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Published here on February 22 2014: Ukraine: "From the spirits that I called - Sir, deliver me!" The opposition in the Ukraine and its paymasters in the U.S. and EU called up the spirits of the right, the fascist, to wage a coup against the elected president and to push their selfish objectives onto the Ukrainian public. Now those spirits won't go away ... Parts of the Ukraine will soon show signs of anarchy with those that protested and rioted without having any real aim moving towards criminal activities. The opposition, which is now empowered and will have to deliver results, will soon squabble and will again fall apart. The fascist forces, euphemistically called "nationalists" in "western" media, will win more power.

Those predictions have turned into reality and even those who arranged the coup against the legal government of Ukraine can no longer deny the dangers. On Tuesday a member of the imperialists Atlantic Council wrote in the Washington Post about a "new threat" to Ukraine which is not Russia but are "independently operating warlords and armed groups" [N]ow several of these units, especially those linked to oligarchs or the far right, are revealing a dark side. In recent months, they have threatened and kidnapped government officials, boasted that they will take power if Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko fails to defeat Russia, and they served as armed muscle in illegal attempts to take over businesses or seize local governments. Yesterday thousand of fascists marched with torches (vid) in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities to remember the birth of the fascist mass murderer of Poles and Jews and Nazi collaborator Stephan Bandera. Those forces will not go away and they will drag Ukraine further to the right and further apart.

This spring and summer the fighting in east Ukraine will again flare up in earnest. The coup government in Kiev will likely falter and Ukrainian state will be declared bankrupt. The Washington Post OpEd is the first glimpse of realization of these dangers. More will follow. It will be a rude awakening and after much gnashing of teeth the apprentices will call for help

The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full. That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell. “The CIA informed the Committee that due to CIA record retention policies, the CIA could not produce all CIA email communications requested by the Committee,” the report noted, explaining that the desired information was sometimes recovered from a reply message when the original email was missing. Agency emails turned out to be a critical source of information, a fact that illuminates the Committee’s sharp response recently to the (now suspended) CIA proposal to the National Archives (NARA) to destroy most Agency emails of non-senior officials.

Thus, the gruesome record of the waterboarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah “was referenced in emails, but was not documented or otherwise noted in CIA cables.” (This is at odds with NARA’s initial view that “It is unlikely that permanent records will be found in these email accounts that is not filed in other appropriate files.”) The Committee report is also a remarkable demonstration of the congressional oversight function that is all the more impressive because it was performed in adverse, unfavorable conditions. It is striking to see how the CIA sometimes treated the Senate Intelligence Committee, its leadership and its staff with the same disdain and evasiveness that is often perceived by FOIA requesters and other members of the public. Committee questions were ignored, inaccurate information was provided, and the oversight process was gamed.

“Internal CIA emails include discussion of how the CIA could ‘get… off the hook on the cheap’ regarding [then-Committee] Chairman [Bob] Graham’s requests for additional information…. In the end, CIA officials simply did not respond to Graham’s requests prior to his departure from the Committee in January 2003,” the report said. “I am deeply disturbed by the implications of the study for the committee’s ability to discharge its oversight responsibility,” wrote Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in his additional remarks. “Because it appears from the study that the committee was continuously misled as to virtually all aspects of this program, it naturally raises the extremely troubling question as to whether we can trust the representations of the agency in connection with difficult or sensitive issues in the future.” But minority members of the Committee disputed this characterization: “In reality, the overall pattern of engagement with the Congress shows that the CIA attempted to keep the Congress informed of its activities,” they wrote in their extensive dissenting views. Perhaps the most important achievement of the Committee report was to document and memorialize the fact that agents of the US Government practiced torture. Not “harsh measures” or “enhanced techniques,” but torture.

