Group items tagged

Global banking giant HSBC for years catered to a motley crew of weapons dealers, tax evaders, tin-pot dictators and celebrities, using its private Swiss arm to shield accounts worth more than $100 billion. Documents obtained and analyzed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reveal how HSBC (HSBC) used the secretive Swiss banking system to conceal the identities of accounts holders, and in many cases, help depositors avoid paying taxes.

ICIJ's findings are based on data turned over to French authorities by former HSBC employee Hervé Falciani in 2008. The files were later obtained by the newspaper Le Monde and shared among other media outlets. ICIJ said the leaked documents show that HSBC "repeatedly reassured clients that it would not disclose details of accounts to national authorities" and even "discussed with clients a range of measures that would ultimately allow clients to avoid paying taxes in their home countries." In a statement provided to ICIJ, HSBC said that its Swiss private bank has undergone a "radical transformation in recent years," including reforms that will make it more difficult for clients to evade taxes or launder money. "We acknowledge that the compliance culture and standards of due diligence in HSBC's Swiss private bank, as well as the industry in general, were significantly lower than they are today," the statement said.

Members of the German media are paid by the CIA in return for spinning the news in a way that supports US interests, and some German outlets are nothing more than PR appendages of NATO, according to a new book by Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's largest newspapers.Ulfkotte is a serious mainstream journalist.  Here he is on Germany's leading political talk show a couple of years ago.  The book is a sensation in Germany, #7 on the bestseller list.  Its political dynamite, coming on the heels of German outrage of NSA tapping of their phones.  Check out the RT.com story on it in the video below

A digital leak to Al Jazeera of hundreds of secret intelligence documents from the world's spy agencies has offered an unprecedented insight into operational dealings of the shadowy and highly politicised realm of global espionage. Over the coming days, Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit is publishing The Spy Cables, in collaboration with The Guardian newspaper.

Spanning a period from 2006 until December 2014, they include detailed briefings and internal analyses written by operatives of South Africa's State Security Agency (SSA). They also reveal the South Africans' secret correspondence with the US intelligence agency, the CIA, Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad, Russia's FSB and Iran's operatives, as well as dozens of other services from Asia to the Middle East and Africa.

Among the revelations, the Spy Cables disclose how: Israel's Mossad told its allies that Iran was not working to produce nuclear weapons just a month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned it was barely a year from being able to do so; The CIA made attempts to contact Hamas directly despite the US government listing the Palestinian group as a "terrorist organisation"; Britain's MI6 sought South African help in an operation to recruit a North Korean official who had previously refused their cash; and South African and Ethiopian spies struggled to "neutralise" an assassination plot targeting a leading African diplomat.

China wants to have closer military ties with Iran, the Chinese defense minister told the visiting head of the Iranian navy on Thursday, state media reported, reaffirming diplomatic links despite controversy over Iran's nuclear plans.

Naval cooperation between Iran and China is aimed at reinforcing Iran's military capability in the Gulf, analysts say, as well as displaying China's plan to exert greater influence and presence beyond East Asia.“The (port) call reflects China’s military-to-military relationship with Iran," said Christian Le Mière, a naval expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank."It is the most explicit sign of Beijing’s acknowledgment of this relationship, which has remained relatively covert until now."

China's People's Liberation Army Daily separately reported that Sayyari had been given tours of a Chinese submarine and warships, where he "listened to an introduction on equipment ability and weapons systems".Sayyari said he hoped Iran and China could cooperate on anti-piracy operations, the newspaper said.China is Iran's top oil buyer and has been the most aggressive in raising its crude purchases after an easing of the Western sanctions aimed at ending Tehran's disputed nuclear program.

