Obama, Americans Really Do Understand That You Have Hired A Terrorist Army To Wage the Terror War

 

Obama on Syria: Americans Just Don’t Understand

By Chris Stirewalt

Power Play

Published June 18, 2013

FoxNews.com

“What I’m saying is, that if you haven’t been in the Situation Room… Unless you’ve been involved in those conversations, then it’s kind of hard for you to understand the complexity of the situation and how we have to not rush into one more war in the Middle East.”

– President Obama in an interview with the Public Broadcasting Service.

President Obama and other Democrats keep talking about avoiding “another Iraq” and avoiding a “rush to war” similar to the 18-month run up to the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

And while Obama seems to be following much of the U.S. playbook for Iraq between 1992 and 2001 – secretly training, encouraging and equipping rebels, but not enough for them to succeed – there’s no reason to think that anything on the scale of the 2003 invasion is remotely close to happening in Syria.

Instead, the Iraq invasion straw man is key to Obama’s approach to the genocidal civil war between Muslim sects in the impoverished nation of 20 million at the crossroads of the Middle East.

Much as he is defending his domestic surveillance programs by asserting that he is not like former Vice President Dick Cheney, he is defending his arming and training of Islamist rebels in Syria by saying he is not like George W. Bush.

But Obama needn’t reach back a decade for an example of how U.S. military interventions work in the region.

Obama and other NATO leaders in Northern Ireland for an economic summit met today with Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan.

Zeidan is the man who helped convince Obama and his European counterparts to depose Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi and install a new government ultimately led by Zeidan, a liberal reformer Libyan exile, who worked as a human rights lawyer in Switzerland.

The promise, articulated a few times by Obama, was that Islamism would be a transitory state for the new nation. Zeidan and his fellow exiles promised that, in order to take out Gaddafi, who had brutally oppressed Islamists.  A moderate theocracy, they argued, was the only way to unite the opposition and usher in a new era. In time, Libyans would cease to bitterly cling to their rocket launchers and religion–and become enlightened.

But it hasn’t worked out so swimmingly.

Libya has remained a hotbed of Islamist extremism, most notably for Americans with the raid on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi that claimed the lives of four Americans, including the first American ambassador killed on the job in a generation.

The topic of discussion with Zeidan today was likely focused on the fact that the radicals don’t seem to be moderating. The only thing keeping the Western-backed government in power are Islamist militias who, in some cases literally, defend it against popular unrest.

But to keep the Islamists and their Kalashnikovs on board with the new government, the reformers have had to give away the store. When angry mobs are outside the door, the demands of one’s protectors tend to sound quite reasonable. The hard-line Islamists, though, are losing patience and may soon enough decide to oust the Western-backed crew entirely.

Zeidan was likely asking his Western benefactors for some cash and protection. Obama and the Europeans were likely asking that Zeidan do something about the al Qaeda affiliated goon squads roaming the streets.

And so it has been in other places where America and Europe less directly encouraged Islamist overthrow of secular strongmen. Egypt may make it to Western liberalism as Obama promises, but for now it is the world’s most populous theocracy.

The net effect is that Iran is having a great run, as the Great Satan and the Little Satans in Europe help spread Islamism in a way that would have been beyond imagining a decade ago. Obama promises that these are the good Islamists, but sometimes it’s rather hard to tell.

Obama, though, says he can tell. He told Charlie Rose that if Americans, strongly opposed to U.S. intervention in Syria, could see what he saw in the Situation Room at the White House they would be cool with the idea of arming the rebels, but not too well.

The rebel crew in Syria seems to be the roughest lot of any to emerge in the Islamist awakening across the region. But Obama’s implicit promise is that we can help the ones who don’t eat the internal organs of their enemies or shoot children in the face for telling a joke about Mohammed.

In the interview, Obama also pooh-poohed the notion that acting more forcefully or swiftly might have prevented the massive genocide or prevented the really, really bad Islamists from gaining a foothold. It’s complicated, he said. And it requires all of the secret knowledge he has to understand.

The president argues that those people who want air strikes, etc. are trying to remake the Iraq invasion. And for those who don’t want to go in at all, he says he can make sure to help the good guys and not the bad ones.

Obama’s nibbling interventionism – famously dubbed “leading from behind” – has produced plenty of unhappy results so far. But if you knew what he knew, Obama promises, you would be on board.

That seems to be the new motif of this presidency, whether it’s domestic spying, taking it easy on the IRS and Department of Justice scandals or implementing his creaking and groaning health law. Americans can’t understand the details here, but Obama and his team of experts understand things in a way we can’t.

Obama can’t tell you why he’s doing what he’s doing because it is too complicated. But if you could understand, you’d be all for it.

For a government and a president suffering a crisis of confidence, “trust me” takes a mocking tone.

And Now a Word from Charles

“Look, the search for Iranian moderates is perpetual.  And the answer is always the same — it’s a mirage.  We go back to the hostage crisis in ’79.  We were looking for the moderates.  Then Iran-Contra started because the national security advisor of Ronald Reagan of all people had had the idea that he knew of some moderates in Iran and he went over on a secret trip.  In the end he was swindled and humiliated.  But this happens over and over again.  This is a wish.  It’s not a reality.”  

– Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier”
Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News, and his POWER PLAY column appears Monday-Friday on FoxNews.com. Catch Chris Live online daily at 11:30amET  at  http:live.foxnews.com.

the enemies of Islam are attempting to destroy it from within—200 Years of New Kharijism

200 Years of New Kharijism: the Ongoing Revision of Islam

By Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani

Chairman, Islamic Supreme Council of America
We live in a time when the enemies of Islam are attempting to destroy it from within.
Resourceful and determined, they announce new mode of leadership that pretends to restore
the purity of the faith as a guise to gain the confidence of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The
unwary observer is readily misled by their portrayal, which is eagerly disseminated by the
media. In fact, it is these proponents of extremism who are themselves outside the realm of true
Islam. “The Religion of God,” al-Khatib said, “lies between extremism and the laxity.”i

1.0 Prophetic Traditions

The advent of these extremists was foretold by the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (s).
Prophet Muhammad’s authentic traditionsii detail for us the characteristics and behavior of the
extremists, stating that their existence in our world would be revealed when “…the destitute
(al-buhm) camel-herds compete in building tall structures,”iii or in another narration “…the
barefoot, naked, indigent (al-‘âla) shepherds compete in building tall structures.”iv “…The
barefoot and the naked are the heads of the people,”v or “…the barefoot and naked, the deaf
and dumb are the kings of the earth.”vi

“Barefoot and naked” and “deaf and dumb” are metaphors to describe in figurative
speech just how depraved the new leaders would be. “Barefoot and naked” relates to people of
the desert, and implies their utter ignorance in matters pertaining to organized society.vii “Deaf
and dumb” implies that they would fail to use common sense in anything concerning religion,
though they are perfectly sound in mind and limb.viii Implied as well is the notion that the
extremists’ ultimate goal is world domination, to be “kings of the earth.”

The traditions reveal another of the signs of the extremists’ onset is “the affectation of
eloquence by the rabble and their betaking to palaces in big cities.”ix Prophet Muhammad
predicted a reversal in society whereby these depraved leaders would take over the rule of
every region by force. They would become extremely rich and their primary concern would be
to erect the tallest buildings, rather than maintain order or care for the common welfare.x

2.0 A Reversal of Values

Sadly, we have witnessed the realization of the Prophet’s prediction in the dominance of
extremist ideology in the Middle East and its increasing influence in the West. Because of their
influence and their reversal of values, we now see doctrinal, political, and physical wars of
exclusion being waged everywhere in the name of Islam. In the United States, extremist
ideologues have waged a fifty-year long campaign to exclude moderate, traditional Muslims
from political arenas as well as the mosque. The effect has been to create the impression that the
200 Years of New Kharijism – The Ongoing Revision of Islam Islamic Supreme 2 Council of America
extremists are the majority whereas they are simply the most vociferous, having made it more
comfortable for the majority of Muslims to stay at home, away from their doctrinal wrangling.

These two phenomena, depraved leadership and exclusionism, are the mainstays of
New Kharijism in our time. What clearer proof of this than what took place in Makka on
November 20, 1979, when hundreds of armed men seized the Holy Mosque under the 36-year
old Juhayman al-‘Utaybi and proclaimed him as the new leader of the country? They held the
mosque for two weeks during which they practiced lewd sexual behavior with the women they
held captive and those they had brought with them.

According to the New York Times, “There were hundreds of casualties on both sides
before Saudi forces were able to drag out the last remnant of what by then was a bunch of filthy,
bedraggled young men.” Al-‘Utaybi and sixty-three of the captured were later executed by
public beheading. According to As Sayyid Yusuf al-Rifa‘i, these wild young people learned
their ways from the same teacher as Abdel Aziz Ibn Baz (d. 2000), a famous Wahhabi scholar.

3.0 The Original Khawârij

Before we speak of the modern phenomenon of New Kharijism it is important to define
the principal constituents of Khariji doctrines. The name “Khawârij” was applied to those who,
in the time of the Successors of the Companions to the Prophet (one generation after Prophet
Muhammad’s lifetime), parted ways with other Muslims and declared them disbelievers, just as
the followers of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, or “Wahhabis” (also known as the “Salafis”), do today.xi

The Khawârij or “Kharijites” were tens of thousands of Muslims mostly comprised of
Qur’an memorizors and devoted worshippers who prayed and fasted above the norm. Yet, they
declared every one of the Companions and all who associated with them to be apostate
disbelievers and took up arms against them. The practices of declaring Muslims apostate
(takfîr/tashrîk) and taking armed action (baghî) against the central Muslim authority – the
Caliphate – became and continues to remain the hallmark of the Khawârij.

In addition, the Khawârij altered the interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunna, and used
them to declare it lawful to kill and take the property of Muslims, as do their modern
counterparts, the Wahhabis.xii

The classification of the Wahhabis as Kharijis has been a leitmotiv of Sunni heresiography
for the past 200 years. Only now has it become politically incorrect among the scholars of Islam
(ulema).

4.0 Three Principles of the New Kharijis

The chief brand of New Kharijism, or Wahhabism, distinguishes itself from traditional

Islam by three main principles:

1. Anthropomorphism of the Deity: Attributing a body to the object of Islamic worship.
2. Disrespect of P rophet: Harming the Prophet through:
200 Years of New Kharijism – The Ongoing Revision of Islam Islamic Supreme 3 Council of America
! Disrespect of his noble person, mosque, grave, vestiges, Family, or Companions.
! Disrespect of those who visit, love, and praise him.
! Disparaging or holding his status as an intercessor in disdain.
3. Disregard for the schools and methods of the Sunni Imams including:
! The Imams of Sunni doctrine (‘aqîda): al-Ash‘ari and al-Maturidi.
! The scholars of traditional Sunni jurisprudence (fiqh): Abu Hanifa, Malik, ash-Shafi‘i,
and Ahmad.
! The Imams of Sunni morals (akhlâq) known as the Polesxiii of the science of soulpurification
(tasawwuf): al-Junayd, al-Gilani, al-Shadhili, al-Rifa‘i, al-Chishti, al-
Suhrawardi, Shah Naqshband, and al-Tijani.xiv

Since all sincere Muslims believe God is transcendent and love their Prophet, it follows
that this third principle, disregard for the Sunni Schools and their jurisprudential authority, is
by far the most harmful tenet of New Kharijism and its most devastating achievement. The
attack on the schools of thought has resulted in the pollution of pure belief, the arrogant
rejection of Islamic authority, and the discrediting of pious Muslims striving to follow the
straight path.

The traditional schools were immediately supplanted by extremist ideologues and
radical centers of education. Africans tell the story of a young man sent to study Shari‘a at great
expense by his Sunni parents. Upon his return a few years later, he refused to eat a chicken
slaughtered in his honor by his father stating, “my father is an apostate.” Scenarios like this one
quickly caused a great rift between the generations of peace-loving Muslims and the chaosdriven
youth who were their children.

More ugly still is the violence wreaked by extremists on the Muslims of Syria, Egypt,
Algeria, Afghanistan, Daghestan, Chechnya, and within the Indian Subcontinent. Violence and
societal upheaval were instilled at the new schools by radical ideologues like Egyptian ex-
Communist Sayyid Qutb. Sayyid Qutb declared a Muslim is either a “revolutionist” or an
infidel,xv and went so far as to declare all the Islamic societies of his time apostate and fit to be
overthrown. He stated, “Islam is a force that runs to gift freedom to all people on the earth with
no regard to the variety of their religious beliefs. When this force meets with aberrant forces, it
is the duty of his so-called “Islam” to struggle and annihilate them.”xvi Invoking the memory of
the original Kharijis, he also wrote, “Islam is a whole: its separated parts should be united and
the differences removed.”xvii

5.0 Prohibitions of the New Kharijis

Today Sayyid Qutb’s spiritual children – such as the followers of Taqi al-Din al-
Nabahani, who are outlawed in most Muslim countries – tell Muslims not to:

! Participate in government.
! Sit on jury duty.

200 Years of New Kharijism – The Ongoing Revision of Islam Islamic Supreme 4 Council of America
! Vote.
! Collaborate with other faith groups.
! Recite the remembrance of God in collective gatherings of dhikr.xviii
! Commemorate the birthday of our Prophet (mawlid) nor read poetry in his honor.
! Wear turbans or attempt to revive Prophetic traditions concerning dress.
! Show deference or respect to religious scholars or pious elders.
! Visit the tombs of saints.