Putin announced that Russia has cancelled the South Stream project on December 1, 2014. Instead the South Stream pipeline project has been replaced by a natural gas pipeline that goes across the Black Sea to Turkey from the Russian Federation’s South Federal District. This alternative pipeline has been popularly billed the «Turk Stream» and partners Russian energy giant Gazprom with Turkey’s Botas. Moreover, Gazprom will start giving Turkey discounts in the purchase of Russian natural gas that will increase with the intensification of Russo-Turkish cooperation. The natural gas deal between Ankara and Moscow creates a win-win situation for both the Turkish and Russian sides. Not only will Ankara get a discount on energy supplies, but Turk Stream gives the Turkish government what it has wanted and desired for years. The Turk Stream pipeline will make Turkey an important energy corridor and transit point, complete with transit revenues. In this case Turkey becomes the corridor between energy supplier Russia and European Union and non-EU energy customers in southeastern Europe. Ankara will gain some leverage over the European Union and have an extra negotiating card with the EU too, because the EU will have to deal with it as an energy broker.

For its part, Russia has reduced the risks that it faced in building the South Stream by cancelling the project. Moscow could have wasted resources and time building the South Stream to see the project sanctioned or obstructed in the Balkans by Washington and Brussels. If the European Union really wants Russian natural gas then the Turk Stream pipeline can be expanded from Turkey to Greece, the former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) of Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, Austria, and other European countries that want to be integrated into the energy project. The cancellation of South Stream also means that there will be one less alternative energy corridor from Russia to the European Union for some time. This has positive implications for a settlement in Ukraine, which is an important transit route for Russian natural gas to the European Union. As a means of securing the flow of natural gas across Ukrainian territory from Russia, the European Union will be more prone to push the authorities in Kiev to end the conflict in East Ukraine.

From the perspective of Russian Presidential Advisor Sergey Glazyev, the US is waging its multi-spectrum war against Russia to ultimately challenge Moscow’s Chinese partners. In an insightful interview, Glazyev explained the following points to the Ukrainian journalist Alyona Berezovskaya — working for a Rossiya Segodnya subsidiary focusing on information involving Ukraine — about the basis for US hostility towards Russia: the bankruptcy of the US, its decline in competitiveness on global markets, and Washington’s inability to ultimately save its financial system by servicing its foreign debt or getting enough investments to establish some sort of innovative economic breakthrough are the reasons why Washington has been going after the Russian Federation. [13] In Glazyev’s own words, the US wants «a new world war». [14] The US needs conflict and confrontation, in other words. This is what the crisis in Ukraine is nurturing in Europe. Sergey Glazyev reiterates the same points months down the road on September 23, 2014 in an article he authors for the magazine Russia in Global Affairs, which is sponsored by the Russian International Affairs Council — a think-tank founded by the Russian Foreign Ministry and Russian Ministry of Education 2010 — and the US journal Foreign Affairs — which is the magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relation in the US. In his article, Glazyev adds that the war Washington is inciting against Russia in Europe may ultimately benefit the Chinese, because the struggle being waged will weaken the US, Russia, and the European Union to the advantage of China. [15] The point of explaining all this is to explain that Russia wants a balanced strategic partnership with China. Glazyev himself even told Berezovskaya in their interview that Russia wants a mutually beneficial relationship with China that does reduce it to becoming a subordinate to Beijing. [16]

Thousands of recently highly paid workers have been laid off after the oil price plummeted 50 percent in 2014. At least four American oil-producing states are already facing budget problems due to decreasing oil revenues. The price plunge has affected petroleum production in all oil-extracting countries, including the US.

For Texas, which has a far larger and more diversified economy than Louisiana, the oil price downturn is no good either. In just October and November Texas lost 2,300 oil and gas jobs, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week. Through the last half a year the state has been losing $83 million in potential revenue every day, the Greater Houston Partnership recently reported. They blamed this on crashing price of its West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which has depreciated to $54.73 per barrel this week, from more than $100 six months ago.

