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The United States has attempted to claim that the only way to stop the so-called "Islamic State" in Syria and Iraq is to first remove the government in Syria. Complicating this plan are developments in Libya, benefactor of NATO's last successful regime change campaign. In 2011, NATO armed, funded, and backed with a sweeping air campaign militants in Libya centered around the eastern Libyan cities of Tobruk, Derna, and Benghazi. By October 2011, NATO successfully destroyed the Libyan government, effectively handing the nation over to these militants. 

What ensued was a campaign of barbarism, genocide, and sectarian extremism as brutal in reality as what NATO claimed in fiction was perpetrated by the Libyan government ahead of its intervention. The so-called "rebels" NATO had backed were revealed to be terrorists led by Al Qaeda factions including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The so-called "pro-democracy protesters" Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was poised to attack in what NATO claimed was pending "genocide" were in fact heavily armed terrorists that have festered for decades in eastern Libya. Almost immediately after NATO successfully destroyed Libya's government, its terrorist proxies were mobilized to take part in NATO's next campaign against Syria. Libyan terrorists were sent first to NATO-member Turkey were they were staged, armed, trained, and equipped, before crossing the Turkish-Syrian border to take part in the fighting. 

CNN in an article titled, "ISIS comes to Libya," claims: The black flag of ISIS flies over government buildings. Police cars carry the group's insignia. The local football stadium is used for public executions. A town in Syria or Iraq? No. A city on the coast of the Mediterranean, in Libya.  Fighters loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are now in complete control of the city of Derna, population of about 100,000, not far from the Egyptian border and just about 200 miles from the southern shores of the European Union.  The fighters are taking advantage of political chaos to rapidly expand their presence westwards along the coast, Libyan sources tell CNN. Only the black flag of Al Qaeda/ISIS has already long been flying over Libya - even at the height of NATO's intervention there in 2011.  ISIS didn't "come to" Libya, it was always there in the form of Al Qaeda's local franchises LIFG and AQIM - long-term, bitter enemies of the now deposed and assassinated Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.

Back in March, at a time when the IMF reported that Ukraine's official gold holdings as of the end of February, so just as the State Department-facilitated coup against former president Victor Yanukovich was concluding, amounted to 42.3 tonnes or 8% of reserves...

... and notably under the previous "hated" president, Ukraine gold's reserves had constantly increased hitting a record high just before the presidential coup...

... we reported of a strange incident that took place just after the Ukraine presidential coup, namely that according to at least one source, "in a mysterious operation under the cover of night, Ukraine's gold reserves were promptly loaded onboard an unmarked plane, which subsequently took the gold to the US." To wit: Tonight, around at 2:00 am, an unregistered transport plane took off took off from Boryspil airport. According to Boryspil staff, prior to the plane's appearance, four trucks and two cargo minibuses arrived at the airport all with their license plates missing. Fifteen people in black uniforms, masks and body armor stepped out, some armed with machine guns. These people loaded the plane with more than forty heavy boxes.   After this, several mysterious men arrived and also entered the plane. The loading was carried out in a hurry. After unloading, the plateless cars immediately left the runway, and the plane took off on an emergency basis.   Airport officials who saw this mysterious "special operation" immediately notified the administration of the airport, which however strongly advised them "not to meddle in other people's business."   Later, the editors were called by one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of Income and Fees, who reported that, according to him, tonight on the orders of one of the "new leaders" of Ukraine, all the gold reserves of the Ukraine were taken to the United States.

A federal jury here Wednesday convicted one former Blackwater contractor of murder and three of his colleagues of voluntary manslaughter in the deadly shootings of 14 unarmed civilians killed in Baghdad’s Nisour Square seven years ago.The judge in the case ordered the men detained pending sentencing.

the unit’s sniper, Nicholas Slatten, opened fire on a car which, according to the defence, had approached the Blackwater vehicle in a suspicious manner. Slatten’s shots, which killed the car’s driver, a medical student, triggered chaos throughout the circle.In addition to Slatten, who was convicted of first-degree murder, a total of six members of the Blackwater team fired their weapons as they moved through the circle, according to the prosecution.One team member, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to one count of voluntary manslaughter in 2008 and served as a prosecution witness in the case. Charges against another defendant were dropped shortly afterwards. Several other team members also testified against the defendants.Aside from Slatten’s conviction, three other guards Wednesday were found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, as well as various weapons offences.

If sustained, Slatten’s murder conviction requires a sentence of life imprisonment. Each count of voluntary manslaughter – and each of the other three defendants were convicted of multiple counts – can carry a prison sentence of up to 15 years.

The crisis in the Russian automotive market, the decline of the local currency and the decline in sales since the beginning of 2014 confirm the carmaker Renault-Nissan to address the issue of localization of production with even more vigor.As the Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn announced in Davos at the 45th World Economic Forum, it is going ahead with forced localization and a withdrawal of the planning pace of new models in the high price sector. Ghosn in Davos told the Agency RIA Novosti: "All this together forces us to localize the production, and as soon as possible."

