctions regime. And that’s what brought President Rouhani to power.” There is, of course, scant evidence that any of this is true. If anything, on the economic front, the net effect of sanctions has been to rally Iranians behind domestic production and thrift – establishing both the discipline and policy focus necessary to sustain the country indefinitely. A 2013 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report explains this unintended consequence of sanctions: [Iran Deal] [US Middle East strategy]
• The Collapsing US Economy
  by Paul Craig Roberts Do you remember when real reporters existed? Those were the days before the Clinton regime concentrated the media into a few hands and turned the media into a Ministry of Propaganda, a tool of Big Brother. The false reality in which Americans live extends into economic life. Last Friday’s employment report was a continuation of a long string of bad news spun into good news. The media repeats two numbers as if they mean something—the monthly payroll jobs gains and the unemployment rate—and ignores the numbers that show the continuing multi-year decline in employment opportunities while the economy is allegedly recovering. The so-called recovery is based on the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate. This measure does not include any unemployed person who has become discouraged from the inability to find a job and has not looked for a job in four weeks. The U.3 measure of unemployment only includes the still hopeful who think they will find a job. The government has a second official measure of unemployment, U.6. This measure, seldom reported, includes among the unemployed those who have been discouraged for less than one year. This official measure is double the 5.3% U.3 measure. What does it mean that the unemployment rate is over 10% after six years of alleged economic recovery? In 1994 the Clinton regime stopped counting long-term discouraged workers as unemployed. Clinton wanted his economy to look better than Reagan’s, so he ceased counting the long-term discouraged workers that were part of Reagan’s unemployment rate. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to measure the long-term discouraged with the official methodology of that time, and when these unemployed are included, the US rate of unemployment as of July 2015 is 23%, several times higher than during the recession with which Fed chairman Paul Volcker greeted the Reagan presidency. An unemployment rate of 23% gives economic recovery a new meaning. It has been eighty-five years since the Great Depression, and the US economy is in economic recovery with an unemployment rate close to that of the Great Depression. [Statistics] [Unemployment]
• Inside Syria: Kurds Roll Back ISIS, but Alliances Are Strained
  By Rukmini Callimachi Aug. 10, 2015 HASAKA, Syria — Green drapes were drawn against the sun, cloaking the room where members of a Syrian Kurdish militia huddled around walkie-talkies, assiduously taking down GPS coordinates. Talal Raman, a 36-year-old Kurdish fighter, worked on a Samsung tablet, annotating a Google Earth map marked with the positions of the deserted apartment buildings and crumbling villas from where his colleagues were battling Islamic State fighters south of this northern Syrian town. He pinpointed in yellow the positions where his men were hunkered behind a wall, and highlighted in red the coordinates of a building next to a mosque where Islamic State fighters had taken cover. “Our comrades can see the enemy moving at the GPS address I just sent you,” he wrote in Arabic to a handler hundreds of miles away in a United States military operations room. Then he waited for the American warplanes to scream in. 2015 The strike that ensued soon after blasted a crater at exactly the coordinates provided by the Kurdish fighter. It left a circle of bodies, including one of an Islamic State fighter who died slumped over his AK-47. An urgent message came in from the coalition war room: “Please confirm our comrades are O.K.?” The tight coordination of American air power with the militia, known as the Y.P.G., from the Kurdish initials for People’s Protection Units, has dealt the Islamic State its most significant setbacks across an enormous strip of northern Syria near the Turkish border in recent months. Now, the United States air campaign is poised to expand, aided by a deal with Turkey to allow American aircraft to fly bombing missions from bases closer to the border. Yet at a time when the militia, the Americans’ most effective ally in Syria, would otherwise be celebrating the increased help, its members are sounding a note of worry. That is because Turkey is making some moves of its own. [US Syria strategy] [Turkey] [Strategic incoherence]
• Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran: Gulf players willing to abandon old narratives
  By M.K. Bhadrakumar on August 10, 2015 The Iran nuclear deal is yet to cross the Rubicon of approval by the US Congress and the going got a bit tough last weekend with Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Eliot Engel, two top congressional Democrats, announcing their objection to the deal. Schumer claimed he made the decision “after deep study, careful thought, and considerable soul-searching,” while Engel is yet to lay bare his soul. But never mind; the debate in the US looks increasingly surreal. The Middle East may have already begun implementing the Iran deal – and what matters would be that Iran lives in its region and not in the Western Hemisphere. The region is turning upside down with such impatience many established narratives, no sooner than word came from Vienna that the historic deal came through that it takes the breath away. The ‘big picture’ is that a full-bodied strategic partnership between Russia and Saudi Arabia is in the making. This is no longer a matter of two estranged countries exchanging glances. This is a communion. The Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir is heading for Moscow on Tuesday, although he had met his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov only last week. Obviously, he wants to talk more and cannot wait, since the Saudi-backed Syrian National Coalition opposition group is also due to Moscow next week for the first time. Al-Jubeir is set to discuss with Moscow a range of bilateral issues that may bring multi-billion dollar succor to Russia’s economy and try to jointly make efforts to heal a number of festering Middle Eastern wounds. Cynics may say the Saudis are buying off the Russians, but what the two countries are aiming at appears to be nothing less than choreographing the New Middle East. The narrative has been that Russia is fishing in the troubled waters of the US-Saudi relationship. But it appears that the US and Russia are probably having the same agenda toward Riyadh. When Lavrov met Al-Jubeir in Doha, US Secretary of State John Kerry was present and two days later Lavrov and Kerry bumped into each other in Malaysia to exchange notes on the sidelines of the ASEAN meet. Russia has offered to help Saudi Arabia cope with the blowback of terrorism that it faces from the extremist Islamist groups it had supported until recently [Russia] [Saudi Arabia] [Iran deal]
• Transcript: Read the Full Text of the Primetime Republican Debate
  Aug. 6, 2015 Updated: Aug. 10, 2015 12:46 PM ET Ten Republican presidential candidates met in Cleveland for a primetime debate on Fox News. At the debate, real estate mogul Donald Trump, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The moderators were Fox News anchors Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace. Here is a running transcript of what they said. KELLY: It is nine p.m. on the East Coast, and the moment of truth has arrived. KELLY: Welcome to the first debate night of the 2016 presidential campaign, live from Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. I’m Megyn Kelly… (APPLAUSE) … along with my co-moderators, Brett Baier and Chris Wallace. Tonight… (APPLAUSE) Nice. Tonight, thousands of people here in the Q, along with millions of voters at home will get their very first chance to see the candidates face off in a debate, answering the questions you want answered. BAIER: Less than a year from now, in this very arena, one of these 10 candidates or one of the seven on the previous debate tonight will accept the Republican party’s nomination. (APPLAUSE) Tonight’s candidates were selected based on an average of five national polls. Just a few hours ago, you heard from the candidates ranked 11th through 17. And now, the prime-time event, the top 10. WALLACE: Also of note, Fox News is partnering for tonight’s debate with Facebook. For the past several weeks, we’ve been asking you for questions for the candidates on Facebook. Nearly 6 million of you, 6 million, viewed the debate videos on our site, and more than 40,000 of you submitted questions: some of which you will hear us asking the candidates tonight. KELLY: As for the candidates who will be answering those questions? Here they are. Positioned on the stage by how they stand in the polls, in the center of the stage tonight, businessman Donald Trump. [US_Election16] [Republicans] [Trump]
• Beretta’s fight to arm the military
  By Jacob Bogage August 8 ? Beretta employee Eric Livingston tests newly minted M9 pistols in the Beretta manufacturing unit in Accokeek, Md. The Army wants a new sidearm, and for the first time traditional military suppliers are facing competition from civilian manufacturers. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) ACCOKEEK, Md. — The letters gave Cpl. Ernest Langdon “freedom of movement” in the Panama Canal Zone. The United States maintained control of the canal in 1989, when Langdon, a Marine, was stationed there. But as tensions mounted between President George H.W. Bush and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, Langdon and his comrades were ordered to test the lines of the Panama Defense Forces to see how far those papers would take them. On patrol in the muggy jungle, Langdon often reached for his pistol, the only weapon he carried, for a pinch of firepower — just in case. It was a Beretta M9 pistol, standard issue for U.S. servicemembers. Here in Accokeek, at Beretta’s U.S. headquarters, workers kept those M9s rolling off the line, supplying the military long after Noriega was ousted. Production ramped up as U.S. soldiers moved on to the war zones of the Middle East: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. Now, the military says, it’s time for a modern handgun for modern warfare. The M9 has long been a sturdy standby when things fall apart in battle — a defensive weapon. The military wants soldiers to reach for the new gun — the XM17 — going into battle. The military’s move to retire the M9 poses a new business challenge for Beretta on top of other change. After 40 years in Maryland, it’s moving its manufacturing — and more than a hundred jobs — out of the state in response to new gun laws that limit the sale and possession of firearms and threatened its commercial business. [Arms sales] [US military]
• A year after Michael Brown’s fatal shooting, unarmed black men are seven times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire
  Story by Sandhya Somashekhar, Wesley Lowery, Keith L. Alexander ? Photos by Jabin Bottsford, Jahi Chikwendiu Video by Whitney Leaming Illustration by Peter Strain Published on August 8, 2015 [Racism] [Human rights]
• GOP debate contenders give Democrats reason to worry
  By Dan Balz Chief correspondent August 7 at 10:04 PM ? CLEVELAND — Donald Trump may top the polls in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, but this week’s debate was a reminder that the party has able rivals who eventually could take him down — and who also could mount a stiff challenge to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the general election. Trump performed in typical style Thursday in the two-hour debate — the same style that has helped him blow past the other candidates. But as the campaigns broke camp here Friday morning, the smiles on the faces of other candidates’ advisers told the fuller story of what happened on the stage at the Quicken Loans Arena. Dan Balz is Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s National Editor, Political Editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent. View Archive ?Facebook [Trump roils first debate among GOP contenders] Everyone came out a winner — or so the rivals’ advisers proclaimed. Some of that bravado was typical post-debate hype, but some of it was grounded in reality. Trump may have been the center of attention, but others performed more effectively overall. For months, Republican leaders have talked about the breadth, depth and potential strength of their candidates. As a group, the aspiring nominees are certainly more experienced and seemingly more ready for a national campaign than the collection of politicians who sought to deny Mitt Romney the GOP nomination in 2012. Democrats have enjoyed the summer of Trump and hope it lasts long enough to inflict serious damage on the Republican brand. But they no doubt saw enough Thursday night to begin to worry about what a general election pitting a vulnerable Clinton against one of the non-Trumps could portend. [US_Election16] [Governance]
• As campaign heats up, Republican candidates are rushing to the right
  By Sean Sullivan August 7 at 8:50 PM ? In the span of a few days this week, Scott Walker emphasized that he opposes abortions, with no exceptions in cases of rape or incest or to save the woman’s life. Marco Rubio shot down a suggestion that he advocated exceptions for rape or incest. On immigration, Rubio said he backed a fence to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, echoing front-runner Donald Trump’s call for a new border wall. And on same-sex marriage, Rick Santorum compared the legalization of such unions to the infamous Supreme Court ruling that African Americans could not be U.S. citizens. Some of the statements reflected shifts in priorities or positions over the long term; Rubio, for example, has abandoned Senate legislation he helped craft that would give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. Others reflected candidates’ decisions to emphasize conservative positions more than they had before. Either way, in the most wide-open Republican presidential field in memory, most of the contenders continued a rush to the right this week in the hope of capturing the attention of the GOP base [US_Election16] [Governance]
• Behind Israel’s Hysterical Opposition to the Iran Nuclear Deal
  by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh In light of the fact that Israel is in possession of at least 200 (surreptitiously-built) nuclear warheads, and considering the reality that, according to both US and Israeli intelligence sources, Iran neither possesses nor pursues nuclear weapons, the relentless hysterical campaign by Israel and its lobby against the Iran nuclear deal can safely be characterized as the mother of all ironies—a clear case of chutzpah. As I pointed out in a recent essay on the nuclear agreement, the deal effectively establishes US control (through IAEA) over the entire production chain of Iran’s nuclear and related industries. Or, as President Obama put it (on the day of the conclusion of the agreement), “Inspectors will have access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain—its uranium mines and mills, its conversion facility and its centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities. . . . Some of these transparency measures will be in place for 25 years. Because of this deal inspectors will also be able to access any suspicious location.” Even a cursory reading of the text of the agreement shows that, if ratified by the US congress, the deal would essentially freeze Iran’s nuclear program at a negligible, ineffectual level of value—at only 3.67% uranium enrichment. Israel and its lobby must certainly be aware of this, of the fact that Iran poses no “existential threat to Israel,” as frequently claimed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his co-thinkers. So, the question is: why all the screaming and breast beating? There is a widespread perception that because the nuclear agreement was reached despite the lobby’s vehement opposition, it must therefore signify a win for Iran, or a loss for Israel and its allies. This is a sheer misjudgment of what the deal represents: it signifies a win not for Iran but for Israel and its allies. And here is why: under the deal Iran is obligated to (a) downgrade its uranium enrichment capabilities from 20% of purity to 3.67%, (b) freeze this minimal level of 3.67% enrichment for 15 years, (c) reduce its current capacity of 19000 centrifuges to 6104 (a reduction of 68%), (d) reduce its stockpile of low grade enriched uranium from the current level of 7500 kg to 300kg (a reduction of 96%), and (e) accept strict limits on its research and development activities. While some restrictions on research and development are promised to be relaxed after 10 years, others will remain for up to 25 years. In addition, Iran would have to accept an extensive monitoring and inspection regime not only of declared nuclear sites but also of military and other non-declared sites where the monitors may presume or imagine incidences of “suspicious” activity. The elaborate system of monitoring and inspection was succinctly described by President Obama on the day of the conclusion of the agreement in Vienna (July 14, 2015): “Put simply, the organization responsible for the inspections, the IAEA, will have access where necessary, when necessary. That arrangement is permanent.” These are obviously major concessions that not only render Iran’s hard-one (but peaceful) nuclear technology ineffectual, but also weaken its defense capabilities and undermine its national sovereignty. [Iran deal] [Israel]
• Syrian training program no longer seen as only way to fight Islamic State
  Highlights YPG militia wasn’t on U.S. radar when Congress approved $500 million plan Training program not a flop, despite setbacks, Pentagon says 2 new classes underway, hundreds of new volunteers, spokesman says By James Rosen WASHINGTON — The Pentagon pushed back Friday against claims that its program to train Syrian fighters to help defeat the Islamic State is in tatters, asserting that two new classes of recruits are underway and noting that in any case, the United States is increasingly relying on other fighting groups. Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, also claimed that the first group of New Syrian Force trainees had defeated, with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes, a band of 50 al Qaida-affiliated militants who ambushed them July 31 in northern Syria. “At the end of that battle, there were more New Syrian Force guys standing than there were al Nusra Front guys standing,” Ryder said. Nusra is al Qaida’s Syria branch. The fate of the American training program has been a major topic at the Pentagon since news broke a week ago that some of the U.S.-trained Syrians had been abducted by Nusra after they entered Syria from Turkey. Critics of the program, who have labeled it too small to train an effective force to fight the Islamic State, said the abductions underscored its inadequacy. But while acknowledging that the initial foray into Syria for the group, which was trained under a $500 million program approved by Congress, had been less than ideal, Ryder insisted that the program was going forward. “It’s important to keep in mind that success does not hinge on one fight or one event, and we’re still in the early stages of implementing this program,” Ryder said. Ryder also pointed out that other U.S.-allied groups have taken back “large swaths of territory” from the Islamic State. He praised in particular Syrian Kurdish forces that largely had not come to U.S. attention when Congress approved the Syrian training program last September. The U.S. began closely working with the Kurds in October in a campaign to prevent the Islamic State from capturing the border town of Kobani. Since then, U.S.-Kurdish cooperation has expanded. “Syrian Kurds in the northeastern portion of the country have performed exceptionally well,” Ryder said. He said the Kurds are being aided by Syrian Arabic and Turkmen fighters. “As they continue to progress, they are building regional coalitions specifically with local Arab forces committed to defeating ISIL and expelling them from these lands,” Ryder said. That success has made it less necessary for the U.S. to train its own Syrian forces for the battlefield. Ryder called any forces trained under the $500 million program “additive in nature.” “They’ll further contribute to what’s already being done by the Syrian Kurds and other anti-ISIL forces,” he said. When the Obama administration first announced the so-called train and equip program, it said it wanted to train and field 5,000 Syrians in the first year. That figure is now considered unrealistic. Only about 60 have been trained to date, and of the 6,000 Syrians who the Pentagon says have volunteered for training, many were rejected by background checks intended to uncover unacceptable political sympathies or criminal histories. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article30460605.html#storylink=cpy [US Syria policy]
• US’s Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Loose
  F. William Engdahl Who would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly not the Obama Administration, and their brilliant geo-political think-tank neo-conservative strategists. John Kerry’s brilliant “win-win” proposal of last September during his September 11 Jeddah meeting with ailing Saudi King Abdullah was simple: Do a rerun of the highly successful State Department-Saudi deal in 1986 when Washington persuaded the Saudis to flood the world market at a time of over-supply in order to collapse oil prices worldwide, a kind of “oil shock in reverse.” In 1986 was successful in helping to break the back of a faltering Soviet Union highly dependent on dollar oil export revenues for maintaining its grip on power. So, though it was not made public, Kerry and Abdullah agreed on September 11, 2014 that the Saudis would use their oil muscle to bring Putin’s Russia to their knees today. It seemed brilliant at the time no doubt. On the following day, 12 September 2014, the US Treasury’s aptly-named Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, headed by Treasury Under-Secretary David S. Cohen, announced new sanctions against Russia’s energy giants Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftgas and Rosneft. It forbid US oil companies to participate with the Russian companies in joint ventures for oil or gas offshore or in the Arctic. Then, just as the ruble was rapidly falling and Russian major corporations were scrambling for dollars for their year-end settlements, a collapse of world oil prices would end Putin’s reign. That was clearly the thinking of the hollowed-out souls who pass for statesmen in Washington today. Victoria Nuland was jubilant, praising the precision new financial warfare weapon at David Cohen’s Treasury financial terrorism unit. In July, 2014 West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark price for US domestic oil pricing, traded at $101 a barrel. The shale oil bonanza was booming, making the US into a major oil player for the first time since the 1970’s. When WTI hit $46 at the beginning of January this year, suddenly things looked different. Washington realized they had shot themselves in the foot. They realized that the over-indebted US shale oil industry was about to collapse under the falling oil price. Behind the scenes Washington and Wall Street colluded to artificially stabilize what then was an impending chain-reaction bankruptcy collapse in the US shale oil industry. As a result oil prices began a slow rise, hitting $53 in February. The Wall Street and Washington propaganda mills began talking about the end of falling oil prices. By May prices had crept up to $62 and almost everyone was convinced oil recovery was in process. How wrong they were. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/08/08/us-s-saudi-oil-deal-from-win-win-to-mega-loose/ [Oil] [Saudi Arabia] [Shale] [US global strategy]
• On the Next “Decisive” Meeting of TPP Participants
  Vladimir Terehov It looks like the long running soap opera called “the formation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)” is beginning to make pucker not only those who are forced to watch it, more or less regularly, but also the main actors. There are currently 12 such participants, namely the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, Mexico and Peru. In the recent 5-6 years, all of them have been members of various levels of negotiations for a collective Free Trade Zone (FTZ). Each round of negotiations (which have already accumulated 19 “official” and over 20 “work sessions”) culminates in a standard declaration by the main participants in the style of: “a lot of work has been done and there is significant progress, but several outstanding issues still need to be resolved in the next decisive session.” The latest round of negotiations, which took place in Hawaii from 24 to 31 July of this year (initially at the expert and subsequently at the ministerial level), had also been designated previously as “decisive”, where it had been expected to solve all the “remaining” issues from the previous meetings. So, in a solemn ceremony, the heads of states would only have to sign the prepared documents. However, after the Hawaiian round there were “a few” problems. Moreover, the negotiators disagreed as to which of them was to be considered a priority. In New Zealand, it is considered to be the delay in removal of import duties on dairy products; in the U.S. – opening domestic markets of the partner countries of the TPP (primarily Japan) for the import of various agricultural products. At the same time, Americans are in favour of extending the period of preferences for companies – producers of new medications. Japan, by contrast, is interested in extending the period of protection of its market of agricultural products from the free inflow of foreign products, but in prompt removal of barriers for car sales. At the final press conference, the Minister of Economy of Japan, Akira Amari, said that it would take another joint meeting of all the participants of the negotiation process to approve the TPP statutory documents. The representative of the U.S., Michael Froman, intends to continue to focus on solving problems concerning US-Japanese economic relations as a key element in the success of this project. Apparently, during the Hawaiian round, the bilateral US-Japan component occupied a central place. That is quite natural, since the total GDP of the two countries is at least 80% of the total GDP of all 12 TPP members combined. Only on July 30, news agencies reported on problems in the bilateral economic relations being “basically” resolved. However, the ensuing important “clarifications” actually leveled official optimism. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/08/08/on-the-next-decisive-meeting-of-tpp-participants/ [TPP]
• Fears of Lasting Rift as Obama Battles Pro-Israel Group on Iran
  By Julie Hirschfeld Davis Aug. 7, 2015 WASHINGTON — President Obama had a tough message for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, the powerful pro-Israel group that is furiously campaigning against the Iran nuclear accord, when he met with two of its leaders at the White House this week. The president accused Aipac of spending millions of dollars in advertising against the deal and spreading false claims about it, people in the meeting recalled. So Mr. Obama told the Aipac leaders that he intended to hit back hard. The next day in a speech at American University, Mr. Obama denounced the deal’s opponents as “lobbyists” doling out millions of dollars to trumpet the same hawkish rhetoric that had led the United States into war with Iraq. The president never mentioned Aipac by name, but his target was unmistakable. Delegates from Iran and a group of six nations led by the United States in Vienna on Tuesday after agreeing to an accord to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability. The remarks reflected an unusually sharp rupture between a sitting American president and the most potent pro-Israel lobbying group, which was founded in 1951 a few years after the birth of Israel. [AIPAC] Obama] [Israel]
• Obama is Setting his Sights on Armed Intervention in Syria
  Nikolai Bobkin | 08.08.2015 | 00:00 At a meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the White House on Aug. 4, US President Barack Obama stated that Syria needs a «realistic political process» to settle its internal armed conflict, which would «lead to a stabilizing of the country and a transition to a government that is reflective of all the people of Syria». A few days earlier, the US president had authorized the use of US aircraft to defend the «moderate» Syrian opposition troops (trained by the Pentagon), in case they were attacked by the Syrian army. The Americans have already launched the first air strikes in support of the rebels. National Security Council spokesman Alistair Baskey warned that Washington is ready to offer broader military aid to opposition forces in Syria. This will take the Syrian crisis - which has already gone on for four years - to a whole new level: for the first time US forces could be drawn into a direct clash with the Syrian army. Washington still seeks regime change in Syria and the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power. The Military Times notes that for the first time since the air strikes against Syrian targets began a year ago, the US military now has an ally on the ground. Their small numbers do not bother the US president - what is important is the shift in the wind, and that is strong enough for the Americans to manifest a willingness for direct, armed intervention in Syria. [US Syria policy]
• Nicaragua to Build Inter-Oceanic Waterway
  Nil Nikandrov | 08.08.2015 | 00:00 The Latin American presidents who dare to adopt policies independent from the United States have to be vigilant. Anything can happen; even an assassination is not excluded. Recently media outlets have been reporting more frequently about the empire taking revenge. The United States sees violence as the best way to reach strategic objectives and respond to crisis situations. The Washington’s list of «unfriendly leaders» includes Raphael Correa, the President of Ecuador, Bolivian President Evo Morales, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Cristina Fernandez, the President of Argentina, Sanchez Seren, the President of Salvador and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Daniel Ortega tops the list. The US State Department and special services believe he poses a challenge and undermines the process of Latin American consolidation. The State Department always emphasized the Ortega’s hostility towards the US. Meeting Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu in February, he put it very plainly saying that the United States spreads disorder throughout the whole world. That’s why Nicaragua sides with the countries that keep Washington at a distance such as Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil. China is becoming a major partner for Nicaragua. Beijing is to launch the construction of inter-oceanic canal in November-December 2015.
  The CIA and military intelligence prevail among the 150 strong personnel of the embassy added by the United States Agency for International Development and Peace Corps. Scott Fagan, Political Counselor at U.S. Embassy Managua, is a seasoned CIA officer who worked in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Columbia and Iraq. Scott Fagan has an important role to play in the process of allocating funds going to non-government organizations dealing in ecology and politics. Opposition forces are preparing for mass protests. In June 2015 Eduardo Montealegre, President of the Independent Liberal Party, a frequent visitor to the US embassy and the chief opponent of Daniel Ortega, addressed the Liberal International taking an outright pro-American stand. Actually, he launched an offensive against the regime. According to him, Ortega goes against the law by pushing through a project with dubious a project despite economic and environmental questions. According to him, the decision to build the canal is motivated by political ambitions of authoritarian government. [CIA] [NGO] [Environment] [Camouflage] [China confrontatiomn]
• How Pathetic! Why Donald Trump May be the Best Thing Going
  by Andrew Levine Ralph Nader was among the first to take the Trump campaign seriously. Since early June, he has been saying that Donald Trump will become a major problem for the Republicans unless they can find a way to marginalize his candidacy — soon. Nader was ahead of the pack. It took mainstream pundits four to six more weeks to come to a similar view. What Nader argued weeks ago, and what most observers now believe, is that if Trump isn’t gone by Labor Day, it may be too late. They are on to something. As the primary season heats up, all hell could break loose – either because Trump will be on his way to becoming the GOP nominee, alienating all but the most extreme lunatic fringe of the electorate; or, more likely, because, seeing that he cannot win the nomination, he will bolt the Party and run independently — taking a large chunk of the Republican base with him. It has been clear for some time that the GOP would nominate one or another buffoon to run for President in 2016, and therefore that the Democratic nominee – most likely Hillary Clinton – could look forward to an easy time of it once the primary season is over. This would be the case with or without Trump in the picture. However, if she does run against Trump, she might as well declare victory now. It would be the same for any Democrat, even the faux socialist Bernie Sanders. If, heaven forbid, the nominee is Joe Biden, he’d have a cakewalk too. [US_Election16] [Trump]
• Free Puerto Rico, America’s Colony
  By Nelson A. Denis Aug. 6, 2015 PUERTO RICO has begun to default on its bond payments, for the first time since it became part of the United States, 117 years ago. If it fails to make interest payments on its $72 billion public debt, pension funds across the United States may be unable to meet their payment obligations. But if it were allowed to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, as cities and counties have done, every state will want that right. For this reason, the Puerto Rico crisis is a national financial crisis, one that neither President Obama nor Congress has taken steps to resolve. Even a simple debt restructuring — in the unlikely event bondholders agreed to it — would not solve the mess. With a population of 3.6 million, every person on the island would need to pay $1,400 a year — 9 percent of Puerto Rico’s per-capita income — just to cover this year’s $5 billion principal and interest payments on the debt. The problem is not Puerto Rico, or even the vulture funds that have refused to renegotiate the island’s debts: It’s the rigged capitalism the United States has forced on its Caribbean colony.
  Independence is the only solution, for Puerto Rico and the United States. [Imperialism] [Puerto Rico] [Capitalism]
• Tony Blair could face trial for ‘illegal’ Iraq war, says the man who may soon lead Blair’s party
  By Adam Taylor August 5 at 2:34 PM ? Britain's former prime minister and former Labor Party leader, Tony Blair, speaks at an event attended by Labor supporters in central London on July 22, 2015. (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images) As fierce as Thursday's debate between GOP presidential candidates will likely be, it's hard to imagine any of them suggesting that a recent Republican president could face trial over an 'illegal' war. In Britain, however, it happened. When Jeremy Corbyn, the current front-runner in the Labor party leadership race, was asked whether Tony Blair, the former Labor prime minister who led the country into the Iraq war, should be tried for his role in the conflict, he said: "If he's committed a war crime? Yes." Corbyn made the comment on Tuesday during an interview with "BBC Newsnight." Jeremy Corbyn takes part in a Labor Party leadership hustings event in Warrington, northwest England on July 25, 2015. (Paul Ellis/AFP) Pressed on whether he personally thought Blair had committed a war crime, Corbyn responded that the Iraq war was "illegal" – and that it was possible Blair could face trial for it. [Blair] [Iraq] [Corbyn]
• Restoring America’s Strength: My Vision for U.S. Foreign Policy
  By Marco Rubio
  Essay August 4, 2015 United StatesForeign Policy America’s status as the greatest and most influential nation on earth comes with certain inescapable realities. Among these are an abundance of enemies wishing to undermine us, numerous allies dependent on our strength and constancy, and the burden of knowing that every choice we make in exercising our power—even when we choose not to exercise it at all—has tremendous human and geopolitical consequences. This has been true for at least 70 years, but never more so than today. As the world has grown more interconnected, American leadership has grown more critical to maintaining global order and defending our people’s interests, and as our economy has turned from national to international, domestic policy and foreign policy have become inseparable. President Barack Obama has failed to recognize this. He entered office believing the United States was too engaged in too many places and that globalization had diminished the need for American power. He set to work peeling back the protective cover of American influence, stranding our allies, and deferring to the whims of nefarious regional powers. He has vacillated between leading recklessly and not leading at all, which has left the world more dangerous and America’s interests less secure. It will take years for our next president to confront the residual effects of President Obama’s foreign and defense policies. Countering the spread of the self-declared Islamic State, for example, will require a broadened coalition of regional partners, increased U.S. involvement in the fight, and steady action to prevent the group’s expansion to other failed and failing states. Halting Iran’s regional expansionism and preventing its acquisition of a nuclear weapon will demand equal urgency and care. [US global strategy] [Republican] [Decline]
• How the Obama White House runs foreign policy
  By Karen DeYoung August 4 at 8:33 PM ? When Susan E. Rice took over as President Obama’s national security adviser two years ago, she was struck by how the White House had grown. Since she had last served on the National Security Council, during the Clinton administration, its staff had nearly quadrupled in size, to about 400 people. Earlier this year Rice embarked on an effort to trim that number, hoping to make the policy­making process more agile. By mid-July, she said in an interview, the staff had been cut by 6 percent. But it may be too late to change impressions of an NSC bureaucracy whose size has come to symbolize an overbearing and paranoid White House that insists on controlling even the smallest policy details, often at the expense of timely and effective decisions. In the Defense Department, where mistrust of the White House has persisted since the administration began, Obama is described as resolute and bold when a quick executive action is needed on operations such as hostage rescues and targeted captures and killings. However, when the president has wanted to move swiftly on some of his most ambitious policy initiatives — the opening to Cuba and the early Iran nuclear negotiations — he has circumvented the usual practice for decision-making and kept a close hold within the White House. National Security Adviser Susan Rice resisted her initial impulse to cut staff until she understood the reasons for the growth. (Evan Vucci/AP) Two senior NSC officials — deputy national security adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes and then-Latin American director Ricardo Zuniga — handled secret talks leading to last December’s announced opening to Cuba. The White House did not inform Secretary of State John F. Kerry until the discussions were well underway, and State Department officials in charge of the region found out only as they neared completion. [Obama]
• Still Uninvestigated After 50 Years: Did the U.S. Help Incite the 1965 Indonesia Massacre?
  The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue. 31, No. 1, August 03, 2015 Peter Dale Scott It is now fifty years since the so-called “G30S” or “Gestapu” (Gerakan September Tigahpuluh) event of September 30, 1965 in Indonesia, when six members of the Indonesian army general staff were brutally murdered. This event was a decisive moment in Indonesian history: it led to the overthrow of President Sukarno, his replacement by an army general, Suharto, and the subsequent massacre of a half million or more Indonesians targeted as communists.1 It is also forty years since I first wrote to suggest that the United States was implicated in this horrendous event,2 and thirty years since I wrote about it again in 1985 in the Canadian journal Pacific Affairs.3 Strikingly, there has been very little follow-up investigating these events inside the United States. A new generation of scholars, notably John Roosa and Bradley Simpson, have documented U.S. involvement in the exploitation of Gestapu to justify the subsequent mass murder, in the massacre project itself, and in the formation of the subsequent capitalist New Order.4 But there has been, I shall try to show, little or no American response to facts I presented then suggesting U.S. involvement in inciting the specific event of September 30 itself. The Indonesia massacre of 1965 Consider five facts about the U.S. and Indonesia in 1965, facts that (apart from the first) have been little noted or greeted in America with silence. Fact No. 1) Prior to Gestapu, a number of U.S. academics and policy intellectuals with connections to the CIA and RAND Corporation publicly urged their contacts in the Indonesian Army "to strike, sweep their house clean” (Guy Pauker), while “liquidating the enemy's political and guerrilla armies” (William Kintner). [Massacre] [Indonesia] [Outsourcing] [Suharto]
• SAS dress as ISIS fighters in undercover war on jihadis
  BRITISH Special Forces are mounting hit and run raids against Islamic State deep inside eastern Syria dressed as insurgent fighters, the Sunday Express can reveal. By Marco Giannangeli and Josh Taylor PUBLISHED: 00:00, Sat, Aug 1, 2015 | UPDATED: 11:54, Sun, Aug 2, 2015 SAS soldiers are disguising themselves as ISIS fighters The unorthodox tactic, which is seeing SAS units dressed in black and flying ISIS flags, has been likened to the methods used by the Long Range Desert Group against Rommel's forces during the Second World War. More than 120 members belonging to the elite regiment are currently in the war-torn country on operation Shader, tasked with destroying IS equipment and munitions which insurgents constantly move to avoid Coalition air strikes. It comes just days after David Cameron gave "carte blanche" for the SAS and SBS to target IS leaders as part of the Government's "broad spectrum" response to the murder of 30 British tourists by ISIS gunman Seifeddine Rezgui in the Tunisian beach resort of Sousse. Though the Prime Minister is being kept informed, senior military sources last night told the Sunday Express that he would not be required to "green light" every mission. Instead the teams, part of a force known as the Coalition Joint Special Operations Task Force, are under American command. [ISIS] [Special forces] [Media]
• British SAS Special Forces “Dressed Up as ISIS Rebels” Fighting Assad in Syria
  By Stephen Lendman Global Research, August 04, 2015 On August 2, Britain’s Sunday Express newspaper headlined “SAS dress as ISIS fighters in undercover war on jihadis,” saying: “More than 120 members belonging to the elite regiment are currently in the war-torn country” covertly “dressed in black and flying ISIS flags,” engaged in what’s called Operation Shader – attacking Syrian targets on the pretext of combatting ISIS. Maybe covert US special forces and CIA elements are involved the same way. During Obama’s war on Libya, Britain deployed hundreds of Special Forces Support Group (SFSG) paratroopers – drawn from SAS (Special Air Service) and SBS (Special Boat Service) personnel. Around 800 Royal Marines and 4,000 US counterparts were on standby to intervene on short notice if ordered. [Special forces] [Syria] [ISIS]
• Why is Turkey bombing the Kurds?
  Kamran Matin 4 August 2015 Given interlocking domestic, regional, and international developments, the AKP has launched attacks on ISIS and the PKK, the latter evidently being the main target, with four main objectives. PYD checkpoint in Afrin during Syrian Kurdistan rebellion, 2012. PYD checkpint in Afrin during Syrian Kurdistan rebellion, 2012.Wikiommons/ScottBobb. Some rights reserved. 'War is the continuation of politics by other means', Clausewitz famously remarked. Nowhere is this maxim better in display than in Turkey’s current dual-offensive against the ‘Islamic State’, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). For rather than being a policy U-turn, as it has generally been described in mainstream media, this offensive is essentially a new tactic by Turkey's ruling 'Justice and Development Party' (AKP) to extricate its grand strategy of domestic entrenchment and regional hegemony from a structural impasse central to which is the advancements of the Kurdish revolution in Turkey and Syria. This is why and how. [Turkey] [Kurds] [Syria] [Islamist] [Erdogan]
• Iran’s nuclear deal reconsidered
  Bob Rigg 3 August 2015
  Business delegations are flying in daily, making the most of this opportunity to establish themselves in Iran when Republican opposition to the deal is compromising US prospects at this critical early stage. 1953, when Eisenhower and Nixon supported Iran's first nuclear reactor. 1953, when Eisenhower and Nixon supported Iran's first nuclear reactor. Wikicommons/Abbie Rowe. Some rights reserved. US President Eisenhower was carried away by the prospect of the widespread international use of peaceful nuclear energy and, in December 1953, proclaimed an international programme called Atoms for Peace with two major declared objectives: encouraging as many countries as possible to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and cornering as much as possible of the lucrative international market in nuclear technology for the US. The major undeclared objective was, in the context of considerable international concern about Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the nuclear arms race, to legitimise the development of a market for peaceful nuclear energy on a large scale. Interestingly enough, the first three reactors built under this programme, by a US company with expertise in the manufacture of bowling equipment, were in Israel, Iran, and Pakistan. When the US exported highly enriched uranium to as many as 30 countries, the Soviet Union followed its example elsewhere. Only then did it dawn on the US and the Soviet Union that, because the nuclear fuel cycle requires uranium enrichment, the enriched uranium resulting from this process can be put to both peaceful and military use. The greater the number of governments with access to nuclear technology, the greater was the risk of the dilution of their monopoly on nuclear weapons, or proliferation, as they preferred to call it. Because they wanted nuclear weapons for themselves, but wanted to prevent their proliferation to other states, they drafted the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which would be successful only if it had near universal membership. [Iran deal]
• Julian Assange: the Untold Story of an Epic Struggle for Justice
  by John Pilger July 31, 2015 The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a gruelling farce. For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost £12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war. [Assange] [Whistleblower] [Sweden]
• Crucified Boy, Boiled Babies and Stone Fish Law
  Konstantin Asmolov Observing a simultaneous waging of several information wars, the author of the article often wonders why it happens that obvious fabrications are spread in the media. His conspiracy-addicted mind usually draws a picture, in which the chief editor of a propaganda newspaper instructs a journalist to write something dreadful, and the latter energetically elaborates a news-plant. Perhaps, this is how it used to work in the past. But today the mechanism of the elaboration of especially remarkable rumors looks something like that. A certain conflict between two countries has sparked. It could be an undeclared war, which can last for years as on the Korean Peninsula or just for several months as in Ukraine. Mutual rejection has already accelerated, while bilateral propaganda continues bashing the opponents. A certain background information and the general context are created, and news appears in the media. What we call “intelligence officers,” they call “spies.” People whom we tag “insurgents,” they refer to as “militants.” And overall, the other side wages an unfair war and is potentially capable of brutality that only an enemy could commit. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/08/01/crucified-boy-boiled-babies-and-stone-fish-law/ [Media]
• Small Pool of Rich Donors Dominates Election Giving
  By Nicholas Confessore, Sarah Cohen and Karen Yourish Aug. 1, 2015 Fewer than four hundred families are responsible for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign, a concentration of political donors that is unprecedented in the modern era.
  The vast majority of the $388 million backing presidential candidates this year is being channeled to groups that can accept unlimited contributions in support of candidates from almost any source. The speed with which such “super PACs” can raise money — sometimes bringing in tens of millions of dollars from a few businesses or individuals in a matter of days — has allowed them to build enormous campaign war chests in a fraction of the time that it would take the candidates, who are restricted in how much they can accept from a single donor. A New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission reports and Internal Revenue Service records shows that the fund-raising arms race has made most of the presidential hopefuls deeply dependent on a small pool of the richest Americans. The concentration of donors is greatest on the Republican side, according to the Times analysis, where consultants and lawyers have pushed more aggressively to exploit the looser fund-raising rules that have fueled the rise of super PACs. Just 130 or so families and their businesses provided more than half the money raised through June by Republican candidates and their super PACs. [US_Election16] [Plutocracy]
• In a setback for Obama, negotiators fail to wrap up Pacific trade pact
  By Steven Mufson July 31 at 11:06 PM ? High-level talks to forge a ­12-nation trade deal spanning the Pacific broke up Friday without resolving contentious disputes over Canadian dairy tariffs, the protection of cutting-edge drugs known as “biologics” and Japanese access to the North American automobile market. Negotiators said they would continue to seek agreement over the coming months, but the failure to wrap up the accord, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was a setback for President Obama, who hopes that the completion of a deal will be one of his signature achievements. [TPP}
• Bad Posture: Republican opponents of the Iran deal come off looking like they want war.
  By Fred Kaplan Fred Kaplan T hursday’s Senate hearing on the Iran nuclear deal hit its nadir when Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican from Wisconsin, lectured Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz about the dangers of an EMP bomb. Moniz, former head of the MIT Physics Department, could recite more about electromagnetic pulses in his sleep than Johnson could learn in a lifetime. But the deeper absurdity of the scene was that an EMP bomb—an age-old, somewhat mythical worry in certain right-wing circles—has nothing to do with the Iran nuclear deal. In this sense, though, Johnson’s obsessive rambling (and it wasn’t quite the hearing’s nadir: That moment came when he launched into the lecture again in the second round of questioning) typified—in extreme, almost comical fashion—most of the jeremiads that Senate Republicans hurled at the panel of administration witnesses: They too had nothing to do with the Iran nuclear deal—or nothing to do with the Senate’s task, which is to scrutinize the deal for the next two months, then vote it up or down. The whole exercise may be a “charade,” as one senator huffed. Both houses of Congress will probably vote the deal down, the Republicans almost unanimously so; President Obama will veto their dissent; and there won’t be enough naysayers to override him. Everyone understands this, which is why Republican critics can comfortably trash the deal without bothering to study it, certainly without weighing its benefits and risks. They can come off looking strong, pro-Israel, anti-Obama—whatever pose they need to strike to win the next election—without sharing the responsibility if the deal turns out badly or ceding credit if all goes well. I spent many hours of my youth watching, in some cases covering as a newspaper reporter, Senate hearings about nuclear arms treaties that the Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations had negotiated with the Russians. These were contentious hearings, but I don’t remember anything as plainly vicious—and utterly divorced from substance—as the Republicans’ behavior at Thursday’s briefing. And the viciousness was directed not at Iran but at Obama and the witnesses at the table, including the committee’s former chairman, Secretary of State John Kerry. It’s scabrous enough when Sen. Jim Risch the junior senator from Idaho, chortles, “You guys have been bamboozled” and, “Anyone who believes this is a good deal joins the ranks of the most naïve people in the world.” You just shake your head and wonder how it’s possible that someone like this could be a United States senator. But when the Foreign Relations Committee’s current chairman, Sen. Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, rips at Kerry in his opening statement, saying, “I believe you’ve been fleeced,” thus setting the tone for what is to come (not just in this hearing but in the dozens more slated in the next two months), well, things have taken a weird turn. You can like or dislike the terms of the deal. Both sides—the Iranians and the leaders of the P5+1 nations (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany)—made compromises to get the deal. Though its inspection and verification measures are as tight and thorough as any I’ve seen in a deal of this sort (excepting those imposed after the military defeat of a nation), they’re not absolutely airtight; there’s no guarantee this will work out. Nonetheless, it’s not just disrespectful (nothing wrong with that), it’s just misinformed, to accuse the Western negotiators—career diplomats, backed by laboratory scientists, who worked on this deal for two years, struggling nonstop for three weeks at the end to hammer out the precise language—of having the wool pulled over their eyes, of being chumps and suckers, especially when the senators snapping the towels aren’t the brightest lights on the block. (At one point of his you’ve-been-fleeced routine, Corker allowed, “When I was in college, I wasn’t a particularly good student.”) [Iran deal] [Governance]
• Will Iran get its billions back?
  In the run-up to the nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers, there was talk of more than $100 billion of Iranian assets being unfrozen as a result of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Nonetheless, on July 15, Valiollah Seif, the governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), announced that the total amount of “usable funds” that will be released will be “$23 billion belonging to the CBI and about $6 to $7 billion belonging to the government.” Two days later, Gholamreza Mesbahi Moghaddam, a leading member of the Majles Plan and Budget Commission, put the total figure at $130 billion. It is evident that such divergences will cause confusion. The discrepancy created such controversy that Seif wrote a public letter to President Hassan Rouhani to explain the details, underlining that “though the total amount of foreign reserves is $107 billion, only $26 billion will be usable.” [Iran deal] [Financial Sanctions] [Extraterritoriality] [Legality] [Double standards]
• The previous sole superpower
  Tom Engelhardt and Eduardo Galeano 31 July 2015 A little history of Great Britain excerpted from Galeano's late-in-life masterpiece, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone.
  God’s masterpiece or the Devil’s bad joke? Barbarians and apes—from the Opium Wars to the origin of the species By Eduardo Galeano [The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s history of humanity, Mirrors (Nation Books).] Origin of freedom of oppression Opium poppy field. United Nations Photo/Flickr. Some rights reserved. Opium poppy field. Flickr/United Nations Photo. Some rights reserved. Opium was outlawed in China. British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives. The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free trade demanded war. William Jardine, a generous sort, was the most powerful of the drug traffickers and vice president of the Medical Missionary Society, which offered treatment to the victims of the opium he sold. In London, Jardine hired a few influential writers and journalists, including best-selling author Samuel Warren, to create a favorable environment for war. These communications professionals ran the cause of freedom high up the flagpole. Freedom of expression at the service of free trade: pamphlets and articles rained down upon British public opinion, exalting the sacrifice of the honest citizens who challenged Chinese despotism, risking jail, torture, and death in that kingdom of cruelty. The proper climate established, the storm was unleashed. The Opium War lasted, with a few interruptions, from 1839 to 1860. [Imperialism] [Camouflage]
• How Much Cash the Candidates Have Raised and Who’s Giving
  Today, two weeks after campaigns disclosed how much money they’ve raised, the Super PACs that support candidates must file their first fundraising totals with the Federal Election Commission. See who’s leading, and who’s falling behind, in the money race. Updated: 11:37PM, 31st July, 2015 [US_Election16] [Plutocracy]
• ISIS no weaker than a year ago despite bombing
  By Associated Press July 31, 2015 | 9:12am WASHINGTON — After billions of dollars spent and more than 10,000 extremist fighters killed, the Islamic State group is fundamentally no weaker than it was when the US-led bombing campaign began a year ago, American intelligence agencies have concluded. The military campaign has prevented Iraq’s collapse and put the Islamic State under increasing pressure in northern Syria, particularly squeezing its self-proclaimed capital in Raqqa. But intelligence analysts see the overall situation as a strategic stalemate: The Islamic State remains a well-funded extremist army able to replenish its ranks with foreign jihadis as quickly as the US can eliminate them. Meanwhile, the group has expanded to other countries, including Libya, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Afghanistan. The assessments by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others appear to contradict the optimistic line taken by the Obama administration’s special envoy, retired Gen. John Allen, who told a forum in Aspen, Colorado, last week that “ISIS is losing” in Iraq and Syria. The intelligence was described by officials who would not be named because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. “We’ve seen no meaningful degradation in their numbers,” a defense official said, citing intelligence estimates that put the group’s total strength at between 20,000 and 30,000, the same estimate as last August when the airstrikes began. [ISIS]
• US-trained Syrian rebels killed and leaders captured by al-Qaida affiliate
  • Five US-trained fighters killed one day after seven kidnapped by al-Nusra Front • Friday attack on Division 30 HQ is latest blow to US anti-Isis policy Fighters from al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate the al-Nusra Front drive in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo flying Islamist flags as they head to a frontline on 26 May 2015. Photograph: Fadi Al-Halabi/AFP/Getty Images Kareem Shaheen in Beirut Al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria has killed five members of a rebel group trained by the US and wounded 18 others, a day after kidnapping seven members of the same force, in the latest blow to American strategy in Syria. The fighters, who were attacked by al-Nusra Front militants at their headquarters on Friday morning, are among the 50-60 rebels trained in Turkey to fight Islamic State. The controversial programme has so far made no difference on the ground and this latest blow will be embarrassing for the US. [US Syria policy][Jihadist]
• New Hampshire Voters Explain the Appeal of Donald Trump
  Jul 30, 2015 12:45 PM CEST A Bloomberg Politics focus group of Donald Trump supporters in the Granite State helps illuminate the billionaire's rise in the polls. David Knowles Donald Trump is a brand, and his New Hampshire supporters are itching to buy it. A Bloomberg Politics focus group of 12 Republican and independent voters who are supportive of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy shed light Wednesday night on the billionaire's swift rise to the top of the GOP field, and confirmed that his brash, “You're fired!” style and lack of experience in politics is more of an asset than a liability. “He says it like it is,” said Jessica, a data analyst, during the focus group in the first-in-the-nation primary state, conducted by Purple Strategies at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “He speaks the truth.” [Trump] [US_Election16] [Governance]

• Despite economic gains, Obama’s work in Africa is unfinished
  What Obama is doing on his final presidential trip to Africa The trip marks the first time a sitting president has visited Ethi­o­pia. Obama last traveled to Kenya in 2006, when he was a U.S. senator. By Juliet Eilperin and Kevin Sieff July 28 at 3:41 PM ? ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — In the end, President Obama may have gotten closer to the bones of ancient mankind than to ordinary Africans on what was probably his last trip to Africa as president. But no one can say he did not try. In a region that is home to some of the world’s newest tech start-ups and oldest wars, Obama tried to reconcile his abundant hope for Africa’s future with a determination to tell the truth about its challenges, past and present. In a major speech to Kenyan students and in more intimate gatherings with members of civil society, he sometimes seemed torn between heaping praise on the economic progress that has lifted living standards for millions and acknowledging the corruption, violence and security issues that continue to afflict the continent. He celebrated the ingenuity of African business leaders and then promptly confronted South Sudan’s deepening civil war. His plane took off for Ethiopia, one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, just as a prominent hotel was attacked in neighboring Somalia. [Africa US] [Africa China]
• Libyan court sentences Gaddfi's son Seif to death
  Xinhua, July 28, 2015 A Libyan court on Tuesday sentenced Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of former leader Muammar Gaddafi, to death, according to judicial resources. The Tripoli-based court also ruled on eight other senior figures of the former government, including the former security chief, Abdullah al-Senussi. Seif has been held by militias in the western city of Zintan since the downfall of Gadaffi. The militant group refused to hand him over to the Libyan government and it was unclear whether the sentence could be carried out. Some local media also called the ruling controversial, saying the court was under pressure of the Islamist forces that have expelled the elected Libyan government and are currently occupying the capital city of Tripoli. Libya's Ministry of Justice earlier denounced the trials set by the Tripoli court on Seif as well as 37 other Gaddafi's close officials. [Libya]
• The Balance of Power in the Middle East Just Changed
  U.S.-Iranian Relations Emerge from a 30-Year Cold War July 28, 2015 By Peter Van Buren Don't sweat the details of the July nuclear accord between the United States and Iran. What matters is that the calculus of power in the Middle East just changed in significant ways. Washington and Tehran announced their nuclear agreement on July 14th and yes, some of the details are still classified. Of course the Obama administration negotiated alongside China, Russia, Great Britain, France, and Germany, which means Iran and five other governments must approve the detailed 159-page “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.” The U.N., which also had to sign off on the deal, has already agreed to measures to end its sanctions against Iran. If we’re not all yet insta-experts on centrifuges and enrichment ratios, the media will ensure that in the next two months -- during which Congress will debate and weigh approving the agreement -- we’ll become so. Verification strategies will be debated. The Israelis will claim that the apocalypse is nigh. And everyone who is anyone will swear to the skies that the devil is in the details. On Sunday talk shows, war hawks will fuss endlessly about the nightmare to come, as well as the weak-kneedness of the president and his “delusional” secretary of state, John Kerry. (No one of note, however, will ask why the president’s past decisions to launch or continue wars in the Middle East were not greeted with at least the same sort of skepticism as his present efforts to forestall one.) There are two crucial points to take away from all the angry chatter to come: first, none of this matters and second, the devil is not in the details, though he may indeed appear on those Sunday talk shows. Here’s what actually matters most: at a crucial moment and without a shot being fired, the United States and Iran have come to a turning point away from an era of outright hostility. The nuclear accord binds the two nations to years of engagement and leaves the door open to a far fuller relationship. Understanding how significant that is requires a look backward. [Iran deal] [Liberal]
• United States is Destroying Saudi Arabia
  It’s hardly a secret for anyone that the United States and Saudi Arabia are longtime partners, hence Washington has historically been the guardian of Saudi interests in the Middle East. These special relations between the states were built back in the 1930s, when in exchange for security guarantees that were granted to the House of Saud, King Abdulaziz signed a decree that granted American companies an exclusive right to develop oil fields in the eastern parts of the country. And over half a century the security for oil formula has been a solid basis for sound bilateral relations between the US and Saudi Arabia. Following the announcement of a new oil policy that was brought around by the Roosevelt administration in 1944, that encouraged Western companies to seek an active production of oil outside the United States to ensure the economic security of the country, Mobil, Exxon and Texaco started investing heavily in Saudi economy. However, Saudi Arabia was not getting an adequate share of profits from its own oil, as multinational corporations were getting the better part of the income from trade. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/27/united-states-is-destroying-saudi-arabia/
  As the political map of the world is changing so are Washington’s objectives and goals in the Middle East. In just twelve years the Arab world has been completely destroyed by the United States. Today it is marked by chaos, anarchy and bloodshed. Nobody perceives the League of Arab States as a legitimate power anymore, despite the influence it once enjoyed. Therefore the plan that was drafted for the White House by US think tanks implies no reliance on former allies like Saudi Arabia, instead Washington is going to seek the establishment of two centers of power – a Shiite Iran and a Sunni Turkey that will compete for dominance in the chaos riddled region. The US plan to redraw the Middle East and achieve a transformation of the Arabian Peninsula is hardly a secret for anyone since it was revealed back in 2006. According to this plan drafted by Ralph Peters, the Saudi kingdom is to be divided into three parts: the “Islamic Vatican” in the face of Mecca and Medina, the desert where camels and kings can enjoy themselves, and the eastern oil region dominated by Shiites, that will be a part of a larger Shia state. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/27/united-states-is-destroying-saudi-arabia/ [Saudi Arabia] [US Middle East Strategy] [Fragmentation]
• U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam
  Author: Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman Date of Publication: 05.10.12. 05.10.12 The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.” [Saudi Arabia] [US Middle East Strategy] [Islam] [Fragmentation]
• Obama administration to run with sheikhs, hunt with Ayatollah
  By M.K. Bhadrakumar on July 20, 2015 in Asia Times News & Features, M.K. Bhadrakumar The United States has got off to a bad start in the effort to assuage the hard feelings of its close Middle Eastern allies over the Iran nuclear deal. Not that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is unqualified to undertake a delicate mission to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan at this point in time. It is more that Carter’s appearance in the region at this juncture gives the wrong signal – for, his visiting card introduces him as America’s number one arms salesman. The purpose of winning the allies over to President Barack Obama’s side in the upcoming battle over Congressional approval for the Iran deal could have been better served by deputing his National Security Adviser as special envoy to undertake the diplomatic mission. To cap it, even if it was Carter’s intention to ingratiate himself with the Israeli and Saudi leadership, Carter made a faux pas by insisting that the best part about the Iran nuclear deal is that it does not preclude the “military option”, which, he claimed, the US is constantly upgrading and finessing. [Iran deal] [Ash Carter] [US Middle East strategy]
• Evidence Grows of Saudi-led Forces in Yemen
  By Awad Mustafa 6:44 a.m. EDT July 24, 2015 ABU DHABI — Evidence of Saudi-led coalition land forces operating in Yemen has been mounting since the initiation of Operation Golden Arrow to recapture the city of Aden on July 16. Although no official confirmation from the coalition was provided, a coalition official has told Defense News that 600 servicemen and trained Yemeni fighters were deployed to recapture the port city. "We are supporting the legitimate corps in the Yemeni armed forces militarily, logistically and with humanitarian aid and we are supplying them with materials and information," Brig. Gen. Ahmed Al-Assiri, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition told Al-Arabiya television in an interview on July 22. "However I will not be able to explain on what types of support or involvement as operations are still ongoing," he added. [Saudi Arabia]
• Assad admits military setbacks and shortage of soldiers
  Syrian president gives no indication he is ready to make a deal to end civil war Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has admitted his regime has a shortage of soldiers and has suffered military setbacks. In his first public speech for a year, Assad also hailed “positive” changes in western attitudes to the conflict in the country – suggesting the US and its allies now understood they share an interest with his regime in defeating Islamic State-style jihadi terrorism. But he gave no overt indication that he was ready to cut a deal to end the four-year civil war that has left his regime in control of just a third or less of the country. “We are not collapsing,” he said in a televised address. “We are steadfast and will achieve victory. Defeat does not exist in the dictionary of the Syrian Arab army.” The priority US and Britain are giving to defeating Isis extremists, who hold large areas of northeast Syria and northern and western Iraq, has prompted suggestions Barack Obama’s administration may drop its insistence that Assad stand down as part of any deal. [Syria]
• Deceptive Euphoria: US Changes Policy Toward Cuba
  Nil Nikandrov | 26.07.2015 | 00:00 Last December US President Obama had to admit that the US Cuba policy had failed. It took Washington about fifty years to understand a basic fact: sanctions, economic and trade embargo, as well as the attempts to isolate the small island were doomed from the very start. The Cuban revolution has stood up to the challenges to protect the independence and sovereignty. The national leadership has defined the strategic mission to accomplish on the way of modernization. The Castro brothers – Fidel and Raul – stood at the origin of the reforms leaving far behind the old ideological dogmas. [Cuba deal]
• 4 journalists missing in Syria raise new questions
  Highlights Why after last year’s Islamic State executions were they there? Which organizations, if any, would buy their work? Are Europeans more willing to go because their governments have paid ransoms? By Mitchell Prothero mprothero@mcclatchydc.com IRBIL, Iraq — The disappearance in Syria of four freelance journalists – three Spanish and one Japanese – over the last month is raising new fears that the Islamic State or other radical groups have resumed kidnapping foreigners months after the last high-profile murder of journalist hostages. The three missing Spanish journalists, identified by the Spanish Press Association as Antoniu Pampliega, José Manuel López and Angel Sastre, appear to have been detained at a checkpoint in Aleppo, Syria, by unknown gunmen whose style of dress is commonly associated with the Islamic State, which at one stage held as many as 20 to 30 foreigners who were either ransomed or gruesomely executed.
  Most, including McClatchy, have stopped sending either staffers or freelancers into Syria because of the risk. [Syria]
• Israel should back Assad
  AuthorJacky HugiPosted July 1, 2015 On June 23, Druze residents attacked two injured Syrian rebels who were transferred by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ambulance from the border to an Israeli hospital. This lynching in the Druze Majdal Shams village in the Golan Heights is a warning bell not just for Israel, but for all the players in the region. The Druze problem has brought to the surface, at least implicitly, the network of inter-ethnic hostilities and tensions on Israel’s border. If the regime in Damascus collapses or abandons this border region to the goodwill of Sunni factions, we can safely assume that the relative stability and quiet there will end as well. The pent-up tension in the border region would explode. Based on past experience and years of calm borders with Syria, Israel must abandon whatever ties it develops with Syrian rebels and work with its Western allies to stabilize President Bashar al-Assad's regime. What Israel should learn from these events is that it must strive for the survival and bolstering of the current regime at any price. Anyone who wonders why is invited to look at neighboring Iraq or distant Libya. What’s happening there is likely to happen in Syria after President Bashar al-Assad. The Baath regime was cruel to its citizens and robbed them of basic rights, and its leaders should pay the fullest price so that justice is served. But in choosing between one bad thing and another, the balance tips toward the regime. The Israeli security establishment should gradually abandon its emerging alliance with the Syrian rebels and elegantly work with its friends in the West to stabilize Damascus as much as possible. It must not fortify the regime’s enemies, develop friendly relations with them nor weaken its rule. The bitter consequences of this tactic could hit Jerusalem like a boomerang. [Israel] [Syria] [Blowback]
• Obama visits a rising Africa, but one still plagued by economic problems
  Obama arrives in his father’s homeland The president’s visit to Kenya is his first since he was a U.S. senator in 2006. By Kevin Sieff and Juliet Eilperin July 24 at 3:30 PM ? Follow @ksieff Follow @eilperin NAIROBI — President Obama arrived Friday night in a Kenyan capital transformed since his last visit in 2006 — a city of rising glass towers, new shopping malls and brightly lit offices of multinational corporations. Even the site of Obama’s first public speech here at a global entrepreneurship conference on Saturday, a venue where he is expected to embrace Kenya as a nation on the rise and part of a region of viable commercial partners, is a symbol of the nation’s economic ascent. [Africa US] [Africa China] [Obama]
• Surprise! The States Can Reject the Iran Deal
  by Joel B. Pollak22 Jul 20153,925 The Obama administration has sent the Iran nuclear deal to Congress for a 60-day review provided by the Corker bill. However, President Barack Obama has pre-empted Congress by going to the UN Security Council first, which has already voted to end international sanctions and accept the deal. Furthermore, even if Congress rejects the deal, it will struggle to muster a two-thirds majority to override the president’s veto. There is one effective way, however, that the Iran deal can be rejected: states and local governments can refuse to comply with it. That may come as a surprise. States and local governments do not play much of a role in foreign policy. However, they cannot be forced to implement an international treaty or agreement that is not self-executing–i.e. one whose implementation requires new congressional laws. [Iran deal] [Governance]
• Obama’s Last Chance in Africa
  If he wants to save his legacy on Africa, Barack Obama will have to be more than a shill for U.S. security firms and corporations. By Francis Njubi Nesbitt, July 22, 2015. President Obama needs to unveil a new foreign policy initiative on Africa during his trip to Kenya and Ethiopia or risk going down in history as the worst president for Africa in recent memory. It would be a shame if the first American president of African descent ranks last in meaningful engagement with Africa when compared to other presidents in the recent past. Although both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton came under intense criticism for doing nothing in the face of genocide and war crimes, they were able to recover somewhat by launching signature initiatives during their second terms. During his first term, Bill Clinton pulled out of Somalia in a spectacular debacle immortalized in the Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down and then refused to intervene in Rwanda, standing by as tens of thousands were slain during one of the worst outbursts of fratricidal violence in the 20th century. During his second term, however, Clinton launched a series of health and development initiatives that partially mitigated his failures in Somalia and Rwanda. His Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) helped double U.S. trade with the region and triple U.S. exports estimated at $22 billion in 2012. George W. Bush was excoriated for ignoring war crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Darfur. Yet today he’s remembered on the continent for a health initiative known as PEPFAR, which has been credited with saving thousands of lives and transforming the treatment of AIDS in Africa. The Bush administration also played a significant role in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended a brutal 30-year war and led to the relatively peaceful separation of Sudan and South Sudan. [Africa US]
• Barrel Bombing Us All
  Gordon Duff Here is a fair question, why discuss barrel bombs at all? It is clear to anyone who pays attention to world news that President Assad of Syria is using old oil drums filled with caustic chemicals to wipe out his entire population. No western paper, no Russian news bureau, no Arab network of news website has challenged this “fact” so often reported, in all cases at the hands of the Syrian Human Rights Observatory, a CIA “sockpuppet” front. Are people that stupid? The answer to that is a bit more complicated. In general we can say, “Yes,” but it goes further. You see, when you combined a “branded” lie, and the barrel bomb is quite an ingenious fabrication, all that is needed is to repeat the same story, endlessly like the BUK missile myth with the air to air downing of MH17 by a Kiev backed fighter jet, you don’t need facts. As soon as “barrel bomb” is brought up, suddenly the mass graves, the televised beheadings and the CIA training camps in Turkey and Jordan no longer exist, “Assad did it all,” as reality flies into the stratosphere, part of a well-orchestrated disinformation campaign where assertion is fact. Any allegation that is printed or broadcast by the mainstream media is a “fact.” Groups like the Syrian Human Rights Observatory exist to infect the already controlled corporate media with disinformation created by PJ Media, the Heritage and Jamestown Foundations and the Rand Corporation. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/23/barrel-bombing-us-all/ [Barrel bombs] [Media]
• President Obama’s Engagement with Africa: Managing Complex Relationships
  By Richard Downie Jul 23, 2015 President Barack Obama’s meetings this week with the leaders of three of sub-Saharan Africa’s most important countries provide an early opportunity to reflect on his emerging policy legacy on the African continent. In many ways, the story of bilateral relations with Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia during the past six and a half years encapsulates the difficulties the United States has encountered in fashioning more mature, up-to-date, and coherent relationships in Africa at a time when U.S. influence is on the wane. [Africa US]
• Middle East Notes and Comment: A Self Defeating Strategy on Iran
  By Jon B. Alterman Jul 20, 2015 Much of the debate over last week’s Iranian nuclear agreement is badly misplaced. Some—including the president—call it an historic victory akin to President Nixon’s approach to China. Others call it an historic surrender, akin to Neville Chamberlain’s concessions to Adolf Hitler. History will have to wait, and it will not be judged for years. Right now, the American people and the U.S. Congress have a different and more serious task before them: To decide whether to block implementation of this deal or not. Doing so would have profound strategic consequences for the United States, and some are even more serious than the consequences of Iran developing a nuclear weapon.
  Those consequences pale in comparison, though, to what would almost certainly happen to the U.S. position in the global financial system. The United States is so deeply integrated into that system that there are few international entities that U.S. law cannot touch. It was the United States, after all, that was able to attack years of bribery and corruption in the international soccer organization FIFA—not because bribes were offered on U.S. soil, but because they passed through entities connected to U.S. banks. Even far-flung networks of informal money transfer agents in South Asia, known as “hawalas,” are part of the web. If the robust secondary sanctions contained in U.S. law were applied in defiance of international consensus, there would surely be a rush to develop robust financial instruments that would be beyond U.S. reach. The reason, of course, is that sovereign states agree to abide by international agreements, not by the political vicissitudes of the United States in an election year. The UN Security Council Resolution, which is likely to arrive today, will drive home the notion that this agreement—and not some imaginary perfect agreement that has not been made and probably could not be made—is the basis for international action going forward [Iran Deal] [Financial sanctions] [Extraterritoriality]
• Inherited Power: Are Asia’s political dynasties in decline?
  16 July 2015 Author: Mark R Thompson, City University of Hong Kong It may seem that after several recent electoral defeats of prominent national dynasts, Asia’s ‘ruling families’ are in decline. But a closer look suggests that reports of their political deaths are premature.Congress Party vice-president Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka were showered with flowers as Rahul drove to nominate for election in April 2014. But the family magic didn't work for Congress this time. (Photo: AAP)The most prominent recent setback was the crushing defeat of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty-run Indian Congress Party in the May 2014 elections, which swept the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power and left the Congress Party with only 44 seats in the Indian parliament. The Nehru-Gandhis have governed India directly as prime minister (Nehru, Indira, Rajiv Gandhi) or indirectly as the ‘power behind the throne’ (Sonia Gandhi) for more than a half a century. But a lacklustre campaign led by Sonia’s son, Rahul Gandhi, who has little apparent skill or even interest in politics, seemed to mark the end of the political road. The BJP struck an anti-dynastic pose that appeared to resonate with voters, while the Congress Party has appeared directionless without a strong family dynasty to unite it and appeal to India’s poor voters. The shock defeat in Sri Lanka of president Mahinda Rajapaksa in January 2015 seemed to be another example of ‘dynasty down’. Rajapaksa’s defeat was attributed not just to his administration’s growing dictatorial tendencies, but also to the blatant nepotism and corruption that saw him turning his family into the country’s new ruling clan. Besides appointing one brother Defence Secretary and another Senior Presidential Advisor, a third became Speaker of Parliament. At one point the Rajapaksa brothers were said to have direct control, through their ministries, of more than two-thirds of the national budget. In Indonesia, Joko Widodo (Jokowi), a political outsider who campaigned on his image as a common man who understands the people, was elected president in July 2014. The narrow loss to Jokowi by former president Suharto’s former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, seemed to be a further sign of dynastic decline. In the Philippines — one of Asia’s most dynastic democracies, where one child of a president, Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III, succeeded another, the discredited Gloria Macapagal Arroyo — the once popular Noynoy Aquino has lost public support following a major pork-barrel scandal and a botched anti-terror operation. In Thailand protests, judicial activism and then a May 2014 coup ended the government of Yingluck Shinawatra, who was seen as the puppet of her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra. In Malaysia, dynasties seem to be facing a dual crisis. In government, Prime Minister Najib Razak — the son of a former prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein — faces growing criticism for corruption. In the opposition, Anwar Ibrahim has come under attack for attempting to appoint his wife as chief minister of Selangor, Malaysia’s richest and most populous state. The death of authoritarian Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015 raised questions about the political future of the Lee family now that the ‘founding father’ was gone. [Dynasty]
• Trump belittles McCain’s war service, sparking stern Republican backlash
  Watch Donald Trump say John McCain is 'not a war hero'(1:05) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam war veteran, was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese. (C-SPAN) By Philip Rucker July 19 ? AMES, Iowa — Donald Trump, the celebrity businessman who has rocketed to the front of the Republican presidential race, flippantly belittled Sen. John McCain’s war service here Saturday, inviting a torrent of criticism from party leaders and other candidates. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain at a summit of 3,000 socially conservative activists. He continued, sarcastically, “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” For the past month, Republican leaders have cringed privately at Trump’s inflammatory comments about undocumented immigrants from Mexico and have been aghast at his summer surge to the top of the polls. But they have been reluctant or afraid to condemn a candidate whose outbursts have proven both brash and unpredictable. [Trump] [Governance] [McCain]
• How Not to Build a Foreign Policy
  By Congressman Randy Forbes July 16, 2015 Many say to be truly smart on foreign policy, it takes a certain suave thinking – a heady blend of negotiation, policy, and intelligence. You cannot be overly reluctant, nor can you be haphazard. You have to be visceral, yet factual. It is not easy. This is perhaps why so many U.S. presidents are defined by their foreign policy legacies. I think more important than foreign policy finesse, however, is a commitment to outcomes. No matter how you cut it, foreign policy decisions should 1) contribute as much as possible to our nation’s credibility abroad, and 2) never, ever put our nation at risk. Lack of commitment to these outcomes is what brings a foreign policy deficit. Unfortunately, Americans know this from experience. With swelling frustration, Americans have watched as, through decision after decision, the Administration has misplayed America’s hand and created bad deals that have put our nation at risk. The President’s foreign policy legacy is marked by a lack of commitment to our credibility abroad and our nation’s safety. As a result, his decisions essentially create a blueprint for how not to build a foreign policy. You and I are not in the seat at Pennsylvania Avenue, but there are some foreign policy moves that many Americans know are just too risky to make: You don’t make dangerous nuclear deals. This week’s announcement of the Iran nuclear deal was met with fierce criticism from many Americans. Iran is a state-sponsor of terrorism and developer of a robust ballistic missile capability. This is not an opinion – it is a U.S.-designated fact, put in place in large part because we are uncertain over whether Iran can or should be trusted. Instead of a shaky bargain, we need a plan to prevent Iran from developing any nuclear weapons. We need to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions in its tracks. [Iran deal] [Republican]
• U.S., Cuba restore full diplomatic ties after 5 decades
  In this June 10, 2015 file photo, members of the media cover workers from Eastern Shores Flagpoles raising a flagpole at the Cuban Interest Section in Washington in preparation for re-opening of embassies in Havana and Washington. Cuba’s blue, red and white-starred flag is set to fly Monday, July 20 outside the country’s diplomatic mission in the United States for the first time since the countries severed ties in 1961. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File/Associated Press) By Matthew Lee and Peter Orsi?|?AP July 20 at 12:16 AM WASHINGTON — More than a half century of Cold War and lingering enmity came to an abrupt but quiet end on Monday as the United States and Cuba restored full diplomatic relations. The new era began with little fanfare when an agreement between the two nations to resume normal ties on July 20 came into force just after midnight Sunday and the diplomatic missions of each country were upgraded from interests sections to embassies. When clocks struck 12:00 in Washington and Havana, they tolled a knell for policy approaches spawned and hardened over the five decades since President John F. Kennedy first tangled with youthful revolutionary Fidel Castro over Soviet expansion in the Americas. Without ceremony in the pre-dawn hours, maintenance workers were to hang the Cuban flag in the lobby of the State Department alongside those of other nations with which the U.S. has diplomatic relations. The historic shift will be publicly memorialized later Monday when Cuban officials formally inaugurate their embassy in Washington and Cuba’s blue, red and white-starred flag will fly for the first time since the countries severed ties in 1961. Secretary of State John Kerry will then meet his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodriguez, and address reporters at a joint news conference. [Cuba] [Agency]
• The Horrors of John McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?
  by Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn July 20, 2015 Donald Trump is currently taking flak from the media and politicians for deprecating John McCain’s status as a “war hero”. Trump’s rhetoric is typically bombastic, but this time he may have struck a nerve. Here is a piece that Cockburn and I wrote in 1999 about a psychiatric evaluation of McCain underwent while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The psych0logical portrait drawn by Spanish psychiatrist Fernando Barral is that of a deeply narcissistic personality, cold, hardened and largely devoid of human empathy, a man who seemed to view the bombing of civilian populations as a kind of sport. These aggressive personality traits have also characterized his nasty political career.–JSC The top war-monger in Congress has been Senator John McCain, Republican from Arizona, seeker of the Republican presidential nomination. In one rhetorical bombing run after another, McCain has bellowed for “lights out in Belgrade” and for NATO to “cream” the Serbs. At the start of May he began declaiming in the US senate for the NATO forces to use “any means necessary” to destroy Serbia.
  McCain is often called a “war hero”, a title adorning an unlovely resume starting with a father who was an admiral and graduation fifth from the bottom at the US Naval Academy, where he earned the nickname “McNasty”. McCain flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam, each averaging about half an hour, total time ten hours and thirty minutes. For these brief excursions the admiral’s son was awared two Silver Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Stars, the Vietnamese Legion of Honor and three Purple Hearts. US Veteran Dispatch calculates our hero earned a medal an hour, which is pretty good going. McCain was shot down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967 and parachuted into Truc Boch Lake, whence he was hauled by Vietnamese, and put in prison. [McCain]
• Greece Surrendered: But to Whom Exactly?
  by Diana Johnstone July 17, 2015 On July 12, Greece surrendered abjectly and totally. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who had promised to combat the austerity measure that are driving the Greek people to ruin, poverty and suicide, betrayed all his promises, denied the will of the people expressed in the July 5 referendum, and led the Greek parliament to accept an agreement with the nation’s creditors even worse than all those that had already caused the economy to shrink and which further abandoned the last scraps of national sovereignty. Yes, Greece surrendered unconditionally, as has been thoroughly and eloquently expressed here on CounterPunch and elsewhere. But one crucial question appears not to have been adequately answered. To whom, exactly, did Greece surrender? [Greece]
• Obama promotes “historic” nuclear deal with Iran
  By Keith Jones 15 July 2015 After 18 days of intensive negotiations, Iran and the P-6—the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China—have reached a final agreement to “normalize” Iran’s civil nuclear program over the next 15 years. Yesterday’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) enshrines the sweeping concessions Iran made under the “framework” agreement reached in Lausanne, Switzerland on April 2, as well as introducing further conditions and stipulations highly advantageous to Washington. Iran must either dismantle or roll back and freeze the key elements of its nuclear program and must submit to the most intrusive nuclear inspections regime ever devised. [Iran deal] [US global strategy]
• Grexit or Jubilee? How Greek Debt Can Be Annulled
  By Ellen Brown Global Research, July 15, 2015 Web of Debt 14 July 2015 The crushing Greek debt could be canceled the way it was made – by sleight of hand. But saving the Greek people and their economy is evidently not in the game plan of the Eurocrats. Greece’s creditors have finally brought the country to its knees, forcing President Alexis Tsipras to agree to austerity and privatization measures more severe than those overwhelmingly rejected by popular vote a week earlier. No write-down of Greece’s debt was included in the deal, although the IMF has warned that the current debt is unsustainable. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls the deal “a new Versailles Treaty” and “the politics of humiliation.” Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos calls it a “coup d’état” done by “blackmailing the Greek prime minister with collapse of the banks and a complete haircut on deposits.” “Blackmail” is not too strong a word. The European Central Bank has turned off its liquidity tap for Greece’s banks, something all banks need, as explained earlier here. All banks are technically insolvent, lending money they don’t have. They don’t lend their deposits but create deposits when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently confirmed. When the depositors and borrowers come for their money at the same time, the bank must borrow from other banks; and if that liquidity runs dry, the bank turns to the central bank, the lender of last resort empowered to create money at will. Without the central bank’s backstop, banks must steal from their depositors with “haircuts” or they will collapse. [Greece]
• US Lobby Groups Try to Squash Iran Deal Despite Public Support
  By: Medea Benjamin Published 6 July 2015 Multimillion-dollar ad campaigns aim to influence Congressional votes. A nuclear deal with Iran could be a game changer for US foreign policy and for the Middle East. The P5+1 (the U.S., China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom, plus Germany) and Iran have been developing a comprehensive agreement that would freeze Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon and start the process of sanctions relief. If it succeeds, this deal would dramatically decrease the probability of another costly war in the Middle East and could usher in an historic rapprochement between the US and Iran after 34 years of hostilities. US-Iranian collaboration against extremist groups from ISIL to Al Qaeda could help damp down the fires raging across the Middle East. Key US allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, oppose the deal. Both nations harbor long-standing hostilities toward Iran and both want to preserve their preferential relationship with the US. But the American people, frustrated by over a decade of US involvement in Middle East wars, support the initiative. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 6 in 10 Americans support a plan to lift international economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program. Democrats back the agreement by an overwhelming majority of five to one, but even a plurality of Republican voters support the Iran nuclear deal. Why, then, will there be such a tough battle in Congress to approve a deal that the Obama administration has worked so hard to achieve and is supported by most Americans? Some Republicans have a knee-jerk reaction to anything the Obama administration puts forth. And certain Republican and Democrat Congress members fundamentally distrust Iran, believe it is sponsoring militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and think a deal will strengthen Iran to the detriment of Israel. But the most compelling reason that so many elected officials will oppose the deal is the power of lobby groups and think tanks, backed by hawkish billionaires who are determined to quash a deal they see as bad for Israel. [Iran deal]
• Iran Nuclear Deal Is Reached After Long Negotiations
  By David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon July 14, 2015 VIENNA — Iran and a group of six nations led by the United States have agreed to a historic accord to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions against Iran, a senior Western diplomat involved in the negotiations said on Tuesday. The deal, which President Obama had long sought as the biggest diplomatic achievement of his presidency, culminates 20 months of negotiations. [Iran deal]
• Deal reached with Iran over its nuclear program
  By Carol Morello July 14 at 1:47 AM VIENNA — World powers and Iran have reached an historic deal to end decades of economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for sharp restrictions on its nuclear program, diplomats here said. The deal follows more than a year and a half of negotiations between Iran and the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany, and 17 gruelling days of final talks in the Viennese capital. A spokesperson from the European Union, which is also participating in the talks, said a news conference was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. local time, 4:30 a.m. EDT. Negotiators from seven countries talked until past 1 a.m. Tuesday morning in a last minute push to get a deal that had been delayed time and time again over a handful of remaining hurdles. But as a rainy dawn broke over the Austrian capital, it was believed that the top diplomats from Iran, the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany had finally reached a breakthrough. Though diplomats have hinted for days that they were just steps away from a finalized deal, they had trouble settling a few last differences. Chief among them was what would happen to an embargo on conventional weapons and missiles that is part of U.N Security Council resolutions designed to bring Iran to the negotiating table. Diplomats have said their draft text runs to around 100 pages, including five separate annexes. [Iran deal]
• Forbes: Grave Concerns Over Iran Nuclear Deal
  Washington, D.C. – Congressman J. Randy Forbes (VA-04), Chairman of the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, released the following statement in response to the Obama Administration’s announcement that negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear program have resulted in a deal to end economic sanctions. “I continue to have grave concerns about the impact of the Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran on security in the region, as well as doubts that an increasingly aggressive Iran – as a U.S. designated state-sponsor of terrorism and the developer of a robust ballistic missile capability – can or should be trusted to uphold their end of the agreement.” Now, Congress has a 60 day period to review the agreement and vote over whether or not it will lift Congressionally mandated sanctions on Iran. [Iran deal] [Republican]
• Iran’s return to global trade could reshape Middle East: ‘This is the deal we have been waiting for’
  Andrew Torchia, Reuters | July 14, 2015 4:28 PM ET . DUBAI —Iran is preparing for a trade and investment boom that could reshape the region after agreeing with world powers to curb its nuclear program, paving the way for sanctions that have stifled its economy to be lifted. Oil prices rose about 1 per cent on Tuesday, reversing early losses, after it became apparent that a nuclear deal between Tehran and six global powers will not immediately remove sanctions placed on Iranian crude exports. A Reuters survey expected Tehran to raise exports by 60 per cent within a year. [Iran deal] [Sanctions]
• Historic deal reached with Iran to limit nuclear program
  By Carol Morello and Karen DeYoung July 14 at 3:27 PM ? Iran has finally reached a nuclear deal with the U.S. and international partners. Here's what's in the deal, and what happens next. (Gillian Brockell and Julio C. Negron/The Washington Post) VIENNA — President Obama basked in a brief moment of triumph early Tuesday at the White House as he announced a historic agreement aimed at preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon, a deal reached in the Austrian capital after nearly two years of grueling diplomatic talks. Then he quickly turned to what may be the more arduous task of selling the deal to skeptical lawmakers and U.S. allies. “This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change,” Obama told a nation that awoke to news of an accord reached overnight. He said it would ensure that Iran had no possibility to achieve rapid nuclear weapons “breakout” for at least the next decade. “Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off,” Obama said. In Vienna news briefings and Washington conference calls, senior administration officials joined the president in hailing the agreement, which limits Iran’s nuclear capability and imposes strict international monitoring in exchange for lifting international economic sanctions, as a way to make America and the world more secure. Officials suggested it might also help build momentum inside Iran to move away from radicalism and toward greater ties with the West. [Iran deal]
• TIME Admits ISIS Bringing Arms, Fighters in From NATO Territory
  Late last year, Germany’s broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) investigated what turned out to be hundreds of trucks a day carrying billions of dollars in supplies, flowing across the Turkish border into Syria and directly into the hands of the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS). The border crossing near the Turkish city of Oncupinar, approximately 100km west of the Syrian city of Kobani, is apparently only one of many such crossings where ISIS fighters, weapons, and materiel move directly under the watch and apparent assistance of NATO. TIME in their recent article titled, “ISIS Fighters Kill 200 Civilians in Syrian Town,” reported that: The attacks also came after the group [ISIS] suffered a series of setbacks over the past two weeks, including the loss last week of the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad — one of the group’s main points for bringing in foreign fighters and supplies. Tal Abyad, a Turkish-Syrian border crossing east of Kobani, is now a second, confirmed point of entry into Syria used by ISIS to supply its ongoing campaign within the country. Reports of confirmed, extensive logistical networks passing through NATO and US-ally territory, into Syria, contradict the current prevailing narrative that ISIS is an “indigenous” terrorist organization, funded and self-sustaining within the territory it currently holds in both Syria and Iraq. The Western media has attempted to claim with little evidence that ISIS’ immense, global operations are somehow underwritten by “ransom payments” and “black market oil” it has seized in eastern Syria. Clearly, not only are these reports as untenable as they are untrue, the Western media itself has reported precisely how ISIS has been sustaining its impressive fighting capacity – with billions of dollars of state-sponsored aid flowing through NATO territory, directly to their front lines. Were the supplies flowing over the Syrian-Iraqi border, it may be possible to argue plausible deniability – with the governments of either nation unable to control either side of the border. However, Turkey, a NATO member since 1952 and host of the United States Air Force’s Incirlik Air Base, has full control of its borders meaning that ISIS-bound convoys not only pass over its borders with the apparent approval of Turkish border guards, but are assembled somewhere within Turkey itself before arriving at the edge of Syrian territory. [ISIS] [Turkey]
• Why American Presidents are so Rotten
  What few people inside or outside the United States grasp is the fundamental transformation of US politics, especially since the 1970’s, from political parties with stable mass-based constituencies to two parties bought lock, stock and barrel by a handful of American oligarchs with one agenda—the advancement of the interests of those same oligarchs regardless of the social consequences. Next year, 2016 is a Presidential election year. Already so-called front-runners are being proclaimed by mainstream media. It has nothing to do with genuine voter support but rather with the money behind Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Jeb Bush. To understand this transformation makes clearer why the United States and their Washington politicians have become some of the most despised and ridiculed in the world today and why recent presidents from Ronald Reagan through to Barack Obama have been so morally rotten. A key part of the transformation of America has come from extraordinary Supreme Court rulings. The country has gone from a country and political system where bipartisan consensus and cooperation on legislation in Washington was the hallmark of Washington politics, to the present undemocratic state. Today ultimately there is not a dime’s difference between major candidates—Democrat or Republican. This is because there has been a series of Supreme Court rulings and laws that virtually eliminate what used to be strict limits on how much money individuals and special interest groups could give to get their candidate elected. Creation of the American Oligarchy Because of changes introduced in the 1980’s from the Bush-Reagan presidencies the amount of tax exemptions enjoyed by the highest income group has soared while burdens on what was once the stable middle class in income has been squeezed severely over the past three decades. As of 2010 the richest 400 Americans–people like Bill Gates, George Soros, Ted Turner, Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller—had more assets than half of all Americans. While the average incomes of the top 20 percent in the United States grew by 43 percent in inflation-adjusted terms between 1979 and 2012, the average incomes of those in the middle 60 percent grew by only 10 percent, and the incomes of the bottom 20 percent actually fell by 3 percent. The top rapidly pulled away from the middle, while the bottom simultaneously fell further behind. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/13/why-american-presidents-are-so-rotten/ [Governance] [Plutocracy] [Inequality]
• A City Turns to Face Indonesia’s Murderous Past
  By Jeremy Kutner July 12, 2015 PALU, Indonesia — A half-century after the massacre of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists and sympathizers, Indonesia has shown little interest in reckoning with the event. An investigation by the National Human Rights Commission, calling for the prosecution of military leaders, was rejected, and efforts to establish a truth and reconciliation commission have failed. School history texts ignore or whitewash the killings. A 2012 documentary about them won an Oscar nomination, but was not shown in theaters in Indonesia for fear it would be rejected by government censors. There is one notable exception: the city of Palu, a picturesque provincial capital of some 300,000 people that hugs a horseshoe-shaped bay on the island of Sulawesi. [Massacre] [Suharto] [Indonesia]
• The Problem of Greece Is Not Only a Tragedy. It Is a Lie
  By John Pilger Global Research, July 13, 2015 An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse – 4 billion euros more than the “austerity” figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July. These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come. “Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory”, declared aGuardian headline on January 25. “Radical leftists” the paper called Tsipras and his impressively-educated comrades. They wore open neck shirts, and the finance minister rode a motorbike and was described as a “rock star of economics”. It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label, neither were they “anti austerity”. For six months Tsipras and the recently discarded finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, shuttled between Athens and Brussels, Berlin and the other centres of European money power. Instead of social justice for Greece, they achieved a new indebtedness, a deeper impoverishment that would merely replace a systemic rottenness based on the theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy – in accordance with European “neo-liberal” values — and cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greece’s scalp. Greece’s debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, “is illegal, illegitimate and odious”. Proportionally, it is less than 30 per cent that of the debit of Germany, its major creditor. It is less than the debt of European banks whose “bailout” in 2007-8 was barely controversial and unpunished. [Greece]
• What Are Foreign Military Bases For?