This doesn’t apply to the state of Alaska. According to the NYT, approximately 90 percent of state’s budget is formed from oil revenues. Alaska’s government is considering a 50 percent capital-spending cut for bridges and roads in the face of the oil price drop, with Moody’s, the credit rating service, lowering Alaska’s credit outlook from stable to negative. The state of Louisiana’s 2015-16 budget is going to be $1.4 billion short, with 162 state government positions already eliminated and more to be discontinued starting from January. Contracts and projects are being either reduced or frozen in state agencies. According to the state’s chief economist Greg Albrecht, for every $1 fall in price of an annual average barrel of oil, Louisiana loses $12 million.

Let's review. Ukraine produces 45% of its electricity from nuclear power. Fuel for its reactors comes from Russia.It produces 40% of its electricity from thermal power. Since the war in East Ukraie coal for its plants comes from Russia.It produces 10% of its electricity from natural gas that also comes from Russia.Since Ukraine is still unable to produce enough electricity domestically Russia also supplies it with ready-made electricity.It's safe to say the only thing preventing a total Ukraine energy collapse is Russia.

Moscow and Kiev have signed an agreement on the supply of 9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to Ukraine, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said.He added that Russia has already started the delivery, despite the fact that the terms of the agreement have not been fulfilled yet, and hopes for the subsequent payment."In order to reduce the blackouts and other existing problems we [Moscow and Kiev] have held negotiations on the supply of 9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to Ukraine.We have signed an agreement, but the terms of the contract are not currently fulfilled…

Nevertheless, under the instructions of the Russian president, the decision has been made to carry out such a delivery.Hopefully, the payments will be made in future," Russia 24 TV channel has quoted Kozak on its website as saying.In 2013, electricity consumption in Ukraine amounted to nearly 147 billion kilowatt-hours.Russian deputy prime minister also stated that the electricity will be delivered to Ukraine on favorable terms.

Hungary has decided to align itself with Russia against the United States. The Western Alliance is starting to fray, over the insistence by Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress to go to war against Russia.

But, within the European Union, and especially among its former member-states of the Soviet Union, this is, as of yet, still only a cold war, which is in the process of heating up toward perhaps the super-hot temperature of a nuclear conflict between Russia and NATO (the latter organization consisting of the United States and its vassal nations against Russia). And America is already investing heavily in it. According to German Economic News (GEN), on December 25th, “Hungary Will Not Take Part in the Cold War Against Russia.” They report that, “Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban takes his distance from the EU, and accuses the US government of trying to instigate a new Cold War against Russia. Hungary will not participate.” GEN also links to an earlier, October 19th, GEN article, which had reported that, “After Russia, Hungary is now apparently also being targeted by Americans: the United States is hitting senior Hungarian government officials and businessmen with entry bans. The Americans throw corruption-charges against the Hungarians.”

On Tuesday, December 23rd, Reuters headlined, “Hungary PM Orban: U.S. uses corruption charges to gain influence,” and reported that, “The United States is using corruption allegations against some Hungarian public officials as a ‘cover story’ to boost its influence in central Europe amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Tuesday. Orban’s comments come amid a wider souring of relations between Hungary, a NATO ally, and the United States over what America perceives as Orban’s increasingly authoritarian rule and Budapest’s warm relations with Russia.”

At the symposium, held in a divinely frescoed former 15th century Dominican refectory now part of the Italian parliament's library, Sergey Glazyev, on the phone from Moscow, gave a stark reading of Cold War 2.0. There's no real "government" in Kiev; the US ambassador is in charge. An anti-Russia doctrine has been hatched in Washington to foment war in Europe - and European politicians are its collaborators. Washington wants a war in Europe because it is losing the competition with China. Glazyev addressed the sanctions dementia: Russia is trying simultaneously to reorganize the politics of the International Monetary Fund, fight capital flight and minimize the effect of banks closing credit lines for many businessmen. Yet the end result of sanctions, he says, is that Europe will be the ultimate losers economically; bureaucracy in Europe has lost economic focus as American geopoliticians have taken over.