5.0 The Ongoing Revision of Islam

The Neo-Kharijis and their sponsors are mounting a worldwide offensive to convince
Muslims and the rest of the world that theirs is the only way. To this end, a vast publishing
campaign to revise Islam has been under way since the early thirties, an effort that has been
redoubled since the eighties. This campaign is waged on five fronts:

5.1 Tampering with the Texts

A wanton, unethical manipulation of the great books of Islam has removed words or
entire chapters from classical works by the great Imams such as al-Nawawi, al-Sawi, and Ibn
‘Abidin. Quranic exegeses such as Tafsir al-Jalalayn and the works of ‘Abd Allah Yusuf ‘Ali have
all been reprinted with changes. This corrupt tampering of these guiding texts has been
documented at length.xix

5.2 “Improving” on the Foundational Books of Islam

They have unabashedly published corrective comments on manuals whose contents
were long ago established as normative in the scholarly community of Islam. Many such
instances have also been documented. xx

5.3 Revising Their Own Source Texts

Not content to fiddle with historically accepted books, they also find fault with the
minor texts they publish and distribute in order to gainsay their own putative authorities. This
is a patent illustration of the principle that each new generation of innovators rejects the
previous one as too moderate.xxi

5.4 Reprinting Discredited Works

The Neo-Kharijis are supplementing their own works by re-circulating books that have
already been condemned by the majority of scholars. Though heretical and un-Islamic,
numerous books are now being promoted as the fundamental guides for the practice of Islam.xxii
200 Years of New Kharijism – The Ongoing Revision of Islam Islamic Supreme 5 Council of America

5.5 P romoting the Works of Unqualified, Self-styled Scholars to Attack Sufis and Asharis

Including:

! Muhammad Ahmad ‘Abd al-Salam,
! Muhammad al-Shuqayri,
! Ibn Abi al-‘Izz,
! Muhammad Nasiruddeen al-Albani,
! Abdul Aziz Bin Abdullah Bin Baz,
! Muhammad bin Saleh Al-’Uthaymin,
! Dr. Abu Ameenah Bilal Phillips,
! Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali,
! Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan,                                                                                                                                                   ! And many others. xxiii

Their dismissal of the traditional schools of thought, their development of schools as
incubators for radical ideology, their attack on the source texts of Islam and generations of
recognized scholars, and their financing by ideological counterparts worldwide, have truly
enabled the Neo-Kharajite movement to dominate the vision of Islam in the world. Finding
roots in the Khawârij of ca. 750 CE, and given new life by Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Wahhab in
the 19th century, these extremists have only really succeeded in their efforts to subvert Islam in
the past 75 years.

Traditional Muslims, the silent majority, remain numerous and confidant enough to
repel the Neo-Kharajite movement from within Islam, given the necessary support. However,
backed by the oil-wealth of their ideological counterparts overseas, Neo-Kharajites have a
definitive advantage over the majority of Muslims, who have only their own humble resources
at their disposal. Only with real financial and political support can classical Muslim scholars
and moderate, mainstream Muslims reclaim the banner of Islam from these usurpers, retake the
podium they have hijacked, repel these extremists and discredit their heretical ideology. Truly,
this is a battle worth fighting. And it is a battle which, with the help of Almighty God, we can
and must win.

Truly we belong to Allah and to Him is our return, and there is no power nor might except in Allah the
Exalted and Almighty Lord.

200 Years of New Kharijism – The Ongoing Revision of Islam Islamic Supreme 6 Council of America

NOTES:

i In al-Dhahabi, Siyar A‘lam al-Nubala’ (1997 ed. 13:598).
ii Prophet Muhammad’s sayings and advice communicated through verifiable chains of transmission, known as
the ahadith. The body of traditions are called the Sunna, and form the second basis for Islamic law, in addition to the
Holy Qur’an.
iii The well-known hadith of Gibril in Sahih al-Bukhari.
iv Sahih Muslim.
v Ibid.
vi Ibid
vii see Al-Taymi, Sulayman.
viii Ibn Hajar, Fath al-Bari.
ix Related by Al-Tabarani, through Abu Hamza, on the authority of Ibn ‘Abbas.
x Al-Qurtubi.
xi Ibn ‘Abidin, Radd al-Muhtar ‘ala al-Durr al-Mukhtar (3:309), “Bab al-Bughat” [Chapter on Rebels].
xii Al-Sawi, Hashiya ‘ala Tafsir al-Jalalayn (v. 58:18-19) in the Cairo, 1939 al-Mashhad al-Husayni edition (3:307-8)
repr. Dar Ihya’ al-Turath al-‘Arabi in Beirut.
xiii Aqtâb, sing. qutb
xiv The schools of tasawwuf are known as Paths, turuq, sing. Tarîqa.
xv Qutb, Sayyid, World’s Peace and Islam.
xvi The Future is Islaam (p. 203).
xvii Social Justice in Islam (p. 35).
xviii Dhikr is considered by traditional Muslims as the most excellent form of devotion for a servant of God, and is
stressed over a hundred times in the Holy Qur’an. For the spiritually-inclined, it is polish for the heart, the essence of
the science of faith, and the key to all success. Nor are there any restrictions on the form, frequency, or timing of
dhikr whatsoever.
xix Cf. Appendix, “Albani and Company,” in Struggle for the Soul of Islam: Exposing the Scholars of Najd and
the Wahhabi/Salafi Movement, paragraph on Ibn Baz.
xx For example: Ibn Abi al-‘Izz’s commentary on al-Tahawi’s ‘Aqida. Al-Tahawi’s `Aqida is a normative classic of
Islam but Ibn Abi al-‘Izz is unknown and unacceptable as a source for Ahl al-Sunna teachings. Examples of his
unreliability are his rejection of al-Tahawi’s articles:
! §35: “The Seeing of Allah by the People of the Garden is true, without their vision being all-encompassing
and without the manner of their vision being known” and
! §38: “He is beyond having limits placed on Him, or being restricted, or having parts or limbs, nor is He
contained by the six directions as all created things are”.
Al-`Izz states, “Can any vision be rationally conceived without face-to-face encounter? And in it there is a proof
for His elevation (‘uluw) over His creatures,” and “Whoever claims that Allah is seen without direction, let him verify
his reason!” [Ibn Abi al-‘Izz, Sharh al-‘Aqida al-Tahawiyya, p. 195]. He also endorses Ibn Taymiyya’s view of the finality
of Hellfire, in flat contradiction of the al-Tahawi’s statement, §83. “The Garden and the Fire are created and shall
never be extinguished nor come to an end.” [Ibid. p. 427-430] There is also doubt as to Ibn Abi al-‘Izz’s identity and
authorship of this Sharh.
xxi Muhammad Hamid al-Fiqqi objects apoplectically to Ibn Taymiyya in his edition of the latter’s Iqtida’ al-Sirat
al-Mustaqim in the section entitled “Innovated festivities of time and place.” He criticizes Ibn Taymiyya for saying
that “some people innovate a celebration out of love for the Prophet and to exalt him, and Allah may reward them
for this love and striving.” Al-Fiqqi writes a two-page footnote exclaiming, “How can they possibly obtain a reward
for this?! What striving is in this?!”
200 Years of New Kharijism – The Ongoing Revision of Islam Islamic Supreme 7 Council of America
xxii Including:
! Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s Tawhid, which is replete with doctrinal errors such as:
o Calling the Ash‘aris “Nullifiers of the Divine Attributes” (mu‘attila) [chapters 2, 16]
o Declaring the Lesser shirk an integral part of the Greater. [7]
o Misinterpreting the hadith “do not make my grave an idol” to mean: do not even pray near it
whereas the agreed-upon meaning is: Do not pray towards or on top of it. [20]
o Stating: “The disbelievers who know their disbelief are better-guided than the believers.” (inna
al-kuffâr al-ladhîna ya‘rifûna kufrahum ahdâ sabîlan min al-mu’minîn) [23]
o Stating: “Among the polytheists are those who love Allah with a tremendous love” [31].
o Stating that “the two opposites [belief and disbelief] can be found in a single heart” [41] in
violation of the verse [Allah has not assigned unto any man two hearts within his body] (33:4).
This and the previous four concepts are fundamental to understand their propagation of
mutual suspicion among Muslims.
o Stating that Allah is explicitly said to have two hands: the right holds the heaven and the other
holds the earth, and the other is explicitly named the left hand. [67]
! ‘Abd Allah ibn Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s al-Sunna, a foundational book of the Wahhabi creed. According to
Shu‘ayb al-Arna’ut, “at least 50 percent of the hadiths are weak or outright forgeries” in this book. Its
publication was sponsored by His Highness King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Sa‘ud and a Jedda businessman
named Muhammad Nasif in Cairo in 1349/1930 at al-Matba‘a al-Salafiyya.
The same Muhammad Nasif financed:
! an attack on Imam Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari and the Hanafi School by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mu‘allimi
al-Yamani (d. 1386 H) entitled al-Tankil li Ma W arada fi Ta’nib al-Kawthari min al-Abatil.
o the reprinting of al-Qari’s hapless fatwa against the parents of the Prophet.
o the dissemination in India of al-Khatib’s derogatory biography of Imam Abu Hanifa from Tarikh
Baghdad.
Also:
! Ibn Taymiyya: Fatwa Hamawiyya; ‘Aqida W asitiyya; Hadith al-Nuzul; Awliya’ al-Shaytan; Iqtida’ al-Sirat al-
Mustaqim; Qa‘ida fi al-Tawassul; Ziyarat al-Qubur, etc.
! Ibn al-Qayyim: al-Qasida al-Nuniyya; Ijtima‘ al-Juyush al-Islamiyya.
! al-Harawi’s Dhamm ‘Ilm al-Kalam wa Ahlih
! al-Biqa‘i’s takfîr of Shaykh Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi – may Allah have mercy on him – in his book Masra‘ al-
Tasawwuf, Tanbih Al-Ghabi Ila Takfir Ibn ‘Arabi, ed. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Wakil (Bilbis: Dar al-Taqwa, <1989>)
xxiii In Arabic:
! Muhammad al-Shuqayri who wrote the book al-Sunna wa al-Mubtada‘at
! Muhammad Khalil Harras wrote a commentary on Ibn Taymiyya’s ‘Aqida W asitiyya – distributed for free
in the Arab world
! Al-Albani
! ‘Abd al-Rahman ‘Abd al-Khaliq, al-Albani’s student and deputy in Kuwait, al-Fikr al-Sufi (“Sufi Thought”)
and its abridgment Fada’ih al-Sufiyya (“The Disgraces of the Sufis”).
! ‘Abd al-Rahman Dimashqiyya
! Mahmud ‘Abd al-Ra’uf al-Qasim al-Madkhali, al-Kashf ‘an Haqiqat al-Sufiyya (“Unveiling the Reality of the
Sufis”), 1993. The book was refuted by Dr. ‘Abd al-Qadir ‘Isa in his 700-page Haqa’iq ‘an al-Tasawwuf.
! Al-Tuwayjiri (Hamd ibn ‘Abd al-Muhsin). With all respect to his person, he demanded that women caught
driving in Saudi Arabia be labeled as prostitutes in the courts.
200 Years of New Kharijism – The Ongoing Revision of Islam Islamic Supreme 8 Council of America
! Al-Jaza’iri (Abu Bakr)
! Al-Wadi‘i (Muqbil ibn Hadi), Nashr al-Sahifa fi Dhikr al-Sahih min Aqwal A’immat al-Jarh wa al-Ta‘dil fi Abi
Hanifa. Fada’ih (“Disgraces”), 1999.
In English
! Ibn Baz, Sunnah and Caution against Innovation
! An anonymous tract entitled A Brief Introduction to the Salafi Da‘wah.
! Muhammad Ma‘soomee al-Khajnadee (d. 1961 ce), Blind Following of Madhhabs (Birmingham: al-
Hidaayah Publishing, 1993).
! A. A. Tabari, a fictitious name for the author of The Other Side of Sufism, a tract distributed in Wahhabifunded
mosques and posted on the Internet.
! The Naqshbandi Tariqat Unveiled, al-Hidaayah, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

8,500 Saudi Terrorists In Syria Are Also “Foreign Fighters,” Just Like Hezbollah

[SEE:  Gulf Source Says Saudi Supplying Missiles to Syria Rebels]

Bodies of 70 Saudi fighters return from Syria: Report

Foreign-backed militants in Syria (file photo)

The source said there are currently 8,000 Saudi nationals fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

According to a report by mirataljazeera.net published on Friday, a Saudi source said the bodies were delivered to the country in King Fahad International Airport.

The source said the Saudi regime had sent a number of diplomats to Turkey in order to facilitate the transfer process.

According to the source, the Saudi regime did not dispatch anyone to fight in Syria, and that the 70 people had been fighting on their own will.

The source added that there were four women among the 70 killed. He also said there are currently about 8,000 Saudi nationals fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country.

According to the report, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence sources help with transferring fighters to Syria through Jordan.

The Syria crisis began in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

The Syrian government says that the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

Damascus says the West and its regional allies, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, are supporting the militants.

In an interview broadcast on Turkish television in April, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that if the militants take power in Syria, they could destabilize the entire Middle East region for decades.

“If the unrest in Syria leads to the partitioning of the country, or if the terrorist forces take control… the situation will inevitably spill over into neighboring countries and create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond,” he stated.

NT/AS

U.S. puts jets in Jordan, fuels Russian fear of Syria no-fly zone

[The "Eager Lion" exercise playing-out in Jordan this week is an international Special Forces war game, involving the 5th Fleet's Expeditionary Strike Group 5 and 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, commanding more than 40 amphibious assault ships, carrying at least 7 helo aircraft carriers, with up to 200 helicopters, as many as 50 Harrier jump-jets and an unknown number of tilt-rotar Ospreys.  It has been reported that a "detachment of F16s" (24 aircraft?) and Patriot missile batteries would be left in Jordan after the exercise. 

Since Jordan is almost a landlocked country, except for the port of Aqaba, on the Red Sea (Damascus is 286.1 miles away from Aqaba), this means that most of these 40 ships are probably in the Med, where they will be face-to-face with the Russian fleet, now stationed off Syria.  The USS Nimitz Strike Group, with 90 fixed-wing aircraft, is also currently consigned to the 5th Fleet.  Regardless of the number of F16s left behind in Jordan, the Navy alone, has enough assets on hand to put a Syrian "no-fly-zone" in place.  This says nothing about the sabotage potential of nearly one thousand Navy Seals and Marines, that are also on board those ships.  It looks like Obama plans on making Syria a navy operation. 

Hell is coming, probably within a week.  Look for Eager Lion to "go live" at the end of the war game, just like the Sept. 11 attacks and the London train bombing.  I guess that I was getting tired of waiting for Armegeddon to begin, anyway.  We all will have ringside seats to the big Big Show.]

By Oliver Holmes

BEIRUT

(Reuters) – The United States said on Saturday it would keep F-16 fighters and Patriot missiles in Jordan at Amman’s request, and Russia bristled at the possibility they could be used to enforce a no-fly zone inside Syria.