12 August 1988  Cover, pages 10-12   Somebody's  listening  . . . and they don't give a damn about personal privacy or commercial confidence. Project 415 is a top-secret new global surveillance system. It can tap into a billion calls a year in the UK alone. Inside Duncan Campbell on how spying entered the 21st century . . .  They've got it taped In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy, fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time   American, British and Allied intelligence agencies are soon to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their global electronic surveillance system. According to information given recently in secret to the US Congress, the surveillance system will enable the agencies to monitor and analyse civilian communications into the 21st century. Identified for the moment as Project P415, the system will be run by the US National Security Agency (NSA). But the intelligence agencies of many other countries will be closely involved with the new network, including those from Britain, Australia, Germany and Japan--and, surprisingly, the People's Republic of China. New satellite stations and monitoring centres are to be built around the world, and a chain of new satellites launched, so that NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, may keep abreast of the burgeoning international telecommunications traffic.

Both the new and existing surveillance systems are highly computerised. They rely on near total interception of international commercial and satellite communications in order to locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals. Last month, a US newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, revealed that the system had been used to target the telephone calls of a US Senator, Strom Thurmond. The fact that Thurmond, a southern Republican and usually a staunch supporter of the Reagan administration, is said to have been a target has raised fears that the NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes. These were originally exposed and criticised during the Watergate investigations, and their closure ordered by President Carter. After talking to the NSA, Thurmond later told the Plain Dealer that he did not believe the allegation. But Thurmond, a right-wing Republican, may have been unwilling to rock the boat. Staff members of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said that staff were "digging into it" despite the "stratospheric security classification" of all the systems involved. The Congressional officials were first told of the Thurmond interception by a former employee of the Lockheed Space and Missiles Corporation, Margaret Newsham, who now lives in Sunnyvale, California. Newsham had originally given separate testimony and filed a lawsuit concerning corruption and mis-spending on other US government "black" projects. She has worked in the US and Britain for two corporations which manufacture signal intelligence computers, satellites and interception equipment for NSA, Ford Aerospace and Lockheed. Citing a special Executive Order signed by President Reagan. she told me last month that she could not and would not discuss classified information with journalists. But according to Washington sources (and the report in the Plain Dealer, she informed a US Congressman that the Thurmond interception took place at Menwith Hill, and that she p

A secret listening agreement, called UKUSA (UK-USA), assigns parts of the globe to each participating agency. GCHQ at Cheltenham is the co-ordinating centre for Europe, Africa and the Soviet Union (west of the Ural Mountains). The NSA covers the rest of the Soviet Union and most of the Americas. Australia--where another station in the NSA listening network is located in the outback--co-ordinates the electronic monitoring of the South Pacific, and South East Asia.

Israeli practices of detaining Palestinians without charge or trial is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which defines humanitarian protection for civilians, the United Nations has said.

The comments made by a spokeswoman for the United Nations Human Rights Office (OHCHR) came just days after Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian lawmaker, was imprisoned without trial by Israeli authorities, The Nation website said. "We are concerned at the continued and increasing use of administrative detention by Israeli authorities against Palestinians. Administrative detainees are held without charge or trial, often on the basis of secret evidence, for periods of up to six months, which are extendable indefinitely," UN spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said, during a press briefing in Geneva, adding that this practice had been condemned by the UN on numerous occasions in the past. OHCHR reiterates its call on Israel to end its practice of administrative detention and to either release without delay or to promptly charge all administrative detainees and prosecute them with all the judicial guarantees required by international human rights law, she said. Khalida Jarrar, a member of the Palestinian parliament and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was arrested on Monday and is currently being held in administrative detention, PNN reports.

Jarrar is just one of the many Palestinians that include several other legislators, believed to be held in prisons by Israel. "As of February this year, there were reportedly 424 Palestinians held under administrative detention orders - more than double the 181 held at the same time last year," Shamdasani said. "We call, once again, on Israel to end its practice of administrative detention and to either release without delay or to promptly charge all administrative detainees and prosecute them with all the judicial guarantees required by international human rights law and standards." The policy of administrative detention, which Israel has reportedly defended as necessary to prevent attacks, has also been criticized by several Israeli lawmakers, who have denounced it as "draconian." "Israel should be ashamed of the draconian regime of administrative detentions, which is unparalleled in any democracy," Aida Touma-Suliman, a member of the Arab Joint List party, said, according to a report by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.

