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Paul Merrell

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35198.htm - 0 views

  • According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the scope of the NSA phone monitoring includes customers of all three major phone networks—Verizon, AT&T and Sprint—as well as records from Internet service providers and purchase information from credit card providers.
  • GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, first of all, after our story was published, and The Washington Post published more or less simultaneously a similar story, several news outlets, including NBC News, confirmed with government officials that they in fact have exactly the access to the data that we describe. The director of national intelligence confirmed to The New York Times, by name, that the program we identify and the capabilities that we described actually exist. So, you have a situation where somebody seems to be lying. The NSA claims that these companies voluntarily allow them the access; the companies say that they never did.
  • on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful." SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business records section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.
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  • On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange. SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir. SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not? JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.
  • AMY GOODMAN: That’s the questioning of the head of the national intelligence, James Clapper, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Glenn Greenwald? GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways. We are going to do a story, coming up very shortly, about the scope of the NSA’s spying activities domestically, and I think it’s going to shock a lot of people, because the NSA likes to portray itself as interested only in foreign intelligence gathering and only in targeting people who they believe are guilty of terrorism, and yet the opposite is true. It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago. And we intend to make all those facts available so people can see just how vast it is and how false those kind of statements are.
Paul Merrell

Iraq's Next PM? Ahmed Chalabi - 0 views

  • JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In other news from Iraq, pressure is mounting on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to form a less sectarian government or to resign. Earlier today, a representative of the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for the creation of what he described as a new "effective" government. Meanwhile, on Thursday, The New York Times revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and the State Department’s top official in Iraq, Brett McGurk, recently met with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who has been described as a potential candidate to replace Maliki. AMY GOODMAN: Chalabi is the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-funded Iraqi exile group that strongly pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion. Chalabi’s INC helped drum up pre-war claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. The group provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration, U.S. lawmakers, and journalists at The New York Times and other papers. After the invasion, Chalabi became chair of the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification. Many blame his actions for politically isolating Iraq’s Sunni minority and causing sectarian strife.
  • Chalabi has defended his actions leading up to the invasion. In 2004, he told the London Telegraph, quote, "We are heroes in error. ... As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important," Chalabi said. Well, to talk more about Ahmed Chalabi, we’re joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine. His latest piece for Harper’s is headlined "The Long Shadow of a Neocon." Welcome to Democracy Now!, Andrew Cockburn. Talk about what you understand is happening in this battle right now over whether Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be—will be overthrown and what role Chalabi could play in this.
  • ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, my understanding is that the Americans have made it very clear in Baghdad that Maliki—they want Maliki to go, I mean, even to the point of saying—they were saying a couple days ago that there would be no aid of any kind—military aid, airstrikes or what have you—unless—while Maliki was leader of the government. I mean, they view him as the source of all their troubles, which is not totally inaccurate. There’s a certain irony in this, in that they—Maliki is in power, really, thanks to the—thanks to the U.S. Zalmay Khalilzad, then the ambassador to Baghdad, in 2006 selected Maliki, much to everyone’s surprise, including Maliki’s. When Khalilzad said, "How would you like to be prime minister?" Maliki said, "Are you serious?" So, and then that was reaffirmed again in 2010 when Maliki had basically lost an election, and the U.S. and Iran, for that matter—further ironies here—really got—really rammed him back down the throats of the Iraqi people. So, now to be saying, you know, Maliki has to go, as I say, is rich with irony.
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  • JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your article on Khalilzad also talks about his influence in Afghanistan, as well. Could you talk a little bit about his history? ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, Khalilzad, yeah, he’s been a sort of longtime foot soldier in the neocon, neoconservative, movement. I mean, he has a sort of pretty grisly pedigree. He, early on—I mean, he’s an Afghan, and then made his way to the U.S. as a young man, as a bright student. And from there, he fell under the influence of Albert Wohlstetter, who was a character in Chicago who was very influential in the movement, who also mentored Richard Perle. And then you see Khalilzad—from the beginning of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, he’s very much in the mix. He claims now to have been instrumental in sort of directing the whole policy, which I don’t think is really the case. But anyway, there he was signing all the resolutions, calling for war with—overthrowing Saddam, and so forth.
  • And his moment came in 2001, or after 2001, when we, you know, successfully toppled the Taliban regime, and Khalilzad was really only the Afghan or sort of pretty much the only Muslim any of these people knew, and so they appointed him the overseer of the post-Taliban Afghanistan, from which position he selected one Hamid Karzai—again, much to the subsequent grief of U.S. administrations—really with the view of—a lot of Afghans I talked to at the time thought, well, Karzai was a fairly weak figure, and Khalilzad’s idea was that he, Khalilzad, would be the real ruler of Afghanistan and behave like that, really. He was bossing all them, and he restored—he fostered all these ghastly warlords and strongmen, with himself really as the biggest warlord of all. He’d threaten them with airstrikes and so forth. So, after he had pretty much ensured that no stable settlement would emerge in Afghanistan, and really his actions had led to the revival of the Taliban, he failed upwards and was moved to Iraq, where the U.S. was trying to sort of put in place some kind of government that they could entrust Iraq to. And as I said, they didn’t like the man they had, a prime minister called Jaafari. And Khalilzad looked around and selected this character, al-Maliki, who was a fairly comparatively obscure figure in the—had been in the exiled opposition. He had lived in Damascus for most of his adult life, running a butcher shop. And suddenly, as I say, he called in al-Maliki.
Paul Merrell

Administration will soon be forced to confront big decisions on Syria - The Washington ... - 0 views

  • The Obama administration will be forced this weekend to grapple with major decisions on Syria that it has long resisted making but may now be unavoidable if the president’s diplomatic and military strategies there are to succeed. In a meeting Saturday in Vienna, Secretary of State John F. Kerry will try to build momentum for a Syrian political transition. Allies at the table plan to challenge him to expand the narrow list of U.S.-approved opposition forces fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and to recognize Islamist groups the administration has shunned as extremist. On Sunday and Monday, President Obama will face Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Group of 20 economic summit in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya. Erdogan said Wednesday that Syria will be a “major topic” at the summit and that he will push his long-standing demand for the creation of a U.S.-protected Syrian safe zone along the Turkish border. Russian President Vladi­mir Putin will also attend the G-20 meeting. Russian bombing of opposition forces in support of Assad has fundamentally altered the equation in Syria, and Putin has his own ideas about political transformation, terrorism and air operations there. The Vienna meeting is the second in as many weeks since Kerry launched a new effort to resolve the Syrian civil war through diplomatic channels. In addition to the humanitarian disaster the conflict has caused, the administration thinks the continuation of the war undercuts its higher priority of defeating the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.
  • “It’s a philosophy based on momentum,” said British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, one of the participants. “You get people together, you force them to make some forward movement, keeping them at it, keeping their noses to the grindstone, keep them in a locked room.” Kerry, Hammond said, “wants to make some further significant progress this week.” The plan is for the rapid-fire meetings to continue until success is achieved. “But if he can’t deliver,” a senior administration official acknowledged, “there will maybe be one more after this and it will fizzle. We just don’t know. I’ve seen Kerry pull rabbits out of hats before.” The official was one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal administration discussions. Before the first Vienna meeting at the end of October, Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, agreed that they would set aside the issue that most divided them — whether Assad could be part of a negotiated transition to a new Syrian government. In addition to U.S. allies in the Middle East and Europe, the 19 attendees also included Assad-backer Iran, invited for the first time to participate in international discussions over Syria. The Syrian opposition and representatives from Assad government were not invited and will not attend the Saturday meeting. The assumption by participants is that if they can reach agreements among themselves, it will eventually be easier to convince the combatants that a deal is viable and to push them toward making compromises that may be necessary.
  • While Kerry is seen as open to expanding the list of acceptable organizations, “I don’t know if the White House will sign off on it,” an administration official said. Any cease-fire would include an exemption for bombing raids against the Islamic State and likely Jabhat al-Nusra, a complication in the case of the latter because its forces in northwest Syria are co-mingled with other opposition groups. While the United States has rarely targeted that part of the country, Russian airstrikes have centered on the area. “Basically, they want a free pass to keep hitting people,” said the administration official, noting that the Russians might claim they were targeting only Jabhat al-Nusra while continuing to bomb Assad’s opponents.
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  • While there is broad accord over a terrorist list that includes the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, agreement beyond that has been elusive. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State are demanding that the United States expand its list of viable opposition groups to include Islamist organizations such as Ahrar al-Sham, or Free Men of Syria, and others. One of the largest and most powerful rebel organizations, Ahrar al-Sham has at times cooperated with Jabhat al-Nusra and has welcomed some of its former members. The administration, as it has with many other locally supported rebel groups, does not consider it part of the “moderate” opposition eligible to participate in transition plans. Hammond predicted that settling on a definitive list of terrorist organizations “will require deep breaths on several sides, including the U.S. side. The Saudis are never going to sign off on Ahrar al-Sham being categorized as terrorists.”
  • Whatever optimism Kerry has appears to be based on his belief that Russia is less concerned about Assad than it is fearful that his removal will cause Syria’s military to collapse, eliminating Russia’s sole foothold in the Middle East and opening the door to the Islamic State. U.S. officials from Obama on down have said since the beginning of Russia’s air campaign in Syria in late September that Moscow is making a “mistake” that will make the situation worse. Assuming Kerry is correct — and that Shiite Iran can also be persuaded to relinquish some of its influence in Syria in favor of a government with a prominent and perhaps dominant role for Syria’s largely Sunni opposition — the question of Assad will soon have to be put on the table.
  • In the tangled mess of Syria, resolution of the Assad problem leads directly back to the question of who will be eligible to participate in the transition process — due to be discussed at Saturday’s meeting in Vienna. Most opposition leaders, including those backed by the United States, have said they will not participate unless the timing of Assad’s departure is set. Government representatives fearful of their own futures are unlikely to participate in negotiations that begin with assurances of Assad’s departure. The outcome of the Vienna meeting will weigh heavily on both the tone and substance of the G-20 summit that begins the next day. Erdogan, who spoke by telephone with Obama this week, said Wednesday that his government is prepared to take unspecific “stronger steps” to support a safe zone where Syrian refugees from the fighting, as well as opposition combatants, can be protected from government airstrikes. He may find growing sympathy for his position among European governments anxious about the rising tide of refugees from the conflict pouring across their own borders.
Paul Merrell