The Drug Enforcement Administration is collecting information about more than just license plates with the tracking system revealed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Documents released by the ACLU this morning show that the DEA is also using the license plate readers (LPRs) on which this system relies to capture photographs of a vehicles’ passengers. The images can then be run through facial recognition software. This is meant to give the DEA more context about the people whose movements it’s tracking with this program, which gathers data from more than 100 LPRs managed by an unknown number of police departments around the country to aid in their investigations. The program was originally meant to assist with civil asset forfeiture cases, but it has since expanded to assist departments approved by the El Paso Intelligence Center with investigations into murders, rapes, and other crimes, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Previous reports indicated that the DEA was collecting license plate information about “millions” of Americans. That figure might be low if it didn’t account for the number of plates collected versus the number of people in a vehicle when these images are taken. Either way, this program represents a clear violation of privacy for many Americans, most of whom didn’t know the DEA could collect this information. As I wrote before: The result is a national surveillance program with an unknown number of contributors offering up location data about millions of Americans; all to a database used by an untold number of police departments without any public oversight regarding their searches.

That’s a problem. Backchannel reported in December that police have used their access to license plate readers to stalk former colleagues, and IB Times revealed earlier this month that Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) used location data to smear a political rival. Perhaps the DEA will support the program by claiming that learning who is in a vehicle isn’t much different from learning where the vehicle was going — it could all be considered metadata, and the government considers that information to be fair game.

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

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

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

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Internet of Things (IoT) — so-called “smart” devices, vehicles, and appliances which employ various computer technologies — may be used to spy and keep tabs on people in the future. “In the future, intelligence services might use the IoT for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper’s prepared testimony claimed. Though his remarks were ostensibly, and not surprisingly, directed toward the fight against ‘terrorism,’ the potential implications for all civilians cannot be ignored — particularly considering the IoT comprises everything from smart cars and fitness tracking devices to televisions and Barbie dolls. Clapper warns the threat from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and such non-state actors as ISIL and al-Qaeda. can be expected in the form of cyber attacks, gathering information about individuals, and even psy-ops, which make the IoT vulnerable to malicious intent — and ideal for U.S. intelligence-gathering purposes. “Future cyber operations will almost certainly include an increased emphasis on changing or manipulating data to compromise its integrity (i.e., accuracy and reliability) … Broader adoption of IoT devices and AI [artificial intelligence] — in settings such as public utilities and health care — will only exacerbate these potential effects,” said Clapper.

No matter the possible veracity in concerns of National Intelligence, the agency’s desire to thwart terrorism with an exponential increase in surveillance should be disquieting to all civilians wishing to maintain a modicum of privacy. As researchers with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard warned in their recent report, Don’t Panic: “The Internet of Things promises a new frontier for networking objects, machines, and environments in ways that we [are] just beginning to understand. When, say, a television has a microphone and a network connection, and is reprogrammable by its vendor, it could be used to listen in to one side of a telephone conversation taking place in its room — no matter how encrypted the telephone service itself might be. These forces are on a trajectory towards a future with more opportunities for surveillance.” In fact, the Nest is a home automation producer of programmable, self-learning, sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats, smoke detectors, and other security systems. It’s also one of the devices can be used to spy on people in their homes. Clapper’s testimony carefully constructs a potential legal justification for expanding surveillance via, say, your dishwasher, in his assertion that homegrown violent extremists — who have now earned an acronym, HVEs — present the greatest looming threat inside the United States. According to his remarks:

Using doublespeak – supporting an organization while pointing at it as the enemy and calling terrorists people who were previously hailed as ‘freedom fighters’, is not some prerogative of the French government. Producing one’s own enemy has become a pivotal process in Western strategy, one that comforts an imperial structure in which there is no separation any more between inside and outside, between law and sheer violence, between citizens and enemies. In Belgium the muslim preacher Jean-Louis Denis is tried in court for having promoted the jihad in Syria among young people because he is suspected of being acquainted with Sharia4Belgium, a group that is labelled as terrorist. His lawyer exposed the equivocation in the prosecution when he reminds the court that kids were indeed sent to fight for the Islamic State in Syria but by the Belgian intelligence service. He was referring to the part played by an undercover agent of the Belgian federal police. The signifier’s comeback It seems that in Paris too a major concern for the terrorists was to make it easy for them to be identified. Yet this paradox is no longer really a surprise. The miraculous find of ID papers has now become a classic feature in such circumstances. It is a recurring event, a repetitive compulsion that points again and again at people who belong to some jihadist movement. In the official version for 9/11 the FBI claimed that they found the unscathed passport of one of the pilots near one of the towers that were reduced to ashes by explosions whose heat melted even the steel columns in the buildings’ structure. The fourth plane’s crash near Shanksville also yielded a passport which, though scorched, still made it possible to read the person’s first name and surname and to see his ID photo. This is all the more disturbing as nothing at all was left in the crater, no part of the plane or of the people travelling in it, only this partly scorched passport.

