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Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs - 2 views

www.atimes.com/...MID-03-090913.html war & peace Syria Obama Pipelinestan U.S.-credibility
shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
Gary Edwards liked it
  • There is nothing tragic about the Obama presidency, capable of drawing the analytical talents of a neo-Plutarch or a neo-Gibbon. This is more like a Pirandello farce, a sort of Character in Search of An Author. Candidates to Author are well documented - from the Israel lobby to the House of Saud, from a select elite of the industrial-military-security complex to, most of all, the rarified banking/financial elite, the real Masters of the Universe. Poor Barack is just a cipher, a <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> functionary of empire, whose ''deciding'' repertoire barely extends to what trademark smile to flash at the requisite photo-ops. There's nothing ''tragic'' about the fact that during this week - marking the 12th anniversary of 9/11 - this presidency will be fighting for its bombing ''credibility'' trying to seduce Republican hawks in the US Congress while most of the warmongers du jour happen to be Democrats.
  • Republicans are torn between supporting the president they love to hate and delivering him a stinging rebuke - as much as they are aching to follow the orders of their masters, ranging from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to military contractors. Once again, this is farce - caused by the fact that a man elected to finish off wars is eager to start yet another one. And once again without a United Nations vote. The White House ''strategy'' in this crucial negotiating week boils down to this; to convince the US Congress that the United States must start a war on Syria to punish an ''evil dictator'' - once again, as bad as Hitler - for gassing children. The evidence? It's ''indisputable''. Well, it's not ''irrefutable''. It's not even ''beyond-a-reasonable-doubt''. As Obama's Chief of Staff Denis McDonough admitted, with a straight face, it boils down to ''a quite strong common sense test, irrespective of the intelligence, that suggests that the regime carried this out''. So if this is really about ''common sense'', the president is obviously not being shown by his close coterie of sycophants this compendium of common sense, compiled by a group of top, extremely credible former US intelligence officials, which debunks all the ''evidence'' as flawed beyond belief. To evoke a farce from 12 years ago, this clearly seems to be a case of ''facts being fixed around the policy''.
  • The Arab street doesn't buy it because they clearly see through the hypocrisy; the desperate rush to ''punish'' the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria while justifying everything the apartheid state of Israel perpetrates in occupied Palestine. The Muslim world doesn't buy it because it clearly sees the demonization only applies to Muslims - from Arafat to bin Laden to Saddam to Gaddafi and now Assad. It would never apply to the military junta in Myanmar, which was clever enough to engineer an ''opening''; the next day Westerners were lining up to kiss the hem of Burmese longyis. It would never apply to the Islam Karimov dictatorship in Uzbekistan because ''we'' always need to seduce him as one of our bastards away from Russia and China. It eventually applies, on and off, to the Kim dynasty in North Korea, but with no consequences - because these are badass Asians who can actually respond to an US attack. Informed public opinion across the developing world does not buy it because they clearly see, examining the historical record, that Washington would never really be bothered with the sorry spectacle of Arabs killing Arabs, or Muslims killing Muslims, non-stop. The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war is a prime piece of evidence.
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  • Then there's the ''credibility'' farce. The Obama administration has convoluted the whole world in its own self-spun net, insisting that the responsibility for the ''red line'' recklessly drawn by the president is in fact global. Yet the pesky ''world'' is not buying it.
  • At the Group of 20 summit last week, the BRICS group of emerging powers - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - as well as Indonesia and Argentina, clearly stressed that a war on Syria without UN Security Council approval would qualify Obama as a war criminal. Even among the European poodles ''support'' for the White House is extremely qualified. Germany's Angela Merkel and even France's attack dog Francois Hollande said the primacy is with the UN. The European Union as a whole wants a political solution. It's enlightening to remember that the EU in Brussels can issue arrest warrants for heads of EU governments guilty of war crimes. Someone in Paris must have warned attack dog Hollande that he would not welcome the prospect of slammer time. ''Evil'' as a political category is something worthy of the brain dead. The key question now revolves around the axis of warmongers - Washington, Israel and the House of Saud. Will the Israel lobby, the more discreet but no less powerful Saudi lobby, and the Return of the Living Dead neo-cons convince the US Congress to fight their war?
  • And then there's the curioser and curioser case of al-Qaeda - essentially the Arabic denomination for a CIA database of US-Pakistani-Saudi trained mujahideen during the 1980s: the oh so convenient transnational bogeyman that ''legitimized'' the Global War On Terror (GWOT) of the George W Bush years; the ''opening'' for al-Qaeda to move to Iraq; and now, no middle men; the CIA and the Obama administration fighting side-by-side with al-Qaeda in Syria. No wonder the denomination ''al-CIAeda'' has gone viral. With farce after farce after farce piling up in their own Tower of Babel, the much-vaunted ''US credibility'' is in itself the biggest farce of all. Politically, no one knows how the vacuum will be filled. It won't be via the UN. It won't be via the BRICS. It won't be via the G-20 - which is seriously divided; at least new multipolar players are carrying way more weight than US poodles. Much would be made to restore ''US credibility'' if the Obama administration had the balls to force both the House of Saud and Qatar (''300 people and a TV station'', in the epic definition of Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar Sultan - aka Bandar Bush) to end once and for all their weaponizing of hardcore ''rebels'' and ultimately hardcore jihadis, and accept Iran in the negotiating table for a real Geneva II peace process in Syria. It won't happen because this bypasses farce. Once again; helpless Barack is just a paperboy. The plutocrats in charge are getting extremely nervous. The system is melting - and they need to act fast.
  • They need a Syria as docile as the Arab petro-monarchies. They want to hit Russia bad - and then discuss missile defense and Russian influence in Eastern Europe from a position of force. They want to hit Iran bad - and then continue to issue ultimatums from a position of force. They want to facilitate yet another Israeli attempt to capture southern Lebanon (it's the water, stupid). They want a monster gas pipeline from Qatar for European customers bypassing Iran and Syria as well as Gazprom. Most of all, this is all about control of natural resources and channels of distribution. These are real motives - and they have nothing to do with farce. Farce is only deployed to kill any possibility of real diplomacy and real political discussion. Farce is a theatrical mask - as in ''humanitarian'' imperialism - the ''acceptable'' version of the Dick Cheney-run years. It's as if Dick Cheney had never left the building; paperboy Barack is Dick Cheney with a ''human'' face. The only good outcome in this multi-sorrowful tale is that the real ''international community'', all around the world, has seen the naked Emperor in all its (farcical) glory.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Sep 13
     
    What can I say? The iconoclastic Pepe Escobar strikes again. 
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Sep 13
     
    Outstanding article Paul. Wow! Watching the 911 link now. But here's one for you: Massimo Mazzucco's new 5-hour documentary "September 11- The New Pearl Harbor" summarizes 12 years of public debate on 9-11, looking at the events from all sides. Watch a trailer for the film here: http://goo.gl/M5c0dj Full five hours available here: http://www.luogocomune.net/site/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=167 I listened to a two hour interview with Massimo last night. Awesome stuff.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Sep 13
     
    A 5-hour documentary will have to wait for tomorrow. I'm about 7 hours away from a deadline for the current development cycle's Help file. :-) I do think Pepe is a off on a couple of details in this article. The Neocons were mostly silent on this one and Rumsfeld came out against the intervention, saying that Obama hadn't made a valid case for war. That's most likely because the Neocons are joined at the hip with Israeli government and that government is a house divided this time around, with only factions supporting the military strike. The current thinking in Tel Aviv/Jerusalem is, in line with the Israeli right's long term strategy, that it's just fine with them to have Muslims running around killing each other in Syria. That long-term strategy is to destabilize Israel's Arab neighbor states while Israel builds its economic empire and military hegemony in the region. Israeli government isn't exactly thrilled by the prospect of Obama delivering fulfillment of the Saudi goal of transforming Syria from a secular state into a non-secular Islamic state run by Wahabi extremists. Such a state, armed to the teeth by the U.S. and/or the Saudi-Qatari zillionaires could be very bad news for Israel. Notably, the very strongest case thus far that the August 21 chemical attack was conducted by the opposition forces with the U.S. and Syria in on it to create a false flag attack, has been delivered in installments by Yossef Bodansky, an Israeli-American uber-scholar of Islamic "terrorism" and Soviet/Russian weaponry who is incapable of criticising Israel's decades-long terrorism inflicted on the Palestinian people and Israel's continuing unlawful occupation of Palestine plus parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Bodanysky sits at the center of an intelligence web of intelligence professionals from nations worried about Islamic "terrorism." In other words, he's extremely pro-Israeli and to boot, very close to Mossad and Israel's IDF intelligence forces. Israel's AIPAC lobby d
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Has questioning 9/11 become more acceptable? - RT Op-Edge - 2 views