The issue of removing international sanctions on Iran is one of the most important aspects of the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1). While the nuclear talks are confidential, there have been conflicting reports about how the sanctions can and should be removed in return for Iran reducing their nuclear program. During his March 21 Iranian New Year's speech, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who has final say on the nuclear program, discussed his positions on the nuclear talks and sanctions removal.

“What the Americans repeat, ‘We’ll sign the contract with Iran, then we’ll see if they act upon the contract, then we’ll remove the sanctions’ — this is wrong and unacceptable," Khamenei said. "The removal of sanctions is part of the negotiations, not the result of negotiations. Those people involved [in the talks] know well the difference between the two. “The removal of sanctions should happen without any distance [delays] when an agreement is made.” Sa’adollah Zaeri, an Iranian analyst whose work is published on the supreme leader’s website and in the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, spoke to Tasnim News Agency about the issue. “One of the important statements of the supreme leader is that the removal of the sanctions be in the text of the negotiations.” Zaeri said, “However, the last few months, the West tried with cleverness to avoid its commitments and introduce the sanctions as an issue of time and connected to Iran’s commitments.” Zaeri said that the West tried to make sanction removal a “marginal issue” and that they had proposed “Iran reduce the nuclear program for 10 years and afterward if the West gives Iran a passing grade, then the sanctions will be removed.” There have also been reports that there could be a multistep removal of sanctions, which Khamenei has rejected in the past. Given that there are numerous UN, US and European Union sanctions against Iran, the nuclear negotiators have to at least to include specific language on the removal of sanctions in a final nuclear agreement.

During his Nowruz speech, Khamenei also rejected the possibility of cooperation between Iran and the United States in the Middle East. The idea that both countries have a common interest in fighting the terrorist group the Islamic State and can cooperate on this issues has been floated by some in Washington and even by members of President Hassan Rouhani’s administration. On this, Khamenei said: “The negotiations with America are about the nuclear program and nothing else, everyone should know this. We will not negotiate with America over regional matters. The goals of the Americans on regional matters are exactly the opposite of our goals. We want security and calm in the region … the policy of the US in the region creates instability. “We definitely do not speak or negotiate with the Americans on regional, domestic or weapons matters. The negotiations are merely on nuclear matters and how we can reach a conclusion on the nuclear negotiations through diplomacy.” 

In an unusually pointed threat, the Russian ambassador in Copenhagen warned that Danish ships would become targets of Russia’s nuclear arsenal if the Scandinavian country joins NATO’s missile defense program.The comments by the Russian ambassador, Mikhail Vanin, drew an angry response from the Danish foreign minister, Martin Lidegaard, who called them “unacceptable.”“I do not think that Danes are fully aware of the consequences if Denmark joins the U.S.-led missile defense shield,” Mr. Vanin was quoted in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. “Denmark will be part of the threat to Russia.”He added, “if it happens, then Danish warships will be targets for Russia’s nuclear weapons.”

Russia has long voiced strenuous objections to plans by the United States to build a Europe-based missile defense system. Russia has repeatedly said it views the antimissile program as a threat, despite reassurances from Washington.

The Costa Rican government fired its recently appointed ambassador to Venezuela yesterday after the latter expressed support for the Bolivarian government in an interview with a prominent rightwing Venezuelan newspaper.Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis stated that his government did not share the opinions of ex-ambassador Federico Picado, which have generated an uproar in the small Central American country with rightwing politicians demanding the ambassador's immediate dismissal.In his interview with La Nacion conducted via email, the 69 year-old ex-ambassador ridiculed suggestions of a lack of press freedom in Venezuela and attributed scarcities of essential goods to sabotage by "political factors" and "big business" seeking "internal destabilization". Picado also contrasted the image of the country presented by international media externally and the reality that he experienced on the ground.