In the case of the attack at Charlie Hebdo, investigators found the ID papers of the elder Kouachi brothers in a car they had abandoned in the north-east of Paris. This document allows them to conclude that the authors of the attack were known to the anti-terror department as ‘pioneers of the French Jihad.’ The ‘hunt’ could begin. How can killers who operate with such professional skill make such blunder? It is an elementary caution known to any burglar that you do not to take ID papers along. Since 9/11 unlikelihood has become part of our lives. It has become the basis on which  truth is assessed. Reason is banished. We must not believe what is said but the speaking voice, whatever nonsense it may utter. The more patently absurd, the more unwavering our belief in what is stated must be. Unlikelihood has turned into the measure of truth.

Major-General Hosam Al-Awak of the Intelligence Service at the Free Syrian Army has confirmed to Sputnik Arabic that they have the proof of crude oil purchases by Turkey from Daesh (also known as ISIL/ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.Major-General Hosam Al-Awak has confirmed to Sputnik Arabic that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) has photos of the oil deals and contracts signed by a Turkish party to buy oil from Daesh (also known as ISIL/ISIS) terror organization, which controls large areas in Syria and Iraq.

“Since the very start of the Syrian crisis in 2011, Turkey has been supporting the Islamists (extremists) and terrorists in Syria in every possible way against moderate groups,” he added. “We have photos of the contracts of oil deals signed between the Turkish party and Daesh… We also have photos of [buying] vehicles – Toyota cars bought by Qatar, which have the name of “al-ghanem” – [which] entered Syria along with armored vehicles used by militants of Daesh for their leaders’ transportation.”

“We noticed that extremist Islamic factions gain support from Turkey before the emergence of “Daesh”…. This support reached them through Qorsayah Mountain, near to Bawabet as-Salam on the Turkish-Syrian borders.” The Major-General also explained that the Turkish intelligence service used these deals (signed with the extremist parties) for other purposes – it obtained facilities from those parties, so that they “could steal factories and laboratories in Aleppo for the benefit of the Turkish companies.” Hosam Al-Awak noted that the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was supervising these organizations and coordinating with them, in order to put an end to the Free Syrian Army and other moderate groups. The Major-General stressed that his groups held the Head of the Turkish Intelligence Hakan Baydan accountable [for the deals] and added that they showed the evidence to their friends in the region and in the world, however, President Erdogan of Turkey insists on supporting extremism, Islamist parties and terror organizations in the region.

Governments should stop thinking about refugee camps as temporary places, says Kilian Kleinschmidt, one of the world's leading authorities on humanitarian aid (+ interview). "These are the cities of tomorrow," said Kleinschmidt of Europe's rapidly expanding refugee camps. "The average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That's a generation." "In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city," he told Dezeen.

Kleinschmidt said a lack of willingness to recognise that camps had become a permanent fixture around the world and a failure to provide proper infrastructure was leading to unnecessarily poor conditions and leaving residents vulnerable to "crooks". "I think we have reached the dead end almost where the humanitarian agencies cannot cope with the crisis," he said. "We're doing humanitarian aid as we did 70 years ago after the second world war. Nothing has changed."

He believes that migrants coming into Europe could help repopulate parts of Spain and Italy that have been abandoned as people gravitate increasingly towards major cities. "Many places in Europe are totally deserted because the people have moved to other places," he said. "You could put in a new population, set up opportunities to develop and trade and work. You could see them as special development zones which are actually used as a trigger for an otherwise impoverished neglected area."

During secret proceedings in Washington, a key witness in undermining the $9.5 billion judgment Chevron faces in Ecuador repudiated much of his explosive testimony, transcripts made public today show.     Since agreeing to testify for the oil giant, Judge Alberto Guerra's fortunes have changed, and so have Chevron's.     Roughly two years ago, Guerra took to the witness stand in a New York federal courtroom and swore that lawyers for rainforest villagers bribed him to ghostwrite a multibillion-dollar Ecuadorean court judgment against Chevron for oil contamination to the Amazon jungle.     About a year before he made a deal with Chevron, Guerra had little more than $100 to his name. He also owed tens of thousands of dollars in debt and could not afford to visit his children living in the United States.     U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan had warned early on in proceedings that he did not "assume that anyone's hands in this are clean," yet he credited Guerra's testimony last year in ruling that the Ecuadoreans obtained their award "by corrupt means."     The Ecuadoreans have long attacked Guerra, who has a contract with Chevron for various perks, including at least $326,000, an immigration attorney and a car, as a "paid-for" participant in the oil giant's self-styled witness-protection program.     Kaplan's decision conceded that "Guerra's credibility is not impeccable," but found that his account was "corroborated extensively by independent evidence."