  Share on FacebookTweet about this on TwitterShare on TumblrEmail this to someoneShare on Google+Share on StumbleUponPrint this page If you’re like most people in the United States, you have a vague awareness that the U.S. military keeps lots of troops permanently stationed on foreign bases around the world. But have you ever wondered and really investigated to find out how many, and where exactly, and at what cost, and to what purpose, and in terms of what relationship with the host nations? A wonderfully researched new book, six years in the works, answers these questions in a manner you’ll find engaging whether you’ve ever asked them or not. It’s called Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Harm America and the World, by David Vine. Some 800 bases with hundreds of thousands of troops in some 70 nations, plus all kinds of other “trainers” and “non-permanent” exercises that last indefinitely, maintain an ongoing U.S. military presence around the world for a price tag of at least $100 billion a year. Why they do this is a harder question to answer. [Bases]
• Germany doesn’t want to save Greece. It seems to want to humiliate Greece.
  By Matt O'Brien July 12 at 7:08 AM ? Angela, what's the German word for getting kicked out of the euro? (Tobias Schwartz/AFP/Getty Images) Greece has offered an almost unconditional surrender on its bailout, but Germany might not accept anything less than a Carthaginian peace. In other words, a deal that not only forces Athens to submit, but also humiliates it in the process. This latest melodrama, playing out in Brussels as European finance ministers meet to discuss whether or not to approve a new Greek bailout, appears so nonsensical that it can be hard to believe these people are deciding the future of Europe. Although you wouldn't know it from the headlines, the truth is that Greece and Europe have been close to a deal for awhile now. Both sides agreed about how much austerity Athens should do, but disagreed about how Athens should do it—at least until last Thursday. That's when Greece came up with an offer that was not only nearly identical to Europe's, but also to the one its people had just rejected in a referendum. French President François Hollande, whose government helped put the proposal togehter, called it a "serious" and "credible" one. At the very least, it seemed like the basis for new negotiations. [Greece] [Germany]
• The Srebrenica Precedent
  by David N. Gibbs This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, in which eight thousand people were killed in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. The mass killing was the single deadliest event of the Bosnian War, and the most recognized atrocity of the post–Cold War era. Its significance cannot be overstated: the massacre triggered a NATO bombing campaign that is widely credited with ending the Bosnian War and giving NATO a new lease on life after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ever since, the Srebrenica precedent has been invoked to justify military interventions around the globe. In 2005, Christopher Hitchens defended the US decision to invade Iraq with an article entitled “From Srebrenica to Baghdad.” In 2011, when Guardian columnist Peter Preston advocated military intervention in Libya, his article began with the words: “Remember Srebrenica?” In 2012, a call in CNN for Western intervention in Syria appeared under the title “Syria, Sarajevo, and Srebrenica.” And a 2014 article on ISIS advances in Syria warned of a possible “New Srebrenica,” with the implication that Western military action was needed to prevent this calamity. [Srebrenica] [Double standards]
• In Greece, defiance dissipates into capitulation
  The Greek Parliament backed down in its confrontation with the country’s creditors. By Ylan Q. Mui and Anthony Faiola July 10 at 10:10 PM ? ATHENS — Less than a week ago, Greece stood defiant. Thousands of people flooded the square outside Parliament, draping themselves in blue-and-white flags to celebrate the country’s sweeping rejection of the tough austerity measures demanded by its European creditors, which Greece’s fiery young leader had likened to “blackmail.” But by Friday, the euphoria had faded as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s vows to stand up to ­Europe caved to the harsh realization that the birthplace of democracy stood just 48 hours away from financial ruin — and Greeks were poised to swallow what amounted to the same dose of austerity they had refused in a vote Sunday. “Each one of us shall be confronted with his stature and his history. Between a bad choice and a catastrophic one, we are forced to opt for the first one,” Tsipras said in a speech before his party’s lawmakers, according to local media. “It is as if one asks you for your money or your life.” In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the Greek Parliament backed a ­last-ditch plea to creditors for more than 50 billion euros in emergency funding that could carry the country through the next three years. European officials in Brussels also planned to pore over the proposal Saturday afternoon. Approval from the 19-member euro zone’s finance ministers would open the door to restarting formal negotiations that had broken down in the run-up to the referendum. Securing the bailout money could pave the way for shuttered banks to reopen, return some semblance of normalcy to beleaguered citizens and affirm this Mediterranean nation’s identity as an integral part of Europe. But it almost would amount to an acknowledgment that while the austerity Tsipras disdained may be painful — and may deepen Greece’s financial crisis — leaving the common euro currency would be worse. “The revolutionary moment has fizzled,” said Mark Medish, who served as a top official in the Treasury Department and the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. “In effect, the no vote would be turning into a yes.” [Greece]
• Another Attempt to Organize «Orange Revolution» in Ecuador
  Nil Nikandrov | 09.07.2015 | 08:00 Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is blowing the whistle. The country may face another coup attempt. There is solid ground to support this allegation. In his March weekly address to the people the President said the protests in Ecuador were staged by enemies of «citizens’ revolution»as the opposition was implementing the strategy of attrition. According to him, the parties and organizations funded by international structures are subject to the influence of the US Central Intelligence Agency which does its best to create hotbeds of chaos and violence and hinder the creative activities of government. Talking to people, Correa often gives details on the policy of «soft regime change» practiced by Washington in Latin America. According to President, there is a five-phased plan to destabilize Ecuador. First: public brainwashing (ablandamiento) will be launched by media outlets acting as informal opposition political parties’ mouthpieces. Their mission will be to incite public discontent and then point a finger at the government as the main culprit. Second: the opposition will try to discredit the government as illegal and acting against the interests of people. To convince people they will launch an intensive propaganda campaign accompanied by thousands of biased publications, dissemination of fake analytical documents and spreading information allegedly received from «reliable» sources. They will also use social networks. Third: the anti-government forces will heat up street protests by staging manifestations. It does not matter how many protesters will hit the streets. The puppet media outlets will highlight the events as instructed to convince the world that Ecuador is a conflict-torn country. Fourth: the opposition will use different non-violent methods recommended by Gene Sharp to bring the government down. That is something they are trying to do in Venezuela and Argentina. Fifth: the opposition will strike at the pillars of power. It will seize government buildings, provoke street unrests, incite discontent among the military etc. The CIA knows how to do it. It will all be done to make the President go. [CIA] [Destabilisation] [Media]
• America’s latest failure in Syria
  By Editorial Board July 7 at 7:29 PM IN MAY 2014, President Obama promised a new U.S. effort to train and equip moderate Syrian rebel forces. The next month, the administration asked Congress for $500 million to fund the effort, with the aim of deploying 5,000 U.S.-backed fighters a year for three years. Numerous analysts quickly pointed out two big flaws in the plan: The new force was too small to make a significant difference on Syria’s multi-sided battlefield, and the administration was hamstringing it by insisting that it target only the Islamic State and not the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. As so often in his handling of Syria, Mr. Obama dismissed proposals for a more robust approach. Now, once again, the president is reaping the consequences of his half-measures. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter reported the pitiful result of the training program: After a year, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, just 60 Syrians were enlisted. Meanwhile, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that Israel and Jordan “very much believe [in] the possibility” that the Assad regime could soon collapse, touching off “a foot race” of al-Qaeda and Islamic State forces “converging on Damascus.” [US Syria Policy] [Incompetence] [Strategic incoherence] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• The next Cold War is here: China, Russia and the ghosts of Dwight Eisenhower
  As America lurches from crisis to crisis, our foreign policy elites can't even agree on our principal adversary Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch.com The next Cold War is here: China, Russia and the ghosts of Dwight Eisenhower (Credit: RT/YouTube screenshot) This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. America’s grand strategy, its long-term blueprint for advancing national interests and countering major adversaries, is in total disarray. Top officials lurch from crisis to crisis, improvising strategies as they go, but rarely pursuing a consistent set of policies. Some blame this indecisiveness on a lack of resolve at the White House, but the real reason lies deeper. It lurks in a disagreement among foreign policy elites over whether Russia or China constitutes America’s principal great-power adversary. Knowing one’s enemy is usually considered the essence of strategic planning. During the Cold War, enemy number one was, of course, unquestioned: it was the Soviet Union, and everything Washington did was aimed at diminishing Moscow’s reach and power. When the USSR imploded and disappeared, all that was left to challenge U.S. dominance were a few “rogue states.” In the wake of 9/11, however, President Bush declared a “global war on terror,” envisioning a decades-long campaign against Islamic extremists and their allies everywhere on the planet. From then on, with every country said to be either with us or against us, the chaos set in. Invasions, occupations, raids, drone wars ensued — all of it, in the end, disastrous – while China used its economic clout to gain new influence abroad and Russia began to menace its neighbors. [US global strategy] [Strategic incoherence] [NCW]
• India, Pakistan set to become members of SCO
  Xinhua, July 6, 2015 The upcoming Ufa summit of leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will make a political decision on India's and Pakistan's accession to the SCO, Vice Chinese Foreign Minister Cheng Guoping said on Monday. Cheng made the remarks at a news briefing on President Xi Jinping's attendance at the seventh BRICS summit, scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, and the 15th meeting of the Council of SCO Heads of State for Thursday and Friday in Ufa, capital of Russia's Bashkortostan Republic. The decision on starting procedures for India and Pakistan to join the SCO is scheduled to be adopted at the Ufa summit, which signifies the official start of the SCO expansion and the launch of the legal process of the countries' induction into the SCO, Cheng said. "As the influence of the SCO's development has expanded, more and more countries in the region have brought up joining the SCO," Cheng said. "India and Pakistan's admission to the SCO will play an important role in the SCO's development. It will play a constructive role in pushing for the improvement of their bilateral relations," Cheng said. The SCO, founded in 2001, currently has six member states -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, with Afghanistan, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan as observers and Belarus, Turkey and Sri Lanka as dialogue partners. [SCO]
• Global Poverty Drops Sharply, With China Making Big Strides, U.N. Report Says
  By Somini Sengupta July 6, 2015 UNITED NATIONS — Dire poverty has dropped sharply, and just as many girls as boys are now enrolled in primary schools around the world. Simple measures like installing bed nets have prevented some six million deaths from malaria. But nearly one billion people still defecate in the open, endangering the health of many others. These are among the findings that the United Nations released Monday as part of a final report on the successes and failures of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets established 15 years ago to improve the lives of the poor. “The report confirms that the global efforts to achieve the goals have saved millions of lives and improved conditions for millions more around the world,” the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said Monday as he released the report in Oslo. In fact, though, how much of those gains can be attributed to the goals is unknown. The sharp reductions in extreme poverty are due largely to the economic strides made by one big country, China. Likewise, some of the biggest shortfalls can be attributed to a handful of countries that remain very far behind. In India, for example, an estimated 600 million people defecate in the open, heightening the risk of serious disease, especially for children. [China rising] [Poverty]
• In Syria, the weakness of the Islamic State and U.S. strategy on display
  By Liz Sly July 6 at 7:03 PM ? AKCAKALE, Turkey — The unexpected rout of Islamic State forces across a wide arc of territory in their northeastern Syria heartland has exposed vulnerabilities in the ranks of the militants — and also the limits of the U.S.-led strategy devised to confront them. Islamic State fighters have been driven out of a third of their flagship province of Raqqa in recent weeks by a Kurdish-led force that has emerged as one of the most effective American partners in the war. The offensive, backed by U.S. airstrikes, has deprived the militants of control of their most important border crossing with Turkey and forced them onto the defensive in their self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa city, something that would have been unthinkable as recently as a month ago. The advance has shifted the focus of the fight from Iraq to Syria for the first time in months. A blitz of 18 coalition airstrikes against Raqqa over the weekend took out bridges and roads used by the Islamic State to move supplies to battlefronts elsewhere. The air attack was one of the most intense in Syria, according to a Pentagon statement and activists in Raqqa. [US Syria policy] [Kurds]
• The Greek Vote and the EU Miscalculation
  Geopolitical Weekly July 7, 2015 | 08:00 GMT By George Friedman In a result that should surprise no one, the Greeks voted to reject European demands for additional austerity measures as the price for providing funds to allow Greek banks to operate. There are three reasons this should have been no surprise. First, the ruling Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza party, is ruling because it has an understanding of the Greek mood. Second, the constant scorn and contempt that the European leadership heaped on the prime minister and finance minister convinced the Greeks not only that the scorn was meant for them as well but also that anyone so despised by the European leadership wasn't all bad. Finally, and most important, the European leadership put the Greek voters in a position in which they had nothing to lose. The Greeks were left to choose between two forms of devastation — one that was immediate but possible to recover from, and one that was a longer-term strangulation with no exit. The Europeans' Mistaken Reasoning As the International Monetary Fund noted (while maintaining a very hard line on Greece), the Greeks cannot repay their loans or escape from their economic nightmare without a substantial restructuring of the Greek debt, including significant debt forgiveness and a willingness to create a multidecade solution. The IMF also made clear that increased austerity, apart from posing an impossible burden for the Greeks, will actually retard either a Greek recovery or debt repayment. The Greeks knew this as well. What was obvious is that austerity without radical restructuring would inevitably lead to default, if not now, then somewhere not too far down the line. Focusing on pensions made the Europeans appear tough but was actually quite foolish. All of the austerity measures demanded would not have provided nearly enough money to repay debts without restructuring. In due course, Greece would default, or the debt would be restructured. Since Europe's leaders are not stupid, it is important to understand the game they were playing. They knew perfectly well the austerity measures were between irrelevant and damaging to debt repayment. They insisted on this battle at this time because they thought they would win it, and it was important for them to get Greece to capitulate for broader reasons. [Greece] [Example]
• Isolate or Engage: Adversarial States, US Foreign Policy, and Public Diplomacy
  Geoffrey Wiseman The U.S. government has essentially two choices when dealing with adversarial states—isolate them or engage them. Isolate or Engage systematically examines the challenges to and opportunities for U.S. diplomatic relations with nine intensely adversarial states—China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, U.S.S.R./Russia, Syria, Venezuela, and Vietnam: states where the situation is short of conventional war and where the U.S. maintains limited or no formal diplomatic relations with the government. In such circumstances, "public diplomacy"—the means by which the U.S. engages with citizens in other countries so they will push their own governments to adopt less hostile and more favorable views of U.S. foreign policies—becomes extremely important for shaping the context within which the adversarial government makes important decisions affecting U.S. national security interests. [US global strategy] [Subversion]
• Just Say No
  Robert Kuttner Posted: 07/05/2015 8:52 pm EDT Updated: 5 hours ago The No vote to austerity by a margin of 62 to 38 is a stunning vindication of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's tactical gamble and political savvy. However, the Greeks and the austerity-mongers, most notably in Germany, remain as far apart as ever. The press and the European financial elite played Tsipras's surprise referendum as reckless and suicidal. Much of the E.U. establishment was savoring a Yes vote, a Tsipras resignation, and a new center-right unity government as enablers of austerity. But Tsipras demonstrated that he has a far surer grasp of his own people than the Berlin-Brussels echo chamber. The elite press has tended to play this tragedy as a case of Greek self-destruction. The larger story, in truth, is the self-destruction of the European Union. In the short run, the Greek No vote has smoked out the true goals of the worst of the austerity faction such as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble -- to force Greece out of the Eurozone. Schauble, abetted by much of the financial press, tried to redefine the referendum as a vote on whether Greece should keep the euro. But that gamble only backfired. Greek voters resented the interference with their democracy. The referendum was never about the euro, but about whether to accept crushing and perverse austerity terms. For five years, the outlines of a sensible deal have been clear. Greece needs massive restructuring of its debt, as well as a partial debt write-off. This is what occurs in an ordinary bankruptcy, when debtors cannot repay creditors but the entity cannot simply be liquidated. In return, Greece needs to reform aspects of its economy and government, including its tax administration system. But that project would be so much easier and more effective in the context of a recovery program as opposed to a debtors' prison. Imagine if the Europeans came bearing genuine technical assistance, investment capital and debt restructuring as opposed to more austerity demands. [Greece]
• Yanis Varoufakis's resignation statement: 'I wear the creditors' loathing with pride'
  Greek finance minister steps down, saying in a statement on his blog that some of the negotiating partners had sought his ‘absence’ from talks Yanis Varoufakis: ‘We of the left know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office.’ Photograph: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images Monday 6 July 2015 08.02 BST Last modified on Monday 6 July 2015 09.06 BST The referendum of 5 July will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt bondage. Like all struggles for democratic rights, so too this historic rejection of the Eurogroup’s 25 June ultimatum comes with a large price tag attached. It is, therefore, essential that the great capital bestowed upon our government by the splendid no vote be invested immediately into a yes to a proper resolution – to an agreement that involves debt restructuring, less austerity, redistribution in favour of the needy, and real reforms. Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted “partners”, for my … “absence” from its meetings; an idea that the prime minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the ministry of finance today. I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum. And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride. We of the left know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office. I shall support fully Prime Minister Tsipras, the new minister of finance, and our government. The superhuman effort to honour the brave people of Greece, and the famous oxi (no) that they granted to democrats the world over, is just beginning. [Greece]
• Marco Rubio Is Hardly a Hero in Cuba. He Likes That.
  By Jason Horowitz July 5, 2015 CABAIGUÁN, Cuba — In the lush countryside and teeming city neighborhoods where Senator Marco Rubio’s family cut sugar cane, toiled in tobacco mills and scraped by to make a better life for their children, the first Cuban-American to have a plausible chance to become president of the United States is the island’s least favorite son. “If Marco Rubio becomes president, we’re done for,” said Héctor Montiel, 66, offering a vigorous thumbs-down as he sat on the Havana street where Mr. Rubio’s father grew up. “He’s against Cuba in every possible way. Hillary Clinton understands much more the case of Cuba. Rubio and these Republicans, they are still stuck in 1959.” Resistance to Fidel Castro’s Communist government has served as the foundation of Mr. Rubio’s personal and political identity. A Florida Republican who has been identified in the state-controlled newspaper here as a “representative in the Senate of the Cuban-American terrorist mafia,” he has argued for years that normalized relations with the United States would only strengthen an oppressive Cuban government that impoverishes its people, limits access to information and violates human rights. That did not change in the months leading up to Wednesday’s announcement that the United States and Cuba will reopen embassies in each other’s capitals, a critical step in ending a devastating half-century embargo. Signs on the road here read “Blockade: The Worst Genocide in History,” punctuated with a noose. As Mr. Rubio has intensified his opposition, Cubans have begun to view him as the most prominent of American hangmen. [Rubio] [Cuba] [Émigré]
• US Preparing for Never Ending War
  Leonid Savin | 05.07.2015 | 00:00 The new military strategy is a fundamental document of global nature along with the National Security Strategy and Cyber Security Strategy. The US believes that the preservation of economic status-quo in the world and dissemination of so called «universal values» meet the national security interests. «Since the last National Military Strategy was published in 2011, global disorder has significantly increased while some of our comparative military advantage has begun to erode», Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey wrote in his introduction to the strategy document. That’s why the need for a new document came to the fore. The strategy reads that «today, the probability of U.S. involvement in interstate war with a major power is assessed to be low but growing». «Russia is more frequently mentioned in this context. Russian international maritime presence has grown significantly in recent years, specifically since the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2014», senior NATO commander Gen. Adrian Bradshaw said on July 1 addressing a conference in London on NATO's naval future. The strategy is a 24 – page document addressed to young Americans ready to serve the country, according to chairman’s foreword. The main challengers are the state actors, the strategy specifically calls out Iran, Russia and North Korea as aggressive threats to global peace, and non-state groups – particularly the «violent extremist organizations» (VEOs) such as Islamic State and the Taliban. The strategy attempts to create a unified approach to dealing with both, seeking to «deter, deny, and defeat» the states and «disrupt and degrade» the non-state groups (the report terms tem «violent extremist networks», or VEOs). Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are called revisionist states. It’s not clear what a revisionist state implies, probably, the authors mean the countries that pose a challenge to the world system where the US plays the role of global hegemon. [US global strategy] [Permanent War]
• Pentagon Releases National Military Strategy
  By Aaron Mehta 9:32 a.m. EDT July 2, 2015 WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has released a new National Military Strategy, the first update to that document since 2011 — one that warns the threat of major war with another nation is "growing." The strategy is being updated to reflect the new global security situation, one in which the US is facing near-peer adversaries like Russia and China while simultaneously having to handle diffuse militant groups like the Islamic State. "Since the last National Military Strategy was published in 2011, global disorder has significantly increased while some of our comparative military advantage has begun to erode," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey wrote in his introduction to the strategy document. "We now face multiple, simultaneous security challenges from traditional state actors and transregional networks of sub-state groups — all taking advantage of rapid technological change," Dempsey continued. "We are more likely to face prolonged campaigns than conflicts that are resolved quickly." The contents of the document should be no surprise to those who follow the Pentagon. It is a straightforward military document, devoid of politics. The words "budget" and "sequestration" are nowhere to be found. Instead, the document focuses on the importance of partnerships to maintain the delicate security balance around the globe, something Pentagon officials have been pushing over the last several months. Speaking after the release of the document, Dempsey said the strategy acknowledges that American success "will increasingly depend on how well our military instrument supports the other instruments of national power, and how it enables our network of allies and partners. The strategy specifically calls out Iran, Russia and North Korea as aggressive threats to global peace. It also mentions China, but notably starts that paragraph by saying the Obama administration wants to "support China's rise and encourage it to become a partner for greater international security," continuing to thread the line between China the economic ally and China the regional competitor. "None of these nations are believed to be seeking direct military conflict with the United States or our allies," the strategy reads. "Nonetheless, they each pose serious security concerns which the international community is working to collectively address by way of common policies, shared messages, and coordinated action." Later, the strategy authors note that "today, the probability of U.S. involvement in interstate war with a major power is assessed to be low but growing." However, "hybrid conflicts" — not just the Islamic State, but forces such as the Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine — are likely to expand. The strategy also hits on the concerns, highlighted by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Deputy Secretary Bob Work over the last six months, that the US is no longer guaranteed technological superiority, or that in conflicts with groups like the Islamic State, that technological superiority may not be a guarantee of victory. [US global strategy] [Pentagon]
• Greeks defy Europe with overwhelming referendum 'No'
  Athens | By Karolina Tagaris and Lefteris Papadimas Greeks voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to reject terms of a bailout, risking financial ruin in a show of defiance that could splinter Europe. With nearly half of the votes counted, official figures showed 61 percent of Greeks rejecting the bailout offer. An official interior ministry projection confirmed the figure as close to the expected final tally. The astonishingly strong victory by the 'No' camp overturned opinion polls that had predicted an outcome too close to call. It leaves Greece in uncharted waters: risking financial and political isolation within the euro zone and a banking collapse if creditors refuse further aid. But for millions of Greeks the outcome was an angry message to creditors that Greece can longer accept repeated rounds of austerity that, in five years, had left one in four without a job. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has denounced the price paid for aid as "blackmail" and a national "humiliation". Hundreds of Greeks began pouring into the central Syntagma square in front of parliament to celebrate, after a week of building desperation as banks were shut and cash withdrawals rationed to prevent a collapse of the Greek financial system. "This is an imprint of the will of the Greek people and now it's up to Europeans to show if they respect our opinion and want to help," said Nikos Tarasis, a 23-year-old student. Officials from the Greek government, which had argued that a 'No' vote would strengthen its hand to secure a better deal from international creditors after months of wrangling, immediately said they would try to restart talks with European partners. "I believe there is no Greek today who is not proud, because regardless of what he voted he showed that this country above all respects democracy," Labour Minister Panos Skourletis said. "The government now has a strong mandate, a strong negotiating card, to bring a deal which will open new ways." But euro zone officials shot down any prospect of a quick resumption of talks. One official said there were no plans for an emergency meeting of euro zone finance ministers on Monday, adding the vote outcome meant the ministers "would not know what to discuss". [Greece]
• The Pentagon’s “2015 Strategy” For Ruling the World
  July 3, 2015 by Mike Whitney On Wednesday, the Pentagon released its 2015 National Military Strategy, a 24-page blueprint for ruling the world through military force. While the language in the report is subtler and less incendiary than similar documents in the past, the determination to unilaterally pursue US interests through extreme violence remains the cornerstone of the new strategy. Readers will not find even a hint of remorse in the NMS for the vast destruction and loss of life the US caused in countries that posed not the slightest threat to US national security. Instead, the report reflects the steely resolve of its authors and elite constituents to continue the carnage and bloodletting until all potential rivals have been killed or eliminated and until such time that Washington feels confident that its control over the levers of global power cannot be challenged. As one would expect, the NMS conceals its hostile intentions behind the deceptive language of “national security”. The US does not initiate wars of aggression against blameless states that possess large quantities of natural resources. No. The US merely addresses “security challenges” to “protect the homeland” and to “advance our national interests.” How could anyone find fault with that, after all, wasn’t the US just trying to bring peace and democracy to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria? [US global strategy] [Militarisation]
• How Jeb Bush’s firm made him rich — and created a nest egg for his family
  By Matea Gold, Rosalind S. Helderman and Robert O'Harrow Jr. July 2 at 10:41 PM ? Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s former firm, Jeb Bush & Associates, earned $33 million in proceeds from 2007 to 2013. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press) Shortly after Jeb Bush left the Florida governor’s office in 2007, he established his own firm, Jeb Bush & Associates, designed to maximize his earning potential as one of the country’s more prominent politicians. Tax returns disclosed this week by the Republican’s presidential campaign revealed that the business not only made him rich but also provided a steady income for his wife and one of his sons. The family salaries were among the new information to emerge from this week’s disclosures, which provided the most detailed picture yet of the structure and finances of the firm that formed the core of Bush’s private-sector work during the past eight years. The returns show that the company set up a generous and well-funded pension plan now rare in corporate America, allowing Bush to take large tax deductions while he and his wife built up their retirement portfolio. They also illustrate how Bush — who has touted his business experience on the campaign trail — relied on his public persona and political connections to rapidly increase his net worth. More than a third of the firm’s $33 million in proceeds from 2007 to 2013 came from banking giants Lehman Bros. and Barclays, which paid Bush a combined total of about $12 million for his work as a senior adviser, according to the tax filings and campaign officials. An additional $8.1 million during that period came from speaking fees. [Jeb Bush] [Corruption]
• U.S. prepares to send first group of Syrian fighters back onto battlefield
  A Free Syrian Army fighter in combat in 2013. Many soldiers in the Free Syrian Army traveled to Syria’s border with Turkey in hopes of taking part in a U.S. military training program. (Muzaffar Salman/Reuters) By Missy Ryan and Greg Miller July 2 at 6:41 PM ? The U.S. military will send its first class of trained Syrian fighters back into Syria in the next several weeks, in what promises to be a key test for the Obama administration’s effort to stand up an effective local force to combat the Islamic State, Pentagon officials said. A U.S. military official said that American and allied forces are wrapping up training in Turkey for the first group of moderate opposition fighters, numbering fewer than 100. The men will be sent south into Syria by the end of the summer. Before that occurs, military officials must finalize plans for reinserting the rebels into an active war zone. But even as training concludes for this initial cohort of fighters, major questions remain about the effect the program will have on Syria’s crowded battlefield. The White House has not yet decided, for example, what sort of support it will provide to the rebels, especially if they come into conflict with forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The program, which aims to eventually field up to 5,400 fighters a year, has gotten off to a slow start as U.S. officials struggle to select and screen qualified candidates. The military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a mission that has been shrouded in secrecy, said the low numbers so far have been “disappointing.” But he also said the slow start illustrated the rigor of vetting designed to screen out candidates who are unsuited to the program or may pose a danger to trainers. [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing] [Proxy]
• The CIA’s Creation of “Islamic Terrorism” on American Soil
  By Dr. Paul L. Williams Global Research, July 03, 2015 Islamic paramilitary camps have been set up in the United States and Canada to train African American Muslims in guerilla warfare. After months of training on firing ranges and obstacle courses, the black Muslims are sent to Pakistan where they receive advanced training in explosives. Many never return. Stories about these camps are not new. They have been reported by the main stream media, including Fox News. The origin of these compounds for would-be jihadis dates back to 1979, when the Agency sent hundreds of radical Islamic clerics to the United States in an effort to recruit African American Muslims for the holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Tablighi Missionaries By and large, these missionaries hailed from Pakistan and belonged to Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim movement with 150 members in 213 countries.[1] Upholding a strict interpretation of Islamic law (shariah), the Tablighi were united in their resistance to Western culture; their insistence that Muslims should avoid contact with all those who do not share their beliefs; and their approval of jihad by sword (jihad bin saif).[2] Members of the movement gathered every year for three days in the small Pakistani town ofRaiwind. In 1979, Sheikh Mubarek Ali Gilani, a Tablighi missionary from Lahore, Pakistan, arrived in Brooklynwhere he called upon members of Dar ul-Islam, a notoriously violent street gang, to take arms in the great jihad. Scores answered his call and were headed off to Pakistan with payments of thousands of dollars in cash and promises of seventy houris in seventh heaven, if they were killed in action.[3] Welcome To Islamberg By 1980, the Agency realized that considerable expense could be saved by setting up paramilitary camps under the supervision of Shiekh Gilani in a rural area of the country. An ideal location was located near Hancock New York at the base ofPointMountain, where the east and west branches of the Delaware River converge to form the headwaters that flow throughPennsylvania and New Jersey to theAtlantic Ocean. The rocky terrain was infested with rattlesnakes, and the woods were home to black bears, coyotes, wolves, and a few bobcats. Islamberg, a seventy acre complex, came into existence. [CIA] [Outsourcing]
• Drug cops took a college kid’s savings and now 13 police departments want a cut
  By Christopher Ingraham June 30 ? Photo of Charles Clarke courtesy of the Institute for Justice. In February 2014, Drug Enforcement Administration task force officers at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport seized $11,000 in cash from 24-year-old college student Charles Clarke [who happens to be black]. They didn't find any guns, drugs or contraband on him. But, according to an affidavit filled out by one of the agents, the task force officers reasoned that the cash was the proceeds of drug trafficking, because Clarke was traveling on a recently-purchased one-way ticket, he was unable to provide documentation for where the money came from, and his checked baggage had an odor of marijuana. (He was a marijuana smoker.) Clarke's cash, which says he he spent five years saving up, was seized under civil asset forfeiture, where cops are able to take cash and property from people who are never convicted of -- and in some cases, never even charged with -- a crime. The DEA maintains that asset forfeiture is an important crime-fighting tool: "By attacking the financial infrastructure of drug trafficking organizations world-wide, DEA has disrupted and dismantled major drug trafficking organizations and their supply chains, thereby improving national security and increasing the quality of life for the American public." But the practice has become contentious, in part because agencies are generally allowed to keep a share of the cash and property they seize. In cases like Clarke's, where local and federal agents cooperate on a seizure, federal agencies typically keep at least 20 percent of the assets, while local cops split the remainder among themselves. Critics argue that this creates a profit motive and leads to "policing for profit." [Human rights] [Drugs] [Racism]
• The Money Race Hillary Clinton Raises Record $45 Million in First Quarter of Campaign
  Jul 2, 2015 3:01 AM NZST The haul is a result of star-studded fundraisers and also grassroots enthusiasm: 91 percent of the donations were of $100 or less, the campaign said. by Jennifer Epstein Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign raised at least $45 million during its first quarter, her campaign announced Wednesday, preempting all other White House hopefuls with a haul that her aides see as a sign of significant strength. Clinton's haul from her campaign's launch in mid-April through June 30 is a record for primary money raised in a candidate's first quarter. President Barack Obama held the previous record, raising $41.9 million after launching his re-election bid. The $45 million goes a long way toward the campaign's public goal of raising $100 million by the end of 2015, which aides say will put her on strong footing to make it through months of primaries and caucuses. The number could also rise slightly since campaign is still tabulating last-minute contributions. Presidential candidates have until July 15 to file financial disclosure forms with the Federal Election Commission; the release will mark the first time the public will see how much the campaigns are raising and who is giving to them. [Hillary Clinton] [Governance] [US_Election16] [Corruption] [Plutocracy]
• The De-politicization of Black Oppression: No ‘Je Suis Charleston’?
  by Ajamu Baraka Where are the international marches of solidarity with African Americans? The statements from world leaders condemning the terrorist attack and calling on U.S. Authorities to crack down on the white nationalist terror networks developing in the U.S.? Where are the marches in white communities condemning racism and standing with black people? Why no ‘Je Suis Charleston’? The fact that these questions are not being raised by most people speaks to the adroit way in which the propagandists of the U.S. state, with the corporate media in lockstep, successfully domesticated and depoliticized the murderous attack in Charleston, South Carolina. First, President Obama, as the government’s chief propagandist, defined Dylann Roof, the white nationalist assailant, as a pathological, hateful loner who had easy access to guns. The words “terrorist” never crossed his lips or the lips of any other officials of the national government. [Double standards]
• Nuke Deal Inches Ahead as US-Iran Play Information War
  by Pepe Escobar Vienna So today is not D-Day. No landing in post-Wall of Mistrust territory. A nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 won’t be clinched today – for a number of very complex reasons, way beyond the vicious media information war; not least finding the absolute, exact wording in every line of 85 pages of text. It still amounts, for all the bluster and the dramatic turnarounds, to a question of trust. Rather, breaching the 36-year-plus Wall of Mistrust between Washington and Tehran. There are breakthroughs, of course. On the status of the Fordo research site, for instance, for the first time both sides reached an agreement. Compare it to the cosmic gap — exacerbated by the American wordplay — on the gradual lifting of sanctions. This is at the heart of the Viennese diplomatic waltz; what happens after the adoption of an agreement – what some negotiators define as “operationalization.” Only after the US Congress reviews the deal, “iron-clad guarantees” would be provided that sanctions will be lifted. That’s the much-lauded but still hazy “phase three” – when the whole US, EU and UN infrastructure of sanctions is supposed to vanish. There’s the rub — as a top Iranian official told Asia Times: The main issue for Tehran is how to have complete assurance this complex process will be fully implemented. What Tehran wants – according to negotiation insiders – is to “carry a parallel process”; while Iran fulfills all its nuclear restriction commitments, the US, especially, works to dismantle the “institutionalized process of sanctions.” It’s no secret Washington controls the whole framework. And the secret for a successful deal is that all these details should be explicit in writing. [Iran deal] [Renege]
• Why isn’t U.S. tougher on Turkey’s hesitance to fight Islamic State?
  Highlights Turkey still main pathway for Islamic State recruits Turkey unhappy with U.S. support for Kurds in Syria Analysts say Turkey’s position understandable By Hannah Allam WASHINGTON — Last fall, when faced with questions about why NATO partner and regional ally Turkey wasn’t pulling its weight in the fight against the Islamic State, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that there was “no discrepancy” between U.S. and Turkish policy on the extremists and said Ankara would define its role on its own timetable. Eight months later, that role is as undefined as ever, and Washington is no more likely to criticize Turkey for it. Analysts of Turkey’s foreign policy say that Ankara’s often contradictory measures and messages come from two main sources: pockets of Islamic State sympathizers within the leadership, and the broader alarm over Kurdish land grabs as a result of the Syrian conflict. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article25995421.html#storylink=cpy [ISIS] [Outsourcing] [Turkey]
• The BBC, the Weapons Industry and War Propaganda
  By Global Research Global Research, July 02, 2015 Last March the Chairman of Europe’s largest arms firm BAE Systems, Roger Carr, was appointed Vice Chairman of the BBC Trust. Will Carr’s close ties to the arms industry “get the best out of the BBC for licence fee payers” as its mission statement promises? On the trust’s web site we can read the following: “The BBC exists to serve the public, and its mission is to inform, educate and entertain. The BBC Trust is the governing body of the BBC, and we make sure the BBC delivers that mission.” For many years, however, the BBC has been caught delivering weapons of mass deception, lying, censoring important stories and engaging in war propaganda on more than one occasion. Here are just a few articles we published about BBC lies and propaganda: The BBC’s Big White (Phosphorus) Lie and BBC and Fallujah: War Crimes and Media Lies, about the BBC’s biased coverage of the U.S. army’s use of white phosphorus bombs against civilians in Iraq. The Media War on Libya: Justifying War through Lies and Fabrications, about “all sorts of inaccurate reports […] fabricated by the BBC […] and other major networks.” Her Majesty’s BBC’s Syria Coverage: “Sorry for the Lies”…, about several BBC lies in the coverage of the events in Syria. Among others a “picture of victims of a ‘massacre in Syria’, shown by the BBC as proof that the government was responsible, turned out to be ”photographic evidence” (taken from the BBC’s photo archives) of a 2003 massacre in Iraq.” Israeli lies unchecked, Palestinian perspectives censored on BBC, about the BBC’s “habit of inviting Israeli politicians or the Israeli government spokesperson […] to speak without challenge. Meanwhile, Palestinians and those who would convey a Palestinian perspective are not given the same opportunity.” MH17 Witnesses Tell BBC They Saw Ukrainian Jet. BBC Deletes Video, about a BBC Russian correspondent who “interviewed numerous eyewitnesses who described seeing a second aircraft in the sky moments before MH17's fatal crash. The BBC pulled the report. Why?” [Media] [BBC]
• The Human Rights Crisis is About Domination, Not Perception
  June 30, 2015 The Problem With Human Rights Organizations by NEVE GORDON and NICOLA PERUGINI When Israel is criticized about its rights-abusive policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the refrain most often heard among local politicians is that the government’s hasbara—the Israeli propaganda machine—is inadequate. The problem, in other words, is not what Israel actually does to the Palestinians, but rather the inability to get its positive message across to the international community. This is usually referred to as “rebranding Israel”. The underlying assumption here is that the merchandise is fine, and only the packaging needs to be replaced. Rachel Krys’ recent argument about the crisis of human rights is based on a similar logic, even though she is writing about a different issue. She tells us that most people in the UK do not support human rights, while arguing that this is happening because human rights are presented in a way that is disconnected from people’s everyday lives. She claims that if the public would hear less “negative discourse” about human rights and more “stories about old people challenging bad treatment, invasive decisions or the intrusion into their private and family life”, support for human rights would be much wider. Once again the problem with human rights has to do with perceptions, and the solution, here as well, is hasbara. [Human rights]
• Have Millions of Deaths from America’s ‘War on Terror’ Been Concealed?
  by Jack Balkwill The mass media in the US have covered up the most important fact in America’s ongoing wars: the number of people slaughtered. Even before the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the mainstream media served as cheerleaders for the bloodshed, spreading the major lies that led us to war. As a combat vet still shocked by what I saw almost 50 years ago in Vietnam, where we earlier slaughtered millions in another war based on lies, I decided to look into what is happening in the current wars. I discovered that as many as seven million innocents may have been slaughtered in Afghanistan and Iraq. I say “innocents,” because even most combatants American forces have killed were merely defending their homelands from invasions by foreigners (that is us). The invasion of Afghanistan was avoidable ? the Taliban had offered to give up bin Laden if the USA would show them proof that he was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The invasion of Iraq meanwhile violated international law and was little more than genocide. I first looked for government or mainstream media reports in researching this article, but found little help there, forcing me to conclude they are not at all interested in counting victims. Anything they’ve put out to date is so simplistic that it should be ignored by anyone seeking facts. They wouldn’t even report on or take seriously a 2006 report by the respected UK medical journal, the Lancet, which, based upon household surveys and other data, concluded that between the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the beginning of 2006, Iraq had suffered over 650,000 war-related deaths, representing an astonishing 2.5% of the country’s population. It should go without saying that nobody has a completely accurate count of the dead. But over the years, the impact of a corporate media and National Security State have taken their toll on the truth, warping it to imply that relatively few people have died in America’s phony “War on Terrorism.” The charge of a cover-up by the mass media seems obvious, as it is unconscionable that major media, a multi-billion dollar industry, could not find the numbers if they made even a feeble attempt. It seems obvious as well that such numbers would shock the public and turn them against the wars, which probably explains the silence of the mainstream, which is in line with their avid war support and simply echoes the words of General Tommy Franks that “We don’t do body counts.” [Imperialism] [Casualties]
• Cuba first among nations to end mother-to-child HIV, syphilis
  By Chris Adams WASHINGTON — World health officials say Cuba has become the first country in the world to receive validation that it has eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. The achievement was hailed as a breakthrough for Cuba’s women and children and one that could serve as a public health guidebook for other countries. While Cuba is the first to reach the designation, several other countries have started the process. More than 20 nations have expressed an interest in reaching a similar designation, which came from the World Health Organization. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article25847818.html#storylink=cpy [Cuba] [Health]
• Bush tax forms show income of $29 million since 2007
  By Ed O'Keefe, Matea Gold and David A. Fahrenthold June 30 at 7:01 PM ? Bush answers questions from employees of Nephron Pharmaceuticals in West Columbia, S.C., on Monday. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images) Jeb Bush has made more than $29 million since he left the Florida governor’s office in 2007 — vastly increasing his wealth through a combination of speaking fees, corporate board memberships, investments and a consulting contract with a global bank that paid $2 million a year. That income was detailed in 33 years of tax returns that Bush, now a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, published online Tuesday evening. The campaign also said Bush is worth between $19 million and $22 million — at least 14 times as much as when he left office in Florida. The tax returns, the most ever released by a candidate, were intended to show how transparent the candidate is willing to be — and in the process to set up a contrast with Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has not released her most recent returns and has been dogged by complaints that she is overly secretive. Still, the information Bush released, though vast, was incomplete. He did not, for instance, release his tax returns for 2014, a year in which his income probably surged when he sold off valuable holdings as he prepared to run for president. Nor has he released the personal financial disclosure required of presidential candidates, which would give a full picture of his assets, investments and debts. [Jeb Bush] [Corruption]

• The Rise and Fall of the Human Terrain System
  by Roberto J. González The most expensive social science program in history–the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS)–has quietly come to an end. During its eight years of existence, the controversial program cost tax payers more than $725 million. The Pentagon distributed much of the funding to two large defense firms that became the HTS’s principal contractors: BAE Systems and CGI Federal. HTS supporters frequently claimed that the program would increase cultural understanding between US forces and Iraqis and Afghans–and therefore reduce American and civilian casualties. The program’s leaders insisted that embedded social scientists were delivering sociocultural knowledge to commanders, but the reality was more complex. HTS personnel conducted a range of activities including data collection, intelligence gathering, and psychological operations. In at least one case, an HTS employee supported interrogations in Afghanistan (Weinberger 2011). The program also served a more insidious function: It became a propaganda tool for convincing the American public–especially those with liberal tendencies–that the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were benevolent missions in which smart, fresh-faced young college graduates were playing a role. It appeared to demonstrate how US forces were engaged in a kinder, gentler form of occupation. Department of Defense photos portrayed HTS personnel sitting on rugs while drinking tea with Afghan elders, or distributing sweets to euphoric Iraqi children. Here was a war that Americans could feel good about fighting. [Imperialism] [Academics] [Psych war]
• Should Tunisia be Thanking Washington for the Recent Terrorist Attacks?
  Vladimir Odintsov After a terrorist attack that was carried out by ISIL militants in a hotel resort in Tunisia on June 26, that resulted in 39 people being killed, the situation in the country started to reach boiling point. This attack claimed more lives than any other massacre in the history of Tunisia. Tunisian authorities announced the closure of over 80 mosques in the, which, according to Prime Minister Habib Essid, have become the place where violence breeds. The public has not fully recovered from shock when on the following day a police car was blown to pieces in the Kef governorate It should be noted that Tunisian authorities raised the level of terrorist threat back in March, when armed Islamists stormed Bardo Museum, killing 20 foreign tourists. Armed clashes, between Islamists and local police units have become commonplace in Tunisia since 2011, when the Ben Ali regime was toppled as a result of the “Arab Spring” movement that was initiated by Washington. From that moment on hundreds of civilian lives were taking in countless terrorist attacks. Here’s just a few of them: [Terrorism]
• How The Guardian told me to steer clear of Palestine
  David Cronin Media Watch 11 March 2015 Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian’s opinion editor, is an apologist for ethnic cleansing. (Chatham House/Flickr) When I started out as a journalist in the 1980s, I asked an experienced Irish reporter for advice. “Read The Guardian,” he told me. The message that there was no better newspaper had a lasting effect. For years, I wanted to write for The Guardian. Eventually, this desire was realized after I emailed the late Georgina Henry, then editor of its Comment is Free section, in 2007. Henry was immediately receptive to my idea of tackling the European Union from a critical, left-wing perspective. I very much enjoyed contributing to The Guardian. Having previously worked for quite a stuffy publication, it felt liberating to be able to express opinions. There was one issue, however, on which I felt my freedom curtailed: Palestine. Although The Guardian did publish a few of my articles denouncing Israeli atrocities, I began to encounter obstacles in 2009. [Media]
• Editor of Major German Newspaper Says He Planted Stories for the CIA
  By Ralph Lopez Global Research, February 04, 2015 Reader Supported News Becoming the first credentialed, well-known media insider to step forward and state publicly that he was secretly a “propagandist,” an editor of a major German daily has said that he personally planted stories for the CIA. Saying he believes a medical condition gives him only a few years to live, and that he is filled with remorse, Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers, said in an interview that he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name. Ulfkotte said the aim of much of the deception was to drive nations toward war. Dr. Ulfkotte says the corruption of journalists and major news outlets by the CIA is routine, accepted, and widespread in the western media, and that journalists who do not comply either cannot get jobs at any news organization, or find their careers cut short. Dr. Ulfkotte is the author of a book currently available only in German, “Bought Journalists” (Kopp 2014.) Aged 55, he was also once an advisor to the government of German Chancellor Helmet Kohl. The book has become a bestseller in Germany but, in a bizarre twist which Ulfkotte says characterizes the disconnect caused by CIA control of the western media, the book cannot be reported on. Ulfkotte says: “No German mainstream journalist is allowed to report about [my] book. Otherwise he or she will be sacked. So we have a bestseller now that no German journalist is allowed to write or talk about.” [Media] [CIA]
• What Turkey’s Election Means for Syria
  by Rick Sterling The June 7 parliamentary election in Turkey could have a huge impact on the conflict in Syria. The invincible image of President Erdogan has been cracked. There is a real chance that the election might lead to substantive change in Turkish foreign policy promoting the war in Syria. Even though Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the most votes, they lost their majority in parliament and must now find a coalition partner. Turkey’s new parliament was seated for the first time on Tuesday June 23. Now begins the political bargaining and negotiations to form a governing coalition. Depending on the outcome, Turkey may stop or seriously restrict the flow of weapons and foreign fighters through its territory into Syria. If Turkey does this, it would offer a real prospect for movement toward negotiations and away from war in Syria. Why? The Syrian war continues because Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, USA, France, UK and others are spending billions of dollars annually to fund the armed opposition and sustain the war in violation of the UN Charter and international law. Closely allied with Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey has been the primary path for weapons and foreign fighters in Syria. ISIS has depended on export of oil and import of weapons and fighters through Turkey. Jabhat al Nusra, Ahrar al Sham and other armed opposition groups have depended on weapons and foreign fighters coming in via Turkey for attacks on northern Syria including Syria’s largest city, Aleppo. [Syria] [Turkey]
• Middle East: Conceptual Dead-end of the US Strategy
  Maxim Egorov In recent decades, the US Middle East policy, according to Henry Kissinger, has been based on three pillars: ensuring the security of Israel as a major ally of Washington in the Middle East, preventing the emergence in the Middle East geopolitical space of a strong and independent regional power, including one that could be a challenge to Israel, as well as ensuring the free flow of hydrocarbon exports from the region to the countries of the historic and dominant West. To this stratagem of the ways to ensure US hegemony in the region, significant adjustments were made after September 11, 2001 the form of fight against terrorism and regimes supporting it (except Saudi Arabia and Qatar), a systematic line was added to overthrow “dictatorial” regimes, in other words, those objectionable to the White House (although the US has always been engaged in this), as well as the “democratic” reorganization of the region, which was packed into the concept of the “Group of Eight” partnership and “Greater Middle East and North Africa” adopted at Sea Island, June 11, 2004. This was stated in the pompous declaration made at the time: “Partnership for Progress and a Common Future with the Region of the Broader Middle East and North Africa”. [US Middle East strategy]
• Five Things That Won't Work in Iraq
  When at First You Don’t Succeed, Fail, Fail Again
  By Peter Van Buren In one form or another, the U.S. has been at war with Iraq since 1990, including a sort-of invasion in 1991 and a full-scale one in 2003. During that quarter-century, Washington imposed several changes of government, spent trillions of dollars, and was involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. None of those efforts were a success by any conceivable definition of the term Washington has been capable of offering. Nonetheless, it’s the American Way to believe with all our hearts that every problem is ours to solve and every problem must have a solution, which simply must be found. As a result, the indispensable nation faces a new round of calls for ideas on what “we” should do next in Iraq. With that in mind, here are five possible “strategies” for that country on which only one thing is guaranteed: none of them will work. [US Middle East strategy]
• ‘The American Century’ Has Plunged the World Into Crisis. What Happens Now?
  U.S. foreign policy is dangerous, undemocratic, and deeply out of sync with real global challenges. Is continuous war inevitable, or can we change course? By Conn Hallinan and Leon Wofsy, June 22, 2015. There’s something fundamentally wrong with U.S. foreign policy. Despite glimmers of hope — a tentative nuclear agreement with Iran, for one, and a long-overdue thaw with Cuba — we’re locked into seemingly irresolvable conflicts in most regions of the world. They range from tensions with nuclear-armed powers like Russia and China to actual combat operations in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Why? Has a state of perpetual warfare and conflict become inescapable? Or are we in a self-replicating cycle that reflects an inability — or unwillingness — to see the world as it actually is? The United States is undergoing a historic transition in our relationship to the rest of the world, but this is neither acknowledged nor reflected in U.S. foreign policy. We still act as if our enormous military power, imperial alliances, and self-perceived moral superiority empower us to set the terms of “world order.” While this illusion goes back to the end of World War II, it was the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union that signaled the beginning of a self-proclaimed “American Century.” The idea that the United States had “won” the Cold War and now — as the world’s lone superpower — had the right or responsibility to order the world’s affairs led to a series of military adventures. It started with President Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Yugoslav civil war, continued on with George W. Bush’s disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and can still be seen in the Obama administration’s own misadventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and beyond. In each case, Washington chose war as the answer to enormously complex issues, ignoring the profound consequences for both foreign and domestic policy. Yet the world is very different from the assumptions that drive this impulsive interventionism. It’s this disconnect that defines the current crisis. [Decline] [American century] [Exceptionalism] [Militarisation]
• Obama scores a major trade win, burnishing his foreign policy legacy
  President Obama, shown here with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ahead of a June 12 House defeat of his trade agenda, has rescued the legislation and appears headed for victory this week. (Carolyn Kaster/AP) By David Nakamura June 24 at 7:29 PM ? President Obama won new powers from Congress on Wednesday to bring home an expansive Pacific Rim free-trade deal that analysts said could boost U.S. economic standing in Asia and ultimately burnish his foreign policy legacy. Obama’s victory on Capitol Hill, coming 12 days after House Democrats nearly scuttled his bid for “fast-track” trade authority, sets the stage for his administration to complete the multi-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, by year’s end. It represents a hard-won payoff for a president who was willing to partner with his Republican rivals and defy a majority of his party in pursuit of an accord that aides have said will ensure that the United States maintains an economic edge over a rising China. [TPP] [China confrontation]
• The Jihadist Trap of Here and Now
  Security Weekly June 25, 2015 | 06:00 GMT By Scott Stewart In recent weeks, I have found myself spending a lot of time thinking about the jihadist strategy of al Qaeda and how it compares to that of the Islamic State. Earlier this month, I wrote about the possibility that the al Qaeda brand of jihadism could outlast that of the Islamic State. Last week, I wrote about how ideologies are harder to kill than individuals, focusing on the effect that the death of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Nasir al-Wahayshi will have on the group and the wider global jihadist movement. But beyond the impact of leaders like al-Wahayshi, there are other facets of strategy that will influence the war for the soul of jihadism. Specifically, I am talking about time and place. Both al Qaeda and the Islamic State seek to establish a global caliphate, but both differ quite starkly in how to accomplish this task and how soon it can be achieved. Al Qaeda argues that the caliphate can be established only after the United States and its European allies have been defeated, to the extent that they can no longer interfere in Muslim lands — either because of a lack of ability or a lack of desire. The organization pursues a long-war approach that emphasizes the need to attack the United States, "the far enemy," before focusing on overthrowing local governments. The Islamic State takes the opposite tack. It has adopted a more urgent "why wait?" approach and concentrates its efforts on immediately taking, holding and governing territory. This strategy banks on being able to use any conquered territory and resources for the purposes of continued expansion. The direct approach explains the Islamic State's decision to quickly proclaim a caliphate at the beginning of Ramadan last year, after it had captured a large portion of Iraq and Syria. The group's message to the Muslim world is that the caliphate is here and now, and there is nothing the world can do to stop its inexorable expansion. [Jihadist]
• United Against Combat: Why the US Military Opposed New Combat Roles in Iraq
  by Gareth Porter The story published in the Washington Post on 13 June shows how the US military service chiefs – who make decisions on war policy in light of their own institutional interests – prefer an inconclusive war with IS and existing constraints on US involvement, to one with even the most US limited combat role. The resistance of top US military officials to deepening US military involvement in the war against ISIS came in the wake of a major policy debate within the Obama administration following the collapse of Iraqi military resistance in Ramadi. In that debate, senior State Department officials reportedly supported the option of putting US advisers into Iraqi combat units to direct airstrikes on IS positions and sending US Apache attack helicopters into urban combat situations. But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, joined top military commanders in opposing that option, the Post story recounted. Dempsey was said to have concluded that the potential gains from such an escalation were not worth the costs in terms of possible US combat losses. The result of that internal debate was that Obama sent 450 more advisers to Iraq, but only to bases removed from the IS combat zone. [US Middle East Strategy] [US military]
• George Soros as Disaster Capitalist
  Valentin Katasonov | 23.06.2015 | 00:00 George Soros is a well-known billionaire. He has recently started to take an active part in Ukrainian affairs. No, Mr. Soros does not play the role of peacekeeper, to the contrary, his activities are aimed at inciting a large-scale war against Russia. In early June, Cyber Berkut hacked the correspondence of Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko and Soros. The possessed materials show that Soros wants the United States to deliver up-to-date lethal weapons to Ukraine and provide training for Ukrainian soldiers. What does financier Soros need it for? George Soros is known throughout the whole world. Many people witnessed his deeds with their own eyes. According to Forbes, he is one of the thirty wealthiest people on the planet. His presence is visible or felt in many countries. He has a reputation of profiteer, businessman (owner of companies) and aphilanthropist - all at once. The multifaceted activities match well his distinctive way to behave and do things. He stands out as master of financial speculations or the alchemy of finance. He did a masterly job of making British pound collapse in 1992. Even the Bank of England failed to stand up to Soros. In a wink of an eye he earned $1 billion. He contributed into the 1998 financial crisis in South-East Asia. Those days the currencies of about a dozen of countries collapsed. He had his finger in the pie when a default hit Russia in 1998. Soros used the Quantum Fund which is part of Quantum Group of Funds, the privately owned hedge funds based in Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles) and Cayman Islands. The Group is currently advised by George Soros through his company Soros Fund Management. Currency speculations are the main source of his fortune (nearly $30 billion). Contrary to what is generally believed, Soros is also involved in more «quite» and «decent» activities like buying companies shares. He pays with the money earned as a result of currency speculations. For this purpose he founded Soros Fund Management, LLC, a privately owned firm investing in the capital of world leading corporations. Soros Fund Management, LLC maintains ownership of large share percentages in key corporations that benefit from investment in other countries. Soros owns over 5 million shares of the chemical giant Dow Chemicals. Another big investment is Monsanto. Soros owns half a million shares of the bio-tech firm. The two companies are known as chemicals producers with diversified products and services from industrial to agricultural applications, bio technology, food industry and other branches of economy. The financier is also interested in energy. Soros owns nearly two million shares of Energen, a natural gas utility company. PDC Energy, with one million shares owned, is another big investment project. George Soros is involved in banking business. He owns significant stakes of Citigroup, one of Wall Street «Big Six banks». The second direction of his activities is not much talked about. He puts his «golden eggs» (assets) in many baskets (companies and banks) in different parts of the world. [Soros] [Softwar] [NGO]
• What Borders Mean to Europe
  Geopolitical Weekly June 23, 2015 | 08:00 GMT By George Friedman Europe today is a continent of borders. The second-smallest continent in the world has more than 50 distinct, sovereign nation-states. Many of these are part of the European Union. At the core of the EU project is an effort to reduce the power and significance of these borders without actually abolishing them — in theory, an achievable goal. But history is not kind to theoretical solutions. Today, Europe faces three converging crises that are ultimately about national borders, what they mean and who controls them. These crises appear distinct: Immigration from the Islamic world, the Greek economic predicament, and the conflict in Ukraine would seem to have little to do with each other. But in fact they all derive, in different ways, from the question of what borders mean. Europe's borders have been the foundation of both its political morality and its historical catastrophes. The European Enlightenment argued against multinational monarchies and for sovereign nation-states, which were understood to be the territories in which nations existed. Nations came to be defined as groupings of humans who shared a common history, language, set of values and religion — in short, a common culture into which they were born. These groups had the right of national self-determination, the authority to determine their style of government and the people who governed. Above all, these nations lived in a place, and that place had clear boundaries. The right of national self-determination has created many distinct nations in Europe. And, as nations do, they sometimes distrust and fear one other, which occasionally leads to wars. They also have memories of betrayals and victimizations that stretch back for centuries before the nations became states. Some viewed the borders as unjust, because they placed their compatriots under foreign rule, or as insufficient to national need. The right of self-determination led inevitably to borders, and the question of borders inevitably led to disputes among states. Between 1914 and 1945, Europeans waged a series of wars about national boundaries and about who has the right to live where. This led to one of the greatest slaughters of human history. The memory of that carnage led to the creation of the European Union. Its founding principle was that this kind of massacre should never happen again. But the union lacked the power to abolish the nation-state — it was too fundamental to the Europeans' sense of identity. And if the nation-state survived, so did the idea of place and borders. If the nation-state could not be abolished, however, then at least the borders could lose their significance. Thus two principles emerged after World War II: The first, predating the European Union, was that the existing borders of Europe could not be changed. The hope was that by freezing Europe's borders, Europe could abolish war. The second principle, which came with the mature European Union, was that the bloc's internal borders both existed and did not exist. Borders were to define the boundaries of nation-states and preserved the doctrine of national self-determination, but they were not to exist insofar as the movement of goods, of labor and of capital were concerned. This was not absolute — some states were limited in some of these areas — but it was a general principle and goal. This principle is now under attack in three different ways. [Borders] [EU]
• “Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards”: The Alice in Wonderland World of Fast-tracked Secret Trade Agreements
  By Ellen Brown Global Research, June 22, 2015 `Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. `No, no!’ said the Queen. `Sentence first–verdict afterwards.’ `Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!’ `Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple. `I won’t!’ said Alice. `Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. — Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” Fast-track authority is being sought in the Senate this week for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), along with the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) and any other such trade agreements coming down the pike in the next six years. The terms of the TPP and the TiSA are so secret that drafts of the negotiations are to remain classified for four years or five years, respectively, after the deals have been passed into law. How can laws be enforced against people and governments who are not allowed to know what was negotiated? The TPP, TiSA and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (or TTIP, which covers Europe) will collectively encompass three-fourths of the world’s GDP; and they ultimately seek to encompass nearly 90 percent of GDP. Despite this enormous global impact, fast-track authority would allow the President to sign the deals before their terms have been made public, and send implementing legislation to Congress that cannot be amended or filibustered and is not subject to the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds treaty vote. While the deals are being negotiated, lawmakers can see their terms only under the strictest secrecy, and they can be subjected to criminal prosecution for revealing those terms. What we know of them comes only through WikiLeaks. The agreements are being treated as if they were a matter of grave national security, yet they are not about troop movements or military strategy. Something else is obviously going on. [TPP] [Transparency] [Democracy] [TiSA] [TTIP] [Corporate power]
• Ulan Bator’s Small Country Diplomacy: The Case of North Korea
  By Anthony Rinna | June 22, 2015 Ulan Bator’s Small Country Diplomacy: The Case of North Korea by Anthony Rinna Introduction | Since its successful transition from communist rule in 1990, the Republic of Mongolia has pursued a foreign policy based on the concept of a “Third Neighbor.” This has primarily taken the form of increasing ties to other countries otherwise geographically removed–mostly the United States, but also Japan, Turkey and South Korea. It is a policy based on offsetting the possibility of subjugation, either figuratively or literally, by powerful neighbors China and Russia. [Mongolia] [Context] [Agency]
• Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi Dodging or Driving the Rohingya Crisis?
  The Bangkok Post has recently featured an AFP report titled, “Suu Kyi dodges Rohingya issue again,” which claims: In rare comments on Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya Muslims, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi urged caution on granting citizenship to minorities, saying the sensitive issue must be addressed “very, very carefully.” The report then added: But in an interview published online late Tuesday, Suu Kyi dodged a direct question on whether the Rohingya – who have triggered international outcry as they flee the country on rickety boats in their thousands – should be given citizenship. “The protection of rights of minorities is an issue which should be addressed very, very carefully and as quickly and effectively as possible, and I’m not sure the government is doing enough about it,” she said. “It is such a sensitive issue, and there are so many racial and religious groups, that whatever we do to one group may have an impact on other groups as well,” she stressed.”So this is an extremely complex situation, and not something that can be resolved overnight.” If it appears Suu Kyi is attempting to argue against granting the Rohingya people citizenship, most of whom have lived in Myanmar for generations, that is because she is. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, darling of the Western press, and venerated saint of Western “democracy” is backed by the very sects persecuting, butchering, and driving the Rohingya people into the sea. Indeed, the “saffron monks” that have regularly filled the streets on Suu Kyi’s behalf, have also carried out a number of demonstrations over the years advocating segregation, exile, and even genocide against the Rohingya people. They have also carried out regular armed raids on Rohingya neighborhoods – and then after driving them from their homes and businesses – attacked them in squalid refugee camps. When troops operating under the command of the Myanmar government attempt to defend the Rohingya, the Western press and a network of Myanmar and Southeast Asian-based US State Department-funded NGOs regularly decry armed exchanges with Suu Kyi’s mobs as “violent crackdowns.” In reality, Myanmar troops are the only thing standing between the Rohingya and wholesale genocide. The UN has regularly called on Myanmar to grant citizenship to the Rohingya, a process the government has indeed already attempted to push through, however it has met with fierce, even violent resistance by Suu Kyi’s “saffron” supporters. [Myanmar] [Suu Kyi]
• The Saudi Cables
  Over half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry.
  A total of 61195 published so far WikiLeaks publishes the Saudi Cables Today, Friday 19th June at 1pm GMT, WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world. The publication includes "Top Secret" reports from other Saudi State institutions, including the Ministry of Interior and the Kingdom's General Intelligence Services. The massive cache of data also contains a large number of email communications between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign entities. The Saudi Cables are being published in tranches of tens of thousands of documents at a time over the coming weeks. Today WikiLeaks is releasing around 70,000 documents from the trove as the first tranche. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks publisher, said: "The Saudi Cables lift the lid on a increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself." The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a hereditary dictatorship bordering the Persian Gulf. Despite the Kingdom's infamous human rights record, Saudi Arabia remains a top-tier ally of the United States and the United Kingdom in the Middle East, largely owing to its globally unrivalled oil reserves. The Kingdom frequently tops the list of oil-producing countries, which has given the Kingdom disproportionate influence in international affairs. Each year it pushes billions of petro-dollars into the pockets of UK banks and US arms companies. Last year it became the largest arms importer in the world, eclipsing China, India and the combined countries of Western Europe. The Kingdom has since the 1960s played a major role in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) and dominates the global Islamic charity market. [Saudi Arabia]
• Learning the lessons: 11 years of drones in Pakistan
  Esther Kersley 19 June 2015 The case of Pakistan, after a decade long drone war, shows how the appeal of drones as a “cost free” form of warfare is misguided. London: Imran Khan's Pakistan Movt. for Justice protests against US drone strikes. London: Imran Khan's Pakistan Movt. for Justice protests against US drone strikes. Demotix/Mark Kerrison. All rights reserved. This week marks 11 years since the first reported US drone strike in Pakistan. Since 2004, the US has launched more than 419 strikes in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) as part of its global war on terror. Whilst much debate has focused on the ethics, legality and civilian costs of this new technology, little attention has been given to the broader repercussions drones have had on Pakistan as a whole and how they have shaped the country in the past decade. New research into the impact of drone strikes on terrorist behaviour, published this week, shows that drones are having a far wider and more damaging impact on civilian populations beyond those directly killed in the drone strikes themselves. The report, by Dr Paul Gill (UCL) commissioned by the Remote Control project, analyses data on drone strikes and terrorist attacks in Pakistan between 2004 and 2013 at the monthly, weekly and daily levels, finding that terrorist reprisals following a drone strike are disproportionally more likely to target civilians. This is because, although terror groups slow down their activities in the immediate aftermath of a drone strike for basic security reasons, when they do re-emerge the attack that follows will likely be one that doesn’t necessitate the lengthy planning of high value targets, due to the damage done to the terrorist group by a drone strike. The focus instead will be on “softer targets”, i.e. civilians, leading to an increase in fatality rates. When assessing the human costs of drone warfare it is these indirect victims – those who die in terrorist reprisals – that must be factored in. [UAV] [Unintended consequences]
• Out of Uniform and Into the Political Fray
  Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn retired and immediately began bashing the administration. Has he crossed a line? By Seán D. Naylor June 19, 2015 The witness at the June 10 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing was tossing the equivalent of red meat to his Republican questioners, who were practically slavering in gratitude. President Barack Obama’s plan to impose “snapback sanctions” should Iran violate a nuclear deal? “Wishful thinking.” The awkwardness of having U.S. trainers and Iranian forces both in Iraq helping to counter a common enemy? “We have allowed this thing to get so out of kilter.” The president’s June 8 remark that “we don’t yet have a complete strategy” for training Iraqi forces to combat the Islamic State? “I was stunned by his comments,” the witness said. “Stunned.” But the wiry, sharp-featured man giving the representatives what they wanted and then some was no pundit from a right-leaning think tank, nor was he an alumnus of former President George W. Bush’s administration. No, the man in the gray suit sounding the alarm over the current administration’s approach to the Middle East was none other than Obama’s most recent director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Since taking off his uniform last August, Flynn, 56, has been in the vanguard of those criticizing the president’s policies in the Middle East, speaking out at venues ranging from congressional hearings and trade association banquets to appearances on Fox News, CNN, Sky News Arabia, and Japanese television, targeting the Iranian nuclear deal, the weakness of the U.S. response to the Islamic State, and the Obama administration’s refusal to call America’s enemies in the Middle East “Islamic militants.” Flynn is hardly the first retired senior officer to criticize a sitting president’s policies, but in the post-9/11 era, no one else has combined Flynn’s rank and high-profile position at retirement, and the speed — once out of uniform — with which he began lambasting the policies of the administration he had just been serving. [US Middle East strategy]
• Broad Patterns in Global Terrorism in 2014
  By Anthony H. Cordesman Jun 19, 2015 The U.S. State Department has just published its annual country reports on terrorism. In the past, most of the resulting commentary has focused on the narratives in the main report. It is the statistical annex, which largely goes unread, however, which does most to provide a picture of the global patterns in terrorism and which does most to warn that we are neither winning nor containing the struggle. The State Department reports that there were a total of 13,463 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2014, resulting in more than 32,700 deaths and more than 34,700 injuries. In addition, more than 9,400 people were kidnapped or taken hostage . This meant the number of terrorist attacks in 2014 increased 35% and total fatalities increased 81% compared to 2013. [Terrorism]
• The Shale Industry Could Be Swallowed By Its Own Debt
  by Asjylyn Loder June 19, 2015 — 11:00 AM NZST The debt that fueled the U.S. shale boom now threatens to be its undoing. Drillers are devoting more revenue than ever to interest payments. In one example, Continental Resources Inc., the company credited with making North Dakota’s Bakken Shale one of the biggest oil-producing regions in the world, spent almost as much as Exxon Mobil Corp., a company 20 times its size. The burden is becoming heavier after oil prices fell 43 percent in the past year. Interest payments are eating up more than 10 percent of revenue for 27 of the 62 drillers in the Bloomberg Intelligence North America Independent Exploration and Production Index, up from a dozen a year ago. Drillers’ debt ballooned to $235 billion at the end of the first quarter, a 16 percent increase in the past year, even as revenue shrank. “The question is, how long do they have that they can get away with this,” said Thomas Watters, an oil and gas credit analyst at Standard & Poor’s in New York. The companies with the lowest credit ratings “are in survival mode,” he said. The problem for shale drillers is that they’ve consistently spent money faster than they’ve made it, even when oil was $100 a barrel. The companies in the Bloomberg index spent $4.15 for every dollar earned selling oil and gas in the first quarter, up from $2.25 a year earlier, while pushing U.S. oil production to the highest in more than 30 years. “There’s a liquidity issue, and you start looking at the cash burn,” Watters said. Distressed Debt Continental borrows at cheaper rates than many of its smaller peers because its debt is investment grade. S&P assigns speculative, or junk, ratings to 45 out of the 62 companies in the Bloomberg index. “Our cash flow easily covers interest costs, and we expect to continue maintaining our investment-grade credit rating as commodity prices recover,” said Warren Henry, a spokesman for Oklahoma City-based Continental. Almost $20 billion in bonds issued by the 62 companies are trading at distressed levels, with yields more than 10 percentage points above U.S. Treasuries, as investors demand much higher rates to compensate for the risk that obligations won’t be repaid, data compiled by Bloomberg show. “Credit markets have played a big role in keeping the entire sector alive,” said Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd., a consulting firm in London. So far this year, S&P lowered the outlook or downgraded the credit of almost half of the 105 U.S. exploration and production companies that it rates, according to a May report. Financial Drain Companies have reduced spending to cope with lower prices, but those cuts will eventually lead to production declines, further shrinking revenue, Watters said. [Shale]
• Washington in Wonderland: Down the Iraqi Rabbit Hole (Again)
  By Andrew J. Bacevich June 18, 2015 There is a peculiar form of insanity in which a veneer of rationality distracts attention from the madness lurking just beneath the surface. When Alice dove down her rabbit hole to enter a place where smirking cats offered directions, ill-mannered caterpillars dispensed advice, and Mock Turtles constituted the principal ingredient in Mock Turtle soup, she experienced something of the sort. Yet, as the old adage goes, truth can be even stranger than fiction. For a real-life illustration of this phenomenon, one need look no further than Washington and its approach to national security policy. Viewed up close, it all seems to hang together. Peer out of the rabbit hole and the sheer lunacy quickly becomes apparent. Consider this recent headline: “U.S. to Ship 2,000 Anti-Tank Missiles To Iraq To Help Fight ISIS.” The accompanying article describes a Pentagon initiative to reinforce Iraq’s battered army with a rush order of AT-4s. A souped-up version of the old bazooka, the AT-4 is designed to punch holes through armored vehicles. Taken on its own terms, the decision makes considerable sense. Iraqi forces need something to counter a fearsome new tactic of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS): suicide bombers mounted in heavily armored wheeled vehicles. Improved antitank capabilities certainly could help Iraqi troops take out such bombers before they reach their intended targets. The logic is airtight. The sooner these weapons get into the hands of Iraqi personnel, the better for them -- and so the better for us. As it turns out, however, the vehicle of choice for ISIS suicide bombers these days is the up-armored Humvee. In June 2014, when the Iraqi Army abandoned the country’s second largest city, Mosul, ISIS acquired 2,300 made-in-the-U.S.A. Humvees. Since then, it’s captured even more of them. As U.S. forces were themselves withdrawing from Iraq in 2011, they bequeathed a huge fleet of Humvees to the “new” Iraqi army it had built to the tune of $25 billion. Again, the logic of doing so was impeccable: Iraqi troops needed equipment; shipping used Humvees back to the U.S. was going to cost more than they were worth. Better to give them to those who could put them to good use. Who could quarrel with that? Before they handed over the used equipment, U.S. troops had spent years trying to pacify Iraq, where order had pretty much collapsed after the invasion of 2003. American troops in Iraq had plenty of tanks and other heavy equipment, but once the country fell into insurgency and civil war, patrolling Iraqi cities required something akin to a hopped-up cop car. The readily available Humvee filled the bill. When it turned out that troops driving around in what was essentially an oversized jeep were vulnerable to sniper fire and roadside bombs, “hardening” those vehicles to protect the occupants became a no-brainer -- as even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld eventually recognized. At each step along the way, the decisions made possessed a certain obvious logic. It’s only when you get to the end -- giving Iraqis American-made weapons to destroy specially hardened American-made military vehicles previously provided to those same Iraqis -- that the strangely circular and seriously cuckoo Alice-in-Wonderland nature of the entire enterprise becomes apparent. [Iraq] [US Middle East strategy] [ISIS] [Imperialism]
• Orwell, Huxley and America’s Plunge into Authoritarianism
  by Henry A. Giroux In spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercised power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldus Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward an historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of liberal democracy and enter that menacing space where totalitarianism perverts the modern ideals of justice, freedom, and political emancipation. Both believed that Western democracies were devolving into pathological states in which politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and justice. Both were unequivocal in the shared understanding that the future of civilization was on the verge of total domination or what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.” While Neil Postman and other critical descendants have pitted Orwell and Huxley against each other because of their distinctively separate notions of a future dystopian society,[1] I believe that the dark shadow of authoritarianism that shrouds American society like a thick veil can be lifted by re-examining Orwell’s prescient dystopian fable 1984 as well as Huxley’s Brave New World in light of contemporary neoliberal ascendancy. Rather than pit their dystopian visions against each other, it might be more productive to see them as complementing each other, especially at a time when to quote Antonio Gramsci “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”[2]
• The Myth of Pope Francis
  by Andrew Stewart When Cardinal Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis in March 2013, both the faithful and the general population were astounded. After decades of Euro-centric papacies featuring elder clergy who seemed criminally out of touch with reality, especially regarding a not-insignificant case of monetary malfeasance in the Vatican Bank and a sexual abuse scandal of epic proportions that spanned the globe, Francis seemed like a huge relief. He was from South America, he was a Jesuit, he chose to live a life of austerity, he broke taboos left and right, in the minds of many, he was a not just a breath of fresh air, he was an oxygen tank and cardiac crash cart for a Church that had seen its membership and donations significantly shrink since 2002 and the revelations about the Boston clergy abuse cover-up proved to be the crack in the dike that unleashed the flood of revelations about the Church worldwide. However, any mature research into the life and teachings of this man reveals that, just as was the case with Barack Obama, the adulation and praise is merely false hope. Almost every issue that the popular media claims to be a ‘major groundbreaking utterance’ from Pope Francis in reality is just a re-iteration of Catholic dogma and theology, glamorized with a steady dose of sensationalism, American media gloss, and plain stupidity. This can be attributed to the Senior Communications Adviser with the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, the former Fox News correspondent Greg Burke. Burke, a native of St. Louis, is a graduate from the Columbia School of Journalism and a member of Opus Dei. [Religion]
• Deconstructing Donald Trump
  by Cesar Chelala Those who quickly dismiss Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency are wrong. Rather than being a rambling account of a confused man’s thoughts, his announcement is a testament to the vagaries of the capitalist system, and the unpredictable turns of history. He is rather incisive in his opinion about the waves of migrants coming to the U.S. I should know it, since I am an immigrant myself, although not necessarily one of those people that “have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Perhaps some of these statements are right. On more than one occasion I brought some aspirin tablets from my overseas trips…. One of his solutions for the war in Yemen is nothing short of brilliant. Let’s hear his innovative solution. “And believe me, you look at the border with Yemen. You remember Obama a year ago, Yemen was a great victory. Two weeks later, the place was blown up. Everybody got out –and they kept our equipment. They always keep our equipment. We ought to send used equipment, right? They always keep our equipment. We ought to send some real junk, because frankly, it would be –we ought to send our surplus. We’re always losing this gorgeous brand-new stuff.” Now, please, who in the world would have thought of a more stupendous idea? How could we, the rest of the world, total nincompoops, ever be able to come up with a more brilliant idea? Fight a war with second rate, used stuff, and to hell with them! They are the ones that are going to be stuck with it. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant, these are the thoughts of a unique mind. [Trump] [Governance]
• Julian Assange says Swedish prosecutor is 'reckless' for scrapping interview
  Wikileaks founder holed up in Ecuadorian embassy in UK capital says he believed interrogation on rape and molestation claims was to go ahead Ben Quinn in London and David Crouch in Sweden Wednesday 17 June 2015 19.25 BST Last modified on Wednesday 17 June 2015 22.52 BST A Swedish prosecutor has cancelled an appointment to interview Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, according to the Wikileaks founder, who has been living in the building for nearly three years to avoid extradition. Assange said Marianne Ny had led his lawyers to believe that an appointment to take a statement from him would take place on Wednesday and described the cancellation as reckless. But Ny said the meeting would have to be called off because she had not received official permission from Ecuador to enter its London embassy. “Some formal approval has not come, and it is unclear when the matter can be resolved,” the prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to Assange’s lawyers at 3.47pm on Wednesday, in email correspondence seen by the Guardian. “It is therefore no longer necessary to carry out investigative measures this week.” Swedish prosecutors have been trying since 2010 to question Assange about allegations of rape and sexual molestation, although he has never been charged. He entered the embassy three years ago on Friday and has remained there to avoid a perceived threat of being sent on from Sweden to the US for publishing military secrets. Lawyers for Assange claimed a victory in March after Ny bowed to pressure from the courts and agreed to break the deadlock in the case by interviewing him in London. Ny’s formal request to interrogate him in the Ecuadorian embassy was the first sign of movement in a case that has been frozen since August 2012. Assange said on Wednesday: “This afternoon, the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny cancelled a prospective appointment to take my statement today. We proposed the dates and Ny accepted them. “Prosecutor Ny led my lawyers to believe that the appointment was proceeding. My lawyers had booked tickets and I have been put to considerable expense. Last year, the Swedish court of appeal found that prosecutor Ny had breached her duty because she had refused to take my statement for four and a half years. “The prosecutor waited another seven months before finally accepting my offer to take my statement in London. Today, I learned that the Swedish legal application to Ecuador, which is likely to take weeks, was only sent to Ecuador two days ago. “To behave in such a way seems reckless and it is hard to imagine that it was more than a public relations exercise. It is impossible to maintain confidence in this prosecutor under such circumstances.” [Assange]
• The story of BlackRock, a modest participant at the Bilderberg conference
  Valentin Katasonov | 18.06.2015 | 00:00 When it comes to meetings that determine the trajectory of global development, the first half of June was a busy time. The G7 Summit was held in Bavaria, and the Bilderberg Club conducted its annual meeting next door in Austria on June 14. Many of the participants in that club’s meetings carry more weight than the presidents and prime ministers from the Group of Seven. We know that each year, the presidents and chairmen of the boards of directors of banks and corporations with impressive brand names like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Lizard, Banco Santander, HSBC, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, Alcoa, Google, etc. all meet as part of that club. Those brands are household names, and there is no denying the economic and political influence these banks and corporations wield all over the world. But some attendees of Bilderberg Club meetings represent organizations whose names mean little to the public. But that’s not because those organizations are less influential than Goldman Sachs, HSBC, or Royal Dutch Shell. On the contrary, their impact is often even greater, although they avoid the limelight. And that’s true, not only during meetings of the club, but also in everyday life. Organizations like this are rightly known for working «behind the scenes». In particular, Philipp Hildebrand, a vice chairman at BlackRock, made his appearance as one of the 140 participants at the meeting in Austria. Philipp Hildebrand is a man «widely known in narrow circles». A glance at his track record shows that in the past he has held positions such as IMF director for Switzerland, chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), director of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and so on. And now he is a vice chairman at this little-known organization called BlackRock. But I would suggest that Blackrock’s influence is every bit as significant as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley put together. In the past I have written that BlackRock is one of the Big Four - a group of huge financial holding companies that control many sectors of the economy in the US and abroad. Other members of the Big Four also include: the Vanguard Group; State Street Corporation; and FMR Corporation (Fidelity). Here is a brief sketch of BlackRock. [Bilderberg] [Finance] [Deep state]
• The Military Balance in a Shattered Levant: Conventional Forces, Asymmetric Warfare & the Struggle for Syria
  By Aram Nerguizian Jun 15, 2015 The war against ISIL and the civil war in Syria have highlighted the importance of the military balance in the Levant and the extent to which it has an impact on Iraq and the Gulf, the flow of global energy exports and the world economy, and international terrorism. Aram Nerguizian has prepared a comprehensive analysis of the changing military balance in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan that updates our previous analysis and reflects extensive research in the region and work with security experts in the US and Europe. [US Middle East strategy] [ISIS] [Syria]
• Wal-Mart Has $76 Billion in Undisclosed Overseas Tax Havens
  by Jesse Drucker and Renee Dudley June 17, 2015 — 4:01 PM NZST Wal-Mart Stores Inc. owns more than $76 billion of assets through a web of units in offshore tax havens around the world, though you wouldn’t know it from reading the giant retailer’s annual report. A new study has found Wal-Mart has at least 78 offshore subsidiaries and branches, more than 30 created since 2009 and none mentioned in U.S. securities filings. Overseas operations have helped the company cut more than $3.5 billion off its income tax bills in the past six years, its annual reports show. The study, researched by the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union and published Wednesday in a report by Americans for Tax Fairness, found 90 percent of Wal-Mart’s overseas assets are owned by subsidiaries in Luxembourg and the Netherlands, two of the most popular corporate tax havens.