U.S. Syria strategy falters with collapse of rebel group | Reuters - 0 views

  • (Reuters) - The Hazzm movement was once central to a covert CIA operation to arm Syrian rebels, but the group's collapse last week underlines the failure of efforts to unify Arab and Western support for mainstream insurgents fighting the Syrian military. A blow to U.S. moves to aid rebels, the dissolution of Hazzm also highlights the risks that a new Department of Defense program could face in training and equipping fighters in Jordan, Turkey and Qatar.U.S. officials plan to train thousands of Syrian rebels over three years. The program is expected to begin this month in Jordan and focuses on battling the hardline Islamic State group rather than President Bashar al-Assad.Hazzm's collapse has shown how such efforts will prove difficult in a country where insurgents often battle each other and arms have fallen into the hands of hardline groups.
  • (Reuters) - The Hazzm movement was once central to a covert CIA operation to arm Syrian rebels, but the group's collapse last week underlines the failure of efforts to unify Arab and Western support for mainstream insurgents fighting the Syrian military. A blow to U.S. moves to aid rebels, the dissolution of Hazzm also highlights the risks that a new Department of Defense program could face in training and equipping fighters in Jordan, Turkey and Qatar.U.S. officials plan to train thousands of Syrian rebels over three years. The program is expected to begin this month in Jordan and focuses on battling the hardline Islamic State group rather than President Bashar al-Assad.Hazzm's collapse has shown how such efforts will prove difficult in a country where insurgents often battle each other and arms have fallen into the hands of hardline groups.
  • Reuters could not authenticate the photographs but the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdulrahman, said many arms had been seized, including 60 to 90 TOW anti-tank missiles.Hazzm members did not respond to requests for comment or were not reachable. The group once claimed to be the main recipient of the secret U.S.-led operation supporting rebels in the north. It numbered 1,200-1,500 last year, Abdulrahman said.It was set up in January 2014 and came under a body known as MOM, which was used to funnel resources to rebels in an attempt to coordinate funding. Money has poured into northern Syria from Gulf Arab states including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, much of it going to Islamist fighters, including hardliners. "The United States was never particularly serious in its support for the MOM, and coordination among the United States and other state backers broke down," said Noah Bonsey, a senior Syria analyst at the International Crisis Group. "The defeat of Hazzm is the latest indication of the MOM's failure in the north," he said.
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  • An onslaught by al Qaeda's Syria wing, the Nusra Front, last week forced Hazzm into dissolution, its members swallowed by Jabhat al-Shamiyya, a mainly Islamist alliance. It was the second time in four months that Nusra had crushed a Western-backed rebel group.Nusra is now considering cutting its ties with al Qaeda in a rebranding exercise backed by Qatar and some other Gulf states that will bring in more funds, sources say.On Tuesday, Nusra followers published photographs on Twitter of what they said were U.S. weapons, including anti-tank missiles, seized in battles with opposition brigades.
  • State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Hazzm had received non-lethal U.S. assistance. Washington has never acknowledged the CIA program.The group's demise "will have an impact on the moderate opposition's capabilities in the north," Harf said.The group had shrunk to about 400 fighters last month after killings, desertions and arrests, the Observatory's Abdulrahman said. "They are now finished, like sugar in tea."
Paul Merrell

Risking World War III in Syria | Consortiumnews - 0 views

  • Risking World War III in Syria February 6, 2016 Exclusive: After Saudi-backed Syrian rebels balked at peace talks and the Russian-backed Syrian army cut off Turkish supply lines to jihadists and other Syrian rebels, the U.S. and its Mideast Sunni “allies” appear poised to invade Syria and force “regime change” even at the risk of fighting Russia, a gamble with nuclear war, writes Joe Lauria.By Joe LauriaDefense Secretary Ashton Carter last October said in a little noticed comment that the United States was ready to take “direct action on the ground” in Syria. Vice President Joe Biden said in Istanbul last month that if peace talks in Geneva failed, the United States was prepared for a “military solution” in that country.The peace talks collapsed on Wednesday even before they began. A day later Saudi Arabia said it is ready to invade Syria while Turkey is building up forces at its Syrian border.
  • The U.N. aims to restart the talks on Feb. 25 but there is little hope they can begin in earnest as the Saudi-run opposition has set numerous conditions. The most important is that Russia stop its military operation in support of the Syrian government, which has been making serious gains on the ground.A day after the talks collapsed, it was revealed that Turkey has begun preparations for an invasion of Syria, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. On Thursday, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said: “We have good reasons to believe that Turkey is actively preparing for a military invasion of a sovereign state – the Syrian Arab Republic. We’re detecting more and more signs of Turkish armed forces being engaged in covert preparations for direct military actions in Syria.” The U.N. and the State Department had no comment. But this intelligence was supported by a sound of alarm from Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
  • Turkey, which has restarted its war against Kurdish PKK guerillas inside Turkey, is determined to crush the emergence of an independent Kurdish state inside Syria as well. Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan stopped the Syrian Kurds from attending the aborted Geneva talks.A Turkish invasion would appear poised to attack the Syrian Kurdish PYD party, which is allied with the PKK. The Syrian (and Iraqi) Kurds, with the Syrian army, are the main ground forces fighting the Islamic State. Turkey is pretending to fight ISIS, all the while actually supporting its quest to overthrow Assad, also a Turkish goal.Saudi Arabia then said on Thursday it was prepared to send its ground forces into Syria if asked. Carter welcomed it. Of course Biden, Erdogan, Carter and the Saudis are all saying a ground invasion would fight ISIS. But their war against ISIS has been half-hearted at best and they share ISIS’ same enemy: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. If the U.S. were serious about fighting ISIS it would have at least considered a proposal by Russia to join a coalition as the U.S. did against the Nazis.
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  • The excuse of the Geneva collapse is a ruse. There was little optimism the talks would succeed. The real reason for the coming showdown in Syria is the success of Russia’s military intervention in defense of the Syrian government against the Islamic State and other extremist groups. Many of these groups are supported by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States in pursuit of overthrowing Assad.These three nations are all apparently poised for a ground invasion of Syria just as, by no coincidence, the Syrian Arab Army with Russian air cover is pushing to liberate perhaps the greatest prize in the Syrian civil war — Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital. The Russians and Syrians have already cut off Turkey’s supply lines to rebels in the city.On Saturday, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates joined the Saudis in saying they would intervene only as part of a U.S.-led ground invasion. The Obama administration has maintained that it would not send U.S. ground forces into Syria, beyond a few hundred special forces. But these U.S. allies, driven by fierce regional ambitions, appear to be putting immense pressure on the Obama administration to decide if it is prepared to lose Syria. Though Carter said he welcomed the Saudi declaration he made no commitment about U.S. ground forces. But Saudi Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri told al-Arabiya TV that a decision could be made to intervene at a NATO summit in Brussels next week. Carter said the matter would be on the agenda.
  • The U.S. cannot likely stand by and watch Russia win in Syria. At the very least it wants to be on the ground to meet them at a modern-day Elbe and influence the outcome.But things could go wrong in a war in which the U.S. and Russia are not allies, as they were in World War II. Despite this, the U.S. and its allies see Syria as important enough to risk confrontation with Russia, with all that implies. It is not at all clear though what the U.S. interests are in Syria to take such a risk.
  • As a fertile crossroad between Asia and Africa backed by desert, Syrian territory has been fought over for centuries. Pharaoh Ramses II defeated the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh near Lake Homs in 1247 BCE. The Persians conquered Syria in 538 BCE. Alexander the Great took it 200 years later and the Romans grabbed Syria in 64 BCE.Islam defeated the Byzantine Empire there at the Battle of Yarmuk in 636. In one of the first Shia-Sunni battles, Ali failed to defeat Muawiyah in 657 at Siffin along the Euphrates near the Iraq-Syria border. Damascus became the seat of the Caliphate until a coup in 750 moved it to Baghdad.Waves of Crusaders next invaded Syria beginning in 1098. Egyptian Mamluks took the country in 1250 and the Ottoman Empire began in 1516 at its victory at Marj Dabik, 44 kilometers north of Aleppo — about where Turkish supplies are now being cut off. France double-crossed the Arabs and gained control of Syria in 1922 after the Ottoman collapse. The Nazis were pushed out in the momentous 1941 Battle of Damascus.We may be now looking at an epic war with similar historical significance. All these previous battles, as momentous as they were, were regional in nature.
  • What we are potentially facing is a war that goes beyond the Soviet-U.S. proxy wars of the Cold War era, and beyond the proxy war that has so far taken place in the five-year Syrian civil war. Russia is already present in Syria. The entry of the United States and its allies would risk a direct confrontation between the two largest nuclear powers on earth.
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Doug Casey on the Continuing Debasement of Money, Language and Banking... - 0 views