Picado praised the example of Venezuela in the area of citizens' referenda and advocated that Costa Rica institute the option of midterm plebiscites for unseating inefficient leaders from their elected posts.However, not all Costa Rican political leaders sanctioned the firing of Picado.Patricia Mora of the leftwing Broad Front party stood up for the ex-ambassador, informing La Nacion, “It seems that they were objective declarations, he is experiencing what is happening [in Venezuela].”Kidnapping False ClaimThe dismissal of the Costa Rican ambassador for voicing support for the Bolivarian government comes in midst of an intensifying misinformation campaign directed against Venezuela in the international media.

Over the past few days, news headlines and social media feeds have been dominated by the story of an alleged kidnapping of a child in Venezuela.Nevertheless, Chief Prosecutor Luisa Ortega Diaz announced today that there was no kidnapping and that the child's mother was paid $18,000 of a total of $1 million Bolivars in order to issue the false claim.Carmen Yanet Briones, who is of Ecuadorian nationality, was detained yesterday, along with those accused of paying her, after the child's father dismissed the claim as false.President Nicolas Maduro denounced the false kidnapping as an instance of "psychological war" waged against Venezuela and called for those responsible to be brought to justice, mentioning the name of rightwing Venezuelan media consultant and fugitive J.J. Rondón.

The head of the IRS told lawmakers on Tuesday that his agency’s use of secretive phone-tracking technology was restricted to specific criminal cases, a day after new questions were raised about its surveillance powers.Before the Senate Finance Committee, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said that use of the StingRay devices, or “IMSI-catchers,”  is limited to the agency's criminal investigations division to track down money laundering, terrorism and financing of organized crime.ADVERTISEMENT“It’s only used in criminal investigations. It can only be used with a court order. It can only be used based on probable cause of criminal activity,” Koskinen told the Senate panel.“It is not used in civil matters at all,” he added. “It’s not used by other employees of the IRS.”The IRS’s previously unknown use of the technology was revealed on Monday by the Guardian. The newspaper reported that the agency spent more than $70,000 in 2012 to upgrade and train employees on the technology, which are also used by a dozen other federal agencies.The briefcase-sized StingRay device mimics cellphone towers in order to collect identifying data sent through waves emitted from people’s phones, including their location.  

Ambivalence, political twists and turns and the adoption of mutually exclusive decisions on Syria clearly show how completely lost the Saudi leaders are and their distinct lack of understanding of the fundamentals of modern foreign policy. The leaders of the wealthiest countries in the world, the leaders of the Arab and Muslim world have fully displayed their political inadequacy, inability to manoeuvre and adapt to the realities of the modern world. The once infinite riches are melting away rapidly, and soon ordinary Saudis will be faced with the issue of cost-cutting in their simple everyday problems.

The current policy which is so inconsistent and lacks any elementary logic was not only unsuccessful, but plunges Saudi Arabia ever deeper into an abyss of hardship and misery, setting new, complex problems before the King. Primarily, this concerns the economic and financial problems that the once wealthy Saudi society has not yet encountered. As the director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department of the IMF, Masood Ahmed, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the cumulative budget deficit of Middle Eastern oil-exporting countries in the next five years could reach $1 trillion. Moreover, the treasury of the regional leader, Saudi Arabia, is at risk of running dry, and the “kingdom of the welfare state” can expect bankruptcy. Up to now, financial holes – the budget deficit, which this year is projected to be 21.6 percent of GDP, has been covered by the earlier petrodollar savings. In particular, this summer the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency was forced to withdraw $70 billion from foreign investment funds assets. It can be assumed that this is only the beginning of the return of capital to their homeland, to tide over the emerging new outgoings. Otherwise, a sharp reduction in expenditure could lead to a social explosion in the Kingdom, whose citizens have become used to living a well-off life during the oil boom.

Saudi Arabia is currently exploring the possibility of higher energy prices for consumers within the country, as reported by the Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi. Responding to a question about whether the Kingdom is going to reduce energy subsidies in the near future, the Saudi official said: “Your question concerns whether we are considering such a possibility? Yes, we are considering it.” Energy prices in Saudi Arabia are among the lowest in the world. Saudi Arabia is in fact the leader of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Meanwhile, the Kingdom is losing out on potential revenue by selling oil on the domestic market at a much cheaper rate than on the foreign market. Currently, Saudi Arabia spends about 86 billion dollars a year in subsidies for oil producers.