  Units in Luxembourg -- where the company has no stores -- reported $1.3 billion in profits between 2010 and 2013 and paid tax at a rate of less than 1 percent, according to the report. [Corruption] [Tax]
• Jeb Bush Is Out of His Depth on Foreign Policy
  Jeb Bush may impress foreign leaders just because he’s not his brother—but that’s not enough. James Carden June 16, 2015 Over the weekend The Washington Post reported on the state of Jeb Bush’s nascent presidential bid and painted a picture of a campaign that is in a state of panic. And for good reason. In six months, Jeb has revealed himself to be a candidate who is hindered not only by his last name but also by what has—so far, anyway—been a clumsy and awkward performance on the campaign trail. Like his older brother, Jeb struggles mightily with his native tongue. He also seems to have a hopelessly disjointed approach to foreign affairs. In desperate search of foreign-policy credentials, Mr. Bush traveled to several Eastern European capitals last week, where, it was said, he impressed his interlocutors by the fact that he wasn’t his brother. The bar for what would constitute a “successful” European sojourn for Bush was set exceedingly low. According to The New York Times, Bush, after having sat through a “dense presentation” on the Ukrainian economy, asked his hosts: What is the retirement age in Ukraine? For this rather, well, basic policy inquiry, Bush was judged to be “very astute” in the Paper of Record. In Warsaw, Bush stood shoulder to shoulder with the disgraced former foreign minister Radek Sikorski, who, it has recently come to light, had denounced the Polish-American alliance as “worthless” and “bullshit.” Sikorski, who recently stepped down as parliamentary speaker, is on record as complaining, “We’ll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blow job. Losers. Complete losers.” [Jeb Bush] [US Election16]
• CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation
  Exclusive: Watchdogs shocked at ‘disconnect’ between doctors who oversaw interrogation and guidelines that gave CIA director power over medical ethics Spencer Ackerman @attackerman Monday 15 June 2015 12.33 BST Last modified on Monday 15 June 2015 17.41 BST The Central Intelligence Agency had explicit guidelines for “human experimentation” – before, during and after its post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees – that raise new questions about the limits on the agency’s in-house and contracted medical research. Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency’s director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research”. The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency’s history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people. CIA director George Tenet approved abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, designed by CIA contractor psychologists. He further instructed the agency’s health personnel to oversee the brutal interrogations – the beginning of years of controversy, still ongoing, about US torture as a violation of medical ethics. [CIA] [Torture]
• The Truth About Diego Garcia
  June 14, 2015 And 50 Years of Fiction About an American Military Base By David Vine First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate. The truth about the U.S. military base on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia is often hard to believe. It would be easy enough to confuse the real story with fictional accounts of the island found in the Transformers movies, on the television series 24, and in Internet conspiracy theories about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. While the grim saga of Diego Garcia frequently reads like fiction, it has proven all too real for the people involved. It’s the story of a U.S. military base built on a series of real-life fictions told by U.S. and British officials over more than half a century. The central fiction is that the U.S. built its base on an “uninhabited” island. That was “true” only because the indigenous people were secretly exiled from the Chagos Archipelago when the base was built. Although their ancestors had lived there since the time of the American Revolution, Anglo-American officials decided, as one wrote, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos [were] not a permanent or semi-permanent population,” but just “transient contract workers.” The same official summed up the situation bluntly: “We are able to make up the rules as we go along.” And so they did: between 1968 and 1973, American officials conspired with their British colleagues to remove the Chagossians, carefully hiding their expulsion from Congress, Parliament, the U.N., and the media. [Bases]
• Iraq and Libya, the prospect
  Paul Rogers 11 June 2015 The resilience of Islamic State a year after its breakthrough makes an escalation of the current war inevitable. In September 2014, a month after the bombing campaign against Islamic State started, President Obama confirmed that the United States did not yet have a strategy. The comment was pounced on by his political opponents. At the end of this week’s G7 meeting in Bavaria he made a similar comment, although he did phrase it in terms of not yet having a “complete strategy”. Once again the Republicans seized on the remark. One presidential hopeful, former Texas governor Rick Perry, remarked acidly: “If I were commander-in-chief, it would not take nine months to work with our military leaders to develop a complete strategy to destroy ISIS and protect American security interests and values.” It is a more or less standard retort eighteen months before an election, given that neither Perry nor any other presidential contender has to say much more, but it is still an interesting reflection of the dilemma facing any US political leader. The previous column in this series highlighted a number of indicators showing Islamic State was far from being in retreat, and cited senior US special-forces generals voicing the judgment that a war lasting fifteen years is likely ("Islamic State, the long war", 4 June 2015). If Rick Perry really was in the White House, and if his consultation with the military included the heads of special forces, then he might discover that at least nine months are needed to decide on a strategy that commands a military consensus, and that the strategy would easily outlast a single term of office. This is because the air war is not working; there is little sign of Iraqi forces being able to contain Islamic State; and it is not at all certain that even a singularly hawkish Republican presidency would go as far as to intend to launch another large-scale war involving tens of thousands of US troops in the heart of the Middle East. [ISIS] [Strategic incoherence] [Academic] [Elephant]
• Did the War in Syria Just Become a Regional War?
  by Eric Draitser There are growing indications that the war in Syria has now entered a new and dangerous phase that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East in a broad regional war. The news that Iran has sent significant numbers of Iranian, Iraqi, and Afghan troops to take active part in defense of Syria has the potential to transform the conflict into one with global implications as Iran’s key regional rivals – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel – continue to support jihadi factions in their war against the government of Bashar al-Assad. The escalation of the conflict comes in the wake of significant victories for the Al Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front, the Islamic State, and other foreign-backed terror groups in and around the major Syrian city of Idlib. As Reuters reported, sources with knowledge of internal discussions in Damascus have confirmed that the Syrian government had acknowledged strategic losses and was prepared for a lengthy and costly summer defense campaign. While undoubtedly true, there are key elements left out of the narrative of “impending collapse” and Damascus being “overpowered” by the Islamic State. Chief among the crucial points omitted from the majority of western media coverage is the vital support that Turkey has provided, and continues to provide, to jihadi groups in Syria’s northwest. And it is quite likely that it was the direct military intervention of Turkish troops that spurred Tehran to finally sign off on a direct intervention of their own, using a combination of Iranian military and Shia militias from regional allies. Aside from Turkey though, Iran sees in Saudi Arabia and Israel two countries that have also been demonstrably providing overt and covert support to the anti-Assad extremist groups in order to further their own agendas. In this way, it seem that the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini has finally abandoned the cautious approach in order to provide much needed support to his ally Assad, and to maintain the Shia alliance of Hezbollah-Syria-Iran. [Syria] [Iran]
• Al-Qaida 'cut off and ripped apart by Isis'
  Exclusive: Insiders say group has been drained of Middle East recruits and that US wrongfooted by shift in balance of power between warring jihadi groups Spencer Ackerman, Shiv Malik, Ali Younes and Mustafa Khalili Wednesday 10 June 2015 22.30 BST Last modified on Thursday 11 June 2015 00.45 BST Two of al-Qaida’s most important spiritual leaders have told the Guardian that the terror group is no longer a functioning organisation after being ripped apart by Isis. In a wide-ranging interview, Abu Qatada, a Jordanian preacher who was based in London before being deported in 2013, and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, regarded as the most influential jihadi scholar alive, say the al-Qaida leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is cut off from his commanders and keeping the group afloat through little more than appeals to loyalty. How Isis crippled al-Qaida Senior insiders in Jordan add that al-Qaida around the Middle East has been drained of recruits and money after losing territory and prestige to its former subordinate division. The ongoing war between al-Qaida and Isis has left the US struggling to catch up with the tectonic shifts within the global jihadi movement, intelligence insiders told the Guardian. [Al Qaeda] [ISIS]
• Mideast’s worst case: A ‘big war’ pitting Shia Muslims against Sunni
  By Roy Gutman McClatchy Newspapers June 10, 2015 ISTANBUL — The Middle East crisis that peaked one year ago Wednesday when the Islamic State captured Mosul may result in the breakup of Iraq and an indefinite continuation of a war in Syria that’s already out of control, analysts say. Yet still worse things could happen. “The conditions are very much like 1914,” says Michael Stephens of the Royal United Service Institute in London. “All it will take is one little spark, and Iran and Saudi Arabia will go at each other, believing they are fighting a defensive war.” Hiwa Osman, an Iraqi Kurdish commentator, was even more blunt: “The whole region is braced for the big war, the war that has not yet happened, the Shiite-Sunni war.” U.S. and foreign experts say the U.S still has not developed a strategy for dealing with the Sunni extremists who now hold more territory Iraq and Syria than one year ago. President Barack Obama on Monday acknowledged that the U.S. strategy in Iraq was a work in progress. “We don’t have, yet, a complete strategy, because it requires commitments on the part of Iraqis as well,” Obama said at the close of the G-7 summit in Germany. “The details are not worked out.” [ISIS] [US Middle East Policy] [Sectarianism]
• Rumsfeld defends remarks about democracy in Iraq, says he wasn't criticizing Bush
  By Jake Tapper and Tom LoBianco, CNN | Video Source: CNN Updated 1500 GMT (2200 HKT) June 10, 2015 In a story titled "Bush was wrong on Iraq, says Rumsfeld," Rumsfeld told The Times that "the idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words ... I'm not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories." Bush supported the more ambitious goal of democracy in Iraq, but Rumsfeld told CNN that "the implication that that statement was anti-Bush is ridiculous." But others in the media have looked at previous comments Rumsfeld made about democracy in Iraq and suggested he has changed his tune. [Rumsfeld] [Iraq]
• The Dark Saudi-Israeli Plot to Tip the Scales in Syria
  The Saudis and the Turks are scaling up their support for Syrian jihadists while the Israelis contemplate a new war with Hezbollah. By Conn Hallinan, June 8, 2015. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi King Salman meet in Riyadh to discuss Syria. (Photo: NRT TV) Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi King Salman meet in Riyadh to discuss Syria. (Photo: NRT TV) A quiet meeting this past March in Saudi Arabia, and a recent anonymous leak from the Israeli military, set the stage for what may be a new and wider war in the Middle East. Gathering in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh were Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly crowned Saudi King Salman, and the organizer of the get-together, the emir of Qatar. The meeting was an opportunity for Turkey and Saudi Arabia to bury a hatchet over Ankara’s support — which Riyadh’s opposes — to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to agree to cooperate in overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. [Saudi Arabia] [Israel] [Syria] [Jihadist]
• Tartus, the Mother of Martyrs
  Analysis June 7, 2015 | 13:00 GMT Editor's Note: This first-hand account was written by a Stratfor correspondent in the Middle East. Tartus is Syria's second largest port city, overshadowed only by Latakia. Located on the country's coastal plain, both sit within the Alawite minority's geographic core. Originally known as the "Nusayris," the Alawites became established along the Mediterranean coast under the Shiite Hamdanid dynasty. With the fall of this dynasty, however, they became an embattled minority, persecuted by Christian crusaders, the Sunni Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire in turn. The French colonial regime favored the Alawites in order to balance power against the majority Sunnis and their Ottoman backers. Following independence, this privileged position made the Alawites a target of reprisals from the new government. By the 1960s, however, the Alawites had regained influence because of their presence in the military and their support for the Baathist movement. In 1971, after a tumultuous period of coups and counter-coups, Defense Minister Hafez al Assad gained control of the government. The Alawite general remained in power until 2000 and was succeeded by his son, Bashar al Assad. Today, the city of Tartus is gloomy. Syria is four years into a vicious civil war. Bashar al Assad's government has managed to survive but is locked in an existential battle with a host of rebel forces, including the Islamic State. Again and again the government has been forced to retrench to protect its core around the Alawite coast and the capital of Damascus. The heady period of unchallenged Alawite ascendance has come to a murky end. In the early days of the 2011 uprising against al Assad's rule, the Alawites of Tartus came out into the streets to defend him, chanting "Al Assad! Or we set the country on fire!" If al Assad did not remain president, his Alawite supporters promised to rise up to destroy the country themselves. Now a host of rebel groups threaten the al Assad regime. Although the government holds on, the Alawites' threat to destroy the country now rings hollow. After four years of disastrous conflict, the Alawites of Tartus are frustrated and suffering from staggering human losses. More than 70,000 young Alawite soldiers have been killed and 120,000 others wounded. Another 10,000 are unaccounted for. These figures do not even include Tartus' non-Alawite loyalist troops. Tartus is now known as the "mother of martyrs." One-third of all loyalist casualties come from the city, where posters of fallen soldiers are everywhere. [Syria] [Alawite] [Media] [Agency]
• A Net Assessment of the Middle East
  Geopolitical Weekly June 9, 2015 | 08:00 GMT By George Friedman The term "Middle East" has become enormously elastic. The name originated with the British Foreign Office in the 19th century. The British divided the region into the Near East, the area closest to the United Kingdom and most of North Africa; the Far East, which was east of British India; and the Middle East, which was between British India and the Near East. It was a useful model for organizing the British Foreign Office and important for the region as well, since the British — and to a lesser extent the French — defined not only the names of the region but also the states that emerged in the Near and Far East. Today, the term Middle East, to the extent that it means anything, refers to the Muslim-dominated countries west of Afghanistan and along the North African shore. With the exception of Turkey and Iran, the region is predominantly Arab and predominantly Muslim. Within this region, the British created political entities that were modeled on European nation-states. The British shaped the Arabian Peninsula, which had been inhabited by tribes forming complex coalitions, into Saudi Arabia, a state based on one of these tribes, the Sauds. The British also created Iraq and crafted Egypt into a united monarchy. Quite independent of the British, Turkey and Iran shaped themselves into secular nation-states. This defined the two fault lines of the Middle East. The first was between European secularism and Islam. The Cold War, when the Soviets involved themselves deeply in the region, accelerated the formation of this fault line. One part of the region was secular, socialist and built around the military. Another part, particularly focused on the Arabian Peninsula, was Islamist, traditionalist and royalist. The latter was pro-Western in general, and the former — particularly the Arab parts — was pro-Soviet. It was more complex than this, of course, but this distinction gives us a reasonable framework. The second fault line was between the states that had been created and the underlying reality of the region. The states in Europe generally conformed to the definition of nations in the 20th century. The states created by the Europeans in the Middle East did not. There was something at a lower level and at a higher level. At the lower level were the tribes, clans and ethnic groups that not only made up the invented states but also were divided by the borders. The higher level was broad religious loyalties to Islam and to the major movements of Islam, Shiism and Suniism that laid a transnational claim on loyalty. Add to this the pan-Arab movement initiated by former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who argued that the Arab states should be united into a single Arab nation. Any understanding of the Middle East must therefore begin with the creation of a new political geography after World War I that was superimposed on very different social and political realities and was an attempt to limit the authority of broader regional and ethnic groups. The solution that many states followed was to embrace secularism or traditionalism and use them as tools to manage both the subnational groupings and the claims of the broader religiosity. One unifying point was Israel, which all opposed. But even here it was more illusion than reality. The secular socialist states, such as Egypt and Syria, actively opposed Israel. The traditional royalist states, which were threatened by the secular socialists, saw an ally in Israel. [US Middle East policy]
• Rethinking the Asian Century
  Dan Blumenthal, @DAlexBlumenthal Derek Scissors, Nicholas Eberstadt, Sadanand Dhume, @dhume Alex Coblin June 8, 2015 | Washington Examiner Since the end of the Cold War, there has been strong bipartisan dedication to the idea that America’s future will be written in the Asia-Pacific. The Obama administration has argued the case most forcefully. Hillary Clinton, when she was secretary of state, wrote: “The Asia-Pacific has become a key driver of global politics. Stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas, the region spans two oceans — the Pacific and the Indian — that are increasingly linked by shipping and strategy. It boasts almost half the world’s population. It includes many of the key engines of the global economy, as well as the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.” In theory, the concept of an “Asian Century” — meaning that the world’s political and economic center of gravity is shifting to Asia in the 21st century — is correct [US Global strategy] [Pivot] [India] [Counterbalance]
• 'IS' supply channels through Turkey
  Every day, trucks laden with food, clothing, and other supplies cross the border from Turkey to Syria. It is unclear who is picking up the goods. The haulers believe most of the cargo is going to the "Islamic State" militia. Oil, weapons, and soldiers are also being smuggled over the border, and Kurdish volunteers are now patrolling the area in a bid to stem the supplies. [ISIS] [Turkey]
• Logistics 101: Where Does ISIS Get Its Guns?
  Since ancient times an army required significant logistical support to carry out any kind of sustained military campaign. In ancient Rome, an extensive network of roads was constructed to facilitate not only trade, but to allow Roman legions to move quickly to where they were needed, and for the supplies needed to sustain military operations to follow them in turn. In the late 1700’s French general, expert strategist, and leader Napoleon Bonaparte would note that, “an army marches on its stomach,” referring to the extensive logistical network required to keep an army fed, and therefore able to maintain its fighting capacity. For the French, their inability to maintain a steady supply train to its forces fighting in Russia, and the Russians’ decision to burn their own land and infrastructure to deny it from the invading forces, ultimately defeated the French. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/09/logistics-101-where-does-isis-get-its-guns/ [ISIS] [Turkey]
• In Turkish elections, Erdogan’s party slips, power plan appears thwarted
  By Roy Gutman McClatchy Foreign Staff June 7, 2015 Updated 13 hours ago ISTANBUL — In a major upset, Turkish voters Sunday cut their support for the ruling Justice and Development Party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and sent a Kurdish party into the national parliament for the first time ever. With 94 per cent of the votes counted, the ruling party won 41.6 per cent of the vote – translating into 262 seats in the 550-seat parliament. This falls just short of the 271 seats needed for an absolute majority and may force Prime Minister Ahmet Davutogolu into forming a coalition goernment for the first time since 2002. It is likely to deprive Erdogan, who’s now president and supposedly above politics, of his often stated wish to revamp the constitution and install himself as an “executive president,” with powers equal to that of an American president. AKP had won 49.95 per cent of the vote in the last general election in 2011, and 44.19 per cent in the municipal elections last year. The results, broadcast by the major television networks and news agencies here, have not been certified by the national election board. The other major upset was the success of the Kurdish HDP People’s Democratic Party, which won 11.9 per cent of the vote, equal to 75 seats. The Kurdish party had never previously cleared the 10 per cent hurdle needed to enter the parliament, and while it had many members in parliament they served as independents and could not form a caucus. The HDP apparently drew Kurdish voters who’d previously supported Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, but had launched a broad appeal designed to attract voters of every stripe who were opposed to Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic style of rule. The apparent second place winner was the Republican People’s Party, founded by Kemal Ataturk, the father of the Turkish Republic. which won 25.2 per cent of the vote, equal to 136 seats. Finishing third was the Nationalist Movement Party, which won 16.7 per cent of the votes or 83 seats, according to the preliminary results. [Turkey]
• Obama’s Big Lie on Syria
  Daniel Lazare
  5 June Although its doors have been closed since 2012, the U.S. embassy in Damascus has recently sent out a round of pugnacious tweets charging Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with giving Islamic State fighters a free pass while bombing U.S.-aligned Free Syrian Army (FSA) units holed up in the city of Aleppo. By bombing one side in an intra-rebel war and not the other, the embassy says, Damascus is making its preference clear, i.e., in favor of the hyper-brutal Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “Reports indicate,” declared an embassy tweet on June 1, “that the regime is making air-strikes in support of ISIL’s advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population.” “We have long seen that the Assad regime avoids ISIL lines,” said another, “in complete contradiction to the regime’s claims to be fighting ISIL.” Added a third: “Assad is not only avoiding ISIL lines, but actively seeking to bolster their position.” But this picture is complicated by the fact that the FSA also faults the U.S. for not bombing ISIS and that Shi‘ite forces across the border in Iraq actually accuse America of providing ISIS with military aid. The Islamic State is America’s “creation,” declared Akram al-Kabi, leader of the powerful Nujabaa Brigade, while Iraqi forces recently fired on a U.S. helicopter that they believed was ferrying aid to the other side. “We have a continuous problem in effectively countering the narrative,” observes Brigadier General Kurt Crytzer, deputy commander for Special Operations Command Central. The story that the U.S. is secretly supporting ISIS is “easily believed by many … not just the poor and uneducated.” For The New York Times’ Anne Barnard, this swirl of charges and counter-charges demonstrates “the complexity of the battlefield in Syria’s multifaceted war and the challenges it poses for United States policy.” But Barnard is wrong in her analysis. It’s not the Syrian battlefield that’s complex, but the predicament that the U.S. finds itself in. What has caused Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states to ratchet up their support for radical Islamists fighting in Syria and Iraq is the impending nuclear accord with Iran, which has infuriated Sunni states and Israel and is leading the U.S. to assure its allies that it will redouble its efforts to roll back Iranian influence in other countries. This means a stepped-up effort to topple the Iranian-backed government in Syria and to oppose pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen and inside Saudi Arabia. The Obama administration wants to have a peaceful agreement with Iran over nuclear issues but the price is to double down on a proxy war against Iranian (and Shi’ite) interests across the Middle East. The upshot is a policy that has everyone in the Middle East shaking their head in confusion, which is why charges of back-stabbing and double-dealing are proliferating. A vastly overextended U.S. has no alternative but to scale back. But the more it does, the more nervous its partners grow and the more promises it makes that it can’t possibly keep. [US Syria policy] [Strategic incoherence] [Outsourcing] [Iran deal]
• Libyan gains may offer ISIS a base for new attacks
  By Hassan Morajea and Erin Cunningham June 6 at 8:57 PM ? MISURATA, Libya — As the Islamic State scores new victories in Syria and Iraq, its affiliate in Libya is also on the offensive, consolidating control of Moammar Gaddafi’s former home town and staging a bomb attack on a major city, Misurata. The Islamic State’s growth could further destabilize a country already suffering from a devastating civil war. And Libya could offer the extremists a new base from which to launch attacks elsewhere in North Africa. [Libya] [ISIS] [Unintended consequences]
• Kaplan's nostalgia - Empires striking back
  By Sumantra Maitra China.org.cn, June 6, 2015 Robert Kaplan, veteran U.S. journalist and foreign correspondent, cultural commentator and intellectual, came out with a provocative piece in Foreign Policy, arguing for the case of Imperialism. The original title of the piece, as understood from the URL, calls to bring back imperialism to the Middle East, especially to Iraq and Syria, and was possibly deemed too controversial to go to print, and was changed to "Ruins of empire in the Middle East." Predictably, the article has drawn vicious criticism and half-hearted praise from both sides of the political spectrum, and also predictably most of the subsequent literature lacks a basic understanding of Kaplan's thesis. [Imperialism]
• Twilight of the Professors
  by Michael Schwalbe Twenty-eight years ago Russell Jacoby argued in The Last Intellectuals that the post-WWII expansion of higher education in the U.S. absorbed a generation of radicals who opted to become professors rather than freelance intellectual troublemakers. The constraints and rewards of academic life, according to Jacoby, effectively depoliticized many professors of leftist inclinations. Instead of writing in the common tongue for the educated public, they were carrot and sticked into writing in jargon for tiny academic audiences. As a result, their political force was largely spent in the pursuit of academic careers. Jacoby acknowledges that universities gave refuge to dissident thinkers who had few other ways to make a decent living. He also grants that careerism did not make it impossible to publish radical work or to teach students to think critically about capitalist society. The problem is that the demands of academic careers made it harder to reach the heights achieved by public intellectuals of the previous generation. We thus ended up with, to paraphrase Jacoby, a thousand leftist sociologists but no C. Wright Mills. Since Jacoby’s book was published, things have gotten worse. There are still plenty of left-leaning professors in U.S. colleges and universities. But as an employment sector, higher education has changed. There are now powerful conservatizing trends afoot that will likely lead to the extinction of professors as a left force in U.S. society within a few decades. [Academia]
• Alice Goffman’s Heralded Book on Crime Is Disputed
  By Jennifer Schuessler June 5, 2015 Since her book “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City” was published last year, Alice Goffman has achieved a measure of fame that is rarely visited on a young sociologist. “On the Run” won attention because of its timely subject matter — the lives of low-income black men and their interactions with the police — and vivid storytelling, based on six years of immersive fieldwork. It was the subject of dozens of articles and often-glowing reviews in publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times. An impassioned TED talk Ms. Goffman delivered in March has been viewed more than 800,000 times. But all that enthusiasm has curdled somewhat, as critics, in published reviews and anonymous online critiques, have debated not just her facts, interpretations and methods, but the fraught politics of privileged white outsiders’ studying minority communities. Now, Steven Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern University, has added a jolt to the already charged conversation with a blunt question: In her book, did Ms. Goffman not only describe street crime but also admit to having committed a felony herself? Mr. Lubet’s charge, made in an article in the online book review The New Rambler and reposted in condensed form by The New Republic, concerns an anecdote that appears at the end of a long appendix in which Ms. Goffman describes how she spent six years observing and sometimes living among a group of young men in a Philadelphia neighborhood she calls Sixth Street. [Racism] [Incarceration]
• Kansas reaps the whirlwind of its right-wing experiment
  Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback meets with the media on Saturday. (Thad Allton/Associated Press) By Editorial Board June 3 at 7:33 PM KANSAS GOV. Sam Brownback (R) proposed raising taxes over the weekend. You read that correctly. That is the same Sam Brownback who, along with state GOP lawmakers, embarked on a bold conservative experiment in tax-cutting three years ago. The experiment failed, and Kansas is now in big, if predictable, trouble. Instead of spurring a treasury-filling economic boom, the deep tax breaks pushed the state’s budget far out of balance: Even after Republicans hacked away at education and highways and fiddled with payments for its pension program, the state still faces a $400 million gap. With the legislature deadlocked and state workers facing mandatory furloughs if lawmakers don’t have a budget by Sunday, Mr. Brownback bowed to reality and proposed raising more tax revenue. But he bowed only so far. He didn’t roll back his steep cuts to income and business taxes, instead proposing an increase in the sales tax from 6.15 percent to 6.65 percent. In theory, moving away from taxes on labor and business and toward taxes on consumption can have attractive economic benefits. But the way Mr. Brownback originally cut business taxes provided “an incentive to game the tax system without doing anything productive for the economy,” the Tax Foundation’s Joseph Henchman found. Raising revenue by reversing this distortionary policy would seem to be the obvious first step toward fixing the budget. [Tax] [Brownback]
• U.S. faces challenges in building up Syrian training program
  Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks during a graduation and commissioning ceremony May 23 at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. (Mike Groll/AP) By Missy Ryan June 3 at 7:50 PM ? The U.S. military is gradually expanding a new program to train and equip Syrian opposition fighters, but building a force that can effectively take on the Islamic State may take longer than expected, President Obama’s top military adviser said Wednesday. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the training course would be a success if the United States was able to recruit, vet and train enough fighters who will form the new, moderate Syrian rebel force. “That’s going to be a challenge and may take longer than we think,” he said in an interview. In May, the Pentagon launched the long-awaited effort when it began training an initial class of about 90 fighters in Jordan. The program, separate from an earlier CIA course, seeks to stand up a force that will counteract the Islamic State, which is trying to advance a new offensive in northwest Syria that, if successful, could reshape Syria’s civil war. A senior military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a program whose details are veiled in secrecy, said that the U.S. military had begun working with a second class of about 50 Syrian fighters in Turkey in mid-May. Training is expected to eventually expand to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing]
• How Islamic State Victories Shape the Syrian Civil War
  Analysis June 2, 2015 | 09:15 GMT ?The Islamic State will prioritize the defense of its core supply lines, used to provide equipment and much-needed recruits. ?The Islamic State will continue to demonstrate considerable flexibility in its offensive operations. ?The Syrian government and rebel forces will have to increasingly devote their attention and resources to fighting the Islamic State, rather than prioritizing battles with each other. In a display of considerable flexibility on the battlefield, the Islamic State managed to take rebel forces in northern Aleppo by surprise with a large-scale offensive aimed at securing more territory along the Syria-Turkey border. After drawing down its forces in the area, the Islamic State's sudden tactical shift resulted in considerable initial gains against the rebels. Islamic State fighters seized Sawran and are advancing near Mare. But thanks to reinforcements from Aleppo city and other provinces, Syrian rebel forces have already begun to mount powerful counterattacks against the Islamic State. For now, the outcome of the battle hangs in the balance as both sides move to bolster their ranks. The Battle for Aleppo The Islamic State's advance in northern Aleppo is likely driven by its growing concern over its supply lines running through Turkey, which provide the vast majority of the group's foreign recruits. [ISIS] [Turkey]

• U.S. economy shrinks in first quarter, raising questions about underlying strength
  By Chico Harlan May 29 at 10:04 AM ? The U.S. economy shrank at an annualized pace of 0.7 percent in the first three months of the year, according to government data released Friday morning, a tumble for a recovering nation that until recently seemed poised for takeoff. The contraction, the country’s third in the aftermath of the Great Recession, provides a troubling picture of an economy that many figured would get a lift from cheap oil, rapid hiring and growing consumer confidence. Instead, consumers have proved cautious, and oil companies have frozen investment — all while a nasty winter caused havoc for transportation and construction and a strong dollar widened the trade deficit. The numbers released Friday were a revision of earlier figures that had shown GDP growing in the first quarter at 0.2 percent. Markets had since expected the downward revision, in large part because of recent data showing the trade deficit at a 6½-year high.
• Economists have figured out who’s really to blame for exploding income inequality
  By Matt O'Brien May 29 at 9:04 AM ? Corporate greed isn't good, but it might not be as bad for inequality as we thought—or at least not in the way we thought. Now it seems pretty obvious that inequality must have something to do with executive pay. After all, big-company CEOs only made 30 times as much as the average worker in 1978, but make 295 times as much today. The simple story is that corporate bigwigs have doled out cushy jobs on their boards to buddies who have rubber-stamped whatever pay packages they ask for, so that they're all but guaranteed to walk away with millions whether or not they're actually, you know, good at their jobs. Simple, but not quite right. That's because new research shows that, as Slate's Jordan Weissmann puts it, it's not super-managers, but rather super-managers and everybody else at super-companies that are behind the growing income gap. The easiest way to think about this is to think about the different types of inequality. There isn't just inequality between everyone, but also between everyone at a single company. Why does this matter? Well, if CEOs really are gobbling up a bigger and bigger slice of the profit pie, then inequality within society at large should have increased because inequality within companies increased. But that's not what happened. The research team of Jae Song of the Social Security Administration, Fatih Guvenen of the University of Minnesota, and David Price and Nicholas Bloom of Stanford were able to look at what had previously between private earnings data for every company between 1978 and 2012—the best data we have so far—and found that the pay gap between executives and their own workers had barely changed during this time. What had changed, though, was the pay gap between every worker at the highest-paid firms and everyone else. In other words, inequality exploded because the top 1 percent of companies were making more and paying all their employees more. This was true across the country and across industries. [Inequality]
• America Breaks the Middle East
  by Andrew Levine In diplomacy, as in war (“diplomacy by other means,” according to Clausewitz), it can be useful to distinguish goals from strategies. America’s goals in the Middle East are clear: it wants Middle Eastern countries to serve the needs of American capitalists and to advance their interests; and it wants to impose a pax Americana, a stable regional order maintained under American domination. It has been this way since even before the end of World War II. Years ago, the United States also wanted to replace Britain and France as the dominant Western power in the region. This was never a major concern, however; in part because, before World War II, making common cause with Britain and France against Germany was a higher priority. [US Middle East Strategy]
• Gulf War II a Bush Disaster? So was Gulf War I
  by Barry Lando In light of the shocking advances of the Islamic State, the sense that Iraq is coming apart at the seams despite the huge toll of lives and treasure squandered over more than a decade, it’s clear that George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the most fateful foreign policy blunder ever made by an American leader. What’s remarkable, however, is that critics of George W.’s actions overlook the fact that it was his father, George H.W.Bush, who, in 1990, set the stage for his son’s disastrous moves 13 years later. It was Papa Bush, after all, who sent American troops half way around the world to launch the First Gulf War—an error of tragic proportions; responsible in its own way for much of the horror that afflicts the Greater Middle East (and America) to this day. Ironically, it happened just as the U.S. seemed about to become king of the global roost—the greatest military power the planet had ever known. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no power around to challenge U.S. hegemony. It was left to America to blight its own future. (I wrote about this in my book, “Web of Deceit, The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W.Bush.”) What is also extraordinary about the First Gulf War is that—like the outbreak of World War I–it was all so unnecessary—the result of feckless leadership, inept diplomacy and shocking miscalculations by both leaders—Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush. [US Middle East Strategy]
• The Long, Long Fall of Bob Woodward
  by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair This week many liberals gasped when Bob Woodward showed up on Fox News to defend George Bush and Dick Cheney’s prosecution of the Iraq War. Woodward told Chris Wallace that neither Bush nor Cheney lied about Iraq’s WMDs, that the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons wasn’t seriously flawed and that the disastrous war against Saddam Hussein was probably justified. In the condescending tone that Woodward has mastered, he told Wallace that: Iraq is a symbol. You can make a persuasive argument there was a mistake. But there is a kinda line going on that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. Lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. He was the one who was skeptical. If you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, ‘Hey, look, it will only take a week or two.’ Early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months, so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lie in this that I could find. Of course, for those who have been paying attention, this kind of courtly palaver is nothing new for Woodward. For the past 40 years, he has functioned as more of a courtier of the power elite, a stenographer for the imperial front office, than the investigative reporter who helped bring down the Nixon White House. (Recall that Carl Bernstein was the red-diaper baby, Bob Woodward came out of Naval intelligence, and probably never left.) Woodward was a favored scribe in both Bush White Houses, privileged with inside access granted to no other reporters, and his three books on the Bush family’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be charitable beyond measure. Over the years, Woodward had cultivated a particularly intimate relationship with Dick Cheney, who the reporter, perhaps alone in the world, came to view as something akin to the new von Clausewitz. On several occasions, Woodward went out of his way to use his position at the Washington Post to attack critics of the Bush administration, even when those critics were his own colleagues at the paper. In mid-November of 2007, Alexander Cockburn and I wrote this story about one of Woodward’s nastier escapades, his creepy role in the attempt by Cheney’s office to smear Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. Woodward not only minimized the crimes of the Cheney crowd, but his testimony before Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald also exposed his colleague Walter Pincus to potential legal sanctions. There’s a reason that Woodward, despite filing one dubious story after another, retains his position as an éminence grise of DC reporters and Seymour Hersh is treated a meddlesome outcast. [Media]
• Why Aung San Suu Kyi Has Stayed Silent on the Plight of Rohingya
  May 24th 2015 The Guardian – South China Morning Post When thousands of Rohingya people from Myanmar were discovered floating in boats on the Southeast Asian seas much of the world was understandably gripped by this unfolding human tragedy. Voices of anger were raised; something had to be done to end the suffering, to help those men, women and children in need. But what has surprised some is the silence of the Nobel peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. After all, these are the poverty-stricken and disenfranchised refugees from her own country who are now the focus of greater attention than ever before. The contrast could not be more striking: how could such an iconic figure of human rights be so reticent when it comes to defending an ethnic minority from her own country? It was only at the urging of reporters last week that a spokesman for her opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), addressed the issue, urging a solution that acknowledged their right to citizenship status in Myanmar. “If they are not accepted [as citizens], they cannot just be sent onto rivers. Can’t be pushed out to sea. They are humans. I just see them as humans who are entitled to human rights,” Nyan Win, spokesman for the National League for Democracy, said. But nothing has come directly from the party’s leader. Suu Kyi herself has previously justified her reluctance to speak out on the issue of the Rohingya, even when pressed to do so during Buddhist-Muslim clashes that swept through the country in 2013. She feared that any statement she made would only fuel tensions between the Buddhist majority and the Rohingya, who make up about a third of the population of Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh. Now, a surge of Buddhist nationalism and the complex ethnic political ramifications for a country that has just started a transition to democracy are taking their toll on her international image. [Aung San Suu Kyi]
• Dalai Lama urges Suu Kyi to speak out on Burma's persecuted Rohingya people
  The Burmese opposition leader has failed to act on the worsening Rohingya crisis, possibly fearful of alienating voters before elections later this year Agence France-Presse Thursday 28 May 2015 05.44 BST The Dalai Lama has urged fellow Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do more to help Burma’s persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority in a worsening migration crisis. Despite thousands of Rohingya fleeing on harrowing boat journeys to south-east Asia to escape poverty and discriminatory treatment by the country’s Buddhist majority, opposition leader Suu Kyi is yet to comment. Observers have attributed this to fears about alienating voters ahead of elections expected in November. [Aung San Suu Kyi] [Human rights]
• Why is Aung San Suu Kyi silent on the plight of the Rohingya people?
  Burma’s opposition leader appears to be cowed by her need to dampen ethnic tensions and win votes from an electorate in the thrall of Islamophobia Sara Perria Tuesday 19 May 2015 17.03 BST Last modified on Tuesday 19 May 2015 18.48 BST When thousands of Rohingya people from Burma were discovered floating in boats on the south-east Asian seas much of the world was understandably gripped by this unfolding human tragedy. Voices of anger were raised; something had to be done to end the suffering, to help those men, women and children in need. But what has surprised some is the silence of the Nobel peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. After all, these are the poverty-stricken and disenfranchised refugees from her own country who are now the focus of greater attention than ever before. [Aung San Suu Kyi] [Human rights]
• How the U.S. can arrest FIFA officials in Switzerland, explained
  By Philip Bump May 27 at 11:11 AM ? Lynch: FIFA officials ‘corrupted’ worldwide soccer(1:14) Swiss prosecutors opened criminal proceedings into FIFA's awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, after seven soccer officials were arrested pending extradition to the U.S. in a separate probe of "rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted"corruption. (AP) As many amateur humorists on social media noted Wednesday morning, there's a certain appropriateness to the United States having been the country to articulate and disrupt alleged corruption within the governing body of international soccer. There are few secrets so poorly kept that billions of people know them, but FIFA's sketchy practices were one of them. Leave it to the soccer-indifferent Yanks to finally point out that the emperor's clothes appear to be stolen. But from a practical standpoint, it's worth explaining how, exactly, the United States can point out a criminal conspiracy involving a foreign organization and then have people arrested in Europe. The idea of the United States as the world's police force is rarely understood to be so literal. To understand how the United States was able to flex its legal muscle across the Atlantic, we spoke by phone with Jessica Tillipman, assistant dean and lecturer at the George Washington University Law School. "You have U.S. statutes where there are extraterritorial provisions that can reach foreign citizens if they violate certain laws," Tillipman explained. For most of those laws, there has to be "a jurisdictional hook," she explained, an aspect of the crime that took place within the United States' jurisdiction: A phone call that included a person in the United States, for example, or a visit to the country, or, as has happened, an e-mail that passed through a server in the country. "There has to be some sort of touch point for the United States," Tillipman said. [Extraterritoriality] [Russia confrontation]
• Washington’s “Two Track Policy” to Latin America: Marines to Central America and Diplomats to Cuba
  By Prof. James Petras Global Research, May 28, 2015 Everyone, from political pundits in Washington to the Pope in Rome, including most journalists in the mass media and in the alternative press, have focused on the US moves toward ending the economic blockade of Cuba and gradually opening diplomatic relations. Talk is rife of a ‘major shift’ in US policy toward Latin America with the emphasis on diplomacyand reconciliation. Even most progressive writers and journals have ceased writing about US imperialism. However, there is mounting evidence that Washington’s negotiations with Cuba are merely one part of a two-track policy. There is clearly a major US build-up in Latin America, with increasing reliance on ‘military platforms’, designed to launch direct military interventions in strategic countries. Moreover, US policymakers are actively involved in promoting ‘client’ opposition parties, movements and personalities to destabilize independent governments and are intent on re-imposing US domination. In this essay we will start our discussion with the origins and unfolding of this ‘two track’ policy, its current manifestations, and projections into the future. We will conclude by evaluating the possibilities of re-establishing US imperial domination in the region. [Cuba deal] [US Latin America]
• Authoritarian Symps
  In the post-Cold War era, the right and even some on the left are playing a new game of "Who's your favorite dictator?" By John Feffer, May 27, 2015. The United States has been as implicated in false-flag operations as Russian President Putin was. (Photo: www.kremlin.ru / Wikimedia Commons) (Photo: www.kremlin.ru / Wikimedia Commons) In the bad old days of the Cold War, the left and the right used to play a nasty game called “Who’s Your Favorite Dictator?” Right-wing ideologues supported authoritarian leaders like Augusto Pinochet of Chile while left-wing ideologues rhapsodized over Communist leaders like Fidel Castro of Cuba. One side embraced the shah of Iran and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines as “our bastards” and the other side stood up for Brezhnev or Mao or Mugabe as “men of the people.” Many people on both sides of the political spectrum refused to play this game, particularly those who prioritized human rights over what passed for realpolitik. And it wasn’t exactly a balanced tug-of-war, since the right frequently had the U.S. government pulling from the rear. But the game continued nonetheless, with both sides tying themselves into knots trying to square their support of dictators with other professed values such as democracy, self-determination, and the like. [Liberal] [Cliché]
• Report: Western women are attracted to Islamic State for complex reasons
  Spanish officers lead a detained woman in Melilla in December. Spanish and Moroccan authorities said they have arrested seven in a campaign against suspected efforts to recruit women to go to Syria and Iraq to support the Islamic State. (Jesus Balsco de Avellaneda /Reuters) By Karla Adam May 28 at 4:29 PM ? LONDON — Western women in the Islamic State are playing a crucial role in disseminating propaganda and are not simply flocking to the region to become a “jihadi bride,” according to a new British research report. The report, published Thursday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, called the view that women are joining the Islamic State primarily to marry a foreign fighter “one-dimensional.” Women are drawn to the Islamic State by a number of factors, including a sense of isolation, a feeling that the international Muslim community is under threat, and a promise of sisterhood, which was especially important for teenage girls, the report said. “Much has been made of romantic notions in motivating people to go, but we know that reality is very different,” Melanie Smith, one of the report’s authors, said at a news conference in central London. [ISIS] [Gender]
• China Lobby Pre-WWII, Israel Lobby Pre-WWIII
  by David Swanson The history of catastrophically murderous and stupid warfare that the United States can memorialize on Memorial Day dates back to Day 1 and earlier, begins with the genocide of the native inhabitants of the land, the invasions of Canada, etc., and from that day to this too many deadly escapades to list. But one way in which the U.S. government gets itself into major crusades of mass killing is by hearing what it wants to hear. It even goes to the extent of allowing top U.S. government officials, sometimes briefly out the revolving door of public “service,” to work in the pay and service of foreign nations pushing war propaganda on the U.S. public. James Bradley’s new book is called The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in China. It’s well worth a read. For years leading up to World War II, the China Lobby in the United States persuaded the U.S. public, and many top U.S. officials, that the Chinese people all wanted to become Christian, that Chaing Kai-shek was their beloved democratic leader rather than the faltering fascist he was, that Mao Zedong was an insignificant nobody headed nowhere, that the United States could fund Chaing Kai-shek and he would use the funding to fight the Japanese, as opposed to using it to fight Mao, and that the United States could impose a crippling embargo on Japan without any Japanese military response.
• Will Iraq Follow Syria?
  Author: Viktor Titov Talks on May 21 in Moscow with the Iraqi delegation headed by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi were dedicated to Military-technical co-operation, oil, bilateral cooperation and Syria. The first and fourth points are very important to Baghdad, which for almost a year has been in a cruel and unsuccessful struggle with the ISIS. They need weapons and joint coordination with Syria in regards to ISIS. It is significant that this visit of the Iraqi government to Russia took place at a time when terrorists of ISIS seized the city of Ramadi 110 km from Baghdad. The success of the ISIS in Ramadi was a direct consequence of the massive defeat of government troops near the city of Fallujah. Iraqi forces planned to take the city through two flank attacks but fell into a well-planned ambush. As a result of losses (200 militants killed and 59 captured) Iraqi forces were forced to retreat. This provided ISIS with serious quantitative superiority and allowed to transfer part of the forces to Ramadi. This demonstrates not only the combat capability of this terrorist organisation but also the militarily incompetence of the Iraqi authorities. Not coincidentally, two months ago the USA decided to reduce arms supplies to Iraq as the Iraqi army, consisting mainly of Shiites, loses and almost without a fight gives up weapon warehouses to jihadists. At the same time in Washington it was noted that Haider al-Abadi, like its predecessor Nouri al-Maliki, does not want to enter into a coalition with the Sunni forces, which are ready to cooperate with the Shiites and are moderate in their ideology. As a result, the US has taken a de facto policy of preferential development of relations with the Sunnis. In so doing the Americans have made it clear that they are willing to accept in principle the creation of a Sunni enclave within the Iraqi state, or even go for the split of the country into a three part quasi-states: Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni. Especially as the breakaway Sunni regions of Iraq is also supported by Saudi Arabia, while Iran in principle is ready for the Shiite provinces to be divided in a separate state entity, with the support and orientation to Tehran. The following picture, which is obviously “drawn” by the Americans with the help of Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries and possibly Turkey, is to first overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria by force by May of this year, using a new armed opposition, and if necessary with external military intervention; then dividing Iraq into three ethno-religious enclaves, which is directed primarily against Iranian influence in the region; in the next phase – a regime change in Iran through a “colour revolution” or by fomenting inter-ethnic conflict there; and already at the end – the spread of American influence in the use of the opportunities of Turkey in the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is clear that the ultimate goal of the United States is to encircle Russia with hostile states. [Syria] [Iraq]
• Damascus and Baghdad May Soon Fall Into the Hands of ISIL
  Petr Lvov SI48922While analysts were trying to guess who was the weak link in Syria, where renewed opposition forces are preparing a new attack on Damascus, or Iraq, where Islamic State militants have recently captured a strategically important city in the western part of the country some 70 miles from Baghdad, ISIL decided to test its luck in both countries. They have not simply conquered Palmyra in the eastern part of Syria, but on May 22 they managed to establish full control of the entire border area between Syria and Iraq. Today, they control more than 53% of the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic. On May 23 Islamic States militants captured a gas complex near Homs facing no resistance whatsoever. This complex is only 55 miles away from the city of Tartus on the Mediterranean coast which is hosting a Russian naval base and 10 miles from the border with Lebanon. De facto, Syria is now cut in two, which may be the beginning of the final phase of the military operation to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, which will not be carried out by guerrilla unit from the north and the south, controlled by the anti-Syrian coalition of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, but ISIL militants instead. This will mark the end of Alawite rule in Syria, while the opposition created by the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will join the ranks of the Islamic States, which will strengthen this organization even more. [Syria] [Iraq]
• U.S. indicts FIFA officials in alleged $150 million bribery scandal
  The Post's Marissa Payne details the charges facing nine FIFA officials in a round of indictments from the U.S., and delves into why FIFA's president Sepp Blatter is not facing charges. (Nicki DeMarco and Marissa Payne/The Washington Post) By Brian Murphy and William Branigin May 27 at 4:50 PM ? The United States accused top executives of soccer’s world governing body Wednesday of enriching themselves in a 24-year corruption scheme, and Justice Department officials warned that a stunning succession of indictments and arrests was just the beginning of a probe aimed at cleaning up the sport. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said deep-rooted corruption in the governing body, known as FIFA, allowed members and related firms to collect millions of dollars through bribery and kickbacks “year after year, tournament after tournament.” In a news conference in New York, Lynch outlined U.S. complaints against international soccer’s powerful overseers hours after 14 people were publicly charged with corruption — and seven of them, all top FIFA officials, were arrested by Swiss authorities at a luxury hotel in Zurich. At least one suspect was shielded from journalists by a white sheet as he boarded a waiting car. Moments before the arrests, the Justice Department unsealed a 47-count indictment charging the 14 world soccer figures with racketeering, bribery, money laundering and fraud totaling more than $150 million. [Corruption] [Extraterritoriality] [Softpower]
• Spain's indignados could rule Barcelona and Madrid after local election success
  Anti-poverty activist Ada Colau elected as mayor of Barcelona, while battle for control of capital pits countess against former communist Ashifa Kassam Madrid Monday 25 May 2015 08.34 BST Last modified on Monday 25 May 2015 08.46 BST Spain’s indignados made the move from city squares to the halls of power on Sunday in municipal and regional elections that saw an anti-poverty activist elected as mayor of Barcelona and the ruling People’s party battered at the ballot box. Ada Colau, the 41-year-old anti-eviction activist who leads Barcelona En Comú, was elected mayor of the Catalan city. “It’s a victory for David over Goliath,” said Colau as news broke of the historical win. Barcelona's anti-poverty crusader leads race to be city's next mayor A grassroots movement of several leftist political parties, including Podemos, and thousands of citizens, Barcelona En Comú vowed to return decision-making in the city to the people, promising to do away with home evictions, increase public housing and redistribute the city’s wealth. Colau’s party won 11 of the 41 seatson the city council, meaning that she will need to form alliances in order to govern. In Madrid, the People’s party is not certain of hanging on to power in a city where it has dominated for two decades. The PP candidate, Esperanza Aguirre, 63, who is a countess by marriage, squeaked ahead in Sunday’s vote, winning 21 council seats in the city. Aguirre is seen as a hard case but she got a run for her money from “indignada” candidate Manuela Carmena, whose Podemos-backed coalition Ahora Madrid came a close second. Spanish regional elections will be critical test for broken two-party system The 71-year-old former judge and communist was enjoying her retirement last year when friends asked her to run for mayor of Madrid. She could now wrestle power from the PP if her party were to form an alliance with the Socialists. “The vote for change has won a majority,” she said. [Spain]
• Washington Confesses to Backing “Questionable Actors” in Syria
  Taking advantage of a Syrian military stretched thin to protect everywhere at the same time, high concentrations of well-coordinated Al Qaeda forces, based in NATO-member Turkey as well as in US-allies Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have attacked across several fronts. The tactical and strategic gains are minimal compared to the initial stages of the West’s proxy war against Syria beginning in 2011, but the Western media is intentionally fanning the flames of hysteria specifically to break both support for Syria from abroad, and fracture resistance from within. This latest attempt to overwhelm the Syrian people, its government, and its armed forces comes with several shocking revelations. Previously, veteran award-winning journalists foretold the coming conflict in Syria, warning how the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were openly planning to use Al Qaeda as a proxy force to overthrow Syria first, then Iran and how it would unfold into a cataclysmic sectarian war. There were also signed and dated policy papers advocating the use of terrorism and the provocation of war to directly target Iran after Syria and Hezbollah had been sufficiently weakened. However, now, there is a US Department of Defense (DoD) document confirming without doubt that the so-called “Syrian opposition” is Al Qaeda, including the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS), and that the opposition’s supporters – the West, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar – specifically sought to establish safe havens in Iraq and eastern Syria, precisely where ISIS is now based. America is Behind ISIS Looking at maps recently produced by the Western media and Western policy think tanks, it can be seen clearly that Al Qaeda/ISIS is streaming out of NATO and US ally territory, forming up in these two safe havens, and aimed both at the Syrian government and Iran. Despite the Western narrative of “moderate rebels,” the West itself has been increasingly admitting that such “rebels” do not exist. They also admit that to establish “stability,” they must begin openly working with “questionable actors.” Michael O’Hanlon, a signatory of the Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia?” policy paper calling for terrorism and intentional provocations to overthrow the government of Iran, stated in a USA Today op-ed titled, “Michael O’Hanlon: American boots needed in Syria,” that: In the short term, this strategy requires an acceleration of our train and equip program for Syrian opposition fighters — including perhaps a bit less puritanical approach in who we are willing to work with. Most Syrian moderates are tired of waiting for us, or already dead given our delays in helping them. So we may have to tolerate working with some questionable actors to get things started. “Working with some questionable actors,” is O’Hanlon and US policymakers’ way of saying they intend to provide open material support to terrorists, including Al Qaeda, as they’ve been covertly doing all along, and as was warned against as early as 2007 by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” which explicitly stated (emphasis added): First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/05/25/washington-confesses-to-backing-questionable-actors-in-syria/ [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• Americans gave their lives to defeat the Nazis. The Dutch have never forgotten.
  Dutch honor Americans’ graves in display of gratitude By Ian Shapira May 24 at 7:39 PM ? MARGRATEN, Netherlands — They haven’t forgotten. For 70 years, the Dutch have come to a verdant U.S. cemetery outside this small village to care for the graves of Americans killed in World War II. On Sunday, they came again, bearing Memorial Day bouquets for men and women they never knew, but whose 8,300 headstones the people of the Netherlands have adopted as their own. For the American relatives of the fallen, it was an outpouring of gratitude almost as stunning as the rows of white marble crosses and Jewish Stars of David at the Netherlands American Cemetery. Each grave has been adopted by a Dutch or, in some cases, Belgian or German family, as well as local schools, companies and military organizations. More than 100 people are on a waiting list to become caretakers. [WWII]
• Top U.S. Generals: American Allies Support ISIS
  Posted on February 18, 2015 by Washingtons Blog Politicians Agree America’s top military official – the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey – and Senator Lindsey Graham admitted last September in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that America’s closest allies are supporting ISIS: SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA, MEMBER OF ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE: Do you know any major Arab ally that embraces ISIL? GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: I know major Arab allies who fund them. GRAHAM: Yeah, but do they embrace them? They fund them because the Free Syrian Army couldn’t fight Assad. They were trying to beat Assad. I think they realized the folly of their ways. 4-Star General Wesley Clark – who served as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO – agrees: And Turkish politicians say that the Turkish government is also supporting ISIS. Some also allege that Israel is directly or indirectly supporting ISIS. And see this. And the U.S. itself has been taking actions that – intentionally or not – appear to be strengthening ISIS. Maybe a good start for defeating ISIS would be to stop funding them and their BFFs? [ISIS] [Outsourcing]
• Mainstream U.S. Writers Call for Supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS
  Posted on March 23, 2015 by Washingtons Blog At Best, An Insanely Stupid Policy Sure, America’s closest allies support ISIS. And admittedly, the U.S. has repeatedly fumbled, so that arms got into Al Qaeda and ISIS’ hands. Here, here, here, here, here and here. And poor U.S. policies have undoubtedly created more terrorists then they’ve neutralized. And it’s true that the U.S. knowingly supported Al Qaeda in Libya in order to topple Gaddaffi. But that was on the QT. But now – for the first time – mainstream flacks are publicly calling for the United States of America to support ISIS and Al Qaeda … [Outsourcing]
• The Head of the GRU accuses US and allies of creating the transnational “Islamist” terrorist network
  May 22, 2015 Dear friends, I am posting today the speech of Colonel-General Igor Sergun, Head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia. To say that his man, or the GRU is secretive would be an understatement. Almost all the information publicly available about Sergun is in the short biography (researched by Scott) which I have placed at the end of this post. As a general rule, the GRU never makes a public statement, nor does the person heading it. It is thus interesting that on one of the very few occasions were General Sergun agreed to speak in public, he chose to focus on the risks of the so-called “Islamic” extremism and that in a relatively short presentation, he made four reference to the fact that these “Islamic” terrorists are basically a creature of the West. One might be tempted to say “nothing new here, we all know that” – but that would be missing the point. The point is that the head of Russian military intelligence is openly declaring that the so-called “Islamic terrorism” is not an original or indigenous phenomenon, but an instrument in the toolset of western imperialism which is used to subvert the countries which dare oppose the worldwide hegemony of the AngloZionist Empire. The Saker ——- Translated by Shed THESES OF THE PRESENTATION of the Head of the Main Directorate of the General Staff at the IV Moscow Conference on International Security devoted to: “Global Security: Radical Transformation or Creation of New Rules for the Game?” (April 16, 2015 ?.) The subject: “Hot Points” of the Global Fight with Terrorism “ Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, One of the most dangerous challenges of the current times is presented by the international terrorism, which is rapidly acquiring a political nature and is being turned into a real force, striving to come to power in certain countries. We are witnessing a steady trend towards globalization of activities of extremist organizations. This includes a wide geographic spread, strengthening of the interaction between previously disparate groups, as well as swift adaptation to situational changes. Among international terrorist organizations, the role of radical Islamists is increasing. Their leaders are developing collaboration and seek to create zones of instability, which include not only countries but entire regions.
  While flirting with the extremists, some Western countries seem to be sure that the so-called policy of controlled chaos in far-away regions shall not result in tragic consequences, at least, in the middle term, but I think such opinion is unsound. It is no secret that it was at the instigation of Western ‘partners’ that since the 1980s, Islamic extremism was rapidly gaining momentum. To counter the Soviet troops in Afghanistan, there was heavy arming – with the funds from the United Stated of America and other NATO states – of scattered groups of Jihadists and Mujahideen who subsequently merged into major terrorist groups and movements. With financial and military assistance from Washington and its allies, rendered in order to eliminate the regime in Syria, unwanted by the West, the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ and ‘Jabhat al-Nusra’ were created. Military intervention in Libya by the Alliance entailed similar results. Availability of the stable sources of financing for the extremists is the reason for a serious concern. The most reliable cash-flow channels include various non-governmental organizations and foundations. For example, in the states of the Arabian Peninsula there are about 200 such organizations. A major source of income is the control over drugs production and trafficking. This activity brings the Islamists of the Middle East and Central Asia up to US $500 million a year. It happens quite often that actions of Washington and the West in general in various regions of the world contribute to creation of serious problems, including drug trafficking, religious extremism and terrorism, after which Washington heroically mobilizes the international community to neutralize the problems. [Controlled chaos] [Outsourcing]
• “The Islamic State” (ISIS) is Made in America: The Pentagon had Planned the Fall of Mosul and Ramadi in 2012
  By Steve Chovanec Global Research, May 23, 2015 Underground Reports The US-led coalition now attempting to appear as though they are fighting ISIS knowingly aided the rise of the Islamic State for the purpose of isolating Assad and combating expanding Iranian influence. At least as far back as August of 2012 the very same anti-IS coalition knew full well that the precursors to ISIS, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), dominated the Syrian opposition along with other al-Qaeda affiliated groups. They knew that AQI was declining during 2009-10, yet was resurrected due to the insurgency in Syria. In spite of this, the US and her allies continued to provide aid, funding, weaponry, and training to these same extremist groups, specifically seeing their rise (and the horrendous crimes against humanity that they partook in) as a strategic asset for their geopolitical aims. The rise of the Islamic State was not only predicted, it was the expressed aim of the powers sponsoring the sectarian Syrian opposition for the purpose of opposing Assad and containing Iran. Despite the fact that the rise of an Islamic State was predicted to have dire consequences for Iraq, including the fall of Mosul and Ramadi, support from the US-coalition to the Syrian opposition continued to manifest, leading to the conclusion that this was either the expressed intent, or an accepted byproduct of these policy decisions.
  Similarly, the more recent fall of Ramadi is equally as dubious. The US-led coalition, which had promised to defend Iraq against the Islamic State, basically allowed Ramadi to fall, conducting only 7 airstrikes during the battle, which is such a low number as to be completely irrelevant. The remarkably weak excuse was that a great sandstorm had prevented them from conducting regular attacks. This despite the fact that the next day ISIS was holding victory parades among perfectly clear skies, the militants assembling in massive rows down the wide open street.With no “sandstorm” excuse, airstrikes could have easily wiped out entire factions of the extremists the US is supposedly fighting, yet none occurred. Why? Had this too been desired by the US-coalition in order to “isolate” the “strategic depth of Shia expansion” in Iraq? [Outsourcing]
• Washington Blows Itself Up With Its Own Bomb
  F. William Engdahl
  34275444These are sad days in Washington and Wall Street. The once unchallenged sole Superpower at the collapse of the Soviet Union some quarter century ago is losing its global influence so rapidly that most would not have predicted anything comparable six months ago. The key actor who has catalyzed a global defiance of Washington as Sole Superpower is Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President. This is the real background to the surprise visit of US Secretary of State John Kerry to Sochi to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then a four hour talk with “Satan” himself, Putin. Far from a “reset” try, Washington’s hapless geopolitical strategists are desperately trying to find a better way to bring the Russian Bear to her knees. A flash back to December 2014 is instructive to understand why the US Secretary of State holds out an apparent olive branch to Russia’s Putin at this juncture. At that point, Washington appeared about to pin Russia to the ground, with its precision targeted financial sanctions and its deal with Saudi Arabia to collapse oil prices. In mid-December the Ruble was in free fall against the dollar. Oil prices were similarly plummeting down to $45 a barrel from $107 only six months earlier. As Russia is strongly dependent on oil and gas export revenues for its state finances, and Russian companies held huge dollar debt obligations abroad, the situation was bleak as seen from inside the Kremlin. Here fate, as it were, intervened in an unexpected way (at least by the USA architects of the financial warfare and oil collapse strategy). Not only was John Kerry’s September 2014 deal with ailing Saudi King Abdullah delivering heavy pain in the Russian finances. It was also threatening an explosion of an estimated $500 billion in high-risk-high-yield “junk” bonds, debt that the US shale oil industry had taken on from Wall Street banks in the past five years to finance the much-touted US shale oil revolution that briefly propelled the USA ahead of Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. US strategy backfires What Kerry missed in his clever Saudi horse trading was the sly double agenda of the Saudi royals. They had earlier made clear they did not at all want their role as world premier oil producer and market king to be undercut by an upstart US shale oil industry. They were happy to give Russia and also Iran pain. But their central aim was to kill the US shale oil rivals. Their shale projects were calculated when oil was $100 a barrel, less than a year ago. Their minimum price of oil to avoid bankruptcy in most cases was $65 a barrel to $80 a barrel. Shale oil extraction is unconventional and more costly than conventional oil. Douglas-Westwood, an energy advisory firm, estimates that nearly half of the US oil projects under development need oil prices greater than $120 per barrel in order to achieve positive cash flow. By end of December a chain-reaction series of shale oil bankruptcies threatened to detonate a new financial tsunami at a time the carnage from the 2007-2008 securitization financial crisis was anything but resolved. Even a few high-profile shale oil junk bond defaults would have triggered a domino-style panic in the US $1.9 trillion junk bond debt market, no doubt setting off a new financial meltdown that the over-stressed US Government and Federal Reserve could scarcely handle. It could have threatened the end of the US dollar as global reserve currency. Suddenly in the first days of January, IMF head Lagarde was praising Russia’s central bank for its “successful” handling of the ruble crisis. The US Treasury Office of Financial Terrorism quietly eased off on further attacks on Russia while the Obama Administration pretended it was “World War III as usual” against Putin. The US oil strategy had inflicted far more damage on the US than on Russia. USA Russia policy failure Not only that. Washington’s brilliant total war strategy against Russia initiated with the November 2013 Kiev EuroMaidan coup d’etat has become a manifest, utter failure that is creating the worst imaginable geopolitical nightmare for Washington. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/05/24/washington-blows-itself-up-with-its-own-bomb/ [US global strategy] [Russia confrontation] [Saudi Arabia]
• The Destabilization of Macedonia? Greater Albania and the Process of “Kosovization”
  By Vladislav B. Sotirovic Global Research, May 21, 2015 The last open armed conflict in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia – FYROM (former Socialist Republic of Macedonia as one of six federal republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) is just an expected continuation of constant tensions between the ethnic Albanians and the Macedonian Slavs during the last quarter of century.[i] However, these tensions are time to time transformed into the open armed conflicts of the Albanian extremists, usually coming from Kosovo, with the Macedonian security forces. The most notable conflict incidents in Macedonia after the Kosovo War in 1998-1999, when the Kosovo Albanians started to export Kosovo revolution to Macedonia, up to 2015 are recorded in 2001 that was ended by the EU/USA sponsored Ohrid Agreement, in 2007 when on November 7th, Macedonian special police forces liquidated six armed Albanians from the neighboring Kosovo on the Shara Mt. in the North Macedonia – the region known from 1991 as the most nationalistic and separatist Albanian area at the Balkans after Kosovo and in 2008 after the parliamentary elections in June. In the 2007 case, for instance, police found a large amount of hidden arms and ammunition on one location at the Shara Mt. (brought from Kosovo). The Balkan political analysts are kin to speculate that what is happening in Macedonia after 1999 is just a continuation of the export of the 1998-99 Kosovo revolution. 1998-1999. It basically means that Macedonia is scheduled by the Kosovo Albanian “revolutionaries” (i.e., by the political leadership of the Kosovo Liberation Army-the KLA) to be the next Balkan country which will experience a “Kosovo syndrome” that was successfully finished by the proclamation of the Kosovo independence in February 2008. It is as well as assumed that Montenegro is going to be the third Balkan country infected by the process of Kosovization. [Balkans]
• How the Saudis Wag the Dog
  by Andrew Levine American diplomacy favors (majority) white, English-speaking countries (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and non-Hispanic European settler states (Canada, Australia and New Zealand again, but also Apartheid South Africa and, of course, Israel). South Africa eventually fell out of favor, thanks in part to boycott, divestment and sanctions efforts in Western countries. Similar efforts now underway directed towards Israel are beginning to change public opinion too; though elite opinion, in the United States and the other settler states especially, has, so far, hardly budged. Thanks to its lobby and its strategic location, Israel is still, for America, the most favored nation of all. Western European countries are also favored, though to a lesser extent – thanks, again, to cultural affinities and historical ties. Those that sent large numbers of emigrants to North America generally have a leg up. France didn’t send many emigrants, but it is also favored, at least some of the time, for philosophical and historical affinities dating back to the American and French Revolutions. With Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies, there are no deep or longstanding cultural and historical ties; quite the contrary. Nevertheless, those nations, Saudi Arabia especially, receive favored treatment too. [Saudi Arabia] [Client]
• How the Uncertain Outcome of Nuclear Talks With Iran Has Taken Its Economy Hostage
  by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh I recently returned from a six-week trip to Iran. While the primary purpose of my trip was to visit family and friends, I also made some general enquiries into the state of the country’s stagnant economy. These included informal discussions with various strata of economic agents or market players: manufacturers, bankers, shopkeepers, miners, farmers, livestock breeders, workers, teachers, and more. Sadly, most of these economic actors painted pictures of pessimism and distrust of the country’s economic conditions. The economy is mired in a protracted stagflation, with no government plan or macroeconomic policy for recovery. While the Rouhani administration boasts of having contained or slowed down the inflation, the Iranian people do not cherish that tempering of inflation as it has come about at the expense of deepened recession; that is, at the expense of heightened unemployment and weakened purchasing power. As a retired school teacher, who now works as a taxi driver, put it, lowering inflation by worsening recession is no cause for celebration (paraphrased). And what is the major culprit behind the depressing recession? The common answer of the overwhelming majority of the economic actors I spoke with was, in a nutshell, uncertainty—uncertainty of the constantly shifting outcome of the unending nuclear negotiations. There is a clear consensus that while onerous economic sanctions against Iran are obviously damaging, the perilous effects of the protracted and uncertain outcome of the negotiations are even more devastating. Equally devastating is the current administration’s neoliberal policies of austerity economics, which have further aggravated the recession by cutting social/public spending while not offering any industrial or developmental program or planning. [Iran] [Iran Deal] [Sanctions] [Neoliberalism] [Rouhani]
• Secret Intel Reports on Syria & Iraq Revealed
  by Rick Sterling Almost three years ago the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the U.S. Dept of Defense accurately characterized the conflict in Syria and predicted the emergence of the Islamic State. This stunning revelation has emerged as a result of a Freedom of Information Act law suit filed by Judicial Watch in connection with the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The heavily redacted August 2012 seven page intelligence report reveals the following: 1. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) confirmed the sectarian core of the Syrian insurgency. It says “EVENTS ARE TAKING A CLEAR SECTARIAN DIRECTION. THE SALAFIST, THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, AND AQI ARE THE MAJOR FORCES DRIVING THE INSURGENCY IN SYRIA.” (capitalization in the report; AQI = Al Queda in Iraq) This analysis is in sharp contrast with western media and political elite which has characterized the “Syrian revolution” as being driven by protestors in a quest for “democracy and freedom”. [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• State Dept. releases Clinton e-mails on Libya and Benghazi attacks
  By Karen DeYoung May 22 at 12:43 PM ? The State Department on Friday released nearly 900 pages of e-mails on Libya and the Benghazi attacks from the private account Hillary Rodham Clinton used while she was secretary of state. The messages have been turned over to a select House committee investigating the Sept. 11-12, 2012, attacks on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, in which the ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed. Few of the e-mails deal directly with events leading up to the attacks or their aftermath, according to those who have seen them. Many contain administrative details, press accounts, speech drafts and other information exchanged between Clinton and her senior aides. But the messages, some of which were published this week by the New York Times, capture the concerns of Clinton and other officials about the political chaos that engulfed Libya during and following the 2011 NATO air attacks that facilitated the overthrow and death of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi later that year. [Libya] [Hillary Clinton]
• The U.S. Is About to Change the Way It Calculates GDP
  Victoria Stilwell 3:44 AM NZST May 23, 2015 The way some parts of U.S. gross domestic product are calculated are about to change in the wake of the debate over persistently depressed first-quarter growth. In a blog post published Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis listed a series of alterations it will make in seasonally adjusting data used to calculate economic growth. The changes will be implemented with the release of the initial second-quarter GDP estimate on July 30, the BEA said. Although the agency adjusts its figures for seasonal variations, growth in any given first quarter still tends to be weaker than in the remaining three, economists have found, a sign there may be some bias in the data. It’s a phenomenon economists call “residual seasonality.” “BEA is aware of the potential for residual seasonality in GDP and its components, and the agency is looking for ways to minimize this phenomenon,” the division said in the post. More information will be available in a BEA Survey of Current Business report scheduled for mid-June publication. [GDP] [Statistics]
• Forbes Named “Legislator of the Year” by the Virginia Chapter of the Military Officers Association of America
  Washington, D.C. – The Virginia Council of Chapters of the Military Officers Association of America (VCOC MOAA) announced that Congressman J. Randy Forbes (VA-04) has been named the “Legislator of the Year.” The award recognizes Members of Congress for “exemplary support of the national security of the United States and the current and past members of the Armed Forces and their families.” “The men and women serving in our armed forces are not only America’s finest, but also the reason this country is free,” said Congressman Forbes. “I am both honored and humbled to receive this award; I have no higher priority in Congress than continuing my work to defend our defenders, support our military families, care for our veterans, and properly equip our heroes on the frontlines.” [MISCOM] [China confrontation]
• U.S. Hosts Arms Bazaar at White House Arab Summit
  By Thalif Deen Global Research, May 18, 2015 IPS News President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry meet with GCC delegation at Camp David. (Photo: AP) When the United States sells billions of dollars in sophisticated arms to Arab nations, they are conditioned on two key factors: no weapons with a qualitative military edge over Israel will ever be sold to the Arabs, nor will they receive any weapons that are not an integral part of the U.S. arsenal. But against the backdrop of a White House summit meeting of Arab leaders at Camp David this week, the administration of President Barack Obama confessed it has dispensed with rule number two. According to Colin Kahl, national security advisor to Vice-President Joe Biden, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) flies the most advanced U.S.-made F-16 fighter planes in the world. “They’re more advanced than the ones our Air Force flies,” he told reporters at a U.S. State Department briefing early this week, without going into specifics. The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia – which participated in the summit were, not surprisingly, promised more weapons, increased military training and a pledge to defend them against missile strikes, maritime threats and cyberattacks from Iran. An equally important reason for beefing up security in the region is to thwart any attacks on GCC countries by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). [Arms sales] [Pretext]
• Judicial Watch: Defense, State Department Documents Reveal Obama Administration Knew that al Qaeda Terrorists Had Planned Benghazi Attack 10 Days in Advance
  MAY 18, 2015 Administration knew three months before the November 2012 presidential election of ISIS plans to establish a caliphate in Iraq Administration knew of arms being shipped from Benghazi to Syria (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained more than 100 pages of previously classified “Secret” documents from the Department of Defense (DOD)and the Department of State revealing that DOD almost immediately reported that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was committed by the al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood-linked “Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman” (BCOAR), and had been planned at least 10 days in advance. Rahman is known as the Blind Sheikh, and is serving life in prison for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist acts. The new documents also provide the first official confirmation that shows the U.S. government was aware of arms shipments from Benghazi to Syria. The documents also include an August 2012 analysis warning of the rise of ISIS and the predicted failure of the Obama policy of regime change in Syria. The documents were released in response to a court order in accordance with a May 15, 2014, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against both the DOD and State Department seeking communications between the two agencies and congressional leaders “on matters related to the activities of any agency or department of the U.S. government at the Special Mission Compound and/or classified annex in Benghazi.”
  The State Department has yet to turn over any documents from the secret email accounts of Hillary Clinton and other top State Department officials. “These documents are jaw-dropping. No wonder we had to file more FOIA lawsuits and wait over two years for them. If the American people had known the truth – that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other top administration officials knew that the Benghazi attack was an al-Qaeda terrorist attack from the get-go – and yet lied and covered this fact up – Mitt Romney might very well be president. And why would the Obama administration continue to support the Muslim Brotherhood even after it knew it was tied to the Benghazi terrorist attack and to al Qaeda? These documents also point to connection between the collapse in Libya and the ISIS war – and confirm that the U.S. knew remarkable details about the transfer of arms from Benghazi to Syrian jihadists,” stated Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch president. “These documents show that the Benghazi cover-up has continued for years and is only unraveling through our independent lawsuits. The Benghazi scandal just got a whole lot worse for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” [Libya] [US Syria policy] Outsourcing] [Blowback]
• U.S. and Cuba Nearing Deal to Fully Restore Diplomatic Ties
  By Randal C. Archibold May 21, 2015 MEXICO CITY — The United States and Cuba are closer than ever to reaching an agreement to fully restore diplomatic relations and reopen embassies, officials in both countries say, as negotiators prepare to meet Thursday in Washington for another round of talks to iron out remaining details and discuss possible dates. The move toward full diplomatic relations broken decades ago during the Cold War has been seen as a key step toward ending hostilities and normalizing ties with a historic opponent that once agreed to allow Soviet nuclear missiles on its soil and repelled an invasion by American-backed insurgents. Yet progress toward full diplomatic relations has not gone as swiftly as initially hoped in December, when President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba first committed to restoring ties in a surprise announcement. Now, with a number of obstacles out of the way or close to it, particularly for the Cubans, the talks have reached the most optimistic point after four rounds of conversations in Havana and Washington. [Cuba deal]
• Writing history before it happens
  Tom Engelhardt 19 May 2015 Nine surefire future headlines from a bizarro American world. It’s commonplace to speak of “the fog of war,” of what can’t be known in the midst of battle, of the inability of both generals and foot soldiers to foresee developments once fighting is underway. And yet that fog is nothing compared to the murky nature of the future itself, which, you might say, is the fog of human life. As Tomorrowlands at world fairs remind us, despite a human penchant for peering ahead and predicting what our lives will be like, we’re regularly surprised when the future arrives. Remind me who, even among opponents and critics of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, ever imagined that the decision to take out Saddam Hussein’s regime and occupy the country would lead to a terror caliphate in significant parts of Iraq and Syria that would conquer social media and spread like wildfire. And yet, don’t think that the future is completely unpredictable either. In fact, there’s a certain repetition factor in our increasingly bizarro American world that lends predictability to that future. In case you hadn't noticed, a range of US military, intelligence, and national security measures that never have the effects imagined in Washington are nonetheless treasured there. As a result, they are applied again and again, usually with remarkably similar results. The upside of this is that it offers all of us the chance to be seers (or Cassandras). So, with an emphasis on the US national security state and its follies, here are my top nine American repeat headlines, each a surefire news story guaranteed to appear sometime, possibly many times, between June 2015 and the unknown future. [Imperialism] [Exceptionalism] [UAV]
• The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Deeply Flawed Partnership
  The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue. 20, No. 1, May 13, 2015 Mel Gurtov The American people have become used to government trickery in foreign affairs—wars and interventions based on lies and falsified evidence, “national security” used to justify the whittling away of privacy, classification of documents to hide embarrassing disclosures, massaging of budget figures to mask outrageous spending on arms, and demands for new weapons when already in possession of an unmatched conventional and nuclear arsenal. Now comes trickery in a different domain: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has substantial bipartisan support and strong presidential endorsement. Eleven countries1 are awaiting the outcome in Congress as President Obama seeks approval to put the TPP on a “fast track,” meaning skipping hearings, public input, and amendments and going directly to an up-or-down vote after 90 days to review. Once passed, the TPP will do for US corporations operating in Asia what the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) did for them in Canada and Mexico—provide new incentives to send jobs abroad, increase corporate earnings, and downgrade protections of the environment and workers at home as well as abroad. Who Benefits? The TPP is partnership alright, but not the sort that serves the human interest. Instead of enhancing partnership with working people who need higher wages and job training, and with grassroots organizations that are fighting to protect our natural environments, the TPP will promote the interests of trading and investment firms in the cutthroat competition that has come to define globalization. It’s all about providing a “level playing field” for US multinational corporations, as Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel recently explained.2 President Obama, who once resoundingly criticized all such mega-trade agreements, is now its biggest booster, proving once again that money talks just as loudly with liberal as with conservative leaders. [TPP] [China confrontation] [Offshoring]
• The Accidental Operative
  by Camelia Fard and James Ridgeway Here is the shocking story of how the niece of former CIA director Richard Helms became an intermediary for the Taliban in Afghanistan and relayed an offer by the Taliban to the US government for the surrender of Osama Bin Laden months before the 9/11 attacks. The offer was refused. This story, written by my friend and Cockburn’s old partner at the Village Voice, James Ridgeway, and Camelia Fard, was published in the Voice on June 12, 2001, and promptly vanished from the cultural memory after 9/11. In the wake of Seymour Hersh’s recent revelations, Ridgeway asked me to re-run the article on CounterPunch. I was very happy to oblige him. It’s an astounding read. –Jeffrey St. Clair Washington, DC, June 6, 2001. On this muggy afternoon, a group of neatly attired men and a handful of women gather in a conference room at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The guest list includes officials from the furthest corners of the world—Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Turkey—and reps from the World Bank, the Uzbekistan chamber of commerce, the oil industry, and the Russian news agency Tass, along with various individuals identified only as “U.S. Government,” which in times past was code for spook. At hand is a low-profile briefing on international narcotics by a top State Department official, who has recently returned from a United Nations trip to inspect the poppy fields of Afghanistan, source of 80 percent of the world’s opium and target of a recent eradication campaign by the fundamentalist Taliban. The lecture begins as every other in Washington: The speaker politely informs the crowd he has nothing to do with policymaking. And, by the way, it’s all off the record. Lecture over, the chairman asks for questions. One man after another rises to describe his own observations while in the foreign service. The moderator pauses, looks to the back of the room, and says in a scarcely audible voice: “Laili Helms.” The room goes silent. For the people gathered here, the name brings back memories of Richard Helms, director of the CIA during the tumultuous 1960s, the era of Cuba and Vietnam. After he was accused of destroying most of the agency’s secret documents detailing its own crimes, Helms left the CIA and became President Ford’s ambassador to Iran. There, he trained the repressive secret police, inadvertently sparking the revolution that soon toppled his friend the Shah. [Taliban] [Rebuff]
• Will West Unleash New War in Libya?
  Vladislav Gulevich | 17.05.2015 | 12:36 In 2011 the aviation of France and Great Britain bombed Libya. Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of the country, was brutally murdered. Now Europe is considering plans to intervene in Libya again. On May 13, the Guardian published an article devoted to a European plan for a military campaign to smash the migrant smuggling networks operating out of Libya. The scenario envisages the use of ground forces. The 19-page strategy paper for the mission, obtained by the Guardian, focuses on an air and naval campaign in the Mediterranean and in Libyan territorial waters. But it adds that ground operations in Libya may also be needed to destroy the smugglers’ vessels and assets, such as fuel dumps. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s chief foreign and security policy coordinator, reiterated that position on May 13. «We are not planning in any possible way a military intervention in Libya,» she said. According to her, establishing control over the territorial waters of Libya is enough to destroy the smugglers’ infrastructure. But the assurances that there will be no boots on the ground sound unconvincing. It’s clear that the West is serious about what it plans to do. For instance, Great Britain is going to send amphibious transport dock HMS Bulwark, the flagship of Royal Navy, to fight small smuggler’s boats. Air and naval forces are to bear the brunt of the mission. The operations conducted ashore by special operations forces teams are not excluded, no matter the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy says otherwise. Media outlets started to examine the public opinion. The plan obtained by the Guardian says ground operations in Libya may be needed. EU governments have still to discuss and decide on the planning document. A joint session of EU foreign and defence ministers is to decide on the mission on May 18, followed the next day by a meeting of defence chiefs from European Union countries. The military package would then need to be given a green light by heads of government at an EU summit slated for June. Ten European Union members have already expressed their approval, including Great Britain, France, Spain and Italy. According to Ibrahim Dabbashi, Libya's United Nations ambassador, his government has been left out of the urgent international discussion of the migrant crisis. This is the legacy of colonial past. Europeans still view Libya as a colony. [Libya]
• Migrant crisis: EU plan to strike Libya networks could include ground forces
  Exclusive: Strategy paper for the mission focuses on air and naval campaign, but adds that ‘presence ashore’ might be needed to destroy smugglers’ assets Ian Traynor in Brussels Wednesday 13 May 2015 18.04 BST Last modified on Thursday 14 May 2015 00.34 BST European plans for a military campaign to smash the migrant smuggling networks operating out of Libya include options for ground forces on Libyan territory. The 19-page strategy paper for the mission, obtained by the Guardian, focuses on an air and naval campaign in the Mediterranean and in Libyan territorial waters, subject to United Nations blessing. But it adds that ground operations in Libya may also be needed to destroy the smugglers’ vessels and assets, such as fuel dumps. “A presence ashore might be envisaged if agreement was reached with relevant authorities,” says the paper. “The operation would require a broad range of air, maritime and land capabilities. These could include: intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; boarding teams; patrol units (air and maritime); amphibious assets; destruction air, land and sea, including special forces units.” [Libya] [Migration]
• Republican Presidential Prospects Target Extremists, Clinton
  Republicans speaking at a state party dinner in Iowa called for a more confrontational stance toward Iran May 17, 2015 1:02 a.m. ET DES MOINES, Iowa—Nearly a dozen Republican prospects for the 2016 presidential race lined up to appeal to party members in the early voting state of Iowa, agreeing to get tough with America’s enemies but differing on how to do it.
  Most who spoke at a state party dinner Saturday called for a more confrontational stance toward Iran, one of four countries on the U.S. list of nations accused of repeatedly supporting global terrorism. Former Sen. Rick Santorum’s answer was to “load up our bombers and bomb them back to the seventh century.” [Republicans] [USelection16]
• U.S. wakes up to New (Silk) World Order
  Author: Pepe Escobar May 15, 2015 The real Masters of the Universe in the U.S. are no weathermen, but arguably they’re starting to feel which way the wind is blowing. History may signal it all started with this week’s trip to Sochi, led by their paperboy, Secretary of State John Kerry, who met with Foreign Minister Lavrov and then with President Putin. Arguably, a visual reminder clicked the bells for the real Masters of the Universe; the PLA marching in Red Square on Victory Day side by side with the Russian military. Even under the Stalin-Mao alliance Chinese troops did not march in Red Square. As a screamer, that rivals the Russian S-500 missile systems. Adults in the Beltway may have done the math and concluded Moscow and Beijing may be on the verge of signing secret military protocols as in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The new game of musical chairs is surely bound to leave Eurasian-obsessed Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski apoplectic. And suddenly, instead of relentless demonization and NATO spewing out “Russian aggression!” every ten seconds, we have Kerry saying that respecting Minsk-2 is the only way out in Ukraine, and that he would strongly caution vassal Poroshenko against his bragging on bombing Donetsk airport and environs back into Ukrainian “democracy”. [Russia confrontation] [Dialback] [China Russia]
• Congress sends mixed messages on toppling Assad
  WASHINGTON — Congress just can't decide what to do about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The House passed a defense bill with contradictory guidance for assistance to the Syrian rebels. Author Julian Pecquet Posted May 15, 2015 The House passed an annual defense bill on May 15 that instructs the Pentagon to ensure that Syrian rebels trained by the United States have the ability to defend themselves against Assad's forces. Another provision, however, seeks to blacklist vetted units and individuals from further US assistance if they fight the Syrian army instead of the Islamic State (IS). "We [have] spent literally trillions of dollars in the Middle East in what many would describe as wars of choice and nation building," said Rep. Nick Nolan, D-Minn., who sponsored the provision to penalize Syrian rebels who have "misused" US military assistance. "All too often, the moneys have made a mockery of our good intentions and ended up in the wrong hands and in many cases used against us. "The underlying legislation requires the Department of Defense ... to give us a list of who money has been given to in Syria and Iraq to fight [IS]. My legislation says that when they find evidence that those funds have been misused by anyone of those parties, they can no longer be recipients of our funding." A separate provision from Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, however, demands that the Pentagon certify to Congress that US-backed rebels are getting enough help to be "able to defend themselves from attacks by [IS] and government of Syria forces." Thornberry's amendment also requires that the Pentagon issue a "comprehensive strategy for Syria and Iraq" that includes a "description of United States policy and strategy for addressing the Assad regime in Syria and the post-Assad regime in Syria." [US Syria policy] [Strategic incoherence] [Outsourcing]
• Post-Britain: Does it matter?