  • This isn't going to last because the way you get wealthy is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference – not by consuming more than you produce, and borrowing the difference. With the Fed keeping interest rates at artificially low levels, hoping to increase consumption, they're making it very foolish to save – when you get ½% or 1% on your savings. So people are saving less and they're borrowing more than they otherwise would. This is a formula for making things worse, not better.
  • They are, idiotically, doing exactly the opposite of what they should be.
  • In point of fact, the Fed should be abolished; the market, not bureaucrats, should determine interest rates. We wouldn't be in this pickle to start with if the government wasn't involved in the economy.
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  • The Chinese, the Japanese – everybody is selling, trying to pass the Old Maid card of US Government debt, which represents return–free risk. Nobody other than the Fed is buying, and interest rates would skyrocket if they stopped. The more QE there is, the more distortions it will cause, however, making for a bigger disaster the longer it goes on.
  • Will the Fed continue to inflate the money supply? Doug Casey: They have to, because with the huge amount of debt in the world – and the amount of debt in the world has increased something like 40 or 50% just since the Greater Depression started – if they don't keep increasing the amount of money in the world then nobody's going to be able to service the huge amount of debt that is out there. So I don't see anything changing in the years to come. They've truly painted themselves into a corner. They're caught between Scylla and Charybdis, and we don't have Odysseus steering the ship of state.
  • Let me say, again, that the Fed serves no useful purpose and it should be abolished. Central banks create "super money" by buying government or other debt with new currency units that they credit to the sellers' accounts at commercial banks. That's the actual engine of inflation.
  • But it's greatly compounded in the commercial banking system through fractional reserve lending – which would not be possible without a central bank. Fractional reserve lending allows banks to multiply the money supply several times.
  • If $100 of Fed super money, freshly created, is deposited in a commercial bank like Chase or Citibank, then $90 can be lent out with a 10% reserve, the current number. That money is redeposited. They'll then lend out 90% of that $90, or $81, and then 90% of that $81, so it multiplies.
  • Central banking and fractional reserve lending go hand-in-hand.
  • Without a central bank, any bank that engaged in fractional reserve banking would be considered guilty of fraud and, when discovered, would be punished by a bank run, followed by criminal charges. The point to be made here is that the entire banking system today is totally unsound and totally corrupt.
  • In a sound banking system you have two types of deposits – checking account (or demand) deposits, and savings account (or time) deposits. They are completely different businesses. With demand deposits, you pay the bank to store your money securely, and write checks against it. A bank should no more lend out demand deposit money than Allied Storage should lend out the furniture you're paying them to store.
  • Savings accounts are completely different. Here you lend money to a bank, perhaps at 3%, and they relend it at 6%, making 3% to cover costs, risks and profits. A sound bank not only has to match the maturities of its deposits with the maturities of its loans, but must insure loans are both highly secured and self-liquidating.
  • These principles have been totally lost. Today banks operate as hedge funds.
  • As an aside, if someone were to set up a well-capitalized 100% reserve bank in a tax haven, especially using gold as an alternative currency, it would be immensely successful in the years to come – when most all conventional banks will fail.
  • By all historical, normal parameters, the stock market is greatly overvalued.
  • The trillions of new currency units that the Fed is creating are creating bubbles, and one of them is in the stock market. The biggest bubble, of course, is in the bond market – that's a super bubble.
  • Not only does the dollar have no real value but the banks you keep it in are all insolvent.
  • There are few sound investments out there. Today there are no investments; there are only speculations.
  • From the economist's point of view, the bubbles created by central banking are a disaster, but from a speculator's point of view they're a godsend. It's becoming harder and harder to be an investor; I define an investor as someone who allocates capital to productive business. It's hard to be an investor because you now have to spend more money on lawyers than on engineers and workers if you want to produce something. You're increasingly forced to be a speculator in today's climate.
  • Stock and bond markets all over the world are overpriced – with the exception of Russian stocks right now; they could be a very interesting speculation. I wouldn't touch anything in China yet, because all the Chinese banks are going to go bust.
  • The Chinese have been more profligate inflating the yuan than the Americans have been with the dollar. It's fantastic what the Chinese have done since Deng liberalized the economy in the early '80s, but now's not a time to be in their markets.
  • You've got to remember there are two types of people in the world: people who want to control material reality and people who want to control other people.
  • It's that second type who go into politics. They play games – here it's called the Great Game, which dignifies it in a way it shouldn't be – with other people's lives and property. It's been this way ever since the state was created about 5,000 years ago, and I don't think you should play games with other people's lives.
  • On the bright side, there are more scientists and engineers alive today than in all of human history put together, and so technology is advancing more rapidly than ever for that reason. That's a huge plus.
  • The second good thing is that the average person, at least those who aren't on welfare, tries to produce more than he consumes. That creates capital.
  • But I'm afraid that Western civilization reached its peak before World War I. World War I destroyed a huge amount of capital and, more importantly, it changed the moral bases of so many things.
  • Then World War II institutionalized the State as the most important part of society – which is perverse, because the state is actually the enemy of civil society.
  • I think Western civilization reached its peak in 1913, when it reached its maximum geographical extent. That was coincidental with the peak of its technological and philosophical influence on the world, much the way the Roman Empire reached its peak at about the end of the first century, then went down, slowly at first and then quickly. That's what's happening to the West.
  • Relative to the rest of the world, and contribution to world production, our piece of the economic pie is getting smaller and smaller. If we have another serious war it would be absolutely smaller, and the final nail in the coffin. Meanwhile, the US, with its bloated military, is just itching for another war. It's out of control, and unlikely to change at this point. That's a big trend that is in motion that I think is going to stay in motion.
  • Europe is in particularly bad shape. The place is a fascist/socialist disaster.
  • It was possible for the average European to keep his head above water through tax evasion in the past, but now those governments have broken bank secrecy everywhere, and it will destroy a lot of capital.
  • The "nation-state" is a really stupid and dysfunctional idea, and I'm glad it's on its way out.
  • That said, even the US, which from a cultural point of view is as much of a country as any place in the world, should actually break up into at least five or six regions.
  • Canada should break up into at least five or six regions initially.
  • I don't think politically; politics is the problem, not the solution. I think that the ideal solution is for every individual to opt out of the current system. When they give a war, you don't come. When they give a tax, you don't pay. When they give an election, you don't vote. You even try not to use their currency and their banking system. T
  • he ideal thing is to let the system collapse under its own weight as opposed to starting a new political party and then continuing to act politically, which is to say to use force on other people.
  • Market risk is huge today, but political risk is even bigger. One indication of that was, when the banks in Cyprus went bust some months ago, the government essentially confiscated everybody's account above 100,000 euros, in what they called a "bail-in."
  • You need several options. It seems like people haven't learned anything from what happened in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1933, China in 1948, Cuba in 1959, or Vietnam in 1975. Rwanda, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Syria ... there are lots of examples and these things can and will eventually happen almost everywhere. When the chimpanzees go crazy, you don't want to be where they are. You've got to have a Plan B. You've got to have a crib out of that political jurisdiction. Acting like a plant, and staying put, isn't a good survival strategy for a human.
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    "Doug Casey: I don't see a real recovery until they stop debasing the currency, radically cut government spending and taxation and eliminate most regulation. In other words, cease doing the things that caused this depression. And that's not going to happen until there's a collapse of the current order. Things have cyclically improved since the height of the crisis of 2008-09. The trillions of currency units created by the Federal Reserve have jammed the stock market higher and kept the big banks from going under. What surprises me is that retail prices have not moved as significantly as I would have expected. The reason, I believe, is that most of that money is still sitting in financial institutions. It has gone into cash out of fear, into stocks because they represent real wealth with earning power and into various speculative assets like artwork and collectible cars. Real estate has recovered somewhat, not because of strong fundamentals but strictly because of money creation. This isn't going to last because the way you get wealthy is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference - not by consuming more than you produce, and borrowing the difference. With the Fed keeping interest rates at artificially low levels, hoping to increase consumption, they're making it very foolish to save - when you get ½% or 1% on your savings. So people are saving less and they're borrowing more than they otherwise would. This is a formula for making things worse, not better. They are, idiotically, doing exactly the opposite of what they should be. Although, I hasten to add, I hate to pontificate on what the Fed "should" do. In point of fact, the Fed should be abolished; the market, not bureaucrats, should determine interest rates. We wouldn't be in this pickle to start with if the government wasn't involved in the economy. In fact, if it wasn't for the state, I suspect we'd all have a vastly higher standard of living, and would be colonizing the Moon, Mars and
Paul Merrell

Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq | Seumas M... - 0 views

  • The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting. The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead withthe trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition. That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime. Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much. But it’s only the latest of a string of such cases. Less fortunate was a London cab driver Anis Sardar, who was given a life sentence a fortnight earlier for taking part in 2007 in resistance to the occupation of Iraq by US and British forces. Armed opposition to illegal invasion and occupation clearly doesn’t constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva convention.
  • But terrorism is now squarely in the eye of the beholder. And nowhere is that more so than in the Middle East, where today’s terrorists are tomorrow’s fighters against tyranny – and allies are enemies – often at the bewildering whim of a western policymaker’s conference call.
  • A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria. Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”.
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  • Which is pretty well exactly what happened two years later. The report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted and there are ambiguities in the language. But the implications are clear enough. A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria. That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. But there was no al-Qaida in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.
  • The calculus changed when Isis started beheading westerners and posting atrocities online, and the Gulf states are now backing other groups in the Syrian war, such as the Nusra Front. But this US and western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them, goes back at least to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which fostered the original al-Qaida under CIA tutelage. It was recalibrated during the occupation of Iraq, when US forces led by General Petraeus sponsored an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to weaken the Iraqi resistance. And it was reprised in 2011 in the Nato-orchestrated war in Libya, where Isis last week took control of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte. In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly.
  • What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus.
Paul Merrell

Assad's opponents dismiss Russian ideas for solving Syria crisis | Reuters - 0 views

  • Syrian opposition figures and Gulf commentators dismissed on Wednesday a Russian draft proposal for a process to solve the Syrian crisis, saying Moscow's aim was to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power and marginalize dissenting voices.A draft document obtained by Reuters on Tuesday showed Moscow would like Damascus and unspecified opposition groups to agree on launching a constitutional reform process of up to 18 months, followed by early presidential elections.Russia, which with Iran has been Assad's top ally during Syria's nearly five-year conflict, has denied any document is being prepared before a second round of international peace talks in Vienna this week.The text, obtained by Reuters, does not rule out Assad's participation in early presidential elections, something his enemies say is impossible if there is to be peace."The Syrian people have never accepted the dictatorship of Assad and they will not accept that it is reintroduced or reformulated in another way," said Monzer Akbik, member of the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition."The Russians are now trying to play the game they have been playing since Geneva," he told Reuters, referring to United Nations-led peace talks that collapsed in 2014.
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    "The text, obtained by Reuters, does not rule out Assad's participation in early presidential elections, something his enemies say is impossible if there is to be peace." Real reason: Assad would win re-election by a landslide, like he did the last time. That's why the U.S.-led opposition insists on Assad bowing out as a pre-condition to peace negotiations.
Gary Edwards

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout | Politics News | Rolling Stone - 0 views

  • the ultimate bait-and-switch."
  • The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Huh?  Matt is one really hardcore Democrat.  The truth is that the first vote on TARP failed in the House 205-228, with one member not voting. House Democrats voted 140-95 in favor of the legislation, while Republicans voted 133-65 against it.  It's the 95 Democrats plus 133 Repubicans that defeated TARP I. The revised HR1424 was received from the Senate by the House, and on October 3, it voted 263-171 to enact the bill into law. Democrats voted 172 to 63 in favor of the legislation, while Republicans voted 108 to 91 against it; overall, 33 Democrats and 24 Republicans who had previously voted against the bill supported it on the second vote.[6][12]
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  • within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP.
  •  
    Hat tip to the mighty Marbux for this find.  Matt Taibbi has been providing the best coverage of the 911 2008 financial collapse since the crisis hit.  This article sums up where we've been and where we are.  Simply put, we are trapped in a sea of lies, deception, and political corruption on such a massive scale that there is no one we can believe or trust.  Good read.  Great investigative journalism.  High-lites and notes left on page. excerpt: "It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul - right? Wrong. It was all a lie - one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in - only temporarily, mind you - to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the
Gary Edwards

Obama, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and the New World Order - 0 views

  • ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’. The plan calls for the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions,” explains a synopsis on the Worldview Radio website. “Cloward and Piven studied Saul Alinsky just like Hillary Clinton and President Obama.”
  •  
    this is extreme stuff.  Which is perhaps why such an outlandish plan might actually work.  Bastardos! excerpt: an authoritarian control system engineered by the bankers and the global elite. "This new and complete Revolution we contemplate can be defined in a very few words. It is … outright world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed," H.G. Wells wrote in The New World Order. It is a mistake to believe the Cloward-Piven Strategy is scheme cooked up by academic Marxists of "New Left" bent dedicated to the destruction of capitalism in the name of some sort of vaguely defined humanitarianism. In fact, "the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions" is a meticulous plan on the part of the global elite to consolidate power and destroy all opposition. It has nothing to do with liberating the proletariat but rather subjecting them to banker engineered "world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed" and devised to transform the planet into a banker dominated high-tech prison gulag.
Paul Merrell

Main U.S.-Backed Syrian Rebel Group Disbanding, Joining Islamists - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • The Syrian rebel group Harakat al-Hazm, one of the White House’s most trusted militias fighting President Bashar al-Assad, collapsed Sunday, with activists posting a statement online from frontline commanders saying they are disbanding their units and folding them into brigades aligned with a larger Islamist insurgent alliance distrusted by Washington.
  • The apparent implosion comes just weeks after the Obama administration halved its funding of the 4,000-strong secular brigade—one of several more moderate rebel militias that have seen their U.S. funding cut or scaled back since Christmas.   Hazm has suffered an increasing number of defections in recent weeks in the face of repeated attacks from al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra on its remaining redoubts in Aleppo and in the area west of the city.This weekend the brigade suffered 300 casualties, say opposition officials, from fighting with the jihadists, and its leaders say that to avoid further bloodshed they have had no choice but to dissolve themselves and throw in their lot with the larger Shamiah Front, an alliance of mainly-Islamist militias in Aleppo. They say the morale of the militia—one of the few rebel brigades to have been trusted in the past by the U.S. with TOW anti-tank rockets—had plummeted as the American money spigot was slowly turned off.
  • A U.S. official said the secular militia had no alternative but to disband. He said it will now be crucial to see what individual Hazm fighters do, indicating that he hoped some would volunteer for the train-and-equip program.. A 50-man intelligence unit formed by Hazm to assist in on-the-ground damage assessment of U.S. airstrikes on ISIS and to provide information on al Nusra was disbanded because of the funding reductions, a senior opposition source told The Daily Beast.
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  • Hazm was frequently touted by Obama aides as one of the militias they could rely on—a brigade that could partner on train-and-equip.But like other moderate militias, the program didn’t sit well with Hazm fighters, who were infuriated with Washington at what they saw as a downgrading of their efforts to topple President Assad.
  • Hazm’s problems with al Nusra, al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria, have multiplied since late October when their jihadist foes overran several of the militia’s key strongholds in Idlib, including Khan al-Subul, where it stored about 10 percent of its equipment. Hazm denied reports that al Nusra fighters managed to seize U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles, but conceded that al Nusra was able to secure 20 tanks, five of which were fully functional; six new armored personnel carriers recently supplied from overseas; and dozens of the group’s walkie-talkies, which Hazm leaders bought themselves from Best Buy during a visit to the U.S.
  • The brigade’s failure to hold the line against al Nusra—as well as the failure of other Western-backed armed groups to assist the beleaguered Hazm—was one of the reasons given to The Daily Beast by a State Department official for the cutbacks in funding for several rebel groups.Another reason cited was the increasing tendency of the moderate and secular militias to coordinate with the Shamiah Front.
  • Aleppo-based rebels insist they have no choice but to work with the Front, which also coordinates operations against Syrian government forces inside Aleppo with al Nusra. “Without the front, Assad would overwhelm us,” says a secular rebel commander. He and other brigade commanders say the Obama administration’s train-and-equip plan has little to do with what is unfolding rapidly on the ground. Brigades are demoralized, disintegrating, and fighting among themselves.
  • While al Nusra has been fighting the moderate armed opposition to Assad, it has been left alone by rival ISIS, with clashes between the competing jihadists all but ceasing.
Paul Merrell