rt.com/...9-11-conspiracy-acceptable-708 war & peace war on terror™ polling 9-11
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 13 - No Cached
Gary Edwards liked it
  • Despite the media’s best efforts to dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theories, one in two Americans doubt the government’s narrative and skepticism is slowly seeping its way into the mainstream. Twelve years on from the events of September 11, 2001, and a seemingly nightmarish deja vu has gripped the United States and its war-weary citizens. Again, the public is told that destructive weapons in faraway countries pose a critical danger, and that despite wearing the clothes of humanitarianism, a military solution that will inevitably harm civilians is the only meaningful response. The main difference today is that after an abstract decade-long ‘War on Terror’, Washington finds itself fighting in Syria on the same side as Al-Qaeda and those who are sympathetic to the alleged culprits of the 9/11 attacks.
  • Contrary to how the US media has presented them, movements that have questioned 9/11 continue to gather momentum and are often led by increasingly vocal scientists and academics that claim the account presented in the official 9/11 Commission report could not possibly be accurate.
  • The 9/11 Commission was chartered to provide a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, but even former commission vice-chairman Lee Hamilton wrote an article in the New York Times in 2008 describing how the CIA obstructed the 9/11 investigations, destroyed evidence and failed to respond to the commission’s own lawful requests for information – plus it’s also widely known that the 9/11 Commission report relies heavily on torture testimony.
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  • If the United States continually lobbies its population to intervene in unpopular new military conflicts using unsubstantiated claims and questionable evidence, there is little doubt that greater numbers of people will reexamine 9/11 and endorse more critical perspectives of it, especially as those campaigns mature and become more sophisticated. There are many who have looked at the evidence and are convinced that Washington is lying, but the real juicy question is who exactly is responsible? Kevin Ryan of the Journal of 9/11 Studies recently published a book, “Another Nineteen,” which is perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of the political and military command structure that spectacularly failed to act on the morning of 9/11. The task at hand for 9/11 advocacy movements is grasping both the scientific and political totality of events and bringing that scrutiny into the mainstream, which it is steadily beginning to do.
  • It’s not easy to reliably gauge public opinion figures on this issue, but in 2008, a comprehensive international poll showed that 54 percent of respondents believed that parties other than Al-Qaeda were responsible, as reported by Reuters. A new poll conducted in September 2013 by polling firm YouGov found that one in two Americans have doubts about the government’s account of 9/11. 
  • There will always be mocking and scathing criticisms of those who question 9/11, but if scientists and experts disagree over the technical fundamentals, this enough is sufficient ground for advocating a new and comprehensive investigation. As it stands, this transformative event that radically altered American foreign and domestic policy and led to the deaths of over a million people has not been sufficiently explained.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Sep 13
     
    On August 31st, 2013, Kevin Ryan appeared on Coast to Coast (http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2013/08/31) for a four hour interview that is available on request. Amazing interview! The long-time co-editor of the Journal of 9/11, Kevin Ryan, offered an evidence-based analysis of other potential suspects responsible for the September 11th attacks in 2001. A former employee of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), Ryan pointed out that the World Trade Center (WTC) was designed to withstand the impact of airliners and the steel used in the buildings was certified by UL to tolerate several hours of intense fire. The steel was tested at 2000 degrees F and a typical office fire burns at 1200 degrees F, he explained, noting that the temperatures measured at the WTC were much lower, around 500 degrees F. This presents a glaring problem since one of the towers was completely destroyed in only 56 minutes, Ryan added. The UL repeated its tests after the disaster and determined the steel columns and floor structures should not have failed, he revealed. A proponent of controlled-demolition theory, Ryan stated definitively that "the evidence really points to the buildings having been destroyed through the use of explosives." Many witnesses reported explosions and flashes of light, he said. Ryan questioned the official government story that 19 young Arab Muslims led by Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed executed this unbelievable attack, observing that such a feat could not have been accomplished by these men as they had no access to plant explosives. Ryan identified former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney as "the two people who were in perfect position to coordinate the attacks of 9/11." Rumsfeld went missing for more than 30 minutes during the height of the attacks and Cheney gave a stand-down order as a plane approached the Pentagon, he reported. Ryan credited Rumsfeld and Cheney with the false conclusions that led to the Iraq
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Sep 13
     
    Be sure to catch the free on-line documentary, "September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor", where director Massimo Mazzucco presents five hours of interviews and evidence comparing the 9-11 events to Pearl Harbor. Massimo confirms the findings of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth; that this was a controlled demolition. He then goes on to name the inside players responsible, and why they did it. Lots of discussion about the 1997 Cheney-Rumsfeld white paper, "The New American Century". The documentary (3 DVD's) is at: http://goo.gl/EIie3d
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Is Obama the Head of a Secret Cult? A 15-Point Test. | Casey Research - 0 views

www.caseyresearch.com/...-a-secret-cult-a-15-point-test Obammunism Obama-Cult
shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • But what really amazes me are those ideas that even a little reflection and study reveal as ridiculous, but that nonetheless gain a large and devoted following. For instance, that big government—in truth, little more than a motley collection of meddlesome bureaucrats advised by rent-seeking, ivory-tower academics—are in possession of the solutions to all of society's ills.
  • All of which got me to thinking about this odd trait of humans to form associations around bad ideas, and that, in turn, led me to think about the nature of cults. After all, can there be a more ridiculous idea than becoming a trained lapdog to some modern-day messiah? Yet, how does one go from being a go-along-to-get-along kind of person one day to lining up for a fatal dose of poison, thoughtfully flavored with grape Kool-Aid, the next? Or signing up to become a gunman willing to kill or be killed in a foreign adventure in support of a half-baked idea that's cast as somehow being in the "national interest," when even a cursory examination would tell you it's not?
  • Both of those examples are in diametric opposition to self-preservation, the most fundamental of all human instincts.
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  • Less dramatically but yet still with serious consequences, how is it that otherwise rational people come to accept the idea that widespread economic success can flow from the loins of a bureaucracy that produces nothing but regulatory chains on the aspirations of individuals looking to better their lives and those of their families? And when that success fails to materialize, readily accept the idea that the Fed can pump money out by the trillions with no negative effect? In any event, I started poking around the literature of various organizations specializing in the study of mind control and found what I think are some interesting lessons for us all in the studies of cults. After all, if psychological buttons can be pushed in a combination that leads to drinking poisoned Kool-Aid, you can sure as hell bet they can be pushed to get you to vote for a string of sociopathic poseurs… or to dedicate a large chunk of your life and charitable giving to causes that have little connection to reality. Or to decide to create a Facebook page titled, "I love it when I wake up in the morning and Barack Obama is President." In fact, based on the guidelines provided by the International Cult Studies Association (ICSA), you or someone you know may already be in a cult and not even be aware of it. Worse, the president himself might be the head of a cult! There are 15 separate traits the ICSA identifies as common among cults. Ticking through them should prove informative.
  • The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as "the Truth."
  • Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
  • Mind-altering practices are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
  • The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel
  • The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members.
  • Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
  • The leader is not accountable to any authorities.
  • The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary.
  • The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
  • Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.
  • The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
  • The group is preoccupied with making money.
  • Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.
  • The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
  • The most loyal members (the "true believers") feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.
  • How to Spot a Pathological Liar
  • In researching the nature of cults, I took a side street to investigate the mental condition called "pseudologia fantastica," or in lay terms, a mental condition where individuals become pathological liars. I did so because I wondered how politicians can spew forth their untruths with straight faces.
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Nov 13
     
    "So is Obama really the leader of a cult? Based on the above checklist, I'd have to say he is-and it's a pretty big cult, at that. If you agree, it behooves us to define the overarching beliefs of the cult over which he presides. In my view, those beliefs were accurately summed up by Thomas Sowell in his classic, A Conflict of Visions, as revolving around the idea that we humans can and should be made ever-more perfect by government policy. With that idea at the core of the cult's belief, almost no action, no matter how extreme, is off the table when it comes to government action. Deception, artifice, bullying, war-making, spying, money-printing, regulation, forcing Ritz crackers on children, taking over large swaths of the economy, or propping up companies in favored industries are all justifiable parts and parcels of the whole. Unfortunately, because the cult offers financial handouts to join, the ranks of this particular cult have swelled in recent decades. So much so that it has reached the point where, like an uninfected human in a world full of zombies, those who don't belong increasingly have to maintain a low profile or risk having their faces eaten (or, perhaps less dramatically, being subjected to a forensic audit by the IRS). This is equally true, and maybe more so, with private corporations, which keep their mouths shut as the healthcare burden of non-workers is transferred to their balance sheets, or which trumpet the fact that they're "green" in order to avoid being targeted by cult members."
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Turkey Cooks the Books in Syria | The American Conservative - 0 views