  Immanuel Wallerstein. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the United Provinces (more or less today's Netherlands) was the hegemonic power of the capitalist world-system, which was then geographically smaller. Within this world-system, it was the wealthiest country with the most efficient industrial enterprises. It dominated the trade and finances of this world-system. It had the strongest military. Then it started on its decline as a hegemonic power. And one by one it lost each of these advantages. To salvage as much as it could, it became the junior partner of Great Britain, an aspiring hegemon. The advantage that it held onto longest was its financial dominance. It held onto that until the 1780s. At that point one could have written a commentary entitled "Post-Netherlands: Does It Matter?" [UKElection16]
• How Neil Bush Succeeded in Business Without Really Trying
  by Jeffrey St. Clair His mother still calls him Neilsie. He refers to his dad, the former president, as Gampy. Neil Bush may be the black sheep of the Bush family, but his relatives have never let him down. Whenever he’s been mired in financial, legal or marital imbroglios, someone in the Bush family entourage has always reached out a helping hand and often that hand has slipped Neil a fat check. Neil Bush, the fourth child of George and Barbara, was long thought to be the rising star of the family. He had the looks, the convivial demeanor, middle-of-the-road politics and, despite suffering from a severe case of dyslexia that made him the laughing stock of St. Albans (the stuffy DC prep school that groomed Al Gore) the brainpower. At least he seemed brighter than Jeb or George Jr. And, most important of all, he was the favorite son of Barbara Bush, the Agrippina of American politics. [Corruption] [Neil Bush] [Guanxi]
• Sanders or Webb, Does It Make any Difference? Elections: What Are They Good For?
  by Andrew Levine Before the 1960 Presidential Election, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian who would become John Kennedy’s court intellectual, published a short book called Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? His answer was that it made a big difference because Nixon was a feckless scoundrel while JFK was God’s gift to America and the world. Even at the time, it was far from obvious that he was more than half right. With the primary season now just a little more than half a year away, a similar question arises about two contenders for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidency: Jim Webb and Bernie Sanders (or Elizabeth Warren or anyone else who runs against Hillary Clinton from the left). Webb has not yet declared his candidacy; Sanders has. Warren has maintained consistently that she is not running so, at this point, she need not be taken into account. Schlesinger’s book would have been a bestseller even had the Kennedy forces not actively promoted it; the question it posed was on every voter’s mind. Webb and Sanders are on hardly anyone’s mind. Few people know who Sanders is; fewer still know anything about Webb. Also, at this point, the smart money has it that the question is moot because the chances of stopping the Clinton juggernaut are nil. Nevertheless, there is no timelier question in American electoral politics today. [USElection16]
• Power and Vulnerability: Saudi Kingdom and its Troubles
  As it stands, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the most ‘powerful’ states in the Gulf region. However, its ‘power’ does not necessarily render it any less vulnerable to threats (especially those which emanate from the application of that very power in both internal and external spheres) than those powers which may not be so ‘powerful’ but remain as much vulnerable as the Kingdom is today. This proposition gives, perhaps, the most comprehensive geo-political overview of the entire gulf region—a region which has so many ‘powerful’ yet vulnerable states. Power and vulnerability are thus two dimensions which must be given full consideration when it comes to analyzing these states’, especially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s, internal and external policies. Not only does it show how fragile this Kingdom internally is, it also reveals how oppressive it can be, especially when the rule of the ruling family finds itself in trouble. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/05/16/power-and-vulnerability-saudi-kingdom-and-its-troubles/ [Saudi Arabia] [Sectarianism]
• Syrian Regime is Going Down in Flames
  After four years of bloody civil war in Syria, severely affected by external interference, it appears that the regime in Damascus has begun to crack, despite the fact that the Syrian army has scored one victory after another on the field of battle. Yet there’s no visible prospect of a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Moreover, there are signs of the actual collapse of the Syrian state, which can quickly be torn into a number of semi-independent entities. Should this happen the massacre of the Syrian people will only intensify. The grip of the government of Bashar al-Assad is weakening as Damascus becomes increasingly dependent on its allies from abroad, especially volunteers from Iran and Iraq. Traditionally the most effective support Syria has is from the Lebanese Shia organization Hezbollah. [Syria]
• Homeland Beckons Immigrants as Retirement Nears
  May 15, 2015 THEY came to America from all over the world for many reasons — to make money, to marry, to live in peace. But now, as they face their retirement years, many of these longtime immigrants want to go home. [Diaspora]
• Dubious Data, Biased Sources: Eight Problems with Amnesty’s Report on Aleppo Syria
  by Rick Sterling In 1990 Amnesty International made a horrendous mistake in the midst of the media campaign leading up to Gulf War 1. While U.S. military action was being debated and the public was significantly opposed, it was reported that Iraqi troops were stealing incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital and leaving babies to die on the floor. In dramatic testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a Kuwaiti teenage girl claimed she was a hospital volunteer and eye-witness. Congress members were in tears, the event received huge publicity and had significant influence in changing public opinion. The event was a fabrication conceived by a Washington PR firm and the girl was the Kuwaiti Ambassador’s daughter. There might have been more scrutiny and investigation but the story was corroborated by Amnesty International. More recently, in early 2011, Amnesty International and other human rights groups were influential in spreading false or exaggerated information about conditions in Libya. It paved the way for a “No Fly Zone” which NATO converted into a mandate for “regime change”. The consequence has been a catastrophic loss of security and living standards for the citizens of Libya and an eruption of violence and sectarianism within and beyond the borders. Currently we see a major media campaign for a “no fly zone” billed as a “safe zone” in opposition controlled northern Syria. In this context, Amnesty has just issued a report: “Death Everywhere: War Crimes and Human Rights Abuses in Aleppo, Syria”. The 62 page report alleges the Syrian government is deliberately targeting civilians in opposition controlled parts of Aleppo, using barrel bombs to kill 3124 civilians versus only 35 fighters in the past 15 months. Amnesty accuses the Syrian government of committing war crimes and possible “crimes against humanity”. They recommend an arms embargo against the Syrian government. Following are significant problems with the report. [Syria] [Propaganda] [Amnesty International]
• Iran-Pakistan pipeline could finally become reality
  The Iran-Pakistan (IP) pipeline can be characterized as a second “Bushehr” for the Islamic Republic: costly, high-profile, repeatedly delayed and greatly exposed to political pressure. However, 20 years after Iran and Pakistan first signed an agreement to construct a natural gas pipeline, the project finally seems en route to fruition. Summary? Print Iran and Pakistan both have political and economic interests in seeing a long-delayed gas pipeline come to fruition. Author Mohammad Ali Shabani Posted May 14, 2015 Of the numerous obstacles to the project’s finalization, US opposition in particular has weighed heavily. Washington has long lobbied for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline while discouraging the IP pipeline, promoting Turkmen over Iranian natural gas. In recent years, toughened Western sanctions on Iran have made the project even more cumbersome. Punitive measures targeting involvement in Iran’s energy industry, along with financial and banking restrictions, have hit funding for Pakistan’s section of the pipeline, and complicated discussions on payment mechanisms. Compounded by Islamabad’s dire economic condition, Iran has ended up building its section from its southern city of Asalouyeh to its border with Pakistan. Islamabad is contractually obliged to pay steep fines, beginning in the winter of 2014, when gas deliveries were supposed to commence. However, payment of these fines, triggered by Pakistan’s failure to build and operate its section of the IP pipeline, has not materialized — with Iranian consent. Apart from targeting the IP pipeline, Western sanctions have also cut the liquefied natural gas (LNG) route for Iranian exports. Since Western firms hold a monopoly on the technology needed for crucial aspects of LNG infrastructure, sanctions have halted Iran’s ambitious LNG projects. Meanwhile, energy-starved Pakistan earlier this spring bought its first-ever LNG shipment — from Qatar. Ironically, this Qatari natural gas originates from the vast North Dome field, which is shared with Iran, where it’s called South Pars, and from which the IP pipeline is slated to be fed. US pressure has also played a role in thwarting the pipeline’s envisaged extension to India. Pricing, security concerns and troublesome Indian-Pakistani dynamics were important factors in preventing New Delhi’s participation. However, US pressure on India to abstain should not be underestimated. While largely driven by separate dynamics, it is of note that the 2008 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement preceded India’s subsequent decision to pull out of the pipeline’s extension. The heightened prospect of the project’s near-term finalization springs from two recent developments: the breakthrough in the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the world powers, and China’s move to provide a massive $46 billion investment package to Pakistan. [Pipeline] [Iran deal] [Wishful thinking]
• Islamic State seizes key parts of capital of Iraq’s largest province
  Iraqi government forces are fighting back against an Islamic State advance that began overnight. Witnesses say the militant group raised its black flag over a government compound in the city center on Friday. (Reuters) By Hugh Naylor and Mustafa Salim May 15 at 5:50 PM ? BAGHDAD —Islamic State fighters on Friday seized control of key parts of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s largest province, in what appeared to be a significant blow to a U.S.-backed military campaign to retake territory from the insurgents. The offensive began when Islamic State militants slipped into downtown Ramadi dressed in police uniforms, according to a militiaman fighting with the city police. The attackers opened fire on police officers, launching an assault that grew to involve rocket-propelled grenades, artillery and car bombs, he said. By Friday afternoon, the militants had hoisted the Islamic State’s black flag over the provincial government compound and had surrounded an important military operations hub in the west of the city, residents said. The heavy fighting touched off panicked attempts by civilians to escape the city. “It was just like scenes of carnage in a World War II movie with bombing all around and dead people in the streets,” said Ali Dulaimi, a 28-year-old student at Anbar University who fled central Ramadi with his three brothers and parents. “There were dead people lying all over the street as we ran away,” he said. [ISIS] [Bombing] [Civilian]
• Comparative Connections A Triannual E-Journal on East Asian Bilateral Relations
  edited by Carl Baker Brad Glosserman
  January – April 2015 Vol. 17, No.1 May 2015
• Why is Amtrak such a mess?
  Don't blame the railroad for its mediocrity: The U.S. has the system it set out to have. By Tom Zoellner May 13 at 6:10 PM ? Tom Zoellner, an associate professor of English at Chapman University, is the author of "Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World, from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief." At least seven passengers were killed in Monday night’s Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia (EPA/Jim Lo Scalzo) Investigators were still working Wednesday to determine the exact cause of Amtrak’s fatal derailment in Philadelphia Tuesday night, which killed at least seven passengers and injured about 200. The train appears to have been going double the posted speed limit when it crashed going around a hard left turn. But whatever the ultimate findings of the investigation, for anyone familiar with the history of rail in America, the wreckage on the tracks will remain a symbol of deeper and systematic identity troubles within Amtrak, the nation’s quasi-governmental system of long-distance trains. Born from an awkward political fix nearly five decades ago, today’s setup might now be compared to a federalized version of the Chicago Cubs: It has its likable characteristics and impassioned defenders, but seems trapped in its own mediocrity, and incompetence has almost become a distinct brand identity. Americans who vacation in Europe are frequently struck by the professionalism, convenience and reach of the continent’s rail network and ask a very good question: Why can’t we do that here? How can a nation whose industrial power was built by the railroads be left with a starving system that might embarrass former Soviet bloc countries? [Railways] [Decline]
• After The Nuclear Deal, New Regional Arms Race – OpEd
  Kaveh L. Afrasiabi May 13, 2015 Ordinarily, a final nuclear deal between Iran and the world powers should be viewed as a timely blessing and breakthrough for regional peace and tranquility, by virtue of removing the tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and thus presenting a new opportunity for regional cooperation, particularly in Persian Gulf region. Yet, while this remains a distinct possibility, unfortunately it co-exists with another, less sanguine, possibility that in the aftermath of a nuclear deal the region will witness a heightened arms race with debilitating consequences for regional stability. This more ominous development stems from the overt signs that the U.S., France, and other Western powers intend to boost their respective military-industrial complexes through hefty, multi-billion dollar new arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf emirates of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) under the pretext of “allaying” the latter’s concerns about Iran’s power after the deal. In fact, there are unconfirmed reports in the world media that the Camp David summit with the Arab leaders is intended as the occasion to expand U.S. arms sales to the region, irrespective of the ‘snub’ given by some Arab rulers. Coinciding with a five day truce on Yemen, which has been turned into a GCC arms clearing house, albeit at the expense of thousands of civilian victims, the Camp David meeting is ostensibly geared to reassure America’s Arab allies of sustained U.S. support, but it will likely showcase President Obama as a shrewd arms salesman using the Iran threat to funnel more expensive arms to the rich Arab nations, following the footsteps of France’s President, Francois Hollande. [Arms sales] [MISCOM] [Iran deal]
• Tomgram: William Astore, America's Mutant Military
  Posted by William Astore at 7:02am, May 14, 2015. In September 2001, the Bush administration launched its “global war on terror,” to which its supporters later tried to attach names like “the long war” or “World War IV.” Their emphasis: that we were now engaged in nothing less than a multi-generational struggle without end. (World War III had theoretically been the Cold War.) In fact, only the “war on terror” would stick and, in 2009, even that would be tossed overboard when the Obama administration opted for a global war with no name at all. Nonetheless, the idea that we were now in an eternal “wartime” became part of the post-9/11 atmosphere. At the same time, George W. Bush famously called on Americans to act as if everything were normal -- to spend, vacation, and visit Disney World. In other words, the “homeland,” protected in new ways, was to be locked down and at peace, while Washington was to be a war capital into the distant future. In the process, the Bush administration invoked warring powers of every sort -- from torture and offshore imprisonment to assassination and warrantless wiretaps. At the time, all of this seemed like a unique combination, but looking back, the marriage of war and Disney, of military might and consumerism, has a far longer history. Considered a certain way, Washington has been a war capital since December 7, 1941, and certainly the global capital of consumerism since at least 1945. [Permanent war economy] {MISCOM] [Privatisation]
• “Where are the carriers?”
  Friend – When a crisis arises and American lives and interests are at risk, the first question decision makers ask is, “Where are the carriers?” Our Navy’s aircraft carriers provide 4.5 acres of sovereign American territory and a mobile base of operations that reduces the need to deploy U.S. boots on the ground. When ISIS blitzed through the Middle East last year, the strike fighters aboard the carrier George H.W. Bush were the only U.S. aircraft in position and ready to halt their advance. It took 54 days for the United States to negotiate deals with allies in the region that allowed us to employ aircraft based on their territory. In the months since, the carriers Carl Vinson and Theodore Roosevelt have rotated through the region, providing a constant American military presence, supporting ongoing operations against ISIS, and deterring aggression by Iran. In other theaters, meanwhile, the presence of American carriers has deterred aggression, protected the free flow of goods, people, and information, and enabled the United States to extend a helping hand when natural disasters strike. To maintain this critical presence, America needs a fleet of at least 11 carriers. [MISCOM] [Carriers] [Seapower]
• Why Shiite Expansion Will Be Short-Lived
  Analysis May 12, 2015 | 09:15 GMT That a bloc of Shiite states has coalesced in the Middle East is a significant geopolitical development; that it is led by Iran means it could be short lived. ?In fact, the bloc's formation and expansion, such as they are, were possible only through the division and weakness of Sunni Arab states. ?Several factors, most notably the Syrian civil war and ethnic and religious constraints, will prevent Iran from projecting Shiite influence farther than it already has. The sectarian conflict in the Middle East can neatly be divided into two sides: Sunnis and Shiites. Or so it would seem. The reality, it turns out, is more complicated. Sunni unity is a myth – the countries that constitute the Sunni camp are divided over a variety of issues. And the Shiites, whose power has grown since the early 1990s, nonetheless suffer from the inescapable constraints of being a minority population. A Demographic Challenge Indeed, the single most defining characteristic of the Shiite camp is that it comprises only a fraction of the Muslim population. More than three-fourths of all Muslims practice Sunni Islam. According to a 2011 study by the Pew Research Center, only four countries have a Shiite majority: Iran, Azerbaijan, Bahrain and Iraq. But other countries have notable Shiite minority populations as well, including Yemen, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman. Shiites also form the largest confessional group in Lebanon and account for as much as 20 percent of the 180 million or so Muslims in India. [Sectarianism]
• Bin Laden’s Assassination: a Volcano of Lies
  by Alexander Cockburn On Sunday, the London Review of Books published an new account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden by legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, which exposed the story told by the Obama Administration to be, in Hersh’s piquant words, “a blatant lie.” Using sources inside the CIA and Pakistani intelligence, Hersh dismantles plank-by-plank the official narrative first paraded by President Obama in his public address a few hours after the raid in Abbottabad and later embellished by John Brennan. In sum, Hersh’s revelations reveal that: At the time of the raid Bin Laden was essentially an invalid. He was living under a sort of house arrest by the Pakistanis, who were monitoring him 24/7. US intelligence was alerted to Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad by “walk-in” informant, who wanted to collect (and, in fact, did) a portion of the $25 million award. Pakistani intelligence helped provide DNA evidence, collected by Bin Laden’s doctor who was also an ISI agent, confirming Bin Laden’s identity prior to the raid. The CIA alerted Pakistan to the timing of the raid. Pakistani intelligence turned off the electric power to Abbottabad , cleared the flight path for US helicopters and provided an on-the-ground agent to guide Navy SEALS through the house. There was no firefight in the Bin Laden compound. Navy SEALS were under orders to kill Bin Laden on site. Bin Laden offered no armed resistance. No significant intelligence was collected from the compound. As a result of this cooperation, dark money to Pakistani intelligence and the military once again began to flow and the US consented to allow Pakistani a freer hand inside Afghanistan as the US began its withdrawal. Hersh’s report demolished one of the cornerstones of the myth constructed by the CIA about the killing of Bin Laden: that the use torture had led to the discovery of a network of couriers which they eventually tracked to the white house in Abbottabad. That lie has now been crushed. Predictably Hersh has become under withering attack from torture apologists and Obama defenders, especially the talking heads on MS-DNC. Last night, MS-DNC’s hipster teleprompter reader Chris Hayes lead the attack on Hersh, while simultaneously cheerleading the findings of the MS-DNC “investigative” team which “independently confirmed” the two major assertions in Sy Hersh’s report. Hersh, to his credit, swatted down Hayes’s juvenile deprecations like the seasoned pro he is. [Osama]
• The Manufactured Myth of Bin Laden’s Death
  by Michael Brenner Seymour Hersh’s revelations about the systematic mis- representation by the Obama administration of how it brought Osama bin-Laden to bay are causing a stir. Justifiably so. For they puncture the carefully constructed myth of how America revenged itself and renewed itself through this act of righteous justice. Moreover, the unsavory account of chicanery in high places once again spotlights the deceit that now is the hallmark of how our government works. A year or so after the event, I wrote a piece about the CIA sponsored film Zero Dark Thirty which has entrenched a cartoon version of this mythic story in the popular American mind. That commentary lays out some of the logical contradictions and false notes in the official story on which the film is based. I am redistributing it, unedited, in the belief that it could help serve as a primer for following the argument that the Hersh reporting has triggered. [Osama]
• Seymour Hersh Exposes Official Lies about Bin Laden Killing
  By Niles Williamson Global Research, May 12, 2015 World Socialist Web Site Image: White House photo-op of Situation Room during operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden Nearly four years since the US Special Forces raid that resulted in the murder of Osama bin Laden, an extraordinary political exposure by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published Sunday in the London Review of Books has torn the mask off the official narrative by the US government. The wealth of details laid out in Hersh’s article calls attention to the reality that nothing that any government official says on the record can be taken as the truth, and that the mainstream media operates as an echo chamber for official lies. Hersh asserts that the accounts given by President Barack Obama and members of his administration “might have been written by Lewis Carroll,” author of Alice in Wonderland. Among the claims exposed as fabrications are that the CIA torture program contributed to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout; that the raid was carried out without the knowledge of the Pakistani government; that the Special Operations team intended to take bin Laden alive, and only killed him after he resisted; and that bin Laden was given an Islamic burial at sea from the carrier USS Carl Vinson. Hersh writes that the 2011 operation to kill bin Laden was initiated in August 2010 after a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer walked into the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to give the CIA bin Laden’s location in return for the $25 million bounty the US government had placed on the Al Qaeda leader’s head in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. [Osama]
• US Officials Alarmed at New Syrian Rebel Alliance
  • Pentagon Trains Moderate Syrian Rebels to Fight IS Group • In Syria, Reports of Friction Inside Assad Regime • Syria Battles Economic Woes Amid Rebellion • Turkish Border Crackdown Imperils Syrian Refugees Jamie Dettmer May 13, 2015 8:19 AM GAZIANTEP, TURKEY— Battlefield gains by insurgents in northern Syria, in an alliance dominated by an al-Qaida affiliate, and hardline Islamist militias are presenting the Obama administration with a dilemma — whether to support the new insurgent momentum against President Bashar al-Assad or to have nothing to do with it, U.S. officials say. While the victories last month and this month over forces loyal to Assad in Idlib province west of Aleppo may mark a turning point in the fortunes of the rebels in the long-running, bloody civil war that has left more than 200,000 dead, U.S. officials say they are alarmed at the composition of the alliance known as Jaish al-Fata, or the Army of Conquest, announced on March 28. They fear a further erosion of Western-backed “moderate” militias as fighters join the new force and they worry about the rise of another jihadist emirate in Syria to match the caliphate of the Islamic State in the eastern part of the country. [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• The Turkey-Saudi axis against Damascus
  Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu visited Syrian territory uninvited last weekend. While he was foreign minister, and before that, chief adviser to then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he used to boast of having visited Syria more than 60 times and seeing President Bashar al-Assad and his counterpart Walid Moallem more often than he had seen his own wife and children. Davutoglu was justifiably considered the architect of Turkey’s new opening to the Middle East and the backbone of the policy he dubbed “Zero Problems with Neighbors” was the rapprochement with Syria. Will the US support the gains of Islamist opposition in Syria? Author Cengiz Çandar Posted May 12, 2015 That was before relations soured and turned into animosity by the end of summer 2011. Davutoglu's last visit to Syrian territory was not official. He took time during his election campaign in the border province of Urfa to visit the Suleiman Shah mausoleum, now in its new location in Syrian territory a short distance from the Turkish border. Putting his feet on Syrian territory aroused protests from the Damascus regime. As the Turkish government declared the Syrian regime “illegitimate,” that regime’s claims on the “illegality” of Turkish leaders’ acts do not resonate in Ankara at all. There has been widespread speculation in Turkey itself that Turkey, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, is preparing to move into Syria militarily to create a “buffer zone” that would enable the training and equipping of the Syrian opposition within Syrian territory. Moreover, such a move could hasten the downfall of a regime; this looks more plausible than ever after the fall of the provincial center Idlib and the strategically important town of Jisr al-Shughur. Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/05/the-controversial-turkey-saudi-axis-against-damascus.html#ixzz3a3LXPibw [Turkey] [Syria]
• Why Are So-Called Progressives Defending Special Ops Training?
  by Carol Miller Anti-militarism activists are shaking their heads in amazement. We have been working for years to push back against the massive military expansion underway both in the US and around the world, fighting back one threatened community at a time. The national media has barely mentioned these efforts and local media chooses to mostly ignore the work. Militarized violence has become the new normal in the USA. It barely matters whether these militarized forces are controlled by the Pentagon, or state governors, each in control of a national guard (state-based militia), state or local police chief, or even a county sheriff with their own militarized departments. Yet, the largest war “game” ever undertaken by the Pentagon is now getting huge amounts of superficial media attention. The media is not focusing on the tremendous financial cost, the potential environmental consequences, or the unconstitutionality of the plan. The media of both the left and the right are using the plan as yet another convenient tool in enabling the divide and conquer strategy of the Pentagon. Jade Helm 15 and Texas have become the convenient punch lines of jokes and mocking by so-called progressives and the mainstream media without a single serious look at what the actual activity will do on the ground. Think about this; Viet Nam is the size of New Mexico. Iraq is smaller than Texas. Afghanistan is also smaller than Texas. [Military exercises] [Jade Helm 15]
• Christianity faces sharp decline as Americans are becoming even less affiliated with religion
  By Sarah Pulliam Bailey May 12 at 12:20 AM ? The Memorial Peace Cross is a well-known landmark in Bladensburg, Md. (Mark Gail for The Washington Post) Christianity is on the decline in America, not just among younger generations or in certain regions of the country but across race, gender, education and geographic barriers. The percentage of adults who describe themselves as Christians dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years to about 71 percent, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. “It’s remarkably widespread,” said Alan Cooperman, director of religion research for the Pew Research Center. “The country is becoming less religious as a whole, and it’s happening across the board.” At the same time, the share of those who are not affiliated with a religion has jumped from 16 percent to about 23 percent in the same time period. The trend follows a pattern found earlier in the American Religious Identification Survey, which found that in 1990, 86 percent of American adults identified as Christians, compared with 76 percent in 2008 [Religion]
• EU and US differ on Iran sanctions
  • The critical point in the Lausanne statement negotiated by Federica Mogherini involves lifting of the sanctions imposed on Iran as soon as agreement is reached, presumably by 30 June. But will that happen? (Photo: eeas.europa.eu) By Dan Steinbock SHANGHAI, Today, 09:27 Peter Wittig, German ambassador to the US, recently said that alternatives to a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear programme are “not very attractive.” He added that Germany and other nations are ready to move beyond sanctions, despite what the US Congress might do. It was a reference to the fact the US Senate last week passed a controversial bill that will ensure a role for Congress in any nuclear talks between president Barack Obama, Iran and half a dozen world powers. Despite the White House’s opposition, the bill gives Congress the ability to review and to reject a final deal with Iran. In the latter case, Obama could still resort to executive action to offer sanctions relief, in co-operation with EU and UN – but it would be only a temporary measure. Washington’s deep differences over Iran have the potential to undermine progress in the nuclear talks. The US, according to an apocryphal story, used to wonder: “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” Today, Iranians are asking the same question, but about America. In Europe, the question is, will Brussels copy the US president, or US Congress, or will it act on its own? [Iran deal] [Friction]
• The Saudi overreach annoys U.S.
  Author: M.K. Bhadrakumar May 12, 2015 The timing of the overture by President Barack Obama to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin after a two-year chill in relations between the two big powers cannot be merely coincidental. It comes 48 hours before Obama’s summit meeting with the leaders of the member countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC] in Washington and the Camp David retreat. The Secretary of State’s visit to Moscow as announced in Washington a day after the ruler of Saudi Arabia King Salman bin Abdulaziz snubbed Obama by regretting at the last minute the latter’s invitation for the summit meeting (although the White House had already announced the president’s intention to have a one-on-one with the monarch). The U.S. state department press release said that Kerry’s discussions with Putin would relate to “a full range of bilateral and regional issues, including Iran, Syria, and Ukraine” and that the Secretary would thereafter “return to Washington to join” Obama’s dinner for the GCC leaders on Wednesday evening. Other reports in the U.S. media highlighted that Kerry’s focus will be on seeking Russia’s cooperation in resolving the conflicts in the Middle East. What emerges, in particular, is that Obama hopes to rope in Russia to help the U.S. to navigate the intra-Syrian dialogue under UN auspices and also to close the nuclear deal with Iran. It implies that the U.S. is seeking a negotiated settlement in Syria. It also implies that Obama is determined to conclude the deal with Iran by end-June. [US Russia] [Strategic incoherence]
• Central Asia in a Reconnecting Eurasia: U.S. Policy Interests and Recommendations
  Tuesday, May 12, 2015 | 9:00 am - 11:00 am In January 2014 the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program launched the Eurasia Initiative. The first fruits of this project include a series of reports on Central Asia in a Reconnecting Eurasia. The decision to initiate these activities with Central Asia stemmed from a concern that the drawdown of U.S. and allied troops from Afghanistan would augur declining U.S. interest. For U.S. policymakers, turning away from Central Asia now would be a serious miscalculation. The five states of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) are located at the heart of the Eurasian landmass, in close proximity to four of Washington’s biggest foreign policy challenges: Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China. For that reason alone, the United States has a strong interest in developing economic and security ties with the states of Central Asia, and doing so in a way that is no longer driven by the exigencies of the war in Afghanistan, but is responsive to the needs and interests of the region itself, as well as enduring U.S. interests. [Eurasia] [US global strategy]
• ‘Utter nonsense': CIA and White House blast Seymour Hersh’s explosive Osama bin Laden raid story
  By Dan Lamothe May 11 at 12:23 PM ? This undated file photo shows al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. A new report questions the White House narrative of the 2011 U.S. military raid that killed him in Pakistan. (AP Photo, File) Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged in a long-rumored 10,000-word story published Sunday that the United States and Pakistan lied about major details about the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but the CIA and White House are both rejecting his account. Hersh, writing for the London Review of Books, reported that Pakistan and the United States collaborated closely on the mission, and hatched a cover story afterward that held that Washington called for it unilaterally. Starting in 2006, bin Laden, Hersh alleged, was actually a prisoner of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) at the compound in Abbottabad, where he was killed, and not hiding from authorities. A CIA official told The Washington Post that Hersh’s story is “utter nonsense.” White House spokesman Ned Price said it had “too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions” to fact-check each one, and added that the premise that bin Laden was killed in “anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false.” [Osama] [CIA] [Disinformation]
• Rulers Snub Arab Summit, Clouding U.S. Bid for Iran Deal
  Saudi monarch’s decision signals that the Arab states aren’t on board with nuclear accord Saudi Arabia's King Salman, who met with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Riyadh, on Thursday, has delegated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef to lead the Saudi delegation to the Gulf summit at Camp David. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images By Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee in Washington and Ahmed Al Omran in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Updated May 10, 2015 8:00 p.m. ET 796 COMMENTS WASHINGTON—Saudi Arabia’s monarch pulled out of a summit to be hosted by President Barack Obama on Thursday, in a blow to the White House’s efforts to build Arab support for a nuclear accord with Iran. King Salman’s decision appeared to ripple across the Persian Gulf. Bahrain said on Sunday that its ruler, King Hamad bin Isaa Al Khalifa, had opted not to travel to Washington. The only two monarchs from the six countries confirmed to attend the summit at the White House and the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., were the emirs of Qatar and Kuwait. At stake for the White House is Mr. Obama’s key foreign-policy initiative, an Iran pact that is proceeding toward a June 30 deadline without support from regional powers. King Salman’s decision signals that the Arab states aren’t on board and could continue to act on their own to thwart Tehran, as Saudi Arabia has done in leading a military coalition against Iran-backed rebels in Yemen. Senior Arab officials involved in organizing the meeting said not enough progress had been made in narrowing differences with Washington on issues like Iran and Syria to make the Saudi ruler’s trip worth it. Saudi Arabia's King Salman will not be at President Obama's summit later this week and the decision appears to have a ripple effect. WSJ's Jay Solomon reports. Photo: Getty Related • Yemen Truce Opens Way for Aid Deliveries “There isn’t substance for the summit,” said an Arab official who has held discussions with the Obama administration in recent days. Senior U.S. officials said as recently as Friday that they expected King Salman, who took power in January, to travel to Washington. [Decline] [Saudi Arabia] [Iran deal]
• Amnesty International: Whitewashing Another Massacre
  by Paul de Rooij Amnesty International has issued four reports on the Massacre in Gaza in 2014 [1]. Given the scale of the destruction and the number of fatalities, any attempt to document the crimes committed should be welcomed. But these reports are problematic, and raise questions about this organization [2], including why they were written at all. It also raises questions about the broader human rights industry that are worth considering. Basic Background July 2014 marked the onset of the Israeli massacre in Gaza (I will dispense with the Israeli sugar-coated operation names). The Israeli army trained for this attack for several months before finding a pretext to attack Gaza, shattering an existing ceasefire; this was the third such post-“disengagement” (2004) attack, and possibly the worst so far. At least 2,215 were killed and 10,000+ wounded, most of them civilians. The scale of destruction was staggering: tens of thousands of houses rendered uninhabitable; several high-rise buildings struck by huge American-supplied bombs; schools and hospitals targeted; 61 mosques totally destroyed; water purification and sewage treatment plants damaged; Gaza’s main flour mill bombed; all chicken farms ravaged; an incalculable devastation [3]. [Amnesty International] [Israel] [False balance]
• Hey Everybody! Saudi Arabia & Turkey Just Made Us Another Sh*t Sandwich in the Middle East!
  The big news today is that Saudi Arabia and Turkey are clubbing together to overthrow the Assad regime. Actually, this is old news. What happened today is that the news embargo was lifted and the AP’s Desmond Butler got to print the scoop. It was apparent for a couple weeks that something along these lines was going to drop. As I put it on Twitter on April 28, “Something is cooking in the kitchen”. Let me explain, because it’s an interesting illustration of how the “open source” parsing thingamajig works, in kind of a backward way. All of a sudden, starting around April 20, there were flurries of declarations from pundits and journos that Assad was going down. Problem was, many of these pundits and journos were not the sort of people one would expect to have knowledge of the inner workings of the Assad regime (notoriously opaque) or the actual conditions on the battlefield (fragmented, confusing, very dangerous to investigate, and best understood by the Assad forces, not the countries blindly arming and funding proxies and grifters inside Syria). These experts, on the other hand, seemed to be experts at access reporting and consulting with foreign policy decisionmakers in the US and the Gulf Countries. In other words, they’re in the “champagne hopes and caviar dreams” business of reporting elite intentions and aspirations as facts. [Syria] [Turkey] [Saudi Arabia] [Sectarianism]
• APNewsBreak: Turkey, Saudi in pact to help anti-Assad rebels
  By DESMOND BUTLER May. 7, 2015 7:06 PM EDT ISTANBUL (AP) — Casting aside U.S. concerns about aiding extremist groups, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have converged on an aggressive new strategy to bring down Syrian President Bashar Assad. The two countries — one a democracy, the other a conservative kingdom — have for years been at odds over how to deal with Assad, their common enemy. But mutual frustration with what they consider American indecision has brought the two together in a strategic alliance that is driving recent rebel gains in northern Syria, and has helped strengthen a new coalition of anti-Assad insurgents, Turkish officials say. That is provoking concern in the United States, which does not want rebel groups, including the al-Qaida linked Nusra Front, uniting to topple Assad. The Obama administration worries that the revived rebel alliance could potentially put a more dangerous radical Islamist regime in Assad's place, just as the U.S. is focused on bringing down the Islamic State group. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues, said the administration is concerned that the new alliance is helping Nusra gain territory in Syria. [Syria] [Turkey] [Saudi Arabia] [Sectarianism] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist] [Strategic incoherence]
• Beheading of 5 foreigners in Saudi Arabia triggers outcry from human rights campaigners
  Published time: May 08, 2015 09:26 Human rights groups have condemned Saudi Arabia after the beheading of five foreigners this week. Experts warn 2015 will mark a dramatic increase in public executions, as 80 people have already been killed, compared to 88 in the whole of 2014. Despite mounting international criticism from foreign governments and human rights campaigners, Saudi Arabia has shown no willingness to end public executions. On Monday, a group of five men, sentenced to death for murder and theft, were publicly beheaded. The killings come about a month after Amnesty International decried what it labeled as a “macabre spike” in state-sponsored executions Adam Coogle, a Middle East analyst for Human Rights Watch, said: “From January to the end of July 2014 there were 15 executions, but they finished 2014 with 88, which shows clearly that the spike began last year and has continued," Coogle told the Independent. Peggy Hicks, Global Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch, called the jump in beheadings “shocking Amnesty International said the wave of state-sponsored killings proves that the change of leadership in the kingdom does not mean a change in how it views capital punishment, which is carried out for a series of offenses, including blasphemy, treason, murder and drug trafficking. Indeed, since King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud ascended to the throne in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, the outlook for human rights remains grim, said Amnesty International. [Saudi Arabia] [Human rights]
• In a propaganda war against ISIS, the U.S. tried to play by the enemy’s rules
  By Greg Miller and Scott Higham May 8 at 8:41 AM ? CONFRONTING THE ‘CALIPHATE’ | This is part of an occasional series about the rise of the Islamic State militant group, its implications for the Middle East, and efforts by the U.S. government and others to undermine it. America's most graphic anti-Islamic State video(4:00) Hear from the man responsible for one of the most controversial counter-messaging videos produced by the U.S. State Department. "Welcome to ISIS Land" used footage straight from gruesome Islamic State propaganda videos and led to a backlash from officials in Washington. EDITOR’S NOTE: The Washington Post has blurred the graphic images from the State Department video. (The Washington Post) As fighters surged into Syria last summer, a video surfaced online with the grisly imagery and sneering tone of a propaganda release from the Islamic State. “Run, do not walk, to ISIS Land,” read the opening line of a script that promised new arrivals would learn “useful new skills” such as “crucifying and executing Muslims.” The words were juxtaposed with images of the terrorist group’s atrocities: kneeling prisoners shot point-blank; severed heads positioned next to a propped-up corpse; limp bodies left hanging from crosses in public squares. The source of the video was revealed only in its closing frame: the U.S. Department of State. [Propaganda] [Softwar] [ISIS]
• Israeli defense minister promises to kill more civilians and threatens to nuke Iran
  Submitted by Asa Winstanley on Wed, 05/06/2015 - 22:40 Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon on Tuesday said Israel would attack entire civilian neighborhoods during any future assault on Gaza or Lebanon. Speaking at a conference in Jerusalem, Yaalon threatened that “we are going to hurt Lebanese civilians to include kids of the family. We went through a very long deep discussion … we did it then, we did it in [the] Gaza Strip, we are going to do it in any round of hostilities in the future.” The Israeli official also appeared to threaten to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran, although he said “we are not there yet.” In response to a question about Iran, Yaalon said that “in certain cases” when “we feel like we don’t have the answer by surgical operations” Israel might take “certain steps” such as the Americans did in “Nagasaki and Hiroshima, causing at the end the fatalities of 200,000.” [Israel]
• Senate approves Iran nuclear bill
  Erin Kelly, USA TODAY 3:29 p.m. EDT May 7, 2015 (Photo: Andrew Harnik, AP) WASHINGTON — The Senate voted 98-1 Thursday to approve bipartisan legislation that would require President Obama to let Congress review - and possibly reject - any final nuclear deal with Iran. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., an outspoken opponent of the administration's efforts, voted against the bill. "The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act offers the best chance for our constituents, through the Congress they elect, to weigh in on the White House's negotiations with Iran," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said before the vote to end debate on the bill. "And make no mistake, they need to have that opportunity." The bill still must be approved by the House, where Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he will urge its passage. "This important bipartisan legislation will ensure that Congress has a role in reviewing any potential agreement regarding Iran's nuclear weapons program," Boehner said after the Senate vote. "Our goal is to stop a bad agreement that could pave the way to a nuclear-armed Iran, set off a regional nuclear arms race, and strengthen and legitimize the government of Iran – which threatens Israel and other allies in the region, as well as supports terrorism throughout the Middle East." [Iran deal] [Congress]
• The 1.5 Million Man March
  China has its vanishing girls. North Korea has its disappeared prisoners. And America has a generation of missing, jailed, and dead black men. By John Feffer, May 6, 2015. There are several types of missing persons. Some missing people are missed so publicly that their absence is a presence. Vanished children reappeared on milk cartons and then later in amber alerts. American soldiers, killed in action or MIA, look out at us from rows of photos like headstones in the newspaper on Memorial Day. Mothers assembled with signs and photos in Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in the 1970s to demand information about their children who’d disappeared during Argentina’s “dirty war.” Then there are the missing that don’t exist at all. Rather, they should exist — for instance, the missing girls of Asia. Because of declining fertility, prenatal screening, and a cultural preference for boy babies, families in China, Taiwan, Korea, India, and a few places outside Asia (such as the Balkans and the Caucasus) have altered the natural biological balance of about 105 male babies to 100 female babies. This disparity has been most prominent in China, where the ratio today is 123 boy babies to 100 girl babies. As a result of this selective breeding, Asia as a whole is missing upwards of 163 million women. The case of the girls-that-should-be came to light in the 1980s and generated a new term: gendercide. [Incarceration] [Racism]
• A Marine in Syria: Silhouettes of Beauty and Coexistence before the Devastation
  Author (left) in a Syrian village in Homs countryside. This quiet Christian village would later be attacked by anti-government fighters. He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. — Talleyrand, via Bertolucci, from the 1964 film Prima della Rivoluzione IRAQ, LIBYA, SYRIA… Countries ripped apart through sectarian and political violence in the aftermath of cataclysmic external interventions: American invasion and occupation in Iraq, NATO intervention in Libya, and international proxy war in Syria. Mere mention of these countries conjures images of sectarian driven atrocities and societal collapse into the abyss of a Hobbesian jungle. And now it is commonplace to just assume it’s always been so. Increasingly, one hears from all corners of public discourse the lazily constructed logic, “but they’ve always hated each other”… or “violence and conflict are endemic to the region.” But it was not always so?—?I found a place of beauty, peace, and coexistence in a Syria that is now almost never acknowledged, and which risks being forgotten about. But Syrians themselves will never forget. [Syria] [Secularism] [Outsourcing]
• The U.S. Encouragement of Fanatic Islamism in the Arab World
  by Gary Leupp A beautiful essay posted on Medium.com, entitled “A Marine in Syria: Silhouettes of Beauty and Coexistence before the Devastation” by Brad Hoff, draws our attention to what for the warmongers in Washington is a highly inconvenient truth: the secular dictatorships in the Middle East the U.S. has sought to destroy since 9/11 (including most recently that of Libya) have been far more tolerant towards religious and cultural diversity than the regimes that have replaced them. In particular, the much-vilified Baath Party, which governed Iraq during the Saddam years and continues to govern Syria, was and is based upon the principle of secularism (non-religious, relatively religiously tolerant) rule. [US Middle East policy] [Sectarianism] [Saddam Hussein]
• Why the US portrayal is Very Far from the Truth
  Is ISIS Really on the Run? by PATRICK COCKBURN A graphic illustration of Western wishful thinking about the decline of Islamic State (IS) is a well-publicised map issued by the Pentagon to prove that the self-declared caliphate has lost 25 per cent of its territory since its big advances last year. Unfortunately for the Pentagon, sharp-eyed American journalists soon noticed something strange about its map identifying areas of IS strength. While it shows towns and villages where IS fighters have lost control around Baghdad, it simply omits western Syria where they have been advancing in and around Damascus. The Pentagon displayed some embarrassment about its dodgy map, but it largely succeeded in its purpose of convincing people that IS is in retreat. Many news outlets across the world republished the map as evidence of the success of air strikes by the United States and its allies in support of the Iraqi army and Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria. The capture of Tikrit after a month-long siege is cited as a further sign that a re-energised Iraqi state is winning and one day in the not too distant future will be able to recapture Mosul in the north and Anbar province in the west. How much of this comforting news is true? [ISIS]
• Why Iran Must Remain a US Enemy
  by Gareth Porter Since the start of the US nuclear negotiations with Iran, both Israeli and Saudi officials have indulged in highly publicised handwringing over their belief that such a nuclear deal would represent a fundamental strategic shift in US policy towards the region at the expense of its traditional alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the Obama administration is no more likely to lurch into a new relationship with Iran than were previous US administrations. The reason is very simple: The US national security state, which has the power to block any such initiative, has fundamental long-term interests in the continuation of the policy of treating Iran as an enemy. Some in the Israeli camp have spun elaborate theories about how the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran represent a strategic vision of partnership with the Iranian regime. Typical of the genre is former Bush administration official Michael Doran’sspeculation in February that US President Barack Obama based his policy of outreach to Tehran on the assumption that Tehran and Washington are “natural allies”. Saudi response The Saudi response to the negotiations has been, if anything, even more extreme. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, who speaks more candidly in public than any other Saudi public figure, told an audience at London’s Chatham House last month, “The Americans and Iranians have been flirting with each other. Now it seems each side is anxious to get over the flirtation and get to the consummation.” Behind the sexual metaphor lie Saudi fears of a “grand bargain” under which Iran would forgo nuclear weapons in return for ratification of Iranian hegemony over Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf. But these Israeli and Saudi imaginings are divorced from the reality of the Obama administration’s actual Iran policy. Far from the Nixon-like fundamental strategic revision, as the Netanyahu camp and the Saudis have suggested, the Obama administration’s diplomatic engagement portercrisiswith Iran over its nuclear programme represents a culmination of a series of improvised policy adjustments within an overall framework of coercive diplomacy towards Iran. [Iran deal] [MISCOM] [Arms sales] [Missile defense]
• Yemen not a new issue for Saudi monarchs
  National April 30, 2015 BY Mian Abrar wikileaks •Yemen offensive brainchild of new Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad who sought US support for action on Yemen in 2009 A leaked US diplomatic cable has exposed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Naif was the mastermind behind the attack on Yemen even six years ago during the tenure of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Leaked by Wikileaks, a diplomatic cable of a meeting held in Riyadh between then ambassador Richard Holbrooke (late) with then Saudi assistant minister of the interior Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (MbN) narrated how much the new crown prince was perturbed over happenings in Yemen. Interestingly, the entire new leadership of Saudi Arabia was present in the meeting, including now state minister and the then Major-General Dr. Sa’ad al-Jabri, Senior Advisor, Ministry of the Interior, then Major General Khalid al-Humaydan (Abu Ali), Counterterrorism Advisor, Ministry of the Interior, Brigadier General Ahmed al-Issa, US Liaison, Ministry of the Interior and others. All these officials are now on top positions in the new King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz’s government. According to the diplomatic cable, during the meeting, MbN told Holbrooke, “We have a problem called Yemen.” Terming Yemen’s geography similar to Afghanistan, the prince feared it could soon turn even worse than Afghanistan due to threats from al-Qaeda and Houthi-Shia tribes. He said the Saudis had detected a pattern in individuals coming to the Kingdom for Hajj or Umrah and then travelling south to Yemen (“it’s only 400 miles,” he noted) for training before returning to their home countries. Saudi forces have arrested Egyptians and Algerians, among others, who were attempting to do this. Describing Yemen as a “failed state”, the prince said it was “very, very, extremely dangerous,” and required focus. He described the Houthi tribes as “Takfiris” and Shi’a “like Hizballah South”. [Saudi Arabia] [Yemen[ [Takfiri]
• Saudi’s young pretender failing at war, leaving Yemen in tatters
  Bill Law Saturday 2 May 2015 16:12 BST The failing war in Yemen could lead to conflict between Saudi royals and heirs to the throne Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Nayef It was by anybody’s measure an extraordinary week in the House of Saud: the defenestration of Crown Prince Muqhrin replaced by the Interior Minister Mohammed bin Nayef and King Salman’s son Mohammed bin Salman named deputy crown prince. The lineage landscape has been forever altered. No more will a ruler come from the sons of the founding king. Succession has passed to the next generation. And the consolidation of power between two ambitious princes - the older, thoughtful Mohammed bin Nayef and the young and aggressive Mohammed bin Salman - presided over by an aged and ailing king, has set the stage for further behind-the-scenes manoeuvres while giving the impression of surface calm. So a border skirmish between Saudi forces and tribes loyal to the Houthis may seem something of a minor footnote. The Saudi interior ministry reported that three officers died and two were wounded by a mortar shell that struck a border post in the province of Najran. The Saudis also claim that dozens of Houthis were killed in the ensuing action, a claim that has not yet been verified. But could this isolated action be the start of something bigger by the Houthis? If so, it will be a case of history repeating itself. In 2009 the Houthis penetrated more than 50 kilometres into Saudi territory, seized and held the city of Jizan for several days and only left after a substantial amount of money was paid them, eloquent testament to the incompetence and lack of battle readiness of the Saudi military. [Saudi Arabia] [Yemen]
• Iran's tourism industry scrambles to catch up with demand
  Officials in Iran have announced plans to build 400 new three- and four-star hotels. Masoud Soltanifar, the head of the Iran Cultural Heritage, Handcrafts and Tourism Organization, announced that while there are more than 1,100 hotels in the country, only 130 of them rank three or four stars, and that during the next 10 years, 400 new hotels should be built. He said that the goal is to increase Iran’s visitors from 5 million to 20 million per year. Soltanifar made these comments in the northern city of Rasht during a meeting regarding the establishment of a tourism university in the city of Rasht. As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani improves relations with the West, Iranian officials announce they will build more hotels to meet the expected demand of foreign tourists. Author Farahmand Alipour Posted May 1, 2015 The Iranian government is hoping to increase the country’s tourism revenue from its current $6 billion to $25 billion to $30 billion per year. Iran ranks regularly in the top 10 list of countries with the highest number of tourist attractions and historical sites. However, Iran’s complicated relationship with the rest of the world and lack of attention to its tourism industry has resulted in Iran being ranked 48 out of 50 countries, according to a report by the United Nations World Tourism Organization. Reviving the tourism industry has been one of the most important promises of President Hassan Rouhani’s administration. Sanctions, the sudden decrease in oil prices and unemployment are among the reasons why the Iranian government is seriously considering to open the country’s doors to foreign tourists. The new administration's moderate policies regarding the crisis in the Middle East as well as Iran’s attempts for better relations with the West have resulted in Iran experiencing an unexpected wave of foreign tourists coming to the country. [Iran deal] [Tourism] [Sanctions]
• As Israel Lobby Pushes Full-Access Inspections, US Makes False Claims on Iran Nuclear Deal
  Saturday, 02 May 2015 00:00 By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News Analysis • Secretary of State John Kerry leaves a classified bipartisan briefing for senators regarding the Iran nuclear deal, on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 14, 2015. (Photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) Senior US officials have been claiming that Iranian negotiators had agreed in Lausanne to accept a demand that Iran allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect any site it considered suspicious anywhere in the country, including military bases. Such a provision would have given Israel license to make an endless series of bogus intelligence claims such as the ones that had been labeled "possible military dimensions" aimed at preventing the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei repudiated the claims that Iran had agreed in Lausanne to such inspections on demand. He declared in a speech on April 9 that the IAEA would not be allowed to inspect the country's military sites "under the excuse of nuclear supervision." Khamenei's speech came the day after the Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan had made it clear that no international inspections of Iranian military sites would be allowed under the nuclear agreement. In his press availability in Lausanne on April 2, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, "Iran has agreed to allow the IAEA to investigate any suspicious site or any allegation of covert activities anywhere." The US "fact sheet" on the "parameters" of the agreement makes the same claim, stating, "Iran will be required to grant access to the IAEA to investigate suspicious sites or allegations of a covert enrichment facility, centrifuge production facility or yellow cake production facility anywhere in the country." [[Iran deal] [US Iran negotiations] [IAEA] [UNUS] [Israel]
• The Fall of Saigon
  by Jean Bricmont On April 30, 1975, Saigon fell. The last Americans fled the country. Vietnam was reunited, as it was supposed to have been twenty years earlier according to an international agreement sabotaged by Washington. The Vietnam War, which had been going on for thirty years ever since France began its attempt to reconquer its lost Indochinese colonies, finally came to an end. For the Vietnamese who died in that war, there will be no minute of silence, no solemn commemoration, no “duty to remember”, no vows of “never again”. After all, the millions of Vietnamese who died are not considered victims of “genocide “. They were merely killed by years of massive bombing and the systematic slaughter of a people who wanted to be independent. What’s so special about that ? In old Europe we are warned every day against repeating the crimes of Nazism, a phenomenon that has been dead for over half a century. In contrast, the sources of the slaughter in Vietnam have remained alive and active, whether through U.S. policy in Central America or Southern Africa and now for several years in the Middle East. The “war against terror” has already cost over a million lives and is far from over. What do our great European humanitarians have to say on this subject? Do those who deplore the rising number of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean see the connections? Do they realize that the same United States military drive to remake the world is the fundamental source bricmontimpof these ongoing disasters? How many calls to we hear to leave the sinking ship of U.S. imperialist wars? To make a real peace with Russia and Iran? To end our policy of perpetual intervention as obedient auxiliaries of the United States?
  In France, the anti-communist “new left” that emerged from May ’68, influenced by the intellectual bluff of Bernard-Henri Lévy and cohorts, completely reversed the position of the old left. Whereas the traditional left defended international peace and opposed U.S. interventionism, the “new left” welcomed every uprising regardless of political content and showed no concern for the underlying relationship of forces. All that mattered were the “human rights” as defined and highlighted by mainstream media. Today that new left is at a dead end, whether in the Middle East or in relations with Russia or China, along with the American policy that it has helped to disguise ideologically. Forty years after Vietnam gained its freedom, it is high time for new evaluations and drastic changes. But who has the courage to meet these challenges? [Imperialism] [Human rights]
• Gold, Silver and “Crashing Markets”. It’s Ugly if You Look Under the Hood
  By Bill Holter Global Research, May 01, 2015 The Flight into Gold and Silver My plan for today was to write a very basic piece hitched to the one written yesterday “the money has to go somewhere”. The plan was to point out that gold (and silver) will be the final destination for monies dislodged from crashing markets all over the world. Along came the Q1 figures for U.S. GDP, a disaster on many levels. So switching gears, let’s look at the first quarter, how quickly the economy has deteriorated and what it means in the future and in relation to the past. I do plan to tie this together at the end because no matter how you look at it, gold is a magnet for what will be shaken loose. [Crisis] [Gold]
• U.S. allies in Middle East ramping up support for rebel forces in Syria
  By Karen DeYoung and Liz Sly April 29 at 8:18 PM ? U.S. allies in the Middle East have ramped up their support for rebels fighting against Syrian forces in recent months, potentially widening a gulf over strategy between the Obama administration and its regional partners. The partners have grown increasingly impatient with the administration’s slow march toward training and equipping a viable Syrian opposition force, and its insistence that those fighters focus on the Islamic State, according to officials in the region. To facilitate their primary goal of removing President Bashar al-Assad from power, the allies have moved ahead with their own plans. [Outsourcing] [Saudi Arabia]
• George Soros May Face a Monster Tax Bill
  Deferring income helped the billionaire hedge fund manager build his fortune Miles Weiss 9:00 PM NZST April 30, 2015 George Soros likes to say the rich should pay more taxes. A substantial part of his wealth, though, comes from delaying them. While building a record as one of the world’s greatest investors, the 84-year-old billionaire used a loophole that allowed him to defer taxes on fees paid by clients and reinvest them in his fund, where they continued to grow tax-free. At the end of 2013, Soros—through Soros Fund Management—had amassed $13.3 billion through the use of deferrals, according to Irish regulatory filings by Soros. [Tax] [Inequality]
• Will the F-35 change Middle East warfare?
  US Vice President Joe Biden delivered a speech in Washington April 23 on the occasion of Israeli Independence Day celebrations. He announced that in 2016, the United States will deliver two F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to Israel. Yet, the debate still rages on the cost-effectiveness of the Joint Strike Fighter project, with rumors circulating that the project may be terminated due to its phenomenal $1 trillion budget. Summary? Print Once it appears in Middle Eastern skies, the F-35 fighter aircraft may alter how wars are waged in the region. Author Metin Gurcan Posted April 29, 2015 TranslatorTimur Göksel Biden indicated that the F-35s may be fully operational for the first time in the Middle East next year. Will the F-35 totally revamp traditional approaches to warfare in the Middle East? This question is timely because in recent years we have seen a more “militarized Middle East,” with the ongoing civil war in Syria, the expansion of the Islamic State threat to Africa and Afghanistan, clashes in Yemen, increasing sectarian divides and the Iran-Israel conflict. Actually, it is not surprising that Israel will be the first to use F-35s in the Middle East. Israel's privilege is rooted in the US administration's strict adherence to the principle of "qualitative military edge," dating back to the term of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69). According to this principle, it is a vital US interest for Israel to preserve its military deterrence at all times and maintain its supremacy in military leadership, training and tactics. [Arms sales] [Israel] [Qualitative military edge] [F-35]
• Sanders takes on ‘billionaire class’ in launching 2016 bid against Clinton
  Bernie Sanders: 'We're in this race to win'(9:59) During a news conference on April 30, 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke about his agenda for the U.S. He also answered questions about how he would campaign against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (AP) By Paul Kane and Philip Rucker April 30 at 2:24 PM ? Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who supports socialist policies, lifted off his long-shot bid Thursday for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination by declaring war on the “billionaire class” that he contends runs the political system. In an address on the Capitol lawn, Sanders laid out an agenda that took aim at major conservative donors to Republican causes but also landed subtle jabs on the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former secretary of state whose political ties to Wall Street have left some liberals yearning for an alternative. “I don’t believe that the men and women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where billionaires own the political process. That’s a huge issue,” Sanders told reporters. He cited his opposition to the Iraq war, when he was a member of the House in 2002 and then-Sen. Clinton (N.Y.) supported the conflict, as well as staunch opposition to an emerging trade deal with a dozen Pacific-Rim nations that had its initial phases negotiated when Clinton served as the nation’s top diplomat. His main rhetorical targets were David and Charles Koch, industrialist brothers who have become political bogeymen for liberals because of their vast political spending. But Sanders suggested that it was valid to raise questions about the Clinton Foundation, which has come under scrutiny in recent weeks for accepting foreign donations. [US Election16] [Plutocracy]

• Iran seizes Marshall Islands cargo ship in Gulf waters, Pentagon says
  Pentagon says Maersk Tigris, which was thought to have entered Iranian waters, was intercepted by Iranian vessel – but did not belong to US
  An Iranian warship in the Strait of Hormuz. The strait is one of the busiest waterways in the world. An Iranian warship in the Strait of Hormuz. The strait is one of the busiest waterways in the world. Photograph: Mahdi Marizad/AP Saeed Kamali Dehghan and Julian Borger Tuesday 28 April 2015 16.49 BST Last modified on Wednesday 29 April 2015 00.01 BST Iranian naval forces have seized a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship in the strategic waterway of the Gulf, according to US officials. The Maersk Tigris and all its crew members were steered towards the Iranian island of Qeshm near the southern port city of Bandar Abbas after it was intercepted by an Iranian naval vessel.
  The ship, owned by the Danish company Maersk, is thought to have entered Iranian territorial waters as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz. [Iran] [Double standards] [Legality] [Provocation]
• Why Obama Wants to Lift Sanctions on Iran
  by Mike Whitney “It is essential to recognize that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapons program, nor does it possess a nuclear weapon. On February 26, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Ayatollah Khomenei, the supreme leader of Iran, ended his country’s nuclear weapons program in 2003 and “as far as we know, he’s not made the decision to go for a nuclear weapon.” This repeats the “high-confidence” judgement of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) that was first made in November 2007.” -Micah Zenko, Putting Iran’s Nuclear Program in Context, Council on Foreign Relations It always helps to start with the truth, and in Iran’s case, the truth is quite simple. Iran has no nuclear weapons, it has no nuclear weapons program, and it’s never been caught diverting nuclear fuel for other purposes. Iran has pursued nuclear technology for peaceful purposes alone. These are the facts. They may not jibe with the lies propagated in the western media, but they are the facts all the same. Iran is not guilty of anything. It’s merely a victim of Washington’s power-crazy attempt to control vital resources in the Middle East and enhance Israel’s regional hegemony. That’s what’s really going on. It’s all geopolitics. It has nothing to do with nukes. [Iran deal] [Russia confrontation]
• How Thatcher and Murdoch made their secret deal
  In 1981, Mrs Thatcher needed a boost from the press. By supporting Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the Times and Sunday Times, she made sure she got it. Harold Evans, who led an unsuccessful staff takeover bid, recalls a historic carve-up Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch A rare sighting of Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch, in 1991. Their meetings were a good deal more secretive 10 years earlier. Photograph: John Mantel/Rex Features Harold Evans Tuesday 28 April 2015 05.59 BST The coup that transformed the relationship between British politics and journalism began at a quiet Sunday lunch at Chequers, the official country retreat of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. She was trailing in the polls, caught in a recession she had inherited, eager for an assured cheerleader at a difficult time. Her guest had an agenda too. He was Rupert Murdoch, eager to secure her help in acquiring control of nearly 40% of the British press. Both parties got what they wanted. The fact that they met at all, on 4 January 1981, was vehemently denied for 30 years. Since their lie was revealed, it has been possible to uncover how the greatest extension of monopoly power in modern press history was planned and executed with such furtive brilliance. All the wretches in the subsequent hacking sagas – the predators in the red-tops, the scavengers and sleaze merchants, the blackmailers and bribers, the liars, the bullies, the cowed politicians and the bent coppers – were but the detritus of a collapse of integrity in British journalism and political life. At the root of the cruelties and extortions exposed in the recent criminal trials at the Old Bailey, was Margaret Thatcher’s reckless engorgement of the media power of her guest that January Sunday. The simple genesis of the hacking outrages is that Murdoch’s News International came to think it was above the law, because it was. [Thatcher] [Media]
• USA and Germany. Masters and Vassals
  Natalia Meden | 28.04.2015 | 00:00 A scandal broke out after Edward Snowden revealed the facts that Americans spied on allies and intercepted the conversations of Angela Merkel. It was clear that the information was just the tip of the iceberg. Actually it all had been known before but this time the relations became somewhat tense. Angela Merkel had to say the things she was reluctant to pronounce (she said it was unacceptable), send delegations overseas and create a parliamentary commission. Still a lot of things were not said. Germans believe that silence is golden. Minister of Internal Affairs Thomas de Maizière calmed everyone down: those who abide by law have nothing to worry about. The information is gathered to protect them from terrorists. To join anti-terrorist efforts the Bundesnachrichtendienst (the Federal Intelligence Service - BND) and American National Security Agency (NSA) signed a memorandum of agreement in 2002. Internet greatly enhanced the opportunities to control information flows. In 2001 Germany inserted changes into its German telecommunications privacy law. The first law appeared in 1968 - the year of young people’s anti-capitalist protests. Back then the parliament approved a law restricting people’s liberties guaranteed by article 10 of the Constitution like privacy of phone conversations and communications. (Artikel-10-Gesetz, or G-10). Police got the right to control the lives of citizens. The law was reviewed in 2013, but its substance remained the same. The ballyhoo raised about the fight against terrorists scared people making them believe it was necessary to have their correspondence watched. A special parliamentary oversight commission is exercising control, but whatever it says at the sessions is never made public domain. The last report was published in 2011. After 2013 they tried to hush the scandal up. It was said that the help of Americans was useful as they employed cutting edge technology still unknown to Germans. Then it was revealed that Americans used German technologies too. For instance, starting in 2002, the National Security Agency sent surveillance requests to the BND with targets identified by so-called «selectors» – email address, telephone number or the IP address of a computer’s internet connection. The results were to be reported to American colleagues. Seven years ago BND employees noted thousands of these computer-automated requests did not come under the terms of categories agreed with the NSA in 2002, months after the 9/11 attacks. The people under watch had nothing to do with terrorism (around 2 thousand people according to press reports). Americans spied on German and French defence companies. BND decided that silence was golden and continued to carry out the missions assigned by National Security Agency. [Surveillance] [Client] [Germany] [US dominance]
• The Kingpin Strategy Assassination as Policy in Washington and How It Failed, 1990-2015 by Andrew Cockburn
  As the war on terror nears its 14th anniversary -- a war we seem to be losing, given jihadist advances in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen -- the U.S. sticks stolidly to its strategy of "high-value targeting," our preferred euphemism for assassination. Secretary of State John Kerry has proudly cited the elimination of "fifty percent" of the Islamic State's "top commanders" as a recent indication of progress. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself, "Caliph" of the Islamic State, was reportedly seriously wounded in a March airstrike and thereby removed from day-to-day control of the organization. In January, as the White House belatedly admitted, a strike targeting al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan also managed to kill an American, Warren Weinstein, and his fellow hostage, Giovanni Lo Porto. [Assassination]
• Challenging American Exceptionalism
  By Marjorie Cohn Global Research, April 28, 2015 President Barack Obama stood behind the podium and apologized for inadvertently killing two Western hostages – including one American – during a drone strike in Pakistan. Obama said, “one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.” In his 2015 state of the union address, Obama described America as “exceptional.” When he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly in 2013, he said, “Some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional.” American exceptionalism reflects the belief that Americans are somehow better than everyone else. This view reared its head after the 2013 leak of a Department of Justice White Paper that describes circumstances under which the President can order the targeted killing of U.S. citizens. There had been little public concern in this country about drone strikes that killed people in other countries. But when it was revealed that U.S. citizens could be targeted, Americans were outraged. This motivated Senator Rand Paul to launch his 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination for CIA director. It is this double standard that moved Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu to write a letter to the editor of the New York Times, in which he asked, “Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours?” (When I saw that letter, I immediately invited Archbishop Tutu to write the foreword to my book, “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” He graciously agreed and he elaborates on that sentiment in the foreword). [Exceptionalism] [Double standards] [Assassination]
• Globalization versus the Culture of National Security
  Thursday, Apr 30, 2015 | 10:00 am - 11:30 am The Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at CSIS is leading a series – the Next Generation Dialogue on Industry and Defense – to reinvigorate the dialogue between the Department of Defense and industry on significant shifts underway in the defense sector. The series will bring together industry leaders, government stakeholders, and outside experts. This event, the first in the series, will focus on ways to find the right balance between protecting national security, accommodating industry's increasingly global reality, and preserving an open investment climate. William "Bill" Lynn is the Chief Executive Officer of both Finmeccanica North America and DRS Technologies, Inc. Prior to joining DRS in January 2012, Mr. Lynn served as the 30th United States Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2009 until 2011. Serving under Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, he managed three million personnel and oversaw an annual budget of $700 billion. He also personally led the Department's efforts in cybersecurity, space strategy, and energy policy. [MISCOM] [Export controls]
• Assad’s hold on power looks shakier than ever as rebels advance in Syria
  By Liz Sly April 26 at 9:38 PM ? BEIRUT — A surge of rebel gains in Syria is overturning long-held assumptions about the durability of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which now appears in greater peril than at any time in the past three years. The capture Saturday of the town of Jisr al-Shughour in northern Idlib province was just the latest in a string of battlefield victories by rebel forces, which have made significant advances in both the north and the south of the country. As was the case in the capital of Idlib province last month, government defenses in Jisr al-Shughour crumbled after just a few days of fighting, pointing as much to the growing weakness of regime forces as the revival of the opposition. The battlefield shifts come at a time when the Obama administration has set aside the crisis in Syria to focus on its chief priorities: defeating the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and concluding a nuclear deal with Iran. Yet the pace of events in Syria may force the United States to refocus on the unresolved war, which remains at the heart of the turmoil engulfing the Middle East, analysts say. Iran backs ­Assad, Saudi Arabia backs the rebels, and a shift in the balance of power in Syria could have profound repercussions for the conflicts in Iraq and Yemen. A man carries a child who survived after he was pulled from under rubble following what activists said was shelling by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad at Ain Tarma in eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, Syria April 26. (Reuters) “We’re seeing a game changer right now in Syria,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist. “I think we are going to see an end to the Assad regime, and we have to think now about what will happen the day after, because the day after is near.” [Graphic: Visualizing the 220,000 lives lost in Syria] Other observers say the prospect of a government collapse in Damascus is still remote. The capital is well defended, and the rebels’ gains have come mostly on the periphery of the country, where the regime’s supply lines are stretched. [Syria]
• Never before have so many people with so much money run for president
  Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is one of the GOP’s biggest contributors. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) By Matea Gold and Ed O'Keefe April 27 at 7:00 AM ? The 2016 Republican presidential contest, designed to be a tidy affair, is instead shaping up to be a chaotic, drawn-out slog, thanks largely to an expanding pool of rich patrons raining money on a broad field of candidates. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush has raised tens of millions of dollars for his allied super PAC, collecting a historic amount, he told donors Sunday night. But that hasn’t been enough to stop his rivals from amassing their own stockpiles. A super PAC supporting Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida secured about $20 million in commitments in less than two weeks, according to people familiar with the totals. An independent operation backing Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas says it pulled in $31 million in a single week. A new super PAC allied with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is close to matching that, fundraisers say. Never have so many candidates entered a White House contest boosted by such huge sums. The financial arms race could fuel a protracted primary season similar to the one in 2012 — exactly what party leaders were hoping to avoid. [US Election16] [Plutocracy] [Corruption]
• The New Hillary
  by Andrew Levine In the years before he ran for President in 1968, Richard Nixon’s publicists promoted a New Nixon. It was the same old Tricky Dicky with the rough edges smoothed away. The old Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John Kennedy in 1960; then Pat Brown defeated him in 1962, when he ran for the Governorship of California. The hope after that was, as Nixon himself put it, that the press would no longer “have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Nixon had always had trouble with the press. But this was not to be. You just can’t keep a good scoundrel down. The Vietnam War was a bipartisan concoction, from its inception to its ignominious end, but, before 1968, liberal Democrats – JFK and Lyndon Johnson, leading figures in their administrations, and Democratic Senators and Representatives — were the ones leading the way. Vietnam was not just an anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese proxy war; it was a liberal’s war. Republicans were culpable too, and Nixon was hardly an exponent of peace. But neither he nor the party whose ticket he led had yet taken on the now familiar more-bellicose-than-thou persona of the post-Vietnam GOP. The more unpopular the war became, the happier Republicans were that Lyndon Johnson, not one of their own, was taking the blame. Democrats were still widely considered the more warlike of the two parties. How could they not be – having brought the United States into the First and Second World Wars and into Korea? Vietnam was their thing. But then, as now, the Democratic Party was where the liberals were, most of them anyway; and so, the part of the anti-war movement that was electorally inclined, the less radical part, gravitated into their ranks, effectively dividing the party into pro- and anti-war camps. There were Republican liberals too back then, but a cultural divide already separated the anti-war movement from the GOP; and, with only a few exceptions, Republican liberals and moderates were no more peace-friendly than LBJ. The prospect of turning the GOP into an anti-war party never occurred As the 1968 election approached, Nixon said that he had a secret plan for ending the war. He was lying, of course; but, at the time, his claim was not implausible; hadn’t Eisenhower said much the same about Korea, and he was telling the truth. There were even a few anti-war liberals who voted for Nixon to punish the Democrats, and many more who considered doing so. The Democrats who led the way in Vietnam, LBJ and the cohort he inherited from Kennedy, were decent enough on domestic policy. By today’s standards, they were outstanding. Nixon wasn’t bad either. Unlike today’s Republicans and Democrats, but like Eisenhower, he had no interest in dismantling New Deal and Fair Deal advances. And for getting affirmative action going, for launching various “black capitalism” programs, for floating the prospect of a negative income tax and genuine national health insurance, for breathing life into the environmental movement, for pumping money into scientific research and infrastructure development, and much else, his presidency puts Barack Obama’s and Bill Clinton’s to shame. Between Nixon and what we can expect from Bill Clinton’s even more retrograde wife, there is no comparison at all. [Nixon] [Hillary Clinton] [US Election16]
• World War I and the British Empire: The Gallipoli Campaign, The Untold Story
  ‘The first casualty of war is truth’ By Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor Global Research, April 25, 2015 New Dawn Magazine The truth about Gallipoli has, unlike its victims, been buried deep. Historians like Peter Hart who describe it as “an idiocy generated by muddled thinking”1 are justified in their anger, but not their conclusions. The campaign was conceived in London as a grotesque, Machiavellian strategy to fool the Russians into believing that Britain was attempting to capture Constantinople for them. The paradox of its failure lay in its success. Gallipoli was purposefully designed to fail. A secret cabal of immensely rich and powerful men – the Secret Elite – was formed in England in 1891 with the explicit aim of expanding the British Empire across the entire globe. They planned a European war to destroy Germany as an economic, industrial and imperial competitor and, to that end, drew France then Russia into an alliance termed the Entente Cordiale. Their massive land armies were needed to crush Germany. France would be rewarded with Alsace and Lorraine, while Russia was conned into believing she would get Constantinople.2 Thereafter, seizing the Ottoman capital became a “widespread obsession, bordering on panic” in St Petersburg.3 [Gallipoli] [Imperialism]
• There were 3.5 million extra cases of malaria, which were untreated in 2014.
  Friday, 24 April 2015 - 8:18pm IST Updated: Friday, 24 April 2015 - 8:16pm IST | Place: London | Agency: ANI According to new modelling research, as many as 10900 extra malaria deaths may have occurred last year due to the disruption of healthcare services in the three countries in west Africa currently experiencing widespread Ebola virus outbreaks (Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia), with a further 3900 deaths resulting from the interruption of insecticide treated net (ITN) delivery. These new estimates of malaria deaths that would have been prevented by health systems when functioning normally, suggest that the west African Ebola outbreak could have resulted in comparable number of malaria deaths as those due to Ebola itself (8981 by February 1, 2015). However, the findings also indicate that implementing mass drug administration (MDA) and ITN campaigns to coincide with the 2015 malaria transmission season in May/June could largely mitigate the impact of Ebola on malaria. Lead author Dr Patrick Walker explained that the ongoing Ebola epidemic in parts of west Africa largely overwhelmed already fragile healthcare systems in 2014 making adequate care for malaria impossible and threatening to jeopardise progress made in malaria control and elimination over the past decade. [Ebola] [Health] [US dominance]
• Negative Interest Rates. Debt is Better than Cash? …Who’s Running the Monetary Asylum Anyway?
  By Bill Holter Global Research, April 23, 2015 Two days ago Reuters reported the 3 month “Euribor” went into negative interest rate territory. In this missive I will try to make sense of this as to “why or how” this could happen. I do not believe there is an answer other than the madness and insanity of being locked in a “short squeeze” room with the exits being blocked. Over the last three years we have seen gold trade many times in backwardation, James Turk has reported this again is occurring in London. The only explanations for this is that market participants either need gold now for whatever reason and will pay a premium to get it …or, they fear not receiving gold contracted for in the future. The bottom line is this, for backwardation to occur, the “current” gold must be in short supply for some reason. I believe this is what we are seeing in Europe, “collateral” is in shortage and a short squeeze has pushed pricing into a Twilight Zone without logic. After gold backwardation came the next head scratcher which began last year where various bonds, bank accounts and even mortgages being written with negative interest rates. How do any of these make sense? You “pay” the sovereign or even corporate borrower to lend money to them? Or a bank pays you to borrow money on a house or property? Think about the incentives here. Wouldn’t it be better to just take your money out of a bank or broker to avoid the negative interest and just bury it in a hole somewhere? How about banks lending at negative interest rates for a home, wouldn’t the bank be better off NOT making the loan and instead just sitting on the reserves? Here is David Stockman’s current take. A similar situation to this happened years ago in Switzerland (and again currently) where interest rates went negative as people wanted assurance “of” principal rather than “on” principal. The fear of currency devaluation was so great, capital piled into the “hard currency” francs. This is NOT what is happening today in Europe, no one is accepting negative yield just to own the euro “for safety” as it has already crashed versus the dollar and more so versus gold. What I believe has happened is the system has fewer and fewer doors where the exists are being blocked and collateral withdrawn. [Finance] [Crisis]
• Hostages’ deaths raise wider questions about drone strikes’ civilian toll
  By Greg Miller April 23 at 7:12 PM ? After weeks of aerial surveillance, CIA analysts reached two conclusions about a compound to be targeted in a January drone strike: that it was used by al-Qaeda militants and that, in the moment before it was hit, it had exactly four occupants. But as six bodies were removed from the rubble, the drone feeds that continued streaming back to CIA headquarters carried with them a new set of troubling questions, including who the two other victims were and how the agency’s pre-strike assessments could have been so flawed. In his grim statement on Thursday, President Obama described the deaths of two Western hostages held by al-Qaeda as unfortunate but not necessarily a result of negligence. He cited the “fog of war” and said that preliminary assessments indicate the strike “was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts.” But current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said that Thursday’s disclosures undercut years of U.S. claims about the accuracy of the drone program and provided new ammunition for skeptics of administration policies that are supposed to require “near certainty” that no civilians will be harmed. [UAV] [Civilians]
• No War Crimes Here
  by Gregory Elich As a member of a delegation documenting NATO war crimes in 1999, I visited Nish, the third largest city in Yugoslavia. NATO attacked this appealing old city on forty occasions, destroying approximately 120 buildings and damaging more than 3,400. On the night of our second stop in Nish, we attended a meeting with university professor Jovan Zlatich. During the NATO war, Dr. Zlatich served as commander of the city’s Civil Defense Headquarters. In his discussion of the bombardment of Nish, he focused particular attention on the use of cluster bombs. Nish had the misfortune of being the target of several CBU-87/B cluster bombs, a weapon designed to open at a predetermined height and release 202 bomblets. These smaller bombs burst in a furious repeating series of explosions, spraying thousands of pieces of shrapnel over a wide area. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. While causing relatively minor damage to structures, they inflict frightful damage on human beings. [War crimes] [Cluster bombs] [Double standards] [UNUS]
• Saudi Arabia’s Disastrous War in Yemen
  by Michael Horton In what has been three decades of ill-advised wars in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen may be the most ill-advised of them all. “Operation Decisive Storm,” the ironic name for Saudi Arabia’s aerial campaign in Yemen, has led to nothing decisive in Yemen beyond ensuring that the country remains a failed state and fertile ground for organizations like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Long before the commencement of “Operation Decisive Storm,” Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, was grappling with a host of problems ranging from severe water shortages, food insecurity, and a moribund economy, to a long running multi-front insurgency. Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen has exacerbated all of these problems and could well be the coup de grace for a unified and relatively stable Yemen. On Tuesday April 21st, the government of Saudi Arabia abruptly announced that it was ending “Operation Decisive Storm” and that it would be scaling back its aerial campaign in Yemen. “Operation Decisive Storm” will be replaced with “Operation Restore Hope,” an unfortunate name for a military operation given that it was also the name for the US’ ill-fated 1992-3 intervention in Somalia. It is unclear what “Operation Restore Hope” aims to achieve; however, the first phase of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen has been disastrous.
  Saudi Arabia’s Disastrous War in Yemen by MICHAEL HORTON In what has been three decades of ill-advised wars in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen may be the most ill-advised of them all. “Operation Decisive Storm,” the ironic name for Saudi Arabia’s aerial campaign in Yemen, has led to nothing decisive in Yemen beyond ensuring that the country remains a failed state and fertile ground for organizations like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Long before the commencement of “Operation Decisive Storm,” Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, was grappling with a host of problems ranging from severe water shortages, food insecurity, and a moribund economy, to a long running multi-front insurgency. Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen has exacerbated all of these problems and could well be the coup de grace for a unified and relatively stable Yemen. On Tuesday April 21st, the government of Saudi Arabia abruptly announced that it was ending “Operation Decisive Storm” and that it would be scaling back its aerial campaign in Yemen. “Operation Decisive Storm” will be replaced with “Operation Restore Hope,” an unfortunate name for a military operation given that it was also the name for the US’ ill-fated 1992-3 intervention in Somalia. It is unclear what “Operation Restore Hope” aims to achieve; however, the first phase of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen has been disastrous. [Yemen]
• More than $1 billion in U.S. emergency reconstruction aid goes missing in Afghanistan
  By James Rosen McClatchy Washington Bureau April 23, 2015 WASHINGTON — A total of $1.3 billion that the Pentagon shipped to its force commanders in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2014 for the most critical reconstruction projects can’t be accounted for by the Defense Department, 60 percent of all such spending under an emergency program, an internal report released Thursday shows. Most of the $100 billion the United States has spent to rebuild Afghanistan during 13 1/2 years of war has gone through the U.S. Agency for International Development and other civilian departments, but a small portion of that money went through the Pentagon and directly to American military officers there in a bid to bypass bureaucracy and rush the aid to urgently needed roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, water-treatment plants and other essential infrastructure. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/04/23/264136/more-than-1-billion-in-us-emergency.html#storylink=cpy [Corruption]
• The 7 Most Interesting Revelations From the Clinton Reports
  Apr 24, 2015 5:41 AM NZST From Shakira to Vladimir Putin, “Clinton Cash” revelations have begun popping up everywhere. Ben Brody From Russian consolidation of the world's uranium to the gala where Clinton spoke of his love for a business partner to Tom Cruise and Shakira, a flurry of stories about the Clintons' financials have emerged in recent days as reporters dig into Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. The book, by conservative writer Peter Schweizer, details complex ties between the couple, foreign and corporate donors to the Clinton Foundation, and Hillary Clinton's work as secretary of State, and it provides a wealth of revelations. 1. It all started with a dinner in Kazakhstan That's where Bill Clinton and Canadian financier Frank Giustra dined with the country's president in 2005 after flying over on Giustra's private jet, according to the New York Times. Within days, a company of Giustra's acquired stakes in three lucrative mines from Kazakhstan's state-run uranium agency. 2. A few deals later, Russia controlled one-fifth of the U.S. uranium production capacity [Bill Clinton]
• A Letter of Apology to My Grandson
  A Pox on Twenty-First-Century America By Tom Engelhardt Back in 2001, before I even imagined a grandson in my life, I had one of those moments (and wish I hadn’t). It was sometime just after the 9/11 attacks when, nationwide, Americans were still engaged in endless rites in which we repeatedly elevated ourselves to the status of the foremost victims on the planet, the only ones that mattered. In those months, you might say, we made ourselves into Earth’s indispensible or exceptional victims. In that extended moment of national mourning (combined with fear bordering on hysteria), the Bush administration geared up to launch its revenge-fueled global wars, while money started pouring into the national security state in a historically unprecedented way. It was a time when the previously un-American word “homeland” was being attached to what would become a second defense department, secrecy was descending like a blanket on the government, torture was morphing into the enhancement of the week in the White House, assassination was about to become a focus (later an obsession) of the executive branch -- and surveillance? Don’t even get me started on the massively redundant domestic and global surveillance state that would soon be built on outright illegalities and rubber-stamp legalities of every sort. [Decline]
• Eurasia as We Knew it is Dead
  by Pepe Escobar Move over, Cold War 2.0. The real story, now and for the foreseeable future, in its myriad declinations, and of course, ruling out too many bumps in the road, is a new, integrated Eurasia forging ahead. China’s immensely ambitious New Silk Road project will keep intersecting with the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union (EEC). And that will be the day when the EU wakes up and finds a booming trade/commerce axis stretching from St. Petersburg to Shanghai. It’s always pertinent to remember that Vladimir Putin sold a similar, and even more encompassing, vision in Germany a few years ago – stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok. It will take time – and troubled times. But Eurasia’s radical face lift is inexorable. This implies an exceptionalist dream – the U.S. as Eurasia hegemon, something that still looked feasible at the turn of the millennium – fast dissolving right before anyone’s eyes. [Eurasia]
• Global Capitalism and the Global Police State: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism
  By Prof William I. Robinson Global Research, April 21, 2015 Welcome to the Asylum: Capitalism, a Ceaseless and Futile Quest for Money and Goods The world capitalist system is arguably experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history. World capitalism has experienced a profound restructuring through globalisation over the past few decades and has been transformed in ways that make it fundamentally distinct from its earlier incarnations. Similarly, the current crisis exhibits features that set it apart from earlier crises of the system and raise the stakes for humanity. If we are to avert disastrous outcomes we must understand both the nature of the new global capitalism and the nature of its crisis. Analysis of capitalist globalisation provides a template for probing a wide range of social, political, cultural and ideological processes in this 21st century. Following Marx, we want to focus on the internal dynamics of capitalism to understand crisis. And following the global capitalism perspective, we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively evolved in recent decades. The system-wide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier such episodes such as that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because capital- ism is fundamentally different in the 21st century. Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively new epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch.1 - See more at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/global-capitalism-and-the-global-police-state-crisis-of-humanity-and-the-specter-of-21st-century-fascism/5444340#sthash.nwaDQaHU.dpuf [Capitalism] [Crisis]
• Faced with questions on migrants, Italy’s Renzi points fingers about Libya
  Responding to disaster in the Mediterranean Sea An overloaded boat with hundreds of desperate migrants capsized and sank off the Libyan coast on Sunday. By Steven Mufson April 22 at 11:25 AM ? If there was one sour note to the White House visit by Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, it was on the subject of Libya and the boatloads of migrants fleeing to Italy’s shores. On Friday, two days before hundreds drowned in a single incident, Renzi sidestepped questions about how Italy was handling the migrant flotilla, saying that the solution had to lie with reconciliation of the warring tribes that had made Libya so dangerous that people wanted to risk their lives to escape. But Renzi also said that the fault lies with the foreign powers that had helped overthrow Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi. “If you decide to move to remove a dictator — and he was a terrible dictator — you must think about, step by step, what institutional structures will remain,” he said in an interview at The Washington Post on Friday. Yes, he was pointing fingers. One Italian official in Washington last week said that Renzi was upset about the leading role France, under then-President Nicholas Sarkozy, and Qatar played in overthrowing Gaddafi while leaving behind a humanitarian crisis for Italy. The U.S. role? Back in early 2011, the United States was still bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and there was little appetite for sending U.S. troops to North Africa. A New Yorker article published then quoted an unnamed administration official describing Obama’s approach to foreign policy as “leading from behind,” a phrase Republicans seized upon to charge the president with abdicating international leadership and handing it to European and Mideastern nations that had rallied to topple Gaddafi. [Libya] [Unintended consequences] [Dissension] [Outsourcing]
• Chomsky says US is world’s biggest terrorist
  . Noam Chomsky is one of the superstars of the intellectual world; a prolific author and self-proclaimed anarchist, who, at the age of 86 still doesn’t seem to be slowing down. He still rails against a whole host of perceived injustices, with the West generally in his line of fire. Isabelle Kumar of Euronews interviewed him about terrorism, Cuba and the future of Europe. Isabelle Kumar: “The world in 2015 seems a very unsettled place but if we take a big picture view do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about the general state of play?” Noam Chomsky: “In the global scene we are racing towards a precipice which we are determined to fall over which will sharply reduce the prospects for decent survival.” Isabelle Kumar: “What precipice is that?” Noam Chomsky: “There are actually two, one is environmental catastrophe which is imminent and we don’t have a lot of time to deal with it and we are going the wrong way, and the other has been around for 70 years, the threat of nuclear war, which is in fact increasing. If you look at the record it is a miracle we have survived.” [Chomsky]
• Yemen talks a defining moment for US-Iran ties
  Author: M.K. Bhadrakumar April 22, 2015 The first disclosure of Saudi Arabia’s impending announcement on the termination of its air strikes on Yemen didn’t come from Riyadh. It came from Tehran. The Saudi Ministry of Defence formally made its statement a few hours later. (FARS news agency). Clearly, intense consultations preceded it and Iran was not only in the loop but probably positioned itself in a lead role. No doubt, consultations involving the United States and Iran preceded the Saudi decision. President Barack Obama has acknowledged that the U.S. was in touch with Iran, sending “very direct messages” to Tehran not to do anything that might threaten shipping traffic in the region. Obviously, the consultations couldn’t have been restricted to freedom of shipping in the Gulf of Aden alone. Again, the call by the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in the weekend for an immediate ceasefire certainly played its part, too, and it could, perhaps, be understood as a parallel effort in coordination with the US-Iranian consultations. Curiously, the GCC ambassadors in New York didn’t even the ground was shifting when just a day back they had “rejected” Ban’s call. Which means the Iranians operated at a high political level. It will be recalled that President Barack Obama Obama spoke with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud and with the Crown Prince of the UAE over the weekend. The Saudis ultimately sensed that the law of diminishing returns would be at work if the operations had continued. The Saudi rethink could have been anticipated. (See my blog A Saudi rethink on Yemen is possible.) Apart from the international isolation that the Saudis increasingly faced, the fact that the military operation was not really achieving anything, while the latent “anti-Saudi” sentiment among the Yemenis was rearing its head following the wanton air attacks causing killing close to three thousand innocent civilians and destroying the country’s infrastructure — all this put the Saudi leadership on the defensive. [Yemen]
• Iran rejects US call for ‘anywhere, anytime access’ to military sites
  Tue Apr 21, 2015 Iran has rejected a call by US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz for unlimited access of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to the Islamic Republic’s military sites. In a Monday interview with ISNA news agency, the spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) described Moniz’s demand as “not practical and acceptable.” Behrouz Kamalvandi noted that negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program “are still underway,” urging the other side to put forward its views during the talks. Kamalvandi stressed that Tehran will not undertake any commitments beyond “common laws and regulations.” Earlier on Monday, Moniz said nuclear inspectors will need free access in Iran as part of a possible deal on the Iranian nuclear program. “We expect to have anywhere, anytime access,” added the nuclear physicist, who has been part of the recent nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries. [Iran deal]
• Syrian Rebels Caught in ‘False-Flag’ Kidnapping
  April 16, 2015 Exclusive: In August 2013, when the U.S. government almost went to war in Syria over a Sarin attack, suspicions that it was a rebel “false-flag” were ridiculed. But new disclosures about a rebel role in kidnapping NBC’s Richard Engel several months earlier show the rebels knew such propaganda tricks, says Robert Parry. By Robert Parry In December 2012, Syria’s U.S.-backed “moderate” rebels pulled off a false-flag kidnapping and “rescue” of NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and his crew, getting the crime blamed on a militia tied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a propaganda scam that NBC played along with despite having evidence of the truth. On Wednesday, Engel, who had blamed an Assad-linked Shiite militia in reports both for NBC and Vanity Fair, acknowledged that a new examination of the case persuaded him that “the group that kidnapped us was Sunni, not Shia.” He added that the kidnappers “put on an elaborate ruse to convince us they were Shiite shabiha militiamen.” [Media] [Disinformation]
• The defense of inaction in Syria
  By Fred Hiatt Editorial page editor April 19 at 7:52 PM ? One of the most surprising of President Obama’s legacies may be the eclipse of “Never again” as an aspiration of U.S. foreign policy. I don’t mean that Obama is the first president to stand by as atrocities unfold. He is not. Just as Obama has watched passively as Syria has unraveled, with hundreds of thousands killed and more than 11 million — half the nation — displaced, so President Bill Clinton did nothing to stop genocide in Rwanda, and President George W. Bush failed to stop the depredations in the Darfur region of Sudan. Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor of The Post. He writes editorials for the newspaper and a biweekly column that appears on Mondays. He also contributes to the PostPartisan blog. View Archive But Clinton expressed remorse for his inaction in Rwanda. Americans in churches and synagogues demanded that Bush take steps to “save Darfur.” The political will was lacking, but there was at least a sense of unease, even shame, that the United States would stand aside as so many innocents were slaughtered. [US Syria policy] [Inversion] [Agency]
• 'Clinton Cash' takes aim at Hillary. Will it hurt her 2016 campaign?
  'Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich' is the latest salvo aimed at Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. By Husna Haq, Correspondent April 20, 2015 The New York Times call it the "most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle." The Daily Mail hails it as "the bombshell book that could derail Hillary's campaign." And the right-leaning Breitbart says it "could be a presidential game-changer." Recommended: How much do you know about Hillary Rodham Clinton? Take our quiz. “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” by Peter Schweizer, is the latest salvo aimed at Hillary Rodham Clinton's nascent campaign, and according to reports, it may be damaging. Due to hit shelves May 5, the book is a 186-page investigation of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, the culmination of a one-year investigation by Mr. Schweizer, a former speech-writing consultant to President George W. Bush. His claim: foreign governments and organizations that donated to the Clinton Foundation, and to the Clintons themselves in speaking fees, received favors in exchange from the State Department, headed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That's according to reporting by The New York Times, which was given an advance copy of the book and ran an excerpt on it Sunday. [Hillary Clinton] [Corruption]
• Sale of U.S. Arms Fuels the Wars of Arab States
  By Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper April 18, 2015 WASHINGTON — To wage war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia is using F-15 fighter jets bought from Boeing. Pilots from the United Arab Emirates are flying Lockheed Martin’s F-16 to bomb both Yemen and Syria. Soon, the Emirates are expected to complete a deal with General Atomics for a fleet of Predator drones to run spying missions in their neighborhood. As the Middle East descends into proxy wars, sectarian conflicts and battles against terrorist networks, countries in the region that have stockpiled American military hardware are now actually using it and wanting more. The result is a boom for American defense contractors looking for foreign business in an era of shrinking Pentagon budgets — but also the prospect of a dangerous new arms race in a region where the map of alliances has been sharply redrawn. [Arms sales]
• Religious Fanaticism is a Huge Factor in Americans’ Support for Israel
  By Glenn Greenwald Thursday at 1:57 AM A new poll from Bloomberg Politics contains a finding that, if you really think about it, is quite remarkable: Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide. It’s the ultimate violation of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warning that “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded. … The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.” It is inconceivable that a substantial portion of Americans would want to support any other foreign country even where doing so was contrary to U.S. interests. Only Israel commands anything near that level of devoted, self-sacrificing fervor on the part of Americans. So it’s certainly worth asking what accounts for this bizarre aspect of American public opinion. The answer should make everyone quite uncomfortable: it’s religious fanaticism. The U.S. media loves to mock adversary nations, especially Muslim ones, for being driven by religious extremism, but that is undeniably a major factor, arguably the most significant one, in explaining fervent support for Israel among the American populace. In reporting its poll findings, Bloomberg observed: Religion appears to play an important role in shaping the numbers. Born-again Christians are more likely than overall poll respondents, 58 percent to 35 percent, to back Israel regardless of U.S. interests. Americans with no religious affiliation were the least likely to feel this way, at 26 percent. The primary reason evangelical Christians in the U.S. are so devoted to Israel is simple: their radical religious dogma teaches them that God demands this. [Israel] [Religion]
• Iran urges India, China and Russia to oppose NATO's expansion
  17/04/2015 TASS Iran is urging Russia, China, and India to stand shoulder to shoulder against NATO’s eastward expansion and the alliance’s creation of a missile defense system in Europe. This statement was made by Hossein Dehghan, Minister of Defense and Armed Forces of Iran, at the Fourth Moscow Conference on International Security. The minister said that his country was ready “to cooperate with China, Russia, and India to counter NATO’s eastward expansion, deployment of a missile shield in Europe, and the major concentration of US forces to the south and east of China”. “My country and I are ready to participate in consultations in the field of cooperation (on these issues),” said Mr. Dehghan. At the same time, he noted that the defense ministers of Russia, China, and Iran might hold a trilateral meeting in the future. “We discussed some aspects of regional security. It was proposed to hold a trilateral meeting between Russia, Iran, and China,” he said. [NCW] [NATO expansion] [Missile defense]
• Islamic State uses drones to coordinate fighting in Baiji
  BY CALEB WEISS | April 17th, 2015 | In a newly released video showing the Islamic State’s assault on the Baiji oil refinery complex, several scenes depict the jihadist group using unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance and battlefield coordination. The use of drones allowed the Islamic State to gather intelligence to be used by commanders for command and control purposes, as well as act as spotters for artillery pieces. In addition to the scenes showing the use of the drones, other footage features several Islamic State commanders in an “operations control room” directing the fighting at the refinery. It is unclear what kind of unmanned aerial vehicles were employed by the group. [UAV] [NSA] [Entitlement]
• These are all the countries where the US has a military presence
  Written by Annalisa Merelli@missanabeem April 2, 2015 This item has been corrected. On Mar. 24, US president Barack Obama announced that all 9,800 US troops currently stationed in Afghanistan will remain until the end of 2015. This generated a fair amount of criticism: it was, after all, Obama’s promise that the last American troop would leave the country in 2014. Those expecting the US to leave Afghanistan, however, should take a minute to consider this: the US still hasn’t left Germany. In fact, there are quite a few places the US hasn’t left, and while certainly most of them don’t pose a threat to American soldiers, they reveal a pattern about the US staying, rather than leaving. [Bases]
• Secrecy, Intransigence and War
  by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair Last of a three-part series. Hillary Clinton’s propensity for overkill earned her and Bill the enmity of people capable of inflicting serious damage, as the Whitewater and Cattle Futures scandals duly attested. And soon, as they embarked on the 1992 presidential campaign, the same overkill reflex produced a perfect storm of bad publicity that came within an ace of finishing Clinton off altogether. [Hillary Clinton]
• Deindustrialization, NATO-Style
  by Gregory Elich One of the main features of NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 was the deliberate targeting of factories and manufacturing plants. As a member of a delegation travelling throughout Yugoslavia shortly after the end of the war, I could readily see that such targeting had been methodical and thorough. Wherever we went, there was no military value in the facilities that NATO chose to destroy. Indeed, the common criterion was that state-owned and worker cooperative factories and plants that supported many people were singled out. The apparent intent was to drive much of the population into destitution and make people more amenable to demands to install government eager to do the West’s bidding. [Yugoslavia] [Immiseration] [Privatisation]
• Saudi Claims on Iran’s Role in Yemen Face Skepticism in West
  The Saudi-led military campaign to roll back Houthi fighters in Yemen has received public backing from the kingdom’s traditional allies, including the U.S. and France. At the same time, U.S., French, and other Western officials say they are skeptical about Saudi Arabia’s main claim: that the Houthi rebellion is driven by Iran’s ambitions to hold sway over large chunks of the Arab world. [Yemen] [Saudi Arabia]
• Kenya’s Garissa Attack Wasn’t Just a Tragedy. It Was Blowback.
  Sadly, innocent Kenyans are paying the price for their government's actions in Somalia. By David Zarembka, April 13, 2015. The old anti-war song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” has the refrain “When will they ever learn?” That’s what came to mind after al-Shabaab’s ghastly April 2 assault at Garissa University in northeastern Kenya, not too far from the Somali border. The attackers killed nearly 150 people. This wasn’t just a security failure — in part, it was blowback. Sadly, innocent Kenyans are paying the price for their government’s actions in Somalia. When the Kenyan military invaded the country back in 2011, there was almost no discussion or consideration of the possible consequences. Like the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, they seemed to think that as the stronger power, with superior training and resources, the fight would be all theirs. But that’s not how al-Shabaab fights. These are simplistic responses to show that the government is “doing something.” Neither will address the fundamental insecurity posed by al-Shabaab. Roots of the Problem
  Echoing a familiar pattern, it was intervention by the United States that created al-Shabaab. [Somalia] [Blowback] [Outsourcing] [Response]
• Islam, A Forgotten Holocaust, And American Historical Amnesia
  Peter Dale Scott
  In a September 2014 address to the nation, President Obama attacked ISIL (or ISIS) as “terrorists… unique in their brutality. They execute captured prisoners. They kill children.”1 But of course such terrorism in the last half-century is hardly “unique.” Nor is it unprecedented. Still less is it confined to America’s foes. In fact the first major Muslim extermination campaign against civilians killed without trial for their “Westernness,” occurred a half century ago, on a far, far vaster scale, and with active American support and encouragement. If you did not know this, consider these four questions: 1) What has been the largest planned civilian massacre since the Nazi Holocaust? 2) What was the largest massacre ever effectively ignored by the U.S. governing media until after it had been completed? 3) What major CIA operation is almost never treated in the many histories that have now been published about the CIA? 4) What massacre was part of a process later celebrated by Time Magazine as “the West’s best news in Asia”? The answer to all four questions, I believe, is the same: CIA and Pentagon encouragement of a rebellious cadre of anti-Communist generals who in 1965 resolved the question of Indonesia’s uncertain future by a ruse to overthrow its elected president Sukarno and kill off the members and suspected sympathizers of the nation’s largest political party. This was the Indonesian Communist Party or PKI, which was also the largest Communist party in the world outside of the Sino-Soviet bloc. The total number of those killed will remain forever unknown, but was once estimated by Amnesty International to be “many more than one million.”2 [Indonesia] [Massacre]
• Obama’s proposal for more trade with Asia may not go over so well in his own party
  President Obama discusses the opportunities and benefits of trade on March 25 in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. (Susan Walsh/AP) By David Nakamura April 15 ? Galesburg, Ill., was a town on the brink. The local Maytag plant had recently shut its doors, putting hundreds of union employees out of work; frustrated residents despaired that technology and globalization had upended the manufacturing foundations of their community. Against that backdrop, Illinois’ junior U.S. senator, Barack Obama, delivered a commencement speech at Knox College and directly addressed the seismic changes affecting the economic life of places like Galesburg. He suggested that he understood the problem and that he would pursue policies to provide a solution. “It’s as if someone changed the rules in the middle of the game and no one bothered to tell these folks,” Obama said. Then he challenged the graduates: “What do we do about this? How does America find its way in the new global economy? What will our place in history be?” Ten years later, President Obama’s answer to those questions — more trade with Asia — sounds to a lot of people like more of the same, exactly the kind of solution that led to the problems in the first place. [Obama] [Trade] [Unemployment] [Globalisation] [TPP]
• So much for free speech: Southampton University and the pro-Israel lobby
  Hilary Aked 15 April 2015 If our universities can’t stand up to the Israel lobby and uphold free speech, how will the international community ever stand up to the state of Israel and uphold international law? Microphone surrounded by crowd at Trafalgar Square. Whose voices are we hearing? Flickr/Farrukh. Some rights reserved. An academic conference, International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism, was due to start this Friday but the University of Southampton - citing spurious ‘health and safety’ concerns - cancelled it, following intense pressure from the pro-Israel lobby. Despite many academics writing to the university expressing their dismay and a petition which garnered wide public support, an application at the High Court yesterday denied organisers a judicial review and the conference has now been postponed indefinitely. While an outrageous affront to freedom of speech, Southampton’s capitulation to external pressure is not hugely surprising. The Israel lobby has a long history of censorship, including in universities, which are no longer bastions of free speech. In early March a UC Berkeley conference called Censoring Palestine at the University: Free Speech and Academic Freedom at a Crossroads was convened to discuss the apparent escalation in this repressive trend, in the US and beyond. It’s a phenomenon that has occurred in response to heightened criticism of Israel which in turn is a result of the moral outrage generated by three successive Gaza ‘wars’ in six years – wars, Richard Falk observed at Berkeley, better characterised as massacres, so one-sided was the slaughter. This article seeks to answer two key questions: why is it that universities can be bullied into silence by pro-Israel groups? And why is it that Israel can’t stand to be criticised? In the process it offers a critique not only of Israel and Zionism but also of the neoliberal university. [Free speech] [Israel]
• Obama removes Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism
  Obama tells Congress he will remove Cuba from terrorism list(1:12) In a statement released by the White House, President Barack Obama told Congress he will remove Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. (Reuters) By Karen DeYoung April 14 at 6:39 PM ? President Obama has decided to lift the U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, a decision that removes a principal impediment to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries and accepts that Havana’s role as an agent of revolution has long since slipped into history. The long-awaited action, which was announced by the White House in a message to Congress on Tuesday, follows a pledge made by Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro last December to move toward normalized relations. Congress has 45 days to consider Cuba’s removal from the list before it takes effect, but it cannot interfere with Obama’s decision without voting on separate legislation, a measure that the White House has deemed unlikely. [Cuba deal] [Terrorism list] [Inversion]
• Coming to Terms With the American Empire
  Geopolitical Weekly April 14, 2015 | 07:54 GMT By George Friedman "Empire" is a dirty word. Considering the behavior of many empires, that is not unreasonable. But empire is also simply a description of a condition, many times unplanned and rarely intended. It is a condition that arises from a massive imbalance of power. Indeed, the empires created on purpose, such as Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, have rarely lasted. Most empires do not plan to become one. They become one and then realize what they are. Sometimes they do not realize what they are for a long time, and that failure to see reality can have massive consequences. [Imperialism] [Empire]
• The Seeds of Corruption
  by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair Second in a three-part series. In 1990, the National Law Journal ran profiles of “the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in the United States”. Hillary Clinton was on the list, and for years she would publicly boast that the Journal had named her one of “the nation’s 100 top lawyers”. Finally, the editor of the National Law Journal, Patrick Oster, wrote to Arkansas’ first lady–as she still was in 1991–testily pointing out that the word “influential” is not synonymous with “top” or “best”–the latter two words used by Mrs. Clinton interchangeably. By “influential” the Journal’s profile writer, Peggy Fisk, had meant a lawyer plentifully endowed with corporate and political connections, which Mrs. Clinton certainly enjoyed in Arkansas where she had become a partner of the Rose Law Firm in 1977, amid the dawn of her husband’s political career as he began his terms as governor of the state. By the late 1980s, Hillary Clinton was sitting on the board of Wal-Mart, with the rest of Arkansas’ business elite crowding her Rolodex. Hillary ignored Oster’s letter of correction, instructing her staff to continue to use the word “best” in invoking the Journal’s profile. She continued to do so for years. Oster was still writing her a decade later about her misuse–including an editorial column in the Journal in 2000, when she was running for the U.S. Senate. [Hillary Clinton]
• Beheadings: Saudi Arabia Quickens the Pace
  By Sevag Kechichian 4/13/15 at 9:55 AM Grainy video footage of a public execution in Saudi Arabia earlier this year shows a woman on the floor begging for her life beneath her executioner. A man dressed in white raises a sword above his head. The images shocked the world and provided a sobering reminder of the kingdom’s unwavering commitment to the death penalty. In Amnesty International’s 2014 global report on the death penalty, released April 1, 2015, Saudi Arabia once again ranks among the top five executioners in the world. At least 90 people were executed in the kingdom in 2014. So far this year, the authorities are well on track to surpass last year’s annual execution rate, with at least 54 people executed in the first three months of 2015. Most death sentences in Saudi Arabia are carried out by beheading, often in public. This gruesome execution method has driven the media to draw parallels with the beheadings performed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Yet the Saudi Arabian authorities have fiercely defended their own use of the death penalty, arguing that far from being the brutal acts of a notorious armed group, the executions are instead acts of justice, carried out in line with Islamic traditions and religious law, known as Shariah, and only after the strictest fair trial standards are upheld. But is that true? Do cases of executions in 2014 support these claims? The answer, Shariah experts would agree, is no. [Saudi Arabia]
• Is Iran outmaneuvering Saudi Arabia in Yemen?
  The war in Yemen is increasingly being construed as a Saudi contest with Iran. To ascertain the veracity of this oft-repeated conception, two things need to be clarified: whether the conflict is driven by sectarian dynamics and what Iran seeks in Yemen. Accusations that Iran is aiding Yemen's Houthis increased dramatically in 2009, in large part due to Saudi and Iranian media, though little evidence exists for direct Iranian influence. Author Mohammad Ali Shabani Posted April 13, 2015 Yemen has long been the Afghanistan of the Arab world. Most Yemenis live below the poverty rate. The country sits on multiple fault lines, in addition to a long-running border dispute with Saudi Arabia. Following Arab Spring protests, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi came to power through a Gulf Cooperation Council-brokered one-man election, as opposition groups seized on power vacuums. The Houthis have in past months seized major urban centers in collaboration with their old foe (and Hadi’s predecessor) Ali Abdullah Saleh. Experts on Yemen contend that the Houthis emerged as a Zaydi revivalist movement in response to Saudi-funded Salafist proselytizing in the 1990s. Claims that the group is sectarian and linked to Iran are long-running. Robert Worth, a fellow at the Wilson Center and former New York Times Middle East correspondent, told Al-Monitor, “The Houthis have been accused of being Iranian stooges almost since they were first founded.” However, these accusations have not attracted much credence. Worth, who has been on the ground in Yemen and is working on a book on the legacy of the Arab uprisings, said, “When I started reporting on them in 2007, this accusation was ridiculed by almost everyone — even by Yemeni officials, off the record.” [Yemen]
• The Making of Hillary Clinton
  by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair First in a three-part series. Hillary Clinton has always been an old-style Midwestern Republican in the Illinois style; one severely infected with Methodism, unlike the more populist variants from Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa. Her first known political enterprise was in the 1960 presidential election, the squeaker where the state of Illinois notoriously put Kennedy over the top, courtesy of Mayor Daley, Sam Giancana and Judith Exner. Hillary was a Nixon supporter. She took it on herself to probe allegations of vote fraud. From the leafy middle-class suburbs of Chicago’s west side, she journeyed to the tenements of the south side, a voter list in her hand. She went to an address recorded as the domicile of hundreds of Democratic voters and duly found an empty lot. She rushed back to campaign headquarters, agog with her discovery, only to be told that Nixon was throwing in the towel. [Hillary Clinton]
• America's political royalty: Why political dynasties, from the Adams to the Clinton to the Bush families, are both loved and loathed in the United States
  By Linda Feldmann, Staff writer March 22, 2015 • Washington — In a nation of 319 million people, America’s 2016 presidential election could well come down to a rematch between two of its greatest modern political families: the Bushes and the Clintons. Hillary Rodham Clinton is crushing it in polls for the Democratic nomination. The former secretary of State, senator, and first lady leads her nearest potential competitor – Vice President Joe Biden – by an average of 44 percentage points in major polls. And she hasn’t even taken the first formal step toward running. In terms of fundraising and organizing, though, Mrs. Clinton is all in. Jeb Bush, the son and brother of former presidents, is at or near the top of the vast potential Republican field in most polls. The former governor of Florida has some commanding advantages: the Bush family’s killer Rolodex and, flowing from that, the ability to raise vast sums of money. At one recent fundraiser, tickets went for $100,000 a pop. Recommended: How much do you know about Jeb Bush? Take our quiz. Like Clinton, Mr. Bush has lived and breathed politics at the highest level for decades. For both, politics is the family business. Both epitomize “establishment.” Many Americans, when asked, recoil at the prospect of another Clinton-Bush presidential race, an echo of the 1992 contest that pitted then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton against President George H.W. Bush. The United States was founded in rebellion against royal privilege and inherited status. As children, Americans are told that anyone can grow up to be president. And yet throughout US history, voters have regularly gravitated toward “brand name” political families. “There’s this paradox in the American body politic,” says Barbara Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “We always say that we want someone who’s up from the log cabin, but we are drawn to the wealthy, noblesse oblige candidates as well.” How did we reach this moment, when two A-list political families – one with generations of wealth, the other of humble origins but now just as privileged – could end up facing off for the presidency? It’s no accident. Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that opened the floodgates of outside spending on campaigns, has raised the stakes exponentially for presidential fundraising. That gives a huge advantage to candidates with entree to big money. [Democracy] [Plutocracy] [Dynasty]
• U.S. Widens Role in Saudi-led Campaign Against Yemen Rebels
  Washington has concerns about Riyadh’s goals in the conflict By Maria Abi-Habib in Beirut and Adam Entous in Washington Updated April 12, 2015 8:35 p.m. ET 10 COMMENTS The U.S. is expanding its role in Saudi Arabia’s campaign in Yemen, vetting military targets and searching vessels for Yemen-bound Iranian arms amid growing concerns about the goals of the Saudi-led mission, according to U.S. and Arab officials. U.S. officials worry mounting civilian casualties will undermine popular support in Yemen and in other Sunni Arab countries backing the campaign. At least 648 civilians have been killed since the intervention began, and Saudi-led strikes have hit hospitals, schools, a refugee camp and neighborhoods, according to U.N. officials. The Saudis have blamed the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and their Yemeni allies for civilian casualties and said they were doing their best to limit them. [Saudi Arabia] [US dominance]
• Iran and a Possible New Energy Geopolitics
  F. William Engdahl The recent tentative agreement between Iran and the USA regarding Iran’s nuclear program open the prospect of a lifting of almost 36 years of American economic sanctions against Iran. It is being greeted by threats of unilateral military strikes by Israel against Iran to “pre-empt” Iran developing a nuclear bomb. An alliance improbable as it may seem between the ultra-conservative Saudi monarchy and the government of Israel is emerging against Iran and the US deal. The real question is what the deeper motive of the Obama Administration is regarding Iran. Here energy geopolitics plays the lead role, as so often in the energy-rich Middle East. And Russia is the target. I recently had a dialogue with Shervin, an Iranian energy expert I met two years ago in Tehran regarding these developments. I want to share some of the highlights of that discussion here. He is an energy specialist with Iran’s leading international news agency, Tasnim News Agency. The talk provides a useful insight into the thinking of Iranian intellectuals regarding US sanctions, Iran’s possible role in the world and in energy geopolitics.
  Tasnim: How do the economic sanctions against Iran also impact the US economy? WE: The US Treasury sanctions on Iran have virtually no impact on the US economy, which makes them so diabolical. Tasnim: Are economic sanctions against Iran more beneficial to America or Iran? WE: Actually, and I saw this when I was in Tehran two years ago, it benefits Iran far more. This is because it forces you to be more self-reliant and not let your economy, your industries, your agriculture be destroyed by cheap Western imports like so many countries in Asia, Africa, South America have done. It forces Iran to develop the wonderful capacities internally, to control her own credit, not become a vassal of a dollar system that is going bankrupt. Iranians are very educated and very intelligent people, very resourceful. I think you will do quite well without importing iPhone6 or Monsanto GMO toxic soybeans. [Iran] [Sanctions]
• Yemen crisis: What will Saudi Arabia do when – not if – things go wrong in their war with the Shia Houthi rebels?
  They might ask the Pakistanis to send part of their vast army into the cauldron - but that would not be adding oil to the fire. It would be adding fire to the oil The depth of the sectarian war unleashed in Yemen shows itself in almost every Gulf Arab official statement and in the official press. The Saudis take it as read that Iranian forces are actually present in Yemen to assist the Shia Houthis. There are Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon with the Houthis. Iran is itself behind the Houthi uprising. One Kuwaiti journalist calls the Houthi rebels “rats”. As usual in Arab wars, real evidence has gone out of the window. Another journalist, the editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti Arab Times, Ahmed al-Jarallah, concluded a political tribute to King Salman of Saudi Arabia with the observation that “leaders of the (Saudi) coalition for virtue and stability in Yemen and the region made their point through their offensive against the tunnel and vice of conspiracy where the bats of extremism, enmity and division incubate”. “Rats” and “incubation” – that’s the kind of language sectarian wars also produce. No-one in the wealthy Gulf states has asked if Saudi Arabia is entering the Yemen war simply because it does not want another Shia state on its border – after the Americans “liberated” Iraq and installed a Shia government in Baghdad. Saudi generals talk of massive casualties among the Houthis – they still say they have not killed civilians, even though they use the tired phrase “collateral damage” in their denials. No-one challenges the boasts of its victory – or dares to mention that this extraordinary coalition is a Sunni force fighting Shia. At a Syrian refugee conference in Kuwait this week, the Saudis were lauded for their generosity in pledging $60m for homeless and destitute Syrians out of a total of $3.8bn of promised aid world wide. No-one was ungenerous enough to mention that the Saudis bought $67bn worth of weapons from the US in 2011-12. [Yemen] [Saudi Arabia]
• Does ISIS really smuggle “$3M worth of oil” into Turkey EVERY DAY?
  Last summer, quoting either David Cohen, the “US Treasury department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence” or a statement from Iraq Energy, a “non-profit policy Institute”, ISIS was suddenly revealed by media storm to be bootlegging crude across the Turkish border, and to be getting shockingly rich as a result. The media reaction was intense and – as ever – unified. Claims were rarely examined, sources rarely verified, amounts were often vague, but by God the message was clear. “ ISIS raking in cash: Extremists earn more than $1 million a day – National Post October 23 “ “…the ISIS–controlled oil market in Iraq…is believed to be raising at least $2 million a day…” – CNN August 22 “ “…ISIS Makes Up To $3 Million a Day Selling Oil…” – ABC News August 2 “ “…How ISIS makes up to $6M A DAY…” – Newsweek Nov 6 “ ISIS raises $1 million a day selling crude oil – Daily Mail July 12 So incredibly successful were these terrorists at harvesting, packing and exporting crude (not to mention a bit of their own refining) that in no time it seemed they were worth “$2 billion dollars” and climbing fast. The media outrage at all this of course increased pressure on Washington to “do something”. That something being, to no one’s great surprise, more air strikes, this time aimed at the newfangled ISIS oil empire. [Media] [Spin] [ISIS]
• American Exceptionalism in the New Gilded Age
  by Paul Street At one point last year, United States President Barack Obama declared that he “believe[d] in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” It was hardly a surprising or remarkable thing to hear. In US political culture, faith in “American exceptionalism” has long been doctrinally mandatory for top politicians, policymakers, and other elites. For those persons and others, stating one’s allegiance to “American exceptionalism” is hardly more controversial than standing up for the National Anthem or a US “commander in chief” saying “God Bless America” at the end of a major national speech. (Just to be clear, the more accurate term would be “United States exceptionalism,” for “American exceptionalism” really refers to the US, not “America,” which technically includes Canada, Central America, the Caribbean islands and nations, and South America.) [Exceptionalism]
• Boston Marathon Bombings’ Guilty Verdict Exposed as a Gross Travesty of Justice
  By Joachim Hagopian Global Research, April 11, 2015 With the official government narrative of the 9/11 attack filled with a plethora of lies that have since been subsequently exposed, the next biggest “war on terror” event on US soil that the feds failed to stop was the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. And now the lone living suspect from that horrific crime that killed three people, left 17 limbless and injured 264 victims (though that number’s been accused of being purposely inflated) has now been found guilty of all 30 counts after the jury’s 11 hour deliberation earlier this week. As we mark the second anniversary of this tragic event and the second and final phase of the trial beginning on Monday that will decide the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – whether he’ll live out the rest of his life in prison or be put to death, a critical review of preceding events and developments surrounding his high profile, extremely significant case seems both timely and much needed. Despite Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleading not guilty to the 30 counts (17 carrying the death penalty) he was charged within a week after the April 15th bombings in 2013, his lead defense attorney Judy Clark several days ago conceded to the jury that her client was guilty in her closing argument. Apparently blaming the dead brother whose due process was denied became Dzhokhar’s only defense strategy. The defense team insisted that he was coerced and bullied by his older brother into committing alleged acts of terrorism. Considering no real solid proof other than photos placing Dzhokhar and older brother Tamerlan both wearing backpacks at the scene of the crime where the two bombs exploded was even presented at the trial, no justice for either the Tsarnaevs nor the many victims can possibly come from this guilty verdict. [Boston bombing]
• What's Really Behind The War In Yemen?
  The Huffington Post | By Nick Robins-Early Posted: 04/11/2015 2:03 pm EDT Updated: 2 hours ago Every week, The WorldPost asks an expert to shed light on a topic driving headlines around the world. To gain insight on the conflict in Yemen, we turned to analyst Dr. April Longley Alley. Yemen is currently in a state of crisis as fighting between Houthi rebels and forces loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi devastates the country. In addition to the gun battles and shelling in major cities, there have been weeks of airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis, which have leveled buildings and infrastructure. The continued ground fighting and Saudi air campaign has also threatened to worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in Yemen, while the death toll from the conflict has risen to over 540. The current crisis stems from disagreements between groups in Yemen's complex political environment that started even before the ouster of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh in a 2011 uprising. To better understand the conflict gripping Yemen, The WorldPost spoke with Dr. April Longley Alley, senior analyst on the Arabian Peninsula for the International Crisis Group. [Yemen]
• What was behind the ethnic cleansing of Armenians?
  In 1915, the Ottoman state, in the midst of World War I, took the fateful decision of deporting all Armenians in Anatolia to eastern Syria. An entire people was forced to migrate over night, and many of them, perhaps a million people, perished on the road due to starvation, disease and massacres by locals. There is no doubt this enormous tragedy deserves remembrance and empathy today — and we Turks must be much more considerate about it than we have been over the past century. If Turkish society would develop a more emphatic view of the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, this will happen not due to any foreign pressure, but rather due to some honest self-criticism based on authentic values — such as those presented by Islam. Author Mustafa AkyolPosted April 9, 2015 The proper term to use in defining the fate of Ottoman Armenians has been a matter of controversy. Armenians themselves and many others in the West use the G word: genocide. Most Turks, in return, only use the much more innocent term “tehcir,” or deportation. Personally, I take a middle ground and opt for the term, “ethnic cleansing.” (The difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide is that the former is about cleansing a geographical area from a group of people, whereas the latter is about the very extermination of that people. As a comparison, note that the Ottoman government only pushed Armenians out of Anatolia, whereas the Nazis searched for Jews everywhere in order to exterminate them one by one.) A perhaps more important question, however, is why did this catastrophe happen? In the West, sometimes religion is perceived to be the underlying problem, as “Muslim Turks” are pitted against “Christian Armenians.” Yet this perception disregards the very fact that, before 1915, the same Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians co-existed for centuries under the banner of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious entity, where faith communities constituted “nations.” Muslims were the “ruling nation,” whereas Christians and Jews were “protected” nations, in line with the status Islamic law gives to “the People of Book.” That is why Armenians, like Greeks or Jews, lived and flourished in the Ottoman Empire for centuries with some autonomy and certain rights. They were not allowed to become soldiers or public servants, which were jobs reserved only for Muslims, hence they excelled in artisanship. (No wonder some of the most beautiful mosques and palaces in Istanbul were built by Armenian architects from the famous Balyan family.) Moreover, in the Reform Era of the mid-19th century, the Ottoman state gave all non-Muslims the status of equal citizenship. That is why in final decades of the empire, Armenians began to take public jobs, becoming ambassadors, ministers or parliamentarians. Yet in the same 19th century, the road to disaster began to unfold, in a seemingly unrelated place: the Balkans. The French Revolution had ushered in an era of nationalism, which gradually influenced Ottoman-ruled Christian peoples of the Balkans, such as Serbs, Greeks and Bulgarians [Turkey]
• Iran After Sanctions: An Emerging Economy Giant?
  A final agreement is yet to be signed. But for the first time in the decade-and-a-half-long Iranian nuclear negotiations we may have a viable deal on our hands. By and large, the international community, including Pope Francis, has welcomed the recently announced Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) framework agreement, which marked the culmination of days-long, grueling 11th-hour haggling in Lausanne, Switzerland. The next three months will be extremely crucial to ensuring the P5+1 great powers (Britain, France, China, Russia, the U.S., plus Germany) and Iran hammer out the technical details of a final, comprehensive nuclear agreement. Obviously, the pitched battle over (diplomatically) resolving the Iranian nuclear conundrum is far from over. If anything, as I argued in a previous piece, the “second level” of the negotiations is expected to reach a fever pitch in coming months, as domestic opponents of the deal try to undercut what could end up as Obama’s most enduring foreign policy legacy. Assuming the Obama and Rouhani administrations manage to overcome domestic political hurdles and arrive at a final understanding, which is by no means certain, it is still worth examining the potential economic fallout of an Iranian nuclear agreement. After all, Iran arguably represents the hottest emerging market in waiting, combining the consumer market and human capital potential of Turkey with the oil riches of Saudi Arabia, natural gas reserves of Russia, and mineral resources of Australia. The Sanctions Conundrum Western sanctions against Iran — targeting the country’s financial, transport and oil sectors — have been particularly devastating. After years of robust economic growth, which qualified Iran as a legitimate member of Goldman Sachs’ “Next-11” (prospective or actual) star economies, Iran fell into a vicious “stagflation.” A toxic combination of hyperinflation and economic contraction brought the Iranian economy to the precipice. In 2012 and 2013, Iran suffered economic contraction. [Iran deal] [Sanctions]
• Bombing Yemen Won’t Help It
  By Emma Ashford April 9, 2015 WASHINGTON — Yemen’s volatile civil war has been depicted as merely a battleground between Sunni Arab countries and Shiite Iran for dominance in the Middle East. The Houthis, northern tribal rebels who have waged a prolonged insurgency against the Yemeni government, took the capital, Sana, in September and have continued to seize territory since, drawing near to the southern port city of Aden, forcing President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi to flee and prompting a Saudi-led military intervention last month. But in fact, the conflict in Yemen is local, not regional. And the Saudi-led, American-backed bombing campaign is doomed to failure. It will fuel Yemen’s internal strife, condemning it to a protracted torment that could rival Syria’s four-year-old civil war. Washington and Riyadh have pushed the narrative of an Iranian-supported Houthi rebellion in Yemen. This is an oversimplification at best. While the Houthis are Shiites, their Zaydi faith is theologically distinct from the Shiite practices of most Iranians. Historically, this has limited ties between them and Tehran. And although Iran has given the Houthis some financial support, it has not been directly involved in the conflict. In fact, many of the Houthis’ recent gains are a result of their alliance with Sunni supporters of Mr. Hadi’s predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was removed from power in 2012, during the Arab Spring. Iran’s major gains in the region are in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, where the Iranians are funding and training Shiite militias battling the Islamic State. In Syria, Iranian support has been critical to the survival of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Yemen, where Iran’s involvement is trivial, is simply not a major front in this broader regional struggle. [Yemen] [Iran] [Disinformation]
• The Myths of US Exceptionalism
  by Jack Rasmus One of the elements of cultural ideology in the USA is that the United States is somehow exceptional compared to other countries; that is, it is different in a number of positive ways that distinguish it from all other countries. Exceptional in Health, Education & Retirement? In a perverted way, there is some truth to this. The United States is exceptional in that it is the only advanced economy in the world that has failed to provide universal health care for its citizens. It has a large, parasitical for-profit health care system, dominated by multi-billion dollar profit making private health insurance companies that suck $1 trillion a year from the wallets of US consumers for pushing paper around, a vast network of ‘for profit’ hospital chains that suck another $900 billion a year, pharmaceutical drug companies that charge $94,000 for drugs to treat someone with hepatitis C (that’s $1,125 per pill) and charge patients $14,000 to $64,000 a month for cancer drugs, and it has the highest paid professional medical personnel in the world. The US spends more than $3 trillion a year, and rising, on health care. That’s about 18% of its $17.4 trillion annual GDP, or almost one dollar out of every five spent on everything is for healthcare. That’s the highest spending on healthcare in the industrial world. In return for that massive spending , it ranks 39th in infant mortality rates, 42nd in adult mortality, and 36th in life expectancy. Yes, the US is exceptional in health care. [Decline]
• Who has Championed the Lausanne Nuclear Deal?
  Only a few days after the enthusiastic comments and statements about the “historic breakthrough” in Lausanne in the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program were over, a bunch of less restrained and balanced assessment has started appearing in the media. Yet, everyone understands that there is still much work to do in order to draft the final settlement. This was underlined by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Moreover, it became clear that Lausanne – is the success of Washington, and not an achievement of Tehran as Iranians tried to portray it. The struggle for the successful implementation of the agreement is far from being over, since Israel and Saudi Arabia are clearly not going to give up that easy, therefore they will continue to apply pressure on the United States. Finally, Russia has found itself on the losers side, since Tehran is not as interested in a partnership with Moscow now as it used to be. Barack Obama did everything he could to ensure that the negotiations on the Iran nuclear program would end in a pretty specific agreement. One cannot underestimate the importance of Lausanne accords for him, since this “lame duck’s” second term is coming to a closure and the Democrats have done nothing worth mentioning in the US foreign policy so far. It was Obama who disgracefully fled Iraq and Afghanistan, in his term a wave of “color” revolutions has virtually destroyed the Middle East, leaving Libya, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Yemen on the verge of utter and complete collapse. Bilateral relations with Israel were damaged, while the tension in relations with Riyadh keeps on growing. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Obama portrays the Lausanne agreement as a historic event. He enjoys playing the role of a peacemaker, although he keeps on stirring up the conflict in Ukraine. The “lame duck” is not making a big secret of the fact that he hopes that Iran will carry on transition into the US camp, providing American corporations with huge paychecks once they get the access to Iran’s oil and gas resources. [Iran deal]
• The US isn’t winding down its wars – it’s just running them at arm’s length
  Seumas Milne Barack Obama is playing all sides against each other, but support for the Saudi war in Yemen will only spread conflagration in the Middle East Joe Magee Illustration on Saudi-led action in Yemen ‘The idea that the corrupt tyranny of Saudi Arabia and its fellow Gulf autocracies – backed by Binyamin Netanyahu – are going to bring stability to the people of Yemen is beyond fantasy.’ Illustration by Joe Magee Wednesday 8 April 2015 20.00 BST Last modified on Thursday 9 April 2015 00.06 BST So relentless has the violence convulsing the Middle East become that an attack on yet another Arab country and its descent into full-scale war barely registers in the rest of the world. That’s how it has been with the onslaught on impoverished Yemen by western-backed Saudi Arabia and a string of other Gulf dictatorships. [Outsourcing]
• Iran’s supreme leader voices pessimism on nuclear deal
  Rouhani: Iran will sign nuclear deal only as sanctions are lifted(1:23) Iran will only sign a nuclear deal with six world powers if all sanctions are lifted on the same day, President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised speech. (Reuters) By William Branigin and Daniela Deane April 9 at 10:29 AM ? Iran’s supreme leader expressed pessimism Thursday about a deal reached last week with six world powers to restrict the country’s nuclear program, saying he neither supports nor opposes the accord and demanding that all economic sanctions be lifted immediately upon any final agreement. [Iran deal] [Sanctions]
• For Saudis, Yemen conflict ‘becoming their Vietnam’
  By Hugh Naylor April 9 at 3:25 PM ? BEIRUT — Two weeks into a Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen, the airstrikes appear to have accelerated the country’s fragmentation into warring tribes and militias and done little to accomplish the goal of returning the ousted Yemeni president to power, analysts and residents say. The Yemeni insurgents, known as Houthis, have pushed ahead with their offensive and seem to have protected many of their weapons stockpiles from the coalition’s bombardments, analysts say. The fighting has killed hundreds of people, forced more than 100,000 people to flee their homes and laid waste to the strategic southern city of Aden. The battles are increasingly creating problems that go beyond the rebels opposing President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and the forces supporting him. The conflict has reduced available water and food supplies in a country already suffering from dangerous levels of malnutrition, and created a security vacuum that has permitted territorial advances by al-Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula (AQAP). [Saudi Arabia] [Yemen]
• Sixteenth Anniversary of the Attack on Yugoslavia: Aleksinac
  “The Whole Town Cried” by Gregory Elich It was 1999, shortly after the NATO war. I was with a delegation that came to Yugoslavia to document NATO war crimes, and we found no shortage of them. In all of the towns and cities we visited, not one had been spared destruction. One of our stops was at Aleksinac, a small mining town that NATO had targeted with a special ferocity. The town was led by a strong socialist local government, which may not have been entirely unrelated to NATO’s attentions. Local officials provided us with statistics that were startling for such a small town: 767 houses and 908 apartment flats were destroyed or damaged, as were 302 public buildings. Dragoljub Todorovich, a 74-year-old retired teacher, was at the opening meeting. Metal braces encased his left leg, and he walked with crutches. A missile levelled his home in one of the attacks. “I had been told for forty to fifty years that Americans were our friends,” he reflected. “Americans, with Russians, destroyed fascism together. I survived the Second World War. I was a partisan during the war.” Now war had once again visited Todorovich, but this time he nearly hadn’t survived. Following our meeting, we visited the site of Todorovich’s home. Nothing remained but blasted concrete and bricks strewn about the area. As we stepped through the rubble, the clinking of bricks underfoot wove a counterpoint to his words. “When I regained consciousness, I saw that only a small part of skin connected my leg with my body,” he recalled. Although surgery saved Todorovich’s leg, he would remain crippled for the remainder of his life. During his fourteen-week recovery in the hospital, he was in constant pain and suffered a heart attack. One thought persisted in his bedridden state: “The worst way possible – that was the way America chose.” [Yugoslavia] [Imperialism] [War crimes]
• How America Became an Oligarchy
  by Ellen Brown “The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners.” — George Carlin, The American Dream According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites. “Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home? The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails. In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age. [Democracy] [Oligarchy]
• Iranian establishment faces risks if nuclear deal fails
  Ankara | By Parisa Hafez Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif talks to members of the media while walking through a courtyard at the Beau Rivage Palace Hotel during an extended round of talks in Lausanne April 1, 2015. Reuters/Brendan Smialowski/Pool (Reuters) - Failure to finalise a framework agreement between Iran and the six major powers aimed at curbing the country's sensitive nuclear work could profoundly destabilise the Islamic Republic, analysts and politicians say. Iranians' hopes of ending their international isolation have risen so high since the accord that failure to finalise it would generate levels of dismay that could hurt the authorities, even if the West was portrayed as the guilty party, analysts say. “Finally it is over. The isolation is over. The economic hardship is over. (President Hassan) Rouhani kept his promises,” said university student Mina Derakhshande, who was among a cheering crowd on Friday. “Failure of the talks will be end of the world for us Iranians. I cannot tolerate it.” Managing popular expectations will be more difficult in Iran now, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "If the deal doesn't come to fruition, most Americans won't notice, while most Iranians will be devastated," Sadjadpour said. [Iran deal] [Sanctions]
• Six Things You Didn’t Know the U.S. and Its Allies Did to Iran
  By Jon Schwarz ?@tinyrevolution Yesterday at 5:44 AM It’s hard for some Americans to understand why the Obama administration is so determined to come to an agreement with Iran on its nuclear capability, given that huge Iranian rallies are constantly chanting “Death to America!” I know the chanting makes me unhappy, since I’m part of America, and I strongly oppose me dying. But if you know our actual history with Iran, you can kind of see where they’re coming from. They have understandable reasons to be angry at and frightened of us — things we’ve done that if, say, Norway had done them to us, would have us out in the streets shouting “Death to Norway!” Unfortunately, not only have the U.S. and our allies done horrendous things to Iran, we’re not even polite enough to remember it. Reminding ourselves of this history does not mean endorsing an Iran with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. It does mean realizing how absurd it sounds when critics of the proposed agreement say it suddenly makes the U.S. the weaker party or that we’re getting a bad deal because Iran, as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, does not fear Obama enough. It’s exactly the opposite: This is the best agreement the U.S. could get because for the first time in 35 years, U.S.-Iranian relations aren’t being driven purely by fear. 1. The founder of Reuters purchased Iran in 1872 Nasir al-Din Shah, Shah of Iran from 1848-1896, sold Baron Julius de Reuter the right to operate all of Iran’s railroads and canals, most of the mines, all of the government’s forests, and all future industries. The famous British statesman Lord Curzon called it “the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of.” Iranians were so infuriated that the Shah had to rescind the sale the next year. 2. The BBC lent a hand to the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh [Iran] [Coup]
• Poll shows vast majority of Cubans welcome closer ties with U.S.
  By Joshua Partlow and Peyton M. Craighill April 8 at 2:00 PM ? Neighbors in the poor neighborhood of Portuondo in Santiago sit by a mural that translates “Long Live the Revolution.” A poll conducted in March shows that a majority of Cubans are unhappy with the political system. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) MEXICO CITY — The vast majority of Cubans welcome warmer relations with the United States, holding high expectations that closer ties pledged by the two countries will shake up the island’s troubled economy, according to a new survey of Cuban citizens. But they are doubtful that the diplomatic detente will bring political reforms to their Communist country. The poll of residents on the island shows a people unhappy with the political system, eager to end the U.S. embargo and disenchanted with their state-run economy. More than half of Cubans say they would like to leave the country for good if they had the chance. The survey, conducted in March through 1,200 in-person interviews by the Miami-based Bendixen and Amandi International research firm on behalf of the networks Univision Noticias and Fusion, is reported in collaboration with The Washington Post. [Cuba deal]
• How Amnesty International Criminalizes Palestinians for Their Inferior Weapons
  by Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon Unlawful and Deadly, Amnesty International’s recent report on ‘rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian armed groups during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict’, accuses Hamas and others of carrying out ‘indiscriminate attacks’ on Israel: ‘When indiscriminate attacks kill or injure civilians, they constitute war crimes.’ The report reiterates a formal symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians (previous reports have accused Israel of war crimes during Operation Protective Edge), asking both parties to take all precautions to respect civilian lives, and reminding them to ‘choose appropriate means and methods of attack’. The use of weapons that are inherently indiscriminate such as unguided rockets is prohibited. And the use in densely populated areas of imprecise weapons that cannot be directed at a military objective with sufficient precision, such as mortars, is likely to result in indiscriminate attacks and is also prohibited. There is an implied contrast with Israel’s superior technological capabilities, which the IDF claims allow it to carry out airstrikes with ‘surgical precision’. But the figures tell a different story. At least 2100 Palestinians were killed during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza last summer; around 1500 are believed to have been civilians (according to Amnesty some of them were killed by stray Palestinian rocket fire). On the Israeli side, 72 people were killed, 66 combatants and six civilians. These numbers point to a clear discrepancy. It is not only that Israel killed 300 times as many Palestinian civilians, but that the proportion of civilian deaths among Palestinians was much greater: 70 per cent of those killed by Israel were civilians, compared to 8 per cent of those killed by Palestinians. These figures clearly indicate that there is no correlation between precision bombing and distinguishing combatants from civilians. Hi-tech weapons systems can kill indiscriminately too. Amnesty’s report shows not only how slippery international humanitarian law can be, but also that human rights organisations tend to ignore asymmetries of power, and reproduce them. The report essentially says that using homemade missiles – there isn’t much else available to people living under permanent siege – is a war crime. In other words, Palestinian armed groups are criminalised for their technological inferiority. [Double standards] [False balance] [NGO]
• Who has purchased Amnesty International?
  By Paul Richard Harris from Axis of Logic Amnesty International’s reputation was built on standing up for victims. While sometimes outside viewers might have thought the victims were getting what they deserved – they put themselves in stupid situations, they were inherently bad people, and so on – AI nevertheless came to their rescue. Well, they wrote stuff about coming to the rescue; they didn’t actually show up on white horses with their banners unfurled on the breeze. But over the past week, two reports out of Amnesty cause me to question who it is that has purchased AI’s soul. [NGO] [Double standards]
• U.S. expedites arms shipments to coalition bombing Yemen
  Riyadh/Aden | By Angus McDowall and Mohammed Mukhashaf (Reuters) - The United States is speeding up arms supplies and bolstering intelligence sharing with a Saudi-led alliance bombing a militia aligned with Iran in neighboring Yemen, a senior U.S. diplomat said on Tuesday. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S., a key ally of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, had also set up a coordination center in the Sunni Muslim kingdom, whose forces have led an air campaign against the Shi'ite Houthi group which rules most of Yemen. "Saudi Arabia is sending a strong message to the Houthis and their allies that they cannot overrun Yemen by force," he told reporters in the Saudi capital Riyadh. [Arms sales] [Yemen] [Saudi Arabia]
• The Alternative To Long-Term Austerity: Less Work, Higher Wages, No Mere Utopian Dream
  By Alan Nasser Global Research, April 07, 2015 “A spectre is haunting the treasuries and central banks of the West – the spectre of secular stagnation. What if there is no sustainable recovery of the economic slump of 2008-2013? What if the sources of economic growth have dried up – not temporarily, but permanently?” – preeminent Keynes scholar and economic historian Robert Skidelsky, “Secular Stagnation and the Road to Full Investment,” Social Europe Journal, May 22, 2014 Both Karl Marx and J.M. Keynes concluded that the trajectory of capitalist development placed a radically emancipatory possibility on the political-economic agenda. For the first time in modern history work time could be dramatically reduced with no reduction in our standard of living. In fact, if living standards are measured not merely by money wages but also by increased leisure, i.e. increased time available to develop and exercise our broad range of gratifying capabilities, the reduction in work time would elevate our standard of living to a degree hitherto unimaginable. [Crisis] [Capitalism] [Marx] [Keynes]
• Lessons from Garissa
  By William M. Bellamy Apr 5, 2015 Terrible as it was, al Shabaab’s murderous attack on Garissa University in Kenya was not completely a surprise. The Somali Islamist terrorist group has lost much territory in Somalia in recent years to an African Union military force. Driven from strongholds it once planned to use as the basis of its caliphate, al Shabaab has fallen back on small-unit terrorist attacks in both Somalia and Kenya. Garissa is the latest and deadliest example.
  Al Shabaab’s terror has multiple objectives. It is first of all meant to drive Kenyan forces out of Somalia. [Somalia] [Outsourcing] [Dilemma] [Kenya] [Response]
• Iran Nuclear Agreement: What Comes Around…
  Once the initial euphoria over a successful conclusion of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program has worn off, more realistic or even outright pessimistic assessments started appearing among the international experts both on the content of the agreement and its future. Gradually it became clear that certain parties at the negotiations don’t believe that the process of implementation of this agreement is going to be as rosy as it has been portrayed by the international media. Tehran was confident enough to announce that sanctions will be lifted immediately, as soon as the final agreement is signed on June 30. Meanwhile, the US and the EU had a different opinion on this subject, in their opinion Iran must first deliver on the promises given in Lausanne, namely to put nuclear facilities under the IAEA control, reduce the number of centrifuges for uranium enrichment and abandon the development of ballistic missiles, etc. This means that nothing is going to happen before October, if at all. In addition, the West is not going to withdraw sanctions. In particular, the restrictions on military cooperation have become a source of heated discussions, since immediately after the conclusion of negotiations Russia demanded they be lifted, in hopes that it would be able to deliver modern air defense systems instead of the S-300 systems for up to five battalions that were to be delivered back in 2007. On top of all, the procedure of trade and economic sanctions removal remains puzzling even for Western politicians. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/04/06/rus-soglashenie-po-iyap-v-lozanne-chto-dal-she/ [Iran deal] [Sanctions]
• North Korea and Singapore: Two families, two nations
  The Kims, the Lees and the curious parallels between a leader eulogized and a nation demonized April 6th, 2015 Tim Beal The death of Lee Kuan Yew on March 23 is a reminder of the intriguing parallels between North Korea and Singapore and the importance of context in deciphering events. Parallels involve dissimilarities as well as similarities and for states to be comparable requires that both are of roughly the same order of magnitude and probability so that the pairing of the two provides insight. There must be enough common ground for differences to be meaningful. There would be little point in comparing either North Korea or Singapore with Brazil, or Pakistan, or the United States, or the Vatican – the differences are too overwhelming. But North Korea and Singapore do fit together quite well. The starting point is the role of the two families – the Kims in Korea and the Lees in Singapore. Both countries are essentially one-party states with, so far, an inherited leadership. Kim Jong Un is where he is today because he is the son – though significantly not the eldest son, of Kim Jong Il. And Kim Jong Il was the son of Kim Il Sung. In Singapore, the leader – here the Prime Minister rather than the President – Lee Hsien Loong is the (eldest) son of Lee Kuan Yew. In both countries power does not reside with the nominal head of state. [Lee Kuan Yew] [Kim Il Sung]
• Tech investments show an Iran eager to end isolation
  Some observers see Iran’s technological developments — along with its participation in nuclear talks — as a sign that President Hassan Rouhani is eager to normalize relations with the outside world after years of isolation. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images) By Craig Timberg April 6 at 12:31 PM ? As world powers have been working to curb Iran’s nuclear program, the Islamic Republic has been bolstering its ambitions in cyberspace, positioning itself as a potential technological leader in a turbulent and strategically crucial region. Iran in recent years has inaugurated a new, high-capacity data link to Europe, introduced 3G and 4G cellular service to millions of customers and become a major buyer in a bustling new marketplace for IP addresses — the fundamental building blocks of the online world. Western experts watching these development see little evidence that these steps are intended to bolster Iran’s already formidable cyberwar capabilities. Instead they see a nation making investments in civilian technology that could help Iran build a more modern, open economy, especially if a tentative nuclear deal struck last week yields a permanent accord and an easing of international sanctions. [A step-by-step guide to what the Iran agreement actually means] Despite deep-seated wariness of Iran, some observers see these technological developments as a sign — along with the nuclear talks themselves — that President Hassan Rouhani is eager to normalize Iran’s relations with the outside world after years of combative isolation. [Iran deal] [Inversion] [Media] [ICT] [Internet]
• Meet Senator Robert Menendez’s ‘friend with benefits’
  By Richard White April 2, 2015 Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) reacts as he exits the podium after speaking to the media during a news conference in Newark, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) leaving the podium after speaking to the media during a news conference in Newark, New Jersey, April 1, 2015. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) is outraged. Prosecutors, he said on Wednesday following his indictment on corruption charges, “don’t know the difference between friendship and corruption.” This is, whether Menendez knows it or not, what American politicians have been saying for more than a century and half. The more blatant the influence of the rich and well-connected, the more politicians accept favors; the more the rich give and receive them, the more loudly those involved insist they are just friends. They may be friends, but they are friends with benefits. Florida ophthalmologist Melgen arrives to the Federal court in Newark, New Jersey Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen arrives at the federal court in Newark, New Jersey, April 2, 2015. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz Politicians like Menendez insist that what appears to be undue influence is really just the reciprocal kindness of friends. Menendez has, according to prosecutors, received paid vacations, flights on private jets and very large contributions to his campaign fund from Dr. Salomon Melgen. The favors amount to roughly a million dollars. Melgen, for his part, has billed Medicare for $8.9 million, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He claims the bills are legitimate. Menendez has intervened in the dispute on his behalf, according to prosecutors, and he has tried to help him with other government contracts. All this, Menendez insists, is just friendship. And it is how political friendships work, both during the first Gilded Age and in our own. A politician helps disperse public favors to friends, and friends give private favors to politicians. [Corruption]
• Hassan Rouhani: reformist insider who has ended Iran’s isolation
  The Iranian president has long carried the hopes of his country’s reformists. Now, thanks to last week’s nuclear deal with the US, the pragmatist has made good on his promise Iranian president Hassan Rouhani: carrying the hopes of the country’s reformers. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP Emma Graham-Harrison Sunday 5 April 2015 00.04 BST Last modified on Sunday 5 April 2015 Nearly two years after Hassan Rouhani was elected Iran’s president and began the slow process of rebuilding trust with Washington, a nuclear deal was reached last week in Switzerland. His nation promised to make drastic cuts to its nuclear programme in return for the gradual lifting of sanctions as part of a historic breakthrough in Lausanne that could end a 13-year nuclear standoff. “Today is a day that will remain in the historical memory of the Iranian nation,” the moderate cleric said shortly after the deal was announced, as he thanked Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, without whose approval he could never have stepped up engagement with the west. [Iran deal] [Media] [Wishful thinking]
• Gary Hart: Billion-dollar Clinton campaign should 'frighten' Americans
  The two-time Democratic presidential candidate is alarmed by current ‘dynastic’ politics. By Jonathan Topaz | 4/5/15 2:08 PM EDT | Updated 4/5/15 3:50 PM EDT Gary Hart has serious reservations about a Hillary Clinton candidacy. The prospect of a billion-dollar Clinton campaign “ought to frighten every American,” he said in an interview with POLITICO, and Democrats would be better served by a competitive primary that forced her to speak in more depth about the issues. Hart, a two-time Democratic presidential candidate, offered his opinions in a phone interview Wednesday where he also expressed admiration of Elizabeth Warren and gave advice to prospective challenger Martin O’Malley, a former Hart campaign staffer. “I like Hillary Clinton. I really appreciate what she and her husband have done … but we need new leaders,” said Hart, a former Colorado senator who rose from the bottom of the polls and nearly took down Walter Mondale in the 1984 primaries. The post-Citizens United campaign finance environment has sullied the presidential process, he said, benefiting establishment politicians who cater to financial backers. He pointed to his own experience, noting that he and his wife mortgaged their home for between $50,000 and $75,000 — an amount that made a significant difference in his first campaign in 1984. “I’m now told the Clinton campaign intends to raise $1 billion. Now, that ought to frighten every American,” he said.
  The role of money in elections, the 78-year-old Hart said, is a driving force behind the current “dynastic” nature of American politics. “If you’ve got to have a billion dollars to run for president, how many people can do that? Only the Clintons and the Bushes and one or two others,” he said. “This country is 330 million people, and we should not be down to two families who are qualified to govern. … When you create dynastic networks, you shut a lot of people out,” he added. [Hillary Clinton] [Dynasty] [Governance]
• European Disintegration, Unemployment and Instability
  The European Union and the United States are currently negotiating the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a major trade agreement intended to further integrate their economies. Yet, is it the right strategy for bringing back growth to Europe? by Jeronim Capaldo [FTA]
• The Ambiguities of the Nuclear Framework Deal
  by Gareth Porter The framework agreement reached on Thursday night clearly gives the P5+1 a combination of constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme that should reassure all but the most bellicose opponents of diplomacy. It also provides the basis for at least a minimum of sanctions relief in the early phase of its implementation that Iran required, but some of the conditions on that relief are likely create new issue between Iran and the Western powers over the process. The agreement’s dependence on decisions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the penchant of Israeli intelligence for discovering new evidence of illicit Iranian activities will encourage moves to delay or obstruct relief of sanctions. US and European officials had been telling reporters that they would phase out their sanctions on oil and banking in return for Iranian actions to modify its programme only gradually over several years, and made it clear that the purpose of this strategy was to maintain “leverage” on Iran. [Iran deal]
• Talks on Iran Nuclear Program Result in Framework Agreement
  Nikolai Bobkin | 04.04.2015 | 00:00 On April 2, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Germany and Iran have reached the hard-fought framework agreement on Parameters for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Regarding Islamic Republic of Iran’s Nuclear Program. The compromise is agreed on, but some questions remain unanswered. The P5+1 and Iran plan to sign a final agreement by late June. From point of view of international law the results of the talks are a good example illustrating the fact that diplomatic efforts can solve any complex problem and manage any crisis. This year the United Nations celebrates the 70th anniversary of its founding and the leading world powers have demonstrated that they are able to resolve the most burning international problems. This is the main result of the Lausanne negotiation process. It’s worth noting that this time there was no confrontation between the United States and Russia whatsoever, something that has taken place so seldom recently. Russian experts have been a key part in the Iran nuclear program negotiations, US Department of State spokesperson Marie Harf has told journalists. «His [Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov] experts are still here as well, and their political director, Sergei Ryabkov, and they’ve been a key part of this and certainly bring a lot of expertise», Harf said. Russia applied efforts to make Iran return to the round table. President Putin directly influenced the negotiation process. Russia insists that Iran has an indisputable right to implement a peaceful nuclear program, including enrichment of uranium, if the process is monitored by international organizations and the sanctions imposed on the country are lifted. These are the principles the deal is based on. The Iran’s nuclear program is internationally recognized. Abbas Araqchi, the deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, pointed to the joint statement, saying it officially recognizes Iran’s nuclear program. «According to this statement, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program will be credited and recognized internationally, and this is our greatest achievement», Araqchi said in a telephone interview with IRIB on Thursday, April 2, night following the release of the document. The key parameters of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) envision that «U.S. and E.U. nuclear-related sanctions will be suspended after the IAEA has verified that Iran has taken all of its key nuclear-related steps». The issues related to the heavy water research reactor in Arak were the most difficult part of the deal. Iran has agreed to redesign and rebuild a heavy water research reactor in Arak, based on a design that is agreed to by the P5+1, which will not produce weapons grade plutonium, and which will support peaceful nuclear research and radioisotope production. The original core of the reactor, which would have enabled the production of significant quantities of weapons-grade plutonium, will be destroyed or removed from the country. Iran will ship all of its spent fuel from the reactor out of the country for the reactor’s lifetime. None of the nuclear facilities will be dismantled. Iran will enrich uranium only at the Natanz facility. It has agreed to not enrich uranium over 3.67 percent for at least 15 years. Tehran has agreed to convert its Fordow facility into a nuclear, physics, technology, and research center to be used for peaceful use of atomic energy. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will have regular access to all of Iran’s nuclear facilities to ensure the program is implemented for peaceful purposes only. Inspectors will have continuous surveillance of Iran’s centrifuge rotors and bellows production and storage facilities for 20 years. [Iran deal]
• American Hell For Yemen – OpEd
  April 4, 2015 Margaret Kimberley Leave a comment By Margaret Kimberley The United States used the Al Anad airbase in Yemen as the staging area for drone attacks which killed some 1,000 people since 2009. Those crimes were committed under the guise of fighting terrorism but now that same place is the location of karmic justice for the American government and its ally, Saudi Arabia. United States Special Forces fled from Al Anad before it was overrun by Ansar Allah rebels, also known as the Houthis. It is true that Saudi Arabia bombed Houthi positions and threatens to start a ground invasion with the help of Egypt. Both of these countries are American client states and would not contemplate these actions without having a green light from Washington. The story of Yemen and the shifting international alliances which have brought it to civil war are somewhat complicated. The Houthis ousted the American and Saudi backed president Hadi who is now on the run. His predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was at one time also a Saudi favorite but is now leading the Houthi advance. While the details can be confusing, one thing is simple. American imperialism and the war of terror unleashed on that region are ultimately at fault and continue to destroy nation after nation. In its zeal to have and maintain hegemony the United States resorts to brute force and supports others who do likewise. The result is dead bodies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, but the decisions that lead to these crimes are endemic to American policies. [Imperialism] [Yemen]
• Challenging coverage: The conflict in Yemen
  The Yemen conflict and the geopolitics of the coverage; plus, the resurrection of Greece's state-owned broadcaster. 04 Apr 2015 11:19 GMT When a coalition led by Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen on March 25, 2015, the justification it offered was that the action would stop the spread of the Houthi rebels and bring stability to the country. The Saudis also claim that the Houthis are being backed, ideologically and materially, by Iran. That assertion has gone largely unchallenged in mainstream news coverage. The opaque nature of the story in Yemen is largely down to the difficulties that journalists face while trying to report in the country. For foreign journalists, leaving the capital is nearly impossible and local journalists have to constantly navigate the changing power structures within the country. [Yemen] [Media] [Iran]
• Russia calls an emergency UN council over Yemen crisis
  Russians want to discuss mandatory 'humanitarian pauses' in the Saudi-coalition led air strikes Jamie Campbell Saturday 04 April 2015 Russia has called an emergency UN Security Council sessions to try and reach a resolution that will lead to Saudi-led coalition air strikes in Yemen pausing for humanitarian reasons. Russia have said that it is necessary for the international community to convene in order to discuss the establishment of obligatory and regular ‘humanitarian pauses’ in the coalition air strikes on Yemen. Alexey Zaytsev, spokesman for the mission, told RIA Novosti: “Russia convenes UN security Council consultations to discuss the establishment of a regular and mandatory ‘humanitarian pause’ amid ongoing coalition airstrikes on Yemen.” The meeting is scheduled to take place this morning at 11AM in New York (15:00 GMT.) [Yemen] [Russia]
• Follow the Arms: The Top 5 Hidden Stories Revealed by the SIPRI Report
  14:48 01.04.2015(updated 15:20 01.04.2015) Andrew Korybko The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its regular report highlighting the major trends in the international arms trade over the past five years. The SIPRI report has already been much discussed by the media and various analysts since its debut last week, with many addressing the headline-grabbing trends published in the document. While developments like India’s rise as the world’s largest arms consumer and China’s surge in weapons shipments are certainly worthy of examination, it shouldn’t be at the expense of other trends that are just as important, albeit slightly more hidden to the untrained eye. The following are the top five major stories surrounding the SIPRI report that the mainstream media is neglecting to discuss. [Arms sales]
• Iran, Sanctions and the Fate of the Nuclear Talks
  by Gareth Porter As the P5+1 and Iran agree to continue talks on a possible joint statement past a midnight deadline into Wednesday, the most contentious issue in Lausanne still appears to be how and when sanctions on Iran will be lifted. Virtually all the details of the negotiating positions of the two sides remain cloaked in secrecy. However, Middle East Eye has learned from an informed source in contact with negotiators in Lausanne that the core issue remaining to be resolved is whether the P5+1 will end some sanctions as soon as Iran has taken what it is calling “irreversible’ actions to implement the agreement. Iran has already made some significant concessions on the sanctions issue, the source revealed. Iran and the six-nation group, led by the US, have agreed that unilateral US and European sanctions as UN Security Council sanctions that related to Iran’s nuclear programme could be “suspended” rather than being lifted permanently at the beginning of the implementation of the agreement. The Iranian delegation is also not contesting that the UN Security Council resolutions that forbid assistance to Iran’s ballistic missile program and other military programs can stay in place, the source said. But the remaining bone of contention is that the six-nation group has insisted on maintaining the entire legal system of sanctions in place, even after the sanctions have been suspended, until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reached the conclusion that Iran’s nuclear programme is entirely for peaceful purposes – a process that it admits could take many years. US and European officials have been telling journalists on background for months that maintaining the sanctions architecture in place is necessary to ensure not only that Iran implements the agreement fully but also that it has no ambitions to obtain nuclear weapons. [Iran] [Sanctions]
• Iraq Forces, Pushing ISIS Out of Tikrit, Give Few Thanks for U.S. Airstrikes
  By Rod Nordland April 2, 2015 TIKRIT, Iraq — One week after the start of intensive American airstrikes against Islamic State hide-outs, most of the key parts of central Tikrit had finally fallen to the government’s forces – although significant pockets still remained contested on Thursday. But to hear some of the Iraqi forces here tell it, the Americans deserve little or no credit. And many of the Shiite militiamen involved in the fight say the international coalition’s air campaign actually impeded their victory — even though beforehand they had spent weeks in a stalemate with militants holed up in Tikrit. Some even accuse the United States of fighting on the side of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. [Airpower]
• Iran and world powers agree on parameters of Iranian nuclear deal
  President Obama announced that negotiators from Iran, the U.S. and other countries agreed to a framework for a final agreement to curb Tehran’s nuclear program. (AP) By Carol Morello and William Branigin April 2 at 3:51 PM ? LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Negotiators from Iran and major world powers reached agreement Thursday on a framework for a final agreement to curb Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions, an accord that President Obama hailed as a “good deal” that would make the world a safer place. Participants in the talks said the sides, including the United States and its key European allies, would promptly start drafting a final accord to be completed by a June 30 deadline. Obama, in an appearance in the White House Rose Garden shortly after the deal was announced, said the United States and its partners “reached a historic understanding with Iran, which, if fully implemented, will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He said he was convinced that the deal would leave the United States, its allies and the world safer. “It is a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives,” he said. “This framework would cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.” The key moments in the long history of U.S.-Iran tensions He said Iran has agreed to “the most robust and intrusive inspections” ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history. Obama added: “If Iran cheats, the world will know it. If we see something suspicious, we will inspect it. Iran’s past efforts to weaponize its program will be addressed.” [Iran] [US negotiating] [Iran deal]
• Muslims to make up 10% of European population by 2050: Pew study
  Ahram Online , Friday 3 Apr 2015 Muslims in Europe will make up 10 percent of the overall population by the year 2050, and will outnumber Christians worldwide by 2070, according to a forecast issued by Pew research centre on Thursday. A report by the US-based organisation aimed to predict the future makeup of the world's population in terms of religious identity between the years 2010-2050. “Muslims have an average of 3.1 children per woman—the highest rate of all religious groups," said Conrad Hackett, the author of the study. Christians are second, with 2.7 children per woman, Hindus have 2.4 children per woman, and Jews have an average of 2.3 children per woman, the study shows. The report also forecasts that Muslims will become the second-largest religious group in the United States by 2050, as Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050, and Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion. The number of Christians in Europe is expected to decrease by about 100 million people to 454 million in the same period. [Religion]
• The Real Achievement of the Iran Nuclear Deal
  Details of the accord matter less than the potential end of Washington's cold war with Tehran. Peter Beinart Apr 3 2015, Right now, a thousand pundits and politicians are debating the details of Thursday’s framework nuclear deal with Iran. That’s fine. I think the details are far, far better than the alternative—which was a collapse of the diplomatic process, a collapse of international sanctions as Russia and China went back to business as usual with Tehran, and a collapse of the world’s ability to send inspectors into Iran. But ultimately, the details aren’t what matters. What matters is the potential end of America’s 36-year-long cold war with Iran. For the United States, ending that cold war could bring three enormous benefits. First, it could reduce American dependence on Saudi Arabia. Before the fall of the shah in 1979, the United States had good relations with both Tehran and Riyadh, which meant America wasn’t overly reliant on either. Since the Islamic Revolution, however, Saudi Arabia has been America’s primary oil-producing ally in the Persian Gulf. After 9/11, when 19 hijackers—15 of them Saudis—destroyed the Twin Towers, many Americans realized the perils of so great a dependence on a country that was exporting so much pathology. One of the unstated goals of the Iraq War was to give the United States a large, stable, oil-producing ally as a hedge against the uncertain future of the House of Saud. What George W. Bush failed to achieve militarily, Barack Obama may now be achieving diplomatically. In recent weeks, American hawks have cited Saudi anxiety about a potential Iran deal as reason to be wary of one. But a big part of the reason the Saudis are worried is because they know that as U.S.-Iranian relations improve, their influence over the United States will diminish. That doesn’t mean the U.S.-Saudi alliance will disintegrate. Even if it frays somewhat, the United States still needs Saudi oil and Saudi Arabia still needs American protection. But the United States may soon have a better relationship with both Tehran and Riyadh than either has with the other, which was exactly what Richard Nixon orchestrated in the three-way dynamic between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing in the 1970s. And today, as then, that increases America’s leverage over both countries. Related Story [Iran deal]
• End of Iran sanctions will open gates to companies keen to enlarge markets
  Energy and transport groups are among those lining up to take advantage of change to trading relations Iran used to be the 10th largest car and lorry market and is attracting attention from Peugeot, Renault and General Motors. Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Julian Borger, Terry Macalister and Saeed Kamali Dehghan Thursday 2 April 2015 21.10 BST The preliminary deal on Iran’s nuclear programme will fire a starting pistol on a stampede of western business interests into a potentially vast untapped market. Even as the negotiations were in their latter stages, the expectation of an eventual agreement and the lifting of sanctions brought an ever-increasing influx of the world’s corporations to Tehran to make contacts and voice their interest. “Consulting companies are reviving old contacts, lots of signs that companies are pre-positioning themselves. One sign of the degree of interest is that it’s impossible to get a hotel room these days in Tehran,” said Bijan Khajepour, an Iranian businessman, who is managing partner of the Vienna-based Atieh International consultancy. At the head of the queue have been oil and gas companies, but there are other markets in Iran with enormous potential because the country has been behind a wall of sanctions for so long. There will, for example, be intense competition between Airbus and Boeing to supply parts and planes for Iran’s ageing fleet. “There have already been ongoing discussions between Iranian aviation officials and the two global aerospace giants,” Amir Ali Handjani, an Iranian-American energy executive, said. “Those discussions have happened with the approval of Europeans and Americans. They recognise how important an issue this is for Iranians, who have some of the oldest passenger planes in the world.” The market for cars and lorries used to be the 10th largest in the world, and is attracting keen attention from Peugeot, which used to be a dominant player in Iran, as well as Renault and General Motors. Khajepour said steel and aluminium manufacturers were also likely to flood into the market, attracted by Iran’s combination of cheap gas and warm-water ports. [Iran] [Sanctions] [Wishful thinking]
• McCain Joins Bolton, Invites Israel to Bomb Iran
  Posted: 03/31/2015 4:15 pm EDT Updated: 03/31/2015 4:59 pm EDT Say what, John McCain? Senator John McCain took to the Senate floor last week to rail against peace talks with Iran. No surprises there. But McCain went beyond blasting the deal. He suggested a surprising and disturbing method of blowing up the talks. The Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance. On the Iranian nuclear deal, they may have to go rogue. Let's hope their warnings have not been mere bluffs. Israel survived its first 19 years without meaningful U.S. patronage. For now, all it has to do is get through the next 22, admittedly long, months. Go rogue? This saber rattling it is not just a momentary fit of John McCain's signature pique. McCain, and his allies like Senators Lindsey Graham and Robert Menendez, have repeatedly slipped language into bills calling for the U.S. to support Israel if Israel attacks Iran's nuclear facilities. One such bill, Senate Res. 65, nicknamed the "Backdoor to War" bill read in part: [Congress] urges that, if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence. While that language was later watered down, McCain's war talk is part of an effort to normalize the idea of military attacks on Iran as Plan B if Congress torpedoes diplomacy. [Hardliners] [MISCOM] [Iran]
• Obama administration ends long hold on military aid to Egypt
  By Missy Ryan March 31 at 7:35 PM ? The United States will resume suspended military aid to Egypt, the White House said Tuesday, signaling the Obama administration’s eagerness to help a key Middle Eastern ally confront militant threats despite concerns about its repressive stance on human rights. Following a lengthy internal review, the Obama administration said it would continue to request the annual $1.3 billion in military financing that the United States has provided in the past to Egypt, the second-largest recipient of U.S. military support after Israel. But in a sign that Washington seeks to exercise tighter strings over aid for a government it had condemned for harsh treatment of dissidents, the United States will no longer allow Egypt to purchase military equipment on credit and will earmark future aid for specific activities related to U.S. counterterrorism goals. Obama, speaking by phone with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, said the steps would refine the country’s military relationship “so that it is better positioned to address the shared challenges to U.S. and Egyptian interests in an unstable region,” the White House said in a statement. The announcement reverses a decision announced in October 2013, several months after a military coup that deposed elected leader Mohamed Morsi, to put a large amount of military aid on hold until Egypt made “credible progress” toward democratic reforms. Since Sissi took power, American officials have been dismayed by his government’s crackdown on supporters of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood and other political opponents. [US global strategy] [Egypt] [Double standards]
• Sixteenth Anniversary of the War Against Yugoslavia: Surdulica
  A “Good Day” for NATO?
  by Gregory Elich The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) proclaims its “commitment to maintaining international peace and security.” Mainstream media rarely, if ever, look beyond Western self-justifications and bland assurances of moral superiority, and little thought is given to what NATO’s wars of aggression might look like to those on the receiving end. During the first two weeks of August, 1999, I was a member of a delegation travelling throughout Yugoslavia, documenting NATO war crimes. One of our stops was at Surdulica, a small town which then had a population of about 13,000. We initially met with management of Zastava Pes, an automotive electrical parts factory that had at one time employed about 500 workers. In better days, annual exports from the plant amounted to $8 million. Western-imposed sanctions had stopped export contracts and prevented the import of materials, forcing a 70 percent reduction in the workforce and a decline in the local economy. [NATO] [Yugoslavia] [War crimes]
• Questions you aren’t supposed to ask about ISIS: #1 – those Toyota trucks
  ISIS. Murky, masked, terrifying Bad Guys. Islamic hardliners, doing unspeakably ghastly things in faraway sandy places. A horde poised to be unleashed on the innocent everywhere. They merge in the Jungian western mind with race memories of the Saracens, those other convenient boogey men from a previous and ultimately ill-fated bid to make strategic conquest into a moral Crusade. Fear is the message. And it works. As with most official narratives, the ISIS trope is left largely unexamined by mainstream media, while at the same time being used as a major motivation for continued and increasing war in the Middle East. Given the growing chaos in the region, now spreading to Yemen, and the increasingly blurry role ISIS would appear to be playing, as media fear-porn, war-provocateur and enemy of western enemies, we’ve decided to do a short series asking some of the largely un-addressed questions about these people, and who may be offering them direct or indirect support. How did ISIS acquire those matching Toyota trucks? The official story is ISIS stole them from the “Good Terrorists”, (Al Nusra), who were originally given their cool wheels by the US government. Which would seem to beg a couple of enquiries. Not least of which is – why are the US giving any terrorists matching fleets of luxury SUVs? And for that matter, how many fleets are we talking about? [Outsourcing] [Jihadist] [ISIS]
• New York Times Publishes Call to Bomb Iran
  By Robert Parry Global Research, March 30, 2015 Consortium News If two major newspapers in, say, Russia published major articles openly advocating the unprovoked bombing of a country, say, Israel, the U.S. government and news media would be aflame with denunciations about “aggression,” “criminality,” “madness,” and “behavior not fitting the Twenty-first Century.” But when the newspapers are American – the New York Times and the Washington Post – and the target country is Iran, no one in the U.S. government and media bats an eye. These inflammatory articles – these incitements to murder and violation of international law – are considered just normal discussion in the Land of Exceptionalism. On Thursday, the New York Times printed an op-ed that urged the bombing of Iran as an alternative to reaching a diplomatic agreement that would sharply curtail Iran’s nuclear program and ensure that it was used only for peaceful purposes. The Post published a similar “we-must-bomb-Iran” op-ed two weeks ago. [Neocon] [Iran] [Intelligent design]
• Saudi-caused chaos continues in Yemen
  Ever since the fall of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, in September 2014 in the hands of the Houthis, Yemen has been fighting a regional conflict while its political situation has reached a deadlock; the head of state and the prime minister resigned Jan. 22 amid complete failure to reach a domestic settlement as the Houthis continue to expand militarily. Summary? Print The complexities of the Yemeni state will stand in the way of a political settlement that might result from the military intervention launched by Saudi Arabia against the Houthis in Yemen. Author Maysaa Shuja al-Deen Posted March 31, 2015 Translator Sami-Joe Abboud Yemen has turned into an arena of armed military operations for a broad alliance of 10 countries, which includes all the Gulf states except Oman, as well as Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Morocco and Pakistan. This reveals that there are deep concerns over Iran’s expansion and raises the question as to whether such concerns are justified. The issue has several dimensions. Chief among these is the Houthis’ recklessness in dealing with Saudi Arabia and its interests in Yemen, as the Houthis did not try to assuage Saudis' concerns, and even went so far as to enable Iran to do vital things in Yemen; for example, the Houthis handed over the port of Hodeidah on March 13 — the second-largest port in Yemen — to an Iranian company. The Houthis moved to the stage of provocation through military maneuvers on the Saudi border March 12, amid statements by high-ranking anti-Saudi figures who bragged about an imminent invasion of Riyadh. Ultimately, the Houthis refused any Saudi calls for dialogue in Riyadh and then Doha, the last of which was made just a week before the Saudi attack against Yemen. The second dimension is the power struggle within Saudi Arabia after the death of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud on Jan. 25. This was obvious in Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s speech March 27 about the strike against Yemen, whereby he referred to attempts by the Houthis to communicate with Saudi Arabia for reassurance purposes. These attempts, however, were cut off after the new leadership took rule in Saudi Arabia. [Yemen] [Saudi Arabia] [Iran]
• Saudi Airstrikes in Yemen Fuel the Fire in the Gulf
  by Patrick Cockburn Foreign states that go to war in Yemen usually come to regret it. The Saudi-led military intervention so far involves only air strikes, but a ground assault may follow. The code name for the action is Operation Decisive Storm, which is probably an indication of what Saudi Arabia and its allies would like to happen in Yemen, rather than what will actually occur. In practice, a decisive outcome is the least likely prospect for Yemen, just as it has long been in Iraq and Afghanistan. A political feature common to all three countries is that power is divided between so many players it is impossible to defeat or placate them all for very long. Saudi Arabia is backing President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi but the humiliating speed of his defeat shows his lack of organised support. The threat of further intervention by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council may be intended to redress the balance of power in Yemen and prevent the Houthis winning a total victory. But Saudi actions and those of the Sunni coalition will be self-fulfilling if the Houthis – never previously full proxies of Iran – find themselves fighting a war in which they are dependent on Iranian financial, political and military backing. Likewise, the Houthis, as members of the Zaidi sect, were not always seen by Shia in other countries as part of their religious community. But by leading a Sunni coalition Saudi Arabia will internationalise the Yemen conflict and emphasise its sectarian Sunni-Shia dimension. The US position becomes even more convoluted. Washington had sought to portray its campaign in Yemen against al-Qaeda in the patrickisis2Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as a success. Drone attacks were supposedly wiping out important AQAP operatives, but the humiliating end result of America’s covert war in Yemen came last week when US Special Operations personnel blew up their heavy equipment and fled the country for the US base at Djibouti. AQAP is becoming a stronger force as the shock troops of the Sunni. US policy across the Middle East looks contradictory. It is supporting Sunni powers and opposing Iranian allies in Yemen but doing the reverse in Iraq. [Strategic incoherence] [Sectarianism] [DaR]
• The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics
  Just 15 months after it was founded, Podemos now leads the polls in Spain. Can this grassroots party win power – or is its bubble about to burst? Giles Tremlett Tuesday 31 March 2015 06.00 BST At the start of the 2008 academic year, Pablo Iglesias, a 29-year-old lecturer with a pierced eyebrow and a ponytail greeted his students at the political sciences faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid by inviting them to stand on their chairs. The idea was to re-enact a scene from the film Dead Poets Society. Iglesias’s message was simple. His students were there to study power, and the powerful can be challenged. This stunt was typical of him. Politics, Iglesias thought, was not just something to be studied. It was something you either did, or let others do to you. As a professor, he was smart, hyperactive and – as a founder of a university organisation called Counter-Power – quick to back student protest. He did not fit the classic profile of a doctrinaire intellectual from Spain’s communist-led left. But he was clear about what was to blame for the world’s ills: the unfettered, globalised capitalism that, in the wake of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, had installed itself as the developed world’s dominant ideology. Iglesias and the students, ex-students and faculty academics worked hard to spread their ideas. They produced political television shows and collaborated with their Latin American heroes – left-leaning populist leaders such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador or Evo Morales of Bolivia. But when they launched their own political party on 17 January 2014 and gave it the name Podemos (“We Can”), many dismissed it. With no money, no structure and few concrete policies, it looked like just one of several angry, anti-austerity parties destined to fade away within months. A year later, on 31 January 2015, Iglesias strode across a stage in Madrid’s emblematic central square, the Puerta del Sol. It was filled with 150,000 people, squeezed in so tightly that it was impossible to move. He addressed the crowd with the impassioned rhetoric for which opponents have branded him a dangerous leftwing populist. He railed against the monsters of “financial totalitarianism” who had humiliated them all. He told Podemos’s followers to dream and, like that noble madman Don Quixote, “take their dreams seriously”. Spain was in the grip of historic, convulsive change. The serried crowd were heirs to the common folk who – armed with knives, flowerpots and stones – had rebelled against Napoleonic troops in nearby streets two centuries earlier. “We can dream, we can win!” he shouted. Polls suggest that he is right.