Ukraine: Secretive Neo-Nazi Military Organization Involved in Euromaidan Snyper Shootin... - 0 views

  • An legitimately-elected (said by all international monitors) Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovich, has been driven from office, forced to flee as a war criminal after more than three months of violent protest and terrorist killings by so-called opposition. His “crime” according to protest leaders was that he rejected an EU offer of a vaguely-defined associate EU membership that offered little to Ukraine in favor of a concrete deal with Russia that gave immediate €15 billion debt relief and a huge reduction in Russian gas import prices. Washington at that point went into high gear and the result today is catastrophe. A secretive neo-nazi military organization reported linked to NATO played a decisive role in targeted sniper attacks and violence that led to the collapse of the elected government.
  • Snipers began shooting into the crowd on February 22 in Maidan or Independence Square. Panic ensued and riot police retreated in panic according to eyewitnesses. The opposition leader Vitali Klitschko withdrew from the deal, no reason given. Yanukovich fled Kiev.[3] The question unanswered until now is who deployed the snipers? According to veteran US intelligence sources, the snipers came from an ultra-right-wing military organization known as Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).
  • Strange Ukraine ‘Nationalists’ The leader of UNA-UNSO, Andriy Shkil, ten years ago became an adviser to Julia Tymoshenko. UNA-UNSO, during the US-instigated 2003-2004 “Orange Revolution”, backed pro-NATO candidate Viktor Yushchenko against his pro-Russian opponent, Yanukovich. UNA-UNSO members provided security for the supporters of Yushchenko and Julia Tymoshenko on Independence Square in Kiev in 2003-4.[4] UNA-UNSO is also reported to have close ties to the German National Democratic Party (NDP). [5] Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the crack-para-military UNA-UNSO members have been behind every revolt against Russian influence. The one connecting thread in their violent campaigns is always anti-Russia. The organization, according to veteran US intelligence sources, is part of a secret NATO “GLADIO” organization, and not a Ukraine nationalist group as portrayed in western media. [6] According to these sources, UNA-UNSO have been involved (confirmed officially) in the Lithuanian events in the Winter of 1991, the Soviet Coup d’etat in Summer 1991, the war for the Pridnister Republic 1992, the anti-Moscow Abkhazia War 1993, the Chechen War, the US-organized Kosovo Campaign Against the Serbs, and the August 8 2008 war in Georgia. According to these reports, UNA-UNSO para-military have been involved in every NATO dirty war in the post-cold war period, always fighting on behalf of NATO. “These people are the dangerous mercenaries used all over the world to fight NATO’s dirty war, and to frame Russia because this group pretends to be Russian special forces. THESE ARE THE BAD GUYS, forget about the window dressing nationalists, these are the men behind the sniper rifles,” these sources insist. [7]
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  • If true that UNA-UNSO is not “Ukrainian” opposition, but rather a highly secret NATO force using Ukraine as base, it would suggest that the EU peace compromise with the moderates was likely sabotaged by the one major player excluded from the Kiev 21 February diplomatic talks—Victoria Nuland’s State Department.[8] Both Nuland and right-wing Republican US Senator John McCain have had contact with the leader of the Ukrainian opposition Svoboda Party, whose leader is openly anti-semitic and defends the deeds of a World War II Ukrainian SS-Galicia Division head.[9] The party was registered in 1995, initially calling itself the “Social National Party of Ukraine” and using a swastika style logo. Svoboda is the electoral front for neo-nazi organizations in Ukraine such as UNA-UNSO.[10]
Paul Merrell

Obama Administration Threatens to Suspend Talks With Russia on Syria, Considers Weaponr... - 0 views

  • The Obama administration threatened to pull out of talks with Russia over a collapsed cease-fire in Syria and has renewed an internal debate over giving rebels more firepower to fend off a stepped-up Russian and Syrian assault on their Aleppo stronghold, U.S. officials said. The White House put the weaponry debate on hold earlier this year to give Secretary of State John Kerry an opportunity to try to negotiate a cease-fire with his counterpart in Russia.
  • The renewed debate on what is referred to within the administration as Plan B, according to U.S. officials, centers on whether to authorize the Central Intelligence Agency and its partners in the region to deliver weapons systems that would enable CIA-vetted rebel units to strike Syrian and Russian artillery positions from longer distances. The Obama administration has ruled out providing so-called man-portable air-defense systems, known as Manpads, to the rebels, but officials said they are considering arming them with antiaircraft systems that are less mobile and would pose less of a proliferation risk. State Department spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday that the Obama administration was discussing options to address the conflict “that are outside diplomacy,” but declined to provide specifics.
  • Officials said the speed of the Russian and Syrian offensive against Aleppo has put pressure on the White House to accelerate its deliberations and forced policy makers to look at options they previously were reluctant to seriously consider. In addition to the CIA and its partners providing weapons, the U.S. is considering giving a green light to its regional allies, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to provide more-powerful weapons systems to the rebels. Some U.S. officials believe that it already may be too late to have any impact on the battlefield, and that the administration should consider taking direct U.S. military action against the Assad regime to halt the campaign. Officials predicted there would be strong opposition at the White House to any options involving direct U.S. military action against the Assad regime, because of the risk of triggering a wider conflict with Russia. The U.S. military has been conducting strikes in Syria against Islamic State since 2014.
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  • The Wall Street Journal reported in February that President Barack Obama’s top military and intelligence advisers were pressing the White House to come up with an alternative plan to help the rebels better fend off the Russians and Syrians. The covert CIA program to arm the rebels began in 2013, entailing aid to groups of rebels examined and approved by U.S. officials. The leading advocates within the Obama administration for providing more firepower to the rebels to counter Russia have been CIA Director John Brennan and Defense Secretary Ash Carter. The White House and Mr. Kerry backed negotiations with the Russians instead. The White House has been wary of deepening a proxy fight with Moscow that could suck Washington further into the conflict.
  • In his call to Mr. Lavrov, Mr. Kerry expressed “grave concern” over continued attacks by Russian and Syrian forces on hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in Aleppo, Mr. Kirby said. “The secretary made clear that the United States and its partners hold Russia responsible for this situation, including the use of incendiary and bunker buster bombs in an urban environment, a drastic escalation that puts civilians at great risk,” Mr. Kirby said.
  • Mr. Kirby said the U.S. hopes that the incentive of closer military cooperation with the U.S. as well as rising costs to the Russian military as the conflict in Syria drags on could alter Russia’s course. “Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags and they will continue to lose resources, even perhaps more aircraft,” Mr. Kirby said.
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    And there we have it: Obama's press secretary threatening to kill Russian troops in Syria. By the way, the covert CIA program to arm the Syrian opposition began in 2011, not 2013 as reported in this article. It began with the CIA's shipment of Libyan arms to the rebels from Benghazi. This has been documented by many reporters, notably Seymour Hersh. I don't know why the WSJ wants to post-date that event.
Gary Edwards