Washington, which has long called for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, pledged military support to Syrian rebels this week, citing what it said was the Syrian military’s use of chemical weapons – an allegation Damascus has denied.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has approved a Jordanian request for American F-16s and Patriot missiles to remain in the Western-backed kingdom after a joint military exercise there next week, a Pentagon spokesman said.

Western diplomats said on Friday Washington was considering a limited no-fly zone over parts of Syria, but the White House noted later that it would be far harder and costlier to set one up there than it was in Libya, saying the United States had no national interest in pursuing that option.

Russia, an ally of Damascus and fierce opponent of outside military intervention in Syria, said any attempt to impose a no-fly zone using F-16s and Patriots from Jordan would be illegal.

“You don’t have to be a great expert to understand that this will violate international law,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

The idea of a no-fly zone was endorsed by Egypt, the biggest Arab nation. President Mohamed Mursi, an Islamist more distant from Washington than his deposed military predecessor, made a keynote speech in Cairo throwing Egypt’s substantial weight more firmly than before against President Bashar al-Assad.

Despite their differences, the United States and Russia announced in May they would try to convene peace talks involving the Syrian government and its opponents, but have set no date.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said chemical attacks by Syrian forces and Hezbollah’s involvement on Assad’s side showed a lack of commitment to negotiations and threatened to “put a political settlement out of reach”.

Kerry had not previously expressed such pessimism about prospects for the conference, which has run into many obstacles.

These include disarray in the Syrian opposition and military gains by the Syrian army and its Lebanese Hezbollah allies against rebels who have few ways to counter Assad’s air power.

The involvement of Hezbollah fighters on the side of Assad, a fellow ally of the main Shi’ite power Iran, has galvanized Arab governments, including Egypt, behind the rebels, who mostly follow the Sunni version of Islam that dominates the Arab world.

That has hardened sectarian confrontation across the region, which some Arabs hope might be softened by the election of the moderate Hassan Rohani as Iran’s president – though few believe he can truly influence Tehran’s supreme leader.

Mursi, addressing thousands of cheering supporters at a stadium gathering organized by Egyptian Sunni clerics, demanded Hezbollah pull out of Syria and, after his Muslim Brotherhood joined calls for jihad against Assad and his Shi’ite allies, the president said Cairo had now cut diplomatic ties with Damascus.

Egypt’s powerful, U.S.-backed army seems unlikely to involve itself in Syria, but religious passions are running high and more Egyptian volunteers could travel to join the rebels.

AIR STRIKES

The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian jets and artillery had again attacked Jobar, a battered district where rebels operate on the edge of central Damascus.

It said heavy artillery was also shelling opposition fighters in the provinces of Homs, Aleppo and Deir al-Zor.

Western powers have been reluctant in the past to arm Syrian insurgents, let alone give them sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles that might fall into the hands of Sunni Islamist insurgents in rebel ranks who have pledged loyalty to al Qaeda.

Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander Salim Idriss told Reuters late on Friday that rebels urgently needed anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, as well as a protective no-fly zone.

“But our friends in the United States haven’t told us yet that they are going to support us with weapons and ammunition,” he said after meeting U.S. and European officials in Turkey.

A source in the Middle East familiar with U.S. dealings with the rebels has said planned arms supplies would include automatic weapons, light mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

The United Nations says at least 93,000 people, including civilians and combatants, have died in the Syrian civil war, with the monthly death toll averaging 5,000 in the past year.

Abu Nidal, from the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham rebel group, said U.S. help was welcome, but questioned how effective it would be.

“I doubt the influx of weapons will significantly tip the balance into our favor,” he said via Skype. “They might help push back regime offensives of the last few days.”

SYRIAN OFFICERS DEFECT

Abu Nidal’s faction is not part of the more moderate FSA, Washington’s chosen channel for military aid, but he said the two groups fight alongside each other on the battlefield.

The FSA was set up by defectors from the Syrian military in August 2011, but many rebel factions operate independently.

Assad’s armed forces have remained relatively cohesive, although a Turkish official said 71 Syrian army officers, including six generals, had just defected to Turkey, in the biggest such mass desertion in months.

Western nations have stopped short of arming Syrian rebels or mounting an air campaign as they did, with U.N. approval, to help Libyan insurgents topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Intervening against Assad is considered riskier because Syria has a stronger military, sits on the sectarian faultlines of the Middle East, and is supported by Iran and Russia, which has vetoed three U.N. Security Council resolutions on Syria.

Yet an apparent shift in the military balance in Assad’s favor, especially with the arrival of thousands of Shi’ite fighters from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group, has made his swift removal look unlikely without outside intervention.

However, Israel’s defense minister suggested the pendulum could still swing the other way, despite the capture this month of Qusair, a former rebel stronghold near the Lebanese border.

“Bashar al-Assad’s victory in Qusair was not a turning point in the Syrian civil war, and I do not believe that he has the momentum to win,” said Moshe Yaalon, who is visiting Washington.

“He controls just 40 percent of the territory in Syria. Hezbollah is involved in the fighting in Syria and has suffered many casualties in the battles, and as far as we know, it is more than 1,000 casualties,” Yaalon said in a statement.

“We should be prepared for a long civil war with ups and downs.”

Israel has not taken sides in Syria, but does not want to see any Western anti-aircraft missiles or other advanced arms reach Islamist militants hostile to the Jewish state.

(Additional reporting by Jonathon Burch in Ankara, Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem, Mark Hosenball in Washington, Thomas Grove in Moscow and Tom Perry and Alastair Macdonald in Cairo; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Obama Set To Seal the Fate of Humanity By Exploiting Sunni/Shia Schism

[Obama is such a conceited bastard that he really believes that he can pull all of this off, without setting-off a true global conflagration.  Iran has no choice but to reinforce Syrian govt. positions, since the war on Syria is merely the first step in the war on Iran itself.  Obama and the chickenhawk Zionists, who are all afraid to launch a frontal attack against the forces of the Revolutionary Guard, are opening the back door to Iran, leading from Syria, then to Lebanon, before it backfires across the deserts of Jordan and Iraq.  Any fool would already know that the Pentagon will NOT be able to prevent the burning of Syria and Iran from spreading to the oil assets of Saudi Arabia.  Where is "Red Adair," when we are about to need him much more now, than when he answered the calls coming from "Desert Storm" to put-out the wells fired by Saddam Hussein?]

Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria

 

World Exclusive: US urges UK and France to join in supplying arms to Syrian rebels as MPs fear that UK will be drawn into growing conflict

Robert Fisk

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years.  Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for  2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle.  Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war.  So much for America’s ‘friends’.

Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power.  Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure – that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East.  Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad.  The Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of  Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power.  Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained.  Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.

In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army.  The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy.  They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.

From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus – every war crime committed by the rebels – will be regarded in the region as Washington’s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2011 – who are America’s greatest enemies as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism.  His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.

For the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all, but to the south of Moscow;  and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier.  Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim.  Six of the Soviet Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni.  And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims.  For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.

Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon – with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither.  They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan.  The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance.  One of the sources claimed – not without some mirth — that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran’s help.

It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria.  Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.

Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule.  One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as “Israel’s man in Damascus”.  Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator.  In vain.

If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians.  The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’.  ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s attempts to create such a state have been laughable.  A future ‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation.  But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.

Another of the region’s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush Assad.  Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.

In Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive.  Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.

Erdogan Copies Bashar Assad’s Mistakes—Ordering Police To Treat Protesters As “Terrorists”

[This rebranding of democratic protesters as "terrorists" is a prelude to unleashing lethal force upon the assembled Turkish patriots.   They are there to "redress grieveances," namely Erdogan's subversion of Turkey's democracy to create his Islamist Dictatorship.  At this point, the only thing that can save these people is further demonstrations, which will undoubtedly lead to a massive demonstration of superior firepower by the dictator's minions and the mass death of dozens patriotic democratic forces.  If Erdogan is not very careful he may inadvertantly rebrand all of the protesters as "freedom fighters, when he starts calling them all terrorists.  

The international community has absolutely NO use for honest reporting on these Imperial subjects, but the people are NOT blind to the fact that the weapon of "democratic-revolution," which Erdogan has so eagerly helped the Evil Empire to deploy against Bashar Assad, has now been turned upon Erdogan himself.  Zbigniew Brzezinski was right, very SOON... It will also be unleashed upon Obama, too.

I pray to God that I might be worthy of seeing that joyous day arise very soon.]

Police to consider protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square terror organization members: Minister

ISTANBUL

Egemen Bağış has been very critical of foreign media reports of the ongoing protests in Turkey. DHA photo

Everyone who enters Istanbul’s Taksim Square, the heart of nearly 20-day-long protests against the government, will be considered a member or a supporter of a terrorist organization, Turkey’s European Union minister said in a televised interview late last night.

“I request our citizens who supported the protests until today kindly to return to their homes,” Egemen Bağış said in an interview on broadcaster A Haber.

“From now on the state will unfortunately have to consider everyone who remains there a supporter or member of a terror organization,” he said. “Our prime minister has already assured [activists] about their aim with the protests. The protests from now on will play into the hands of some separatist organizations that want to break the peace and prioritize vandalism and terrorism.”

High-ranking Turkish officials have been posting warnings on the issue and everyone should act in a sensitive manner, he said.

Clashes between the police and protesters in Istanbul continued around the square along with some other parts of the city until this morning.

Bağış repeated his criticism of foreign media for exaggerating the protests in Turkey.

“Unfortunately, the foreign press has made a big mistake on this issue,” he said, saying that they wanted to reflect Turkey as a country where life has halted.

“Hours-long broadcasting that is even not interrupted by commercials has damaged Turkey’s image,” he said.

“But these long broadcasts surely have a financial reason, and this will be revealed. International channels such as BBC and CNN never do such broadcasting without any advertisement. Somebody somehow financed these broadcasts. Like our prime minister said, the losses of the interest rate lobby due to low interest rates have exceeded $650 billion in Turkey,” he said, adding that this was a result of the government’s dedication. “This drives them crazy and they are doing everything to disturb the calm in our country and win back their losses.”

Istanbul Protesters Regroup To Retake Taksim Square

Thousands gather in different areas of Istanbul to march to Taksim Square

 

ISTANBUL

 

 

Thousands in Istanbul walked across the arterial roads hours after the police’s crackdown in Taksim.

Thousands in Istanbul gathered on the streets in several districts of the city to march to Taksim Square, hours after the police’s muscled evacuation of Gezi Park.

Hundreds at the Asian Kadıköy district gathered to cross the Bosphorus Bridge on foot in the direction of the European side of the city. People joined the protesters from their houses, banging pots to make noise while cars on the road sounded their horns. Police intervened against the group, barring the road to prevent the protesters reaching the bridge. The security forces also called on them to continue demonstrations on Bağdat Avenue, the commercial street of the Asian side, where many also gathered following the crackdown in Taksim. Clahses later broke out at Fikirtepe between as police used tear gas to quell protesters.

Many protesters also gathered on the European side in neighborhoods such as Etiler, Bakırköy and Mecidiyeköy, walking on the arterial roads disrupting the car traffic. Clashes broke out between police and protesters near Mecidiyeköy and spread to the side streets of the centric neighborhood.

People in the sensitive Gazi neighborhood, home to many Alevis and where clashes had continued on the sidelines of the protests, also gathered in the streets.

The police’s heavy-handed intervention to evacuate Gezi Park came only an hour after the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ultimatum to protesters, giving them a day to end demonstrations.

Clashes between the police and protesters are continuing around the park.

in for a penny they are in for a pound,

[It is good to see that Assad's air force intends to wipe-out the "Al-Qaeda" enclaves in Aleppo, the pre-recipients of American weaponry, before the USAF can once again become "Al-Qaeda's air force" there, as they have previously done in Yugoslavia and in Libya.  (Obama's project to carve-up the world actually began with Clinton, if not with Reagan himself.)  "In for a penny, in for a pound," Bashar Assad must use all of his tools NOW to uproot the terrorists or to kill them all, before the invasion of Damascus gets underway.  Whenever Western boots get on the ground, he will be hunted-down and killed, just like Saddam and Qaddafi.  If he wants to live through the treachery that is set to wash over him, he must act now.  He probably doesn't realize the level of subterfuge that is headed at him.  Remember that the "Resounding Fall" of Damascus has already been filmed.  Sound stages and mock-ups have already been constructed in Qatar, before Obama fired the "Fat Pig," who had grown  impatient and taken it upon himself to turn Obama's planned Syrian "free-for-all" into an Islamist jihad.  Hezbollah has confirmed  the report for us, that Palestinian "tunnel rats" are already busy helping the terrorist army to construct secret passages, first in Qusayr, then no doubt, in Aleppo, followed by Damascus itself.

Hezbollah Footage Shows Vast Tunnel Network in al Qusayr Syria War 2013

Russia would do well to physically oppose any threatened long-range missile strikes by NATO or US forces.  The tragedy that will be made from any attempt to impose a nationwide “no-fly-zone” upon Syria, is being mere words.  If we are all even a little bit “lucky,” Obama has NOT just opened the gates to World War III.]

Syrian jets hit rebels awaiting promised U.S. weapons

By Oliver Holmes

BEIRUT | Sat Jun 15, 2013 3:51pm BST

(Reuters) – Syrian artillery and warplanes pounded rebel areas in Damascus on Saturday as President Bashar al-Assad’s foes pleaded for advanced weapons from the United States, which has promised them unspecified military aid.

Western powers have been reluctant in the past to arm Syrian insurgents, let alone give them sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles that might fall into the hands of Sunni Islamist insurgents in rebel ranks who have pledged loyalty to al Qaeda.

Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander Salim Idriss told Reuters on Friday that rebels, who have suffered setbacks at the hands of Assad’s forces in recent weeks, urgently needed anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, as well as a protective no-fly zone.

“But our friends in United States, they haven’t told us yet that they are going to support us with weapons and ammunition,” he said after meeting U.S. and European officials in Turkey.

A source in the Middle East familiar with U.S. dealings with the rebels has said planned arms supplies would include automatic weapons, light mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

Russia, an ally of Damascus and fierce opponent of outside military intervention, warned on Saturday against any attempt to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria using F-16 fighter jets and Patriot air defence missile systems from Jordan.

“You don’t have to be a great expert to understand that this will violate international law,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference with his Italian counterpart in Moscow.

Western diplomats said on Friday the United States was considering a no-fly zone over Syria, but the White House said later that it would be far harder and costlier to set up one up there than it was in Libya, stressing that the United States had no national interest in pursuing that option.