www.theamericanconservative.com/...urkey-cooks-the-books-in-syria war & peace Syria Turkey U.S.-foreign-policy false-flag
shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • If you had been a reader of The American Conservative magazine back in December 2011, you might have learned from an article written by me that “Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons [to the Free Syrian Army] derived from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals…” Well, it seems that the rest of the media is beginning to catch up with the old news, supplemented with significant details by Sy Hersh in the latest issue of the London Review of Books in an article entitled “The Red Line and the Rat Line.” The reality is that numerous former intelligence officials, like myself, have long known most of the story surrounding the on-again off-again intervention by the United States and others in Syria, but what was needed was a Sy Hersh, with his unmatched range of contacts deep in both the Pentagon as well as at CIA and State Department, to stitch it all together with corroboration from multiple sources. In a sense it was a secret that wasn’t really very well hidden but which the mainstream media wouldn’t touch with a barge pole because it revealed that the Obama Administration, just like the Bushies who preceded it, has been actively though clandestinely conspiring to overthrow yet another government in the Middle East. One might well conclude that the White House is like the Bourbon Kings of France in that it never forgets anything but never learns anything either.
  • The few media outlets that are willing to pick up the Syria story even now are gingerly treating it as something new, jumping in based on their own editorial biases, sometimes emphasizing the CIA and MI6 role in cooperating with the Turks to undermine Bashar al-Assad. But Hersh’s tale is only surprising if one had not been reading between the lines over the past three years, where the clandestine role of the British and American governments was evident and frequently reported on over the internet and, most particularly, in the local media in the Middle East. Far from being either rogue or deliberately deceptive, operations by the U.S. and UK intelligence services, the so-called “ratlines” feeding weapons into Syria, were fully vetted and approved by both the White House and Number 10 Downing Street. The more recent exposure of the Benghazi CIA base’s possible involvement in obtaining Libyan arms as part of the process of equipping the Syrian insurgents almost blew the lid off of the arrangement but somehow the media attention was diverted by a partisan attack on the Obama Administration over who said what and when to explain the security breakdown and the real story sank out of sight.
  • So this is what happened, roughly speaking: the United States had been seeking the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria since at least 2003, joining with Saudi Arabia, which had been funding efforts to destabilize his regime even earlier. Why? Because from the Saudi viewpoint Syria was an ally of Iran and was also a heretical state led by a secular government dominated by Alawite Muslims, viewed as being uncomfortably close to Shi’ites in their apostasy. From the U.S. viewpoint, the ties to Iran and reports of Syrian interference in Lebanon were a sufficient casus belli coupled with a geostrategic assessment shared with the Saudis that Syria served as the essential land bridge connecting Hezbollah in Lebanon to Iran. The subsequent Congressional Syria Accountability Acts of 2004 and 2010, like similar legislation directed against Iran, have resulted in little accountability and have instead stifled diplomacy. They punished Syria with sanctions for supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon and for its links to Tehran, making any possible improvement in relations problematical. The 2010 Act even calls for steps to bring about regime change in Damascus. The United States also engaged in a program eerily reminiscent of its recent moves to destabilize the government in Ukraine, i.e., sending in ambassadors and charges who deliberately provoked the Syrian government by meeting with opposition leaders and openly making demands for greater democracy. The last U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford spoke openly in support of the protesters while serving in Damascus in 2010. On one occasion he was pelted with tomatoes and was eventually removed over safety concerns.
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  • Lost in translation is the fact that Washington’s growing support for radical insurgency in Syria would also inevitably destabilize all its neighbors, most notably including Iraq, which has indeed been the case, making a shambles of U.S. claims that it was seeking to introduce stable democracies into the region. Some also saw irony in the fact that a few years before Washington decided al-Assad was an enemy it had been sending victims of the CIA’s rendition program to Syria, suggesting that at least some short-term and long-term strategies were on a collision course from the start, if indeed the advocates of the two policies were actually communicating with each other at all. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whose country shared a long border with Syria and who had legitimate security concerns relating to Kurdish separatists operating out of the border region, became the proxy in the secret war for Washington and its principal European allies, the British and French. When the U.S.-Saudi supported insurgency began to heat up and turn violent, Turkey became the key front line state in pushing for aggressive action against Damascus. Erdogan miscalculated, thinking that al-Assad was on his last legs, needing only a push to force him out, and Ankara saw itself as ultimately benefiting from a weak Syria with a Turkish-controlled buffer zone along the border to keep the Kurds in check.
  • Hersh reports how President Barack Obama had to back down from attacking Syria when the Anglo-American intelligence community informed him flatly and unambiguously that Damascus was not responsible for the poison gas attack that took place in Damascus on August 21, 2013 that was being exploited as a casus belli. The information supporting that assertion was known to many like myself who move around the fringes of the intelligence community, but the real revelation from Hersh is the depth of Turkish involvement in the incident in order to have the atrocity be exploitable as a pretext for American armed intervention, which, at that point, Erdogan strongly desired. As the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians was one of the red lines that Obama had foolishly promoted regarding Syria Erdogan was eager to deliver just that to force the U.S.’s hand. Relying on unidentified senior U.S. intelligence sources, Hersh demonstrates how Turkey’s own preferred militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, which is generally regarded as an al-Qaeda affiliate, apparently used Turkish-provided chemicals and instructions to stage the attack.
  • Is it all true? Unless one has access to the same raw information as Sy Hersh it is difficult to say with any certainty, but I believe I know who some of the sources are and they both have good access to intelligence and are reliable. Plus, the whole narrative has an undeniable plausibility, particularly if one also considers other evidence of Erdogan’s willingness to take large risks coupled with a more general Turkish underhandedness relating to Syria. On March 23rd, one week before local elections in Turkey that Erdogan feared would go badly for him, a Turkish air force F-16 shot down a Syrian Mig-23, claiming that it had strayed half a mile into Turkish airspace. The pilot who bailed out, claimed that he was attacking insurgent targets at least four miles inside the border when he was shot down, an assertion borne out by physical evidence as the plane’s remains landed inside Syria. Was Erdogan demonstrating how tough he could be just before elections? Possibly.
  • Critics of Hersh claim that the Turks would be incapable of carrying out such a grand subterfuge, but I would argue that putting together some technicians, chemicals, and a couple of trucks to carry the load are well within the capability of MIT, an organization that I have worked with and whose abilities I respect. And one must regard with dismay the “tangled webs we weave,” with due credit to Bobby Burns, for what has subsequently evolved in Syria. Allies like Turkey that are willing to cook the books to bring about military action are exploiting the uncertainty of a White House that continues to search for foreign policy successes while simultaneously being unable to define any genuine American interests. Syria is far from an innocent in the ensuing mayhem, but it has become the fall guy for a whole series of failed policies. Turkey meanwhile has exploited the confusion to clamp down on dissent and to institutionalize Erdogan’s authoritarian inclinations. Ten years of American-licensed meddling combined with obliviousness to possible consequences has led to in excess of 100,000 dead Syrians and the introduction of large terrorist infrastructures into the Arab heartland, yet another foreign policy disaster in the making with no clear way out.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Apr 14
     
    Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi adds valuable context to revelations of Turkey's involvement in the false flag Sarin gas attack in Syria and in Turkey's follow-up plan to stage a false flag attack on a Turkish tomb in Syria as a pretext for Turkish invasion of Syria. 
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ISIS: Potentially 'Thousands' of Online Followers Inside US Homeland, FBI Chief Warns -... - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story war & peace politics of fear FBI ISIL
shared by Paul Merrell on 12 May 15 - No Cached
  • There may be as many as thousands of people inside the United States consuming online “poison” from ISIS alone, and, “I know there are other Elton Simpsons out there,” FBI director James Comey warned today, referring to one of the men who opened fire outside of an event in Texas earlier this week celebrating artists’ portrayals of the Prophet Mohammad. “We have a very hard task” in trying to identify and stop anyone inspired to launch an attack inside the U.S. homeland, Comey told ABC News’ Pierre Thomas and a small group of reporters. Such efforts have become particularly challenging because ISIS has reconfigured and redefined terrorist recruitment, according to Comey. In fact, while the FBI is trying to find that so-called needle in a haystack, “increasingly the needles are invisible to us,” he said.
  • As recently as two years ago, someone in the United States who wanted to consume “radical poisonous propaganda” would have to seek that out on the Internet, most likely on a jihadist web forum. So the FBI focused its investigative efforts on those jihadist web forums, Comey said. But “that has changed dramatically, especially with [ISIS] and their use of social media,” where on phones in people’s pockets they ask Americans and other foreigners “to travel to the so-called caliphate to fight” but simultaneously say, “If you can’t travel, kill where you are,” according to Comey.
  • “It’s almost as if there is a devil sitting on the shoulder saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill’ all day long,” he said. “[They are] recruiting and tasking at the same time. … In a way, the old paradigm between ‘inspired’ and ‘directed’ breaks down here." And with that distinction “no longer relevant," is it all the more challenging for the FBI to determine whether someone seeking jihadist propaganda online or even promoting themselves is “a talker or a doer,” as Comey described it. There’s also the question, “Where are they on the pathway from ‘talker’ to ‘doer’? And that’s really hard,” Comey added. Those are the exact types of questions the FBI faced with Simpson. Comey acknowledged today that Simpson had been under FBI watch since 2006, when the agency opened an investigation on the Phoenix-area man based on information suggesting he wanted to join al-Shabab, the al Qaeda-linked group in Somalia. Simpson was ultimately indicted on terrorism charges and convicted, but due to questions over the government’s case he never went to prison and was sentenced to probation. The FBI officially closed its case into Simpson last year.
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M of A - Turkey Lauches War On Islamic State's Worst Enemies - The Kurds - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...y-re-lauches-war-on-kurds.html war & peace Syria Iraq Turkey Kurds attacks
shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Since 2013 a ceasefire between the state of Turkey and Kurdish PKK rebels in south-east Turkey held up well. The government pledged some support for Kurdish cultural autonomy and in return the ruling AK Party gained votes from parts of the Kurdish constituency. The AKP government also has good relations with the Kurds in north Iraq. It buys oil from the Kurdish regional government and supports the kleptocracy of the ruling Barzani clan in that autonomous Iraqi region. The PKK is a militant Kurdish organization in Turkey. The equivalent in Syria is known as YPG. In Iran the group is called PJAK and in Iraq HPG. The HDP party in Turkey is the political arm of the PKK. The PYD is the political arm of the Syrian YPG. All these are essentially the same egalitarian, secular marxist/anarchist organization striving for Kurdish autonomy or independence. Turkey has now reopened its war on the PKK Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and in Syria. Turkish police rounded up hundreds of Kurdish activists in Turkey and tonight dozens of Turkish fighter planes attacked PKK positions in Syria and Iraq. This war is likely to escalate and will be long and bloody. It will be mostly fought on Turkish ground. How did it come to this?
  • The war on Syria and support by Turkey for even the most radical islamists fighting the Syrian government changed the relations with the Kurds. It is undeniable that Turkey not only supports the Free Syrian Army but also the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Turkey is the transit country for international suicide bomber candidates joining these organizations. Weapons, ammunition and other goods are smuggled into Syria with the help of the Turkish secret services and the Islamic State exports oil to Turkey. The Islamic State is recruiting in Turkey and is believed to have many sleeper cells throughout the country. When the Islamic State attacked Kurdish positions in Kobane in north Syria the U.S. intervened on the side of the Kurds. Turkey was miffed and at first blocked all support. The Kurds in Kobane are, like the Kurdish rebels in Turkey, organized in the PKK/YPG. They want an continuous autonomous region in north Syria connecting all Kurdish enclaves along the Turkish Syrian border. Ankara fears that such a region could be joined by the Kurdish areas in south-east Turkey. This would be a threat to the Turkish state. Turkey wants to gain land in the war on Syria not lose any. Idleb and Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq are regions that Erdogan would like to add to his realm.
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Israel Joins Chinese Bank, Defies U.S.  « LobeLog - 0 views