What he did emphasize was this was outright financial war, helped by a fifth column in the Russian establishment. The only equal component in this asymmetrical war was nuclear forces. And yet Russia would not surrender. Leontyev characterized Europe not as a historical subject but as an object: "The European project is an American project." And "democracy" had become fiction. The run on the rouble came and went like a devastating economic hurricane. Yet you don't threat a checkmate against a skilled chess player unless your firepower is stronger than Jupiter's lightning bolt. Moscow survived. Gazprom heeded the request of President Vladimir Putin and will sell its US dollar reserves on the domestic market. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier went on the record against the EU further "turning the screw" as in more counterproductive sanctions against Moscow. And at his annual press conference, Putin emphasized how Russia would weather the storm.

Essentially, the Empire of Chaos is bluffing, using Europe as pawns. The Empire of Chaos is as lousy at chess as it is at history. What it excels in is in upping the ante to force Russia to back down. Russia won't back down.

The United States and Turkey have agreed tentatively to start joint training of Syrian rebel fighters in March but have put off the question of defining the enemy – the government of President Bashar Assad or Islamist extremists – the Turkish Foreign Ministry said Monday.Under a memorandum of understanding, the U.S. will send about 100 military trainers to the Kirsehir-Hirfanli base in central Anatolia to train and equip up to 2,000 rebels this year, a senior official told reporters.Altogether, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are to host training for 5,000 rebels this year and a total of 15,000 over three years, said the official, who declined to be named because this was not an official announcement.Turkey expects to conclude the deal by late January, but major questions remain open – not only about naming the ultimate foe but also how to choose the rebels and where to base them.Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have backed down from his demand that the U.S. support a no-fly zone over northern Syria, something the Obama administration adamantly opposed.

Other differences appeared to have been papered over. Turkey has been adamant that any force deployed in Syria must have as a goal defeating the Assad government, but the Obama administration has insisted it is interested only in battling the Islamic State. There is no need to define the ultimate target now, the Turkish official said, because rebel forces already are fighting a two-front war, against both the Syrian government and the Islamic State. Turkey had sought to select rebels from the anti-regime Free Syrian Army umbrella group who have been fighting inside Syria, but the Obama administration would not agree, the official said. Instead, the two sides agreed to select rebels through a joint commission.Also left up in the air is how the new force will be integrated with forces already fighting in Syria. Rebel officials estimate there are at least 30,000 fighters in southern Syria and 10,000 in the north, and of the total, at least 1,000 already have been trained in Qatar through a covert CIA-directed program.Top Pentagon aides favor recruiting unit-level commanders for the training and providing them weapons to defend Syrian civilians against the regime’s use of barrel bombs and other unguided munitions, but they have yet to win White House backing, according to an informed Capitol Hill official who spoke under the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Algeria. Long before the identity of the murder suspects was revealed by the French police – even before I heard the names of Cherif and Said Kouachi – I muttered the word “Algeria” to myself. As soon as I heard the names and saw the faces, I said the word “Algeria” again. And then the French police said the two men were of “Algerian origin”. For Algeria remains the most painful wound within the body politic of the Republic – save, perhaps, for its continuing self-examination of Nazi occupation – and provides a fearful context for every act of Arab violence against France. The six-year Algerian war for independence, in which perhaps a million and a half Arab Muslims and many thousands of French men and women died, remains an unending and unresolved agony for both peoples. Just over half a century ago, it almost started a French civil war.

But there’s an important context that somehow got left out of the story this week, the “history corner” that many Frenchmen as well as Algerians prefer to ignore: the bloody 1954-62 struggle of an entire people for freedom against a brutal imperial regime, a prolonged war which remains the foundational quarrel of Arabs and French to this day.The desperate and permanent crisis in Algerian-French relations, like the refusal of a divorced couple to accept an agreed narrative of their sorrow, poisons the cohabitation of these two peoples in France. However Cherif and Said Kouachi excused their actions, they were born at a time when Algeria had been invisibly mutilated by 132 years of occupation. Perhaps five million of France’s six and a half million Muslims are Algerian. Most are poor, many regard themselves as second-class citizens in the land of equality.