Last week, the UK Guardian newspaper published the results of a 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic. Euphemistically titled ‘James Steele: America’s mystery man in Iraq‘, the video report presents fairly damning evidence that, in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, the US Government and military began to assemble a 10,000 strong ‘Shia militia’ that, under US command, would be used to do three things: Kidnap, torture, murder and maim members of the Iraq resistance and those members of the Iraqi population that supported them. Plants bombs that targeted predominantly Sunni and Shia areas in an effort to divide the population and thereby any unified resistance to the US occupation. Create the impression of a ‘civil war’ in Iraq that could be used by the US and European governments and militaries to justify the continued occupation of Iraq for ‘peace-keeping’ purposes. While the 50 minute documentary is proof enough that Rumsfeld, Cheney, General Petraeus, and all the other NeoCon warhawks and CIA monsters consciously employed the services of former US Army Colonel James Steele in the organisation of death squads against the Iraqi grass-roots resistance (a tactic that he, Steele, had used against resistance movements in South America in the 1970s and 90′s), it panders to the official narrative that ‘sectarianism’ in Iraq was the root cause of the carnage that unfolded.

The so-called ‘Shia militia’ used by the American government (with the help and advice of British and Israeli counter-insurgency ‘experts’) were recruited directly by the CIA and people like James Steele to carry out extra-judicial murders of anyone they could loosely identify as ‘resistance’. In order to cloak this strategy, indiscriminate attacks on Iraqi civilians, Shia and Sunni alike, were carried out on a massive scale. Some of these individuals, in another setting, would be called ‘al-Qaeda’. Their usefulness in the employ of US warhawks in the Pentagon was doubly valuable because they both justified continued US occupation and provided ‘proof’ for the American War on Terror mythology, ex post facto, that the US was at war with the perpetrators of 9/11. Whereas before the invasion in 2003 there was absolutely nothing to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the creation of death squads (real) labelled ‘al Qaeda in Iraq’ (fictitious) ‘made real’ the lie that America and all Western civilization was at war against hordes of irrational and violent Muslims, and became the template for instigating terrorism to suppress popular uprisings in Yemen, Mali and elsewhere. Once they have people violent, they can wear down and manage the national popular resistance, ensuring no opposition to the real strategic objectives (namely the control of Middle Eastern oil). The US forces of occupation, along with their British counterparts, had long experience in what actually happens when you militarily invade and occupy a sovereign nation: the people resist, and not just one ethnic or religious group, but more or less the whole population. There is nothing quite like a foreign occupation for uniting a country.

In Iraq, these US-controlled ‘Shia’ death squads have been operating in much the same way, and while the media is content to portray them as ordinary Shias motivated by religious bias, they are in fact hired thugs who value only the money they are paid by their US masters and the promise of positions of power in a future Iraqi government. Like the rank and file of the ‘Libyan rebels’ and the ‘Free Syrian Army’, these people form the dregs of Arab and Middle Eastern societies. Led by spellbinders who veil their barbaric actions with religious prose, secular leaders in the region, like Ghaddafi and Assad, and Nasser and Arafat before them, struggled in vain to keep them at bay. The reason for this is because the US, Britain, France and Israel have consistently supported – in the form of weapons, money, training and blatant lies – the extremists against the rational voices. Throughout the US occupation of Iraq, the main representative of Shias in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, has repeatedly called for unity among Shia and Sunni Iraqis in the face of foreign occupation and deception in the form of efforts to divide the resistance. These efforts included the bombing of bridges in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in an effort to prevent communication between Iraqis, the use of widespread terror tactics to force Sunni and Shia Iraqis to flee their homes, and the bombing of religious shrines, either Shia or Sunni, in an effort to create the reality of ‘sectarian strife’. Iraq today is in ruins. The country has been ripped apart socially, mainly by way of the literal ripping apart of tens of thousands of civilians, with many being first brutally and systematically tortured by US-sponsored death squads. Hundreds of thousands more have been summarily murdered, either by the bombs of US aircraft, the bullets of US soldiers, or those ubiquitous and very effective ‘car bombs‘ planted by US and British operatives and their hired thugs.