Outgunned rebels have few ways to counter Assad’s air power. The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said jets and artillery had attacked Jobar, a battered district where rebels operate on the edge of central Damascus, on Saturday.

It said heavy artillery was also shelling opposition fighters in the provinces of Homs, Aleppo and Deir al-Zor.

A Turkish official said 71 Syrian army officers, including six generals, had defected to Turkey, in the biggest single mass desertion from Assad’s military in months.

The United Nations says at least 93,000 people, including civilians and combatants, have died in the Syrian civil war, with the monthly death toll averaging 5,000 in the past year.

MILITARY BALANCE

On Thursday, a U.S. official said President Barack Obama had authorised sending U.S. weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time, after the White House said it had proof the Syrian military had used chemical weapons against opposition forces.

Abu Nidal, from the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham rebel group, said U.S. help was welcome, but questioned how effective it would be.

“I doubt the influx of weapons will significantly tip the balance into our favour,” he said via Skype. “They might help push back regime offensives of the last few days.”

Abu Nidal’s faction is not part of the more moderate FSA, Washington’s chosen channel for military aid, but he said the two groups fight alongside each other on the battlefield.

“We are not at odds with the Free Syrian Army now. We fight in one formation,” the Islamist fighter said.

Other opposition sources have also voiced scepticism over what type and quantity of arms the United States would deliver.

The surface-to-air missiles that rebels say they need to ward off Assad’s air force are particularly worrisome for Western powers as they could be used against commercial jets.

Since the anti-Assad revolt erupted in March 2011, Western nations have demanded the Syrian leader’s ouster, but have not used force as they did to back Libyans fighting Muammar Gaddafi.

Intervening against Assad is considered riskier because Syria has a stronger military, sits on the sectarian faultlines of the Middle East, and is supported by Iran and Russia, which has vetoed three U.N. Security Council resolutions on Syria.

Yet an apparent shift in the military momentum in Assad’s favour, especially with the arrival of thousands of fighters from Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah group, has made his swift removal look unlikely without outside intervention.

However, Israel’s defence minister suggested the pendulum could still swing the other way, despite the capture this month of Qusair, a former rebel stronghold near the Lebanese border.

“Bashar al-Assad’s victory in Qusair was not a turning point in the Syrian civil war, and I do not believe that he has the momentum to win,” said Moshe Yaalon, who is visiting Washington.

“He controls just 40 percent of the territory in Syria. Hezbollah is involved in the fighting in Syria and has suffered many casualties in the battles, and as far as we know, it is more than 1,000 casualties,” Yaalon said in a statement.

“We should be prepared for a long civil war with ups and downs.”

It was not immediately clear why the group had deserted. Just hours ago, the United States said it would arm Syrian rebels, having obtained proof that Assad’s forces used chemical weapons against fighters trying to end the president’s rule.

(Additional reporting by Jonathon Burch in Ankara, Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem, Mark Hosenball in Washington and Thomas Grove in Moscow; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

Obama’s Plan Is To Reduce the Entire Middle East To Piles of Rubble

Why Obama is Declaring War on Syria

mirror

by FRANKLIN LAMB

(Beirut) – The short answer is Iran and Hezbollah according to Congressional sources. “The Syrian army’s victory at al-Qusayr was more than the administration could accept given that town’s strategic position in the region. Its capture by the Assad forces has essentially added Syria to Iran’s list of victories starting with Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, as well as its growing influence in the Gulf.”

Other sources are asserting that Obama actually did not want to invoke direct military aid the rebels fighting to topple the Assad government or even to make use of American military power in Syria for several reasons. Among these are the lack of American public support for yet another American war in the Middle East, the fact that there appears to be no acceptable alternative to the Assad government on the horizon, the position of the US intelligence community and the State Department and Pentagon that intervention in Syria would potentially turn out very badly for the US and gut what’s left of its influence in the region. It short, that the US getting involved in Syria could turn out even worse than Iraq, by intensifying a regional sectarian war without any positive outcome in sight.

Obama was apparently serious earlier about a negotiated diplomatic settlement pre-Qusayr and there were even some positives signs coming from Damascus, Moscow, and even Tehran John Kerry claimed. But that has changed partly because Russia and the US have both hardened their demands. Consequently, the Obama administration has now essentially thrown in the towel on the diplomatic track. This observer was advised by more than one Congressional staffer that Obama’s team has concluded that the Assad government was not getting their message or taking them seriously and that Assad’s recent military  gains and rising popular support  meant that a serious Geneva II initiative was not going to happen.

In addition, Obama has been weakened recently by domestic politics and a number of distractions and potential scandals not least of which is the disclosures regarding the massive NSA privacy invasion. In addition, the war lobby led by Senators McClain and Lindsay Graham is still pounding their drums and claim that Obama would be in violation of his oath of office and by jeopardizing the national security interest of the United States by allowing Iran to essentially own Syria once Assad quells the uprising.” Both Senators welcomed the chemical weapons assessment.  For months they have been saying that Obama has not been doing enough to help the rebels. “U.S. credibility is on the line,” they said in a joint statement this week. “Now is not the time to merely take the next incremental step. Now is the time for more decisive actions,” they said, such as using long-range missiles to degrade Assad’s air power and missile capabilities. Another neo-con, Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said the opposition forces risk defeat without heavier weapons, but he also warned that may not be enough. “The U.S. should move swiftly to shift the balance on the ground in Syria by considering grounding the Syrian air force with stand-off weapons and protecting a safe zone in northern Syria with Patriot missiles in Turkey,” Casey said.

According to some analysts, Obama could alternatively authorize the arming and training of the Syrian opposition in Jordan without a no-fly zone. That appears unlikely according to this observers Washington interlocutors because the Pentagon wants to end the Syrian crisis by summers end, the observer was advised “rather than working long term with a motley bunch of jihadists who we could never trust or rely on. The administration has come to the conclusion apparently that if they are in for a penny they are in for a pound, meaning would not allow Iran to control Syria and Hezbollah to pocket Lebanon.”

Secretary of State Kerry had meetings with more than two dozen military specialists on 5/13/13. The Washington Post is reporting that Kerry believes supplying the rebels with weapons might be too little and too late to actually flip the balance on the Syrian ground and this calls “for a military strike to paralyze Al-Assad’s military capacities.” A Pentagon source reported that  the USA, France, and Britain are considering a decisive decision to reverse the current Assad momentum and quickly construct one in favor of the rebels” within a time period not exceeding the end of this summer.

Shortly after the meetings began, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia quickly returned to Saudi Arabia from his palace at Casa Blanca, Morocco after receiving a call from his intelligence chief, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. Bander reportedly had a representative at the White House during the meetings with President Obama’s team. King Abdullah was reportedly advised by Kerry to be prepared for a rapid expansion of the growing regional conflict.

What happens between now and the end of summer is likely to be catastrophic for the Syrian public and perhaps Lebanon.  The “chemical weapons-red line” is not taken seriously on Capitol Hill for the reason that the same “inclusive evidence” of months ago is the same that is suddenly being cited to justify what may become essentially an all-out war against the Syrian government and anyone who gets in the way.  Hand wringing over the loss of 125 lives due to chemical weapons, whoever did use them, pales in comparison to the more 50,000 additional lives that will be lost in the coming months, a figure that  Pentagon planners and the White House have “budgeted” as the price of toppling the Assad government.

“We are going to see a rapid escalation of the conflict”, a staffer on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee emailed this observer: “The president has made a decision to give whatever humanitarian aid, as well as political and diplomatic support to the opposition that in necessary. Additionally direct support to the (Supreme Military Council), will be provided and that includes military support.” The staffer quoted the words of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes to the media on 5/13/13 to the same effect.

A part of this “humanitarian assistance” the US is going to established in the coming weeks a “limited, humanitarian no-fly zone, that will begin along several  miles of the Jordanian and Turkish borders in certain military areas into Syrian territory, and would be set up  and presented as a limited bid  to train and equip rebel forces and protect refugees. But in reality, as we saw in Libya a Syrian no fly zone would very likely include all of Syria.

Libya’s no-fly zones made plain that there is no such thing as a “limited zone”.  Put briefly, a “no-fly zone” means essentially a declaration of all-out war.  Once the US and its allies start a no fly zone they will expand it and intensify it as they take countless other military actions to protect its zones until the Syrian government falls. “It’s breathtaking to contemplate how this in going to end and how Iran and Russia will respond,” one source concluded.

The White House is trying to assuage the few in Congress as well as a majority of the American public that it can be a limited American involved and that the no-fly zone would not require the destruction of Syrian antiaircraft batteries.  This is more nonsense.  During the no-fly zone I witnessed from Libya in the summer of 2011 the US backed it up with all manner of refueling, electronic jamming, special-ops on the ground and by mid-July a kid peddling his bike was not safe. Over the 192 days of patrolling the Libyan no-fly zones, NATO countries flew 24,682 sorties including 9,204 bomb strike sorties. NATO claimed it never missed its target but that was also not true. Hundreds of civilians were killed in Libya  by no-fly zone attack aircraft  that either missed their targets and emptied their bomb bays before returning to base  while conducting approximately 48 bombing strikes per day using a variety of bombs and missiles, including more than 350 cruise Tomahawks.

At a Congressional hearing in 2011, then US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates got it right when he explained which discussing Libya “a no-fly zone begins with an attack to destroy all the air defenses … and then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts.”

According to the accounts published in American media, Obama could alternatively authorize the arming and training of the Syrian opposition in Jordan without a no-fly zone. That appears unlikely because the Pentagon wants to end the Syrian crisis by summers end, the observer was advised “rather than working long term with a motley bunch of jihadists who we could never trust or rely on. The administration has come to the conclusion apparently that if they are in for a penny they are in for a pound.”

In response to a question from this observer about how he thought event might unfold in this region over the coming months, a very insightful long-term congressional aid replied: “Well Franklin, maybe someone will pull a rabbit out of the hat to stop the push for war. But frankly I doubt it.  From where I sit I’d wager that Syria as we have known it may soon be no more. And perhaps some other countries in the region also.”

************

Franklin Lamb , a former Assistant Counsel of the US House Judiciary Committee at the US Congress and Professor of International Law at Northwestern College of Law in Oregon, earned his Law Degree at Boston University and his LLM, M.Phil, and PhD degrees at the London School of Economics. Lamb is Director, Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Beirut-Washington DC, Board Member of The Sabra Shatila Foundation, and a volunteer with the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Lebanon. He is the author of The Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons Against Civilians in Lebanon. He can be reached at: fplamb@gmail.com He is a regular contributor to Intifada Palestine, is doing research in Lebanon.

Economic Shock Testing In Afghanistan To Time Attacks

[The fact that we can now read "conspiracy" articles in a top-notch magazine like Forbes, which discuss the same principles of "shock testing" that were previously revealed in the infamous Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars document, tell us two things---that the conspiracy masters are getting either scared or overconfident, and that The Big  Conspiracy" is about to be revealed.  Why else would the people who run the big show, who normally keep their tracks covered, let The Big Secret out---that they actually control all things economic, without being physically in control of the manipulated economic event.  The article from Forbes below, really misses the point in discussing the odd relationship between Afghan potato prices and Talliban attacks.  Fluctuations in commodity prices do NOT predict when attacks will occur, except in the sense of predicting the prime time of the highest civilian agitation and frustration, in order to know WHEN to order the attack which will unleash the shock wave upon the targeted population.  "Shock testing" civilian populations grew out of the Operations Research "Strategic Bombing Surveys" of WWII.  Contrary to popular perception, the studies were NOT carried-out to predetermine the "breaking points" of our civilizations, in order to avoid those conditions, but to find the breaking points of enemy populations and human beings in general, in order to more easily break them with the nightly European terror-bombing of German cities, or whenever the times called for it.

After the war ended, the United States and Britain had to become more inventive, in order to develop instruments of "shock" of sufficient power to break targeted populations without resulting to physical war.  This led to things like "Gladio" in Europe and small-scale terrorism and death squads in the West.  The terror war has brought all of these elements together, in one great symphony of terror, which resounds across the face of the earth. The key is to use your terrorists and death squads after the local citizenry has been prepped by small, local incidents, hyped to outlandish distortions by the local subservient press.  This is the process that the Forbes article dances around, without ever touching.  Economic shock testing is a science.  Its successes can be measured by the means mentioned in the Forbes piece, developed by New England Complex Systems Institute.

source

There are definitely correlations between social tensions and mass-violence, but in the West's many war zones, the violence is by the Western forces, associated with the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), is timed to coincide with optimum local tensions, military action serving as a release valve, used to limit the intensity ot the managed conflict.  In the Afghan studies, the points of violence are predicted, but only to know the best time to strike.  That is the true connection between Afghan potato prices and local violence.  The potato prices are manipulated by the violence, and used as an instrument of social agitation.  The Silent Weapons explanation of "Shock Testing" is given below.]

Economic Shock Testing

“In recent times, the application of Operations Research to the study of the public economy has been obvious for anyone who understands the principles of shock testing.

In the shock testing of an aircraft airframe, the reclikoil impulse of firing a gun mounted on that airframe causes shock waves in that structure which tell aviation engineers the conditions under which some parts of the airplane or the whole airplane or its wings will start to vibrate or flutter like a guitar string, a flute reed, or a tuning fork, and disintegrate or fall apart in flight.

Economic engineers achieve the same result in studying the behavior of the economy and the consumer public by carefully selecting a staple commodity such as beef, coffee, gasoline, or sugar, and then causing a sudden change or shock in its price or availability, thus kicking everybody’s budget and buying habits out of shape.

They then observe the shock waves which result by monitoring the changes in advertising, prices, and sales of that and other commodities.

The objective of such studies is to acquire the know-how to set the public economy into a predictable state of motion or change, even a controlled self-destructive state of motion which will convince the public that certain “expert” people should take control of the money system and reestablish security (rather than liberty and justice) for all. When the subject citizens are rendered unable to control their financial affairs, they, of course, become totally enslaved, a source of cheap labor.

Not only the prices of commodities, but also the availability of labor can be used as the means of shock testing. Labor strikes deliver excellent tests shocks to an economy, especially in the critical service areas of trucking (transportation), communication, public utilities (energy, water, garbage collection), etc.

By shock testing, it is found that there is a direct relationship between the availability of money flowing in an economy and the real psychological outlook and response of masses of people dependent upon that availability.