• American People Should Hold War Lobby Accountable for Libya Debacle
  Posted: 03/29/2015 2:32 pm EDT Updated: 03/29/2015 4:59 pm EDT Will America ever again be at peace? A new war always seems to start before the last one ends. The U.S. is bombing targets in Syria and sending troops back into Iraq. Yet Washington's involvement in Afghanistan persists as the administration slows the withdrawal of American forces. Worse, pressure is building for the U.S. again to intervene in Libya. It took a decade before the sectarian flames fed by the invasion of Iraq lit the Islamic State. It took less than three years for the administration's intervention in Libya to blow up spectacularly. Observed Glenn Greenwald, "Libya has rapidly unraveled in much the way Iraq did following that invasion: swamped by militia rule, factional warfare, economic devastation, and complete lawlessness." The country of Libya has ceased to exist. This debacle offers a clear lesson for American policymakers. But denizens of Washington never learn from the past. Indeed, Samantha Power, one of the most consistent advocates of a militarized foreign policy, complained that "one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons" from failed interventions. In her view the fact that America's constant wars have resulted in constant failures -- and constant pressure to intervene again to confront the new problems created -- is no reason to be more careful in the future. Like many presidents in other conflicts, Barack Obama lied the American people into war. [Libya] [Libertarian]
• Islamophobia in the USA: The Case of The Arabic Language
  By Sufyan bin Uzayr Global Research, March 31, 2015 On March 18, a student in Pine Bush High School near New York City recited the American Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic. This was done as part of the school’s Foreign Language Week, which was conducted to celebrate the “many races, cultures and religions that make up [the US and the Pine Bush] School District.” One would expect the multicultural and cosmopolitan American society to appreciate such gestures. However, the reactions to the recitation of the Pledge in Arabic spoke otherwise: the language in itself was described to be meant for terrorists, and associated with Islam. Such bigotry once again highlighted everything that is wrong with USA: xenophobia, racism, ignorance, violence and above all, Islamophobia. The Controversy Pine Bush is a small town located roughly 85 miles from New York City. It is predominantly white, with Arab and/or Muslim-American populations being negligible. The Foreign Language Week was an attempt undertaken by Pine Bush High School to foster cultural integration and interaction. It was an occasion to celebrate the multiple tongues, cultures and events that make up the human civilization in total. Sadly, this praiseworthy teaching exercise received nothing but criticism from the American nation. One student claimed, “The Pledge should always be said in English.” Also, certain parents were offended because they had “family members killed in Afghanistan.” Apparently, they overlooked two basic things: 1.Arabic, as a language, did not kill any of their family members. 2.Arabic, as a language, hardly has any proper speakers in Afghanistan. [Islamophobia] [Xenophobia]

• The Geopolitics behind the War in Yemen (I)
  Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya | 30.03.2015 | 00:00 The United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia became very uneasy when the Yemenese or Yemenite movement of the Houthi or Ansarallah (meaning the supporters of God in Arabic) gained control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa/Sana, in September 2014. The US-supported Yemenite President Abd-Rabbuh Man?our Al-Hadi was humiliatingly forced to share power with the Houthis and the coalition of northern Yemenese tribes that had helped them enter Sana. Al-Hadi declared that negotiations for a Yemeni national unity government would take place and his allies the US and Saudi Arabia tried to use a new national dialogue and mediated talks to co-opt and pacify the Houthis. The truth has been turned on its head about the war in Yemen. The war and ousting of President Abd-Rabbuh Man?our Al-Hadi in Yemen are not the results of «Houthi coup» in Yemen. It is the opposite. Al-Hadi was ousted, because with Saudi and US support he tried to backtrack on the power sharing agreements he had made and return Yemen to authoritarian rule. The ousting of President Al-Hadi by the Houthis and their political allies was an unexpected reaction to the takeover Al-Hadi was planning with Washington and the House of Saudi. [Yemen]
• Syria's Assad says open to dialogue with US
  America still wants a negotiated political settlement to Syria's civil war that excludes the president By Reuters 1:03AM GMT 27 Mar 2015 Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is open to having a dialogue with the United States, but there can be no "pressuring of the sovereignty" of his country, he said in an excerpt of an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" that aired on Thursday. Asked about recent comments by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that Washington would have to negotiate with the Syrian leader to end the conflict there, Assad said: "In Syria we could say that every dialogue is a positive thing, and we are going to be open to any dialogue with anyone, including the United States, regarding anything based on mutual respect." While saying there had been no direct communication between Damascus and Washington, Assad, who has been fighting Islamist and other rebels since 2011, added: "Any dialogue is positive, as I said, in principle, of course, without pressuring the sovereignty of Syria." [US Syria policy] [Media]
• US-Saudi Blitz into Yemen: Naked Aggression, Absolute Desperation
  By Tony Cartalucci Global Research, March 27, 2015 New Eastern Outlook The “proxy war” model the US has been employing throughout the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and even in parts of Asia appears to have failed yet again, this time in the Persian Gulf state of Yemen. Overcoming the US-Saudi backed regime in Yemen, and a coalition of sectarian extremists including Al Qaeda and its rebrand, the “Islamic State,” pro-Iranian Yemeni Houthi militias have turned the tide against American “soft power” and has necessitated a more direct military intervention. While US military forces themselves are not involved allegedly, Saudi warplanes and a possible ground force are. Though Saudi Arabia claims “10 countries” have joined its coalition to intervene in Yemen, like the US invasion and occupation of Iraq hid behind a “coalition,” it is overwhelmingly a Saudi operation with “coalition partners” added in a vain attempt to generate diplomatic legitimacy. [US global strategy] [Proxy] [Saudi Arabia] [Iran] [Yemen]
• Officials: Saudi-led action relied on U.S. intelligence
  By Karen DeYoung March 26 ? Saudi Arabia told the Obama administration and Persian Gulf allies early this week that it was preparing a military operation in neighboring Yemen, and relied heavily on U.S. surveillance ­images and targeting information to carry it out, according to senior American and Persian Gulf officials. Despite days of planning for possible airstrikes, officials said, the Saudis withheld a final decision until it became clear late Wednesday that Houthi rebels were poised to take over Aden, the country’s main southern port. The capture of Aden, the Saudis believed, would eliminate any chance for an early end to the fracturing of Yemen. Retaining control of the city was seen as crucial to reinstalling the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who secretly fled Aden on Wednesday. Within hours, acting on orders from King Salman, the Saudis notified allies already signed up for the operation, including the United States, that it was a go. The first airstrikes began at 2 a.m. Thursday, Yemen time. [US global strategy] [US dominance] [Saudi Arabia] [Intelligence]
• Civil society against deployment of armed forces in Yemen
  • • March 29, 2015 LAHORE: Pakistani human rights activists and civil society organisations have raised a strong voice of protest against the reported imminent deployment of Pakistani armed forces in Saudi Arabia – at the request of the House of Saud – to fight against the Iran-backed forces in the current civil war raging in Yemen. Civil society has strongly condemned the PML-N government and its allies amongst the political parties for even the consideration or the remote possibility of such an unethical and wrong move. It would be a huge strategic and tactical mistake for Pakistan, in longer-term political, military, economic and foreign policy losses, against the ruling political party’s immediate/short-term financial and monetary gains. The mysterious “gift” of $1.5 billion in 2014, and the reluctance of the government to be transparent about it then, begins to be comprehended now. The government should have the courage to be open and honest now. Firstly, it should not attempt to befool citizens that “the holy land of Saudi Arabia (ie the home of Islam’s two holiest shrines) is under threat of attack” (sic). It is not. The fact is that Saudi Arabia is attacking Yemen, not vice versa. [Pakistan] [Corruption] [Saudi Arabia]
• M.K. Bhadrakumar responds: It suits everyone to pretend this is a solo Saudi act
  Author: M.K. Bhadrakumar March 28, 2015 Asia Times It suits everyone to pretend this is a solo Saudi act. Without tacit American consent, this act is inconceivable. In all probability the air strikes in Yemen depend on US intelligence inputs. Two, a GCC coalition is already at work in Bahrain and this is not the first time that the Saudis have created the illusion of collective security. Three, Saudi money prompts other Arab states to lend their name to the ‘coalition’, but the hardcore players are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. So much for the unity of the Sunnis. Period. Four, Turkey and Saudi Arabia cannot have a meeting of minds because Turkey never accepted the British puppet being propped up as the Custodian of the Holy Places in succession to the Caliph. Now, the mutual dislike is far too well-known to be narrated. Five, it is all Israeli propaganda — and the version of the compliant western press — that Erdogan is in deep trouble, et al. He has many options other than Saudi Arabia even if he is with his back against the wall. To my mind, he is going strong and will continue with his anti-Israel, anti-American posturing which endears him to the regional audience. Turkey will never intervene in Yemen and Erdogan is going ahead with his visit to Iran. it is useful to refresh memory that Yemen and Saudi Arabia have scores to settle. Iran may not have to do much to see that the Saudis end up in a quagmire. I feel Iran anticipates such an eventuality. Iran will never get involved directly in Yemen. Historically, Iran’s relations with Yemen have been patchy. But Yemen matters to Iran because Shi’ite empowerment in yet another country brings the tsunami to the Saudi doorstep. By the way, the Houthis are hardened fighters and they will be fighting for their homeland. They don’t need Iranian advisors. They will be highly motivated. They have a long border with Saudi Arabia. Besides, Yemeni tribal politics is incredibly complex. As you know, Saudis had thought that former President Ali Abdullah Saleh was their man, but now they realise that he is with the Houthis. How fast the alignments changed! As for the Pakistani role, to my mind (and information), Bruce Riedel didn’t read the tea leaves correctly as regards Nawaz Sharif’s summons to travel to Riyadh post-haste a month ago.The Sharif family has massive business interests in Saudi Arabia and Sharif is in no position to defy the Saudi diktat. Apart from Pakistan, there is no other participant who is capable of fighting a protracted guerilla war. Kuwait, UAE, Tunisia, Jordan? You must be joking. Egypt is barely coping with the Sinai. And even for Pakistan, once the body bags begin returning to Pakistan, it remains to be seen how long Sharif can remain impervious to Pakistan’s own interests. Money cannot have the final say. The only solution will be a UN mediation to have a consensus reached on power-sharing, which is what Iran and Russia are aiming at. But if the Saudis press ahead, there is going to be big trouble ahead. And for a UN role, US will have to take Russian help. That will be a bitter pill to swallow for Washington [Saudi Arabia] [Pakistan]
• How U.S. weapons will play a huge role in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen
  By Dan Lamothe March 26 at 1:03 PM / Yemen spiraled further into chaos on Wednesday night, with a Saudi Arabia-led Arab coalition launching a military intervention marked by airstrikes by dozens of fighter jets and the deployment of thousands of ground troops and tanks on its Yemeni border. U.S. officials said they will offer intelligence and logistical support to the Saudis, but that’s really only a piece of it: The Saudi military is equipped with billions of dollars in advanced American-made weapons. Between October 2010 and October 2014, Washington and Riyadh reached more than $90 billion in weapons deals, according to a report published in January by the Congressional Research Service. The sales have included everything from war planes to armored vehicles, along with powerful missiles and bombs. “In spite of apparent differences of opinion over regional developments, U.S.-Saudi security cooperation continues to anchor official bilateral relations as it has for decades, bolstered by major new arms sales, continued security training arrangements, enhanced counterterrorism cooperation, and shared concerns about Iran, Al Qaeda, and, more recently, the rise of the group known as the Islamic State,” the report said. “The latter group’s military advances in Syria and Iraq appear to have generated serious concern among Saudi officials, as have reports that suggest popular support for the group may be strong among a small, but potentially dangerous minority of Saudis,” the report adds. [Saudi Arabia]
• Singapore honors Lee with grand state funeral
  Shanghai Daily, March 29, 2015 Thousands of people braved heavy rains today to line major streets in Singapore for a final farewell to founding leader Lee Kuan Yew, who will receive a rare 21-gun salute before a state funeral attended by world dignitaries. People gather outside a tribute area opposite Parliament House to pay their respect to the late former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew outside Parliament House in Singapore today. Singapore's founding leader Lee Kuan Yew will be given an elaborate state funeral, ending a week of mourning for the man who led the city-state to independence 50 years ago. [Photo: Shanghai Daily] Officials said more than 450,000 people had paid their last respects to the 91-year-old, who served as prime minister for 31 years, before his public wake ended in parliament on Saturday night. "It has been a deeply moving experience," his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, said in a Facebook post thanking the public for honoring the former leader, who died Monday after seven weeks in hospital. Families turned up early to catch choice spots along the 15-kilometer procession route from parliament to the National University of Singapore, where the state funeral will start at 2:00 pm (0600 GMT). "We are here today as a family to witness this historic moment. As Singaporeans we may have our differences, but when it comes to a crunch we stand together. That is what Singapore is about and that is Mr Lee's legacy," said teacher Joel Lim, 35. [Lee Kuan Yew]
• Saudi Arabia launches airstrikes in Yemen
  By Steve Almasy, Hakim Almasmari and Jason Hanna, CNN Updated 0058 GMT (0858 HKT) March 26, 2015 (CNN)—Saudi Arabia has launched military operations in neighboring Yemen, where for months Houthi rebels have intensified their violent campaign against the government, the Saudi ambassador to the United States told reporters in Washington on Wednesday. Adel al-Jubeir said the operation consisted of airstrikes on more than one city and in more than one region. "We are determined to protect the legitimate government of Yemen," he said. "Having Yemen fail cannot be option for us or for our coalition partners." A senior Arab diplomat told CNN that the Gulf Cooperation Council soon will issue a statement that the Yemenis have asked for military assistance and the GCC is prepared to step in. It will be signed by all GCC countries except for Oman. Not all countries will contribute military forces, the source said. Arab and senior administration officials from the United States told CNN that an interagency U.S. coordination team is in Saudi Arabia. The sources said the Saudis have not specified what they want yet, but will likely ask for American air support, satellite imagery, and other intelligence. [Saudi Arabia] [Sectarianism]
• CIA official who directed hunt for bin Laden is being removed from post
  The Central Intelligence Agency is embarking on a major reorganization under CIA Director John Brennan. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images) By Greg Miller March 25 at 7:51 PM ? The head of the CIA’s Counter­terrorism Center, who presided over the agency’s drone campaign and directed the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is being removed from his post, officials said, a watershed moment as the CIA turns its focus to a new generation of extremist threats. The move, part of a major reorganization under CIA Director John Brennan, ends a nine-year tenure during which the center was transformed into a paramilitary force that employed armed drones to kill thousands of suspected terrorists and militants but also killed an unknown number of civilians. As the architect of that campaign, the CTC chief came to be regarded as an Ahab-like figure known for dark suits and a darker demeanor. He could be merciless toward subordinates but was also revered for his knowledge of terrorist networks and his ability to run an organization that became almost an agency unto itself. He embodied a killing-centric approach to counter­terrorism that enraged many Muslims, even though he is a convert to Islam. [At CIA, a convert to Islam leads the terrorism hunt] Because he remains undercover, The Washington Post has agreed to withhold his full name. He has been publicly identified in the past by both his actual first name, Mike, as well as that of his CIA-created identity, Roger. U.S. officials said that Roger is expected to remain at the CIA in a new assignment which has yet to be determined and that he is being replaced by an agency veteran who has held a series of high-level positions, including running the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan. His name is Chris. Current and former U.S. officials said that the switch does not appear to signal a change in direction for the CTC or a retreat from the CIA’s willingness to use lethal force. “The new individual is just as aggressive with counter­terrorism operations as the guy leaving,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who worked closely with both officers. Even so, the transition comes at a time when U.S. counter­terrorism operations have entered an unnerving new phase. After killing most of al-Qaeda’s core leaders, the pace of lethal drone strikes has tapered off dramatically. But the CTC has so far found few new approaches to contain the terrorist group’s morphing and multiplying successors. [CIA] [Global insurgency] [Assassination] [Counterproductive] [Strategic incoherence] [Islam] [Irony]
• Economic lessons from Lee Kwan Yew
  By John Ross China.org.cn, March 24, 2015 The economic development of Singapore under the leadership of Lee Kwan Yew and those with whom he worked is famous as one of the greatest success stories in history. Singapore has become the only Asian country to achieve a higher per capita gross domestic product than the United States by every measure. To have achieved this from the starting point of a third world country, and during a single lifetime, is a true Asian "economic miracle" meriting close study by every country, and above all by every developing country. This naturally includes China. What, therefore, were the fundamental mechanisms explaining Singapore's stunning economic success? To start with the facts, by 2013, the latest year for which World Bank data is available, Singapore's per capita GDP was 104 percent of that of the U.S., calculated at current exchange rates. Calculated at Parity Purchasing Powers, Singapore's GDP was 148 percent of that of the U.S. This after Singapore's per capita GDP was less than one quarter that of the U.S. in terms of PPPs - and less than one sixth measured at current exchange rates - when it achieved independence in 1965. [Lee Kuan Yew]
• General David Petraeus: Back into the National Spotlight
  Anton Veselov | 25.03.2015 | 00:00 Another scandal is on the rise in the United States and David Petraeus, former CIA Director and four-star Army four General, is in focus again. This is an indicative story. David Petraeus is not an ordinary man. He is a professional military, a West Point graduate. The General has served in the ranks of special operations forces, he has commanded the 82 air-borne and 101 air assault divisions – the privileged units of US military. Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974. He earned the General George C. Marshall Award as the top graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College Class of 1983 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He subsequently earned an M.P.A. (master of public administration) in 1985 and a Ph.D. in international relations in 1987 from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Petraeus also served as an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the US Military Academy from 1985 to 1987. His Princeton dissertation was devoted to The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: a Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the post-Vietnam Era. The General went to Iraq twice, once in the capacity of Commanding General, Multi-national Force, Iraq. In 2007 Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senator and the majority leader of the Senate, said during the congressional hearings, «We'll now have our very best general in charge of the operations in Iraq,» Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. «If it can't be done under Gen. Petraeus, then it cannot be done at all. We ought to give him a chance to succeed». The same year Petraeus got his fourth star; few American military have done it. There are many more 100-storey buildings in the United States than the military who have made it to the rank of full general. [Petraeus]
• Blood Money: These Companies and People Make Billions of Dollars from War
  By Lily Dane Global Research, March 25, 2015 The Daily Sheeple 24 March 2015 More than 50% of US Government Spending Goes to the Military War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. –George Orwell The late United States Marine Corps Major GeneralSmedley D. Butler is perhaps most famous for his post-retirement speech titled “War is a Racket.” In the early 1930s, Butler presented the speech on a nationwide tour. It was so popular that he wrote a longer version as a small book that was published in 1935. Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidized by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially from mass human suffering. The work is divided into five chapters: 1.War is a racket 2.Who makes the profits? 3.Who pays the bills? 4.How to smash this racket! 5.To hell with war! It contains this summary: War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. What Butler was candidly describing was later referred to as the “military-industrial complex”by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned Americans of its existence in his farewell address in 1961: [MISCOM]
• How crashing drones are exposing secrets about U.S. war operations
  Syrian news agency claims to show intercepted U.S. drone(2:44) The Syrian News Agency SANA and Alikhbaria TV channel reported that a “hostile” drone was intercepted in northern Latakia, a regime-held city. This video is said to show some of the drone wreckage. U.S. officials have confirmed that the Predator drone crashed and believe it may have been shot down, but have not made a final determination. (YouTube/??????? ??????? ??????? ???????) By Craig Whitlock March 25 at 8:00 AM ? Crashing drones are spilling secrets about U.S. military operations. A surveillance mission was exposed last week when a Predator drone crashed in northwest Syria while spying on the home turf of President Bashar al-Assad. U.S. officials believe the drone was shot down, but they haven’t ruled out mechanical failure. Regardless, the wreckage offered the first hard evidence of a U.S. confrontation with Assad’s forces. The mishap in Syria follows a string of crashes in Yemen, another country where the U.S. military keeps virtually all details of its drone operations classified. Yemeni tribesmen have reported three cases in the past 15 months in which U.S. drones have fallen from the sky, pulling back the curtain on likely surveillance targets. Air Force spokesmen said they could not confirm any crashes in Yemen, but Air Force records obtained by The Washington Post show the dates match up with official acknowledgments of accidents that occurred in classified locations [UAV]
• Neoconservative Ideology “Supports US Financial and Military-Political Imperialism”
  The Saker interviews Paul Craig Roberts By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts and The Saker Global Research, March 24, 2015 The Saker: It has become rather obvious to many, if not most, people that the USA is not a democracy or a republic, but rather a plutocracy run by a small elite which some call “the 1%”. Others speak of the “deep state”. So my first question to you is the following. Could you please take the time to assess the influence and power of each of the following entities one by one. In particular, can you specify for each of the following whether it has a decision-making “top” position, or a decision-implementing “middle” position in the real structure of power (listed in no specific order) *Federal Reserve *Big Banking *Bilderberg *Council on Foreign Relations *Skull & Bones *CIA *Goldman Sachs and top banks *“Top 100 families” (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Dutch Royal Family, British Royal Family, etc.) *Israel Lobby *Freemasons and their lodges *Big Business: Big Oil, Military Industrial Complex, etc. *Other people or organizations not listed above? Who, which group, what entity would you consider is really at the apex of power in the current US polity? Paul Craig Roberts: The US is ruled by private interest groups and by the neoconservative ideology that History has chosen the US as the “exceptional and indispensable” country with the right and responsibility to impose its will on the world. In my opinion the most powerful of the private interest groups are: *The Military/security Complex *The 4 or 5 mega-sized “banks too big to fail” and Wall Street * The Israel Lobby *Agribusiness *The Extractive industries (oil, mining, timber). The interests of these interest groups coincide with those of the neoconservatives. The neoconservative ideology supports American financial and military-political imperialism or hegemony.
• Report: Israel spied on Iran-U.S. talks and shared information with lawmakers
  By Fred Barbash and Brian Murphy March 24 at 5:27 AM ? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greeted supporters at the party’s election headquarters in Tel Aviv on March 18. (Oded Balilty/AP) UPDATE: President Obama addressed the report on Tuesday. Head here for more. Israel obtained sensitive information about the nuclear talks between Iran and the United States and turned it over to members of Congress, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. The insider details came from “confidential” briefings from U.S. officials as well as from “informants, diplomatic contacts in Europe and eavesdropping,” the paper said. [Israel] [Espionage] [Congress] [Governance]
• Here are the salaries of 13 major world leaders
  Amanda Macias, Mike Nudelman Mar 20 2015, 3:39 AM ? Bookmark ? ? 55 Earlier this month Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that he and almost everyone who works for him will take a 10% pay cut because of mounting economic sanctions imposed on his country. Whether Putin and his staff will actually feel the slash in their salaries is debatable considering Putin is unaware of the amount printed on his paychecks. “Frankly, I don’t even know my own salary, they just give it to me, and I put it away in my account,” he reportedly said to a group of reporters during his annual Q&A session in December. Putin’s official salary is chump change compared to that of a prime minister of an island nation smaller than New York City. Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong earns 12 and a half times more than Putin at a whopping $US1.7 million. Loong’s salary is large enough to pay the for the leader’s salary of India, Brazil, Italy, Russia, France, Turkey, Japan, United Kingdom, South Africa, and Germany. [Lee Hsien Loong]
• Former Turkish Officer’s Revelations on Subversive Operations of the Turkish Intelligence Agency MIT Against Syria
  By Heba Delacres Global Research, March 23, 2015 The Arab Source 1 March 2015 Currently on the run from Turkish prison system, former officer Önder Sigircikoglu asserts he wasn’t out for money: “I took action to save my identity, my honour and my conscience.” “I abducted the mass murderer Colonel Harmoush and turned him over to Syria” Lt Col Hussein al-Harmoush was the most senior defector from the Syrian Arab Army early in the Syria conflict. He fled to Turkey in June 2011 where he proceeded to set up a so-called Free Officers Movement to overthrow the Syrian government. His ambitions were short-lived. He disappeared from Hatay Altinözü camp on 29 August together with Mustafa Kassoum, a gym instructor who had been passing himself off as an Army Major. Two weeks later Harmoush was on Syrian TV, confessing to his crimes and to Turkey’s complicity. After a frenzied investigation, Turkish security rounded up several people, and seven individuals were tried for the ‘crime’ of returning Harmoush to Syria. The most senior among them, Önder Sigircikoglu, a 19-year veteran of Turkey’s Intelligence Agency MIT, was handed a 20-year sentence. After 32 months incarceration at Osmaniye prison, Sigircikoglu made his escape while being transferred to another facility and was able to leave Turkey clandestinely. The following is Part 1 of his revelations to Ömer Ödemis for leading Turkish news site OdaTV. (Part II follows below.) [Syria] [Jihadist] [Turkey]
• CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup. Declassified Documents; Historical Model of Regime Change?
  Documents Provide New Details on Mosaddeq Overthrow and Its Aftermath By Malcolm Byrne Global Research, March 23, 2015 The National Security Archive 19 August 2013 Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today [2013] posting recently declassified CIA documents on the United States’ role in the controversial operation. American and British involvement in Mosaddeq’s ouster has long been public knowledge, but today’s posting includes what is believed to be the CIA’s first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup. The explicit reference to the CIA’s role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit, but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release. Additional CIA materials posted today include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. They provide new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency’s actions before and after the operation. [Coup] [Iran] [CIA] [Mosaddeq]
• Arms and the men: Sweden’s revoked Saudi arms deal
  Adam Bott 21 March 2015 From the outside, the Swedish snub to the Saudi royals looks like a big triumph for women’s rights over commercial pressures. Close up, the ethical picture is a little muddier. Swedish foreign minister addressing media Margot Wallström: feminist foreign policy. Wikimedia / Frankie Fouganthin. Creative Commons. Earlier this month, Sweden’s social-democratic prime minister, Stefan Löfven, announced that the country would not be renewing its military co-operation agreement with Saudi Arabia. The English-speaking media were full of praise. Here was the feminist foreign policy which Margot Wallström, the foreign minister, had promised. “It’s always nice to have the Scandinavians around, to show us there’s a better way of doing things,” said the Guardian. There were calls for other western governments to follow suit, leavened with scepticism that more ‘pragmatic’ administrations would ever exhibit Scandinavian levels of idealism. Was Stockholm, perhaps, a little naïve? Foreign Policy summed it up as “money versus principles”. The Guardian called it “a clash between Sweden’s progressive foreign policy and the harsh realities of the Middle East”. The truth is that Sweden’s ‘progressive’ foreign policy is a decades-long study in äta tortan och ha den kvar—having your cake and eating it. The self-described ‘humanitarian superpower’ is, per capita, simultaneously the EU’s most generous humanitarian-aid donor and its biggest arms exporter. [Sweden]
• Big Bank’s Analyst Worries That Iran Deal Could Depress Weapons Sales
  By Lee Fang ?@lhfang Today at 3:00 AM Could a deal to normalize Western relations with Iran and set limits on Iran’s development of nuclear technology lead to a more peaceful and less-weaponized Middle East? That’s what supporters of the Iran negotiations certainly hope to achieve. But the prospect of stability has at least one financial analyst concerned about its impact on one of the world’s biggest defense contractors. The possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call this past January 27th. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability. [MISCOM] [Arms sales]
• Petraeus: The Islamic State isn’t our biggest problem in Iraq
  By Liz Sly March 20 at 3:30 AM ? In this January 31, 2012 file photo, CIA Director David Petraeus, testifies before the US Senate Intelligence Committee during a full committee hearing on "World Wide Threats,"on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images) Gen. David H. Petraeus, who commanded U.S. troops in Iraq during the 2007-2008 surge, was back in that country last week for the first time in more than three years. He was attending the annual Sulaimani Forum, a get-together of Iraqi leaders, thinkers and academics, at the American University of Iraq - Sulaimani in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region. [Read: Five things Petraeus thinks about the future of the Middle East] In his most expansive comments yet on the latest crisis in Iraq and Syria, he answered written questions from The Post’s Liz Sly, offering insights into the mistakes, the prosecution and the prospects of the war against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, which he refers to by its Arabic acronym, Daesh. How does it feel to be back in Iraq after four years away? Iraq is a country I came to know well and the place where I spent some of the most consequential years of my life. So it has been a bit of an emotional experience to return here after my last visit in December 2011 as director of the CIA. I was very grateful for the chance to be back to see old friends and comrades from the past. That said, it is impossible to return to Iraq without a keen sense of opportunities lost. These include the mistakes we, the U.S., made here, and likewise the mistakes the Iraqis themselves have made. This includes the squandering of so much of what we and our coalition and Iraqi partners paid such a heavy cost to achieve, the continuing failure of Iraq's political leaders to solve longstanding political disputes, and the exploitation of these failures by extremists on both sides of the sectarian and ethnic divides.
  Yet despite that history and the legacy it has left, I think Iraq and the coalition forces are making considerable progress against the Islamic State. In fact, I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq’s long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by — and some guided by — Iran. [US global strategy] [Iraq] [Iran] [Petraeus] [Outsourcing]
• Tom Cotton calls for ‘global military dominance’ in maiden Senate speech
  By Mike DeBonis March 18 at 1:06 PM ? Tom Cotton calls for increased defense budget(2:04) Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) delivered his "maiden speech," in which he called for strengthening the military. (C-SPAN) Over the course of just a few days last week, Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) went from relatively anonymous freshman senator to what seemed like the tip of every tongue in Washington -- thanks to the letter he wrote and got 46 fellow Republicans to join, warning the ruling Iranian regime to be wary of negotiating a nuclear deal with President Obama. But here's a fun fact: Cotton made his big splash before even giving his first speech on the Senate floor. That occasion came late Monday, when Cotton delivered his "maiden speech," which is typically given after a period of silence and as a statement of principles or objectives rather than a comment on the partisan issue of the day. [Republican] [US global strategy] [Threat] [Militarisation]
• Delivery of US Weapons and Ammunition to ISIS: Iraqi Commander Wiretaps ISIS Communications with US Military
  By Fars News Agency Global Research, March 19, 2015 A commander of Iraq’s popular forces disclosed that wiretapping of ISIL’s communications has confirmed the reports that the US planes have been airdropping food and arms supplies for the Takfiri terrorists. “The wiretapped ISIL communications by Iraqi popular forces have revealed that the US planes have been dropping weapons and foodstuff for the Takfiri terrorist group,” Commander of Iraq’s Ali Akbar Battalion told FNA on Wednesday. He noted that tapping on ISIL disclosed the terrorist group’s regular contacts with the US army, and said, “They exchanged sentences like if they would have a share of the ammunition dropped near (Spiker Military Base) or responses such as ‘you will also receive your share’.” “The US forces by dropping weapons and ammunition for ISIL, specially in Yassreb, Al-Ramadi and near Spiker Base in Hay al-Qadessiya have provided a lot of help to the ISIL,” he added. Many similar reports by Iraqi officials and forces have surfaced in the last few months. [ISIS] [Outsourcing] [Iraq]
• The U.S. Military Just Plunged Philippine Politics into Crisis
  American fingerprints are all over a botched commando raid in the southern Philippines that left dozens dead and shocked the country. By Walden Bello, March 17, 2015. Early in the morning of January 25, commandos belonging to the Special Action Force of the Philippine National Police crept into the southern town of Mamasapano — a stronghold of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The elite Seaborne Unit had come for Zulkifli Abdhir, a Malaysian bomb maker better known as “Marwan.” By the end of the morning, dozens lay dead. The episode has severely discredited the administration of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, jeopardized decades of progress on peace talks with Moro separatists, and underlined the perils for developing world governments that put themselves at the beck and call of Washington. The commandos were able to kill Marwan, who’d sat high on the FBI’s list of “Most Wanted Terrorists.” But then all hell broke loose. The insurgents woke up and opened fire on the intruders, forcing the commandos to leave Marwan’s body behind. They had to content themselves with cutting off the corpse’s index finger to turn over to the FBI. [Philippines] [Imperialism] [US dominance] [Separatism]
• San Francisco cathedral will stop dousing sleeping homeless people with water
  By Abby Ohlheiser March 18 at 5:01 PM ? Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, the principal church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco. (Roi Brooks/iStock) In order to prevent homeless people from sleeping outside of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the Archdiocese of San Francisco installed a system that dumps water onto the ground near its sheltered doorways, where people tend to rest at night. On Wednesday, after facing substantial backlash for the deterrent, the archdiocese announced that the system will be removed “by the end of the day.” [Human rights] [Religion]
• The Guardian whitewashes its own support for the invasion of Afghanistan
  written by BlackCatte We’re re-blogging this short but significant piece by Ian Sinclair because it calls attention to the current bid to erase from collective memory the part our media played, during recent conflicts, in propagandising and paradigm-creating for the war-agenda. The Guardian and other liberal outlets want us to forget they supported, either tacitly or quite overtly, the atrocities of the Bush/Blair coalition, because they are busy doing the same thing again. Someone said journalists of every persuasion always support the war party – because that’s who’s paying their wages. A hundred years ago it was Germany and Kaiser Bill and babies on bayonets. In 2003 it was Iraq and Saddam and WMDs. This time it’s Syria and Russia, sarin gas and fake “invasions”, otherwise the script is identical. But the lie only works if we all think that this time it’s true, and for that we need to forget about all the times it wasn’t. The Memory Hole is the friend of journalists with corrupted intent. Reblogged from Ian Sinclair Journalism Following the official service at St Paul’s cathedral to commemorate the British servicemen and servicewomen who served in the 13-year Afghan war, on Saturday 14 March 2015 the Guardian’s editorial turned to assessing Britain’s leading role in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. [Media] [Imperialism] [Guardian] [Afghanistan]
• Syria's Assad dismisses Kerry's remarks on negotiating
  DAMASCUS, Syria - Syrian President Bashar Assad said Monday that only Syrians can decide his future - apparently dismissing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's remark that the U.S. would be willing to talk with the Assad regime to help broker a political resolution to the country's civil war. Asked about Kerry's statement regarding potential talks with the Syrian government, Assad said, "We are still hearing statements and have to wait for actions. Then we will decide." Assad added that any "talk about the future of the Syrian president is for Syrian people alone." Assad said Damascus is not concerned about comments made from abroad, describing them as "bubbles that disappear after some time." [Syria] [Assad]
• Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2014
  • The volume of transfers of major weapons in 2010-14 was 16 per cent higher than in 2005- 2009. • The five biggest exporters in 2010-14 were the USA, Russia, China, Germany and France. Together, they accounted for 74 per cent of the volume of arms exports. Combined, the USA and Russia supplied 58 per cent of all exports. • China replaced Germany as the third largest arms exporter in 2010-14; in 2005-2009 it ranked ninth. • Total exports from all EU member states in 2010-14 were 16 per cent lower than in 2005-2009; in 2005-2009 EU export volumes were higher than those for the USA or Russia, while in 2010-14 they were below US and Russian export totals. • The five biggest importers in 2010-14 were India, Saudi Arabia, China, the UAE and Pakistan. Together, they received 33 per cent of all arms imports. • The main recipient region in 2010-14 was Asia and Oceania (accounting for 48 per cent of imports), followed by the Middle East (22 per cent), Europe (12 per cent), the Americas (10 per cent) and Africa (9 per cent). • Between 2005-2009 and 2010-14, arms imports by states in Africa increased by 45 per cent, Asia and Oceania by 37 per cent, the Middle East by 25 per cent and the Americas by 7 per cent. Imports by states in Europe decreased by 36 per cent. [Arms sales]
• Landscape of U.S. Failure: Financial Collapse Leads to War
  By Dimitry Orlov Global Research, March 17, 2015 Club Orlov Scanning the headlines in the western mainstream press, and then peering behind the one-way mirror to compare that to the actual goings-on, one can’t but get the impression that America’s propagandists, and all those who follow in their wake, are struggling with all their might to concoct rationales for military action of one sort or another, be it supplying weapons to the largely defunct Ukrainian military, or staging parades of US military hardware and troops in the almost completely Russian town of Narva, in Estonia, a few hundred meters away from the Russian border, or putting US “advisers” in harm’s way in parts of Iraq mostly controlled by Islamic militants. The strenuous efforts to whip up Cold War-like hysteria in the face of an otherwise preoccupied and essentially passive Russia seems out of all proportion to the actual military threat Russia poses. (Yes, volunteers and ammo do filter into Ukraine across the Russian border, but that’s about it.) Further south, the efforts to topple the government of Syria by aiding and arming Islamist radicals seem to be backfiring nicely. But that’s the pattern, isn’t it? What US military involvement in recent memory hasn’t resulted in a fiasco? Maybe failure is not just an option, but more of a requirement? [US global strategy] [Domestic] [Crisis]
• An immodest Iranian proposal
  Hugh Gusterson LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND—In a worldwide news exclusive, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists can report that Iranian nuclear negotiators have shocked their American counterparts by announcing—after months of haggling over the minutiae of uranium enrichment—a 180-degree change in their negotiating position. Looking tired after a negotiating session that stretched late into the night and apparently caught off-guard by a reporter’s question, a top Iranian negotiator, Arad Iqhal, offered the Bulletin a startling inside look at his country's new position: Iran has agreed to dismantle every bit of its nascent nuclear weapons capability, he said, if the United States complies with the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. "The Iranian people can no longer withstand the sanctions," Mr. Iqhal said. "We have thrown in the towel. All the Americans have to do is follow a treaty they helped write back in the Beatles era. It should be simple." [Satire] [Iran] [NPT] [Double standards]
• War with Iran is probably our best option
  By Joshua Muravchik March 13 Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. The logical flaw in the indictment of a looming “very bad” nuclear deal with Iran that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered before Congress this month was his claim that we could secure a “good deal” by calling Iran’s bluff and imposing tougher sanctions. The Iranian regime that Netanyahu described so vividly — violent, rapacious, devious and redolent with hatred for Israel and the United States — is bound to continue its quest for nuclear weapons by refusing any “good deal” or by cheating. This gives force to the Obama administration’s taunting rejoinder: What is Netanyahu’s alternative? War? But the administration’s position also contains a glaring contradiction. National security adviser Susan Rice declared at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference before Netanyahu’s speech that “a bad deal is worse than no deal.” So if Iran will accept only a “bad deal,” what is President Obama’s alternative? War? Obama’s stance implies that we have no choice but to accept Iran’s best offer — whatever is, to use Rice’s term, “achievable” — because the alternative is unthinkable. But should it be? What if force is the only way to block Iran from gaining nuclear weapons? That, in fact, is probably the reality. [Iran] [Hardliner] [MISCOM]
• Britain is often fighting with words — not troops
  Washington’s wing-man in Europe is losing clout on the world stage as its military forces shrink. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images) By Griff Witte March 12 at 8:59 PM ? LONDON — With Europe facing its shakiest security environment in a generation, Britain has slipped into a familiar role: Washington’s tough-talking wingman. British leaders have led the rhetorical charge against the twin menaces of Russia and the Islamic State while browbeating reluctant European governments to wake up to the reality of a newly unstable continent. But behind the flinty facade lies an unmistakable erosion in British power, one that has reduced Washington’s indispensable ally to a position that U.K. officials, military leaders and analysts acknowledge could leave the United States without a credible partner in taking on the greatest threats to global ­security. “If the U.K. can’t do it, who else is the U.S. going to turn to in Europe?” said Gen. Richard Dannatt, a retired British army chief. “There’s no one else.” Britain’s diminished military capacity is a product of years of stringent austerity policies that show no sign of easing. [UK] [Military expenditure] [Subordinate] [Alliance]
• When will Islamic State use its chemical weapons?
  Bob Rigg 12 March 2015 The west turned a blind eye to the possible use of chemical weapons by militant Islamists allied against the Assad regime in Syria. Now that Islamic State almost certainly possesses them, the chickens are coming home to roost. They think IS has used chemical wepons: Kurds protesting in Berlin over alleged use of 'poison gas' against civilians in Kobane. Demotix / Thorsten Strasas. All rights reserved. For decades the Achilles heel of the Chemical Weapons Convention was the failure of key Middle Eastern states to ratify it. Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya and Syria have all been known to possess chemical weapons (CW) at times, with Egypt and Israel now sharing a regional monopoly on these weapons of mass destruction. Syria’s powerful CW capability, backed up by tailor-made Russian missiles, was a threat to Israel’s population centres and would have been a major strategic factor in a war with Israel. [ISIS] [CBW]
• Boots on the Ground: The Realities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria
  By Anthony H. Cordesman Feb 13, 2015 The Obama administration and its strongest opponents in Congress may not have all that much in common, but one thing they do share is the constant misuse of the word “strategy.” Strategy does not consist of stating a broad policy goal and empty rhetoric. It consist of stating an actual plan with clearly defined goals, specific means to achieve, milestones for action, estimates of the necessary resources and their availability, estimates of cost-benefits and risks, and metrics to measure success. A sound bite that fits in Twitter or a fortune cookie is not a strategy. Getting this wrong is particularly dangerous when one starts talking about the use of military force and mindlessly throwing around terms like “boots on the ground” with no actual definition of what is involved or what the term is intended to mean. Every American has to accept the fact that the coming presidential election means two years of vacuous partisan political posturing, but any form of war is serious and the stakes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are all too real. The Need for an Integrated Civil-Military Strategy, Based on Command and Embassy Expertise on the Scene To begin with, these are areas where the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the key commanders on the scene, along with the ambassadors and State Department who have responsibility for the political and economic dimensions of a given operation, need to be asked for detailed advice. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria do not have that much in common, but one thing is clear in all three cases. U.S. military action must be tied to a civil-military strategy that offers the best possible hope of producing a stable and friendly nation as its ultimate outcome. [US global strategy] [Middle East]
• The West’s Historical Amnesia, Moral Collapse, and Criminal Culpability in Syria
  Today the Guardian in its trademark handwringing fashion is marking the fourth anniversary of the Syrian conflict: 200,000 dead, 3.5 million refugees. The Guardian should also commemorate three and a half years of bloodshed, destruction, and misery inflicted upon Syria by the United States, the EU, and the GCC—make that murder, war crimes, and collective punishment IMO--much of it enthusiastically endorsed by the Guardian and its media brethren. Think I’m exaggerating? But first read the piece (reproduced below) that I wrote in November 2011, when it was clear that the domestic uprising was headed for defeat and the West and GCC faced the crucial choice whether to let Assad cobble together some reconciliatory process…or try to bring him down with a foreign-supported insurrection. We all know—or should know—what choice was made. And we should know—but probably don’t know—the actual cost. Consider these numbers: 7,000…and 193,000. 7,000 is the estimated death count for the Syrian unrest after the Syrian government had crushed the rebel enclave in Homs in February 2012 and shattered the domestic uprising. 193,000 is the death toll since then…since the United States, the GCC, Turkey, and their enablers began pumping money, arms, and diplomatic support into the various Syria-based paramilitaries that eventually encompassed not only the hapless Free Syrian Army but Al-Qaeda, IS, and their affiliates and allies. When you read my piece, you’ll see some bad pennies turning up again. Like Victoria Nuland, charged with inciting the Syrian opposition to ignore reconciliation. Like Abdelhakim Belhadj who, on his long march from anti-Qaddafi Islamist to reputed head of IS Libya, shows up in Turkey to succor the Syrian opposition. [US Syria policy] [Outsourcing] [Media]
• Chilean accused of murder, torture taught 13 years for Pentagon
  By Marisa Taylor and Kevin G. Hall McClatchy Washington Bureau March 12, 2015 Updated 11 hours ago This photo taken almost 42 years ago shows troops rounding up loyalists to President Salvador Allende. Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with help from the Nixon administration, toppled an elected leader and ruled from 1973 until 1990. Victims of repression under Pinochet regime continue to seek justice through Chilean courts. NEW YORK TIMES — New York Times SANTIAGO, Chile — A member of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s brutal secret police who’s been accused of murder taught for more than a decade at the Pentagon’s premier university, despite repeated complaints by his colleagues about his past. Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in criminal court in Santiago with being the mastermind in the execution-style slayings of seven people in 1973, according to court documents. McClatchy also interviewed an accuser who identified Garcia Covarrubias as the person who sexually tortured him. Despite knowing of the allegations, State and Defense department officials allowed Garcia Covarrubias to retain his visa and continue working at a school affiliated with the National Defense University until last year . Human rights groups also question the school’s selection of a second professor, Colombia’s former top military commander. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/03/12/259553/chilean-accused-of-murder-torture.html#storylink=cpy [Torture] [Pacification]
• America's Self-Inflicted National Security Crisis
  By J. Randy Forbes & Jim Talent Over the past several years, knowledgeable witnesses appearing before Congress have testified to an impending crisis in national security. Whether it is the readiness of American personnel, the capability of our ships and aircraft, or the size of the force itself, the warnings have been both frequent and alarming. The Chief of Staff of the Army, General Ray Odierno, is uncertain whether the United States could prevail in a major regional war. General Mark Welsh, Chief of Staff of the Air Force has warned that we can no longer be assured of dominating the air in a future conflict. The Commander of U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear, has stated that losing just a few more ships will reduce our Navy from a global to a regional power. They all believe that we are not near a crisis point for the defense of the United States. We have already reached it. Four years ago, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates offered a plan calling for modest yearly increases in his Department’s budgets over the next ten years. We had serious doubts whether that budget was sufficient to enable the armed forces to recover after ten years of hard fighting and after a history of underfunding -- especially for the modernization accounts -- dating back to the 1990s. But the Gates’ proposal would at least have allowed the Department to maintain its end strength, support a modest increase in shipbuilding, and begin to recapitalize its inventories. However, within a short time Congress and the President agreed on the Budget Control Act and sequester, which together cut the Gates’ budgets by $1 trillion over ten years. Secretary Leon Panetta said at the time that those cuts were “like shooting ourselves in the head.” He was right; the cuts have forced reductions in personnel, the elimination of modernization programs, and a dangerous decline in day-to-day military readiness. [MISCOM] [Military expenditure]
• Stewart: FOX Failed To Mention Co-Owner Is One They Accuse Of 'Terror Funding' (VIDEO)
  Huffington Post | By Katla McGlynn Posted: 08/24/2010 9:31 am EDT Updated: 05/25/2011 5:25 pm EDT Jon Stewart continued his coverage of the 'Ground Zero Mosque' debate last night, focusing on Fox News' incongruities harder than he ever has. In a segment called "The Parent Company Trap," Stewart shared with his viewers how Fox News' plan to "follow the money" from mosque builder Imam Rauf to terrorists will be a tricky one because it leads right back to Fox News. Stewart showed clips from his show last week, in which he mocked Fox News for playing a dangerous game of association based on speculation, and wherein Fox continued to mention a nameless man with ties to Imam Rauf through the "Kingdom Foundation." It turns out the man they are referring to but never name is Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the biggest shareholders of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. [Media] [Saudi Arabia]
• Why Obama’s Hopes of Decapitating the Islamic State Won’t Work
  by Andrew Cockburn Unveiling “Operation Inherent Resolve” against the Islamic State back in September, President Obama made it clear that his principal strategy would be the same as that pursued in other recent campaigns: assassination. Deploying his preferred macho euphemism, he reminded us “we took out Osama bin Laden, much of al Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and leaders of al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia.” Thus would we “degrade and destroy” this latest threat. Six months later, no one seems to feel much in need of a rethink despite the fact that swaths of territory have fallen to the enemy, now mounting battalion-strength attacks on Kurdish positions uncomfortably close to Irbil, while making steady inroads not only in Libya, but Turkey. It took three months, 700 air strikes, and a battle-hardened force of Syrian-Kurdish guerillas to lift the siege of Kobani, the Kurdish town on the Turkish border besieged by the Islamic State. Despite hopeful bulletins, there is little sign that enemy cohesion or resolve is weakening. Nevertheless, the mystique of “high value targeting,” especially when inflicted by supposedly unerring precision weapons or super-elite Special Forces commandos, isn’t going to go away any time soon. [Assassination]
• What about an international education?
  Joanna E. Springer 10 March 2015 The 2012 US federal law denying visas to Iranian students comes into conflict with the educational mission of the US State Department. Economic sanctions targeting Iran’s nuclear program are intervening increasingly in daily interactions between Iranian expatriates and their communities in countries across Europe, but most notably in the US. Singling out individuals for discrimination on the basis of ethnic identity seems to be an unfortunate consequence of exclusionary sanctions laws. In an ironic twist, this effect is seen in universities despite the importance traditionally placed on international exchange among students for the long-term goal of improved foreign relations. A 2012 US federal law that denies visas to Iranian students intending to work in the field of energy in their home country garnered little media coverage when it was enacted. However, it was recently the alleged reason the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) issued an admissions ban on Iranian students in several engineering, computer science and chemistry-related fields. Despite the fact that UMass is committed to open access to education for all eligible applicants, the administration issued the ban following an incident where an Iranian student was unable to continue in the program because of being denied re-entry to the US. [Softpower] [Incompetence] [Governance] [Iran] [Education]
• In the shadow of an empire
  Maged Mandour 10 March 2015 The reasons for the involvement of the west in the MENA region are not limited to oil and security. These are the arguments used by both local autocrats and western powers to maintain control. The real threat however is a global revolutionary movement. After more than four years of unrest, revolution, and counter-revolution the Arab World still sits firmly within the confines of its position as a peripheral zone in an international capitalist system led by the United States. One of the main goals of breaking the neo-colonial relationship between the west and the Arab World failed miserably. One could argue that the social and political collapse of the Arab World has increased its ruling elites’ dependence on the west, and as such the level of political, social and economic penetration of the west has multiplied. The US and its allies continue to be involved in military operations in the Arab World, and Arab autocrats from Bahrain to Egypt are receiving a plethora of political and material aid to sustain their rule. The question that imposes itself is why the west, particularly the United States, pursues this policy in the Arab World? [Imperialism] [Client]
• Precedent for GOP’s Iran letter hard to find, historians say
  By David Goldstein McClatchy Washington Bureau March 10, 2015 WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate Historian’s Office has so far been unable to find another example in the chamber’s history where one political party openly tried to deal with a foreign power against a presidential policy, as Republicans have attempted in their open letter to Iran this week The letter sent by 47 Republican senators sets out to instruct Iranian leaders about how the U.S. Constitution works. They wrote that the deal currently being negotiated with their government by the U.S. and western allies, to limit Iran’s nuclear expansion could be undone by Congress. “We haven’t found a precedent,” said Senate Historian Donald Ritchie. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a precedent. After 200 years. It’s hard to find anything that unprecedented.” In the past, Ritchie said, “what usually happened is a senator would sign a ‘round robin’ letter or a sense of the Senate resolution, or write a letter to the president or secretary of State voicing objections to some particular policy. [Republicans] [Governance]
• Victoria Nuland’s “Secret” Coup d’etat in Georgia
  Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has been saying for six months that he will be back in six months! No elections are due to be held and he can’t run for president again. Now, unfortunately, we might know what he meant. On February 17 Victoria Nuland, a US Assistant Secretary of State, visited Tbilisi. She is best known for being an outspoken supporter of the coup d’etat in Kiev a year ago, which led to the violent overthrow of then-president Viktor Yanukovich and the ongoing fighting over this now nearly failed state. She appeared in Tbilisi at the same time Saakashvili officially became an “advisor” to Ukraine’s new incumbent, Petro Poroshenko. Nuland’s notoriety as a field-tested battleaxe precedes her. Both she and her husband, Robert Kagan, are products of the Bush-Cheney neo-con regime and are closely linked with its “1984” mindset of conducting continuous war, which was the basis of the defence strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration, the now-notorious “Project for a New American Century”. Nuland and Kagan both subscribe to the old doctrine of “manifest destiny” which this document was based on. According to this, America must remain the undisputed leader of the world, because that is the reason for America’s existence. As a diplomat she has been employed to serve America’s interests, but, like many official US representatives, she has taken the view that the US interest is the only one, there is no such thing as a general or even broader interest, as her famous “Fuck the EU” remark last year testifies. In late February Germany’s Der Spiegel described her as “America’s Riot Diplomat”— a sobriquet which can mean both that Nuland acts disruptively, and that she creates actual riots (as on the Maidan in Ukraine). Its “Politics” column stated that Nuland poses a threat to America’s allies (including Georgia and Azerbaijan, the countries she has just visited), and that while her current remit is to solve the crisis of Ukraine and its relations with Russia, “In the crisis, Nuland herself has become the problem.” First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/03/04/victoria-nuland-s-secret-coup-d-etat-in-georgia/ [Nuland]
• Thomas Piketty on the Euro Zone: 'We Have Created a Monster'
  Interview by Julia Amalia Heyer and Christoph Pauly The euro-zone is struggling and star French economist Thomas Piketty says EU institutions are partly to blame. The euro-zone is struggling and star French economist Thomas Piketty says EU institutions are partly to blame. In an interview with SPIEGEL, celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty speaks about Alexis Tsipras' election victory in Greece, Europe's inability to fix its financial woes and what EU leaders can learn from the United States. SPIEGEL: You publicly rejoiced over Alexis Tsipras' election victory in Greece. What do you think the chances are that the European Union and Athens will agree on a path to resolve the crisis? Piketty: The way Europe behaved in the crisis was nothing short of disastrous. Five years ago, the United States and Europe had approximately the same unemployment rate and level of public debt. But now, five years later, it's a different story: Unemployment has exploded here in Europe, while it has declined in the United States. Our economic output remains below the 2007 level. It has declined by up to 10 percent in Spain and Italy, and by 25 percent in Greece. [Euro]
• With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war
  George Monbiot As technology allows machines to make their own decisions, warfare will become bloodier – and less accountable Monday 30 January 2012 21.00 GMT Last modified on Saturday 4 October 2014 15.08 BST The ancient Greeks, unlike the Jews or the Christians, invested their gods with human failings. Divine judgment, they believed, was neither flawless nor dispassionate; it was warped by lust, vengeance and self-interest. In the hands of Zeus, the thunderbolt was both an instrument of justice and a weapon of jealousy and revenge. Those now dispensing judgment from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it. The people striking mortals down with drones are doubtless as capable as anyone else of self-deception, denial and cognitive illusions. More so, perhaps, as the eminent fictions of the Bush years and the growing delusions of the current president suggest. Barack Obama began last week's state of the union address by claiming that the troops who had fought the Iraq war had "made the United States safer and more respected around the world". Like Bush, like the gods, he has begun to create the world he wants to inhabit. These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfil one of humankind's abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance. [UAV]
• US Role in Disastrous Raid in the Philippines under Scrutiny
  9 March, 2015 Agence France-Presse – South China Morning Post A disastrous raid on alleged Islamic militants has ignited the worst political crisis yet for Philippine President Benigno Aquino – and questions about the extent of any US role in the operation are deepening his discomfort. Some Philippine lawmakers are asking whether the US military played a leading role in the operation in January, which ended with 44 police commandos dead in a field in the country’s Muslim-majority south. They point to reports that a US drone was flying over the area at the time, and said to have be beaming back real-time images to US commanders as the fiasco unfolded. The Senate president, Franklin Drilon, a powerful member of Aquino’s ruling Liberal Party, is one of at least five senators to have raised questions about what the United States knew. “Did the FBI know beforehand about this operation?” Drilon asked the head of the police commando unit Getulio Napenas, who lost his job over the affair, in one hearing. “Or any US armed forces personnel, did they know about this operation beforehand?” Under the terms of an anti-terrorism training deployment, the US is not permitted to engage in combat in the Philippines. [Separatism] [Philippines] [Client] [US dominance]
• Broken, venal, dysfunctional: The GOP clown show, Hillary’s challenge, and our dangerously frozen democracy
  Mitch can't fix the Senate. Boehner can't control his caucus. GOP's a disaster; Democrats have no soul. Now what? Bill Curry “We ought to start with the view that maybe there are some things we can agree on to make progress in this country… the Senate needs to be fixed… We’re going back to work and actually pass legislation… “ –Sen. Mitch McConnell, Nov. 5, 2014 On the day after the biggest win of his life, Mitch McConnell was feeling the love. Once he called hounding President Obama out of office his primary duty as a public servant. But rhapsodizing about common ground and fixing Congress, he sounded almost Obamaesque. Looking back at those words — and at a Congress that remains as venal and broken as it ever was — one can’t help but wonder: Did he mean it? He probably did. Every politician has heard his inner Lincoln beseech him to bind up the nation’s wounds. Even if McConnell were deaf to the plea, the same self-interest that led him to a life of obstruction now requires him to prove he can do what he fought to keep Obama from doing: Make the damn place work. He figured the bar would be easy to step over, having lowered it himself. Was he ever wrong. McConnell promised to open the floor to more amendments and force senators to come to work — and that he did. But as for finding common ground or actually passing any bills, the pattern seems set in stone. Despite winning historic majorities in both houses, Republicans haven’t changed Congress or themselves. They aren’t about to. A quick recap: Their only victory came before they were sworn in, when Obama leaned on Democrats to back a budget that increased defense spending, weakened efforts to slow global warming, allowed stock speculators to saddle taxpayers with their losses, and punched another hole in campaign finance laws. Republicans buried it all in a lame-duck budget because each of those moves are so unpopular. Obama said he gave in to avert a shutdown. Once the session got going, things really fell apart. The House treated us to yet another return engagement of the Benghazi follies, tried to deny rape victims access to emergency contraception, repealed Obamacare for the 56th time and came within nanoseconds of defunding homeland security. The public strongly opposes each of these actions — and truly detests the larger spectacle of endless gamesmanship in lieu of governance. But the GOP base loves it and Obama hates it, so they do it anyway, right up to the moment they’re sure the public is about to fry them. Then, as with Cuba or Ebola or the homeland security funding crisis, they ever so quietly drop the matter and move on to some fresh outrage. [Republicans] [Governance]
• The Logan Symposium
  Building an alliance against Secrecy, Surveillance and Censorship The Logan Symposium gathers a unique and powerful coalition of individuals with a single goal — the defence of freedom and democracy. The WikiLeaks and Snowden revelations made clear that we are all vulnerable, both as individuals and as nations. For journalists, the disclosures also impacted much of what we do and, importantly, how we do it. Remarkably, we also discovered allies we didn’t know we had. That fortuitous discovery inspired The Logan Symposium. We invited leading journalists, hacktivists, legal and security experts and artists to London. This eclectic band come together for the first time from Britain, the United States, Europe and Asia to inform the debate on freedom of the press and internet, privacy, and government accountability. [Media]
• As inequality soars, the nervous super rich are already planning their escapes
  Hedge fund managers are preparing getaways by buying airstrips and farms in remote areas, former hedge fund partner tells Davos during session on inequality Friday 23 January 2015 15.10 GMT Last modified on Friday 30 January 2015 20.31 GMT With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session in Davos, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway,” he said. [Inequality]
• Libya, ISIS and the Unaffordable Luxury of Hindsight
  by Ahmad Barqawi Who are you?” the late Muammar Gaddafi once rhetorically asked in a famous speech of his towards the end of his reign; (rightly) questioning the legitimacy of those seeking to over-throw his government at the time, calling them extremists, foreign agents, rats and drug-addicts. He was laughed at, unfairly caricatured, ridiculed and incessantly demonized; a distasteful parody video poking fun at the late Libyan leader even went viral on social media; evidently the maker of the video, an Israeli, thought the Libyan colloquial Arabic word “Zenga” (which means an Alleyway) sounded funny enough that he extracted it from one of Gaddafi’s speeches, looped it on top of a hip-hop backing track and voila… he got himself a hit video which was widely (and shamefully) circulated with a “revolutionary” zeal in the Arab world. We shared, we laughed, he died. But the bloody joke is on all of us; Gaddafi knew what he was talking about; right from the get-go, he accused the so-called Libyan rebels of being influenced by Al-Qaeda ideology and Ben Laden’s school of thought; no one had taken his word for it of course, not even a little bit. I mean why should we have? After all, wasn’t he a vile, sex-centric dictator hell-bent on massacring half of the Libyan population while subjecting the other half to manic raping sprees with the aid of his trusted army of Viagra-gobbling, sub-Saharan mercenaries? At least that’s what we got from the visual cancer that is Al Jazeera channel and its even more acrid Saudi counterpart Al-Arabiya in their heavily skewed coverage of NATO’s vicious conquest of Libya. Plus Gaddafi did dress funny; why would anyone trust a haggard, weird-looking despot dressed in colorful rags when you have well-groomed Zionists like Bernard Henry Levy, John McCain and Hillary Clinton at your side, smiling and flashing the victory sign in group photo-ops, right? [Gaddafi] [Outsourcing] [Blowback]
• Yemen’s Houthis Seek Iran, Russia and China Ties
  U.S. and other countries have sided with deposed leader. By Hakim Almasmari in San’a and Asa Fitch in Dubai March 6, 2015 1:01 p.m. ET Houthi militants controlling Yemen’s capital are trying to build ties with Iran, Russia and China to offset Western and Saudi support for the country’s ousted president. The Houthis’ interim government has sent delegations to Iran in search of fuel supplies and to Russia to look for investment in energy projects, according to two senior Houthi officials. Another delegation is planning to visit China in the coming weeks, they said. The U.S., France, Turkey and Saudi Arabia were among at least a dozen countries that shut embassies in San’a after the Houthis seized control of the capital in January, leaving their movement isolated internationally. Since then, President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has fled to the southern port city of Aden, where he is appealing to his allies at home and abroad for financial and political support for an alternative administration. The U.S., the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf and the United Nations have sided with him. The diplomatic standoff threatens to split the country and trigger a civil war fought along Yemen’s many sectarian, political and geographical fault-lines. The Houthis and Mr. Hadi are the main adversaries in the deepening crisis, but the presence of Yemen’s Sunni Muslim tribes—and the country’s potent al Qaeda offshoot, which Mr. Hadi has fought with U.S. backing—add a layer of complexity to the conflict. Houthi leaders say their interim government is trying to gain legitimacy abroad. [Yemen]
• Why Can’t the Islamic State Be Eradicated?
  Pavel Urintsev | 08.03.2015 | 00:00 Recent events involving terrorist attacks in various countries carried out in the name of jihadists and the calls ringing out for a war against Islamic extremism are forcing a rethink about why the long-term battle with radical Muslim groups is bearing such meagre fruit. Following the tragic events in France and Denmark in January and February, when inflammatory caricatures of the prophet Muhammad gave rise to a number of murders, European politicians almost unanimously declared that the Islamist attacks on European values are a threat to the entire global community. There is obviously no point comparing the scale of the events in Paris and Copenhagen with, say, the deaths of thousands of children in Africa from starvation, which are infinitely less worrying to the Western world. At the same time, the exceptionally high level of media support for displays of Islamic extremism, which the Western media presents as one of the greatest evils in the world, cannot but suggest that it is not only its proponents who have an interest in the existence of this evil, but also those who are waging such an uncompromising struggle against it. [Global insurgency] [Outsourcing] [Jihadist]
• CIA Asset Joins Islamic State in Libya – Abdelhakim Belhadj Worked with U.S. and NATO to Overthrow Gaddafi
  By Kurt Nimmo Global Research, March 05, 2015 Infowars 4 March 2015 Abdelhakim Belhadj has reportedly joined forces with the Islamic State, according to the journalist Sara Carter. Belhadj is a former al-Qaeda operative who was a key player in the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi. He worked directly with the U.S. and NATO. Kyle Shideler writes for The Washington Times: If Belhadj has gone over to Islamic State, it will represent a major boost to Islamic State’s efforts to co-opt and bring in Libya’s existing jihadist forces under their banner, which now reportedly includes as many as 3,000 fighters. Belhadj’s forces play a significant role in the Islamist “Libyan Dawn” coalition (which includes the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda’s Ansar al-Sharia), which currently holds Tripoli, and which claims to be the rightful government in opposition to the U.N. recognized government of Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni. [Jihadist] [Libya] [ISIS]
• Is Barack Obama Actually Trying To Help the Islamic State (ISIS) Take Over Syria?
  By Michael Snyder Global Research, March 01, 2015 investmentwatchblog.com That headline sounds crazy, right? It must be untrue, right? Well, read on, because you might be absolutely shocked by what you learn. As you will read about below, the Obama administration has used al-Qaeda fighters and other radical Islamic groups in the past to topple governments. And without a doubt, Barack Obama is absolutely determined to oust Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. In fact, he came dangerously close to taking us to war with Syria earlier in his presidency before backing down in the face of overwhelming public pressure. But what Obama wants to do in Syria has not changed, and he is using the same playbook that he used in Libya and elsewhere to get it done. Of course on the surface Obama has “declared war” on ISIS. He says that we must defeat them in Iraq and in Syria so that the group does not spread. But when it comes to airstrikes, the Obama administration has had an “Iraq first” policy. This has put ISIS on a defensive posture in Iraq, but this has actually encouraged expansion of ISIS in Syria. ISIS is just following the path of least resistance. Is Obama trying to discourage ISIS from committing troops and resources in Iraq because he actually wants them to focus on taking down the Assad regime in Syria? Is Obama attempting to “herd” ISIS forces toward Damascus? Those are some very important questions. What we do know is that the size of the territory that ISIS controls in Syria has doubled since airstrikes began last summer… ISIS has almost doubled the land it controls in Syria since the US-led coalition began airstrikes against the extremist group in the summer, a new map has revealed. [ISIS] [Outsourcing] [Obama]
• America Dropped Deadly Barrel Bombs in Vietnam
  U.S. Army and Air Force deployed devastating munitions decades before Syria did
  Helicopter-dropped barrel bombs have become a bloody hallmark of the Syrian civil war, but the idea has been around for at least 45 years. The U.S. used the tactic decades ago in Vietnam. Of course, Vietnam and Syria are very different wars. Bashar Al Assad’s military uses the explosive drums to terrorize civilians. War is Boring’s own David Axe witnessed barrel-bombings in northern Syria last fall. In Vietnam, the American plan was to smoke out guerrillas. [Syria] [Vietnam] [Double standards]
• War Propaganda: Human Rights Watch Accuses Syria of ‘Barrel Bomb’ Damage Created by US Attacks
  Global Research, March 01, 2015 Moon of Alabama 27 February 2015 Human Rights Watch has been part of a sectarian, anti-Syrian propaganda campaign. It is hyping the “barrel bombs”, allegedly used by the Syrian government, as inhumane weapons. I have yet to see Human Rights Watch equally damning the indiscriminate use against civilians of improvised rockets by the Jihadist “moderate rebels.” Yesterday Human Rights Watch send out this tweet: According to HRW the picture of the destroyed town is somehow related to Syrian “barrel bombs.” That is not the case. The picture was published in the New York Times on February 13, 2015.¸ Caption states: “The predominantly Kurdish town of Kobani is devastated after months under siege by Islamist forces and airstrikes by a United States-led coalition” | Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images (Click to enlarge) [Propaganda] [HRW]
• The Civilian Carnage From Operation Noble Justice: Remember, Kill Chain
  by Andrew Cockburn In a cold February dawn in 2010, two small SUVs and a four-door pickup truck headed down a dirt road in the mountains of southern Afghanistan. They had set out soon after midnight, traveling cross-country to reach Highway 1, the country’s principal paved road, which would lead them to Kandahar and north to Kabul. Crammed inside were more than thirty men, women, and children, four of them younger than six. Everyone knew one another, for they all came from the same cluster of mountain villages roughly two hundred miles southwest of Kabul. Many of the men, unemployed and destitute, were on their way to Iran in hopes of work. Others were shopkeepers heading to the capital to buy supplies, or students returning to school. The women carried turkeys, gifts for the relatives they would stay with in Kabul. A number were Hazaras, an ethnic minority of Shia Muslims whom the Taliban treated with unremitting cruelty whenever they had the opportunity. Now they were in western Uruzgan Province, Taliban country and therefore very dangerous for them, but they risked the shortcut because they were short on gas. They met no other cars and little foot traffic; the world around them must have seemed empty. But it was not. Unbeknownst to them, they were being watched and their every movement—even the warmth from their bodies—transmitted across the globe. As the ramshackle vehicles—one of them kept breaking down and another blew a tire—clattered along, people they would never meet conferred across oceans and continents as to who they were, where they were going, what they were carrying, and whether they should live or die. [UAV] [Assassination] [Afghanistan] [Civilians] [Intelligence]
• Dollar Imperialism, 2015 Edition
  by Michèle Brand and Rémy Herrera Paris. “The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.” This is what US Treasury Secretary John Connally said to his counterparts in the Rome G-10 meeting in November, 1971, shortly after the Nixon administration ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold and shifted the international monetary system into a global floating exchange rate regime. The world has been suffering from this “problem” ever since the US obtained the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the world’s reserve and trade currency under the Bretton Woods system after WWII. The Fed effectively acts as the world’s central bank, but sets monetary policy only in its own interest. Under the pressure and the orders of financial oligopolies, it fixes interest rates and prints money to suit itself, sending economies across the globe into tailspins. When the Fed wanted to halt the decade-long decline in the profit rate and to pull the US out of stagflation in the late 1970s, it raised its rates sharply – the Volcker shock of 1979-1981, when the federal funds effective rate jumped to more than 20% at the beginning of the 1980s – throwing many developing countries into freefall, default and debt servitude. As their debts were denominated in dollars and rates jumped, suddenly they were paying drastically heavier debt service burdens, which they could only cover by taking out more debt under the draconian conditions of the IMF. In 1997, the US interest rate hike of only a quarter of a point was one of the main reasons for the “Asian crisis,” as hot money fled South-East Asia. Today in 2015, the end of QE, a strengthening dollar and an anticipated rise in US interest rates could wreak havoc in developing economies. Since 2009, trillions of dollars hot off the printing press or borrowed at near zero rates have been flooding into the global South and East. But today’s monetary tightening is already leading to an exodus of hot money that is destabilizing these countries, with the effect of keeping the United States’ rivals in the “emerging” world down. Like the Volcker shock, these policies aren’t enacted with the express goal of kicking the global South in the stomach, but this outcome is a necessary and predictable result of the domination of the global financial order by a sole country whose interest is to keep its hegemonic status. [Reserve] [Imperialism]
• U.S. Companies Are Stashing $2.1 Trillion Overseas to Avoid Taxes
  'By'Richard Rubin 11:00 PM NZDT March 4, 2015 Eight of the biggest U.S. technology companies added a combined $69 billion to their stockpiled offshore profits over the past year, even as some corporations in other industries felt pressure to bring cash back home. Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google Inc. and five other tech firms now account for more than a fifth of the $2.10 trillion in profits that U.S. companies are holding overseas, according to a Bloomberg News review of the securities filings of 304 corporations. The total amount held outside the U.S. by the companies was up 8 percent from the previous year, though 58 companies reported smaller stockpiles. The money pileup, reflecting companies’ incentives to park profits in low-tax countries, has drawn the attention of President Barack Obama and U.S. lawmakers, who see a chance to tap the funds for spending programs and to revamp the tax code. That effort is stalled in Washington, and there are few signs that tech companies will bring the profits back to the U.S. until Congress gives them an incentive or a mandate. [Tax] [Governance]
• Myanmar: Meet Aung San Suu Kyi’s Saffron Mobs
  Not unlike other US-backed “color revolutions” around the world, Myanmar’s “Saffron Revolution” is sold as an ultra-liberal pro-democracy, progressive movement, with one of the West’s most successful neo-colonial creations to date, Aung San Suu Kyi, portrayed and revered as a modern day, secular “saint” of neo-liberalism and Western democratic values. Underneath the pageantry and spin, however, is harbored ultra-right racism, bigotry, misogyny, and unhinged violence that if ever truthfully reported on, would end the “Saffron” wave, and spell the absolute end of both Suu Kyi’s political career and her legacy. Most recently Suu Kyi’s “Saffron” movement took to the streets, not to call for greater “freedom” or to defend “human rights,” but to condemn the government’s move toward giving hundreds of thousands of stateless Rohingya refugees citizenship. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/03/05/myanmar-meet-aung-san-suu-kyi-s-saffron-mobs/ [Myanmar] [Aung San Suu Kyi] [Colour] [NED]
• The BRICS Plus Germany
  by Pepe Escobar Winston Churchill once said, “I feel lonely without a war.” He also badly missed the loss of empire. Churchill’s successor – the ‘Empire of Chaos’ – now faces the same quandary. Some wars – as in Ukraine, by proxy – are not going so well. And the loss of empire increasingly manifests itself in myriad moves by selected players aiming towards a multipolar world. So no wonder US ‘Think Tankland’ is going bonkers, releasing wacky CIA-tinted “forecasts” where Russia is bound to disintegrate, and China is turning into a communist dictatorship. So much (imperial) wishful thinking, so little time to prolong hegemony. [US global strategy]
• The spy who came in from al-Qaeda Aimen Dean
  Aimen Dean is a founder member of al-Qaeda, who changed tack in 1998 and became a spy for Britain's security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. Interviewed by Peter Marshall, he describes his years working in Afghanistan and London as one of the West's most valuable assets in the fight against militant Islam. Bosnia Dean was brought up in Saudi Arabia, where opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s made military jihad a noble concept. He was a teenager when Yugoslavia splintered, and Bosnian Muslims found themselves in mortal danger from Serb nationalists. He and a friend, Khalid al-Hajj - later to become the leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia - set off to become mujahideen. I would say it was the most eye-opening experience I ever had. I was a bookish nerd from Saudi Arabia just weeks ago and then suddenly I find myself prancing up on the mountains of Bosnia holding an AK-47 feeling a sense of immense empowerment - and the feeling that I was participating in writing history rather than just watching history on the side. And also at the same time, being in the military training camps, receiving knowledge that I never thought in a thousand years I would be receiving about warfare and war tactics and military manoeuvres, and to be receiving it alongside people from many different nationalities, with the one common factor among them that they were all Muslims. And they were all there in order to participate in the jihad in defence of the Bosnian population, was in itself also an overwhelming experience. Q: You weren't afraid? A: Between you and me, I think at the beginning I was afraid of the unknown rather than afraid of the fact that I'm going into, embarking on a journey that might end up with all of us being killed actually. Q: You didn't fear death? A: I would be lying if I say no I didn't fear death but I started to come to peace with the idea that yes, I am entering Bosnia. Most likely I will never come out of it. Q: Did you want martyrdom, did you want to die? A: Yes. Jihad school By the end of the Bosnian conflict I started to notice something else within my comrades. Those who survived started to adopt a rather more anti-Western, anti-globalisation feeling that the global community were conspiring against the Muslims in Bosnia because they were turning the tide of the war in their favour - so they wanted to end the war there and then before they score any more victories. Continue reading the main story Find out more Peter Marshall This is an edited version of Peter Marshall's interview with Aimen Dean, which was broadcast on The Spy Who Came in from al-Qaeda, on BBC Radio 4 at 09:00 GMT on 3 March. You can catch up via the BBC iPlayer Radio. Catch up with Peter Marshall's interview with Aimen Dean on Islamic State - an edition of The Report broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2015. At least that's the perception. And with that perception, I think they started to feel that the West is fighting Islam as a religion… and that led to further radicalisation that made it easy for them to make the transformation from being mujahideen into being jihad operatives. Bosnia was a school in which many talented leaders of al-Qaeda were born. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed [accused of being the architect of the 9/11 attacks] was one of those people who were in Bosnia. The impression I had at that time, was that he was there in Bosnia in order to spot talent, let's put it this way, in order to you know scout for talents who will be useful for the later struggle. I remember that one of the things he said, and it was in a wedding where we were seated next to each other basically, and one of the things he said, he said, "Well, the Bosnian war seems to be ending here, that you know the end is in sight but what will happen after the war? The question is are we going to roam the globe from one hopeless battle to another trying to save a Muslim population until someone else, and then someone else come and reap the reward?" In other words, there will be a government that is secular and doesn't rule by the rules of Sharia. He says that this cycle need to end and that we have to think about another front where we can serve Islam and basically resurrect the spirit of jihad within the Muslim world. I think that little speech was the first indication that things are moving from jihad being an instrument to defend Muslim populations on the frontiers to an instrument to bring down regimes and to fight a terror war… against the US interests in the region. Q: To become terrorists rather than soldiers? A: Absolutely. [Outsourcing] [Jihadist] [Bosnia] [Blowback] [Defector]
• President Obama Tastes the Bitter Fruit of Appeasement…of Israel, not Iran
  Jeffrey Goldberg opined on his twitter feed that the Netanyahu-Obama grudge has its roots in Obama not letting Netanyahu bomb Iran. That’s BS, I think. I suspect that if Netanyahu really wanted to bomb Iran’s hardened and dispersed nuclear facilities--and enrage its population and a good chunk of the Muslim world and virtually guarantee that Iran would actually build an atomic weapon--instead of simply engaging in polarizing posturing, President Obama would simply be one in a long line of US and Israeli military and security poohbahs seeking to restrain Israel’s bellicose PM, if not put him in a straitjacket and remove him from office. No, Netanyahu will never forgive Obama for challenging the security narrative that is so important to Israel’s position in the Middle East and Netanyahu’s own political fortunes: the assertion that a) Israel b) the region c) the world face an existential threat from an unhinged theocracy that wants to bathe the world in blood. [Israel] [Netanyahu]
• US comments about British army raise vital questions about defence spending
  Worries about scaled-down army voiced by General Raymond Odierno highlight fears of defence cuts and changing priorities Members of the armed forces Britain is at present the fifth biggest spender on defence in the world. Photograph: Mark Winter/Demotix/Corbis Ewen MacAskill, defence correspondent Monday 2 March 2015 20.00 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 3 March 2015 00.36 GMT The British military does not normally take kindly to comments from American counterparts about the state UK forces. Any such intervention is usually met, as it has been the case since at least the second world war, with a dismissive comment about American military prowess. But British military chiefs will welcome the intervention at the weekend of the US army chief of staff, General Raymond Odierno, who told the Telegraph he was worried about a scaled-down British army. With the Ministry of Defence almost certain to face deep cuts after the election, regardless of which party wins, Odierno said: “I would be lying to you if I did not say that I am very concerned about the GDP investment in the UK.” Odierno’s comments are in line with what British military chiefs have been saying for months, both publicly and privately. Although there is an election still to be fought, the next chancellor, whether Labour or Conservative, will be looking for deep budget cuts. Defence, in contrast with protected budgets for health and overseas development, is among the most vulnerable for further reductions. [MISCOM] [Subordinate]
• Pakistan still trapped in its labyrinth
  BY Roger Cohen | FEBRUARY 28, 2015 , 5 : 38 PM GST There is a bit of a hermetic feel to Pakistan these days, as if the country that lies on the ancient road from the West to Asia, a natural bridge, had somehow contorted itself into a self-imposed isolation. The border with India, dividing the Punjab, lies not far from this great city. It is a barrier rather than a gateway. The border with Afghanistan is problematic in its nonexistence. The beast nurtured in the name of Islamabad's policy of "strategic depth", the Taliban in its Pakistani iteration, massacred 134 children at Peshawar's Army Public School late last year. Not surprising then that tourism is down to a trickle. I made my way to the Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort — high-walled, dusky-red, magnificent in extent. There was not a foreigner in sight, not a camera clicking. President Obama goes to India and Pakistan is way down on his agenda — if it is there at all. Nobody in Washington frets any longer about balancing visits to New Delhi and Islamabad. Oh, yes, Afghanistan, American treasure and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), or top spy agency: Well, the less said about that, the better. [Pakistan]
• Hospital food is a recipe for disaster
  Prue Leith The new guidelines are pathetic. Patients deserve so much better than plastic containers filled with sweaty cheese, dabs of marge and Monday 2 March 2015 06.00 GMT Imagine you’re in hospital recovering from an operation. Your appetite is returning and you’re looking forward to nothing more complicated than a bowl of hot, tasty soup. Instead, on your tray you find a tired tuna sandwich encased in a plastic container, and a bag of crisps; or worse, a “ready meal” that looks like an unidentifiable plate of grey mush. No wonder more than 80,000 hospital meals are left uneaten every day and two-thirds of staff admit they would not themselves eat what they serve up to patients. You can’t blame either patients or staff: most hospital food is a disgrace. After a needlessly long drawn out process of consultation, new recommendations to address this scandal are finally due to come into force in April. Unfortunately none of it amounts to more than a hill of over-processed beans. [Health] [Governance]
• King Juan Carlos Returns To Washington
  King Juan Carlos is Spain’s best king since Carlos III of the eighteenth century and one of the most consequential statesmen of the twentieth century. He is overlooked in the United States because Spain’s success is taken for granted and because his life has been chronicled in Spanish. He is far more appreciated in Latin America than in the United States. His reign tinged with sacrifice and tragedy, he succeeded General Francisco Franco, orchestrated Spain’s transition to democracy, faced down a major coup attempt in 1981, drove Spain’s full return to the West, and built bridges to Latin America and the Middle East. With his active support, Spain became largely prosperous, a net provider of security as a member of NATO, and even became a significant donor of foreign aid. Spain’s transition to democracy is seen as the “textbook” case. The historic transition placed far higher responsibilities on Juan Carlos than almost any other twentieth-century European monarch. [Spain] [Democracy] [US global strategy] [NATO]
• Why the Rise of Fascism is Again the Issue
  by John Pilger The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism. “To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
  For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships”.