The Sides Are Forming For The Coming Civil War. | Militia News - 1 views

  • America is in the choosing sides phase of the coming civil war. To use a college recruiting phrase, it is accurate to state that the letters of intent to join one side or another have mostly been signed and the commitments offered. However, there is one big uncommitted piece, but very soon the sides will be drawn.
  • The Chess Pieces of Civil War What is going on today in America all about choosing sides. There are clear lines being formed in the United States. The recruiting pool consists of the Department of Homeland Security, the American military, local law enforcement, the Russian troops pouring into the United States, the trickle of Chinese troops coming into the country through Hawaii and, of course, the poor, the middle class and elite. This is the recruiting pool which will form the chess pieces of the coming American Civil War. Even if all parties in this country wanted the country to continue, even in its present mortally wounded state, it would be foolish to believe that it could continue for much longer.
  • Before the cognitive dissonance crowd rears their ugly heads and accuses me of fear mongering, ask yourself what the elite did prior to the crash of the economy in 1929. For example, Joseph Kennedy took his money out of the stock market the day BEFORE it crashed. Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Westinghouse, et al., all took their money out just prior to the crash, leaving the ignorant masses unaware of what was coming. Don’t make the same mistake.
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  • The net result of these staggering numbers can only end one way, and that is with a financial collapse, followed by a bank holiday, rioting in the streets and the full roll out of martial law. These financial numbers guarantee that the party cannot continue much longer. Since America, in her present form, cannot continue much longer without experiencing a cataclysmic shift, we would be wise to realize what resources are going to be the impetus for civil war. When you play the board game, Monopoly, the properties on Boardwalk are among the most coveted. It is no different in real life. The biggest prize of the coming conflict is real estate. Homes, office buildings and shopping malls are the most coveted prize. The MERS mortgage fraud continues unabated as millions of homes have been confiscated through mortgage fraud. When the dollar is worthless and is awaiting its replacement (e.g. the Amero or the Worldo), real estate will be more valuable than gold.
  • Other big game that is being hunted by both sides in the coming civil war will be bank accounts, which must be looted before the dormant computer digits we call money can be converted into hard assets. That is why my advice is, and has been, convert your cash into tangible assets which can enhance your survivability in the upcoming crash.
  • Also, your pensions, your 401K’s and your various entitlement programs are also at risk as evidenced by Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew’s “borrowing” from various Federal retirement accounts in order to increase the debt ceiling fight that will resurface in Congress, again, early next year.
  • Again, my advice is to convert your assets in tangible items which will aid in getting you through some very dark days coming up in the near future.
  • Barring a false flag event, US martial law will have a trigger event, which will lead to martial law, that will be financial and it will naturally occur as we are already on a collision course with destiny.
  • I have news for you, there are Federal officials in every town, city and county in America. If one violates HR 347, they will be immediately arrested and charged with a felony.
  • The NDAA constitutes another big fence being built around the people in which all due process will soon be gone. The NDAA will allow the administration the “legal” right to secretly remove any burgeoning leadership of citizen opposition forces.
  • The second provision which will allow this country to quickly transition to martial law is Executive Order (EO) 13603 which allows the President to take control over any resource, property and even human labor within the United States. This EO gives the President unlimited authority including the ability to initiate a civilian draft as well as a military draft.
  • In short, this spells the potential enslavement of the American people.
  • For those of you who still have your blinders on, research the NDAA and EO 13603 and then when you realize that I am correct in my interpretation, ask yourself one question; If the powers that be were not going to seize every important asset, then why would the government give itself the power to do just that?
  • And while you are at it, remember the Clean Water Act gives the EPA to control all private property as well as the precious resources of all water. And then of course, the FDA and the conflicts with local farmers is escalating.
  • And if this is not enough to convince the sheep of this country that the storm clouds are overhead, then take a look at HR 347 which outlaws protesting and takes away the First Amendment. This unconstitutional legislation makes it illegal to criticize the President and the government, as a whole, in the presence of Federal officials.
  • There are three paramount numbers that every American should be paying attention to and they are (1) national deficit ($17 trillion dollars), (2) the unfunded liabilities debt ($238 trillion dollars), and (3) the derivatives/futures debt (one quadrillion dollars which is 16 times the entire wealth of the planet.
  • I just saw the Hunger Games sequel, Catching Fire, and this is eerily similar to what I saw in the movies in that the people are being provoked to revolution.
  • in the TV show, Revolution, the most evil entity in the series is the re-emergence of the United States government and the heroes of the show are rebelling against the abuse.
  • It seems like everywhere we turn in the media, the people are being encouraged to rise up now and challenge authority. I am sure the establishment would rather confront a small group of dissidents and squelch the rebellion now, before the numbers can become significant and overwhelming to the establishment and this theme is being carried out in the media.
  • The final action will consist of gun confiscation and one side of the coming conflict is attempting to position themselves to do that in the near future and that would be the DHS, the Russians and the Chinese.
  • I cannot think of another legitimate reason which would describe why they are here.
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    While I'd be the first to agree that the degree of fiscal mismanagement of this nation's economy is beyond insane and have to admit that I see very little to admire in Barack Obama's presidency, the meme about Executive Order 13603 authorizing confiscation of any property and enslavement of the American public needs to be put to rest. See http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/2012.html#13603 E.O. 13603 is not much more than an updating of similar executive orders issued by prior presidents beginning with Dwight Eisenhower. In fact, in skimming it a few minutes ago, I didn't see anything drastically different from some of the prior related orders. E.g., it reflects that a bunch of agencies that were formerly either independent or under other departments are now under the newish Department of Homeland Security, whose Secretary now gets the authority formerly delegated to other department and agency heads. If blame must be cast, it belongs on the Congress that enacted the Defense Production Act of 1950, 50 U.S.C. 2061, et seq. The executive order does no more than obey that Act's instructions. For example there is a section authorizing pre-emption of manufacturing capacity of critical industries over any existing civilian contracts in the event of a national emergency, but that language is in the statute as well. But that power hasn't had much traction since Harry Truman tried to nationalize the steel industry to break a nationwide strike. The Supreme Court swatted down that effort as an abuse of a power that would be lawful in a true emergency, like another major. But even that semi-radical "survival" power is ameliorated by other provisions of the statute and the order that authorize loan guarantees for companies' construction and maintenance of critical productive capacity. Much of that has been implemented over the years as outright grants. So for example, many chemical manufacturing plants were built with Defense Production Act funds, with
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, Security vs. Securities | TomDispatch - 0 views

  • I live in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I can more or less roll out of bed into the House of Representatives or the Senate; the majestic Library of Congress doubles as my local branch. (If you visit, spend a sunset on the steps of the library's Jefferson Building. Trust me.) You can't miss my place, three stories of brick painted Big Bird yellow. It's a charming little corner of the city. Each fall, the trees outside my window shake their leaves and carpet the street in gold. Nora Ephron, if she were alive, might've shot a scene for her latest movie in one of the lush green parks that bookend my block. The neighborhood wasn't always so nice. A few years back, during a reporting trip to China, I met an American consultant who had known Capitol Hill in a darker era. "I was driving up the street one time," he told me, "and walking in the opposite direction was this huge guy carrying an assault rifle. Broad daylight, no one even noticed. That's what kind of neighborhood it was." Nowadays, row houses around me sell for $1 million or more. I rent.
  • Washington's a fun place to live if you're young and employed. But as a recent Washington Post story pointed out, the nation's capital is slowly pricing out even its yuppies who, in their late-twenties and early-thirties, want to start families but can't afford it. "I hate to say it, but the facts show that the D.C. market is for people who are single and relatively affluent," a real estate researcher told the Post. The District's housing boom just won't stop; off go those new and expecting parents to the suburbs. And we're talking about the lucky ones. Elsewhere in the country, vulnerability in the housing market isn't a trend story; it's the norm. The Cedillo family, as Laura Gottesdiener writes today, went looking for their version of the American housing dream and thought they found it in Chandler, Arizona. They didn't know that the house they chose to rent rested on a shaky foundation -- not physically but financially. It had been one of thousands snapped up and rented out by massive investment firms making a killing in the wake of the housing collapse. As Gottesdiener -- who has put the new rental empires of private equity firms on the map for TomDispatch -- shows, the goal of such companies is to squeeze every dime of profit from their properties, from homes like the Cedillos', and that can lead to tragedy.
  • Drowning in Profits A Private Equity Firm, a Missing Pool Fence, and the Price of a Child’s Death By Laura Gottesdiener
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  • Security is a slippery idea these days -- especially when it comes to homes and neighborhoods. Perhaps the most controversial development in America’s housing “recovery” is the role played by large private equity firms. In recent years, they have bought up more than 200,000 mostly foreclosed houses nationwide and turned them into rental empires. In the finance and real estate worlds, this development has won praise for helping to raise home values and creating a new financial product known as a “rental-backed security.” Many economists and housing advocates, however, have blasted this new model as a way for Wall Street to capitalize on an economic crisis by essentially pushing families out of their homes, then turning around and renting those houses back to them. Caught in the crosshairs are tens of thousands of families now living in these private equity-owned homes.
  • The same month that the family rented the house at 1471 West Camino Court, Progress Residential purchased more homes in Maricopa Country than any other institutional buyer. Nationally, Blackstone, a private equity giant, has been the leading purchaser of single-family homes, spending upwards of $8 billion between 2012 and 2014 to purchase 43,000 homes in about a dozen cities. However, in May 2013, according to Michael Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Progress Residential bought nearly 200 houses, surpassing Blackstone's buying rate that month in the Phoenix area. The condition and code compliance of these houses varies and is rarely known at the time of the purchase. Mike Anderson, who works for a bidding service contracted by Progress Residential and other private equity giants to buy houses at auctions, was sometimes asked to go out and look at the homes. But with the staggering buying rate -- up to 15 houses a day at the peak -- he couldn’t keep up. “There’d be too many, you couldn’t go out and look at them,” he said. “It’s just a gamble. You never know what you’ve got into.”
  • Global private equity firms have not been, historically, in the business of dealing with pool fences and the other hassles of maintaining single-family houses. But following the housing market collapse, the idea of buying a ton of these foreclosed properties suddenly made sense, at least to investors. Such private-equity purchases were to make money in three ways: buying cheap and waiting for the houses to gain value as the market bounced back; renting them out and collecting monthly rental payments; and promoting a financial product known as “rental-backed securities,” similar to the infamous mortgage-backed securities that triggered the housing meltdown of 2007-2008. Even though the buying of the private equity firms has finally slowed, economists (including those at the Federal Reserve) have expressed concern about the possibility that someday those rental-backed securities could even destabilize -- translation: crash -- the broader market.
  • ince Wall Street was overwhelmingly responsible for the original collapse of the housing market, many have characterized these new purchases as a land grab. In many ways, Progress CEO Donald Mullen is the poster-child for this argument. An investment banker who enjoyed a brief flurry of fame after losing a bidding war to Alec Baldwin at an art auction, he was the leader of a team at Goldman Sachs that orchestrated an infamous bet against the housing market. Known as “the big short,” it allowed that company to make “some serious money“ when the economy melted down, according to Mullen’s own emails. (They were released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2010.) As Kevin Roose of New York magazine has written, “A guy whose most famous trade was a successful bet on the full-scale implosion of the housing market is now swooping in to pick up the pieces on the other end.”
Gary Edwards