www.lobelog.com/-joins-chinese-bank-defies-u-s war & peace economic-warfare Israel China AIIB U.S.-foreign-policy
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Updating the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago on how the U.S. failed to persuade some of its closest allies not to join the new Chinese-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), it’s worth noting that Israel has also abandoned Washington by signing up for membership. The Israeli foreign ministry announced on March 31–the deadline for applying to join the new bank–that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had signed “a letter of application to join the [AIIB], a result of the initiative of the President of China.”
  • The process of joining the bank was led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in recognition of the importance of joining major Asian organizations on the continent. Israel’s membership in the Bank will open opportunities for integration of Israeli companies in various infrastructure projects, which will be financed by the bank. …It should be noted that the establishment of the bank is a Chinese diplomatic achievement. China initially intended that 35 countries should join, and to date 50 countries have joined. The establishment of AIIB is one of the most important initiatives in terms of Chinese foreign policy and in particular for President Xi Jinping, as this is his personal initiative.
  • Needless to say, Israel’s decision, which is perfectly defensible on the grounds of national interest, constitutes another slap at the Obama administration, which in the view of many experts stupidly lobbied U.S. allies against membership. (Of Washington’s closest allies, only Canada and Japan did not apply.) Israel has substantial commercial interests in China, particularly in the hi-tech and defense sectors. In fact, the Pentagon has long complained about Israeli transfers of sensitive U.S. military technology to China. In 2004, the Bush administration even sent then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Greater Israel advocate Douglas Feith to Jerusalem to demand the resignation of the director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Amos Yaron, for allegedly concealing details of the sale and upgrade of an Israel-made Harpy attack drone to China.
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  • Of course, one of the reasons Obama lobbied allies against joining the bank is that he knew that a Republican Congress would itself reject Washington’s accession. The same Republican Congress has steadfastly refused to ratify a long-pending governance reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that would give Beijing and some other middle-income countries a somewhat bigger voice in the two western-dominated Bretton-Woods institutions (even without diluting the U.S. voting power on their boards). And, yes, this is the same Republican Congress that invited Netanyahu to speak to it, that approves virtually any appropriation desired by Israel, and that is trying its utmost to derail a multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran largely at Bibi’s behest.
  • Like most small countries, Israel practices realpolitik. Despite claims by AIPAC, neoconservatives, and many Christian Zionists that Israel is our “closest ally” in the Middle East, if not the world, and that its “values” are identical to our own, in fact, it pursues its own interests abroad with little regard for Republican (or anyone else’s) sensibilities. As we have reported before, it is also providing support to al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, but no Republican that I know of has raised the slightest objection. Indeed, in their devotion to Netanyahu and his Likud Party, no doubt well lubricated by the millions of dollars in campaign and other political contributions offered by Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, and other Republican Jewish Coalition donors, most Republican lawmakers appear perfectly comfortable with Israel’s Middle East policies, including continued settlement-building and expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the de facto blockade against Gaza, and demands that Israel be recognized as a Jewish State. These actions and others serve not only to radicalize the Palestinians and other Arabs but also make it more difficult for the United States and its military to gain goodwill and operate effectively throughout the region, as then-CentCom Commander Gen. David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee shortly after Netanyahu became prime minister. Indeed, no one has undermined U.S. credibility in the region and beyond over the past six years as much as Bibi himself.
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Do The Math: Global War On Terror Has Killed 4 Million Muslims Or More - 1 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...208225 war & peace war on terror™ casualties stats
shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • A study released earlier this year revealed the shocking death toll of the United States’s “War on Terror” since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the true body count could be even higher. Published in March by Physicians for Social Responsibility, the study, conducted by a team that included some Nobel Prize winners, determined that at least 1.3 million people have died as a result of war since Sept.11, 2001, but the real figure might be as high as two million. The study was an attempt to “close the gaps” in existing research, including studies like the Iraq Body Count,” which puts the number of violent deaths in that country at about 219,000 since 2003, based on media reports of the time period. Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, writing in April for Middle East Eye, explained some of the ways the previous figures fell short, according to the physicians’ research: “For instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of the war, IBC [Iraq Body Count] recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.
  • Such gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance, IBC recorded just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number of air attacks had in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again, the gap here is by a factor of 40.” The physicians behind the study also praised a controversial report from the medical journal The Lancet that placed the toll count far higher than that of Iraq Body Count, at closer to one million dead. In addition to the war in Iraq, the PSR study added additional victims from other countries where the United States has waged war: “To this, the PSR study adds at least 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, killed as the direct or indirect consequence of US-led war: a ‘conservative’ total of 1.3 million. The real figure could easily be ‘in excess of 2 million’.” These figures may still be underestimating the real death toll, according to Ahmed. These studies only account for the victims of violent conflict, but not the many more who will die as a result of the damage war brings to crucial infrastructure, from roads to farms to hospitals — not to mention devastating sanctions like those placed on Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991. He continues:
  • “Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children. The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to ‘an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq.’” Similar figures for Afghanistan, he reports, could bring totals to four million or more. As Ahmed points out in his article, the majority of those killed in these wars and those suffering most from these wars, statistically speaking, were Muslim — a stark contrast to the common view that radical Muslim terrorists are the deadliest group in the Middle East. Rather, it would seem the American military are the worst killers, and the death toll resembles religious genocide. In 2009, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, wrote in Foreign Policy:
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  • “How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.” Or, as Ben Affleck famously quipped to Bill Maher last year: “We’ve killed more Muslims than they’ve killed us by an awful lot.”
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 15
     
    Reminds of an opinion poll conducted in the UK a couple of years ago. When asked how many Iraqis were killed by the invasion and occupation, the media answer was "about 5,000." 
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DoJ Creates Special Dept to Deal with Growing Domestic Extremism Threat | nsnbc interna... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...wing-domestic-extremism-threat liberties tyranny DoJ domestic-terrorism™
shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • John Carlin, Department of Justice assistant attorney general and head of the national security division, spoke at George Washington University (GWU) about concerns over mounting threats posed by violent extremists within the US which has prompted the creation of a special counsel position to deal with these issues.
  • Carlin told the audience that “the domestic terrorism counsel would not only help oversee the prosecution of cases but also would develop plans to intervene when the threat of violence is imminent.” The DoJ expressed concern over the “staggeringly broad” threat to national security posed by domestic extremists “motivated by anti-government animus, eco-radicalism and racism have created a new urgency for federal and local law enforcement authorities.” Carlin said: “No single ideology governs hate and extremism. Nevertheless, we see commonalities among those who wish to do us harm. This gives us important information as we shape our deterrence and disruption strategies. Across the spectrum of extremist ideologies, two related traits emerge: first, the prevalence of lone offender attacks that do not require a terrorist network; and second, the increasing number of disaffected people inspired to violence who communicate their hate-filled views over the Internet and through social media.’’
  • The deputy attorney general said: “White supremacists represent the most violent. The Charleston shooter, who had a manifesto laying out a racist worldview, is just one example. His actions followed earlier deadly shooting sprees by white supremacists in Kansas, Wisconsin and elsewhere.’’ Along with white supremacists, Carlin said: “Adherents to the sovereign citizen ideology believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities or law enforcement. And although most sovereign citizens peacefully espouse these views, some sovereign citizen extremists resort to violence.’’ Foundational concerns about domestic terrorism can be found in the 2010 report Rightwing Extremism, wherein domestic extremists, particularly white supremacists, were proposed to be the newest and most dangerous threat to the US since al-Qaeda.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Oct 15
     