More than 100 years earlier, France had invaded Algeria itself, subjugating its native Muslim population, building small French towns and chateaux across the countryside, even – in an early 19th-century Catholic renaissance which was supposed to “re-Christianise” northern Africa – converting mosques into churches.The Algerian response to what today appears to be a monstrous historical anachronism varied over the decades between lassitude, collaboration and insurrection. A demonstration for independence in the Muslim-majority and nationalist town of Sétif on VE Day – when the Allies had liberated the captive countries of Europe – resulted in the killing of 103 European civilians. French government revenge was ruthless; up to 700 Muslim civilians – perhaps far more – were killed by infuriated French “colons” and in bombardment of surrounding villages by French aircraft and a naval cruiser. The world paid little attention.

PARIS TERROR ATTACKS Holder: French attacks point to threats to United States  "This is the nature of the new threat we must confront," he said.  http://ow.ly/H7Y6N Holder: US at war with terrorists who 'corrupt' Islam  "We are determined to take the fight to them," he said.  http://ow.ly/H80nw Holder: US does not stereotype in identifying terror suspects  “I think we’re doing a good job monitoring those people," he said.  http://ow.ly/H89Vu Homeland Security chairman: Foreign fighters a threat to US  Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said Europe should tighten its travel restrictions.  http://ow.ly/H8kEu Senate Intel chief: Terrorist attacks could start happening every week  Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) pointed to the number of sleeper cells in Europe.  http://ow.ly/H87bW Former Intel chairwoman: Major attack on US 'in the realm of possibility'  Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said sleeper terrorist cells exist in the United States.  http://ow.ly/H82PL

Visa waiver program poses security threat, Dem senator says  "The visa waiver program is the Achilles heel of America," Feinstein said.  http://ow.ly/H83qO McCain: Obama has no plan to defeat terrorists  The senator said the number of threats are the result of "leading from behind."  http://ow.ly/H86xO Top GOP senator: Call it a war on terror  "There is a tendency toward political correctness," Sen. John Cornyn said.  http://ow.ly/H8iBE Top Obama military adviser: No al Qaeda link to Paris attacks  Gen. Martin Dempsey said the gunmen have been linked by family and school ties.  http://ow.ly/H825h

Before dawn broke in Washington on Saturday, “Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists” – more accurately described as federalists of southeast Ukraine who oppose last February’s coup in Kiev – unloaded desperately needed provisions from some 280 Russian trucks in Luhansk, Ukraine. The West accused those trucks of “invading” Ukraine on Friday, but it was a record short invasion; after delivering their loads of humanitarian supplies, many of the trucks promptly returned to Russia. I happen to know what a Russian invasion looks like, and this isn’t it. Forty-six years ago, I was ten miles from the border of Czechoslovakia when Russian tanks stormed in to crush the “Prague Spring” experiment in democracy. The attack was brutal.

I was not near the frontier between Russia and southeastern Ukraine on Friday as the convoy of some 280 Russian supply trucks started rolling across the border heading toward the federalist-held city of Luhansk, but that “invasion” struck me as more like an attempt to break a siege, a brutal method of warfare that indiscriminately targets all, including civilians, violating the principle of non-combatant immunity. Michael Walzer, in his War Against Civilians, notes that “more people died in the 900-day siege of Leningrad during WWII than in the infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together.” So the Russians have some strong feelings about sieges. There’s also a personal side for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was born in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, eight years after the long siege by the German army ended. It is no doubt a potent part of his consciousness. One elder brother, Viktor, died of diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad.