Both that credibility and the corroborating evidence came under withering attack this year during closed-door proceedings before an international arbitration tribunal.     Though the hearings took place without press or public access at the World Bank in Washington on April 23 and 24, the tribunal agreed to release transcripts of the proceedings in response to a Courthouse News request that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press supported.     Courthouse News obtained advanced copies of more than 3,000 pages of transcripts, which were formally released on Monday.     They show Guerra putting a new twist on an old saying. "Money talks, gold screams," Guerra said in a June 25, 2012, meeting with Chevron representatives - a meeting Chevron recorded.     Testifying about this comment at the arbitration hearing, Guerra said Chevron showed him a safe filled with money. He recounted Chevron's representatives telling him: "Look, look, look what's down there. We have $20,000 there."     He remembered replying: "Oh, OK, very well, very well."     Guerra said he had only $146 in his bank account a year earlier, and owed tens of thousands more to finish the construction of his house. He said he could not scrape money for airfare to visit his children in the United States.

 Minutes from Guerra's meeting with Chevron that came to light during the tribunal proceedings showed that Chevron's lawyers hoped to find evidence that the Ecuadorean government had pressured the Guerra to rule against the company.     Guerra disappointed by saying that Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa's administration "never butted in" to the process, the transcript shows.     "These guys are idiots, but the truth, the truth, I attest, damn, they never got involved," Guerra added, referring to Correa's government.     The remark appears to undercut the foundation of Chevron's arbitration case, which asks the tribunal to blame the Ecuadorean government for a miscarriage of justice.     Guerra stood by those comments on the arbitration panel's witness stand.      "My position is that the government did not intervene," Guerra said.     The only time an Ecuadorean government official tried to elbow into the case, Guerra testified, was under a prior administration. Correa's predecessors pushed to dismiss the case in Chevron's favor in 2003, he said.

A Detroit judge has ruled against releasing Volkswagen AG manager Oliver Schmidt, who is awaiting trial over the VW emissions scandal in the US. The German national represented a "serious" flight risk, the judge said.

The 48-year-old Schmidt is set to stay in detention until the start of his trial in January 2018, according to the Thursday court ruling. He faces eleven felony counts over accusations that Volkswagen (VW) cheated on emission tests for diesel cars. The fraud and conspiracy charges carry a maximum of 169 years in prison. "The allegations of fraud and conspiracy in this case are very, very serious," said Judge Sean Cox of the US District Court for Eastern Michigan. There was "a serious risk" that Schmidt would not appear before the court if released, he added. Among other things, Schmidt is accused of lying to US officials. He allegedly claimed that technical problems were to blame for discrepancy between diesel emissions in road and laboratory tests. The company later admitted to using a software tool to manipulate the results. Schmidt is one of several VW executives who face charges in the US. He worked as the carmaker's emissions compliance manager. He ran a VW office in Detroit between 2012 and 2015 and later returned to Germany. He was arrested at Miami airport in January 2017 after vacationing in Florida and Cuba. He pleaded not guilty before the Detroit court. Sentence milder in Germany

There was some good news and some not so good news in the Fed's latest annual Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households. First the good news. The report, based on the Board's fourth annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking conducted in October 2016, presents a "picture of improving financial well-being among Americans", at least according to the report (read on to see if this is merited). Overall, 70% of the more than 6,600 respondents said they were either "living comfortably" or "doing okay," up 1% from 2015 and up 8% from the first survey results in 2013.

Now, the not so good news. Nearly eight years into an economic recovery, nearly half of Americans didn’t have enough cash available to cover a $400 emergency. Specifically, the survey found that, in line with what the Fed had disclosed in previous years, 44% of respondents said they wouldn’t be able to cover an unexpected $400 expense like a car repair or medical bill, or would have to borrow money or sell something to meet it. Troubling as this statistic remains, the overall share of adults who would struggle to come up with $400 in a pinch has declined by 2% from the last survey conducted in 2015, and down 6% since 2013. Of the group that could not pay in cash, 45% said they would go further in debt and use a credit card to pay off the expense over time. while a quarter would borrow from friends of family, and another 27% just couldn’t pay the expense. Others would turn to selling items or using a payday loan.

The breakdown was largely by education attainment: 79% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree said they would still be able to pay all of their other bills in full if hit with a $400 charge. Just 52% of those with no more than a high school diploma said the same. Just as concerning were other findings from the study: just under one-fourth of adults, or 23%, are not able to pay all of their current month’s bills in full while 25% reported skipping medical treatments due to cost in the prior year. Additionally, 28% of adults who haven’t retired yet reported to being grossly unprepared, indicating they had no retirement savings or pension whatsoever.