    To get a glimmer of just how ridiculous this DoJ initiative is, skim http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/08/youre-nine-times-likely-killed-police-officer-terrorist.html Talk about misplaced priorities. 
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'Foreigners' land top minister posts in Ukraine - fastFT: Market-moving news and views,... - 0 views

www.ft.com/...and-top-minister-posts-ukraine war & peace Ukraine coup-government appointments
shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Two foreign-born investment fund managers and a reform-minded former official from the Caucasus republic of Georgia have been given top ministerial posts in Ukraine's newly-formed, pro-EU integration coalition government. The unorthodox appointment of the three "foreigners" swiftly granted Ukrainian citizenship on Tuesday is seen as a desperate attempt by the war-torn and recession-battered country to jump-start reforms, crack corruption and unlock billions of dollars in bailout funds from the International Monetary Fund, reports Roman Olearchyk. US-born Natalie Jaresko, a former US State Department official and investment fund manager with Ukrainian roots who has resided in Kiev for some 20 years, will join the government of prime minister Arseniy Yatseniuk as finance minister. In this role, the former head of Horizon Capital and economic section chief at the US Embassy will lead bailout and reform talks with the IMF and other creditors.
  • Working closely with her as economy minister will be Lithuanian Aivaras Abromavicius. Formerly a top executive at East Capital, a Swedish asset manager, he has in recent years been based in Ukraine. His wife is Ukrainian. Pledging to adopt anti-corruption and pro-business reforms, Mr Abromavicius addressed Ukrainian lawmakers on Tuesday saying: "I'm from Europe. We will work together European style." US-educated Alexander Kvitashvili, who reformed Georgia's healthcare system, will now be health minister in Ukraine and be tasked with the grim job of overhauling the country's dysfunctional healthcare system.
  • Explaining the need for foreigners to enter the government, Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko speaking before lawmakers approved the new cabinet said: Ukraine faces outstanding challenges – an incredibly difficult economic situation, aggression from the side of Russia, the need for radical reforms and tackling of corruption. This all requires non-standard decisions …. These decisions require a search for candidates for the new government not only from within in Ukraine, but also from across its borders, specifically from the countries which have experience in coming out of systemic crisis of foreign and domestic nature.
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LEAKED: Secret Negotiations to Let Big Brother Go Global | Wolf Street - 0 views

wolfstreet.com/...s-to-let-big-brother-go-global trade agreements TISA privatization data privacy globalization
shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Much has been written, at least in the alternative media, about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), two multilateral trade treaties being negotiated between the representatives of dozens of national governments and armies of corporate lawyers and lobbyists (on which you can read more here, here and here). However, much less is known about the decidedly more secretive Trade in Services Act (TiSA), which involves more countries than either of the other two. At least until now, that is. Thanks to a leaked document jointly published by the Associated Whistleblowing Press and Filtrala, the potential ramifications of the treaty being hashed out behind hermetically sealed doors in Geneva are finally seeping out into the public arena.
  • If signed, the treaty would affect all services ranging from electronic transactions and data flow, to veterinary and architecture services. It would almost certainly open the floodgates to the final wave of privatization of public services, including the provision of healthcare, education and water. Meanwhile, already privatized companies would be prevented from a re-transfer to the public sector by a so-called barring “ratchet clause” – even if the privatization failed. More worrisome still, the proposal stipulates that no participating state can stop the use, storage and exchange of personal data relating to their territorial base. Here’s more from Rosa Pavanelli, general secretary of Public Services International (PSI):
  • The leaked documents confirm our worst fears that TiSA is being used to further the interests of some of the largest corporations on earth (…) Negotiation of unrestricted data movement, internet neutrality and how electronic signatures can be used strike at the heart of individuals’ rights. Governments must come clean about what they are negotiating in these secret trade deals. Fat chance of that, especially in light of the fact that the text is designed to be almost impossible to repeal, and is to be “considered confidential” for five years after being signed. What that effectively means is that the U.S. approach to data protection (read: virtually non-existent) could very soon become the norm across 50 countries spanning the breadth and depth of the industrial world.
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  • The main players in the top-secret negotiations are the United States and all 28 members of the European Union. However, the broad scope of the treaty also includes Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey. Combined they represent almost 70 percent of all trade in services worldwide. An explicit goal of the TiSA negotiations is to overcome the exceptions in GATS that protect certain non-tariff trade barriers, such as data protection. For example, the draft Financial Services Annex of TiSA, published by Wikileaks in June 2014, would allow financial institutions, such as banks, the free transfer of data, including personal data, from one country to another. As Ralf Bendrath, a senior policy advisor to the MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht, writes in State Watch, this would constitute a radical carve-out from current European data protection rules:
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Egypt and UAE discuss Security Cooperation: Nibbing NATO's Covert Infrastructure in the... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...vert-infrastructure-in-the-bud war & peace terrorists™ Egypt UAE terrorist-organizations-list™ NATO U.S.-foreign-policy
shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Egyptian Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim and an Egyptian delegation left Egypt on Sunday for a three-day visit and meetings with UAE Interior Minister Saif Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan and Emitati police chiefs. In November 2014 the UAE published a “terror list” including 85 organizations. Among them, many who are known to be involved in activities as proxy for Gulf Arab, Western and NATO government’s in covert war and regime change operations. 
  • The agenda reportedly focuses on the expansion of cooperation in intelligence, countering terrorism, the arrest of suspects, smuggling and crime. Both Egypt and the UAE are members of Interpol.
  • In November 2014 the UAE published a list of 85 organizations which it had designated as terrorist organizations. The list includes a number of Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda linked organizations which are known to be used as proxies for certain Gulf Arab as well as Western and NATO covert wars and terrorist operations. The development prompted nsnbc editor-in-Chief and independent analyst Christof Lehmann to note that the “UAE Terror List nibs NATO’s covert Infrastructure in the Bud”.
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  • The list also includes organizations which are currently legally operating in at lest seven European countries and at least two organizations which are currently legally operating in the United States. Most noteworthy with regards to the United States’ covert regime-change program is that the USA’s terror list includes CANVAS, a.k.a. as DEMOZ. Virtually identical CANVAS flyers instructing protesters in combating police were found during Rabaa al-Adaweya and Nahda Square sit ins and the violent protests in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. Both situations ended in mass bloodshed and evidence strongly suggesting that cells embedded within the protest organizers shot and killed both police officers and protesters with the intention to create civil war like circumstances. Other organizations with known ties to Western and certain Gulf Arab countries covert war on Libya, Mali, Syria, Iraq and beyond include Jabhat al-Nusrah, Fatah al-Islam, Daesh, a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL or Islamic State, Boko Haram, Terik-i-Taliban, the Houthi movement, Liwa-al-Islam, as well as the ISIS associated Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. (see complete list below).
  • The list also includes Fatah al-Islam which is legally operating in Italy, the Islamic Association in Finland, the Muslim Association of Sweden, Det Islamske Forbundet in Norway, Islamic Relief in the United Kingdom, The Cordoba Foundation in the United Kingdom, Council on American Relations CAIR in the United States, which is known for having close ties to networks around Zbigniev Brzezinski and the Rockefeller family, the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, the Islamic Society of Germany, the Islamic Society of Denmark, the League of Muslims in Belgium and others. While many of the included organizations project an image of charitable or religious organizations or lobbies, many have been or are actively involved in covert infiltration and recruitment projects in cooperation with intelligence services, radicalization, subversion, financing of terrorism, or regime change operations.
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Farsnews - 0 views

english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx war & peace ISIL Russia U.S. Saudis false-flag
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  • Russia's External Intelligence Service (SVR) warned Kremlin that the US is using the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group to create a new front against Russia in the Central Asia. "The SVR has warned Kremlin in a report that the US is seeking to lead the ISIL forces in the Caucasus and the Central Asia to create a new front against Russia in the Central Asia in future to implement their plots and policies in the Middle-East," an informed source, who is close to Kremlin officials and asked to remain unnamed due to the sensitivity of his information, told FNA on Tuesday. "Using Saudi Arabia's facilities, which has shown its capability in transferring terrorists to Syria and Iraq, for recruiting forces in the Central Asia, the US has coaxed the Wahhabi clerics affiliated to Riyadh into attracting fighters from different Central Asian states, including Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, to prepare them mentally for being sent to Syria and Iraq. Then, they are trained in Kyrgyzstan and transferred to Istanbul and then to Syria and Iraq," the source said.
  • The report warns Russia of the danger of a US-led front run by the ISIL fighters in the Central Asia, stressing that the threat will sooner or later jeopardize the country's security, he concluded. Analysts believe that given the situation in the Middle-East if the ISIL creates a radical Islamic state in the region, then that would become a catalyst for what can become a much more widespread war and chaos involving not only the regional powers but given the interests of other international powers in the region, including Russia, China, the United States, some pretty serious conflicts among these great powers. They say that any success of the ISIL cult would have “a very important indirect effect” on the US and on the rest of the countries in the Eurasian region.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Aug 14
     