1913: The Blow That Killed America 100 Years Ago - 0 views

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    "There is a lot of ruin in a nation," wrote Adam Smith. His point was that it takes a long time for nations to fall, even when they're dead on their feet. And he was certainly right. America took its fatal blow in 1913, one hundred years ago; it just hasn't hit the ground yet. This is a slow process, but it's actually fast compared to the Romans. It took them several centuries to collapse . The confusing thing about our current situation is that America - and by that I mean the noble America that so many of us grew up believing was real - has long been poisoned. Its liver, kidneys, and spleen have all stopped functioning. Its heart beats slowly and irregularly. But it still stands on its feet and presents itself as alive to all those who would let their eyes fool them. And I'm not without sympathy for those who want to believe. They find themselves in a world where politics is almighty, and where their comfort, prosperity, and perhaps their survival all hang in a delicate balance. They don't want to upset anything, and questioning the bosses is a good way to get yelled at. But just because someone wants to believe doesn't make it so. We are not children and we are not powerless. We Producers should never be intimidated by those who live at our expense. So let's start looking at the facts. 1913: The Horrible Year For all the problems America had prior to 1913 (including the unnecessary and horrifying Civil War), nothing spelled the death of the nation like the horrors of 1913. Here are the key dates: February 3rd : The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, authorizing the Federal government to impose income taxes on individuals. An amendment to a tariff act in 1894 had attempted to do this, but since it was clearly unconstitutional, the Supreme Court struck it down. As a result - and mostly under the banner of bleeding the rich - the 16th amendment was promoted and passed. As a result, the Revenue Act of 1
Gary Edwards

The Great Deceiver - The Federal Reserve - 0 views

  • From November 2013 through January 2014 Belgium with a GDP of $480 billion purchased $141.2 billion of US Treasury bonds. Somehow Belgium came up with enough money to allocate during a 3-month period 29 percent of its annual GDP to the purchase of US Treasury bonds. Certainly Belgium did not have a budget surplus of $141.2 billion. Was Belgium running a trade surplus during a 3-month period equal to 29 percent of Belgium GDP? No, Belgium's trade and current accounts are in deficit. Did Belgium's central bank print $141.2 billion worth of euros in order to make the purchase? No, Belgium is a member of the euro system, and its central bank cannot increase the money supply. So where did the $141.2 billion come from?
  • There is only one source. The money came from the US Federal Reserve, and the purchase was laundered through Belgium in order to hide the fact that actual Federal Reserve bond purchases during November 2013 through January 2014 were $112 billion per month. In other words, during those 3 months there was a sharp rise in bond purchases by the Fed. The Fed's actual bond purchases for those three months are $27 billion per month above the original $85 billion monthly purchase and $47 billion above the official $65 billion monthly purchase at that time. (In March 2014, official QE was tapered to $55 billion per month and to $45 billion for May.) Why did the Federal Reserve have to purchase so many bonds above the announced amounts and why did the Fed have to launder and hide the purchase? Some country or countries, unknown at this time, for reasons we do not know dumped $104 billion in Treasuries in one week.
  • What are the reasons for this deception by the Federal Reserve?
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  • The Fed realized that its policy of Quantitative Easing initiated in order to support the balance sheets of "banks too big to fail" and to lower the Treasury's borrowing cost was putting pressure on the US dollar's value. Tapering was a way of reassuring holders of dollars and dollar-denominated financial instruments that the Fed was going to reduce and eventually end the printing of new dollars with which to support financial markets. The image of foreign governments bailing out of Treasuries could unsettle the markets that the Fed was attempting to soothe by tapering.
  • A hundred billion dollar sale of US Treasuries is a big sale. If the seller was a big holder of Treasuries, the sale could signal the bond market that a big holder might be selling Treasuries in large chunks. The Fed would want to keep the fact and identity of such a seller secret in order to avoid a stampede out of Treasuries. Such a stampede would raise interest rates, collapse US financial markets, and raise the cost of financing the US debt. To avoid the rise in interest rates, the Fed would have to accept the risk to the dollar of purchasing all the bonds. This would be a no-win situation for the Fed, because a large increase in QE would unsettle the market for US dollars.
  • Washington's power ultimately rests on the dollar as world reserve currency. This privilege, attained at Bretton Woods following World War 2, allows the US to pay its bills by issuing debt. The world currency role also gives the US the power to cut countries out of the international payments system and to impose sanctions.
  • As impelled as the Fed is to protect the large banks that sit on the board of directors of the NY Fed, the Fed has to protect the dollar. That the Fed believed that it could not buy the bonds outright but needed to disguise its purchase by laundering it through Belgium suggests that the Fed is concerned that the world is losing confidence in the dollar. If the world loses confidence in the dollar, the cost of living in the US would rise sharply as the dollar drops in value. Economic hardship and poverty would worsen. Political instability would rise. If the dollar lost substantial value, the dollar would lose its reserve currency status. Washington would not be able to issue new debt or new dollars in order to pay its bills.
  • Its wars and hundreds of overseas military bases could not be financed.
  • The withdrawal from unsustainable empire would begin. The rest of the world would see this as the silver lining in the collapse of the international monetary system brought on by the hubris and arrogance of Washington.
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    Incredible.  Since 2009, the Fed has been pumping $85 Billion per month into the Wall Street hedge funds of it's member banks.  Economist Paul Craig Roberts noticed some funny business the past few months regarding the Fed's numbers.  It turns out that while the Fed has been trying to convince the world that they are tapering off on their $85 Billion per month debt printing spree, the truth is just the opposite.  They have increased the debt spree to $112 Billion per month; with the help of a secret money laundering operation involving Belgium! Incredible!
Gary Edwards

American Thinker: Cloward-Piven Government - The art of the manufactured crisis - 0 views

  • These people are our enemies. They don't use guns, yet, but they are just as dangerous, determined and duplicitous as the communists we faced in the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam and bush wars across the globe, and the Nazis we faced in World War II.
  • These people have violated countless laws, and could be prosecuted, had we the political power. Not only are their policies unconstitutional, but deliberately so - the goal being to make the Constitution irrelevant.
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    This explains everything.  Sadly.  Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact. excerpt: The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. In a September 2009 article, James Simpson wrote an article entitled "Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis". Part of a series, it connected then presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government.   The basis of this strategy is a plan called Cloward-Piven.  
Paul Merrell

Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria | nsnbc international - 0 views