Egyptian media have reacted with fury as Britain and the United States increasingly point to a bomb as the cause of the Oct. 31 Russian plane crash in Sinai, with many outlets hammering home the same message: Egypt is facing a Western conspiracy that seeks to scare off tourists and destroy the country's economy. The warnings of a plot have been widely promoted by opinion-makers in print, online, and on TV, sometimes hinting and sometimes saying flat-out that the West has restricted flights to Egypt not purely out of safety concerns for its citizens but because it wants to undermine the country or prevent President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi from making Egypt too strong.And though they seem wild, these conspiracy theories have apparently tapped into the Egyptian mindset — so much so that when Russia last Friday grounded all flights to Egypt, some media speculated that Moscow had fallen victim to British pressure and manipulation."The people defy the conspiracy — Egypt will not cave in to pressures," the state-owned Al-Gomhuria newspaper proclaimed in a front-page headline this week. "Egypt stands up to 'the West's terrorism,'" an independent daily, El-Watan, headlined.

Washington continues making an international fool of herself by her inability to effectively counter the impression around the world that Russia, spending less than 10% of the Pentagon annually on defense, has managed to do more against ISIS in Syria in six weeks than the mighty US Air Force bombing campaign has done in almost a year and half. One aspect that bears attention is the demonstration by the Russian military of new technologies that belie the widely-held Western notion that Russia is little more than a backward oil and raw material commodity exporter. Recent reorganization of the Russian state military industrial complex as well as reorganization of the Soviet-era armed forces under Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s term are visible in the success so far of Russia’s ISIS and other terror strikes across Syria. Clearly Russian military capabilities have undergone a sea-change since the Soviet Cold War era. In war there are never winners. Yet Russia has been in an unwanted war with Washington de facto since the George W. Bush Administration announced its lunatic plan to place what they euphemistically term “Ballistic Missile Defense” missiles and advanced radar in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Turkey after 2007. Without going into detail, BMD technologies are the opposite of defensive. They instead make a pre-emptive war highly likely. Of course the radioactive ash heap in such an exchange would be first and foremost the EU countries foolish enough to invite US BMD to their soil.

What the Russian General Staff has managed, since the precision air campaign began September 30, has stunned western defense planners with Russian technological feats not expected. Two specific technologies are worth looking at more closely: The Russian Sukoi SU-34 fighter-bomber and what is called the Bumblebee hyperbaric mortar weapon.

The plane responsible for some of the most damaging strikes on ISIS and other terror enclaves in Syria is manufactured by the Russian state aircraft industry under the name Sukhoi SU-34. As the Russian news agency RIA Novosti described the aircraft, “The Su-34 is meant to deliver a sufficiently large ordnance load to a predetermined area, hit the target accurately and take evasive action against pursuing enemy planes.” The plane is also designed to deal with enemy fighters in aerial combat such as the US F-16. The SU-34 made a first test flight in 1990 as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos of the Yeltsin years caused many delays. Finally in 2010 the plane was in full production. According to a report in US Defense Industry Daily, among the SU-34 features are: • 8 ton ordnance load which can accommodate precision-guided weapons, as well as R-73/AA-11 Archer and R-77/AA-12 ‘AMRAAMSKI’ missiles and an internal 30mm GSh-301 gun. • Maximum speed of Mach 1.8 at altitude.