• CIA is on the Hunt for Foreign Politicians’ Money
  Vladimir Platov A while ago a French daily evening newspaper Le Monde in collaboration with the US-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released data on secret accounts of the Geneva branch of HSBC – one of the largest banking and financial service institutions in the world, which allowed the rich and influential to evade taxes. Additionally, HSBC has allegedly been providing drug traffickers and arms dealers with secret accounts. According to the above mentioned publication a total worth of more than 106,000 individuals accounts of international clients amounts to the staggering 100 billion dollars. Among the clients of the Swiss branch of HSBC one could track members of political and business elites, top richest business owners, both former and sitting public officials, their relatives, royal family members, and, guess who – politicians. The unfolding scandal was dubbed “Swiss Leaks” by the international press. The published information, that was stolen by an HSBC insider Hervé Falciani, concerns the period of 2005-2007. In a short period of time following the scandal, different media outlets across the globe started to publish their own revelations that stated that “due to the further investigation of the HSBC case” different governments managed to recover billions of dollars of unpaid taxes. However, financial claims that quickly followed the scandal, that were put forward by the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against two Swiss banks – HSBC and UBS, clearly show that this whole story was carefully orchestrated by the White House and the US Central Intelligence Agency to achieve a desired effect. The timing of this leak was flawless since as of lately the Obama administration has been suffering one defeating blow after another — starting in the international arena, where the pursuit of “White House-style democracy” has been facing growing criticism all around the globe due the stand-off with Russia over the Ukraine crisis, on top of numerous European, Middle Eastern, and Asia-Pacific crises, and ending with a multitude of domestic affairs. It’s clear that at home Obama has nothing to put on the table – the deepening financial crisis has been crippling the American economy further, while this process has been aggravated even further by the oil war that Washington has unleashed against allegedly non-friendly countries. In such a situation minor financial injections in the form of “fines” paid by Swiss banks may serve a temporarily remedy to what lies ahead of the United States in economic terms. Above all, for the first time in a long while the White House may play the role as a positive hero, by fighting a righteous fight against tax evaders. But there’s a chance that it has been waging this war for all the wrong reasons: [Corruption] [CIA]
• Dresden and Poznan: Two Different Ways to Wage War
  Yuriy Rubtsov | 26.02.2015 | 00:00 The Red Army and British-American forces had one enemy - the German Wehrmacht but quite often they waged different wars. The liberation of Polish city of Poznan by Red Army and the bombing of Dresden by allies – one event following another in a week - took place 70 years ago, February 1945. These examples provide a good illustration to support the point of view stated above. [War crimes] [Way of War]
• Rohani Adviser Says Rights Violations Hurting Iran
  Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty
  February 27, 2015 Ali Yunesi, a senior adviser to Iran's President Hassan Rohani and a former intelligence minister, has admitted that "many cases" of human rights violations are taking place in Iran's courts and prisons, blaming them on extremists. The human rights situation in the Islamic republic is often the subject of criticism by rights group and UN rights experts. Yet Iranian officials very rarely admit that abuses take place in the country. [Iran ] [Human rights] [Softwar]
• All about Iran: One-note Netanyahu goes totally tone deaf
  By Noga Tarnopolsky February 26, 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not having a good election. Recent polls show his right-wing Likud Party running neck-and-neck with the left-of-center Zionist Union, or in some cases, running behind. His numbers took a hit after Netanyahu was served with a damning report in which Israel’s state comptroller slammed him for excessive expenditure of public funds at his official residence. The report, which was in the works before elections were announced, has been turned over to the attorney general for investigation of possible criminality. Among the allegations: over $2,000 spent every month cleaning the Netanyahu’s private residence in Caesarea, where the family is rarely present, and a pattern of not refunding staff for costs incurred at the personal request of the Netanyahus. Netanyahu’s response was to blame MennyNaftali, his former household manager for the debacle. Naftali has an elite military background and has passed innumerable security screenings. Last year, he became the last of a long line of staffers to sue the Netanyahus over an allegedly abusive work environment. The charges include verbal abuse, overtime without appropriate compensation and such capricious treatment as a 3 a.m. phone call from Sara Netanyahu — the prime minister’s wife — who was upset that her milk was in a bag, not a carton. On Wednesday, another previously planned comptroller’s report was issued, on Israel’s housing crisis. It outlined years of lackadaisical policies and negligence during which time the cost of housing shot up 36 percent. Netanyahu’s response to the stinging critique was to avoid the issue entirely, instead strikinghis campaign’s singular note, Iran: “When we talk about housing costs and cost of living, I never forget life itself. The biggest challenge of our lives is preventing Iran from going nuclear.” Batya Giladi, an Israeli blogger, retorted “Tomorrow, when the bank manager calls, I will very politely tell her that I don’t forget life itself and the real dangers we face: Iran.” Giladi was reflecting Israelis’ growing impatience with Netanyahu and his singular focus on Iran. [Netanyahu]
• U.S., Cuba Meet For Second Round of Diplomatic Talks Part of Obama’s call to pursue fully normalized ties
  Felicia Schwartz Feb. 27, 2015 12:19 p.m. ET WASHINGTON—Cuban and American officials were meeting in Washington Friday in a second round of talks aimed at re-establishing diplomatic relations, part of President Barack Obama ’s call in December to pursue fully normalized ties. Friday’s meetings involve midlevel government officials and will focus mostly on the nuts and bolts issues related to reopening embassies in Havana and Washington. But Friday’s talks could play an important role. Mr. Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro both are attending the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April, fueling expectations the embassies would open before then. Both sides have an interest in showing progress ahead of the April meeting, but a senior State Department official acknowledged that re-establishing the embassies ahead of the summit could be difficult. One potential sticking point is Cuba’s designation by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terror. Mr. Obama announced the terror designation would be reviewed in December, along with policy shifts that loosened travel and trading restrictions and allowed for increased remittances to the island. The U.S. considers the review of Cuba’s terror designation as separate from the diplomatic talks. But Cuban officials have said they don’t envision moving forward in the normalization process so long as the designation remained. “It would be very easy to restore diplomatic relations if they would not link those two things,” the senior State Department official said. A recent State Department report found “no indication” that the Cubans provided weapons or support to terrorist groups, though it noted that Cuba continues to harbor fugitives wanted in the U.S. [Cuba] [Double standards] [Terrorism]
• Gen. Wesley Clark: “ISIS Got Started With Funding From Our Closest Allies”
  By Daniel McAdams Global Research, February 22, 2015 Ron Paul Institute Many remember General Wesley Clark as the man who almost started World War III by ordering the British to fire on Russian peacekeepers who landed in the Kosovo capital, Pristina, before the Americans. British commander of the international KFOR peacekeeping force, General Sir Mike Jackson, is reported to have replied, “I’m not going to start the third world war for you.” One of the most interesting things about Gen. Clark, however, is his propensity to blurt fascinating things out every now and again. Who can forget his interview with Amy Goodman back in 2007 where he revealed that one of the top generals in the Pentagon had showed him a memo from then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld not long after the 9/11 attack outlining US global war plans. According to Clark at the time, the general said: [W]e’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!” Well Clark is back with another very interesting blurt. Far from a spontaneously-arising root-of-all-evil organization, at least according to General Wesley Clark, ISIS was created and funded by our “closest allies.” As the General said: ISIS got started through funding from our friends and allies… to fight to the death against Hezbollah. [ISIS] [Outsourcing]
• Top 10 Bogus ISIS Stories
  By Adam Johnson Global Research, February 25, 2015 FAIR 20 February 2015 ISIS’s violent bona fides are not in doubt to anyone paying attention. They’vetargeted religious minorities, beheaded aid workers, sold women into sex slavery and have been all-around devastating for those under their rule. But as America debates the possibility of a full-scale ground invasion of ISIS-controlled territory, it’s important to note that much of the ISIS threat — namely that which targets the West — has been habitually overstated by an uncritical media. In no particular order, here are the ten most bogus ISIS scare stories over the past year: [ISIS] [Media]
• Bush Family Ties to Terror Suspects Re-opened by the 9/11 Classified “28 Pages”
  By Ralph Lopez Global Research, February 24, 2015 Digital Journal As pressure builds to make public 28 pages of a joint congressional inquiry on 9/11 which was classified by President George W. Bush, the Bush family’s well-documented relationships to Saudi and other foreign terror suspects are again coming to the fore. North Carolina Republican Congressman Walter Jones told the New Yorker last September, of the what is now commonly known as the “28 Pages”: “There’s nothing in it about national security…It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Prominent in the rise of the political fortunes of both the 41st and 43rd presidents is the support of figures listed by the US government as terrorist financiers, as well as some connected to the now closed, Saudi-controlled criminal enterprise known as BCCI. Of special interest to independent researchers is the failure of the nation’s air defenses on 9/11, and the reliance of these defenses on the company formerly known as Ptech, which was founded with funding partly from Saudi financiers with ties to designated terrorist organizations. Ptech employed a mix of foreign nationals and Americans with ties to Israeli software companies with possible links to Israeli Mossad. Now renamed Go Agile, Ptech is a purveyor of software which is critical to the security of major software systems embedded throughout the FAA and the US Department of Defense. [George W Bush] [Saudi Arabia] [28 pages]
• The Ideology of the American Media is That it Believes That It Doesn’t Have any Ideology
  by William Blum So NBC’s evening news anchor, Brian Williams, has been caught telling untruths about various events in recent years. What could be worse for a reporter? How about not knowing what’s going on in the world? In your own country? At your own employer? As a case in point I give you Williams’ rival, Scott Pelley, evening news anchor at CBS. In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.” In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.” Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself told CBS’s Rather in February 2003: “These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.” Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991. There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world, before the 2003 American invasion, that the WMD were non-existent. Enter Scott Pelley. In January 2008, as a CBS reporter, Pelley interviewed FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed: PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed? PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq. PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed? PIRO: Yes. PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade? [Media] [Iraq] [Propaganda]

• UN Experts: Yemen Ex-President Allegedly Amassed Billions
  By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FEB. 25, 2015, 12:29 P.M. E.S.T. UNITED NATIONS — Yemen's former president Ali Abdullah Saleh is alleged to have amassed assets worth between $32 billion and $60 billion, most believed to have been transferred abroad under other names, U.N. experts said in a report circulated Wednesday. The experts, who monitor U.N. sanctions ordering all countries to freeze the assets of Saleh and two Houthi rebel leaders, said the ex-president's assets are believed to include property, cash, shares, gold and other valuable commodities in at least 20 countries. [Corruption] [Yemen] [Client]
• Reading the Greek Deal Correctly
  by James K. Galbraith On Friday as news of the Brussels deal came through, Germany claimed victory and it is no surprise that most of the working press bought the claim. They have high authorities to quote and to rely on. Thus from London The Independent reported: several analysts agreed that the results of the talks amounted to a humiliating defeat for Greece. No details followed, the analysts were unnamed, and their affiliations went unstated – although further down two were quoted and both work for banks. Many similar examples could be given, from both sides of the Atlantic. The New Yorker is another matter. It is an independent magazine, with a high reputation, written for a detached audience. And John Cassidy is an analytical reporter. Readers are inclined to take him seriously and when he gets something wrong, it matters. [Greece] [Syriza]
• The Real American Exceptionalism
  by Alfred W. McCoy Though the U.S. was once key in establishing what we now casually call "the international community," recent decades have seen the once noble idea of American leadership fall victim to the noxious paradigm of "American exceptionalism" — complete with drone attacks on civilian populations, endless and borderless wars, and human rights abuses that are a direct affront to some of the global institutions the U.S. once fought to create. (Photo: AP/Robert F. Bukaty) "The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond damaged his reputation for decades, today his ideas have achieved unimagined influence. They have, in fact, shaped the neo-conservative view of presidential power that has become broadly bipartisan since 9/11. Indeed, Schmitt has influenced American politics directly through his intellectual protégé Leo Strauss who, as an émigré professor at the University of Chicago, trained Bush administration architects of the Iraq war Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky. All that should be impressive enough for a discredited, long dead authoritarian thinker. But Schmitt’s dictum also became a philosophical foundation for the exercise of American global power in the quarter century that followed the end of the Cold War. Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should, said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power. [Exceptionalism] [Legality] [US global strategy] [Imperialism]
• Obama’s ‘moving finger’ writes Iran ties
  The remarks by the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini at the Chatham House, London, on Tuesday to the effect that a nuclear deal with Iran is “at hand” are to be taken as the most definitive indication so far at a high level that a historic compromise between the United States and Iran could be taking shape. Indeed, she added the caveat (which we know already) that “a series of internal domestic political dynamics” would need to be handled with care and she listed three — the sparring between the White House and the Republican-dominated US Congress, Israel’s elections (March 17) and the Saudi-Iranian rivalry. Mogherini is an old ‘Iran hand’, having pioneered the West’s thaw with Iran in her capacity as Italian foreign minister. She visited Tehran repeatedly to position Italy ahead of any other European country in the outreach to Iran — and the Iranians on their part valued her friendly approach. But Mogherini’s assessment also helps to decode the evaluations by US Secretary of State John Kerry at a testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington yesterday and a media briefing by senior American officials earlier on Monday regarding the outcome of the talks, which took place this weekend in Geneva. [Iran] [Obama]
• Passport-Gate: Turkey’s Brewing Uyghur Passport Scandal
  Yesterday I speculated that the plethora of fraudulent Turkish passports showing up in the hands of Uyghur refugees could be attributed to the connivance of Turkish government elements. The passports, after all, are smart-chipped biometric documents (in order to satisfy EU requirements as part of the Turkish admission campaign), and seem virtually impossible to forge without the participation of some quasi-official actor. I should also add that Malaysia, the primary channel for Uyghur refugees traveling to Turkey on faked documents, is also the world’s pioneer in biometric passports, having instituted the system in 1998. It is also a primary channel for Uyghurs seeking refuge in Turkey. It would seem unlikely that human trafficking of Uyghurs would rely on trying to sneak a non-biometric Turkish passport past Malaysian immigration and emigration (although, it must be admitted that Malaysia, with two million illegal immigrants, is suspected of having a few holes in its border security game. Notoriously, one of the passengers on the vanished flight MH 370 turned out to be an identity thief traveling on a stolen Austrian biometric passport). [Xinjiang] [Turkey]
• Special Report: How Iran's military chiefs operate in Iraq
  By Ned Parker, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Isabel Coles BAGHDAD Tue Feb 24, 2015 6:00am EST (Reuters) - The face stares out from multiple billboards in central Baghdad, a grey-haired general casting a watchful eye across the Iraqi capital. This military commander is not Iraqi, though. He's Iranian. The posters are a recent arrival, reflecting the influence Iran now wields in Baghdad. Iraq is a mainly Arab country. Its citizens, Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims alike, have long mistrusted Iran, the Persian nation to the east. But as Baghdad struggles to fight the Sunni extremist group Islamic State, many Shi'ite Iraqis now look to Iran, a Shi'ite theocracy, as their main ally. In particular, Iraqi Shi'ites have grown to trust the powerful Iranian-backed militias that have taken charge since the Iraqi army deserted en masse last summer. [Iraq] [Iran] [Decline]
• Iraqi Army Downs Two British Planes Carrying Weapons for ISIL Terrorists
  al-Anbar province: numerous flights by US-led coalition planes airdrop weapons and supplies for ISIL in terrorist-held areas. By Fars News Agency Global Research, February 24, 2015 GR editor’s Note There are no reports in the Western mainstream media pertaining to this issue. This report is based on statements emanating from the Iraq parliament, with photographic evidence. We have not been in a position to corroborate this report by FARS News. * * * Iraq’s army has shot down two British planes as they were carrying weapons for the ISIL terrorists in Al-Anbar province, a senior lawmaker disclosed on Monday. “The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” Head of the committee Hakem al-Zameli said, according to a Monday report of the Arabic-language information center of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. He said the Iraqi parliament has asked London for explanations in this regard. The senior Iraqi legislator further unveiled that the government in Baghdad is receiving daily reports from people and security forces in al-Anbar province on numerous flights by the US-led coalition planes that airdrop weapons and supplies for ISIL in terrorist-held areas. The Iraqi lawmaker further noted the cause of such western aids to the terrorist group, and explained that the US prefers a chaotic situation in Anbar Province which is near the cities of Karbala and Baghdad as it does not want the ISIL crisis to come to an end. [Iraq] [ISIS] [Outsourcing]
• What ISIS Really Wants
  The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it. By Graeme Wood March 2015 What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors [ISIS]
• Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System
  By Richard Fausset Feb. 19, 2015 An advisory panel of the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors has recommended closing three academic centers, including a poverty center and one dedicated to social change, inciting outrage among liberals who believe that conservatives in control of state government are targeting ideological opponents in academia. Conservatives are cheering the move, seeing it as a corrective to a higher education system they believe has lent its imprimatur to groups that engage in partisan activism. “They’re moving in the right direction, though I don’t think they went far enough,” said Francis X. De Luca, president of the Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank based in Raleigh. “A lot of these centers were started up with a specific advocacy role in mind, as opposed to an educational role.” But critics say the moves by a panel whose members were appointed by a Republican-dominated Legislature reflect the rightward tilt of state government. “It’s clearly not about cost-saving; it’s about political philosophy and the right-wing takeover of North Carolina state government,” said Chris Fitzsimon, director of NC Policy Watch, a liberal group. “And this is one of the biggest remaining pieces that they’re trying to exert their control over.” The impassioned response is the latest manifestation of a deep ideological rift in North Carolina that was exacerbated by the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of both houses of the Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. They soon enacted an ambitious conservative agenda in what had been one of the South’s more moderate states. The fate of the 17-campus public university system was bound to be affected: While many here take pride in its carefully cultivated rise to the top tier of American public education, conservatives have long groused about some campuses, particularly the flagship school at Chapel Hill, as out-of-touch havens of liberalism. Since the recession began, the state government has also subjected the system to budget cuts leading to the loss of hundreds of positions. Twenty-nine of the 32 university board members were appointed by the Legislature after the Republicans’ 2010 gains. Last year, lawmakers instructed the board to consider redirecting some of the funding that goes to the system’s 240 centers and institutes, which focus on topics ranging from child development to African studies. [Academia] [Republicans] [Inequality]
• Reports suggest some Western countries want rapprochement with Syria
  February 19, 2015 15:18 Diplomats from some EU capitals have reportedly told Reuters the time is ripe for restoring diplomatic relations with Syria, where President Bashar Assad remains in power four years after the start of a brutal civil war. Although London and Paris are reportedly opposed to shifting their stance on Syria, adhering to the US line that Assad “must go,” diplomats from a growing number of European Union countries support a move toward the renewal of relations, Reuters reported. The countries that appear to be leaning towards a rapprochement with Damascus include Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Romania and Spain. The Czech Republic, which did not withdraw its ambassador, is in favor of the initiative. Norway and Switzerland, which are not members of the EU, are also on board. But even in those EU countries that are officially opposed to renewed relations, there is talk that the Syrian crisis could have been handled better. One senior French diplomat admitted that closing the embassy was a mistake, the news agency said. The gradual change in attitude toward Syria has increased since the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) made territorial gains in Syria and Iraq, prompting US-led aerial attacks on IS positions in the country – despite harsh criticism from Damascus, which accused Washington of violating its territorial integrity. [Syria] [Alliance] [Friction]
• he Logic of the Imperial Security State
  by Luciana Bohne What to think of a policy that bombs countries and leaves them to their fate? Most observers of US foreign policy since 2001 regard this policy as a failure. They look upon the ruins of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and see no victory parade, no reconstruction, no stable government, no democracy, and no human rights. These are observers whose mindset is stuck in models of the past. They may have in mind WW II, a declared war, battles, victory, negotiations, treaties, and reconstruction. Say, Europe and the Marshall Plan or Japan. They may be thinking of a world order ruled by international law, Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, and of America as safeguarding this order. Consequently the disorder that the United States is sowing across the planet makes no sense. The politicos on the Potomac must be crazy—is the conclusion. No such thing. They may be megalomaniacs, but they have a plan for precisely disorder, no less a plan than to subdue the world to its economic will militarily [Imperialism]
• Islamic State: bring on the drones
  Paul Rogers 19 February 2015 The challenge of jihadism in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere is reinforcing the United States's embrace of "remote control" warfare. In late January 2015 there was a determined effort by the Barack Obama administration to present a picture of effective progress against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Thousands of fighters had been killed, much of the middle-ranking paramilitary leadership removed, and the entire progress of the movement across northern Iraq blunted. The United States secretary of state John Kerry was at the forefront of the rhetorical campaign, which for a short time it seemed to have an effect. More recent developments have cast the situation in a rather different light. Among the most significant was testimony from Vincent Stewart, incoming director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, to the congressional armed-services committee. Only a couple of days after Kerry's up-beat interviews, Stewart predicted that Islamic State would “continue entrenching itself and consolidating gains in Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria, while fighting also for territory outside those areas.” [ISIS] [UAV]
• Setting the Stage for Another Proxy War in Yemen
  by Michael Horton On 26 September 1962, four tanks rumbled through a moonless night and surrounded Imam Badr’s palace in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a. Hearing the tanks Badr and his father-in-law descended from the highest room of the palace moments before it was shelled. The coup that would plunge north Yemen into almost eight years of bloody civil war was underway. Imam Badr ordered his remaining guards to bring him Bren guns. Then Badr and his father-in-law stepped out onto a balcony and opened fire on the mutinous soldiers that surrounded the palace while gasoline soaked sandbags were ignited and hurled onto the tanks below. The soldiers momentarily fled and Badr lived on to fight from northwest Yemen’s rugged mountains until his eventual exile in the UK in 1970. Imam Badr’s exile marked the end of the Zaidi Imamate that had ruled parts of Yemen for a thousand years. The leader of the coup was the chief of Badr’s corps of bodyguards, Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal who was supported by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Within months, several thousand Egyptian soldiers were on the ground in north Yemen to support Sallal’s republicans in their fight against Badr’s royalists. The royalists were bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and covertly supported at various times by Jordan, Israel, Iran, France, and the UK, all of whom had a strategic interest in weakening Nasser and the Egyptian Army. Nasser would eventually commit more than fifty-thousand soldiers supported by MiGs and heavy weaponry to Yemen. Despite the number of soldiers, extensive air-support, and even the Egyptians’ use of chemical weapons, the war in Yemen became what Nasser would later describe as, ‘my Vietnam.’
• Wiretaps reveal Turkey's attacks on Syrian regime positions
  Media reports based on eyewitness and opposition sources saying that Turkey has become a party to the civil war in Syria have found their way into court proceedings. During the trial of the Islamic State (IS) militants who attacked Turkish security forces at Nigde last year, court files revealed that Turkey, beyond supplying opposition forces with weapons and ammunition, had also given artillery support to the opposition groups that captured Kassab. The prosecutor obtained striking admissions by tapping the defendants’ phones. According to documents obtained by Ahmet Sik of Cumhuriyet, the wiretapping transcripts reveal that the opposition forces at Kassab inform people in Turkey of the coordinates of Syrian army positions around Kassab, and then Turkey shells those locations. Court documents reveal that last year, when the Syrian opposition captured the Armenian town of Kassab, the Turkish army shelled the Syrian army. Author Fehim Tastekin Posted February 18, 2015 Translator Timur Göksel On March 21, armed Syrian opposition groups entered Turkey from five different crossings and re-entered Syria at the Yayladag border crossing and captured Kassab. In addition to armed Turkmen groups, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic Front’s most prominent group Ahrar al-Sham, IS-affiliated Shukur el-Izz, Sham el Islam (established by former Guantanamo prisoner Moroccan Ibrahim Binshekrun) and Ansar al-Islam, which has links both to al-Qaeda and IS, took part in the operation to capture Kassab. As clashes continued around Kassab on March 23, a Syrian warplane was shot down by a missile fired from Turkey for violating Turkish airspace. In June 2014, when President Bashar al-Assad’s army recaptured Kassab, including the high ground known as Feature 45, the Turkish army fired on the Syrian side. The Turkish government and military persistently said all firing on Syria after the changed rules of engagement following the shooting down of the Turkish jet were in retaliation for border violations on the Turkish side. The Turkish Foreign Ministry rejected the accusation, saying, “All claims that Turkey has been supporting the opposition forces by allowing them to use Turkish territory or in any other way are totally baseless.” Wiretaps tell another story The information collected from the Nigde assailants’ tapped phones contradicted official statements. [Turkey] [Outsourcing]
• Obama’s “Fake War” against the Islamic State (ISIS). The Islamic State is Protected by the US and its Allies
  By Prof Michel Chossudovsky Global Research, February 19, 2015 Since August 2014, the US Air Force with the support of a coalition of 19 countries has relentlessly waged an intensified air campaign against Syria and Iraq allegedly targeting the Islamic State brigades. According to Defense News, over 16,000 airstrikes were carried out from August 2014 to mid January 2015. Sixty percent of the air strikes were conducted by the US Air Force using advanced jet fighter and bombing capabilities (Aaron Mehta, “A-10 Performing 11 Percent of Anti-ISIS Sorties”. Defense News, January 19, 2015.) The airstrikes have been casually described by the media as part of a “soft” counter-terrorism operation, rather than an act of all out war directed against Syria and Iraq. Aerial view of jet aircraft, carrying cylindrical fuel tanks and ordnance, overflying desert This large scale air campaign which has resulted in countless civilian casualties has been routinely misreported by the mainstream media. According to Max Boot, senior fellow in national security at the Council on Foreign Relations. ”Obama’s strategy in Syria and Iraq is not working… [ because] the U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS has been remarkably restrained”. (Newsweek, February 17, 2015, emphasis added). Americans are led to believe that the Islamic State constitutes a formidable force confronting the US military and threatening Western Civilization. [ISIS] [US global strategy]
• Venezuela vs. a “Common Enemy”
  by John Pilger and Michael Albert Albert: Why would the U.S. want venezuela’s government overthrown? Pilger: There are straightforward principles and dynamics at work here. Washington wants to get rid of the Venezuelan government because it is independent of US designs for the region and because Venezuela has the greatest proven oil reserves in the world and uses its oil revenue to improve the quality of ordinary lives. Venezuela remains a source of inspiration for social reform in a continent ravaged by an historically rapacious US. An Oxfam report once famously described the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua as ‘the threat of a good example’. That has been true in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez won his first election. The ‘threat’ of Venezuela is greater, of course, because it is not tiny and weak; it is rich and influential and regarded as such by China. The remarkable change in fortunes for millions of people in Latin America is at the heart of US hostility. The US has been the undeclared enemy of social progress in Latin America for two centuries. It doesn’t matter who has been in the White House: Barack Obama or Teddy Roosevelt; the US will not tolerate countries with governments and cultures that put the needs of their own people first and refuse to promote or succumb to US demands and pressures. A reformist social democracy with a capitalist base – such as Venezuela – is not excused by the rulers of the world. What is inexcusable is Venezuela’s political independence; only complete deference is acceptable. [Venezuela] [Imperialism]
• Peter Oborne resigns, saying Telegraph's HSBC coverage a 'fraud on readers'
  John Plunkett and Ben Quinn Tuesday 17 February 2015 23.00 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 18 February 2015 00.19 GMT The Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator has resigned and launched a blistering attack on the paper’s management and owners over its lack of coverage of the HSBC tax story, which he described as a “fraud on its readers”. Peter Oborne, associate editor of the Spectator and a familiar face on Channel 4 Dispatches documentaries, claimed the paper deliberately suppressed stories about the banking giant, including last week’s revelations that its Swiss subsidiary helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars in assets, in order to keep its valuable advertising account. He said it was a “most sinister development” at the broadsheet title, which he described as “the most important conservative-leaning newspaper in Britain”, but where he alleged the traditional distinction between the advertising and editorial departments had collapsed.
• Iraq’s pro-Iranian Shiite militias lead the war against the Islamic State
  Volunteers with Iraq’s Badr Organization patrol in Tikrit, Iraq, on Feb. 7. Badr and other Iran-backed Shiite militias are playing a more important role in the fight against the Islamic State. (Ali Mohammed/European Pressphoto Agency) By Liz Sly February 15 at 5:11 PM ? MANSOURIYA, Iraq — Shiite militias backed by Iran are increasingly taking the lead in Iraq’s fight against the Islamic State, threatening to undermine U.S. strategies intended to bolster the central government, rebuild the Iraqi army and promote reconciliation with the country’s embittered Sunni minority. With an estimated 100,000 to 120,000 armed men, the militias are rapidly eclipsing the depleted and demoralized Iraqi army, whose fighting strength has dwindled to about 48,000 troops since the government forces were routed in the northern city of Mosul last summer, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. [ISIS] [Iraq] [Iran]
• Singapore: A Mutiny Like No Other
  The Singapore Mutiny of 1915 would have profound consequences for the future of Asia. By Joseph Hammond February 10, 2015 When Ismail Khan began shooting at a British Army lorry on a humid afternoon of February 15, 1915, few realized one of the most consequential events of World War I in Asia had just begun. This act signaled the start of a mutiny in which 850 soldiers of the 5th Light Infantry of the Indian Army rose up against their officers. Though the actual fighting was brief, the Singapore Mutiny was another nail in the coffin of the British Empire. The mutiny would also have important consequences for the nationalist history of India, the role of Japan in Southeast Asian politics, and Singapore’s security that resonate to this day. [Imperialism] [Singapore] [Prisoners]
• US-Saudi mark 70 years of rocky alliance
  Feb. 14 marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the US alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 14, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with King Abdul-Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud in Egypt and the two forged a partnership that has endured despite occasional severe strains for the last 70 years. It faces a rocky future ahead. Seventy years ago, FDR and Ibn Saud met on a cruiser to initiate an alliance that has persisted ever since. Author Bruce Riedel Posted February 13, 2015 The meeting was a closely held secret for security reasons. Only a handful on each side knew it was coming. FDR and Ibn Saud met on the USS Quincy, a cruiser, in the Great Bitter Lake along the Suez Canal, as World War II was coming to an end. FDR arrived from the Yalta summit with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt’s health was very poor; he had only weeks to live. Ibn Saud had come from Jeddah on an American destroyer, the USS Murphy, with an entourage of bodyguards, cooks, slaves, an astrologer, a fortune-teller and other retainers and some sheep. The king only reluctantly agreed to leave his wives behind in Jeddah. It was his first trip outside the Arabian Peninsula aside from a brief visit to Basra in Iraq. The two agreed to work together to ensure stability in the post-war Middle East. The United States would ensure security for the kingdom, and the Saudis would ensure access to their oil fields. The United States acquired use of Dhahran air base for operations in the Middle East. US oil companies were already operating in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia declared war on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan two weeks later, securing a seat in the United Nations. [Saudi Arabia] [US global strategy]
• Assad’s Weak Hand
  by Patrick Cockburn President Bashar al-Assad has given four interviews to the foreign media in recent weeks after a year of silence, the latest being to the BBC. The aim is obvious enough: he believes that the moment may have come when the US will be willing to more or less openly accept him as the ruler of the whole of Syria. This is a logical step for Washington to take if it gives total priority to defeating Isis since the Syrian government and army are the main opponent of Isis on the ground in Syria. The “moderate” Syrian rebels are a feeble and declining force and do not have the strength to combat the jihadis of Isis or Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate. Mr Assad confirmed in his latest interview that there is tactical coordination between Syria and the US over US air strikes against Isis in Syria with Iraq being the interlocutor. There is nothing surprising in this since it has been evident ever since US air strikes against Isis began on 23 September that they would not be taking place unless it was known that the Syrian government’s air defence system would not be directed against them. Mr Assad denies there is any direct cooperation with the US and says that several third parties are involved. Syrian government self-confidence is based on a simple calculation that the most powerful leader of the armed opposition in Syria these days is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared Caliph of Isis. Those rebels who do not follow his black banner mostly follow that of Jabhat al-Nusra, which was created by Mr al-Baghdadi and then split from him. This is politically good news for Mr Assad, but militarily dangerous because it means fragmented opposition groups – 1,200 in number according to the US – are uniting against him under patrickisisexperienced commanders. Mr Assad may be exaggerating the extent to which the tide has turned in his favour. It is by no means clear that the US is going to abandon publicly its previous policy of ousting him. The political base of the regime looks too small to hope to recapture the whole of the country even if the Americans were prepared to go along with this. The US would also have to persuade Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE, who fostered the jihadi movement in Syria, to cut their losses and admit that Mr Assad has emerged victorious from the four-year war.
• Israel’s Obsession for Monopoly on Middle East Nuclear Power
  By Thalif Deen UNITED NATIONS, Feb 13 2015 (IPS) - As the Iranian nuclear talks hurtle towards a Mar. 24 deadline, there is renewed debate among activists about the blatant Western double standards underlying the politically-heated issue, and more importantly, the resurrection of a longstanding proposal for a Middle East free from weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Asked about the Israeli obsession to prevent neighbours – first and foremost Iran, but also Saudi Arabia and Egypt – from going nuclear, Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Jerusalem-based Palestine-Israel Journal, told IPS, “This is primarily the work of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has built his political career on fanning the flames of fear, and saying that Israel has to stand pat, with a strong leader [him] to withstand the challenges.” "If Israel lost its regional monopoly on nuclear weapons, it would be vulnerable. So the U.S. goes all out to block nuclear weapons - except for Israel." -- Bob Rigg And this is the primary motivation for his upcoming and very controversial partisan speech before the U.S. Congress on the eve of the Israeli elections, which has aroused a tremendous amount of opposition in Israel, in the American Jewish community and in the U.S. in general, he pointed out. [Israel] [Nuclear weapons]
• There is no such thing as a moderate Syrian opposition
  Kamal Alam 13 February 2015 The Syrian Arab Army has multiple charities that go house to house looking after its men in uniform. David Cameron has recently announced that British military trainers will soon begin assisting the Syrian rebels. This could be a colossal mistake given a now four-year failure to vet the so called moderate Syrian opposition. It seems that Cameron has not learnt from the experiences of Libya, Iraq & Yemen. However the most costly blunder that the west has made is the complete misunderstanding of the Syrian state and the will of its military to fight on. Despite the brutal ravages of this war, it is only the Syrian Arab Republic that is providing not just salaries to over 100,000 soldiers but also looking after its injured troops, their families and giving the semblance of normality to the areas it controls. The Syrian Arab Army has multiple charities that go house to house looking after its men in uniform. Whilst the ‘moderate rebels’ beg the west for military intervention their leaders spend time in luxury hotels in Turkey, Qatar and western capitals. Leaders of men are most needed on the ground, yet the Syrian moderate opposition is nowhere to be seen. They have successfully to their credit at least convinced the corridors of power in Washington DC and London to support them with weapons. But so had Ahmad Chalabi of Iraq, and look where that got Iraq. [Syria] [Outsourcing]
• Syria conflict: BBC exclusive interview with President Bashar al-Assad
  10 February 2015 Last updated at 05:59 GMT Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has defended his government's actions in the region since the uprising against his rule, which erupted in 2011. In an exclusive interview with the BBC's Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen, Mr Assad denied that his forces had dropped barrel bombs indiscriminately on rebel-held areas, killing thousands of civilians, and dismissed as propaganda a statement by the UN that his government often blocks access to besieged areas for relief organisations. The Syrian leader also denied that there was a direct dialogue with the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State but confirmed that "general messages" were sometimes passed via third parties. [Syria] [Bashar Assad] [Media] [Video]
• The Guardian view on Bashar al-Assad’s BBC interview: the lies of a tyrant
  Editorial The Syrian dictator is profiting from the west’s lack of strategy, while the bloodshed he unleashes leads a country to ruin A handout picture dated February 8, 2015 Syrian president Bashar al-Assad (R) gives an interview to the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen in Damascus. 'Watching Mr Assad smugly commenting in an almost casual way about this ongoing calamity sounded like an exercise in denial.' Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Tuesday 10 February 2015 19.55 GMT Bashar al-Assad’s BBC interview may not have broken any new ground regarding what the Syrian leader thinks about the tragic situation in his country or in the wider region. But it did portray a man of utter cynicism and terrifying self-confidence. The crisis in Syria is approaching its fourth anniversary. It started in March 2011 with a popular peaceful uprising against Mr Assad, which six months later morphed into a civil war after the regime began using snipers, machine guns and tanks against the crowds. The death toll now stands at over 210,000. There are around 3 million refugees in neighbouring states and a third of the 22-million-strong Syrian population, trying to flee the fighting, is internally displaced. [Syria] [Bashar Assad] [Media]
• The Warmongering Record of Hillary Clinton
  by Gary Leupp If reason and justice prevailed in this country, you’d think that the recent series of articles in the Washington Times concerning the U.S.-NATO attack on Libya in 2011 would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects. Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State at that time knew that Libya was no threat to the U.S. She knew that Muammar Gadhafi had been closely cooperating with the U.S. in combating Islamist extremism. She probably realized that Gadhafi had a certain social base due in part to what by Middle Eastern standards was the relatively equitable distribution of oil income in Libya. But she wanted to topple Gadhafi. Over the objections of Secretary of “Defense” Robert Gates but responding to the urgings of British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, she advocated war. Why? Not for the reason advertised at the time. (Does this sound familiar?) Not because Gadhafy was preparing a massacre of the innocents in Benghazi, as had occurred in Rwanda in 1994. (That episode, and the charge that the “international community” had failed to intervene, was repeatedly referenced by Clinton and other top officials, as a shameful precedent that must not be repeated. It had also been deployed by Bill Clinton in 1999, when he waged war on Serbia, grossly exaggerating the extent of carnage in Kosovo and positing the immanent prospect of “genocide” to whip up public support. Such uses of the Rwandan case reflect gross cynicism.) No, genocide was not the issue, in Libya any more than in Kosovo. According to the Washington Times, high-ranking U.S. officials indeed questioned whether there was evidence for such a scenario in Libya. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that a mere 2,000 Libyan troops armed with 12 tanks were heading to Benghazi, and had killed about 400 rebels by the time the U.S. and NATO attacked. It found evidence for troops firing on unarmed protestors but no evidence of mass killing. It did not have a good estimate on the number of civilians in Benghazi but had strong evidence that most had fled. It had intelligence that Gadhafy had ordered that troops not fire on civilians but only on armed rebels. [Libya] [Hillary Clinton] [Disinformation] [Outsourcing] [Humanitarian intervention]
  • House Benghazi committee to review secret Hillary tapes on Libya
    The chairman of a special House committee created to investigate the 2012 Benghazi tragedy on Monday instructed his staff to review secretly recorded tapes and intelligence reports that detail Hillary Clinton's role in advocating and executing the war in Libya, opening the door for a possible expansion of his probe. (Associated Press) The chairman of a special House committee created to investigate the 2012 Benghazi tragedy on Monday instructed his staff to review secretly recorded tapes and intelligence reports that detail Hillary Clinton’s role in advocating and executing the war in Libya, ... more > By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro and Kelly Riddell - The Washington Times - Monday, February 2, 2015 The chairman of a special House committee created to investigate the 2012 Benghazi tragedy on Monday instructed his staff to review secretly recorded tapes and intelligence reports that detail Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in advocating and executing the war in Libya, opening the door for a possible expansion of his probe. Rep. Trey Gowdy’s decision to seek a review of the materials, first highlighted in a series of Washington Times stories last week, carries consequences for the 2016 election in which Mrs. Clinton is expected to seek the presidency. It could also move the committee to examine the strained relationship between the State Department and Pentagon, which sharply disagreed over the 2011 war in Libya and the response to the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi a year later. The Times reported last week that U.S. intelligence did not support Mrs. Clinton’s story of an impending genocide in Libya that she used to sell the war against Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. The newspaper also unveiled secretly recorded tapes from Libya that showed that the Pentagon and Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich so distrusted her stewardship of the war that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime. [Libya] [Outsourcing] [Hillary Clinton] [Disinformation]
  • Secret Benghazi report reveals Hillary’s Libya war push armed al Qaeda-tied terrorists
    Hillary Rodham Clinton is likely to face questions over whether she had an adequate plan for Libya in 2011 and whether her efforts led to the Benghazi tragedy a year later. (Associated Press) By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro - The Washington Times - Sunday, February 1, 2015 Last of three parts Libyan officials were deeply concerned in 2011, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was trying to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power, that weapons were being funneled to NATO-backed rebels with ties to al Qaeda, fearing that well-armed insurgents could create a safe haven for terrorists, according to secret intelligence reports obtained by The Washington Times. The reports included a 16-page list of weapons that Libyans supposedly tracked to the rebels from Western sources or their allies in the region. The memos were corroborated by a U.S. intelligence asset familiar with the documents as well as former top Gadhafi regime official Mohammed Ismael. [Libya] [Outsourcing] [Hillary Clinton] [Disinformation]
  • Listen to the tapes: Intel undercuts Hillary Clinton’s primary argument for Libya military action
    The intelligence community gathered no specific evidence of an impending genocide in Libya in spring 2011, undercutting then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s primary argument for using the U.S. military to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power, which cast his country into chaos. Listen to the tapes: (click on the links below) Pentagon's plans for Saif Gadhafi Pentagon source describing to Gadhafi regime Pentagon's plans to perhaps get Saif Gadhafi to lead country after his father steps down. Pentagon Source Pentagon source telling Gadhafi regime about mistrust of information coming from State Department. [Libya] [Outsourcing] [Hillary Clinton] [Disinformation]
  • Exclusive: Secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan war
    Joint Chiefs, key lawmaker held own talks with Moammar Gadhafi regime By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro and Kelly Riddell - The Washington Times - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 First of three parts Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli. The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns. [Libya] [Outsourcing] [Hillary Clinton] [Disinformation]
  • Hillary Clinton’s ‘WMD’ moment: U.S. intelligence saw false narrative in Libya
    The gap between Hillary Rodham Clinton's rhetoric warning of a Rwanda-like slaughter of civilians in Libya and the facts gathered by career intelligence staff is taking on significance as the former secretary of state prepares another bid for the White House and her national security credentials are re-examined. (Associated Press) The gap between Hillary Rodham Clinton’s rhetoric warning of a Rwanda-like slaughter of civilians in Libya and the facts gathered by career intelligence staff is taking on significance as the former secretary of state prepares another bid for the White ... more > By Kelly Riddell and Jeffrey Scott Shapiro - The Washington Times - Thursday, January 29, 2015 Second of three parts The intelligence community gathered no specific evidence of an impending genocide in Libya in spring 2011, undercutting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary argument for using the U.S. military to remove Col. Moammar Gadhafi from power, an event that has left his country in chaos, according to officials with direct knowledge of the dispute. Defense officials, speaking in detail for the first time about their assessments of the Libyan civil war four years ago, told The Washington Times that Mrs. Clinton’s strong advocacy for intervention against the Libyan regime rested more on speculative arguments of what might happen to civilians than on facts reported from the ground. [Libya] [Outsourcing] [Hillary Clinton] [Disinformation]
• 5 Reasons Congress Should Reject Obama’s ISIS War
  The Obama administration wants a rubber stamp on its unwise, unlimited, and unauthorized new war in the Middle East. It shouldn't get it. By Peter Certo, February 11, 2015. At long last, the Obama administration has submitted a draft resolution to Congress that would authorize the ongoing U.S.-led military intervention against the Islamic State, or ISIS. The effort comes more than six months after the U.S. began bombing targets in Iraq and Syria. Since then, some 3,000 U.S. troops have been ordered to Iraq, and coalition air forces have carried out over 2,000 bombing runs on both sides of the border. Better late than never? Maybe not. The language proposed by the White House would authorize the president to deploy the U.S. military against the Islamic State and “associated persons or forces” for a period of three years, at which point the authorization would have to be renewed. In an attempt to reassure members of Congress wary of signing off on another full-scale war in the Middle East, the authorization would supposedly prohibit the use of American soldiers in “enduring offensive ground combat operations.” It would also repeal the authorization that President George W. Bush used to invade Iraq back in 2002. The New York Times describes the draft authorization as “a compromise to ease concerns of members in both noninterventionist and interventionist camps: those who believe the use of ground forces should be explicitly forbidden, and those who do not want to hamstring the commander in chief.” [ISIS]
• Argentina’s Tangled Web
  The death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was certainly suspicious. But that doesn't prove a thing about his charges against Iran. By Gareth Porter, February 10, 2015. Originally published in Middle East Eye. The evidence already available about Argentine Prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s death from a gunshot to the head creates a strong presumption that he was murdered. He was about to present publicly his accusation that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman conspired to absolve Iran of the 1994 AMIA bombing and lift the Interpol red notices on the accused Iranians. And it was Nisman’s 2006 request for the arrest of six former senior Iranian officials for the bombing that prompted his push for those red notices. In the context of Argentine political culture, with its long experience of impunity for crimes committed by the powerful, the circumstances of his death have led to a general conviction that the government must have been behind his murder. But there is good reason to be cautious about that assumption. Nisman’s case against Kirchner was problematic. The central accusation in his affidavit, made 96 times, according to press accounts, was that Kirchner and Timerman had sought to revoke the Interpol arrest warrants against the former Iranian officials. But Ronald K. Noble, the secretary general of Interpol for 15 years until last November, denied Nisman’s accusation. Noble declared, “I can say with 100 percent certainty, not a scintilla of doubt, that Foreign Minister Timerman and the Argentine government have been steadfast, persistent and unwavering that the Interpol’s red notices be issued, remain in effect, and not be suspend or removed.” Noble’s denial raises an obvious question: Why would the Kirchner government, knowing that Nisman’s main claim could be easily refuted, have any reason to kill him on the eve of the presentation of his case? Why give those seeking to discredit the government’s policy on the AMIA bombing the opportunity to shift the issue from the facts of the case to the presumption of officially sponsored assassination?
• Will the Real ‘Low-Life Scum’ Please Stand Up?
  I called Henry Kissinger a war criminal to his face. Here's why. By Medea Benjamin, February 5, 2015. As you may have heard, security guards recently tossed me and my fellow activists out of a Senate hearing where former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was about to testify. It became a hot story when Senator John McCain denounced us as “low-life scum.” Why was McCain so mad? Probably because we were holding signs that said “Arrest Kissinger for War Crimes” while dangling handcuffs. For this, the Arizona Republican called us “disgraceful, outrageous, and despicable.” He even accused us of “physically intimidating” the 91-year-old Kissinger. [Kissinger] [War crimes] [Democracy]
• “Frankly, I don’t think we know who we killed”
  Jack Serle 10 February 2015 A drone strike in Somalia highlights how the US is increasingly pursuing a strategy of remote-control warfare. A US drone strike which killed a senior al-Shabaab leader in Somalia a week ago appears to have been part of a change of tactics by the Americans since they started targeting the militant group in 2007. It was the fifth consecutive such strike against al-Shabaab’s leadership, with drones now appearing to have superseded other, manned aircraft and cruise missiles in the seven years since attacks began in Somalia. Such unmanned systems are now widely seen as the US weapon of choice in its ‘war on terror’, as they can “strike their targets with astonishing precision”, according to John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But despite their vaunted precision, there are reports the latest strike in Somalia, on 31 January, killed or injured civilians. Senior figure The attack killed at least five people, all reportedly members of al-Shabaab and one identified as Yusef Dheeq, a senior figure. It reportedly hit an al-Shabaab convoy at about 9am local time. [UAV] [Casualties] [Civilians] [Intelligence] [Assassination]
• Iran and a Comprehensive Settlement
  Thomas Pickering, Career Ambassador
  NAPSNet Policy Forum, February 10, 2015 Nautilus-CIIS Workshop on Comprehensive Security Settlement and DPRK Nuclear Issue, Beijing, January 23, 2014 I. Introduction Pickering explains the mistrust between the negotiating parties working towards a lasting Iran deal. He then illustrates the progress made to date and articulates future steps. “The depth of misunderstanding is significant enough that reassurances given, even at the highest levels, will not be sufficient to overcome differences. It will only be through: (1) clear intent by the parties, and particularly Iran and the United States, to address the full range of areas of difference; (2) agreements on how to move forward on these questions over time; and (3) faithful, full and complete implementation of commitments made by each side in the course of such negotiations under appropriate, full measures of international inspection, monitoring and control, that the issues can be fully resolved and a new course of action bringing about full mutual respect for sovereignty, independence and the territorial integrity of all parties can be achieved.” Despite differences in context, perhaps some lessons can be used in reaching a comprehensive settlement with North Korea. [US Negotiating] [Iran] [False balance]
• Netanyahu’s Congress invitation raises eyebrows among some US generals
  Analysis: Top brass who have questioned Obama’s strategies don't want a foreign leader influencing US decision-making February 2, 2015 5:00AM ET by Mark Perry The uniformed leaders of the U.S. military have had a testy relationship with President Barack Obama since he took office in 2009, with a number of relatively public spats revealing discord over how his administration has approached the use of military force. So it might be assumed that when a foreign politician confronts Obama, portraying his policies on threats overseas as naive, many in the senior uniformed ranks would nod in silent affirmation. But that’s not what has happened since House Speaker John Boehner invited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Obama’s Iran policy in Congress. Instead the speech, planned for next month, has rallied senior military figures behind the president, with some warning that there’s a limit to what U.S. military officers consider acceptable criticism of the commander in chief. Obama and his generals have clashed privately and publicly since 2009 over his plans to draw down troops and exit from Afghanistan, and a number of respected recently retired top commanders told Congress that what they called the administration’s piecemeal strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria is destined to fail. Some have also publicly recorded misgivings about Obama’s Iran strategy. Still, Netanyahu’s planned speech has prompted a number of senior military men to rally around the office of a president whose policies they regularly, if privately, question. [Netanyahu] [Pentagon]
• What does Iran’s choice of UN envoy reveal?
  The appointment of Gholamali Khoshroo as Iran's permanent representative to the United Nations on Jan. 31 was an important development. Washington’s refusal to issue a visa for the previous appointee, Hamid Aboutalebi, for alleged involvement in the 1979 US Embassy hostage crisis, had left the position vacant for more than a year. Summary? Print Iran's appointment of Gholamali Khoshroo as its UN envoy signals a desire for broader engagement with the West. AuthorvMohammad Ali Shabani Posted February 6, 2015 Tehran has an interests section in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, but it is staffed by Iranian permanent residents of the United States, not diplomats. Thus, the Iranian UN Mission in New York functions as the Islamic Republic’s most important diplomatic outpost in North America. The influence of some Iranian diplomats who have served in New York or who have spent time in the United States is such that conservative foes have labeled them “NewYorki-haa” (the “New Yorkers”). What marks these individuals is their shared quest for a more constructive Iranian relationship with the West. Some of these figures include Mohammad Javad Zarif (minister of foreign affairs), Sadegh Kharazi (head of the Reformist Voice of Iranians Party), Majid Takht-Ravanchi (deputy minister of foreign affairs and nuclear negotiator), Hossein Fereydoun (brother of President Hassan Rouhani and special adviser on executive affairs), Amir-Hossein Zamaninia (deputy minister of oil and nuclear negotiator) and Kazem Sajjadpour (head of policy planning at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Khoshroo is also considered a New Yorker, having previously served at the UN Mission. [Iran] [Acceptance] [Illusion]
• Defiance and Charm: A Measured First Week for New Greek Leader
  By Manfred Ertel, Julia Amalia Heyer, Walter Mayr and Juliane von Mittelstaedt AP Syriza's victory in the recent Greek elections set off a wave of concern in Europe. But even as the new prime minister tries to woo other leaders, his left-wing government is already busy getting down to work. Many of its first moves have been the right ones Minister of Administrative Reform Georgios Katrougalos sits cheerfully in his new office and rejoices about his little revolution. He has just announced that soon the first 3,500 public-sector employees can return to work, including the famous cleaning ladies who led the protest against job cuts. With their rubber-glove-clad clenched fists, they embodied a feeling shared by many Greeks -- that they had been mistreated by Europe. Now the cleaning ladies were becoming the symbol of the new beginning. According to the administrative reform minister, these aren't new hires -- they are the reversal of unfair layoffs. "The cleaning ladies were the weakest, and the troika needed numbers." He claims this is primarily a redress for the absurdity of the austerity measures. After they were let go, the financial authority's 595 cleaning ladies -- who had to be fired in September 2013 in order to fulfill the requirements of the savings plan -- continued to receive 75 percent of their earnings. Their work was then done by private cleaning companies -- in the end, the whole thing was more expensive than it had been before. It was these kinds of decisions by the previous government that had made the Greeks furious -- and led them to vote for Syriza. [Crisis] [Austerity] [Greece]
• Iraq’s Children: Ever Expendable – From Madeleine Albright to Tony Blair and “Save the Children.”
  By Felicity Arbuthnot Global Research, February 08, 2015 “It’s a hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it. “ (Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN, on the “embargo related” deaths of half a million Iraqi children, 12thMay 1996.) “The most traumatized child population on earth.” (Professor Magne Raundalen, Centre for Crisis Studies, Bergen, Norway, February 1992.) Tony Blair was, mind-stretchingly, presented with Save the Children’s Global Legacy Award, on 19th November 2014. His acceptance speech included that his: “… sense is that amidst all the challenges, and all the misery and deprivation that we seek to conquer and vanquish, there is something hopeful … something to be thankful for.” Ironically, just two months earlier (15th August 2014) Save the Children released a Report (1) on the on the trauma amongst Iraq’s children in Northern Iraq alone, after eleven years of a Bush-Blair driven illegal invasion and ongoing resultant conflict. Iraq’s children, it was clear, had no hope and nothing “to be thankful for.” Yet Blair was lauded by an organization that claims: “We envision a future in which no child will die from preventable causes and where every child has nutritious food and clean water.” [Blair] [Iraq]
• RIC Wades into Asia-Pacific Waters
  Melkulangara Bhadrakumar | 05.02.2015 | 09:50 The meeting of the Russia-India-China [RIC] forum at the level of foreign ministers, which was held in Beijing on February 2, had an extraordinary setting. For sure, the power dynamic within the RIC is dramatically transforming what with the notable improvement in the climate of India-China relations in the past six-month period and with a big upswing in the Sino-Russian partnership, which in turn lends the forum much gravitas. The relevance of the forum in regional and world politics has shot up like at no time before since the foreign ministers of the ‘trilateral’ held a modest meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2002. This also coincides with a formative period in the reshaping of the international system and in global governance in a polycentric world order. The joint communiqué adopted at the meet in Beijing this week testifies to the convergence in the perspectives that the three countries share apropos of the international situation, especially over the conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria. Prima facie, it may seem the RIC has not said anything startlingly new by advocating the establishment of a stable, secure and fair system of international relations riveted on the central coordinating role of the United Nations «at the very center of global governance and multilateralism». But, in reality several recent developments in world politics give piquancy to the RIC stance – such as the ‘regime change’ agenda that was pushed by the United States and its allies in Syria or the coup in Ukraine last year (which the US president Barack Obama tacitly acknowledged for the first time in an interview with the CNN last weekend). [Realignment] [Russia China India]
• Who’s Your Daddy, ISIS?
  Submitted by Glen Ford on Wed, 09/17/2014 - 11:09 oil and resource wars by BAR executive editor Glen Ford “ISIS has many, many fathers, all of whom now deny patrimony.” Let us be clear, if that is possible, about President Obama’s plan to deal with ISIS, the boogeyman of America’s own making. The president last week swore that he would “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State, after having spent three years providing weapons and money to jihadists fighters, including ISIS, in hopes that they would “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Syrian state of president Bashar Assad. So, the Americans set out to destroy one state, in Syria, whose government had never presented any danger to the U.S., and wind up creating another state, a caliphate astride the borders of Syria and Iraq, that openly declares its intention to do battle with the U.S. Obama assures us that he is assembling a new coalition of the willing to join him in smashing ISIS. It turns out that every prospective member of the coalition was a co-conspirator with the United States in giving birth to ISIS – Britain and France and other Europeans, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates...ISIS has many, many fathers, all of whom now deny patrimony. [ISIS] [Outsourcing] [Blowback] [US global strategy]
• The Destruction of Syria’s Cultural Heritage
  by Eva Bartlett Much has been written about the destruction and looting of Syria’s heritage sites. Syria’s Directorate-General of Antiquities & Museums (DGAM), as well as UNESCO have documented the vast damage and looting as extensively as possible in this time of proxy-war-manufactured crisis. In July 2014, the DGAM issued a statement and plea regarding the critical situation of Syria’s heritage under attack. “A year has passed since we last sent an international call out to all those concerned with defending Syria’s heritage. At the time, we warned against a possible cultural disaster that might be inflicted on an invaluable part of the human heritage existing in Syria,” the DGAM statement read. It noted, “Much of what we had feared happened… vast regions extending along the geography of Syria are now classified as ‘distressed cultural areas’ due to the exacerbation of the clandestine excavation crimes and deliberate damage to our historic monuments and cultural landmarks in those regions…” As for UNESCO, it noted, “Syria’s exceptional archaeological, urban and architectural heritage has been considerably damaged during the conflict, and has affected all six World Heritage Sites in Syria and eleven sites inscribed on UNESCO’s Tentative List.” The six UNESCO-recognized sites are: The Ancient City of Damascus; Palmyra; The Ancient City of Aleppo; Crac des Chevaliers and Qal‘at Salah al-Din; and The Ancient villages of Northern Syria, many of which have suffered intense digging and looting, as well as various acts of intentional destruction. Yet, in spite of DGAM warnings and UNESCO confirmations, as we near the start of year five of the war on sovereign Syria, the Axis-of-Interventionalists continue to arm terrorists within Syria, and train and funnel still more terrorists into Syria — terrorists who are not only murdering Syrians and Palestinians, but destroying Syria’s heritage, as they have been doing since the beginning.
• Former members of France’s military have joined Islamic State
  By Mitchell Prothero McClatchy Foreign Staff February 4, 2015 IRBIL, Iraq — At least 12 former members of the French military are among the estimated 1,000 French citizens who’ve joined the Islamic State, including one highly trained special forces commando who was radicalized while working as a security contractor in the Persian Gulf, according to French officials and analysts as well as Arab security services. One French intelligence official said the number is a reflection of France’s changing demographics, even though mandatory military service ended in France in 2001. “I don’t have any hard numbers on this because France is a secular society where religious affiliation isn’t supposed to be tracked formally, but the general sense is that the French military has evolved into a heavily – and often devout – Roman Catholic officer corps leading a primarily and somewhat devout Muslim enlisted formation,” said the official, who spoke under the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/02/04/255514/former-members-of-frances-military.html#storylink=cpy [Jihadist] [Outsourcing] [Blowback]
• Files show FBI closing in on al Qaida blogger Samir Khan before he slipped away
  By Franco Ordoñez McClatchy Washington Bureau February 4, 2015 Updated 7 hours ago This 2008 image taken from Fox News video shows Samir Khan in Charlotte, N.C. U.S-born Samir Khan, who edited the slick Jihadi Internet magazine, and cleric Anwar al-Awlaki were killed Friday, Sept. 30, 2011 in an air strike on their convoy in Yemen by a joint CIA-U.S. military operation, according to counterterrorism officials. FOX NEWS — AP Photo WASHINGTON — FBI agents in Charlotte, N.C., had been actively engaged in gathering evidence for terrorism charges against al Qaida propagandist Samir Khan just months before the slipped out of the country, newly released files show. The nearly 300 pages of heavily redacted FBI records, acquired by McClatchy through the Freedom of Information Act, shows that the FBI, in coordination with federal prosecutors, had grown so concerned with Khan’s activities that agents reached out to one of the nation’s most elite special forces units to help out in preparation of a likely arrest. Federal agents had indeed recognized Khan as a serious threat, the documents show, with legitimate ties to terrorist leaders while he was still in the United States. The files show that agents were building a case and had taken steps to stop him. But possibly not soon enough. “Khan is becoming more radical and although working this case simply to gain intelligence on Khan’s contacts is certainly an option, it is the investigative team’s view that all work done in this case should be focused towards finding a resolution, i.e. a disruption via an arrest/prosecution,” FBI agents wrote in a Dec. 4, 2008, report. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/02/04/255551/files-show-fbi-closing-in-on-al.html#storylink=cpy [Free speech] [Double standards] [Jihad]
• Syrian opposition and ISIS use chemical weapons
  As the events of the past months have shown, a number of Western governments, primarily the US and Great Britain, have not left their attempts at politicization of the process of destroying chemical weapons (CW) in the Syrian Republic, by means of blaming certain participants of the process of breaching the conditions of liquidation of CW in the SAR. Recently, in an attempt to reawaken the idea of an armed intrusion into Syria, aiming at toppling existing authorities, the USA and a number of Western countries once again began accusing Syrian leaders of using chemical weapons in their fight against armed opposition. These very same militants, who have almost completely crossed over to the side of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (ISIS), are still stubbornly called “moderate opposition” in Washington and London from where they receive not only financial, but also military assistance. In order to understand the intricacies of Western propaganda and the tireless campaign for forceful overthrow of the government of Bashar Al-Assad, I would like to remind of several events, recognized by the world community and by the UN, related to the complete elimination of chemical weapons by the authorities of Damascus. Washington has actively used cases of the use of chemical poisoning agents in the Syrian inter-civil war since 2011, as a basis for another military intervention in the Middle East and armed incursion in Syria. The chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus, in Gute, on August 21, 2013, caused a direct threat of the resort to force against Syria by the USA and its allies. As the official representatives of Damascus and numerous foreign experts repeatedly pointed out, there was no direct evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian authorities, but rather there were active ongoing attempts by the USA and its allies to unleash a propaganda campaign concerning this problem with the frequent use of direct provocation by Syrian opposition groups supported by the West. In 2013, the threat of military intervention in Syria was successfully averted as a result of an agreement between the USA and Russia on transferring the stock of Syrian CW under the international control. After the UN Security Council adopted a resolution on the chemical weapons destruction in Syria in September, 2013, the international operation of transporting components and precursors of CW out of Syria was completed as early as the first half of 2014. The achievement of this unprecedented result was fully confirmed by the conclusions of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in December 2014. There cannot be two different opinions on the matter; the operation was a success, which is recognized by all the professionals involved in the work. Taking into account current state of affairs, it may be said that the Syrian chemical dossier is no longer a burning issue, and all future work in that direction should be done solely on a pragmatic and depoliticized basis, under the auspices of the OPCW and within the framework of its working agenda. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/02/05/rus-sirijskaya-oppozitsiya-i-igil-ispol-zuyut-himicheskoe-oruzhie/ [Syria] [cbw] [False flag]
• Economics Wars and Economic Sanctions (I)
  Valentin Katasonov | 05.02.2015 | 00:00 Economic wars in the 21st century An analysis of economic wars from the 19th to the 21st centuries shows that, in an overwhelming number of cases, they primarily pursued and are pursuing political objectives. They differ in this from trade wars, the objective of which is to seize markets. The wars are referred to as economic wars because they put pressure on other states through economic means: trade, maritime, and credit blockades, as well as the seizure and confiscation of property. While carrying out its aggressive foreign policy towards countries on the periphery of global capitalism, the West prefers to avoid using the term ‘economic warfare’. America’s ruling elite and its allies use neutral words like ‘economic sanctions’, ‘trade and economic restrictions’, ‘moratorium’, ‘embargoes’ and so on. As a rule, however, these restrictions, moratoriums and embargoes in combination can have a powerful effect designed to undermine an enemy’s economy, provoke social unrest, force a regime change and change political policies. The combination of economic sanctions introduced by the West against Russia in 2014 could undoubtedly be characterised as a full-scale economic war. [Economic warfare] [Sanctions]
• Islamic State: A US-Saudi Chicken Come Home To Roost – OpEd
  February 5, 2015 ?Margaret Kimberley ?Leave a comment By Margaret Kimberley Saudi Arabia is clearly of great importance to the government of the United States. President Obama not only cut short his India trip to visit with newly installed king Salman, but brought along a who’s who of administration officials and congressional leaders for the ride. Secretary of State John Kerry, former secretaries Condoleezza Rice and James Baker, Vice President Joseph Biden, Senator John McCain, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and CIA director John Brennan were all part on the entourage. All that fire power was devoted to a visit which lasted for just a few hours. The show of force was not coincidental. The reaction of the corporate media to the death of the late Saudi king Abdullah tells us everything we need to know about the United States/Saudi axis of evil. It is one thing for the president to call Abdullah his friend and for the secretary of state to claim that the absolute monarch was a “man of wisdom and vision” but it is another for the media to parrot the same words. The New York Times called Abdullah a “shrewd force” and a “cautious reformer.” He didn’t reform the policies of beheading and flogging his citizens or creating instability in other countries. Those facts don’t count when our government makes it clear that he was a partner in America’s imperial designs. It is easy to tell who is and isn’t an American ally just by reading the newspaper. Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela three times but the most positive description from his New York Times obituary referred to him as “a polarizing figure.” Unlike the Saudi royals, Chavez didn’t intervene in the affairs of other nations. In fact he used his nation’s oil wealth to aid neighboring countries. You wouldn’t know any of that from the media which get and obey marching orders that come straight from the White House. [Saudi Arabia] [Media] [Outsourcing] [Blowback]
• ISIS targets the Pilots of the Airwar
  ISIS executed (burned to death) a Jordanian pilot this week. To maximize the impact of the event, ISIS released a slickly produced video of the event. The video was a "complete trial" that included >> •An interview with the pilot (the "testimony"). •Some footage of western airplanes blowing things up (the "crime"). •The brutal execution of the pilot (the "punishment"). Censorship as a Non-Strategy? What was the west's response? Censorship. Here's a full version of the video I've found (it won't last long).[it had been removed by 6 Feb TB] The US government is putting on Web hosts around the world to remove videos like this. So, it will be censored and removed soon. Censorship isn't a smart strategy. [Isis] [Censor]
• The Sanctions of Mass Destruction
  by Garikai Chengu Under the late King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia played a role most treacherous in world affairs: its oil fueled U.S. militarism and its money funded Islamic extremists. Saudi Arabia is perhaps the greatest inherent contradiction of U.S. foreign policy. Prior to the 20th century, the value of money was tied to gold. When banks lent money they were constrained by the size of their gold reserves. But in 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon took the country off the gold standard. Nixon and Saudi Arabia came to an agreement whereby the only currency that Saudi Arabia could sell its oil in was the US dollar and the Saudi Kingdom would in turn ensure that its oil profits flow back into U.S. government treasuries and American banks. In exchange, America pledged to provide the Saudi Royal family’s regime with military protection and military hardware. [Sanctions]
• Moussaoui Calls Saudi Princes Patrons of Al Qaeda
  By Scott Shane Feb. 3, 2015 WASHINGTON — In highly unusual testimony inside the federal supermax prison, a former operative for Al Qaeda has described prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family as major donors to the terrorist network in the late 1990s and claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington. The Qaeda member, Zacarias Moussaoui, wrote last year to Judge George B. Daniels of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over a lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia by relatives of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said he wanted to testify in the case, and after lengthy negotiations with Justice Department officials and the federal Bureau of Prisons, a team of lawyers was permitted to enter the prison and question him for two days last October. In a statement Monday night, the Saudi Embassy said that the national Sept. 11 commission had rejected allegations that the Saudi government or Saudi officials had funded Al Qaeda. [Saudi Arabia] [Jihadist] [Al Qaeda]
• Patent Examination and Legal Fictions: How Rights are Created on Feet of Clay
  By Carlos M. Correa In this column*, Carlos Correa, the South Centre's special adviser on trade and intellectual property issues, argues that the rights conferred by patents are based on partial and often imperfect factual determinations and it is thus “fuzziness” rather than “definitiveness” that characterises patent grants. This, he says, is not accidental, but deliberately sought by patent applicants to discourage competitors. GENEVA, Feb 3 2015 (IPS) - Industry’s demands and political pressures exerted by developed countries to expand and strengthen patent protection worldwide have been based on the argument that patents promote innovation and thereby contribute to achieve social, political and economic well-being, independently of the level of development of the country where they are granted and enforced. This view ignores the fact that patents do not have the same impact in countries with different industrial bases, research and development (R&D) capabilities and availability of capital to finance innovation, among others. Significantly, there is a growing body of academic studies challenging the belief that patents are essential to incentivise innovation, even in advanced countries, or to enhance economic growth. While many scholars call for a substantial reform of the patent system, others go as far as suggesting its abolition. In a working paper entitled The case against patents, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine have argued that “in spite of the enormous increase in the number of patents and in the strength of their legal protection we have neither seen a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress nor a major increase in the levels of research and development (R&D) expenditure. There is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.” [IPR] [Patents]
• New Saudi King Tied to Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and Islamic Terrorism
  King Salman Has Been a Huge Backer of Terrorism Globally for Decades
  By Washington's Blog Global Research, February 04, 2015 Washington's Blog We’ve long noted that Saudi Arabia is a huge supporter of terrorism. But the new Saudi king is particularly bad. Investors Business Daily notes: King Salman has a history of funding al-Qaida, and his son has been accused of knowing in advance about the 9/11 attacks. *** Salman once ran a Saudi charity tied to al-Qaida and has been named a defendant in two lawsuits accusing the Saudi royal family of helping the 9/11 terrorists, one of which the U.S. Supreme Court recently let move forward after years of being blocked by the State Department and the well-funded Saudi lobby. Plaintiffs have provided an enormous amount of material to source their accusations against Salman. Here’s why his ascension to the throne is not good news, especially as the terrorism threat grows: [Saudi Arabia] [Salman] [Jihadist] [Outsourcing]
• Saudi Royal Family Faces Fresh Accusations of Funding al-Qaeda
  By Kia Makarechi Zacarias Moussaoui, a member of al-Qaeda commonly referred to as the “20th hijacker,” has accused members of the Saudi royal family of directly funding the terrorist organization that planned and executed the September 11, 2001, attacks. Moussaoui made the striking claim from inside the federal supermax prison where he is serving a life sentence on terrorism charges. In interviews with lawyers across two days in October but first made public on Tuesday, Moussaoui painted a picture of multi-faceted Qaeda-Saudi relations. He claimed that, tasked with creating a digital record of al-Qaeda’s donors by Osama bin Laden, he entered into the record the names of Prince Turki al-Faisal, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal. Al-Faisal was then Saudi Arabia’s chief of intelligence, Bin Sultan was a longtime ambassador to the United States, and bin Talal is a billionaire investor perhaps best known to Americans for owning a large stake in News Corp., the company that owns Fox News. The Saudi royal family immediately rejected Moussaoui’s accusations, noting that he is a convicted terrorist conspirator whose lawyers once argued was mentally unfit to stand trial. “Moussaoui is a deranged criminal whose own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent,” a statement from the Saudi government read. “His words have no credibility.” [Saudi Arabia] [Jihadist]
• King Abdullah's friends in the West stayed loyal, but revolution is on the horizon in Saudi Arabia
  How long can our Western leaders go on stroking and purring and fawning over – and arming – these Croesus-like autocrats?
  Poor old Kingdom. And old is the only word you can use about Saudi Arabia, where monarchical brothers take precedence over sons. King Abdullah died at 90. He had outlived two other crown princes. His successor Salman is already 79 and cannot expect to survive much more than a decade. And at 69, the new Crown Prince Muqrin is no spring chicken. Can these old folk go on ruling one of the richest nations on earth without a revolution? And how long can our Western leaders go on stroking and purring and fawning over – and arming – these Croesus-like autocrats before they make themselves look as pitiful to their own electorates as they do to the Arabs who have to tolerate Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi ethics – the most purist, anti-apostate extremism and a ruling family of thousands whose cult-like worship was founded by a violent 18th-century Muslim preacher. Remember the Taliban? Remember, for that matter, Osama bin Laden? [Saudi Arabia] [Wahhabi] [Jihadist]
• "It is Painful to Live Amidst Chaos"
  The world-system is in serious trouble and it is causing pain to the vast majority of the world's population. Pundits and politicians grasp at straws. They magnify every momentary, and usually transitory, occurrence of slight improvements in the various measures we are accustomed to using. In the last month or so, we were suddenly being told as the calendar year ended that the market looked much better in the United States, even if it looked worse in Europe, Russia, China, Brazil and many other places. But as the New Year began, there was a serious decline in both stocks and bond prices in the United States. It was a quick and sharp turnaround. Of course, the pundits immediately had explanations, but they offered a wide gamut of explanations. The real question in any case is not the prices of the stock and bond markets in any given country. It is the picture of the world-system as a whole, which doesn't seem to me to look very good at all. [Crisis]
• The Global De-dollarization and the US Policies
  In its quest for world domination, that the White House has been pursuing for more than a century, it relied on two primary tools: US dollars and military power. In order to prevent the complete hegemony of Washington certain countries have recently been revising their positions towards these two elements by developing, on the one hand, military cooperation with the states that are non-dependant on the US, and by getting rid of their US dollars on the other. Until the mid-twentieth century, the gold standard was the dominant monetary system that was based on a fixed quantity of gold reserves stocked in the national banks, which was putting a limit on the lending. At that time, the United States managed to become the owner of 70% of world’s gold reserves (excluding the USSR from the count), therefore it pushed its weakened competitor the UK aside, which led to the creation of the Bretton Woods financial system in 1944. That’s how dollar became the predominant currency for international payments. But a quarter century later this system was proved ineffective due to its inability to contain the economic growth of Germany and Japan, along with the reluctance of the US to adjust its economic policies to maintain the dollar-gold balance. At that time, the dollar experienced a dramatic decline but it was saved by the support of rich oil exporters, especially once Saudi Arabia he consented to exchange its black gold for the US weapons and support in talks with Richard Nixon. As a result, President Richard Nixon in 1971 unilaterally ordered the cancellation of the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold, instead he established the Jamaican currency system in which oil has become the foundation of the US dollar system. [Imperialism] [Reserve]
• What Happened to Alberto Nisman?
  January 31, 2015 By Jonathan Blitzer On January 18th, just before midnight, an Argentine state prosecutor named Alberto Nisman turned up dead in his apartment. The cause of death was a shot to the head, fired from a .22-calibre pistol that the prosecutor had borrowed from his assistant the day before. Nisman told his assistant that an Argentine spy had warned him that his life was in danger. The two main doors to the apartment were locked, and several bodyguards had been standing watch outside. Analysis of a third passageway, a small nook used to gain access to the apartment’s air-conditioning unit, revealed a footprint and a smudge, but nothing more. The door to the bathroom, where Nisman was found, was locked from the inside. It looked like he had killed himself, but could someone else have made him do it? Four days before Nisman died, he had accused President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her Foreign Minister, Héctor Timerman, of a spectacular crime. The two were the “authors and accomplices of an aggravated cover-up and obstruction of justice,” Nisman told a Buenos Aires court. They had allegedly protected the perpetrators of the bombing, in 1994, of a Jewish community center, the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA). The attack, which left eighty-five people dead and hundreds injured, was the worst in the country’s recent history. Nisman had spent more than ten years investigating the case, and he had long believed that the Iranian government and agents of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, were behind it. In recent years, he had also become concerned that Kirchner’s government had conspired to shield them from justice. (The case is still unresolved and the attack’s perpetrators remain unpunished.)
  This theory that Stiusso was somehow directing Nisman’s investigation is riddled with conjecture. But the notion that Nisman was a kind of cipher for Argentine and foreign-intelligence operatives has its roots in certain demonstrable facts. Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveal that Nisman obsessively consulted with the American Embassy. He went to the Embassy with advance tips on his investigation, he shared knowledge about judges’ leanings, and he showed Embassy officials drafts of his arrest orders and made revisions based on their comments. In October, 2006, Nisman formally accused Iranian officials and a Hezbollah operative of orchestrating the AMIA attack. U.S. Embassy representatives told Nisman that they were “convinced” his case was solid, and “congratulated” the Argentine prosecutors for their “dedication.” Some of the same cables refer to U.S. efforts to impose international sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program, a campaign that the Argentine government joined at the United Nations. This enthusiasm for the case against Iran is particularly noteworthy because Iran and Hezbollah were never the only suspected culprits in the bombing [Iran] [Argentina]
• Germans in shock as new Greek leader starts with a bang
  By Noah Barkin and Andreas Rinke BERLIN Wed Jan 28, 2015 (Reuters) - In his first act as prime minister on Monday, Alexis Tsipras visited the war memorial in Kaisariani where 200 Greek resistance fighters were slaughtered by the Nazis in 1944. The move did not go unnoticed in Berlin. Nor did Tsipras's decision hours later to receive the Russian ambassador before meeting any other foreign official. Then came the announcement that radical academic Yanis Varoufakis, who once likened German austerity policies to "fiscal waterboarding", would be taking over as Greek finance minister. A short while later, Tsipras delivered another blow, criticising an EU statement that warned Moscow of new sanctions. The assumption in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's entourage before Sunday's Greek election was that Tsipras, the charismatic leader of the far-left Syriza party, would eke out a narrow victory, struggle to form a coalition, and if he managed to do so, shift quickly from confrontation to compromise mode. Instead, after cruising to victory and clinching a fast-track coalition deal with the right-wing Independent Greeks party, he has signalled in his first days in office that he has no intention of backing down, unsettling officials in Berlin, some of whom admit to shock at the 40-year-old's fiery start. "No doubt about it, we were surprised by the size of the Syriza victory and the speed with which Tsipras clinched a coalition," said one senior German official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. [Greece]
• Michelle Obama gives American Sniper a thumb’s up
  By Lesley Clark McClatchy Washington Bureau January 30, 2015 The Clint Eastwood film, American Sniper, has drawn a storm of controversy, but First Lady Michelle Obama called it an honest depiction of military life. Obama, who said she watched the movie aboard Air Force One during the trip she and President Obama took to India and Saudi Arabia, said the box office draw is a “complex, emotional depiction of a veteran and his family. “While I know there have been critics, I felt that, more often than not, this film touches on many of the emotions and experiences that I’ve heard firsthand from military families over these past few years,” Obama said. The movie is based on the bestselling memoir by the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle and has raised questions in some quarters about whether he should be considered a hero. Obama’s remarks came at a filmmakers event on telling veterans’ stories at the National Geographic Society. She told the audience she wouldn’t divulge any spoilers, but said the movie reflects “wrenching stories that I’ve heard, the complex journeys that our men and women in uniform endure .... And the challenges of transitioning back home to their next mission in life.” Obama, who was preceded at the event by actor Bradley Cooper, who plays Kyle in the movie, called it important to tell such stories, noting that the “vast majority of Americans” may have little contact with the military. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/30/255026/michelle-obama-gives-american.html#storylink=cpy [Propaganda] [Obama]
• How the CIA and Mossad teamed up to kill Hizbollah's 'father of smoke'
  US role in killing Imad Mughniyeh with a car bomb in Damascus is revealed for the first time by former officials, who say it took President George W Bush 30 seconds to approve the operation By Rob Crilly, New York 3:15PM GMT 31 Jan 2015 The CIA and Mossad collaborated in the 2008 assassination of a senior Hizbollah leader, detonating a car bomb in the Syrian capital Damascus, according to former intelligence officials who have spoken to American media outlets. Few details have ever been known about the life and death of Imad Mughniyeh, who was believed to be the group's international operations chief. He was nicknamed the Father of Smoke, so elusive did he prove. Now, intelligence officials have told The Washington Post and Newsweek that he was killed by a bomb hidden in the spare tyre of a parked car after an extraordinary joint operation between the US and Israel. The claims have already led to accusations that the CIA acted illegally by ignoring a US ban on assassination. [Assassination] [Legality] [CIA]

• Islamic State: the unknown war
  Paul Rogers 28 January 2015 Western states express optimism about the anti-jihadist campaign in Syria-Iraq. A report from a high-level meeting in London offers another view. At the multinational conference on Iraq held in London on 22 January 2015, the United States secretary of state John Kerry was able to claim that the tide was turning in the war against Islamic State. The evidence cited includes well over 2,000 airstrikes since August 2014, Iraqi army ground incursions backed by coalition support, more than 700 km sq of territory retaken, thousands of Islamic State fighters killed, hundreds of military vehicles destroyed, and half of Islamic State’s top military commanders “eliminated”. If what Kerry says is accurate, then Islamic State must be facing serious problems. The narrative is supported by reports that the Iraqi army is planning an assault later this year to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city which lies at the core of Islamic State’s rapid expansion in June 2014. Moreover, Kurdish sources claim that their peshmerga forces are now in control of the fiercely contested town of Kobane in northern Syria. If the claim about the Islamic State military commanders is accurate that would be the biggest blow so far to the movement. .......