  • On 21 August 2013, the Syrian Arab Army launched a major military campaign in Damascus. The campaign, called “Operation Shield of the Capital”, was the largest military operation of the Syrian Arab Army in the Damascus region since the beginning of the war in 2011.
  • Although U.S. Intelligence reports repeatedly stressed that the opposition was incapable of launching a major, well coordinated attack, the Syrian Army in Damascus was confronted with an organized fighting force of 25.000 men under arms. The Saudi Arabia backed Jihadist front had amassed 25.000 fighters, organized in 13 battalions or kitab, to to launch a major assault against the capital Damascus. Most of the battalions belonged to Jabhat al-Nusrah and Liwa-al-Islam. The other battalions that took part in the campaign, were the Abou Zhar al-Ghaffari, al-Ansar, al-Mohajereen, Daraa al-Sham, Harun al-Rashid, Issa bin Mariam, Sultan Mohammad al-Fatih, Syouf al-Haqq, the Glory of the Caliphate, the Jobar Martyrs. During the night of 20 to 21 August and during the early morning hours of 21 August, the Syrian Arab Army broke through the insurgent lines in the area near the Jobar entrance. The breakthrough resulted in a collapse of the jihadists defensive positions and to a crushing and decisive strategic defeat of the Jabhat al-Nusrah led brigades.
  • Loosing Jobar effectively cut off the insurgents connection to the Jordanian border town of Al-Mafraq, the most important logistical base for the insurgents as well as for Saudi Arabia and the United States in Jordan. Al-Mafraq was already used as a major staging ground for the two failed attempts to conquer the city of Homs in June and July 2012. In 2012 al-Mafraq became the staging ground for some 40.000 fighters; more than 20.000 of them fought under the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was under the command of Abdelhakim Belhadj and his second in command, Mahdi al-Harati. The CIA maintains a station, US Special Forces (JSOC) train insurgents, and several other US institutions are present in al-Mafraq. The point is of particular importance with regards to the visit of the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Jordan, which will be detailed below. Al-Mafraq has been the major transit point for Saudi and U.S. arms shipments since 2012, and the delivery of advanced Saudi and U.S. weapons to the insurgents since early August 2013.
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  • The collapse of the insurgent front prompted the front commanders, most of which work in liaison to U.S. Special Forces, to deploy an elite force that should prevent the Syrian Army, at all costs, from gaining access to the Jobar Entrance, and from gaining control over the Jobar area. The majority of the insurgent crack forces came from Liwa-al-Islam with some additional troops from Jabhat al-Nusrah. The commanding officer of the elite forces was a Saudi national who is known by the name Abu Ayesha, whom eyewitnesses from Ghouta later identified as Abu Abdul-Moneim. Abdul-Moneim had established a cache of weapons, some of which had a tube-like structure, and others which looked like big gas bottles. The cache was located in a tunnel in the Eastern Ghouta district of Damascus. Reports about this tunnel and the weapons cache emerged in international media, after the son of Abdul-Moneim and 12 other fighters lost their lives there, because they mishandled improvised chemical weapons and caused a leak in one of them. Besides Abu Abdul-Moneim, the supreme leader of the Liwa-al-Islam and commander of their chemical weapons specialists, Zahran Alloush took personal charge of the elite troops and chemical weapons specialists who were operating under his direct command. Liwa-al-Islam has, along with other al-Qaeda brigades, the capability to manufacture and launch primitive, but none the less very deadly chemical weapons. The chemical weapons which Zahran Alloush had delivered to Damascus were most likely from al-Qaeda’s (ISIL) chemical weapons stockpiles in Iraq.
  • In early September 2013, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif stated, that Iran had sent a memo to the White House via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. Tehran had reportedly informed the USA that handmade articles for chemical weapons, including Sarin gas, were being transferred to Syria. The White House failed to respond. Having to hold the Jobar Entrance and the Jobar district of Damascus “at any cost to maintain any hopes of launching a successful, major military assault on Damascus”, the insurgent commanders decided to launch a chemical weapons attack to halt the advance of the Syrian Arab Army. The political and military opposition and core members of the international alliance behind them had already decided that chemical weapons should be used in August – September. The large scale use of chemical weapons should justify renewed calls for a military intervention. Intelligence about this decision transpired in June.  nsnbc international issued several reports in late June and early July, warning that the insurgents would use large scale chemical weapons attacks in August or September.
  • The decision to launch the chemical weapon on 21 August was most likely based on two considerations. That the use of chemical weapons was already planned. That the Jobar Entrance should be defended at all costs. The final decision, made by Zahran Alloush may in fact have been predetermined together with his U.S. – Saudi liaison officers. Launching a chemical weapons attack would allow the USA, UK and France, to call for military strikes against Syria and to turn the tide. Also, Russian and Syrian intelligence sources described the weapons which were used in the attack as rockets which were altered so as to carry chemicals, launched by Liwa-al-Islam. The projectiles were most likely fired from a flatbed.
  • There is a growing and substantial amount of evidence that indicates direct U.S. and Saudi involvement in the chemical weapons attack. To begin with one merely has to answer the fundamental question “Who Benefits”, and the answer is definitely not “the Syrian government”. In fact, the  Federal German Intelligence Service (BND) claims that it has intercepted phone calls between Syrian officers and the Syrian High Command. The BND is convinced that none of the Syrian forces have used a chemical weapon. Leaving alone any moral considerations, the domestic and international repercussions were foreseeable and there would not have been any strategic benefit for the Syrian Army or the government.
  • Also, the involvement of Saudi Arabia ultimately points towards Washington and the White House. The involvement of Liwa-al-Islam in the chemical weapons attack establishes a strong chain of circumstantial evidence to the Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The supreme leader of Liwa-al-Islam and commander of the groups’ chemical weapons specialists, Zahran Alloush, has been working for the then Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Turki al-Faisal in both Afghanistan and Yemen in the 1980s. Since the 1990s, Alloush was involved in the Salafist – Wahabbist terrorist networks in Syria which led to his arrest by Syrian intelligence. He was released in early of 2011, when the Assad administration granted a general amnesty. Immediately after his March 2011 release from prison, Zahran Alloush began receiving substantial funds and weapons from Saudi intelligence, which enabled him to establish Liwa-al-Islam as a de facto Saudi Arabia sponsored mercenary brigade under the auspices of the Saudi Interior Ministry.
  • Saudi funding enabled Alloush to establish the Liwa-al-Islam as a major fighting force in Syria. The group gained fame due to risky, high-profile attacks. On 8 July 2012, the group carried out a bomb attack against the headquarters of Syria’s National Security Council in Rawda Square, Damascus. The group succeeded in assassinating several high profile members of Syria’s security establishment, including the Deputy Minister of Defense and brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad, Assaf Shawkat, Defense Minister Dawoud Rajiha, Hassan Turkmani, a former Defense Minister and military adviser to then Vice-President Farouk al-Sharaa.
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    One I had missed before. Whodunnit on the Ghouta, Syria sarin gas attack, right down to the unit commander, a Saudi intelligence asset working with a U.S. Special Forces unit, both controlled by the U.S.-led command and control center in Jordan.   
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia Replaces Key Official in Effort to Arm Syria Rebels - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • Saudi Arabia has sidelined its veteran intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, as leader of the kingdom's efforts to arm and fund Syrian rebels, replacing him with another prince well-regarded by U.S. officials for his successes fighting al-Qaeda, Saudi royal advisers said this week. The change holds promise for a return to smoother relations with the U.S., and may augur a stronger Saudi effort against militants aligned with al Qaeda who have flocked to opposition-held Syrian territory during that country's three-year war, current and former U.S. officials said.
  • Saudi Arabia has sidelined its veteran intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, as leader of the kingdom's efforts to arm and fund Syrian rebels, replacing him with another prince well-regarded by U.S. officials for his successes fighting al-Qaeda, Saudi royal advisers said this week. The change holds promise for a return to smoother relations with the U.S., and may augur a stronger Saudi effort against militants aligned with al Qaeda who have flocked to opposition-held Syrian territory during that country's three-year war, current and former U.S. officials said.
  • Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who has won praise in Washington for his counterterror work against al Qaeda in Yemen and elsewhere, is now a main figure in carrying out Syria policy, a royal adviser and a security analyst briefed by Saudi officials said Tuesday. Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, Saudi King Abdullah's son and head of the Saudi National Guard, has also assumed a bigger share of responsibility for the kingdom's policy towards Syria, the advisers said. A Saudi analyst who serves as adviser to top royals said the changes signaled the kingdom would also now emphasize diplomatic means, including outreach to and pressure on Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the main backers of Mr. Assad's regime.
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  • "Prince Miteb and Mohammed bin Nayef, they are in charge," the adviser said. The world will see a "new strategy for Syria—quieter, more open, not too extreme. There will be more politics to it, and probably much less military." U.S. officials said Prince Mohammed enjoys good relations with Secretary of State John Kerry and CIA Director John Brennan. The latter first met the prince in 1999, shortly before he left Saudi Arabia after serving as the CIA station chief there. The officials also credit the prince with providing intelligence that foiled at least two al Qaeda bomb plots against Western targets.
  • The changes put the Syria efforts in the hands of princes who are believed to have been among the most cautious among top royals about aggressively supporting the rebels. The U.S. wants to see the moderate rebels it supports fight both the regime and radical fighters such as the al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS). Increasingly, this is happening on the ground in Syria. "You could see a smarter Saudi approach, one more targeted on the Assad regime and one also targeting extremists," said Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank. "It seems as if they continue to back the rebels. I think the question is what will that entail."
  • Prince Mohammed, as a leading counterterror figure globally, is in a position to assuage American fears that if the West supplies weapons, they will wind up in the possession of radicals, said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst with the Gulf Research Center who is close to Saudi security and intelligence circles. "The Americans have to change their policy, and Prince Mohammed is the right person to take this mission.…He's the one who can calm their worries," Mr. Alani said. Saudi officials have told their American counterparts that they intend to ramp up their support for the moderate opposition after the collapse of peace talks in Geneva last month. U.S. officials say they haven't given the Saudis a green light to move forward with plans to give shoulder-fired missiles that can bring down jets to hand-picked rebels. But it is unclear to what extent the U.S. would move to block the Saudis if they insisted on going ahead with the deployment of the weapons over Washington's objections.
  • Prince Mohammed's appointment reflects shifting U.S. interests in the conflict, with both the Americans and Saudis increasing their focus on countering al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria. U.S. and European officials fear these groups could plot attacks against the West from camps in Syria and that foreign fighters now in Syria will pose a significant threat when they return home to Europe, the Gulf and the U.S. The U.S. has gradually expanded its involvement in Syria at the urging of the Saudis, though not nearly as quickly as the Saudis had hoped. The Saudis persuaded the CIA to pay salaries to some fighters of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army rebel group, and the payments started about a year ago.
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    Bandar Bush exits, stage right, as the Obama Administration scrambles for realignment in the Mideast. 
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