Despite the fury expressed by U.S. and NATO officials about Russia’s unilateral delivery of the supplies after weeks of frustrating negotiations with Ukrainian authorities, there was clearly a humanitarian need. An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) team that visited Luhansk on Aug. 21 to make arrangements for the delivery of aid found water and electricity supplies cut off because of damage to essential infrastructure. The Ukrainian army has been directing artillery fire into the city in an effort to dislodge the ethnic Russian federalists, many of whom had supported elected President Viktor Yanukovych who was ousted in the Feb. 22 coup. The Red Cross team reported that people in Luhansk do not leave their homes for fear of being caught in the middle of ongoing fighting, with intermittent shelling into residential areas placing civilians at risk. Laurent Corbaz, ICRC head of operations for Europe and Central Asia, reported “an urgent need for essentials like food and medical supplies.” The ICRC stated that it had “taken all necessary administrative and preparatory steps for the passage of the Russian convoy,” and that, “pending customs checks,” the organization was “therefore ready to deliver the aid to Luhansk … provided assurances of safe passage are respected.” The “safe passage” requirement, however, was the Catch-22. The Kiev regime and its Western supporters have resisted a ceasefire or a political settlement until the federalists – deemed “terrorists” by Kiev – lay down their arms and surrender.

A fascinating nuclear/energy ballet involving Iran, Russia, the US and the EU is bound to determine much of what happens next in the new great game in Eurasia. Let’s start with what’s going on with the Iranian nuclear dossier.

As we stand, the gap between the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany on one side, and Iran on the other side, remains very wide. Essentially, the gap that really matters is between Washington and Tehran. And that, unfortunately, translates as a few more months for the vast sabotage brigade – from US neo-cons and assorted warmongers to Israel and the House of Saud – to force the deal to collapse. One of Washington’s sabotage mantras is “breakout capability”; a dodgy concept which boils down to total centrifuge capacity/capability to produce enough enriched uranium for a single nuclear bomb. This implies an arbitrary limit on Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium. The other sabotage mantra forces Iran to shut down the whole of its uranium enrichment program, and on top of it negotiate on its missiles. That’s preposterous; missiles are part of conventional armed forces. Washington in this instance is changing the subject to missiles that might carry the nuclear warheads that Iran does not have. So they should also be banned. Moscow and Beijing see “breakout capability” for what it is; a manufactured issue. While Washington says it wants a deal, Moscow and Beijing do want a deal – stressing it can be respected via strict monitoring.

ranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has established his red line on the record, so there should be no misunderstanding; the final nuclear deal must preserve Tehran’s legitimate right to enrich uranium - on an industrial scale – as part of a long-term energy policy. This is what Iranian negotiators have been saying from the beginning. So shutting down uranium enrichment is a non-starter. Sanction me baby one more time Uranium enrichment, predictably, is the key to the riddle. As it stands, Tehran now has more than 19,000 installed enrichment centrifuges. Washington wants it reduced to a few thousand. Needless to add, Israel – which has over 200 nuclear warheads and the missiles to bomb Iran, the whole thing acquired through espionage and illegal arms deals – presses for zero enrichment. In parallel undercurrents, we still have the usual US/Israeli “experts” predicting that Iran can produce a bomb in two to three months while blasting Tehran for “roadblocks” defending its “illicit” nuclear program. At least US National Security Adviser Susan Rice has momentarily shut up.

On Saturday evening, the Israeli army stated that Hadar Goldin, the soldier it claimed Hamas had captured on Friday morning, is dead: on Twitter A special IDF committee has concluded that Lt. Hadar Goldin was killed in combat in Gaza on Friday. May his memory be a blessing.— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) August 2, 2014 It was on the pretext of searching for the missing soldier that Israel slaughtered at least 110 of people in the southern Gaza town of Rafah since Friday morning, destroying what was supposed to be a 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire. But the toll is rising as more bodies are found. “Such was the savagery of Israel’s bombardment in Rafah, such was the quantity of dead bodies, that there was simply no other option but to use vegetable refrigerators as makeshift morgues,” journalist Mohammed Omer, who hails from Rafah, reports.