    Well, duh!
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How the NSA Helped Turkey Kill Kurdish Rebels - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...nsaturkeyspiegel war & peace surveillance state NSA Turkey PKK
shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The reconnaissance flight—which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2012—and its tragic consequences provided an important insight into the very tight working relationship between American and Turkish intelligence services in the fight against Kurdish separatists. Although the PKK is still considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, its image has been improved radically by its recent success in fighting ISIS in northern Iraq and Syria. PKK fighters—backed by U.S. airstrikes—are on the front lines against the jihadist movement there, and some in the West are now advocating arming the group and lifting its terrorist label. Documents from the archive of U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden that Der Spiegel and The Intercept have seen show just how deeply involved America has become in Turkey’s fight against the Kurds. For a time, the NSA even delivered its Turkish partners with the mobile phone location data of PKK leaders on an hourly basis. The U.S. government also provided the Turks with information about PKK money flows, and the whereabouts of some of its leaders living in exile abroad.
  • At the same time, the Snowden documents also show that Turkey is one of the United States’ leading targets for spying. Documents show that the political leadership in Washington, D.C., has tasked the NSA with divining Turkey’s “leadership intention,” as well as monitoring its operations in 18 other key areas. This means that Germany’s foreign intelligence service, which drew criticism in recent weeks after it was revealed it had been spying on Turkey, isn’t the only secret service interested in keeping tabs on the government in Ankara.
  • U.S. secret agents have also provided support to the Turkish government in its battle against the Kurdish separatists with the PKK for years. One top-secret NSA document from January 2007, for example, states that the agency provided Turkey with geographic data and recordings of telephone conversations of PKK members that appear to have helped Turkish agents capture or kill the targets. “Geolocations data and voice cuts from Kurdistan Worker Party communications which were passed to Turkey by NSA yielded actionable intelligence that led to the demise or capture of dozens of PKK members in the past year,” the document says.
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  • The NSA has also infiltrated the Internet communications of PKK leaders living in Europe. Turkish intelligence helped pave the way to the success by providing the email addresses used by the targets. The exchange of data went so far that the NSA even gave Turkey the location of the mobile phones of certain PKK leaders inside Turkey, providing updated information every six hours. During one military operation in Turkey in October 2005, the NSA delivered the location data every hour. In May 2007, then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell signed a “memorandum” pledging deeper intelligence support for Turkey. A report prepared on the occasion of an April 2013 visit by a Turkish delegation to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade indicates that cooperation in targeting the PKK had “increased across the board” since then. That partnership has focused overwhelmingly on the PKK—NSA assets in Turkey collected more data on PKK last year than any other target except for Russia. It resulted in the creation of a joint working group called the Combined Intelligence Fusion Cell, a team of American and Turkish specialists working together on projects that included finding targets for possible Turkish airstrikes against suspected PKK members. All the data for one entire wave of attacks carried out in December 2007 originated from this intelligence cell, according to a diplomatic cable from the WikiLeaks archive.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Sep 14
     
    Suddenly, the U.S. wants to arm the PKK to fight ISIL, despite previous years of NSA collaboration with Turkey to destroy them. 
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Turkish President's Stunning Outburst: The French Are Behind The Charlie Hebdo Massacre... - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...-charlie-hebdo-massacre-mossad war & peace Charlie-Hedbo Russia Turkey Mossad false-flag
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • It was less than 48 hours ago when Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, joined millions marching in Paris to pay tribute to the 17 people killed by ISIS-supporting extremists. Then, almost the moment he got back, things changed, and as the FT politely paraphrases what transpired, the "country’s president struck a much more confrontational tone." That's one way of putting it. Another is that the former PM and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of NATO-member Turkey did the unthinkable: accused the west, and French citizens in particular, of staging the Charlie Hebdo murder in order to blame Muslims, even as the mayor of Ankara said "Mossad is definitely behind such incidents . . . it is boosting enmity towards Islam."
  • "The duplicity of the west is obvious,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a press conference on Monday evening. “As Muslims we have never sided with terror or massacres: racism, hate speech, Islamophobia are behind these massacres.” His punchline: "The culprits are clear: French citizens undertook this massacre and Muslims were blamed for it,” he added. The FT is confused: "Although political leaders in Turkey have repeatedly condemned the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, a Jewish supermarket and a policewoman, a parallel narrative has emerged in the country, with conspiracy theorists blaming the murders on foreign intelligence agencies rather than radical Islamists."
  • The FT is further confused that Turkey is not the only place which has dared to offer conspiratorial theories: Russia is too. In Russia, some pro-Kremlin commentators sought to link the killings to geopolitical machinations by the US.    Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of Russia’s leading tabloids, ran the headline: “Did the Americans stage the terror attack in Paris?” and posted a series of interviews on its website that presented various reasons why Washington might have organised the attack. 
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  • Alexander Zhilin, head of the pro-Kremlin Moscow Centre for the Study of Applied Problems, claimed the terror attack was US retribution against President François Hollande for a January 6 radio interview in which Mr Hollande urged the EU to lift sanctions against Russia.  Washington used the attacks as “a quick fix for consolidating” US and EU geopolitical interests in Ukraine, Mr Zhilin claimed.
  • The FT is most stunned that in Russia the events in Charlie Hebdo are being equated to the 9/11 tragedy: “For the last 10 years, so-called Islamist terrorism has been under the control of one of the world’s leading intelligence agencies,” Alexei Martynov, director of the International Institute for New States, a think-tank, told pro-Kremlin internet outlet LifeNews. “I am sure that some American supervisors are responsible for the terror attacks in Paris, or in any case the Islamists who carried them out.” Whatever could have given the Russian this idea...
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Netanyahu-Mossad Split Divides U.S. Congress on Iran Sanctions - Bloomberg View - 0 views

www.bloombergview.com/...u-s-congress-on-iran-sanctions war & peace Iranian-nukes-myth sanctions legislation
shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • Israeli intelligence officials have been briefing both Obama administration officials and visiting U.S. senators about their concerns on the Kirk-Menendez bill, which would increase sanctions on Iran only if the Iranian government can't strike a deal with the so-called P5+1 countries by a June 30 deadline or fails to live up to its commitments. Meanwhile, the Israeli prime minister’s office has been supporting the Kirk-Menendez bill, as does the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, ahead of what will be a major foreign policy confrontation between the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government in coming weeks. Evidence of the Israeli rift surfaced Wednesday when Secretary of State John Kerry said that an unnamed Israeli intelligence official had said the new sanctions bill would be “like throwing a grenade into the process.” But an initial warning from Israeli Mossad leaders was also delivered last week in Israel to a Congressional delegation -- including Corker, Graham, McCain and fellow Republican John Barrasso; Democratic Senators Joe Donnelly and Tim Kaine; and independent Angus King -- according to lawmakers who were present and staff members who were briefed on the exchange. When Menendez (who was not on the trip) heard about the briefing, he quickly phoned Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer to seek clarification. Barrasso told us Tuesday that different parts of the Israeli government told the delegation different things. “We met with a number of government officials from many different parts of the government. There’s not a uniform view there,” he said.
  • Menendez is so livid at the administration, he decried its efforts to avert Congressional action on Iran at the hearing, telling Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken: “You know, I have to be honest with you, the more I hear from the administration in its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran.” Tuesday night, Obama threatened to veto the Kirk-Menendez bill if it passes Congress. Wednesday morning, House Speaker John Boehner responded by announcing that Netanyahu has accepted his invitation to address a joint session of Congress on Feb. 11, just as Congress is likely to be embroiled in a legislative fight over both bills. Boehner told fellow Republicans that he was specifically inviting Netanyahu to address the threat posed by radical Islam and Iran. Netanyahu is expected to deliver full-throated support for sanctions. The administration is upset that Netanyahu accepted Boehner’s invitation without notifying them, the latest indication of the poor relationship between the Israeli government and the White House. Two senior U.S. officials tell us that the Mossad has also shared its view with the administration that if legislation that imposed a trigger leading to future sanctions on Iran was signed into law, it would cause the talks to collapse.
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  • The Israeli view shared with Corker and other senators also mirrors the assessment from the U.S. intelligence community. “We’ve had a standing assessment on this,” one senior administration official told us. “We haven’t run the new Kirk-Menendez bill through the process, but the point is that any bill that triggers sanctions would collapse the talks. That’s what the assessment is.” Another intelligence official said that the Israelis had come to the same conclusion.  This is not the first time Israel’s Mossad has been at odds with Netanyahu on Iran. In December 2010, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan told Israeli reporters that he had openly opposed an order from Netanyahu to prepare a military attack on Iran. At the time, Obama was also working to persuade the Israeli prime minister to hold off on attacking Iran. Iranian diplomats have also routinely threatened to leave the talks if new sanctions were imposed. Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, at the end of December said new sanctions would “violate the spirit” of the negotiations that have been going on for more than a year now. Despite the intelligence analyses, however, predicting Iranian behavior is no exact science. There is still much about Iran’s program that U.S. spies do not know. In November, former CIA director Michael Hayden told Congress that U.S. intelligence assessments do not have a “complete picture” of the extent of Iran’s nuclear program.
  • On Capitol Hill, the fight over how to proceed against the administration is far from over. The Senate Banking Committee was supposed to mark up the Kirk-Menendez bill on Thursday, but the session was delayed by one week. Some Senate staffers told us that Democrats asked for the delay because Menendez wants to get more Democrats to commit to his bill before he goes public. A main pitch of the Kirk-Menendez bill is that is could garner bipartisan -- even perhaps veto-proof -- support in the face of Obama's disapproval. So far, most Democrats have stayed on the sidelines, especially after Obama and Menendez got into a heated argument over the bill at last week’s private Democratic retreat. Kirk and Menendez softened their proposal to make it more palatable to Democrats, by giving the president more flexibility than the previous version and providing the administration waivers after the fact. Corker, Graham and McCain are trying to woo Democrats to their side by arguing that avoiding sanctions language altogether and simply mandating that the Senate get a vote is a more bipartisan approach. There are only a handful of Democrats that will support any Iran bill, so competition for these votes is heated.
  • Update, 12 p.m. Jan. 22:  The Israeli prime minister's office released a statement Thursday about Mossad chairman Tamir Pardo’s meeting with the U.S. Senate delegation last weekend. The statement said Pardo didn’t oppose new sanctions on Iran but acknowledged that Pardo used the term “hand grenade” to describe the effect new sanctions would have on the nuclear negotiations with Iran. “He used this term to describe the possibility of creating a temporary breakdown in the talks, at the end of which the negotiations will be restarted under better conditions,” the statement said. “The Mossad chairman explicitly pointed out that the agreement that is being reached with Iran is bad, and may lead to a regional arms race.”
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jan 15
     