France warned the Israeli government Friday that if Paris fails to break an impasse in the following weeks in the peace talks between Palestine and Israel, its government will recognize the state of Palestine, the Foreign Ministry announced. “If this attempt to achieve a negotiated solution reaches a dead end, we will take responsibility and recognize the Palestinian state,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said. ​The diplomat explained that as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, France has the responsibility to maintain efforts to find a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. Fabius said he had high hopes that Israel and Palestine will participate in the international peace summit. The peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have been at an impasse since 2014, when they decided to end their meetings, as did the other key international players, including the U.S., the European Union member states and Arab nations. “Unfortunately, (Israeli) settlement construction continues. We must not let the two-state solution unravel,” he said.

If a statement by an unidentified Israeli official to Haaretz newspaper is confirmed, France will in fact end up recognizing the Palestine state in the coming weeks, because the source said Israel will reject the French peace initiative. ​Earlier this month, the Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki discussed with French officials in Paris the possibility of proposing a U.N. Security Council resolution declaring that the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank are an obstacle to a peaceful solution between the two states.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated Monday that she supports Turkey's proposal for a no-fly zone in Northern Syria. "In the current situation, it would be helpful if there was a designated airspace in the area - a kind of no-fly zone," Merkel told the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper. "If it were possible to make such an agreement between the anti-Assad moderate opposition forces and Assad supporters, that would be helpful," she added.

You know the country has really gone to the dogs when Washington’s main allies in its war on Syria are the two biggest terrorist incubators on the planet. I’m talking about Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both of which are run by fanatical Islamic zealots devoted to spreading violent jihad to the four corners of the earth. Not that the US doesn’t have blood on its hands too. It does, but that’s beside the point.

Four and half years later, the place is a worse mess than Iraq.  Half the population is either dead or internally displaced, the civilian infrastructure is a shambles, and nothing has been achieved. Nothing.  Assad is safely tucked away in Damascus, the jihadi proxies are on the run, and everyone hates the US more than ever. Great plan, eh? Where’s the downside? The downside is that now Washington finds itself backed against the wall with precious  few options that don’t involve a direct confrontation with Moscow.

These developments have forced Washington into a fallback position that will likely entail air-support for Turkish ground forces who will be deployed to Northern Syria to take and hold area sufficient for a “safe zone”, which is an innocuous sounding moniker the media invokes to conceal the fact that Turkey plans to annex sovereign Syrian territory which, by the way, is an act of war. Now fast-forward to last week:

US experts are reconstructing and equipping a desolate airport special to carrying agricultural products in the region controlled by the Kurdish forces in Hasaka region, Northeastern Syria, to turn it into a military base.The Lebanese al-Akhbar newspaper reported on Saturday that a number of US experts have entered the region since 50 days ago to develop and prepare the runways with 2,500m length and 250m width to be used by fighter jets. Abu Hajar airport which has not been used since 2010 is located in Tal al-Hajar region in the Eastern countryside of Hasaka which is controlled by the Kurdish People's Defense Units (YPG).

The airbase is located Southeast of the town of Rimelan, which is one of the YPG’s main strongholds and “largest arms and ammunition depots”. The US has not received or even asked for a permission from Damascus for reconstructing the airbase. The United States does not have a UN mandate for interventing in the Syria war. The airport will help enable Washington to add an additional safe place to land its forces, commando units for instance, and bring in military support to its allies who are working to finalize control over Southern Hasaka countryside, al-Akhbar said. The report came over a week after the Kurdish region said that the US and Kurdish forces were working together to construct a 10 hectare military airbase South of the town of Rimelan in the village of Rimelan al-Basha. “American experts are directly supervising the airbase with a Kurdish workforce,” the reports claimed, saying that US unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) had been flown from the facility to test it.

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel urged Saudi Arabia on Sunday to stop supporting religious radicals, amid growing concern among some lawmakers in Berlin about the funding of militant mosques by the world's biggest oil exporter. The unusual criticism of the Gulf state follows a report by Germany's foreign intelligence agency which suggested that Saudi foreign policy was becoming more "impulsive". The German government rebuked the BND agency for making such suggestions about Saudi Arabia, an important business partner that is involved in international talks to find a political solution to the Syria crisis.. "We need Saudi Arabia to solve the regional conflicts," Sigmar Gabriel, the head of the Social Democrats (SPD) who share power with conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel, told the mass-circulation newspaper Bild am Sonntag. "But we must at the same time make clear that the time to look away is past. Wahhabi mosques are financed all over the world by Saudi Arabia. In Germany, many dangerous Islamists come from these communities," he said. Saudi Arabia follows the ultra-conservative Wahhabi form of Islam, and some outsiders see it as a cause of the international jihadist threat.