  The decision, reports Jane’s, was taken at a meeting of the UK's national-security council (NSC) on 16 December 2014, chaired by prime minister David Cameron. “According to senior defence sources in London, fears that UK troops could be killed or taken hostage in the run-up to the UK general election in May were behind the rejection of the plans” (see Tim Ripley, "UK puts training Iraq mission on hold", Jane's Defence Weekly, 19 January 2015). The political calculation is all too obvious. For a government facing a tight election and a public expressing strong opposition to further British involvement in wars in the Middle East, the prospect of video of captured soldiers in orange jump-suits prior to execution by beheading was too difficult to contemplate. [ISIS] [Spin]
• Leonard Pitts Jr.: Why serious people discount Fox News
  By Leonard Pitts Jr. Miami Herald January 25, 2015 Tucker Carlson said on Fox that more children die of bathtub drownings than of accidental shootings. They don't. Steve Doocy said on Fox that NASA scientists faked data to make the case for global warming. They didn't. Rudy Giuliani said on Fox that President Obama has issued propaganda asking everybody to "hate the police." He hasn't. John Stossel said on Fox that there is "no good data" proving secondhand cigarette smoke kills nonsmokers. There is. So maybe you can see why serious people - a category excluding those who rely upon it for news and information - do not take Fox, well ... seriously, why they dub it Pox News and Fakes News, to name two of the printable variations. Fox is, after all, the network of death panels, terrorist fist jabs, birtherism, anchor babies, victory mosques, wars on Christmas and Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. It's not just that it is the chief global distributor of unfact and untruth but that it distributes unfact and untruth with a bluster, an arrogance, a gonad-grabbing swagger, that implicitly and intentionally dares you to believe fact and truth matter. Many of us have gotten used to this. We don't even bother to protest Fox being Fox. Might as well protest a sewer for stinking. But the French and the British, being French and British, see it differently. And that's what produced the scenario that recently floored many of us. There was Fox, doing what Fox does, in this case hosting one Steve Emerson, a supposed expert on Islamic extremist terrorism, who spoke about so-called "no go" zones in Europe - i.e., areas of Germany, Sweden, France and Great Britain - where non-Muslims are banned, the government has no control and sharia law is in effect. Naturally, Fox did not question this outrageous assertion - in fact, it repeated it throughout the week - and most of us, long ago benumbed by the network's serial mendacities, did not challenge Fox. Then, there erupted from Europe the jarring sound of a continent laughing. British Prime Minister David Cameron called Emerson an "idiot." A French program in the mold of "The Daily Show" sent correspondents - in helmets! - to interview people peaceably sipping coffee in the no-go zones. Twitter went medieval on Fox's backside. And the mayor of Paris threatened to sue. [Media] [Islamophobia]
• The «Black Knights» are the Partisan Fighters in an Economic War
  Valentin Katasonov | 29.01.2015 | 00:00 Occasionally while discussing issues related to the West’s economic sanctions against various countries, the subject of the «black knights» crops up. The term «black knight» is given to the small trading partners of a country that is affected by sanctions. They act as intermediaries, facilitating trade and economic relations between that country and the rest of the world. Currently, «black knights» are doing business on such a huge scale that the companies themselves are finding their own clients from among the countries under sanctions, and those nations are able to select the intermediaries that best fit their needs. Most of the information about the activities of «black knights» comes from media outlets with ties to Iran. Some experts argue that the first «black knights» appeared on Iran’s horizon immediately after Washington introduced sanctions against that country in 1979. Some of them were thought to already have experience working with other countries under sanctions, such as Cuba, South Africa, and Rhodesia. The «black knights» that are now offering their services to Iran are registered in some of the farthest-flung corners of the globe: Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the CIS countries. And from time to time they may change the country in which they are registered or simply vanish without a trace. In the latter case, it means that the firm had been established for merely a single day’s work on a single transaction. For those who levy the sanctions, one unpleasant idiosyncrasy of the «black knights» is that such firms settle their accounts without the assistance of banks. The «knights» often employ barter (making direct exchanges) that do not require conventional forms of money. Increasingly they are resorting to time-honored means of setting accounts, such as using gold. And what’s more, many companies from Muslim countries use the informal Hawala financial system, under which the services of a bank are not required, and even cash does not need to be transported from one country to another. Today the Hawala system is gaining popularity even among small businesses outside of the Islamic world, such as in Europe and Latin America. [Sanctions]
• Save Us From Washington’s Visionaries
  In (Modest) Praise of a Comforting Mediocrity
  By Andrew J. Bacevich January 29, 2015 En route back to Washington at the tail end of his most recent overseas trip, John Kerry, America’s peripatetic secretary of state, stopped off in France “to share a hug with all of Paris.” Whether Paris reciprocated the secretary’s embrace went unrecorded. Despite the requisite reference to General Pershing (“Lafayette, we are here!”) and flying James Taylor in from the 1960s to assure Parisians that “You’ve Got a Friend,” in the annals of American diplomacy Kerry’s hug will likely rank with President Eisenhower’s award of the Legion of Merit to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” and Jimmy Carter’s acknowledgment of the “admiration and love” said to define the relationship between the Iranian people and their Shah. In short, it was a moment best forgotten. Alas, this vapid, profoundly silly event is all too emblematic of statecraft in the Obama era. Seldom have well-credentialed and well-meaning people worked so hard to produce so little of substance. Not one of the signature foreign policy initiatives conceived in Obama’s first term has borne fruit. When it came to making a fresh start with the Islamic world, responsibly ending the “dumb” war in Iraq (while winning the “necessary” one in Afghanistan), “resetting” U.S.-Russian relations, and “pivoting” toward Asia, mark your scorecard 0 for 4. [US Global strategy] [Obama]
• This Is Obama’s Last Foreign Policy Chance
  Leslie H. Gelb The failure of Obama or Biden to show up in Paris made clear that most of the president’s team can’t be trusted to conduct U.S national security policy and must be replaced—at once. Here’s why America’s failure to be represented at the Paris unity march was so profoundly disturbing. It wasn’t just because President Obama’s or Vice President Biden’s absence was a horrendous gaffe. More than this, it demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years. It’s simply too dangerous to let Mr. Obama continue as is—with his current team and his way of making decisions. America, its allies, and friends could be heading into one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War. Mr. Obama will have to excuse most of his inner core, especially in the White House. He will have to replace them with strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience. [US Global strategy] [Obama]
• The Conviction of Jeffrey Stirling, CIA Whistleblower
  by Norman Solomon The mass media have suddenly discovered Jeffrey Sterling — after his conviction Monday afternoon as a CIA whistleblower. Sterling’s indictment four years ago received fleeting news coverage that recited the government’s charges. From the outset, the Justice Department portrayed him as bitter and vengeful — with the classic trash-the-whistleblower word “disgruntled” thrown in — all of which the mainline media dutifully recounted without any other perspective. Year after year, Sterling’s case dragged through appellate courts, tangled up with the honorable refusal of journalist James Risen to in any way identify sources for his 2006 book State of War. While news stories or pundits occasionally turned their lens on Risen, they scarcely mentioned Sterling, whose life had been turned upside down — fired by the CIA early in the Bush administration after filing a racial discrimination lawsuit, and much later by the 10-count indictment that included seven counts under the Espionage Act. Sterling was one of the very few African American case officers in the CIA. He became a whistleblower by virtue of going through channels to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003 to inform staffers about the CIA’s ill-conceived, poorly executed and dangerous Operation Merlin, which had given a flawed design for a nuclear weapons component to Iran back in 2000. [Whistleblower]
• Crisis in Yemen: what the media is getting wrong
  Steven A. Zyck 28 January 2015 It is important to stop perpetuating misconceptions about the current crisis (i.e., that it’s a sectarian conflict or proxy war among Iran and Saudi Arabia) that make for a good – albeit largely unfounded – story. Houthis march in celebration of the Prophet's birthday, Sana'a, 2013. Houthis march in celebration of the Prophet's birthday, Sana'a, 2013. Luke Somers/Demotix. All rights reserved. Watching the media coverage of Yemen’s most recent crisis, it is easy to get a sense that a radical, Iranian-backed and relatively new rebel movement has seized control of the government in a coup d’état. Media reports tell us that the Houthis, a movement associated with the Zaydi branch of Shia’a Islam, is a new group that engineered a coup – and that they are inadvertently creating new opportunities for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Much of this is at best half-truth and requires some crucial corrections. [Yemen]
• Jury convicts Sterling of espionage in leak to New York Times
  By Greg Gordon McClatchy Washington Bureau January 26, 2015 Updated 7 hours ago TISH WELLS — McClatchy WASHINGTON — A federal court jury on Monday found Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA employee, guilty of espionage charges for leaking to The New York Times over a decade ago details of a secret U.S. attempt to slow Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Federal prosecutors alleged that Sterling, 47, of O’Fallon, Mo., leaked the information in retaliation for the agency’s refusal to settle to his satisfaction administrative and civil complaints that he had filed against the agency. Times correspondent James Risen disclosed the CIA operation in 2006 in his book, “State of War,” describing an agency scheme to send Iran phoney blueprints for a nuclear weapon. After threatening to compel Risen to testify, however, prosecutors ultimately won Sterling’s conviction in federal court in Alexandria, Va. without calling the journalist as a witness and without providing direct evidence that Sterling was Risen’s source. Rather, they strung together years of evidence of the relationship between the men in a circumstantial case. Sterling was convicted of six counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and one count each of unlawful retention of national defense information, unauthorized conveyance of government property and obstruction of justice. [Whistleblower]
• Obama, Netanyahu, Iran, Congress and the Republican Party
  Bob Rigg 27 January 2015 An intense political battle is going on over Iran on Capitol Hill. Insular Republicans underestimate at their peril international pressures driven by global security concerns. A State of the Union speech by an American president can normally be compared to a Speech from the Throne by the Queen of England. In each case the executive takes advantage of an opportunity, in a ritualised public context, to outline its legislative and political programme for the coming year. The opposition responds as predictably, the public barely notices and political life rolls on. Last week’s State of the Union by Barack Obama’s blew this tradition out of the water, advocating a range of domestic proposals anathema to the Republican establishment. Obama inflamed the Republican right by reaffirming the historic importance of opening up diplomatic relations with Cuba and by declaring his willingness to use his veto to block any move by the Republican-majority Senate to torpedo the nuclear negotiations with Iran, in a decisive final phase.
• Even Fox News is outraged at Boehner and Netanyahu's plan to undermine Obama
  Updated by Max Fisher on January 24, 2015, 4:00 p.m. ET ?@Max_Fisher ?max@vox.com Fox News is not exactly known as an ally of the Obama administration, especially when it comes to disputes between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, or disputes between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet two prominent Fox News hosts, Chris Wallace and Shepherd Smith, harshly criticized Boehner and Netanyahu on Friday for secretly arranging a Netanyahu speech to Congress that is transparently aimed at undermining President Obama, and set up without the White House's knowledge. The White House, State Department, and many foreign policy observers, including prominent former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, expressed outrage over the move. And, in a sign of just how many lines Boehner and Netanyahu crossed, so did the two Fox News hosts. "I agree 100 percent," Wallace said when Smith read a quote from Indyk criticizing the Boehner-Netanyahu maneuver. [Israel] [Netanyahu]
• Contradiction in Action: The Eulogies for Saudi King Abdullahbin Abdulaziz al Saud
  By Binoy Kampmark Global Research, January 24, 2015 What a spanner in the works of international relations he proved to be. The late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud of Saudi Arabia was always the spoiler in the morality plays of Western powers keen to back him. Oil was always the greatest deterrent against getting on his wrong side, but it also meant the most intolerable of inconsistencies. For most governments, however, these were tolerated. Those inconsistencies were there for all to see in the eulogies for the monarch. US President Barack Obama gave a description of someone who was distinctly different from a member of the House of Saud. Abroad, he pursued the Arab Peace Initiative. “At home, King Abdullah’s vision was dedicated to the education of his people and to greater engagement with the world” (Politico, Jan 22). It was precisely such behaviour that gave David Pryce-Jones room for a vital observation. “The world will remember one thing only of King Abdullah, the late king of Saudi Arabia” ventured Pryce-Jones, “and that is how President Barack Obama bowed before him in obeisance. Democracy was seen paying dues to absolute monarchy” (National Review Online, Jan 23).[1] Such a prostrate position was similar adopted by other US officials. US Secretary of State John Kerry used his twitter account to suggest that he was a “man of wisdom & vision. US has lost a friend and Kingdom of #Saudi Arabia, Middle East, and world has lost a revered leader.” Former US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel seem to be channelling another spirit in describing Abdullah as, “a powerful voice for tolerance, moderation and peace,” having advanced “the lives of his people at home as well as his country’s leadership abroad.” Former British prime minister, Tony Blair, added the predictable icing sugar, claiming that Abdullah was “loved by his people and will be deeply missed” while the British incumbent, David Cameron, mystified with his statement that the late monarch would be remembered “for his commitment to peace and strengthening the understanding between faiths.”[2] The cynics were certainly getting their fill, and even publications such as the New York Times would strive to find a streak of modernity lurking somewhere in that being which had governed Saudi Arabia as essentially a tribal CEO. The Guardian’s editorial found room to admire the late sovereign’s efforts to curb the export of Wahhabism, minor moves towards democratisation in introducing elections to municipal councils, and proved “good, if slow” in his efforts to court the growing grouping of “educated commoners” needed to keep Saudi Arabia stable.[3] The editorial had to also concede to the Saudi ability, not merely to weather the stormy onslaught of the Arab Spring, but turn it against itself in various Middle Eastern states. It did not take long for various news agencies to pick up that Saudi Arabia, prior to a 2013 law banning terrorist financing, had been at the forefront of Sunni funding for a colourful assortment of so-called enemies of the free world. [Saudi Arabia] [Spin] [Double standards] [Outsourcing]
• My Future in Prison
  by Kathy Kelly The Bureau of Prisons contacted me today, assigning me a prison number and a new address: for the next 90 days, beginning tomorrow, I’ll live at FMC Lexington, in the satellite prison camp for women, adjacent to Lexington’s federal medical center for men. Very early tomorrow morning, Buddy Bell, Cassandra Dixon, and Paco and Silver, two house guests whom we first met in protests on South Korea’s Jeju Island, will travel with me to Kentucky and deliver me to the satellite women’s prison outside the Federal Medical Center for men. In December, 2014, Judge Matt Whitworth sentenced me to three months in federal prison after Georgia Walker and I had attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the commander of Whiteman Air Force base, asking him to stop his troops from piloting lethal drone flights over Afghanistan from within the base. Judge Whitworth allowed me over a month to surrender myself to prison; but whether you are a soldier or a civilian, a target or an unlucky bystander, you can’t surrender to a drone. When I was imprisoned at Lexington prison in 1988, after a federal magistrate in Missouri sentenced me to one year in prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites, other women prisoners playfully nicknamed me “Missiles.” One of my sisters reliably made me laugh today, texting me to ask if I thought the women this time would call me “Drones.” [Human rights] [Democracy] [Double standards]
• Federal Prison Sentence Begins for Kathy Kelly
  by Medea Benjamin On January 23, Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare, will begin a three-month jail sentence in federal prison for a protest against drones (also known as “unmanned aerial vehicles”) at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. I had a chance to interview her before she had to turn herself in. Medea: Can you just say why you have been particularly moved to take action against drone strikes? Kathy: I think 21st-century militarism is very frightening when you combine the military’s Joint Special Operations Forces with drone and air strike capabilities. The military doesn’t need sprawling bases anymore because they can use these new technologies to control populations and instill tremendous fear. But the use of drones creates resentment and antagonism, and continues to kill civilians. Wars have been killing civilians for a long time, but with the help of drones, 90 percent of the people killed in wars these days are civilians. The British organization Reprieve reports that for every one person who is selected as a target for assassination by drones, 28 civilians are killed. The weaponized drones are operated here in the United States in Air National Guard bases and Air Force bases, and with the press of a button they are killing people thousands of miles away in places like Afghanistan. Many people are enamored with being able to send an unmanned aerial vehicle to kill people in another country without a soldier in this country being harmed. But we find that the people operating these drones are experiencing trauma and stress just like soldiers in war zones. [Human rights] [Democracy] [Double standards] [UAV] [Civilian] [Assassination]
• America’s Altered State of Consciousness
  Dmitriy Sedov | 23.01.2015 | 10:40 Psychiatry defines the altered state of consciousness or mind alteration as a mental state which significantly deviates from the normal waking beta wave state of consciousness. Reading attentively the US President Obama’s State of the Union address the question pops up if the President really sees the world as he describes it in his speeches or is it kind of Walt Disney’s animated cartoons-style fantasies specially prepared for US internal consumption? Americans are accustomed to consume such products. Numerous Hollywood-produced Rambos, movie-made high-minded presidents and daring private Ryans regularly save the world from some kind of plague. It’s been a long time since they have used information hypnosis to make Americans believe that their country is «the best of the best» and an American is the acme of human evolution. [Rhetoric] [Fantasy]
• America’s new aristocracy
  As the importance of intellectual capital grows, privilege has become increasingly heritable Jan 24th 2015 WHEN the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination line up on stage for their first debate in August, there may be three contenders whose fathers also ran for president. Whoever wins may face the wife of a former president next year. It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties. Because America never had kings or lords, it sometimes seems less inclined to worry about signs that its elite is calcifying. Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it. Jefferson himself was a hybrid of these two types—a brilliant lawyer who inherited 11,000 acres and 135 slaves from his father-in-law—but the distinction proved durable. When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves. Now they are beginning to find out, (see article), because today’s rich increasingly pass on to their children an asset that cannot be frittered away in a few nights at a casino. It is far more useful than wealth, and invulnerable to inheritance tax. It is brains. [Capitalism] [Inheritance]
• Is Die Linke a Syriza of the north?
  Jamie Mackay 23 January 2015 The German left are now rallying behind Tsipras. It is an alliance that might shape the future of the European left. Flickr/Die Linke. Some rights reserved. It’s not just in the Mediterranean that Syriza is galvanizing hopes for a new European left project. In Germany the former communists Die Linke – who recently won control of their first region since 1989 – have been vocal in demonstrating solidarity with Greece. Unlike Merkel’s CDU which will likely permit few concessions to a Syriza government, Die Linke’s programme is defiantly internationalist, emphasizing historical grievances and Germany’s obligation to pay further war reparations. Tsipras received a riotous applause when he spoke at Die Linke’s congress in May 2014. Addressing the room as a “sister party” he spoke of the need to “overcome the north south division” and fight “the ghost of fascism in Europe”. In emphasizing these factors, he brought with him an unexpected solidarity, arguing for Greece’s role in supporting the struggle of workers in the wealthier North. A Syriza government, he claimed, would fight for German people as much as for its own: “soon, [Merkel] will have to deal with a government of the Left in Greece. A government that – and I promise that to you – will negotiate with her on your behalf as well.” A year ago, such rhetoric seemed the epitome of Marxist hyperbole. As the elections approach, however, Die Linke will play an important role in determining how these statements are interpreted abroad and moreover, how they might shape the programme of the Party of the European Left. [Socialism]
• Israeli Mossad Goes Rogue, Warns U.S. on Iran Sanctions
  981 Jan 21, 2015 7:26 PM EST By Josh Rogin & Eli Lake The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad has broken ranks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling U.S. officials and lawmakers that a new Iran sanctions bill in the U.S. Congress would tank the Iran nuclear negotiations. Already, the Barack Obama administration and some leading Republican senators are using the Israeli internal disagreement to undermine support for the bill, authored by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Robert Menendez, which would enact new sanctions if current negotiations falter. Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- supported by Republican Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain -- is pushing for his own legislation on the Iran nuclear deal, which doesn't contain sanctions but would require that the Senate vote on any pact that is agreed upon in Geneva. The White House is opposed to both the Kirk-Menendez bill and the Corker bill; it doesn't want Congress to meddle at all in the delicate multilateral diplomacy with Iran. [Israel]
• Congress on Iran, after Obama veto threat
  Published January 21, 2015 FoxNews.com This May 24, 2011 file photo shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with House Speaker John Boehner on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP) House Speaker John Boehner announced Wednesday he is inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress next month about the threat from Iran, in a sharp rebuke to President Obama. Such invitations typically are coordinated with the White House and State Department, but this one was not. The House speaker's office said Netanyahu will be invited to speak Feb. 11 before a joint session of Congress. The invitation comes as lawmakers weigh legislation, supported by Republicans and some Democrats, to tee up more sanctions against Iran in case negotiations fail to curtail the country's nuclear enrichment program. [Governance]
• Truth, War Propaganda, CIA and Media Manipulation
  By Global Research Global Research, January 19, 2015 31 March 2011 Never before has it been so important to have independent, honest voices and sources of information. We are – as a society – inundated and overwhelmed with a flood of information from a wide array of sources, but these sources of information, by and large, serve the powerful interests and individuals that own them. The main sources of information, for both public and official consumption, include the mainstream media, alternative media, academia and think tanks. The mainstream media is the most obvious in its inherent bias and manipulation. The mainstream media is owned directly by large multinational corporations, and through their boards of directors are connected with a plethora of other major global corporations and elite interests. An example of these connections can be seen through the board of Time Warner. Time Warner owns Time Magazine, HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN, among many others. The board of directors includes individuals past or presently affiliated with: the Council on Foreign Relations, the IMF, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Warburg Pincus, Phillip Morris, and AMR Corporation, among many others. Two of the most “esteemed” sources of news in the U.S. are the New York Times (referred to as “the paper of record”) and the Washington Post. The New York Times has on its board people who are past or presently affiliated with: Schering-Plough International (pharmaceuticals), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chevron Corporation, Wesco Financial Corporation, Kohlberg & Company, The Charles Schwab Corporation, eBay Inc., Xerox, IBM, Ford Motor Company, Eli Lilly & Company, among others. Hardly a bastion of impartiality. And the same could be said for the Washington Post, which has on its board: Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and individuals associated with (past or presently): the Coca-Cola Company, New York University, Conservation International, the Council on Foreign Relations, Xerox, Catalyst, Johnson & Johnson, Target Corporation, RAND Corporation, General Motors, and the Business Council, among others. It is also important to address how the mainstream media is intertwined, often covertly and secretly, with the government. Carl Bernstein, one of the two Washington Post reporters who covered the Watergate scandal, revealed that there were over 400 American journalists who had “secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Interestingly, “the use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA.” Among organizations which cooperated with the CIA were the “American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.” [Media] [CIA] [Propaganda] [Foundations]
• In Honor of Martin Luther King's Birthday
  Martin, Thurgood…and J. Edgar? The Preacher, the Black Cardinal, and the Grand Inquisitor I highly recommend Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. Reading it in the context of Ferguson, Garner, etc. this book really f*cked me up, as they say nowadays. Based on my experience, I’d recommend just picking up the book and reading it, without googling “Groveland Boys” or looking at some reviews of the book. All I can say is that, despite that determinedly sunny subtitle, it will take you into some very dark places. Actually, what I will say is that the book also offers some more fascinating insights into the relationship between J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the civil rights movement. As I wrote in a previous post, “Everybody Wants Their Own Stasi,” Hoover disliked and distrusted Martin Luther King as a troublemaker and, possibly, a communist asset. One of the worst abuses of the FBI was the campaign of illegal wiretaps and bugging against King and his inner circular conducted at the behest of the Kennedys. It culminated in the infamous “suicide letter” prepared by the FBI and mailed to King’s home (not at the behest of the Kennedys, I should point out). On the other hand, when pressed by LBJ, Hoover devoted massive resources to breaking the Mississippi Burning case and went on to destroy the Mississippi KKK with considerable efficiency and apparent enthusiasm. [FBI]
• Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar al-Ja'afari on Sovereignty, Terrorism, and the Failure of the UN
  By: Eva Bartlett Published Saturday, January 17, 2015 On January 8, in his sparsely-furnished New York City office, the Syrian Arab Republic Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Dr. Bashar al-Ja'afari, sat down with Al-Akhbar for an interview. The veteran diplomat, who has held his position at the UN since 2006, and lives restricted to a 25-mile radius of New York City, has much more to say than the half hour allowed. Defiant as always, he discussed the challenges he faces at the UN, explained why he thinks the organization has lost its way, and censured Western states and media for their hostility toward the Syrian government. First, however, we discussed the exhibition of Aleppo-based Syrian photographer Hagop Vanesian, titled "My Homeland," which opened the same day at the United Nations headquarters. [UNUS] [Syria]
• U.S. airstrike in Syria may have killed 50 civilians
  By Roy Gutman and Mousab Alhamadee McClatchy Foreign Staff January 11, 2015 GAZIANTEP, Turkey — A U.S.-led coalition airstrike killed at least 50 Syrian civilians late last month when it targeted a headquarters of Islamic State extremists in northern Syria, according to an eyewitness and a Syrian opposition human rights organization. The civilians were being held in a makeshift jail in the town of Al Bab, close to the Turkish border, when the aircraft struck on the evening of Dec. 28, the witnesses said. The building, called the Al Saraya, a government center, was leveled in the airstrike. It was days before civil defense workers could dig out the victims’ bodies. The U.S. Central Command, which had not previously announced the airstrike, confirmed the attack Saturday in response to repeated McClatchy inquiries. “Coalition aircraft did strike and destroy an ISIL headquarters building in Al Bab on Dec. 28,” Col. Patrick S. Ryder said in an email. He said a review of the airstrike showed no evidence of civilian casualties but offered to examine any additional information, “since we take all allegations seriously.” ISIL is an alternative name for the Islamic State. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/11/252671/us-airstrike-in-syria-may-have.html#storylink=cpy [Casualties] [Civilian]
• Clinton talks to be co-hosted by foreign bank investigated by US
  By Anita Kumar McClatchy Washington Bureau January 19, 2015 Updated 6 hours ago WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton, the presumed frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, will give a pair of speeches Wednesday in Canada co-hosted by a major bank that has been the subject of several investigations into wrongdoing over the past dozen years. Clinton refused to say if she's being paid for the speeches and the bank says it is unaware of Clinton’s contractual agreement. But the appearances are all but certain to fuel complaints that she's too close to the corporate elites, especially coming a day after President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech focusing on the plight of the middle class and signs that several top Republicans also plan to make economic populism a centerpiece of their campaigns. Clinton has given dozens of speeches since leaving office as Secretary of State, many for free and many drawing paychecks of as much as $200,000 to $300,000. The Wednesday addresses could stand out, as they’ll be hosted by a foreign bank with a history of investigations by U.S. officials. In 2003, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce settled a case with the Securities and Exchange Commission for $80 million for allegedly helping the Enron energy company mislead investors through a series of transactions over a period of several years, according to the SEC. At least two executives agreed to settle charges of aiding and abetting the fraud, paying a total of $600,000. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/19/253592/clinton-talks-to-be-hosted-by.html#storylink=cpy [Hillary Clinton] [Corruption]
• The Golden Age of Black Ops
  Special Ops Missions Already in 105 Countries in 2015 By Nick Turse January 20, 2015 In the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Landing in a remote region of one of the most volatile countries on the planet, they raided a village and soon found themselves in a life-or-death firefight. It was the second time in two weeks that elite U.S. Navy SEALs had attempted to rescue American photojournalist Luke Somers. And it was the second time they failed. On December 6, 2014, approximately 36 of America’s top commandos, heavily armed, operating with intelligence from satellites, drones, and high-tech eavesdropping, outfitted with night vision goggles, and backed up by elite Yemeni troops, went toe-to-toe with about six militants from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. When it was over, Somers was dead, along with Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher due to be set free the next day. Eight civilians were also killed by the commandos, according to local reports. Most of the militants escaped. That blood-soaked episode was, depending on your vantage point, an ignominious end to a year that saw U.S. Special Operations forces deployed at near record levels, or an inauspicious beginning to a new year already on track to reach similar heights, if not exceed them. [Special operations]
• On election day, young Greeks will be voting for SYRIZA
  Elati Pontikopoulou-Venieri 19 January 2015 As a young person in Greece, I have been hit especially hard by the crisis. Like many others my age, I feel that Syriza is the only party that represents people like me. SYRIZA youth members at a conference in Athens. Demotix/Giorgos Panagakis. Some rights reserved. Greek legislative elections are due to take place on 25 January. All evidence points to a victory by the Coalition of the Radical Left party, Syriza, which before the economic crisis received 4% of the vote, but is now backed by a large part of the Greek people, especially the young. Its rise can be attributed to how the crisis was used as a means to unleash a neoliberal attack on citizens' rights, based on pre-existing divisions in society. Young people were among the first victims. As a young person myself, I am a victim of the crisis too. As architects, my parents were among the first to take a hit. The situation got even worse, as Greece entered the IMF and Memoranda period. I got into Athens Law School in 2011, at a time when an extended university reform had been voted in, that would begin the privatisation of Greek higher education. This reform would make it harder for poorer students to continue their studies, especially during this economic crisis. With the Greek state becoming more conservative under the New Democracy - PASOK government, the de facto abolition of democracy and stories of activists' torture, arbitrary police acts and immigrants' murders, I turned to Syriza. I became a member of the Organization of the Youth of Syriza, the autonomous organization of young supporters. In my view Syriza presents the best alternative to the problems young people in Greece are faced with. [Crisis] [Greece]
• Are All Terrorists Muslims? It’s Not Even Close
  Dean Obeidallah ? Out of Proportion 01.14.15 What percentage of terror attacks in the United States and Europe are committed by Muslims? Guess. Nope. Guess again. And again... “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.” How many times have you heard that one? Sure, we heard Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade say it, but to me, that was simply part of the Fox News plan to make their viewers dumber, as we saw again this past weekend when its terrorism “expert” Steve Emerson was caught fabricating the story that Birmingham, England, is closed to non-Muslims. But more alarmingly, even some reasonable people have uttered this statement. And that comment is often followed up by the question: Why don’t we see Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish terrorists? Obviously, there are people who sincerely view themselves as Muslims who have committed horrible acts in the name of Islam. We Muslims can make the case that their actions are not based on any part of the faith but on their own political agenda. But they are Muslims, no denying that. However, and this will probably shock many, so you might want to take a breath: Overwhelmingly, those who have committed terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe aren’t Muslims. Let’s give that a moment to sink in. [Terrorism] [Islam]
• Shiite leaders forbid insults against Sunnis
  During the last week of 2014, Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb demanded that Shiite authorities in Iran and Iraq issue clear fatwas strictly forbidding the insulting of Sunni figures and their sanctities. This happened during the visit of Mahmoud Mahmoudian, the new head of Iran’s Interest Desk in Egypt. Najaf's Shiite authorities in Iran and Iraq issue fatwas against insults to Sunni figures and their sanctities. Author Ali Mamouri Posted January 13, 2015 Translator Pascale Menassa Tayeb called on Muslim scholars to “avoid strife between Sunnis and Shiites, as it is tearing the Islamic nation apart and preventing consensus and dialogue between both sects.” Prominent Shiite authorities had issued several fatwas in the past, forbidding any sort of attack on Sunni figures and sites. These included Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s fatwa in October 2013, when he strictly forbade attacking Sunni sanctities, stating, “These are condemnable acts, and they violate the Shiite imams’ orders.” Moreover, the Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic issued several fatwas on different occasions, in which he clearly forbade “offending Sunni figures and insulting the wives of the prophet.” Several Shiite authorities cooperated with Tayeb’s latest request and issued several fatwas and statements forbidding insulting Sunnis. Shiite authority Hussein al-Sadr issued a detailed statement that noted, “We have reiterated that respecting religious figures and sanctities of each confession and religion is a critical duty imposed by Sharia and religious order on everyone. Besides, it is a humanitarian and moral mission before being a religious duty.” [Sectarianism]
• Why I Am Not Charlie
  • By Scott Long • • January 11, 2015 Scott Long supports free speech, opposes all censors, abhors the killings and mourns the dead, but he isn’t Charlie. There is no “but” about what happened at Charlie Hebdo on January 7. Some people published some cartoons, and some other people killed them for it. Words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence, whether you want to call that plane spirit or imagination or culture, and to meet them with violence is an offense against the spirit and imagination and culture that distinguish humans. Nothing mitigates this monstrosity. There will be time to analyze why the killers did it; time to parse their backgrounds, their ideologies, their beliefs; time for sociologists and psychologists to add to understanding. There will be explanations, and the explanations will be important, but explanations aren’t the same as excuses. Words don’t kill, they must not be met by killing and they will not make the killers’ culpability go away. To abhor what was done to the victims, though, is not the same as to become them. [Charlie]
• America Is Open for Business in Iraq
  January 15, 2015 (Psst... Wanna Buy an M1 Tank?) By Peter Van Buren The current American war in Iraq is a struggle in search of a goal. It began in August as a humanitarian intervention, morphed into a campaign to protect Americans in-country, became a plan to defend the Kurds, followed by a full-on crusade to defeat the new Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS, aka ISIL), and then... well, something in Syria to be determined at a later date. At the moment, Iraq War 3.0 simply drones on, part bombing campaign, part mission to train the collapsed army the U.S. military created for Iraq War 2.0, all amid a miasma of incoherent mainstream media coverage. American troops are tiptoeing closer to combat (assuming you don't count defensive operations, getting mortared, and flying ground attack helicopters as “combat”), even as they act like archaeologists of America’s warring past, exploring the ruins of abandoned U.S. bases. Meanwhile, Shia militias are using the conflict for the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis and Iran has become an ever-more significant player in Iraq's affairs. Key issues of the previous American occupation of the country -- corruption, representative government, oil revenue-sharing -- remain largely unresolved. The Kurds still keep “winning” against the militants of IS in the city of Kobani on the Turkish border without having “won.” In the meantime, Washington’s rallying cry now seems to be: “Wait for the spring offensive!” In translation that means: wait for the Iraqi army to get enough newly American-trained and -armed troops into action to make a move on Mosul. That city is, of course, the country’s second largest and still ruled by the new “caliphate” proclaimed by Islamic State head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. All in all, not exactly inspiring stuff [Strategic incoherence] [Iraq] [Arms sales] [MISCOM]
• Here's What the Swiss Central Bank Just Did and Why It's Such a Shocker
  By Joe Weisenthal January 15, 2015 People follow the development of courses in Zurich after the turbulence at the stock exchange on Jan. 15, 2015. Photographer: Walter Bieri/Keystone via AP Photo People follow the development of courses in Zurich after the turbulence at the stock exchange on Jan. 15, 2015. Today the Swiss National Bank shocked the world when it announced it would remove the cap it had in place to prevent the Swiss franc from rising too high against the euro. Here's what that means and what it's all about. Switzerland has a long reputation for having an incredibly stable financial system (everyone knows about its legendary banks). In 2011, during the scariest times for the euro zone, the country's safe-haven status turned the nation into an island of tranquility. Money poured into it from elsewhere in the euro zone as investors sought a safe place to park their cash. Of course, with everyone wanting to have their money in Switzerland, the franc exploded in value. In early 2010 one franc was less than 0.7 euro. By the middle of 2011 the franc was nearly at parity against the euro, a massive move in a very short period. [Currency] Crisis]
• Charlie Hebdo and the hypocrisy of pencils
  11 January 2015 | Corey Oakley It was Herald Sun cartoonist Mark Knight who tipped me over the edge. To be fair, he wasn’t wholly responsible. If it wasn’t for all the lunacy that preceded him, I probably would have dismissed his cartoon as just another Herald Sun atrocity, more a piece of Murdoch-madness to be mocked rather than trigger for outrage. But context is everything. And after days of sanctimonious blather about freedom of speech and the Enlightenment values of Western civilisation, his was one pencil-warfare cartoon too many. The cartoon in question depicts two men – masked and armed Arab terrorists (is there any other kind of Arab?) – with a hail of bomb-like objects raining down on their heads. Only the bombs aren’t bombs. They are pens, pencils and quills. Get it? In the face of a medieval ideology that only understands the language of the gun, the West – the heroic, Enlightenment-inspired West – responds by reaffirming its commitment to resist barbarism with the weapons of ideas and freedom of expression. It is a stirring narrative repeated ad nauseam in newspapers across the globe. They have been filled with depictions of broken pencils re-sharpened to fight another day, or editorials declaring that we will defeat terrorism by our refusal to stop mocking Islam. It is well past time to call bullshit. Knight’s cartoon made the point exceptionally clear, but every image that invoked the idea that Western culture could and would defend itself from Islamist extremism by waging a battle of ideas demonstrated the same historical and political amnesia. Reality could not be more at odds with this ludicrous narrative. For the last decade and a half the United States, backed to varying degrees by the governments of other Western countries, has rained violence and destruction on the Arab and Muslim world with a ferocity that has few parallels in the history of modern warfare. It was not pencils and pens – let alone ideas – that left Iraq, Gaza and Afghanistan shattered and hundreds of thousands of human beings dead. Not twelve. Hundreds of thousands. All with stories, with lives, with families. Tens of millions who have lost friends, family, homes and watched their country be torn apart. [Charlie] [Hypocrisy] [Inversion]
• Four top Secret Service executives told to leave their posts in agency shake-up
  By Carol D. Leonnig January 14 at 8:53 PM ? The Secret Service is forcing out four of its most senior officials while two others are retiring — the biggest management shake-up at the troubled agency since its director resigned in October after a string of security lapses. The departures will gut much of the Secret Service’s upper management, which has been criticized in recent months by lawmakers and administration officials who say it has fostered a culture of distrust between agency leaders and its rank-and-file and made poor decisions that helped erode the quality of this once elite agency. Acting director Joseph P. Clancy on Tuesday informed the four assistant directors who oversee the Secret Service’s core missions of protection, investigations, technology and public affairs that they must leave their leadership positions. If they do not resign or retire, they can report for a new assignment with the Secret Service or its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the discussions. “Change is necessary to gain a fresh perspective on how we conduct business,” Clancy said in a statement to The Washington Post. “I am certain any of our senior executives will be productive and valued assets either in other positions at the Secret Service or the department.” The departures of six out of the agency’s eight assistant directors follows a scathing report last month by a DHS-appointed panel that concluded the agency is suffering from low morale among the rank-and-file and is “starved for leadership.”
• GOP hopefuls scramble for the money people
  By David Lightman McClatchy Washington Bureau January 14, 2015 Updated 7 hours ago CORONADO, Calif. — The primary of the wealthy is underway. It’s conducted almost entirely behind closed doors. No one holds public rallies or runs ads. Instead, potential candidates are courting the wealthy who can make the first crucial decision of whether a candidate should run for the White House. Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts are already eagerly campaigning for the support of the people who’d finance their campaigns for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination – or freeze them out. Romney made his first pitch to wealthy donors in the New York office of an NFL owner. Bush also huddled with potential financial backers last week in New York, and reportedly will head to Washington next week to woo lobbyists and other potential donors. [Election] [Plutocracy] [Democracy] [Governance] [Oligarch]
• UN rights chief urges Saudi king to halt flogging of blogger
  GENEVA Thu Jan 15, 2015 (Reuters) - The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Saudi Arabia on Thursday to stop the serial flogging of an atheist and civil rights blogger sentenced to receive 1,000 lashes over an extended period. Raif Badawi, who set up a website called "Free Saudi Liberals", received 50 lashes after Friday prayers last week and global rights groups say he is expected to be submitted to a second round on Friday. "Flogging is in my view at very least a form of cruel and inhuman punishment," High Commissioner Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in a statement from his Geneva office. As such, it was banned under international rights law, he added. "I appeal to the King of Saudi Arabia to exercise his power to halt the public flogging by pardoning Mr Badawi, and to urgently review this type of extraordinary harsh penalty," said Zeid, a former Jordanian diplomat. Badawi was arrested in June 2012 and prosecutors originally asked that he be tried for apostasy - or leaving his religion, an offense which carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. But a judge dismissed that charge and he was given 10 years jail and a fine of 1 million Saudi rials ($267,666), as well as the lashes, on charges including cybercrime after an earlier sentence of seven years and 600 lashes was found too lenient. The U.N. statement said Badawi was "convicted for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of opinion and expression" in a series of prosecutions of civil society activists, including his lawyer and brother-in-law, Waleed Abu al-Khair. [Human rights] [Saudi Arabia]
• Misinformed expert or misinformation network?
  David Miller and Tom Mills 15 January 2015 Terrorism "expert" Steve Emerson is more than a comic buffoon. His claims about no-go zones for non-Muslims in European cities are just part of a wealthy network spreading Islamophobia across the west. On Sunday, the veteran terrorism expert Steven Emerson appeared on Fox News to discuss Europe's Muslim population and claimed that Birmingham was an example of a 'totally Muslim [city] where non-Muslims just simply don't go in'. The claim led to him being ridiculed online, and after the news media picked up on the story he issued an apology to 'the beautiful city of Birmingham' for his 'terrible error'. So high profile was the story, that the Prime Minister David Cameron felt moved to comment, reportedly describing Emerson as 'a complete idiot'. The claims were idiotic. But Emerson is not simply an 'idiot', or a hopelessly misinformed 'expert'. An examination of his background, the sources of his ideas, and the funding for his think tank the Investigative Project on Terrorism, show that he is part of what the Center for American Progress in a widely cited 2011 report Fear Inc. described as ‘a small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts’ that ‘peddle hate and fear of Muslims and Islam’. [Think tanks] [Islamophobia] [Softwar]
• The Curious Case of David Cohen: The Follies of a Target-Obsessed Government
  by Andrew Cockburn The nomination of David Cohen, currently Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, to be deputy director of the CIA means more more than just the appointment of a seasoned apparatchik, popular on Capitol Hill, to high intelligence rank. It represents the fusion in one agency of the two principal strands of American power projection. The CIA has become notorious around the world in recent years for its leading role in incinerating high value targets with drone-fired missiles. This campaign, enthusiastically endorsed by President Obama, has been based on the presumption that the removal of individuals identified as enemy leaders is to the benefit of the United States. Meanwhile, over at the U.S. Treasury, officials with a high degree of shared continuity in the job – Cohen has been intimately involved in this strategy for ten years — have worked to perfect the use of economic sanctions to target selected individuals. Whereas once upon a time entire nations would be collectively sanctioned, as in the case of Cuba in the Kennedy Administration, recently developed techniques permit the economic incineration of a specific target. Just as drones killchain2commanded from Nevada can strike across the globe, so economic missiles launched from Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, housed across the street from the main building, are directed at distant targets regardless of whether the U.S. has jurisdiction- the mere threat to freeze a bank, or a bank with which the target does business, out of the New York money market is almost invariably enough to do the job. Thus the French bank BNP Paribas was fined last June for dealing with Sudan, and obediently paid up, while shipments of food and medicine to Iran, supposedly exempt from sanctions, are held up because banks are fearful of possibly attracting condign punishment for financing the trade. Interestingly, these two modes of offensive warfare employ similar language. [Assassination] [Personalisation] [Sanctions]
• Israeli newspaper edits out Angela Merkel from front page on Paris march
  Small Jewish ultra-orthodox newspaper Hamevaser digitally removed female world leaders present at Sunday’s unity march after Charlie Hebdo attacks • theguardian.com, Wednesday 14 January 2015 17.44 GMT • A crop of the photo from Hamevaser’s front page. Merkel who marched next to François Hollande was digitally removed. Photograph: Israel Sun/Rex A small Jewish ultra-Orthodox newspaper in Israel has found itself in the spotlight after digitally removing Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel from a photo of this week’s Paris march. World leaders had linked arms to march in Paris against terrorism after Islamic extremists killed 17 people. At the march, Merkel stood in the front row between the French president, François Hollande, and Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. But readers of the Hamevaser newspaper’s Monday edition didn’t know, as she had been digitally removed, leaving Abbas standing next to Hollande. Israeli media joked it was meant to bring Abbas closer to Israeli premier Binyamin Netanyahu, who was standing nearby. The un-edited line-up of world leaders at the unity march in Paris on Sunday. Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/AP Within the insular ultra-Orthodox community, pictures of women are rarely shown, due to modesty concerns. In Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox vandals frequently deface buses and billboards with advertising deemed to be immodest. ‘Including a picture of a woman into something so sacred, as far as we are concerned, it can desecrate the memory of the martyrs and not the other way around,” Hamevaser’s editor said. Photograph: Israel Sun/Rex The picture in Hamevaser also cut out other women, like the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, though the newspaper clumsily left her dark glove on the sleeve of a marcher. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, was cropped out.
  Binyamin Lipkin, editor of Hamevaser, said the newspaper is a family publication that must be suitable for all audiences, including young children. “The eight-year-old can’t see what I don’t want him to see,” he told Israel’s Channel 10 television station. “True, a picture of Angela Merkel should not ruin the child, but if I draw a line, I have to put it there from the bottom all the way to the top.”
  He also said he did not want to tarnish the memories of the people killed in the attacks.
  “Including a picture of a woman into something so sacred, as far as we are concerned, it can desecrate the memory of the martyrs and not the other way around,” he said. [Bizarre] [Religion] [Gender]
• Where is the outrage?
  Ahmed E. Souaiaia 14 January 2015 Europe’s hypocrisy and latent racism was also displayed after the Paris attacks. On January 11, 2015, an estimated 1.6 million people walked the streets of Paris as part of a “unity march” in reaction to the recent attack in the French capital. Some 40 world leaders joined the march. Other high-profile individuals also recognized the attack and the march—for instance, George Clooney and other actors referred to the events as they received awards on January 11. “Paris is the capital of the world today,” declared Francois Hollande. Those who are informed of current events know that every day people are killed by the violence that was unleashed by the opportunistic manipulators of the Arab Spring and the invasion of Iraq before that. It is perplexing to see world leaders converging on Paris, the media saturated with news about the attack, and the large unity march in response to the attack. Why are we expected to respond to these events with unity when indiscriminate violence, illegal wars, and genocidal massacres have taken the lives of people in Muslim countries every day for the past four years? Where is the outrage when—just one day before the march in Paris—al-Nusra genocidal bombers, financed and armed by Qatar and Turkey and their western allies, killed at least 7 people and wounded more than 30 in a cafe in Tripoli, Lebanon?
  The unity march was a shameful display by opportunists to capitalize on the blood of innocent people. Instead of that hypocritical exercise, world leaders should have reached out to the primary victims of terrorism and shown true unity by displaying equal outrage for offenses committed against them. They should have shown some sincere sympathy towards the victims of genocidal killing in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. If western leaders wanted to fight extremism and supremacism, they would not distinguish between a life lost to terrorism in Paris and a life lost to terrorism in Baghdad and Damascus, even when they disagree with the political leaders in those capitals. [Charlie] [Hypocrisy]
• Pundit on Fox News claims that Birmingham is ‘totally Muslim’ city
  Steven Emerson later apologises for error as Twitter rounds on his view of Islam in Britain under the hashtag #FoxNewsFacts Fox News’ speaks to ‘expert’ Steve Emerson Kevin Rawlinson Sunday 11 January 2015 23.37 GMT Non-Muslims do not go to the British city of Birmingham, which has become a “totally Muslim” city, it has been claimed. Speaking on US news channel Fox News, Steven Emerson – who claims to be a “terrorism expert” – also said that gangs of religious police in parts of London beat up people who are not wearing Islamic clothes. Emerson later apologised for his comments, which he admitted were “totally in error”, and said he was planning to make a donation to the Birmingham Children’s hospital. Emerson appeared as part of Fox News coverage of the recent series of murders in Paris, including the attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He said: “In Britain, it’s not just no-go zones, there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in. “And, parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to religious Muslim attire.” According to census data, around 850,000 non-Muslims live in Birmingham, accounting for approximately 80% of the near 1.1 million population of Britain’s second largest city. Emerson’s claims drew both criticism and ridicule, with many people mocking his view of Islam in Britain on Twitter under the hashtag #FoxNewsFacts. In a statement, Emerson said he made a “terrible error” for which he was “deeply sorry”. He said: “My comments about Birmingham were totally in error. And I am issuing an apology and correction on my website immediately for having made this comment about the beautiful city of Birmingham. “I do not intend to justify or mitigate my mistake by stating that I had relied on other sources because I should have been much more careful. “There was no excuse for making this mistake and I owe an apology to every resident of Birmingham. I am not going to make any excuses. I made an inexcusable error. And I am obligated to openly acknowledge that mistake. “I intend to make a donation to Birmingham Children’s Hospital.” Fox News did not respond to a request for comment. [Media] [Canard] [Islam] [Hysteria]
• Sen. Skewers Trade Rep. For 'Incomprehensible' TPP Secrecy
  By Alex Lawson Law360, New York (January 05, 2015, 5:32 PM ET) -- U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Monday blasted the Obama administration for an “incomprehensible” lack of transparency surrounding the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and called for the release of the full version of the current TPP text. In a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, Sanders said it was “troubling” and “unacceptable” that he and other lawmakers have only been able to get a thorough look at the TPP deal through scattered leaks of various chapters. “It is incomprehensible to me that the leaders of major corporate interests who stand to gain enormous financial benefits from this agreement are actively involved in the writing of the TPP while, at the same time, the elected officials of this country, representing the American people, have little or no knowledge as to what is in it,” Sanders wrote. “In my view, this is simply unacceptable.” [TPP] [Corporation] [Democracy]
• Exclusive: Cuba has freed all 53 prisoners as agreed in U.S. deal - U.S. officials
  By Matt Spetalnick, David Adams and Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON/HAVANA Mon Jan 12, 2015 (Reuters) - Cuba has released all 53 prisoners it had promised to free, senior U.S. officials said, a major step toward détente with Washington. The release of the remaining prisoners sets a positive tone for historic talks next week aimed at normalizing relations after decades of hostility, the officials said. They described the Cuban government’s release over the weekend of the last detainees on the list as a milestone but said they would keep pressing Havana to free more people the United States considers political prisoners. The officials, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, did not say how many prisoners were released over the weekend or identify them. But the White House will provide the names of all 53 to Congress and expects lawmakers to make them public, the officials added. There had been questions over whether Havana would release all 53 prisoners as part of the deal Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced on Dec. 17 to restore diplomatic ties that Washington severed more than 50 years ago. Intense secrecy surrounding the 53, whose names have been withheld by both countries, had fueled skepticism over Cuba’s intentions and played to critics who said Washington hasn't pressured Havana enough on human rights in exchange for normalizing ties and loosening economic and travel restrictions. The U.S. exchanged three convicted Cuban spies for an agent who had spied for the U.S. government. The United States also received Alan Gross, a U.S. aid worker jailed in Cuba. The Cuban government informed the Obama administration over the weekend that the last of those on the list of prisoners had been released, and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, which handles consular affairs and other contacts for Washington, confirmed it, the officials said. The U.S. officials said they would pressure communist-ruled Cuba to release more prisoners. "The fact of the matter is there are other individuals whose cases we have raised in the past," one of the officials said. "We have every expectation of going forward in the future. We’re going to be wanting to raise the cases of different individuals who may be detained in Cuba for exercising their universal rights." Cuba's government says there are no political prisoners on the island and typically describes dissidents as U.S.-paid mercenaries. [Prisoners] [Cuba] [Double standards]
• Mourning Charlie Hebdo Journalists, While Ignoring that US-NATO State-Sponsored Terrorism is the “Number One Killer” of Journalists
  By Julie Lévesque Global Research, January 10, 2015 In the wake of the terrorist attack by self-proclaimed Al-Qaeda operatives killing 12 people including 8 journalists from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the Western elite and mainstream media display of compassion and indignation highlights their complaisance towards Western and Israeli state terrorism. Before exploring the broader issue, it should be noted that while the Paris attacks bear the hallmarks of a possible false flag, such as the ID card left in the car by one terrorist, an examination of the false flag hypothesis is excluded outright, completely ignored by the mainstream media. Moreover, one of the alleged terrorists, Cherif Kouachi told a French news outlet he had been financed by former Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki, an American cleric who dined at the Pentagon a few months after 9/11 and «worked as a triple agent and an FBI asset well before 9/11», according to U.S. Lt.Col. Anthony Shaffer. (Kurt Nimmo, FBI Admits Pentagon Dinner Guest Al-Awlaki Worked for Them, Infowars, August 2, 2012) Since the deadly attacks on January 7, 2015, the Western media, especially the French Canadian media, claim in a very ethnocentric manner that “the planet is mourning” the death of the French journalists. This tragic event which needs to be condemned must be examined in an appropriate context. People in countries where France has been bombing civilians, through NATO and U.S.-led military invasions, and where Western-backed terrorists kill innocent civilians (Libya, Syria) are routinely mourning the death of their own people. These deaths remain unreported. The Western world is not “the planet” and not “everyone is Charlie”, contrary to what the media leads us to believe. [Charlie] [Double standards]
• No, we’re not all Charlie Hebdo, nor should we be
  Ben Hayes 9 January 2015 I respect your right to show solidarity with the victims of this horrible crime by reposting those drawings, but only if you respect my right not to do so because I happen to find them bigoted and incendiary. There is nothing new about people suspending their critical faculties in the aftermath of terrorist attacks; unconscionable atrocities are by their very nature easier to denounce than understand. Such a retreat from reason is inevitably accompanied by attacks on those who seek it out. After 9/11, merely suggesting that the attacks might have had something to do with US foreign policy was akin to treason; today it is Charlie Hebdo that is beyond reproach. Now, as then, these constraints should disturb. It is no more than a simple statement of fact that among the reasons a number of the magazine’s staff were selected for assassination by maniacs was its predilection for Muslim-baiting – this is not a justification, not an excuse, not a defence – but a relevant part of the historical record. Yet, just as in September 2001, you’d be most ill-advised to mention it, lest you wish to be branded a “victim-blamer”, a “weasel excuser of murder”, or much worse. [Charlie] [Double standards] [Free speech]
• From Syria to Paris
  by Patrick Cockburn There is a feeling of inevitability about the attack in Paris. The likelihood must be that the killers were Islamic fanatics, the murder of the journalists and police underlining the degree to which the ferocious religious war being waged in Iraq and Syria now affects all of the world. Regardless of whether or not those who attacked the Charlie Hebdo office have any direct connection with this conflict, it has provided an ideal seedbed for Islamic extremism. It was culpably naïve to imagine that sparks from the Iraq-Syrian civil war, now in its fourth year, would not spread explosive violence to Western Europe. With thousands of young Sunni Muslims making the difficult journey to Syria and Iraq to fight for Isis, it has always been probable that some of them would choose to give a demonstration of their religious faith by attacking targets they deem anti-Islamic closer to home. One way of measuring the spread of al-Qaeda-type groups is to look at suicide bombings over the last week. Several of them have inflicted heavier casualties than at Charlie Hebdo. For instance, in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, today, a suicide bomber driving a minibus packed with explosives killed 33 police cadets. On Tuesday, another suicide bomber killed 23 Iraqi soldiers and pro-government Sunni tribesmen in a town in Anbar province north-west of Baghdad. The day before, gunfire and a suicide bombing killed the general heading the Saudi border control force and two others on the Saudi-Iraq frontier. A week earlier, on 30 December, a suicide bomb blew up outside the internationally recognised anti-jihadi Libyan government building in Tobruk. In this widening sea of violence, regardless of who carried out the Paris massacre, it would be surprising if Western European states remained unaffected. One of the characteristics of the modern jihadi movement has been to commit highly public atrocities both as a method of intimidation and as a demonstration of the religious commitment of those carrying them out. [Jihadist] [Syria] [Charlie] [Blowback]
• 88,000 French police in furious search fail to find Paris gunmen
  By Matthew Schofield McClatchy Foreign Staff January 8, 2015 Updated 7 hours ago PARIS — The French manhunt for two brothers suspected of killing 12 people in and around the offices of a satirical weekly newspaper in Paris continued late into a second night Thursday, with as many as 88,000 police scouring an area 50 miles north of the capital. The manhunt for brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, Paris natives reportedly with years of links to al Qaida, focused on the towns of Villers-Cotterets, Longpont and Corcy after a gas station attendant said the two men had robbed him earlier Thursday, stealing food and gas. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/08/252480_88000-french-police-in-furious.html?sp=/99/100/&rh=1#storylink=cpy [Charlie]
• Shooters in Paris terror attack still free as ties to Syria fighting probed
  By Matthew Schofield McClatchy Foreign Staff January 7, 2015 BERLIN — The terror attack Wednesday that killed 12 people at the Paris offices of a satirical newspaper known for running cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad wasn’t a total surprise. Europe, France and even the newspaper have been preparing for such an attack for months. Europe has been on high alert as anti-terror experts voiced alarm at the thousands of Europeans who’ve gone to Syria and Iraq to fight on behalf of the Islamic State and other terror organizations, and who security experts warned would return to their home countries trained and radicalized. The attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices seemed to bear those worries out. French news outlets reported late Wednesday that police had identified three suspects; two were brothers of French-Algerian extraction who were reported to have returned from Syria this past summer. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/07/252316/suspects-in-paris-terror-attack.html#storylink=cpy [Charlie] [Syria] [Jihadist] [Blowback]
• Charlie Hebdo and Tsarnaev’s Trial: Cui bono?
  January 8, 2015 Paul Craig Roberts There are two ways to look at the alleged terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. One is that in the English speaking world, or much of it, the satire would have been regarded as “hate speech,” and the satirists arrested. But in France Muslims are excluded from the privileged category, took offense at the satire, and retaliated. Why would Muslims bother? By now Muslims must be accustomed to Western hypocrisy and double standards. Little doubt that Muslims are angry that they do not enjoy the protections other minorities receive, but why retaliate for satire but not for France’s participation in Washington’s wars against Muslims in which hundreds of thousands have died? Isn’t being killed more serious than being satirized? Another way of seeing the attack is as an attack designed to shore up France’s vassal status to Washington. The suspects can be both guilty and patsies. Just remember all the terrorist plots created by the FBI that served to make the terrorism threat real to Americans. [Charlie] [Terrorism] [Manipulation]
• Regional powers fighting proxy war in Libya
  The talks sponsored by the United Nations between Libya’s warring factions scheduled for Jan. 5 were postponed. This new delay follows previous, repeatedly postponed attempts resulting from a lack of consensus on the agenda and who should take part in the talks. Meanwhile, events on the ground continue to change by the day, making it increasingly more difficult to reach agreement on certain details and technicalities. The world’s major powers are doing little to stop rival regional blocs from exacerbating the violence in Libya, despite having several UN Security Council resolutions at their disposal to help them do so. Author Mustafa Fetouri Posted January 8, 2015 Over the last four weeks, fighting has taken a serious turn, as Libya Dawn, a collation of Islamists and fighters from Misrata, attacked the biggest oil exporting terminal at Sidra, east of Sirte, setting at least five oil tanks ablaze and burning nearly 1 million barrels of crude oil, costing the country an estimated $1 billion. On the other hand, the Libyan army, led by the recently reinstated Gen. Khalifa Hifter, retaliated with airstrikes, targeting logistical and militia targets in Misrata itself for the first time. This development sends a clear message to Libya Dawn leaders and Misrata militias that their hometown is not immune. Since the recent violence erupted last July, hundreds of civilians have been killed and thousands more displaced. A UN report released Dec. 23 documents at least 450 deaths in Benghazi alone, while highlighting the broader destruction visited across the country by the warring groups. If anything, this indicates how difficult and complicated the task is for Bernardino Leon, head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). The Spanish diplomat has visited Tripoli and Tobruk numerous times in his effort to get the two governments to agree on a dialogue to bring about a political settlement to Libya's escalating crisis. The fighting in Libya is increasingly becoming a proxy war between regional players vying for influence in the shattered, oil-rich country, which has been in turmoil since NATO intervened to help destroy the government of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. This regional dimension of the crisis must be understood if any settlement is to be reached and spare the country from further bloodshed and destruction. By doing so, Leon must by now have realized that a local solution without international involvement is no longer possible. After four years of fighting and militia domination, Libya has passed the stage of finding its own cure to its political and security mess. Sudan, Turkey and Qatar have joined forces, each for its own interest, to meddle in Libyan affairs. While Doha provides arms to the Islamists, Khartoum and Ankara provide political and logistical support to the illegitimate government set up by Libya Dawn in Tripoli after it conquered the capital in August. The trio has been acting within a broader strategy of helping Islamists in the region gain power. On the other hand, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been supporting the elected government, although not for Libya’s sake, but for their own purposes. Egypt is trying to make sure that its own fleeing extremists do not find safe harbor across its western border. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are acting within the broader regional context of countering the pro-Islamist Doha-Ankara axis. [Libya] [Client] [Proxy]
• Killing Charlie: Cui Bono?
  by Pepe Escobar Putin did it. Sorry, he didn’t. In the end, it was not Russia “aggression” that attacked the heart of Europe. It was a pro-style jihadi commando. Cui bono? Careful planning and preparation; Kalashnikovs; rocket-propelled grenade launcher; balaclavas; sand-colored ammunition vest stuffed with spare magazines; army boots; piece of cake escape in a black Citroen. And the icing on the lethal cake; faultless Paris-based logistical support to pull that off. A former top French military commander, Frederic Gallois, has stressed the perfect application of “urban guerrilla technique” (where are those notorious Western counter-terrorism “experts” when one needs them?) They might have spoken perfect French; others said it was broken French. Anyway, what matters is that they uttered the magic word; “We’re al-Qaeda.” Better yet; they told a man in the street, “Tell the media that this is al-Qaeda in Yemen”, which means, in American terror terminology, al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP), which had Charlie Hebdo’s editor/cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier (“Charb”) on a hit list duly promoted by AQAP’s glossy magazine Inspire. Accusation: “Insulting the Prophet Mohammed.” And just to make sure everyone had the perpetrators implanted on their brain, the killers also said, “Allahu Akbar”; “We have killed Charlie Hebdo”; and “We have avenged the Prophet.” Case closed? Well, it took only a few hours for French police to identify the (usual?) suspects; French-Algerian brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi. The third man – the driver of the black Citroen, 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad – then turned himself in with an ironclad alibi. So the third man remains a cipher. They all wore balaclavas. The Kouachi brothers have not been captured. But the police seem to know very well who they are. Because they found an abandoned ID in the black Citroen (oh, the troubles of being a command in a rush …) How come they didn’t know anything before the carnage? [Charlie]
• What to Say When You Have Nothing to Say?
  by Diana Johnstone Paris. What do you say when you have nothing to say? That is the dilemma suddenly thrust on political leaders and editorialists in France since three masked gunmen entered the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and massacred a dozen people. The assassins got away. But not for long. The men were well-armed killers. Charlie Hebdo regularly received death threats since publishing derisive cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed several years ago. But the controversy seemed to be largely forgotten, the weekly’s circulation had declined (like the press in general) and police protection had been relaxed. The two policemen still on guard were easily shot by the gunmen before they entered the offices in the midst of an editorial meeting. Rarely were so many cartoonists and writers present at once. Twelve people were slaughtered with automatic weapons, and eleven others wounded, some critically. In addition to the cartoonist known as Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier, age 47) who was current editor in chief of the magazine, the victims included the two best-known cartoonists in France: Cabu (Jean Cabut, age 76), Georges Wolinski (80 years old). A couple of generations have grown up with Cabu and Wolinski, gentle mirrors of the sentiments of the French left. As they left, one killer came back to finish off a policeman who lay wounded in the street. They stopped to shout: “The Prophet is avenged!” Then they fled toward the northeastern suburbs. Crowds gathered spontaneously in the Place de la République in Paris, not far from the tiny street where the Charlie Hebdo had its offices. Brave, false slogans spread: “We are Charlie!” But they are not. “Charlie lives!” No, it doesn’t. It has been just about wiped out. Everyone is shocked. That goes without saying. This was cold-blooded murder, an unpardonable crime. That also goes without saying, but everyone will be saying it. And there is a lot more that everyone will be saying, such as “we will not allow Islamic extremists to intimidate us and take away our freedom of speech”, and so on. President François Hollande naturally stressed that France is united against the assassins. Initial reactions to an atrocity of this sort are predictable. “We will not be intimidated! We will not give up our freedoms!” Yes and no. [Charlie]
• Shooters in Paris terror attack still free as ties to Syria fighting probed
  By Matthew Schofield McClatchy Foreign Staff January 7, 2015 Updated 3 hours ago BERLIN — The terror attack Wednesday that killed 12 people at the Paris offices of a satirical newspaper known for running cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad wasn’t a total surprise. Europe, France and even the newspaper have been preparing for such an attack for months. Europe has been on high alert as anti-terror experts voiced alarm at the thousands of Europeans who’ve gone to Syria and Iraq to fight on behalf of the Islamic State and other terror organizations, and who security experts warned would return to their home countries trained and radicalized. The attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices seemed to bear those worries out. French news outlets reported late Wednesday that police had identified three suspects; two were brothers of French-Algerian extraction who were reported to have returned from Syria this past summer. The French website Le Point said the brothers were Said and Cherif Kouachi, 32 and 34, respectively, and that they had been pegged from an identity card left in their abandoned getaway car. The website said a third man, Hamyd Mourad, 18, had served as the getaway driver, though later news reports cast doubt on whether he’d played a role in the shootings. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/07/252316_suspects-in-paris-terror-attack.html?sp=/99/117/&rh=1#storylink=cpy [Jihadist] [Blowback] [Charlie]
• What's holding up Iran nuclear deal?
  Iran and the P5+1 — the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany — failed to reach a final deal on Iran's nuclear program before the Nov. 24, 2014, deadline. However, they agreed in Vienna to a new March 2015 deadline for a political agreement and a final agreement (inclusive of annexes) by July 1. The next round of talks is scheduled for mid-January. The US Congress must give diplomacy a real chance and not hinder nuclear negotiations with Iran. AuthorSeyed Hossein Mousavian Posted January 7, 2015 Informed European sources told me that the negotiators were on the verge of announcing a political agreement in Vienna, but it was blocked for apparently unknown reasons. US Secretary of State John Kerry said: "In recent weeks, we have seen new ideas surface, flexibility emerge, that could, I repeat, could help resolve some issues, that had been intractable." Interestingly enough, just a few days after the November marathon talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that “Israel had a critical role in stopping a deal with Iran.” [Iran] [US Negotiating] {Israel] [NPT]
• Yemen falling out of Saudi’s grasp
  Although Khaled Bahah's government obtained the confidence of Yemen's parliament in December and officially started carrying out its duties, the political and military situation in Yemen is getting worse and more complex, as a result of the growing power of Islamist (Shiite and Sunni) militants. It's the last thing that Saudi Arabia would have hoped for, after its alliance with Yemen’s main tribes broke down. Summary? Print Saudi Arabia is struggling to form an effective Yemen strategy as its three main adversaries — the Shiite Houthis, al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood — continue to dominate the Yemeni arena. Author Ibrahim al-Hatlani Posted January 7, 2015 Besides the traditional dangers that Saudi security has been facing across its border with Yemen for decades, such as weapon and drug smuggling and even infiltration and people smuggling, the sharp rise of the Houthis’ Ansar Allah militia is a new danger threatening southern regions of Saudi Arabia. This is especially true since gains made by the Houthis and their military control over the Hajjah governorate, 123 kilometers (76 miles) northwest of Sanaa, is adjacent to the Saudi border. This prompted the Saudis to declare a state of military alert on its border with Yemen in October 2014. The security concern — existent in Riyadh since the Houthi influence was extended to Saada, 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the predominantly Shiite Saudi city of Najran — will deepen amid another media and diplomatic embarrassment: Riyadh will have to deal with the Sanaa government, which includes political and military officials belonging to the Houthi militia. This group was placed on the Saudi terrorist list last March. [Saudi Arabia] [Sectarianism]
• Libya conflict threatens entire Maghreb
  French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has constantly warned against the increasing presence of extremist organizations and movements in southern Libya and about the area turning into a safe haven for groups the French army expelled from northern Mali last year. Senior US officials and some military leaders, like Gen. David Rodriguez, the US military commander in Africa, also warned against this “unprecedented” phenomenon. As Libya descends further into chaos, and the likelihood of any political or military intervention seems unlikely, the whole of North Africa is threatened with a Syria-Iraq style takeover by Islamic State militants. Author Faisal Jalloul Posted January 7, 2015 Moreover, regional warnings [concerning the movement of groups] have been issued by Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. Reportedly, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an [Algerian] jihadist who settled in north Mali before moving to south Libya, executed the Amenas operation in south Algeria [in which an al-Qaeda-linked group affiliated with Belmokhtar took expat hostages at the Tigantourine gas facility in January 2013]. Tunisian authorities believe that there are strong links between Jebel ech Chambi militants and the supporters of the Islamic State (IS) in south Libya. In Egypt, information indicates that terrorist groups in Sinai have received training and weapons in Libya. Although Le Drian classified this phenomenon as the “most dangerous” because it goes against “the international system and its values,” no one has responded to his call for a quick military intervention in Libya. This includes French President Francois Hollande, who rejected the option for military intervention in Libya in an interview last Monday [Jan. 5]. This means that the “unprecedented phenomenon” is likely to expand and shake the stability of the Maghreb, which has not yet been marred by the “creative and destructive” chaos sweeping the Middle East. [Libya] [Outsourcing] [Blowback] [Jihadists]
• A Timeline: Where did the Paris Shooters Get Their Weapons?
  By Tony Cartalucci Global Research, January 08, 2015 Heavily armed, well-trained gunmen executed what appears to be a well-planned attack in Paris, France, killing 12, including 2 police officers. Where did these terrorists get their weapons, training, political backing, funds, and inspiration? A short timeline featuring news stories from 2011 to 2014 helps explain how France’s recent national tragedy could have been the direct result of its own insidious, callous, terroristic foreign policy that has visited this very same carnage seen in Paris, upon the people of Libya and Syria, a thousand fold. 2011 - France supplying weapons to Libyan rebels, London Telegraph: A French military spokesman, Colonel Thierry Burkhard, said it had provided “light arms such as assault rifles” for civilian communities to “protect themselves against Col Gaddafi”. But the decision to arm the rebels is a further move towards direct involvement in the land war on top of the air war against Col Muammar Gaddafi. The Nafusa rebels have come closest to breaking through to Tripoli itself of any of the front lines of the conflict, while three months of Nato bombing have failed to dislodge Col Gaddafi from power. Le Figaro, the French newspaper which first reported the air drops, said the shipment included rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, along with Milan anti-tank missiles. 2011 - Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links, London Telegraph: Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. 2012 - France to push for arming Syria’s opposition coalition, the BBC: France’s foreign minister has said he will discuss supplying arms to the Syrian opposition coalition with European partners. The government plans to push for a relaxation of the EU arms embargo to Syria to enable “defensive arms” to reach opposition fighters. 2013 - Syria crisis: France and Britain move a step closer to arming rebels, the London Guardian: France and Britain have moved a step closer to arming the opposition to the Assad regime in a radical move aimed at tipping the balance in the two-year civil war while also ignoring European policy on Syria. The French president, François Hollande, went into an EU summit in Brussels with a dramatic appeal for Europe to join Paris and London in lifting a European arms embargo, but the sudden policy shift was certain to run into stiff German opposition. 2013 - Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda, USA Today: A Syrian rebel group’s April pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda’s replacement for Osama bin Laden suggests that the terrorist group’s influence is not waning and that it may take a greater role in the Western-backed fight to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. The pledge of allegiance by Syrian Jabhat al Nusra Front chief Abou Mohamad al-Joulani to al-Qaeda leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri was coupled with an announcement by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, that it would work with al Nusra as well. 2014 - France delivered arms to Syrian rebels, Hollande confirms, France 24: President Francois Hollande said on Thursday that France had delivered weapons to rebels battling the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad “a few months ago.” France Isn’t the Only One The cartoonish nature of France first being reported to give weapons to “rebels” before these “rebels” are reported to be, in fact, Al Qaeda is not simply France’s bad luck. It is part of NATO’s very intentional, vast network of global state-sponsored terrorism. [Jihadists] [Outsourcing] [Blowback] [Charlie]
• Palestine and the ICC
  by Robert Fisk Throw an old dog a bone and sure enough, he’ll go chasing after it. So it is with “Palestine’s” request to join the International Criminal Court. An obvious attempt by Mahmoud Abbas to try Israel for war crimes in Gaza this year, we are told. Or maybe a “two-edged sword” – yawns are permitted for such clichés – which could also put Hamas “in the dock”. Israel was outraged. The US was “strongly opposed” to such a dastardly request by the elderly potentate who thinks he rules a state which doesn’t even exist. But hold on a moment. That isn’t the story, is it? Surely the real narrative is totally different. The BBC didn’t get this. Nor CNN. Nor even Al Jazeera. But surely the most significant event of all is that the descendants of the PLO – excoriated only a quarter of a century ago as the most dangerous “terrorist” organisation in the world, its mendacious leader Yasser Arafat branded “our Bin Laden” by Israel’s mendacious leader Ariel Sharon – actually wants TO ABIDE BY INTERNATIONAL LAW! Heavens preserve us from such a thought, but these chappies – after all their past calls for Israel’s extinction, after all the suicide bombings and intifadas – are asking to join one of the most prestigious judicial bodies on earth. For years, the Palestinians have demanded justice. They went to the international court in The Hague to have Israel’s apartheid wall dismantled – they even won, and Israel didn’t give a hoot. Any sane Palestinian, you might think, would long ago have turned his or her back on such peaceful initiatives. Yet still these wretched Palestinians persist, after this most humiliating of insults, in resorting to international law to resolve their conflict with Israel. Here they go again, dutifully seeking membership of the International Criminal Court. Will these Arabs never learn? [ICC] [Double standards] [Israel] [Palestine]
• A History of America’s War on Whistleblowers and Journalists Since 9/11
  By Joachim Hagopian Global Research, January 06, 2015 The Last Whistleblowers With 2014 fresh in our rear view mirror, an honest examination of events and developments of what’s been happening in America to whistleblowers and journalists since 9/11 under the Bush-Obama regime seems a worthwhile review, however disturbing ands foreboding. By definition a whistleblower is an individual who reports an employer’s misconduct. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 (WPA) is a law that protects federal government employees in the United States from retaliatory action for voluntarily disclosing information about dishonest or illegal activities occurring within a government organization. Yet despite these supposed legal protections in place, those who have gone public disclosing illicit and immoral behavior by the federal government have been consistently singled out for discrimination and excessive punishment. In fact, more American citizens have been indicted for allegedly violating the Espionage Act of 1917 under the current president than all other previous presidents combined. Though the law was designed to punish WWI German spies, and rarely used since for indicting those selling secrets to the enemy or efforts to undermine the American way of life, it is completely obsolete. Yet it is being misused by Obama for purely political purposes to shut down the truth. The Obama administration has also turned down more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other prior presidency with each year the denial rate rising. 2013 was 57% more than the year before, with over half the total requests rejected. Of course Obama’s mantra excuse is always using the “national security” card. He has also jailed more whistleblowers and journalists than any other president. By his over the top, punitive methods, Obama has declared war on the first amendment right to a free press in America, threatening, harassing, indicting and imprisoning those brave enough to speak the truth, accusing them of treason when the president through his administration has repeatedly violated the very Constitution that he has sworn to protect and uphold as the so called leader of the free world. His malevolent attack on free speech is even more incriminating and inexcusable as a Harvard educated lawyer who once taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. [Whistleblower] [Free speech]
• The new Congress is 80 percent white, 80 percent male and 92 percent Christian
  By Philip Bump January 5 Trying to predict the gender and race of a member of Congress is like trying to predict who would win a basketball game between the 1996 Chicago Bulls and the 2015 New York Knicks. Which is to say: It is like trying to predict who would win in an arithmetic competition between you and a talking horse. Which is to say: It is like trying to guess how many jellybeans are in a glass jar that contains two jellybeans. Which is to say: It is easy. The 114th Congress, which gets to "work" on Tuesday, is one of the most diverse in American history, comprised of nearly 20 percent women and just over 17 percent of which is non-white. Which means, of course, that four out of five members of Congress are white and four out of five are men. [Governance]
• Saudi Arabia To Create 300,000 Private Sector Jobs For Locals
  The official did not reveal a specific timeline in which the government is aiming to make this quota possible. By Mary Sophia Saudi Arabia’s government has plans to create up to 300,000 jobs in the private sector for its citizens, Minister of Labour Adel Fakeih was quoted as saying in Arab News. The senior official did not reveal a specific timeline in which the government is aiming to make this quota possible. He added that the ministries of Economy and Planning, Finance and Labour will launch about 36 initiatives as part of the job creation scheme. Some of the initiatives planned by the government to engage the local workforce include expanding summer training for university students in the large private companies and new schemes for women that enable them to set up businesses that require work from home, local media reported. Fakeih also said that there are about 650,000 Saudis who are currently unemployed in the country.
  Unemployment rate in the Kingdom has been hovering at around 11.4 to 11.7 per cent throughout the last year but experts say that just 30 to 40 per cent of the working age adults participate in the workforce. [Saudi Arabia] [Unemployment]
• Netanyahu shatters Israel's image
  By Alon Ben-Meir No Israeli government has shattered Israel's international image more than the administration of Benjamin Netanyahu has done over the past six years. Not only have Netanyahu and his cohorts systematically engaged in rancorous public narratives against the Palestinians, they have taken action that could only attest to his unwavering commitment to expand the settlements and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Although the Palestinians have also contributed to the enmity and distrust between the two sides, the conduct of Netanyahu and company has left Israel isolated and scorned while dramatically shifting international public opinion in favor of the Palestinians. To promote his political scheme, Netanyahu has skillfully linked every conflicting issue with the Palestinians to Israel's national security. He masterfully manipulated public opinion over the years to justify his misadventures and continued occupation in the name of national security, while bringing the peace process to a grinding halt.
• Lawyers seek evidence of prince’s support for billionaire paedophile
  US government asked for any documents it may have showing Duke of York lobbied on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein Tracy McVeigh The Observer, Saturday 3 January 2015 21.07 GMT Buckingham Palace has denied "any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors" by Prince Andrew, after being named in US court papers. Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty Images Lawyers have asked the US government to hand over any letters or other documents it might have relating to the claims of two women that Prince Andrew was among those who lobbied its justice department on behalf of the billionaire financier and convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Buckingham Palace said it was categorically untrue that the 54-year-old prince had tried to influence US prosecutors, saying its earlier denial of allegations from a third woman that she had been forced by Epstein to have sex with the Duke of York on three occasions when she was underage also covered the lobbying claims made in the same papers filed in a Florida court earlier last year.
• Is it not time to dismantle the CIA?
  CIA's intelligence activities have clearly continued to be a low priority, writes Rosenberg [AFP] It's not as if we weren't warned about the CIA. Some 50 years before the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 500-page report on torture, former President Harry Truman published an opinion piece in the Washington Post asserting that the CIA was out of control and calling for it to be broken up. Truman's column appeared on December 22, 1963, a month to the day following US President John F Kennedy's assassination and 11 years after he himself moved out of the White House. Truman argued, as the president who authorised its establishment in 1947, that the CIA had strayed from the mission he had intended for it. [CIA]
• Russia and China Mock Divide-and-Rule
  by Pepe Escobar The Roman Empire did it. The British Empire copied it in style. The Empire of Chaos has always done it. They all do it. Divide et impera. Divide and rule – or divide and conquer. It’s nasty, brutish and effective. Not forever though, like diamonds, because empires do crumble. A room with a view to the Pantheon may be a celebration of Venus – but also a glimpse on the works of Mars. I had been in Rome essentially for a symposium – Global WARning – organized by a very committed, talented group led by a former member of European Parliament, Giulietto Chiesa. Three days later, as the run on the rouble was unleashed, Chiesa was arrested and expelled from Estonia as persona non grata, yet another graphic illustration of the anti-Russia hysteria gripping the Baltic nations and the Orwellian grip NATO has on Europe’s weak links. [1] Dissent is simply not allowed. At the symposium, held in a divinely frescoed former 15th century Dominican refectory now part of the Italian parliament’s library, Sergey Glazyev, on the phone from Moscow, gave a stark reading of Cold War 2.0. There’s no real “government” in Kiev; the US ambassador is in charge. An anti-Russia doctrine has been hatched in Washington to foment war in Europe – and European politicians are its collaborators. Washington wants a war in Europe because it is losing the competition with China. [NCW]
• Washington’s Quiet Proxy War Against Vietnam
  535435322Washington’s meddling across Asia has grabbed headlines recently in Hong Kong where US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded opposition leaders attempted to trigger a “color revolution” targeting the government of Beijing and Hong Kong’s local administrators. Its spectacular failure was owed to the almost immediate exposure of the protesters as foreign-backed proxies serving foreign interests. Additionally, political chaos has plagued Thailand amid a half-year struggle to oust Wall Street-Washington-backed dictator Thaksin Shinawatra and his subversive, well-funded proxy political front and various faux-rights advocates all extensively funded by Washington. Malaysia has likewise fought carbon-copies of US-backed opposition fronts in Hong Kong and Thailand, with its own battle against “Berish” led by Wall Street and Washington’s Anwar Ibrahim. Popular support, despite reports by the Western media, in each respective country, has been exposed as extremely small. In Thailand, for instance, even at the height of Shinawatra’s bid to seize back power in 2010, his “red shirt” movement represented a paltry 7% of Thailand’s 70 million citizens – a minority that has only shrunk since then. In Myanmar, US-British creation, Aung San Suu Kyi has also expended her credibility and illusion of popular support. Her bid to work her way into Myanmar’s political order has left even her own supporters disillusioned – not mentioning her support of Myanmar’s brutal and infinitely racist, “saffron monks” who regularly lead machete wielding mobs amid riots of mass murder against Rohingya refugees. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/03/washington-s-quiet-proxy-war-against-vietnam/ [NED] [Subversion]
• The “Cancer Stage of Capitalism”: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution
  Breaking Out of the Invisible Prison By Prof. John McMurtry Global Research, January 02, 2015 As we enter 2015, the global corporate system deepens and spreads in its eco-genocidal effects. But the dots are not joined in their common cause across domains. Money-value coordinates like GDP, commodity productivity and stock market indexes are still adopted as the measures of “economic performance” rather than life capital development which is systemically attacked rather than advanced. More than any prior stage of history, we know not what we are doing at that macro level of life organization, nor why no uptick of American sales can remotely solve the problem of collapsing social and natural life support systems. Greece – the world’s emblem of the sacrifice of society to debt servicing – is now 45% more in debt than it was before the “austerity” programs started. Global social and ecological collapse proceed in lock-step with the ruling paradigm’s transnational corporate and bank prescriptions, and they increase in their demands the more they fail to provide for societies life needs and development. Fatal mind blocks now rule that no economists see from within received models of understanding and that no cognitive science lays bare. Unconnected spectacles of crisis are alone reported. Obviously, no recovery from the most wasteful and destructive economic disorder in history is possible so long as it is unseen. This is why we continue over the long cliff of catastrophe without an evident clue of what is happening at the macro level. As another new year opens with all degenerate trends deepening, a point-by-point resetting of our economic parameters to life reality is more than ever demanded. The fatally absurd economic box within which we have been conditioned to conform at a preconscious level remains life-blind at every step without knowledge of it. [Crisis] [Capitalism]
• Obama's Lists: A Dubious History of Targeted Killings in Afghanistan
  By SPIEGEL Staff AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth Combat operations in Afghanistan may be coming to an end, but a look at secret NATO documents reveals that the US and the UK were far less scrupulous in choosing targets for killing than previously believed. Drug dealers were also on the lists Death is circling above Helmand Province on the morning of Feb. 7, 2011, in the form of a British Apache combat helicopter named "Ugly 50." Its crew is searching for an Afghan named Mullah Niaz Mohammed. The pilot has orders to kill him. The Afghan, who has been given the code name "Doody," is a "mid-level commander" in the Taliban, according to a secret NATO list. The document lists enemy combatants the alliance has approved for targeted killings. "Doody" is number 3,673 on the list and NATO has assigned him a priority level of three on a scale of one to four. In other words, he isn't particularly important within the Taliban leadership structure. The operations center identified "Doody" at 10:17 a.m. But visibility is poor and the helicopter is forced to circle another time. Then the gunner fires a "Hellfire" missile. But he has lost sight of the mullah during the maneuver, and the missile strikes a man and his child instead. The boy is killed instantly and the father is severely wounded. When the pilot realizes that the wrong man has been targeted, he fires 100 rounds at "Doody" with his 30-mm gun, critically injuring the mullah. [Assassination]
• Noam Chomsky on America: ‘This is a very racist society’
  Published time: December 13, 2014 03:05 Professor Noam Chomsky said it would be “no small trick” for the Ferguson protests to turn into an anti-racism and social justice movement, considering America’s founding principles are slavery and the extermination of the indigenous population. In a sweeping interview covering everything from Iraq and Syria to China, capitalism, and the protests in Ferguson, MIT linguistics professor Chomsky told GRITtv’s Laura Flanders that events in Ferguson and the protests that have followed show how little race relations in the United States have advanced since the end of the Civil War. [Racism]
• Something Strange About ISIS
  324234111I recently returned from the Terrorism and Religious Extremism Conference in Damascus. While there, I had the opportunity to meet with Syrian militia leaders. What they had to tell me and show me confirmed some of my suspicions. I already knew that the United States had trained at least 3000 ISIS “cadre” leaders at camps in Jordan. Colonel Jim Hanke US Army Special Forces (ret) had accompanied me and spoke of this during the conference. However, the militia leaders brought evidence. They had photographed not only ISIS dead but their identity papers as well. One group of 74 killed in fighting near Kobani included 15 Ukrainians and 8 Chechens. Others included fighters from Saudi Arabia, Yemen but the rest were from North Africa. There was no gloating over the dead despite the fact the exchange took place in a restaurant at the Damas Rose, a government owned hotel in Syria. There was a sadness, a solemnity about this as even ISIS dead, reputed to be mass murderers, looked no different than others, all young, bearded though many distinctly European. What was surprising was the lack of curiosity as to how any of these fighters had gotten into Syria in the first place. I had travelled through Lebanon, was picked up by security at the airport and, on the way to Damascus, stopped many times at military checkpoints and subjected to 4 hours of background checks at remote border crossings. Even inside Syria it took hours to get clearance despite carrying a letter from the Minister of Justice. Simply put, jihadists don’t just walk through Lebanon. This leaves only two possibilities, they travel through Turkey, something more than obvious or they receive transit across Israel. A cursory examination of the geography of the region leaves only two other remote possibilities. One is that they manage to cross the Red Sea like Moses or they are flown in somehow, magically passing through airport security checkpoints all overseen by Interpol, America’s Department of Homeland Security and NATO financed security forces. It is assumed that any Islamic male, traveling alone or with others, in transit toward Iraq or Syria, is a terrorist. I was certainly questioned several times. One could only assume that perhaps planes the CIA had used to transport narcotics or torture victims had been “retasked” for the purpose of bringing terrorists into Syria and Iraq. There are certainly reports of unmarked planes flying in and out of Mosul despite the fact that American fighter/interceptors maintain what they claim is a “stranglehold” on airspace in the region. Syrian officials informally voice their own suspicions about ISIS First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2014/12/31/something-strange-about-isis/ [ISIS] [Turkey]
• 2015: “Year of the Militaristic Neocons”: Looming Global Financial Crisis and Wars?
  These days, militaristic Neoconservatives, or Neocons, have near complete control of the American government under the façade of whoever is president at the time. They direct U.S. policies at the State Department, at the Pentagon, at the U.S. Treasury and at the Fed central bank. They are thus in position to influence and frame American foreign policy, military policy, economic and financial policies and monetary policy. This was not the case before the Ronald Reagan administration (1981-1989) when the latter adopted a neocon-inspired “muscular foreign policy” based on military intervention abroad, perpetual war, arbitrary regime changes, and imperial worldwide governance in any matters deemed to be in American interests and of that of its close allies. Even though they fared less well under the George H. Bush administration (1989-1993), when they were considered the “crazies in the basement”, they resumed their ascendance within the American government under the Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001) with the U.S.-led Kosovo war and with the irresponsible dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act, thus paving the way for the 2008 worldwide financial crisis. The Neocons’ greatest success, however, came with the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney administration (2001-2009) when they persuaded the latter to launch the (illegal) 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a war still with us and expanding today, twelve years later. They also drafted the so-called “Bush Doctrine” of (illegal) preemptive wars and of forced political regime changes in other countries. ...
  At the beginning of 2015, Neocons occupy key positions within the Barack Obama administration and it should be no surprise that U.S. foreign policy is hardly any different than it was under the George W. Bush administration. They are constantly pushing for provocations, confrontations, conflicts and wars. In fact, the year 2015 could be the year when many of the fires they have lit could turn into conflagrations. [Neocon]
• “Distancing Acts:” Private Mercenaries and the War on Terror in American Foreign Policy
  Jeremy Kuzmarov “I do this job for the opportunity to kill the enemies of my country and also to get that boat I always wanted. . . . [W]hen engaged I will lay waste to everything around me.” – Contractor slogan. “It’s the perfect war… everybody is making money.” – US intelligence officer in Afghanistan. His bulging left bicep featuring a tattoo of a Panther and his right one of the Grim Reaper, Wolf Weiss was a heavy metal guitarist from Los Angeles with fifteen years’ military experience who embodied the new type of warrior for the 21st century. Styled “the Heavy Metal Mercenary” by Rolling Stone Magazine, Weiss was hired by a private contractor, Crescent Security, to drive truck convoys in Iraq and admitted to killing several Iraqis in four separate firefights. His team, the Wolverines, was known for provocative displays of force, going by the motto: “strike down thine enemies and vanquish all evil by the right hand of god, strength and honor to all who live by the code of the warrior.” In November 2004, en route to Baghdad international airport, Weiss’s vehicle was ambushed by U.S. soldiers who mistook him for an insurgent. He was shot in the head and killed. He had told Rolling Stone that “war was one of the few things in the world I can do really well…..A lot of people are calling us private armies – and that’s basically what we are. This is not a security company. This is a paramilitary force.”1 [Imperialism] [Mercenaries] [Privatisation]