    My advice to Obama: tell John Kerry  to change Netanyahu's visa to impose travel restrictions, allowing him to travel only  to New York City  (where the U.N. is located). within the U.S. The U.S. did that routinely with Soviet Union officials during the Cold War days. That will teach Netanyahu a lesson he will remember, that  in the U.S. the Executive Branch has control of diplomatic relations. Netanyahu has already faced heavy criticism in Israel for straining relations with Obama. He's currently facing heavy criticism for forcing his way  into the Charlie Hebdo march in Paris after President Hollande had specifically requested that he not take part and for having the idocy to tell French Jews that they could never have a home if they did not emigrate to Israel. If  the Obama Administration makes a public issue out of Netanyahu's latest affront, it might well cost Netanyahu re-eloection as Prime Minister next month. That decision lies in the hands of a single Israeli official who will choose which party is to try to form a new ruling coalition of parties. Mr. Netanyahu's Likud Party has no guarantee of getting that nod.  
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ISIS Executioner Emwazi claims Harassment by MI5: Forced Recruitment Methods | nsnbc in... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...mi5-forced-recruitment-methods
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The ISIS executioner who appeared in several execution videos, speaking with British accent, has been identified as the 26-year-old Mohammed Emwazi who claims that he had been harassed and intimidated by MI5. How are Western intelligence services recruiting targeted persons? Mohammed Emwazi, a.k.a. Jihadi John” from the British capital London has, according to the guardian  been harassed by the British intelligence service MI5.
  • In an article entitled “How Mohammed Emwazi went from fresh Graduate to knife-wielding killer” the newspaper would report that his ordeal began when he traveled to Tanzania in 2009. The domestic British intelligence service MI5 was reportedly already in touch with Emwazi before he left the UK and began appearing in ISIS videos. Emwazi reportedly stated that he had been harassed to such a degree that he filed a complaint with the Independent Police Complaints Commission over his treatment.
  • What is the most common Forced Recruitment Strategy of the UK’s MI5, the German Verfassunsschutz and other Western European Intelligence Services?  One of the most common recruitment techniques among European intelligence services is to single out persons who committed minor crimes, threaten them with severe consequences or with the possibility to “set them up and let them serve major prison sentences”. After this first round of intimidation they are then approached by a domestic intelligence service who will offer them that “all problems could easily disappear if they cooperate; or else”. Especially the UK’s MI5 and the German Federal as well as State Verfassungsschutz (Constitutional Protection Police) have perfected this recruitment method. The most common “targets” for this recruitment method are individuals of special interest. During the 1960s – 70s this would typically be Communists, Socialists. Since the 1980s and after the end of the so-called cold war in the 90s, the Western European intelligence services began to focus on the new “enemy”, Muslims.
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  • British and most major corporate and State-funded Western media would focus on whether Emwazi’s claims were exaggerated or not; or whether the authorizations granted by the UK’s Counter-terrorism and Security Act violate the rights of citizens and contribute to radicalizing people rather than preventing terrorism. The questions almost all media shun are: Has MI5 used the above described or a similar method to force Emwazi into becoming cooperative? Has he been forced into the role of Jihadi John or is he a willing executioner / actor? Is he still handled by British or eventually NATO intelligence services? Are the revelations by the guardian a limited hangout to crate a new “legend” after inconsistencies in previous ISIS videos and “convenient timing” of executions had become too blatantly obvious?
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15
     
    "Is he still handled by British or eventually NATO intelligence services?" That's a very good question. How Emwazi finally managed to leave the UK despite being placed on a "no foreign travel" list remains a mystery. With MI5's assistance is a distinct possibility given the UK's collaboration with the U.S. in creating and managing ISIL 
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Apartheid Forever: Israel's Netanyahu rules out Palestinian Citizenship Rights | Inform... - 0 views

www.juancole.com/...d-palestinian-citizenship.html war & peace Israel Palestinian statelessness Netanyahu 2-state-solution
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, under extreme pressure over the real possibility that he will lose the March 17 elections, has made a powerful appeal to his far right wing constituency by openly admitting that he will never allow a Palestinian state and that he intends to flood Israeli squatters into East Jerusalem and its environs to make sure this Occupied territory never returns to the Palestinians.Millions of Palestinians whose families were violently expelled from their homes by Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine in 1947-48 remain stateless. These include the people of Gaza, the West Bank (four million) and a million or more in diasporas in Lebanon, Syria, and other countries. A million Palestinians are now citizens in Israel, and others have rights of citizenship in far-flung places like Chile and Honduras, as well as the United States. But I figure five million at least remain stateless.
  • Statelessness is rare in today’s world, a result of reforms initiated by the international community after the horrors of World War II and its preceding decades. Franco rendered many on the Spanish Left stateless after his victory in the Civil War in 1939 (not to mention massacring tens of thousands of them). The White Russians lost citizenship after their revolt against the Communists failed. The Nazis took citizenship rights away from Jews, Gypsies and others in Europe. In fact, the Holocaust was made practically possible in part by the denial of citizenship to Jews, which left them with no access to courts or other levers of social power that might have combated the monstrous Nazi plans for genocide. Millions were stateless in the 1930s and 1940s, and their lack of citizenship rights often exposed them to ethnic cleansing or loss of property and displacement.
  • The Palestinians are the last major stateless population. Stateless people do not have rights as most people understand the term. Their situation in some ways resembles slavery, since slaves also were denied the rights of citizenship. Stateless people’s property is insecure, since people with citizenship rights have better access to courts and to ruling authorities. Palestinians never really know what they own, and Israeli squatters routinely steal their property with impunity. Squatters dig tube wells deeper than those of the Palestinian villagers, lowering aquifers and causing Palestinian wells to dry up. Squatters go on wilding attacks, chopping down entire olive orchards (a prime source of Palestinian income) or beating up Palestinians. If Palestinians assemble peacefully to protest the loss of their farms to ever-expanding squatter settlements, the Israel army arrests them, including, often, children, who are taken away from their families and put in jail. Palestinians can be held for long periods without being charged. The prisoners are sometimes tortured.
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  • Netanyahu and the Israeli right-of-center say they want to keep Palestinians homeless and without citizenship rights in a state because they fear a Palestinian state will make claims on Israel and present a security challenge. Netanyahu said Sunday that if Israel relinquished the West Bank it would become a bastion of Muslim radicalism (but West Bankers are substantially more secular than the Jewish population of West Jerusalem).But in fact, Netanyahu and the right are dedicated to Greater Israel, to annexing the West Bank territory and finding a way to expel the Palestinians from it. The Palestinians are not a security challenge– they are like the guard at a bank getting in the way of bank robbers. The bank robbers feel a need to knock him out or kill him, remove him from the scene.
  • ut it is shameful to have Israel preside over 4 million stateless people forever. This is Apartheid. And Netanyahu has just made Apartheid the official policy of Israel, just as South African leader P.W. Botha dedicated himself to making black South Africans stateless and without the rights of citizenship. The only fig leaf Israel had for its Apartheid was the farce of the “peace process” and a pro forma ritual invocation of a “future Palestinian state.” Now Netanyahu has ripped off the fig leaf and stands naked before the world. Botha was called by his victims the “Great Crocodile.” It would be better epithet for Netanyahu than “Bibi.”
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15
     