For example, there is a measurable quantitative relationship between the price of gasoline and the probability that a person would experience a headache, feel a need to watch a violent movie, smoke a cigarette, or go to a tavern for a mug of beer.

It is most interesting that, by observing and measuring the economic models by which the public tries to run from their problems and escape from reality, and by applying the mathematical theory of Operations Research, it is possible to program computers to predict the most probable combination of created events (shocks) which will bring about a complete control and subjugation of the public through a subversion of the public economy (by shaking the plum tree).”—Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

therearenosunglasses@hotmail.com

Snooping On Potato Prices In Afghanistan To Predict Attacks

Nadia Arumugam, Contributor

Among the cornucopia of reportage on government espionage, one article in particular caught my eye. Earlier this week a Wall Street Journal story on surveillance technology used by the National Security Agency makes mention of a program called Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG).

An Afghan vendor sells potatoes from the back of a truck at a market in Kabul on October 6, 2011. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

Used to predict insurgency attacks in Afghanistan, RTRG monitors intelligence gathered from drones with high-powered cameras and sensors. The “snooping” program also analyzes in-country data including phone conversations, road-traffic patterns, public opinion and, somewhat unexpectedly, the price of potatoes at market.

According to the WSJ, this system, when analyzing 90-day batches of data, has the ability to forecast attacks 60 percent to 70 percent of the time.

The price of potatoes might just one of a plethora of metrics correlated by the program, but it is not an insignificant factor. Indeed, research and real-world case studies have shown that rising food costs are sure and reliable drivers for conflict.

Just take the Arab Spring. Ironically, the rich arc of marshlands that stretches from the Egyptian Nile to the Biblical lands of Tigris and Euphrates known for centuries as the Fertile Crescent is now the biggest importer of food. According to The Economist, most Arab countries today import half of what they eat from abroad. Consequently, when global commodity prices rise, the region suffers.

So when grain prices rocketed in 2007 to 2008 triggered by spikes in oil prices, drought in grain-producing nations and increased demand in Asia, the price of bread in Egypt, for example, rose nearly 40 percent.  These price hikes ultimately instigated “bread riots” in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Syria and Bahrain in 2008. Arab governments responded by increasing subsidies, driving up wages and adjusting food prices. But this did little to provide a long-term solution.

As if we could forget the pro-democracy protests in Tunisia in December 2010 with protesters brandishing baguettes, or the iconic “bread helmet” worn by an anti-Mubarak protester in Tahrir Square in 2011. Political uprisings have since toppled the Tunisian, Libyan and Egyptian regimes, and fostered civil war in Syria. Of course, these revolutions were about so much more than simply bread. But when cheap food, a substitute for democracy and human rights and a tool for commanding obedience, was not so cheap any more, sparks of social unrest were ignited.

Indeed, just last year researchers at New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass developed a mathematical model that relies on food prices to predict when social unrest is likely to erupt. Specifically, they had identified “a very well-defined threshold [for food prices] above which food riots break out,” lead researcher, Yaneer Bar-Yam told NPR’s food blog, The Salt.

In fact, Bar-Yam and his team published a paper in 2011 showing precisely what I’ve described above, how big spikes in food prices coincided with food riots in 2007 to 2008 and precipitated the events of the Arab Spring.

According to NPR, on December 13, 2010 the Cambridge researchers had submitted analysis warning of potential social unrest in Tunisia to the U.S. government. “Four days later, Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire – an event widely seen as the catalyst for the Arab Spring,” says NPR.

Is this really relevant to Afghanistan you might ask? Even when wheat prices in May 2008 had risen by over 100 percent since March of the previous year; even when at least 18 million of the country’s 26.6 million people failed to meet their basic nutritional needs according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); and even when some Afghans were so desperate they were forced to eat grass, no large -scale food riots were reported.

What was noted, however, was that mounting food inaccessibility and costs were driving hungry, aggrieved youth into the arms of the Taliban. In a 2008 article, a UN article published by its news service IRIN ran this quote from the man in the southern province of Kandahar; “I will do whatever I have to – robbery, killing others or blowing myself up – if my children are hungry and I cannot give them food.”

A paper published earlier this year in the Southern Economic Journal, by James A. Piazza at the Pennsylvania State University, not only makes the link between terrorism and food price fluctuations but determines that “rapid food price increases promote terrorist attacks. ” The logic is simple:

Consumer price increases create significant hardships for individuals, which makes them more prone to provide various levels of active and passive support for terrorist group activities. Rapidly increasing prices produce hardships that lead to the formation of strong antiregime, anti-status-quo grievances that can be exploited by extremist movements engaged in terrorism…

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Piazza found that volatile energy and housing prices did not have the same impact on terrorism levels. A parent can rationalize that a child can live without a roof over its head, but not without food in its belly.

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FBI Director Pretends That His Agency Doesn’t Help Bombers, Claiming That It Allegedly Prevents Attacks

[FBI Director Mueller is totally full of shit.  He doesn't really expect anyone to accept his disingenuine claim that they could have prevented 911 with NSA surveillance, especially considering that the entire Pentagon couldn't stop them, even with direct observation of the suspects in operation "Able Danger."]

FBI: Secret NSA Program could have stopped 9/11 attacks

• Janet Kwak  | Email Me

The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is using San Diego’s connection to the 9/11 hijackers in his defense of the controversial NSA phone-tracking program.

Before Congress, FBI Director Robert Mueller said he believed the attacks could have been stopped if the program had existed then.

“The simple fact of their detention could have derailed the plan,” said Mueller. “In any case an opportunity was not there. If we had this program, that opportunity would have been there.”

Khalid Al-Mihdhar was one of 5 Al Qaeda hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon. He and his accomplice Naway Al-Hazmi lived at a Clairemont Mesa apartment complex in 2001, and even took flying lessons at Montgomery field. Mueller said Al-Mihdhar phoned an Al Qaeda safehouse in Yemen, information that intelligence officials found out too late.

“If we had the telephone number from Yemen, we would have matched it up to the telephone number in San Diego, got further legal process, identified Al Mihdhar.”

“A lot of these tools used against terrorists can not be made public,” commented Darryl Thibault, who retired from the CIA Clandestine Services. Thibault spend more than 20 years breaking up terrorist organizations overseas.

“Having [the NSA program] revealed is unfortunate,” Thibault added. “This particular program is not over the top, it’s hugely valuable, and I would hate to see it lost.”

Thibault told 10News revealing details of the program puts Americans at risk, depriving counter-terrorism investigators of the tools they need. He admits security comes with the price of giving up some privacy, but that there are limits to it.

“Our elected officials…our courts will hopefully ensure nothing unconstitutional is taking place,” said Thibault. “We have to have accountability, and transparency… but this is powerful computer weaponry we can use. Not to use it would be a shame.”

http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/turkish-police-grab-12-al-nusra-terrorists-in-possession-of-two-kilos-of-sarin-wmd/

Obama Steps Over The American People’s Own “RED LINE”—Arming Al-Qaeda To Get To Assad

[Obama's sickening double-standards are going to seriously come back to bite him in the ass (SEE:  ’Grounds’ to believe chemical use by both sides in Syria: UN probe ; Turkish Police Grab 12 Al-Nusra Terrorists In Possession of Two Kilos of Sarin WMD)Hopefully, the Syrian terrorists will turn their American-supplied surface-to-air-missiles on John McCain's jet on his next trip to celebrate with his terrorist buddies.  It is highly unlikely that Obama will give them a shot at Air Force One.]

US says it will give military aid to Syria rebels

As David Willis reports from Washington, President Obama had previously said proof of chemical weapons would be a “game-changer” in Syria

The US is to supply direct military aid to the Syrian opposition for the first time, the White House has announced.

President Obama made the decision after his administration concluded Syrian forces under Bashar al-Assad were using chemical weapons, a spokesman said.

Ben Rhodes did not give details about the military aid other than to say it would be “different in scope and scale to what we have provided before”.

The US had warned any use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line”.

The BBC’s Jim Muir in Beirut says the US announcement is one that the Syrian opposition has been pushing and praying for for months.

It seems clear that President Obama has finally been persuaded, as Britain and France have argued, that the battlefield cannot be allowed to tilt strongly in the regime’s favour, as is currently happening, he adds.

Washington’s “clear” statement was welcomed by Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

“Urgent that Syria regime should let UN investigate all reports of chemical weapons use,” he said on his official Twitter feed.

The White House announcement came on the same day the United Nations said the number of those killed in the Syrian conflict had risen to more than 93,000 people.

‘High confidence’

Mr Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr Obama, said the US intelligence community believed the “Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times over the last year”.

He said intelligence officials had a “high confidence” in their assessment, and also estimated that 100 to 150 people had died from chemical weapons attacks, “however, casualty data is likely incomplete”.

“We have consistently said the use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses red lines that have existed in the international community for decades,” Mr Rhodes said.

Mr Rhodes said President Obama had made the decision to increase assistance, including “military support”, to the Supreme Military Council (SMC) and Syrian Opposition Coalition.

He did not give details of the aid, but administration officials have been quoted by US media as saying it will most likely include sending small arms and ammunition.

The New York Times quoted US officials as saying that Washington could provide anti-tank weapons.

Syria’s rebels have been calling for both anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington is also considering a no-fly zone inside Syria, possibly near the border with Jordan, that would protect refugees and rebels who are training there.

When asked whether Mr Obama would back a no-fly zone over Syria, Mr Rhodes said one would not make a “huge difference” on the ground – but would be costly.

He said further actions would be taken “on our own timeline.”

The CIA is expected to co-ordinate delivery of the military equipment and train the rebel soldiers on how to use it.

Until now, the US has limited its help to rebel forces by providing rations and medical supplies.

Mr Rhodes said the White House hoped the increased support would bolster the effectiveness and legitimacy of both the political and military arms of Syria’s rebels, and said the US was “comfortable” working with SMC chief Gen Salim Idris.

“It’s been important to work through them while aiming to isolate some of the more extremist elements of the opposition, such as al-Nusra,” he said.

A senior pro-Kremlin politician in Russia – an ally of Syria – said US claims of the Assad government’s use of chemical weapons were “fabricated”.

Likening it to when the US wrongly claimed Saddam Hussein held chemical weapons in Iraq, Alexei Pushkov, head of lower house of parliament foreign affairs committee, tweeted: “Obama is taking the same path as George Bush.”

‘Long overdue’

The US decision marks a significant escalation of the proxy war that has been gathering pace in Syria, our Beirut correspondent says.

The support of the West’s regional allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, had helped the rebels in the days after the uprising became militarised.

But the tide turned after the Assad government turned to Moscow and Tehran for help. Hezbollah fighters have also been involved in the government’s counter-offensive.

Now the West is lining up to try and help the rebels, but that is likely to take many months with more bloodshed and destruction, our correspondent adds.

UK and French leaders have long argued that President Bashar al-Assad must be made to realise that he cannot secure a military victory against his opponents and must be forced to the negotiating table, according to BBC political editor Nick Robinson.

The White House announcement immediately shook up the ongoing debate in Washington DC over how the US might provide assistance to the rebels.

Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who have been particularly strident in their calls for military aid, said the finding must change US policy in Syria. They called for further action, saying US credibility was on the line.

“A decision to provide lethal assistance, especially ammunition and heavy weapons, to opposition forces in Syria is long overdue, and we hope the president will take this urgently needed step,” they said in a joint statement.

Senator John McCain: “We don’t want boots on the ground”

“But providing arms alone is not sufficient. The president must rally an international coalition to take military actions to degrade Assad’s ability to use airpower and ballistic missiles and to move and resupply his forces around the battlefield by air.”

A UN report released on Thursday found at least 5,000 people have been dying in Syria every month since last July, with 30,000 killed since November.

More than 80% of those killed were men, but the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) says it has also documented the deaths of more than 1,700 children under the age of 10.

Obama Overthrows Fat Pig of Qatar, Without Firing A Shot

[Obama takes over the Syrian terrorist operation from the Fat Boar of Doha.  Replacing the big oinker with the Qatari piglet is rebranding the "Islamist Crusade" with a less controversial face.  This set the stage for today's announcement that the Pentagon will be supplying weapons directly to the Syrian terrorists, much like their previous secret mission to supply the KLA terrorists in Kosovo under Bill Clinton.  I guess that Clinton's calling Obama "chicken" was the real motivation for these decisions.

Time to overthrow Obama.  American revolution is mandatory.  Human survival demands nothing less.]

Sheikh Hamad’s Stepping Down is U.S. Decision

The decision made by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani to cede power in Qatar was not a personal decision to be justified by ‘health reasons’ suffered by the man who plays serious roles in recent years, whether at the Arab level or at the international level, Lebanese Assafir daily reported Thursday.

“The decision is an American one, first and foremost, and the Emir had been informed through an exceptional para-military envoy, who is a senior official at the US Central Investigation Agency (CIA),” the newspaper said citing reliable diplomatic sources.

“The decision was studied in the White House and was made after collecting all the information gathered by different apparatuses on the activities of Sheikh Hamad and his foreign minister,” the sources added.

However, the daily noted that activities of Hamad and his Prime minister have exceeded in many cases the limits set by Washington, both in terms of the situation in Syria, or in what related to the support provided by the Emir of Qatar for some Islamic organizations, including those groups which the U.S. intelligence suspects about their relation with Doha via receiving kinds of financial and military support.

Some of those who have had access to the details of US decision summarized the message delivered by the presidential envoy to Sheikh Hamad as follows:

“You have one specific choice, either we impose seizure over your money around the world, or you leave your position for one of your sons that we name to be the ruler after you.”

When the Emir tried to discuss the matter, the special envoy replied:
“I’m not authorized to negotiate with you, but I’ve come to inform you about our decision.”

The available information revealed that the US conditions include the departure of Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim, the PM and the FM, with his Emir, along with pending all the Qatari investments around the world, except in regions where the US administration decides.

“Any decision regarding various affairs of Qatar should be made in Washington and by Washington,” the diplomatic sources quoted the envoy in his extraordinary message as saying.

Earlier on June 11, The Assafir stated that the power transition process in Qatar will begin at the end of June until the first week of August, in which Emir Hamad bin Khalifa will cede power to his crown prince Tamim.

Arab and Western diplomats in Doha and other countries also noted that the transition process is guaranteed by many Western and Arab countries.