One wonders whether US President Barack Obama will now retract his hasty statement – no doubt based on misinformation from Israel – blaming Hamas for capturing the soldier and demanding that he be “unconditionally” released. Now that Israel has, like Hamas, concluded that Goldin is dead, the question remains whether someone in the Israeli army gave the order to shell Rafah to kill him and prevent Hamas taking a live prisoner.

Friday turned into yet another day of horror for Palestinians in Gaza, as Israel committed massacres and atrocities claiming the lives of at least 100 people. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Friday was meant to be the first day of a three-day “humanitarian ceasefire” announced on Thursday evening by the United Nations and the United States.

Neocons do like to declare victory, especially regarding the Iraq War. So it came as no surprise that Paul Wolfowitz, apparently unimpressed by Iraq’s mounting crisis, regaled a recent panel discussion at the U.S.-Africa Summit with the blunt proclamation, “We have won it — in  2009.” Unsurprisingly, that’s when Team Bush left the White House — and approximately 150,000 troops behind in Iraq. Perhaps also not surprisingly, war-weary Americans didn’t pay much attention to Paul’s pronouncement. No doubt they are as tired of Wolfowitz as they are of the war he helped to start. It probably rang as hollow as the faint echo of his earlier pitch for a quick, all-expenses-paid war against 2003’s Hitler of the Moment — Saddam Hussein.

But it’s not quite as simple as that. The issue got more complicated shortly after the Africa summit when President Barack Obama — who had pinned his legacy on extricating the United States from Iraq — suddenly found himself at a podium to announce limited, but open-ended military action to halt the dreaded march of The Islamic State (often called ISIS or ISIL) through the repeatedly rocked Cradle of Civilization. Many have explained the organization’s plan for creating a fundamentalist caliphate and its reliance on shockingly brutal tactics that make ISIS something that even al-Qaeda could never be, nor perhaps ever wanted to be. Many others have prodded the dying corpse of Iraq to assign blame here, there and everywhere. But the most basic reason for more bombing is found right there in the self-aggrandizing quip by Paul Wolfowitz. The simple fact is that the Iraq War was a smashing success – at least for the neocons – because it smashed the keystone in the arch of the region’s stability. By removing Saddam Hussein, his government and the Republican Guard, neocons removed a bulwark against the very jihadism that has policymakers and pundits forever wringing their hands raw, military contractors ringing their cash registers, and the denizens of the national security state resting assured under a blanket of secrecy.

Considering the persistent ubiquity of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, their growing presence around the Horn of Africa and extension into Sub-Saharan Africa, Wolfowitz’s declaration of victory may not be ironic or delusional; it may have some measure of truth – at least from his perspective – but for a reason most would not consider victorious. That “victory” achieved something the neocons could only dream of during a fitful slumber brought on by counting the media’s sheep, i.e. a permanent war in the Middle East.

As I’ve written many times before, “terrorism” is, and from the start was designed to be, almost entirely devoid of discernible meaning. It’s a fear-mongering slogan, lacking any consistent application, intended to end rational debate and justify virtually any conduct by those who apply the term. But to the extent it means anything beyond that, it typically refers to the killing of civilians as a means of furthering political or military goals.

In American media discourse, when Palestinians overwhelmingly kill soldiers (95% of the Israeli death toll) who are part of an army that is blockading, occupying, invading, and indiscriminately bombing them and killing their children by the hundreds, that is “terrorism”; when Israelis use massive, brutal force against a trapped civilian population, overwhelmingly killing innocent men, women and children (at least 75% of the Palestinian death toll), with clear intentions to kill civilians (see point 3), that is noble “self-defense.” That demonstrates how skewed U.S. discourse is in favor of Israel, as well as the purely manipulative, propagandistic nature of the term “terrorists.”