    Under article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a treaty that Israel ratified: "(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. "(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality."  
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White House: racial slurs in NSA intelligence material 'unacceptable' | World news | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...racial-slurs-training-material surveillance state NSA NSA-targets Muslims NSA-blowback
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The White House has instructed US security agencies to review their training and policy materials for racial or religious bias after documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed training material for the intelligence agencies referring to "Mohammed Raghead".After an extensive investigation by the Intercept on Wednesday reported that the NSA and the FBI spied on the emails of five prominent US activists and attorneys with Muslim backgrounds, White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said that the administration took accusations of the slurs "extremely seriously." "Upon learning of this matter, the White House immediately requested that the director of national intelligence undertake an assessment of intelligence community policies, training standards or directives that promote diversity and tolerance, and as necessary, make any recommendations changes or additional reforms," Hayden said.It is at least the second time the White House has ordered a review of agency training materials said to include offensive language.
  • Hayden declined to provide additional detail on the scope or duration of the investigation. But it is reminiscent of an earlier incident in which the White House ordered the government's vast counter-terrorism apparatus to find and purge inflammatory training material, particularly that which singled out Muslims for particular scrutiny. In 2011, this reporter published FBI training material instructing newer counter-terrorism agents that Islam itself was a threat to US national security and compared the prophet Muhammad to a cult leader. Initial FBI pushback gave way to an inquiry, at the instruction of the White House, that removed significant quantities of offensive or imprecise training material. That instruction came six years after the "Mohammed Raghead" material and stretched far beyond the FBI. Anti-Islam training material, including some urging "Hiroshima" tactics against Islamic nations, was found and removed from professional education courses for US military officers, at the behest of Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
  • The Obama administration has strained to reconcile the vast counter-terrorism bureaucracy with its policy declarations that the US is not at war with Islam and has attempted, with mixed results, to cultivate a less militarized and security-focused relationship with US Muslims, often preferring the term "countering violent extremism" over "counter-terrorism".In some anti-Islam circles, the removal of the instructional material is infamous and considered evidence of an administration capitulation to Islam – the exact opposite of the concern raised by the Intercept on Wednesday. The Intercept report, by former Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, Murtaza Hussain and Josh Meyer, suggested a persistent counter-terrorism atmosphere in which the mixture of Muslim heritage or faith and political activism attracted the scrutiny of US security agencies, despite first amendment protections. It presented the cases of five American activists and attorneys of Muslim heritage who appear to have been targeted for surveillance, at least between 2002 and 2008. None have been charged with a crime.
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  • The accusation is one of the gravest the US intelligence agencies have faced in the year since the Guardian and other news outlets began publishing material leaked by Snowden. A central aspect of the intelligence agency's public defense is that it cannot surveil US persons for constitutionally-protected activity and that its court-certified privacy protections are too robust to allow for privacy intrusions of the sort the Intercept reported.The allegation threatens to sever the tenuous relationship between US law enforcement and surveillance agencies and American Muslim communities, many of whom have long suspected that their government views them as an internal threat and not a population to be protected.The NSA, the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sharply pushed back against the accusations that protected speech, unrelated to terrorism or espionage, turned American Muslims into counterterrorism targets.
  • US Muslim leaders and civil rights groups reacted with fury to the Intercept report.A coalition of 44 civil rights organizations wrote Obama on Wednesday to request a meeting with him, attorney general Eric Holder and FBI director James Comey. "In short, the government’s domestic counterterrorism policies treat entire minority communities as suspect, and American Muslims have borne the brunt of government suspicion, stigma and abuse," reads an open letter issued by a coalition that includes the ACLU, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Arab-American Institute, and dozens of others.In a statement, the law firm Muslim Advocates said the spying, apparently conducted between 2002 and 2008, "confirms the worst fears of American Muslims"."The federal government has targeted Americans, even those who have served their country in the military and government, simply because of their faith or religious heritage," the group said. "The report clearly documents how biased training by the FBI leads to biased surveillance."
  • Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, issued a statement comparing the surveillance of Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, named by the Intercept as one of the five surveillance targets, to the infamous surveillance of the Civil Rights Movement."The NSA’s surveillance of Nihad Awad and CAIR fits the same pattern as the FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr, Ella Baker, Jesse Jackson, Malcolm X, and other leaders of the civil rights movement. Then it was based on manufactured suspicions of associations with the Communist party. Now it is seemingly based on unproven claims of tangential associations with Hamas," Warren said.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 14
     
    Don't look for the American Muslim community to let go of this one anytime soon. They know they've been profiled since 9-11 but finally have proof.
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Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Iraq and the Battle of the Potomac | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/..._and_the_battle_of_the_potomac war & peace Iraq Syria ISIL Obama mission-failure
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • What Could Possibly Go Right? Four Months into Iraq War 3.0, the Cracks Are Showing -- on the Battlefield and at the Pentagon By Peter Van Buren Karl von Clausewitz, the famed Prussian military thinker, is best known for his aphorism “War is the continuation of state policy by other means.” But what happens to a war in the absence of coherent state policy? Actually, we now know. Washington’s Iraq War 3.0, Operation Inherent Resolve, is what happens. In its early stages, I asked sarcastically, “What could possibly go wrong?” As the mission enters its fourth month, the answer to that question is already grimly clear: just about everything. It may be time to ask, in all seriousness: What could possibly go right?
  • The U.S. Department of State lists 60 participants in the coalition of nations behind the U.S. efforts against the Islamic State. Many of those countries (Somalia, Iceland, Croatia, and Taiwan, among them) have never been heard from again outside the halls of Foggy Bottom. There is no evidence that America’s Arab “allies” like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, whose funding had long-helped extreme Syrian rebel groups, including IS, and whose early participation in a handful of air strikes was trumpeted as a triumph, are still flying. Absent the few nations that often make an appearance at America's geopolitical parties (Canada, the Brits, the Aussies, and increasingly these days, the French), this international mess has quickly morphed into Washington's mess. Worse yet, nations like Turkey that might actually have taken on an important role in defeating the Islamic State seem to be largely sitting this one out. Despite the way it’s being reported in the U.S., the new war in the Middle East looks, to most of the world, like another case of American unilateralism, which plays right into the radical Islamic narrative.
  • While American strategy may be lacking on the battlefield, it’s alive and well at the Pentagon. A report in the Daily Beast, quoting a generous spurt of leaks, has recently made it all too clear that the Pentagon brass “are getting fed up with the short leash the White House put them on.” Senior leaders criticize the war’s decision-making process, overseen by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, as “manic and obsessed.” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel wrote a quickly leaked memo to Rice warning that the president’s Syria strategy was already unraveling thanks to its fogginess about the nature of its opposition to Assad and because it has no “endgame.” Meanwhile, the military's “intellectual” supporters are already beginning to talk -- shades of Vietnam -- about “Obama's quagmire.”
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  • The U.S. military came out of the Vietnam War vowing one thing: when Washington went looking for someone to blame, it would never again be left holding the bag.
  • Taken as a whole, the military's near-mutinous posture is eerily reminiscent of MacArthur's refusal to submit to President Harry Truman's political will during the Korean War. But don’t hold your breath for a Trumanesque dismissal of Dempsey any time soon. In the meantime, the Pentagon’s sights seem set on a fall guy, likely Susan Rice, who is particularly close to the president. The Pentagon has laid down its cards and they are clear enough: the White House is mismanaging the war. And its message is even clearer: given the refusal to consider sending in those ground-touching boots, Operation Inherent Resolve will fail. And when that happens, don't blame us; we warned you.
  • Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey has twice made public statements revealing his dissatisfaction with White House policy. In September, he said it would take 12,000 to 15,000 ground troops to effectively go after the Islamic State. Last month, he suggested that American ground troops might, in the future, be necessary to fight IS. Those statements contrast sharply with Obama's insistence that there will never be U.S. combat troops in this war. In another direct challenge, this time to the plan to create those Sunni National Guard units, Dempsey laid down his own conditions: no training and advising the tribes will begin until the Iraqi government agrees to arm the units themselves -- an unlikely outcome. Meanwhile, despite the White House's priority on training a new Syrian moderate force of 5,000 fighters, senior military leaders have yet to even select an officer to head up the vetting process that’s supposed to weed out less than moderate insurgents.
  • In or out, boots or not, whatever its own mistakes and follies, those who run the Pentagon and the U.S. military are already campaigning strategically to win at least one battle: when Iraq 3.0 collapses, as it most surely will, they will not be the ones hung out to dry. Of the very short list of what could go right, the smart money is on the Pentagon emerging victorious -- but only in Washington, not the Middle East.
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