For its part, Reuters news agency stated that two scenarios are highlighted. The first is that crown prince Tamim takes office first as prime minister, while the second is that deputy PM Ahmad Mahmoud occupies the position when Hamad bin Jassim steps down.

Worthy of mentioning that Prince Tamim, 33 years, is the second son of the Emir and the first son of his second wife Mozah Bint al-Masnad.

The British ‘The Daily Telegraph’ newspaper reported Monday that Tamim is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. His powers have been crystallized when he became responsible for defense and arms affairs.

Source:Agencies

Wahhabi Lunatics Call for Terrorist Jihad Against All Shiites, Starting In Syria

Qaradawi and other Sunni scholars denounced the deadly crackdown by the Assad’s regime and his Shiite allies as a war on Islam

Sunni Scholars Call for Jihad in Syria

CAIRO – Prominent Sunni Muslim scholars called Thursday, June 13, for Jihad against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, describing his crackdown on anti-regime protests as a war on Islam.

“Jihad is necessary for the victory of our brothers in Syria,” read a joint statement issued by scholars and read by Egyptian preacher Mohamed Hassan, Reuters reported.

“Jihad with mind, money, weapons; all forms of jihad.”

Scholars from across the Arab world met Thursday in Cairo to discuss ways of helping the anti-Assad opposition in Syria.

They called for using all means to ensure victory of the Syrian opposition forces against Assad.

Hassan said more than 70 organizations represented in the meeting had called for “support, whatever will save the Syrian people”

Leading among attendees in Thursday’s meeting were Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the president of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, and Sheikh Hassan al-Shafai, from Al-Azhar.

Earlier this month, Qaradawi called on Sunni Muslims to join opposition forces in their fight against Assad’s regime.

The two-year fighting between Assad’s forces and anti-regime fighters has killed more than 93,000 people.

The fighting has forced more than one million Syrians to flee their home to neighboring countries in addition to the displacement of two millions others inside the country.

War on Islam

The Sunni scholars denounced the deadly crackdown by the Assad’s regime and his Shiite allies as a war on Islam.

“What is happening to our brothers on Syrian soil, in terms of violence stemming from the Iranian regime, Hizbullah and its sectarian allies, counts as a declaration of war on Islam and the Muslim community in general,” Hassan said.

Hizbullah, a close ally of Iran and the Syrian regime, is openly engaged in the fight against the anti-regime forces in Syria.

Hizbullah fighters helped Assad’s forces retake the strategic town of Qusair near Homs on the Lebanese border last week from opponents drawn mostly from Syria’s Sunni majority.

The Lebanese group has already lost dozens of its men in the battle for Qusayr.

Last month, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed to propel Assad to victory in Syria’s civil war.

The Shiite leader also pledged that Hizbullah will turn the tide of the conflict in Assad’s favor, and stay as long as necessary to do so.

Hizbullah’s involvement in the Syrian conflict has drawn widespread condemnations from Muslim scholars.

On Tuesday, Al-Azhar Grand Imam Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayyeb condemned Hizbullah’s support for the Assad’s regime.

Qaradawi also denounced Hizbullah, which means the party of God in Arabic, as the “party of Satan”.

Two months ago, two Salafi scholars in Lebanon have called for Muslims to join the Syrian opposition to fight against Assad’s regime over Hizbullah’s involvement.

The United Nations Human Rights Council has also condemned Hizbullah’s role in the conflict in Syria.

There is no end in sight to the conflict in Syria, which has divided world powers.

Russia and Shiite Iran support Assad, while the United States, along with some European and Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab nations back a fractured opposition.

Damascus and some of its opponents have said they will consider peace talks, but no meetings have been arranged.

Time to stop the tech giants snooping on us

Graeme Maxton says the fuss made over the revelations of an ex-CIA analyst is distracting us from the task at hand – standing up to amoral tech giants that want to know too much about us

Graeme Maxton

• 

Illustration: Craig Stephens

The events surrounding whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the ex-CIA analyst and until a few days ago a Booz Allen Hamilton employee, have an element of tragedy as well as farce.

The tragedy comes from the witch-hunt that is being used to cover up the news that US security agencies have been gathering data about us from the big technology firms for years.

There is scant evidence that this massive effort to spy on us is making us any safer

The farce is that this is not news. The desires of US spooks to know too much about us and the dubious morality of Google, Microsoft, Apple and others were already well documented.

The story actually begins in 2002, when America’s security agencies established the Information Awareness Office. This was created in order to build a massive database about everyone, to store e-mails, financial transactions, medical records and information about our social networks. It was to be used to identify suspicious activity, unhealthy relationships and threats.

The office was shut down after 18 months because of privacy fears. But many of its projects continued to receive funding, the big computer needed to analyse all the data is almost finished and what it set out to do has largely been achieved. America’s National Security Agency’s (NSA) US$2 billion data-storage facility in Utah will open soon and it will have the capacity to store and process yottabytes for decades to come.

Helpfully, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and all the others have collected all the information that the Information Awareness Office originally wanted to fuel this computer, and much more effectively than first envisaged.

Rather than the NSA needing wire-taps and warrants, these companies have persuaded us to give the information the authorities wanted voluntarily. We have told them all about our habits, views and relationships. We have explained to them in great detail what we like and what we fear. And we have even downloaded little apps to show them our location and the identities of those around us, thinking these useful, not troubling.

And we have done this despite knowing that the companies collecting this information are morally suspect. Intel, Google and Microsoft have all been fined for anticompetitive behaviour, while Apple and Skype have been investigated for it.

Google got caught getting around the privacy settings on its own browser and illegally collected internet access points with its Street View car. It then failed to delete the information despite repeated assurances that it would.

The US Federal Trade Commission says Facebook has “repeatedly” failed to honour promises to keep personal information private. Many of Apple’s apps have been found to be harvesting entire address books without our permission. Twitter was also found storing the address lists of its customers on its servers without them knowing and when it got caught, simply amended its privacy policy to make the practice standard.

Google’s search engine tracks your interests and filters future results depending on your previous searches. YouTube, which Google owns, tracks your taste in videos and music. Street View, Google Earth and Google Maps show where you live and where you go. Picasa, Google’s photo-sharing website, uses facial-recognition software to identify you and your friends.

Gmail knows whom you write to and what you say. Google Docs stores your letters. Google Calendar knows your plans. The company’s Android operating system on your phone or tablet knows exactly where you are and where you have been. The company’s privacy policy also allows it to collate all this information.

It seems almost laughable to think that Google was doing this just so that it could sell us more stuff. Now it is clear that there were other, much more sinister, motives lurking somewhere in the background.

Most troubling of all, there is scant evidence that this massive effort to spy on us is making us any safer. The number of deaths caused by terrorist acts in most of the world in the past 12 years is minuscule compared to those caused by heart disease, road accidents and even childbirth.

Instead of being distracted by the hounding of Snowden, we should be asking ourselves why these companies and the American government are invading our privacy like this. And we should first stop helping them do it.

Graeme Maxton is an author who also once worked for Booz Allen Hamilton

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Eye of the storm

Before Snowden, Mark Klein tried to expose warrantless US surveillance

[SEE:  AT&T Whistle-Blower's Evidence]

Associated Press in San Francisco

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Mark Klein of California allegations against a telecommunications company launched dozens of consumer lawsuits in early 2006. Photo: AP

Before there was Edward Snowden and the leak of explosive documents showing widespread government surveillance, there was Mark Klein – a telecommunications technician who alleged that AT&T was allowing US spies to siphon vast amounts of customer data without warrants.

Klein’s allegations and the news reports about them launched dozens of consumer lawsuits in early 2006 against the government and telecommunications companies. The lawsuits alleged invasion of privacy and targeted the very same provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that are at the centre of the latest public outcry.

That was seven years ago, and the warrantless collection continues, perhaps on an even greater scale, underscoring just how difficult it will be for the recently outraged in pursuing any new lawsuits, like the one the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the government on Tuesday in New York federal court.

“I warned whoever I could,” Klein said in telephone interview from his home in Alameda, a city across the bay from San Francisco. “I was angry then. I’m angrier now.”

All the lawsuits prompted by Klein’s disclosures were bundled up and shipped to a single San Francisco federal judge to handle. Nearly all the cases were tossed out when Congress in 2008 granted the telecommunications retroactive immunity from legal challenges, a law the US Supreme Court upheld. Congress’ action will make it difficult to sue the companies caught up in the latest disclosures.

The only lawsuit left from that bundle is one aimed directly at the government. And that case has been tied up in litigation over the US Justice Department’s insistence that airing the case in court would jeopardise national security.

“The United States government under both administrations has been stonewalling us in court,” said Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the consumers who filed that lawsuit. EFF has also filed a related lawsuit seeking the Justice Department’s legal interpretation of the law that the government is apparently relying on to collect consumers’ electronic data without a warrant.

James Clapper, director of national intelligence, personally urged US District Judge Jeffrey White to throw out the remaining lawsuit. Clapper wrote to the judge in September that the government risks “exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States” if forced to fight the lawsuit.

But on Friday, federal prosecutors asked the judge to delay making any decision until it can report back to the court on July 12 what the latest disclosures may mean to the lawsuit. Tien and other EFF lawyers are also assessing the newest disclosures to determine if they bolster their case.

Snowden, 29, a former CIA employee who most recently worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency, admitted leaking details of two secret government surveillance programmes.

He revealed a top-secret court order issued April 25 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that granted a three-month renewal for the large-scale collection of American phone records. That programme, the same one Klein tried to expose, allows the NSA to gather hundreds of millions of US phone records to search for possible links to terrorists abroad.

Snowden also disclosed another programme that allows the government to tap into nine US internet companies and gather all communications to detect suspicious behaviour that begins overseas.

On Tuesday, Klein said that for a number of reasons, Snowden’s disclosures sparked more public outrage than his own revelations did more than seven years ago.

For one thing, Klein said, Snowden had direct access to a secret court order and details of the programme, while Klein pieced together the government’s surveillance through internal AT&T documents and in discussions with colleagues who worked on the project.

“The government painted me as a nobody, a technician who was merely speculating,” said Klein, who made his disclosures after he accepted a buyout and retired from AT&T in 2004. “Now we have an actual copy of a FISA court order. There it is in black and white. It’s undisputable. They can’t deny that.”

Klein also said the allegations that the government was accessing social media sites such as Facebook may have gotten the attention of more – and younger – people who weren’t bothered by his initial disclosures.

“Now, the government is intruding in places they go,” said Klein, 68. “That probably got their attention.”

“SHOW US THE MONEY,” SPY PRICKS—Name One Dozen Terror Attacks That You Guys Weren’t Behind

US spy chief: surveillance program thwarted attacks

 

The US spy chief in charge of a leaked program to gather and analyse Internet and phone data defended the intelligence tactic Wednesday, insisting it had helped thwart dozens of terror attacks.

 

National Security Agency chief General Keith Alexander. (AFP/Saul LOEB)

 

WASHINGTON: The US spy chief in charge of a leaked program to gather and analyse Internet and phone data defended the intelligence tactic Wednesday, insisting it had helped thwart dozens of terror attacks.

Facing sceptical questions from lawmakers after a rogue technician revealed the secret operation, National Security Agency chief General Keith Alexander insisted it operates under proper legislative and judicial oversight.

“It’s classified but it’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent,” he told the hearing, the first time he had been questioned in public since 29-year-old former contractor Edward Snowden spilled the beans.

“I want the American people to know that we’re being transparent in here,” he insisted, warning that “the trust of the American people” was a “sacred requirement” if his agency was to be able to do its job.

Asked if the light shone on the programs could help terrorists avoid surveillance, Alexander said: “They will get through, and Americans will die.”

“Great harm has already been done by opening this up. The consequence I believe is our security has been jeopardised,” he warned.

Snowden, a technician seconded by a private contractor to an NSA base in Hawaii, disappeared last month after downloading a cache of secret documents and surfaced over the weekend in Hong Kong to give media interviews.

He embarrassed and infuriated President Barack Obama’s administration by revealing that the NSA had gathered call log records for millions of American phone subscribers and targeted the Internet data of foreign Web users.

The leaks triggered a row over privacy and the limits of executive power in the digital age, as Snowden said had been his intention, but also calls for the leaker to be arrested and sent home to face trial.

Snowden told Hong Kong daily the South China Morning Post that he would resist any attempt to extradite him, and accused the NSA of carrying out tens of thousands of hacking attacks worldwide.

Chinese media had remained relatively quiet on the issue, but the China Daily said Thursday that news of the US program “is certain to stain Washington’s overseas image and test developing Sino-US ties.”

“How the case is handled could pose a challenge to the burgeoning goodwill between Beijing and Washington given that Snowden is in Chinese territory and the Sino-US relationship is constantly soured on cybersecurity,” the government-owned newspaper said.

Many people hail Snowden as a whistleblower who carried out an act of civil disobedience to expose US government overreach and defend the privacy of innocent Web users.

Others, including US spy chiefs and some senior lawmakers, say Snowden a traitor who sold out a system that serves to protect Americans.

Alexander said he had “grave concerns” about how Snowden was able to gain access to critical classified information with a limited education and not much work experience, noting: “We do have to go back and look at these processes.”

Several investigations are underway and the leaker may yet face criminal charges, but in the meantime, debate is raging about the legality and utility of the NSA’s broad-brush approach to sweeping up private data.

“How do we get from reasonable grounds… to all phone records, all the time, all locations?” asked Senator Jeff Merkley, a longtime opponent of giving the government broad secret surveillance powers.

Holding up his own phone, he asked Alexander: “What authority gave you the grounds for acquiring my cell phone data?”

Alexander repeated the administration’s defence that, while the NSA did gather large quantities of telephone metadata, it could not mine the logs to target a specific user without an order from a secret court.

“We do not see a trade-off between security and liberty,” he said, insisting that the NSA and US Cyber Command are “deeply committed to compliance with the law and the protection of privacy rights.”

“I do think what we’re doing does protect American civil liberties and privacy,” he protested, claiming he welcomed the “debate” sparked by the leaks.

Senator Mark Udall expressed scepticism at this nod to openness.

“It’s very, very difficult, I think, to have a transparent debate about a secret program written by a secret court, issuing secret court orders based on secret interpretations of the law,” he said.

In Hong Kong, Snowden was unrepentant.

“I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American,” he said.