Another senior Social Democrat, Thomas Oppermann, also homed in on Saudi Arabia, saying Wahhabism offered a ideology for IS insurgents and contributed to the radicalization of moderates. "We don't need or want it in Germany," he told the weekly Welt am Sonntag. Germans are worried about a possible attack on their soil, especially after the bombings and shootings in Paris on Nov. 13 that killed 130 people.

For years, NATO has granted impunity to convoys packed with supplies bound for ISIS and Al Qaeda. Russian airstrikes have stopped them dead in their tracks. If a legitimate, well-documented aid convoy carrying humanitarian supplies bound for civilians inside Syria was truly destroyed by Russian airstrikes, it is likely the world would never have heard the end of it. Instead, much of the world has heard little at all about a supposed “aid” convoy destroyed near Azaz, Syria, at the very edge of the Afrin-Jarabulus corridor through which the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda’s remaining supply lines pass, and in which NATO has long-sought to create a “buffer zone” more accurately described as a Syrian-based, NATO-occupied springboard from which to launch terrorism deeper into Syrian territory. The Turkish-based newspaper Daily Sabah reported in its article, “Russian airstrikes target aid convoy in northwestern Syrian town of Azaz, 7 killed,” claims: At least seven people died, 10 got injured after an apparent airstrike, reportedly by Russian jets, targeted an aid convoy in northwestern Syrian town of Azaz near a border crossing with Turkey on Wednesday. Daily Sabah also reported: Speaking to Daily Sabah, Serkan Nergis from the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) said that the targeted area is located some 5 kilometers southwest of the Öncüpınar Border Crossing.  Nergis said that IHH has a civil defense unit in Azaz and they helped locals to extinguish the trucks. Trucks were probably carrying aid supplies or commercial materials, Nergis added.

Daily Sabah’s report also reveals that the Turkish-Syrian border crossing of Oncupinar is held by what it calls “rebels.” The border crossing of Oncupinar should be familiar to many as it was the scene of Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle’s (DW) investigative report where DW camera crews videotaped hundreds of trucks waiting at the border, bound for ISIS territory, apparently with full approval of Ankara. The report was published in November of 2014, a full year ago, and revealed precisely how ISIS has been able to maintain its otherwise inexplicable and seemingly inexhaustible fighting capacity. The report titled, “‘IS’ supply channels through Turkey,” included a video and a description which read: Every day, trucks laden with food, clothing, and other supplies cross the border from Turkey to Syria. It is unclear who is picking up the goods. The haulers believe most of the cargo is going to the “Islamic State” militia. Oil, weapons, and soldiers are also being smuggled over the border, and Kurdish volunteers are now patrolling the area in a bid to stem the supplies. The report, and many others like it, left many around the world wondering why, if the US is willing to carry out risky military operations deep within Syrian territory to allegedly “fight ISIS,” the US and its allies don’t commit to a much less riskier strategy of securing the Turkish-Syrian border within Turkey’s territory itself – especially considering that the United States maintains an airbase, training camps, and intelligence outposts within Turkish territory and along the very border ISIS supply convoys are crossing over.

Ideally, NATO should have interdicted these supply convoys before they even crossed over into Syria – arresting the drivers and tracking those who filled the trucks back to their source and arresting them as well. Alternatively, the trucks should have been destroyed either at the border or at the very least, once they had entered into Syria and were clearly headed toward ISIS-occupied territory. That none of this took place left many to draw conclusions that the impunity granted to this overt logistical network was intentional and implicated NATO directly in the feeding of the very ISIS terrorists it claimed to be “fighting.”