he CNN poll conducted from Friday to Sunday – just as Israel was launching its ground operation in the conflict, which started July 8 – found that 57 percent of Americans see Israel’s actions as justified, with 12 percent among those respondents saying Israel is not using enough force. CNN noted that the same percentage, 57 percent, believed Israel was justified in its use of force during the previous conflict with Hamas in Gaza in 2012, and 63 percent thought it was justified during the 2008-2009 Cast Lead conflict. The survey carried out by ORC International found, however, that Israel’s unfavorables were climbing, with 38 percent saying that they had an unfavorable opinion of the country, up 14 percent from February, and 60 percent posting a favorable opinion, down from 72 percent in February. The telephone poll of 1,012 Americans had a margin of error of three percentage points.

The price of beef and bacon hit its all-time high in the United States in June, according to data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In January 1980, when BLS started tracking the price of these commodities, ground chuck cost $1.82 per pound and bacon cost $1.45 per pound. By this June 2014, ground chuck cost $3.91 per pound and bacon cost $6.11 per pound. A decade ago, in June 2004, a pound of ground chuck cost $2.49, which means that the commodity has increased by 57 percent since then. Bacon has increased by 78.7 percent from the $3.42 it cost in June 2004 to the $6.11 it costs now. In one month, beef increased from $3.85 in May 2014 to $3.91 in June 2014. Bacon increased from $6.05 in May 2014 to $6.11 in June 2014.

Gunshots have been fired into Al Jazeera's bureau in the Gaza Strip amid an intensified bombardment campaign on the Palestinian enclave. The shots caused panic among the civilians living in the same building but no casualties were reported in the incident on Tuesday morning.

"Two very precise shots were fired straight into our building," Al Jazeera's Stefanie Dekker, reporting from the bureau, said. "We are high up in the building so we had a very strong vantage point over the area. But we have evacuated. "Our office building also has many residential apartments. People [are] leaving, panicked." The bureau is situated in a residential area of Gaza City.

The attack came a day after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was quoted by local media as saying his country will work to close down Al Jazeera's operations in Israel. Al Jazeera "has abandoned even the perception of being a reliable news organisation and broadcasts from Gaza and to the world anti-Israel incitement, lies, and encouragement to the terrorists," Lieberman said. The network has been covering the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip that started on July 8.

Yahoo Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos announced today at Black Hat 2014 that starting in the fall of this year, the purple-hued company will begin giving users the option of seamlessly wrapping their e-mails in PGP encryption. According to Kashmir Hill at Forbes, the encryption capability will be offered through a modified version of the same End-to-End browser plug-in that Google uses for PGP in Gmail. The announcement was tweeted by Yan Zhu, who has reportedly been hired by Yahoo to adapt End-to-End for use with Yahoo Mail. Zhu formerly worked as an engineer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has consistently been outspoken in its call for the widespread use of encryption throughout the Web and the Internet in general.

Israel has said rocket fire from Gaza has "made continuation of talks impossible," trading blame with Palestinian negotiators over the collapse of the ceasefire. Spokesman Mark Regev responded to Palestinian negotiator Azzam al-Ahmed's charge that Israel had thwarted the talks that broke down on Tuesday after Israel recalled its negotiators from Egypt, accusing Hamas of violating a truce. "The Cairo process was built on a total and complete cessation of all hostilities and so when rockets were fired from Gaza, not only was it a clear violation of the ceasefire but it also destroyed the premise upon which the talks were based," Regev said, according to the Reuters news agency. A week-long truce in Gaza collapsed with both sides blaming each other after Palestinian fighters launched rockets into Israel and Israel attacked "terror sites" inside the enclave.

Al Jazeera's Jane Ferguson said at least six children had been killed in the airstrikes since the truce disintegrated. "There is now this fallout row, essentially over who started it," our correspondent said. "Whoever broke the truce, it seems the exchange of rocket fire into Israel and airstrikes on Gaza is unlikely to end today."

The Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing, said on Twitter that it had fired rockets towards Tel Aviv. No one was injured in the attack on the city, the Israeli army said.