Snowden told the South China Morning Post there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, targeting powerful “network backbones” that can yield access to hundreds of thousands of individual computers.

There were hundreds of targets in mainland China and Hong Kong, he was quoted as saying, alleging this exposed “the hypocrisy of the US government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure.”

Snowden accused the US government of “trying to bully” Hong Kong into expelling him before he can reveal details of alleged NSA snooping on communications inside the Chinese financial and trading hub.

But he pledged to resist any extradition attempt.

“I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the US government in the courts, because I have faith in HK’s rule of law,” he said, according to the paper.

- AFP/jc

Snowden saw what I saw—surveillance criminally subverting the constitution

“What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience.”

So we refused to be part of the NSA’s dark blanket. That is why whistleblowers pay the price for being the backstop of democracy

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• • Thomas Drake

Thomas Drake, NSA whistleblower, in a still from the Robert Greenwald documentary War on Whistleblowers. Photograph: guardian.co.uk

What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience.

Like me, he became discomforted by what he was exposed to and what he saw: the industrial-scale systematic surveillance that is scooping up vast amounts of information not only around the world but in the United States, in direct violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution.

The NSA programs that Snowden has revealed are nothing new: they date back to the days and weeks after 9/11. I had direct exposure to similar programs, such as Stellar Wind, in 2001. In the first week of October, I had an extraordinary conversation with NSA’s lead attorney. When I pressed hard about the unconstitutionality of Stellar Wind, he said:

“The White House has approved the program; it’s all legal. NSA is the executive agent.”

It was made clear to me that the original intent of government was to gain access to all the information it could without regard for constitutional safeguards. “You don’t understand,” I was told. “We just need the data.”

In the first week of October 2001, President Bush had signed an extraordinary order authorizing blanket dragnet electronic surveillance: Stellar Wind was a highly secret program that, without warrant or any approval from the Fisa court, gave the NSA access to all phone records from the major telephone companies, including US-to-US calls. It correlates precisely with the Verizon order revealed by Snowden; and based on what we know, you have to assume that there are standing orders for the other major telephone companies.

It is technically true that the order applies only to meta-data. The problem is that in the digital space, metadata becomes the index for content. And content is gold for determining intent.

This executive fiat of 2001 violated not just the fourth amendment, but also Fisa rules at the time, which made it a felony – carrying a penalty of $10,000 and five years in prison for each and every instance. The supposed oversight, combined with enabling legislation – the Fisa court, the congressional committees – is all a kabuki dance, predicated on the national security claim that we need to find a threat. The reality is, they just want it all, period.

So I was there at the very nascent stages, when the government – wilfully and in deepest secrecy – subverted the constitution. All you need to know about so-called oversight is that the NSA was already in violation of the Patriot Act by the time it was signed into law.

When I was in the US air force, flying an RC-135 in the latter years of the cold war, I was a German-Russian crypto-linguist. We called ourselves the “vacuum-cleaner of the sky” because our capability to gather information was enormous at the time. But it was always outward-facing; we could not collect on US targets because that was against the law. To the US government today, however, we are all foreigners.

I became an expert on East Germany, which was then the ultimate surveillance state. Their secret police were monstrously efficient: they had a huge paper-based system that held information on virtually everyone in the country – a population of about 16-17 million. The Stasi’s motto was “to know everything”.

So none of this is new to me. The difference between what the Bush administration was doing in 2001, right after 9/11, and what the Obama administration is doing today is that the system is now under the cover and color of law. Yet, what Snowden has revealed is still the tip of the iceberg.

General Michael Hayden, who was head of the NSA when I worked there, and then director of the CIA, said, “We need to own the net.” And that is what they’re implementing here. They have this extraordinary system: in effect, a 24/7 panopticon on a vast scale that it is gazing at you with an all-seeing eye.

I lived with that dirty knowledge for years. Before 9/11, the prime directive at the NSA was that you don’t spy on Americans without a warrant; to do so was against the law – and, in particular, was a criminal violation of Fisa. My concern was that we were more than an accessory; this was a crime and we were subverting the constitution.

I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he’s been following this for years: he’s seen what’s happened to other whistleblowers like me.

By following protocol, you get flagged – just for raising issues. You’re identified as someone they don’t like, someone not to be trusted. I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have prevented 9/11.

But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.

I reached a point in early 2006 when I decided I would contact a reporter. I had the same level of security clearance as Snowden. If you look at the indictment from 2010, you can see that I was accused of causing “exceptionally grave damage to US national security“. Despite allegations that I had tippy-top-secret documents, In fact, I had no classified information in my possession, and I disclosed none to the Baltimore Sun journalist during 2006 and 2007. But I got hammered: in November 2007, I was raided by a dozen armed FBI agents, when I was served with a search warrant. The nightmare had only just begun, including extensive physical and electronic surveillance.

In April 2008, in a secret meeting with the FBI, the chief prosecutor from the Department of Justice assigned to lead the prosecution said, “How would you like to spend the rest of your life in jail, Mr Drake?” – unless I co-operated with their multi-year, multimillion-dollar criminal leak investigation, launched in 2005 after the explosive New York Times article revealing for the first time the warrantless wiretapping operation. Two years later, they finally charged me with a ten felony count indictment, including five counts under the Espionage Act. I faced upwards of 35 years in prison.

In July 2011, after the government’s case had collapsed under the weight of truth, I plead to a minor misdemeanor for “exceeding authorized use of a computer” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – in exchange for the DOJ dropping all ten felony counts. I received as a sentence one year’s probation and 240 hours of community service: I interviewed almost 50 veterans for the Library of Congress veterans history project. This was a rare, almost unprecedented, case of a government prosecution of a whistleblower ending in total defeat and failure.

So, the stakes for whistleblowers are incredibly high. The government has got its knives out: there’s a massive manhunt for Snowden. They will use all their resources to hunt him down and every detail of his life will be turned inside out. They’ll do everything they can to “bring him to justice” – already there are calls for the “traitor” to be “put away for life”.

He can expect the worst; he knows that. He went preemptively overseas because that at least delays the prying hand of the US government. But he could be extracted by rendition, as he has said. Certainly, my life was shredded. Once they have determined that you are a “person of interest” and an “enemy of the state”, they want to destroy you, period.

I am now reliving the last 12 years from what’s been dislosed in the past week. I feel a kinship with Snowden: he is essentially the equivalent of me. He saw the surveillance state from within and saw how far it’s gone. The government has a pathological incentive to collect more and more and more; they just can’t help themselves – they have an insatiable hoarding complex.

Since the government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out. There’s no room in a democracy for this kind of secrecy: it’s anathema to our form of a constitutional republic, which was born out of the struggle to free ourselves from the abuse of such powers, which led to the American revolution.

That is what’s at stake here: to an NSA with these unwarranted powers, we’re all potentially guilty; we’re all potential suspects until we prove otherwise. That is what happens when the government has all the data.

The NSA is wiring the world; they want to own internet. I didn’t want to be part of the dark blanket that covers the world, and Edward Snowden didn’t either.

We are seeing an unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers and truth-tellers: it’s now criminal to expose the crimes of the state. Under this relentless assault by the Obama administration, I am the only person who has held them off and preserved his freedom. All the other whistleblowers I know have served time in jail, are facing jail or are already incarcerated or in prison.

That has been my burden. I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to defending life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. I didn’t want surveillance to take away my soul, and I don’t want anyone else to have to live it.

For that, I paid a very high price. And Edward Snowden will, too. But I have my freedom, and what is the price for freedom? What future do we want to keep?

Egyptian/German Author “Wanted Dead” for Describing Fanatical Wahhabism As “Religious Fascism”

German author in hiding after receiving Islamist death threats

A German author of Egyptian origin has gone into hiding after having recieved death threats from Islamists. Hamed Abdel-Samad is one of Germany’s highest-profile experts on Islam.

The news of the death threats against Abdel-Samad was announced by his publisher on Tuesday.

“Hamed Abdel-Samad is taking the call for him to be murdered seriously and has gone into hiding,” the head of the Munich-based Droemer Knaur publishing house, Margit Ketterle, said in a statement.

The calls for the author to be killed apparently came after a speech he gave in Cairo last week in which he criticized radical Islam and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, accusing them of spreading “religious fascism.”

Abdel-Sadam reportedly also said he did not intend to insult Islam but had a right to express his views.

Shortly after his speech Assem Abdel Maged, a leading member of the radical Egyptian group Gamaa Islamiya, used a television appearance to declare Abdel-Samad an “infidel.”

Numerous Islamist web sites subsequently published a picture of the author with the words “wanted dead” written above.

“We are shocked by the persecution of our author and support him as much as we can,” said Ketterle, who spoke of a “smear campaign that came directly from the sphere of the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi.”

She also said Abdel-Samad stood for “critical education,” not only in Germany.

The German government’s human rights commissioner, Markus Löning also expressed shock at the news, saying there was “nothing to justify” such death threats.

“I expect the Egyptian government to clearly and unequivocally distance itself from [the threats],” Löning said. He also called on the government in Cairo to ensure his safety.

The 41-year-old Abdel-Samad was born in Egypt but moved to Germany at the age of 23. The political scientist who now holds German citizenship has published several books critical of Islam. In 2010 he became known to a broader audience when he featured in a five part television series in which he joined Polish-born German-Jewish journalist Henryk Broder on a road trip through Germany.

pfd/dr (dpa, AFP)

THE GREAT DICTATOR

A dictator rejects the idea of limits to his power.  Who needs a Congress, when you have wars to fake?

Ordinary Pakistanis Have No Gas Or Electricity for 20 Hours Every Day, While Judges, Politicians and Generals ARE NEVER WITHOUT POWER!

[If this isn't grounds for a full-blown revolution in Pakistan, then what is?  This is what life in America would be like if the self-appoint American "Aristocracy" had their way.]

No load-shedding for President, PM, judges and generals

Angry traders and workers chant slogans next to burning tires during a demonstration against long hours breakdown of natural gas and electricity. — Photo by AP

ISLAMABAD: In a startling disclosure before a Senate committee, the chief executive of Islamabad Electricity Supply Company on Monday said there was no load-shedding at the Presidency, Prime Minister House, Supreme Court, GHQ, headquarters of ISI, National Accountability Bureau and National Database and Registration Authority and the Judges Colony. The disclosure comes at a time when the country is facing worst load-shedding ranging from 12-20 hours a day.

Islamabad Electric Supply Company (IESCO) chief Yousuf Awan who was summoned by the Senate Standing Committee on Power to describe the reasons for load-shedding spilled the beans when the committee’s chairman, Senator Zahid Khan, asked him to name government offices which were exempt from load-shedding.

As temperatures across the country continue to rise over 40 degrees, the disclosure by the IESCO chief had drawn severe criticism from the Senate committee.

“I am utterly disgusted that a common man is facing up to 21 hours of load-shedding while the president, prime minister, generals and judges were facing no load-shedding even though they can afford to keep generators,” Khan said in his remarks.

Khan added that exemption should only be afforded to hospitals and centres managing healthcare.

He threatened to resign in case the practice was not interrupted and government offices and residences were not treated as the rest of the country.

The committee chairman directed the officials to bring an end to the discrimination within 24 hours and report back to the committee on their progress.

The committee also summoned the minister and secretary for water and power to explain why government offices and residences of government functionaries were not undergoing load-shedding as the rest of the country.

Meanwhile, protests against excessive load-shedding in Faisalabad and Khanewal continued.

The country is facing a shortfall of over 4,500 megawatts of power resulting in unprecedented load-shedding. Since taking over, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has vowed to address the concerns on power crisis and has dubbed the issue as one to be dealt with as a matter of priority. The first cabinet meeting of the new government is also taking place to take stock of the energy crisis.

Great authors warned of looming police state

By Douglas Turner | News Washington Columnist

The Buffalo News

WASHINGTON – A century ago, Rudyard Kipling, the imperialist British author of “Kim” and “Gunga Din,” wrote a futurist piece called “As Easy as A.B.C.” for Aerial Board of Control. Inspired by the embryonic stirrings of radio and flight, Kipling gave his readers a world governed through drones, or flying saucers.

In Chicago, for example, a revolt was crushed by the A.B.C.’s airborne blasts of blinding light and unbearable sound.

Two decades later, H.G. Wells, in “Things to Come,” invented a Dictatorship of the Air, a post-apocalyptic place where the ruling survivors were those who controlled air transportation and radio systems. It was a utopian regime, where nations and religions were outlawed, where dissidents were advised to kill themselves.

The core theme is the same in Wells, in Kipling and in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and George Orwell’s “1984.” A secretive ruling elite manages frightened populations through mastery of the tools of snooping.

These authors were not just trying to entertain us. They warned us. Yet few in this country, probably not even Sen. Barack H. Obama of Chicago, could have predicted in 2008 where we are now. With even the Supreme Court ordaining that police can force open the mouth of a criminal suspect and swab away the keys to a person’s genetic code, and warehouse it and share it with whomever the cops wish.

With the revelations of recent months, it must be faced that the tools and political systems now exist for ever-encroaching control by the state over the individual. The individual: Remember me? I own my own body; whom I donate to; my home is my castle; where I go; what I watch on my computer; how I drive a car; and whom I text in private; my health details are none of the state’s business.

Suddenly, all of this is becoming the state’s business. It is tracked at your great expense. How and when the state does it is none of your business. President Obama’s heralded “transparency” is abruptly about you, not the state. The president, his attorney general and the most important names in Congress are either mute or defending it.

Obama inherited the Patriot Act, and the technical gear from the Bush-Cheney administration. Yet it is under this president, supposedly steeped in the Constitution, that it has reached an unlooked-for level, maintaining it will spy on any American it wants to. Describing the secret partnerships between Web firms like Google and the National Security Agency, the regime’s main electronic spy combine, an unnamed intelligence officer told the Washington Post that the NSA “quite literally can watch you form your ideas as you type.”

The Obama administration has pursued more whistle-blowers under a century-old law than all past administrations combined. It is sweeping telephone lists, and smartphone GPS data, tapping reporters’ phones, criminalizing reporters’ questions and warehousing search engine transactions. Obama said blithely, “We can have a conversation about this.” In the words of SNL’s Church Lady, “Isn’t that special!” Joe and Jane Sixpack can’t do much about it.

The permanent Senate and House incumbency is in charge. These legislators worry more about getting millions from donors of the military-industrial complex than about your rights. Conservative fixer Karl Rove said the spying is needed to “keep the nation safe.” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., agrees.

In Britain, 120-plus of the world’s most powerful leaders – including former Clinton and Obama officials, publishers and the heads of Google and Goldman Sachs – are at a secretive meeting called Bilderberg planning your future. Topping the agenda is a seminar on worldwide data mining.

email: dturner@buffnews.com

Mexican Cartels Return the Favor, Spread Their US-Acquired Skills and Weapons Northward, Turning Jails Into Job Fairs

[Los Zetas has evidently made the decision to expand throughout all of North America.  The other cartels must also follow suit, or lose the market.  They have taken their military training to heart (acquired from US Special Forces while serving in the Mexican Army).  They are expanding their N. American operations with military precision, exactly in the same manner that they used to create their Mexican empire (SEE:  DFW now a ‘command and control’ center for Mexican cartels).  On both sides of the border, they are absolutely ruthless against those who cannot be bought, in the key battle zone of Texas daylight assassinations of public officials by black-clad, machine-gun wielding assailants  have become too common (SEE: Police release new details in slaying of attorney in Southlake ). 

The merger of cartels and gangs should be sounding alarm bells from coast to coast to coast, loud enough to drown-out Obama's campaign to bring radical "Islam" to the entire world.  The most troubling part of this growing American catastrophe is that it has all been brought about by the Pentagon and CIA militarizing all the police forces in the Western Hemisphere.  They train criminals to become super-criminals; they create drug and gun-smuggling empires for them, then arm them and open our NAFTA borders to their transporet companies.  The top banks in the Military-Industrial complex launder their dirty money.  Politicians take their bribes.  Where desperate apologists for the police state might grasp at the excuse of a comedy of errors, I see the elements of a great design. 

NONE OF THIS IS BY ACCIDENT OR BECAUSE OF MISTAKES.  THIS IS THE WAY THEY WANT AMERICA TO BE.  THEY ARE MILITARIZING THE AMERICAN/MEXICAN DRUG GANGS TO GIVE THEM AN EXCUSE TO TAKE THE ACTUAL US MILITARY INTO AMERICA'S STREETS.  THIS IS JUST LIKE THEIR "ISLAMIZATION" PLOT IN THE EAST, WHERE THE GANGS SUPPORTED BY THE CIA ARE MUSLIMS.

WE HAVE BEEN HAD, PEOPLE.  THE SOONER WE REALIZE THIS, THE SOONER OUR NAZI-LIKE GLOBAL AGGRESSION WILL END.

(SEE:  Los Zetas Train An International Army, Sharing Their Pentagon-Acquired Skills With Gang Partners ; Mexico’s Zetas Cartel Suspected of Planning Huge Prison Break On Texas Border ; The Spread of the Disease of the Cartels–A Virus Cultivated In CIA Laboratories  ;  Mexican official: CIA 'manages' drug trade)]

‘It’s like a job fair in here’: Mexican cartels tap U.S. prisons to get ‘criminal talent’ to join as drug runners and assassins on release

By Daily Mail Reporter

Mexican drug cartels are recruiting convicts in U.S. prisons to work for them as drug runners, assassins and enforcers when they are released.

One prisoner who is nearing the end of a 10-year sentence has said he was approached by Mexican drug gangs who wanted to give him 20kilograms of cocaine to sell when he got out – worth nearly half a million dollars on the street.

The prisoner said the Mexican drug gangs are beginning to see American prisons as a ‘job fair’ that can supply an endless stream of talent in the United States as prisoners are released back into society.

Inside-out: A federal incitement recently revealed that the federal prison at Forrest City, Arkansas, was being used as a recruitment center for the Gulf Cartel

‘The conditions are perfect right now for the cartels,’ the prison inmate told the Daily Beast.

‘They have a pool of captivated untapped talent and ready-made resources which they can access in our prisons. I’m telling you, it’s like a job fair in here.’

Last month, the FBI indicted 16 members of the Gulf Cartel for bringing more than 100kilograms of cocaine into northern Arkansas, alleging the Mexican crime syndicate recruited numerous drug runners from the Federal Correctional Complex at Forrest City.

The recruits were hired to distribute the cocaine for the cartel after they were released from prison.

High-ranking Gulf Cartel leaders, Indalia Ramos Rangel, aka La Tia or Big Momma, and her son Mohammed ‘Mo’ Martinez were among the Mexican gang leaders charged in connection with the crimes. They remain at large.

Large numbers of the cartels’ Mexican employees in the United States are currently locked up in federal prison with 20 to 30 year sentences.

 

Prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood are working to impress the Mexican cartels so they will be awarded with cash and work peddling drugs

As a result, the cash-rich cartels need new thugs to carry out their work north of the border and they have found an ample supply in U.S. prisons.

Prison gangs works to display their loyalty to the Mexican cartels in the hopes that work – along with money and power – will come along.

‘In prison they make a big deal of trying to impress the narco guys, so they can gain their confidence and show them they are reliable, effective and solid gangsters who aren’t afraid to put in work,’ the prison inmate told the Daily Beast.

‘It used to be they were trying to hook up with the Italian mobsters, but now the prison gangs know the cartels are where it’s at.’

Senator Mark Udall Seeks Review of Patriot Act Amid Surveillance Report—(new Church Committee in the making?)

Senator seeks review of Patriot Act amid surveillance report

U.S. Senator Mark Udall speaks during a memorial service marking the anniversary of the Tuscon shooting, at the University of Arizona campus January 8, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Laura Segall

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON

(Reuters) – A Democratic senator called on Sunday for a review of the Patriot Act, the post-September 11, 2001, law that gave U.S. intelligence agencies broader powers of data surveillance, after disclosures the government has been collecting massive amounts of data on phone and Internet activities.

Senator Mark Udall, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said he thought another look at the law was warranted as reports of the data collection stirred a debate over privacy rights in the United States.

“I think we ought to reopen the Patriot Act and put some limits on the amount of data that the National Security (Agency) is collecting,” Udall told the ABC program “This Week.”

Udall said there must be a balance between protecting the country against terrorist attacks and respecting Americans’ constitutional rights, including the Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure.

“It ought to remain sacred, and there’s got to be a balance here. That is what I’m aiming for. Let’s have the debate, let’s be transparent, let’s open this up,” he said. “I don’t think the American public knows the extent or knew the extent to which they were being surveilled and their data was being collected.”

The Guardian reported last week that the super-secret National Security Agency has been mining phone records from millions of American customers of a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.

The Washington Post revealed a separate program, code-named Prism, that gives federal authorities access to data from companies including Google Inc., Apple Inc and Facebook Inc on emails, photos and other files.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky told “Fox News Sunday” he would consider a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the phone surveillance program.

“They are looking at a billion phone calls a day from what I read in the press and that doesn’t sound to me like a modest invasion of privacy, it sounds like an extraordinary invasion of privacy,” Paul said.

But two senior lawmakers defended the Obama administration’s phone and Internet surveillance programs, saying they have helped to prevent attacks on the United States and have been subjected to strict reviews.

“These programs are within the law,” said Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told “This Week.”

“Part of our obligation is keeping Americans safe,” added Feinstein. “Human intelligence isn’t going to do it.”

Republican Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, agreed with Feinstein that the programs were important for national security.

“One of the things that we’re charged with is keeping America safe and keeping our civil liberties and privacy intact. I think we have done both in this particular case,” he said.

Republican Senator John McCain told CNN he believed the surveillance programs were justified because threats to the United States from abroad have been “growing, not diminishing.”

“I do believe that if this was September 12th, 2001, we might not be having the argument that we are having today,” McCain said.

But the Arizona senator said it made sense for Congress to review the programs. “I think it’s entirely appropriate that we have congressional review, that we have executive review. And we take the case to the American people to some degree as so what we are doing,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Paul Simao and David Morgan; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Where Is the Congressional Investigation of the NSA for Violating Our Constitutional Right To Privacy?

 

Criminal probe sought over US intelligence leaks

The top US intelligence chief is seeking a criminal probe into bombshell leaks of government monitoring of Internet users and phone records, amid a furor over the secret programs’ threat to privacy.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (AFP/Win Mcnamee)

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WASHINGTON: The top US intelligence chief is seeking a criminal probe into bombshell leaks of government monitoring of Internet users and phone records, amid a furore over the secret programs’ threat to privacy.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed on Saturday that US spy agencies use the PRISM program to gather data trails left by targeted foreign citizens using the Internet outside the United States.

But in an interview with NBC News, portions of which aired Sunday, he called the disclosures “literally gut-wrenching” and said they had caused “huge, grave damage” to US intelligence capabilities.

“The NSA has filed a crimes report on this already,” Clapper told NBC, referring to the leaks to The Guardian and The Washington Post.

He said he was “profoundly offended” that a disgruntled intelligence officer was a source for the leak to the Post. “This is someone who for whatever reason has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country,” he said.

“And, so, I hope we’re able to track down whoever’s doing this, because it is extremely damaging to, and it affects the safety and security of this country.”

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who brought to light the PRISM program and a separate program that scoops up US phone records, said the public had a right to know and openly debate what the government was doing.

“Every time there’s a whistleblower, someone who exposes government wrongdoing, the tactic is to demonize them as a traitor,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“What they were seeing being done in secret, inside the United States government, is so alarming they simply want one thing. And that is, they want the American people to learn about this massive spying apparatus and what the capabilities are, so we can have an open, honest debate.”

Clapper said he understood public concerns about the invasion of privacy and threats to civil liberties, but that “a lot of what people are seeing and reading in the media is a lot of hyperbole.”

The intelligence chief has declassified some details of the PRISM program in the face of a storm of controversy over suggestions that the government had backdoor access to the servers of Internet giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

“PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program,” he said.

“It is an internal government computer system to facilitate the government’s statutorily authorised collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”

Internet service providers denied they had given the government unfettered access to customer data, insisting they did so only when compelled by law.

Under PRISM, which has been running for six years, the US National Security Agency can issue directives to Internet firms demanding access to emails, online chats, pictures, files, videos and more uploaded by foreign users.

But Clapper’s statement described a system whereby the government must apply to a secret US court for permission to target individuals or entities, then issue a request to the service provider.

“The government cannot target anyone under the court-approved procedures… unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition” to prevent threats like terror, cybercrime or nuclear proliferation, Clapper said.

He admitted that data on US citizens might be “incidentally intercepted” in the course of targeting a foreign national, but said this would not normally be shared within the intelligence community unless it confirmed a threat.

PRISM was revealed shortly after The Guardian uncovered another intelligence program under which the NSA hoovered up the telephone records of millions of US citizens.

Representative Mike Rogers, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said the government began storing the phone records after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 upon learning that the phone companies routinely destroyed them.

Access to the records involves a “very strict court-order approval process. It has to be a foreign person believed to be on a foreign land,” he told “This Week.”

Senator Diane Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she was prepared to hold public hearings, but added: “Here’s the rub, the instances where this has produced good – has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks, is all classified.”

Obama has defended the phone and Internet data trawls, saying America was “going to have to make some choices between balancing privacy and security to protect against terror.

But civil liberties and privacy groups have raised alarm at both programs, which some have branded “Orwellian” and possibly unconstitutional.

- AFP/fl

Syrian Terrorists Shoot Boy In Mouth To Demonstrate Their “Shariah” To His Mother

Syrian Islamists execute youth: NGO

ISLAMIST rebels fighting the Syrian regime have shot dead a 15-year-old youth in front of his parents and siblings after accusing him of blasphemy, a monitoring group says.

“An unidentified Islamist rebel group shot dead a 15-year-old child who worked as a coffee seller in (the northern city of Aleppo), after they accused him of blasphemy,” said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Abdel Rahman said the rebel group likely comprised foreign jihadists. “They spoke classical Arabic, not Syrian dialect,” he told AFP.

“They shot the boy twice – once in the mouth, another in his neck – in front of his mother, his father and his siblings,” he added.

The Observatory condemned the execution as “criminal and a gift to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“This kind of criminality is exactly what makes people in Syria fear the fall of the regime,” Abdel Rahman said.

The Britain-based monitoring group, which relies on a broad network of activists, doctors and lawyers in Syria for its reports, demanded the killers’ arrest.

“We are working on identifying their names,” said Abdel Rahman.

Large swathes of Aleppo city have since last year fallen into rebel hands.

Activists have frequently lashed out against rebel groups which have taken advantage of the security vacuum in Aleppo to commit rights abuses.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/syrian-islamists-execute-youth-ngo/story-e6frfkui-1226661059170#ixzz2Vk6wVlp8

Obama’s Failures in Afghanistan

The Obama Administration has continuously deceived us about how bad the war in Afghanistan is going.

Sheldon Richman

In his latest major address on foreign policy, President Obama said this:

So after I took office … we pursued a new strategy in Afghanistan, and increased our training of Afghan forces.…

In Afghanistan, we will complete our transition to Afghan responsibility for that country’s security. Our troops will come home. Our combat mission will come to an end. And we will work with the Afghan government to train security forces, and sustain a counterterrorism force, which ensures that al Qaeda can never again establish a safe haven to launch attacks against us or our allies.…

In the Afghan war theater, we must — and will — continue to support our troops until the transition is complete at the end of 2014.…

The Afghan war is coming to an end.

If this and the usual sycophantic news reporting is all you’ve heard lately about the war in Afghanistan, you might think things are going well, that “America’s forces are winning.”

They are not. I trust it will be no shock to say this, but people in government lie, including presidents of the United States. Even presidents proclaimed to be different from anyone else who has ever run for that office.

Afghanistan is a hellhole. Writes Conn Hallinan at Foreign Policy in Focus,

Only U.S. Gen. Joseph “Fighting Joe” Dunford, head of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) thinks the war on the Taliban is being won, and that the Afghan Army is “steadily gaining in confidence, competence, and commitment.”Attacks by the Taliban are up 47 percent over last year, and the casualty rate for Afghan soldiers and police has increased 40 percent. The yearly desertion rate of the Afghan Army is between 27 percent and 30 percent.

Things have gotten so bad, Hallinan writes, that gunman in Pakistan burned a NATO convoy taking equipment out of Afghanistan. He comments,

There is nothing that better sums up the utter failure of America’s longest war than international forces getting ambushed as they try to get the hell out of the country. And yet the April 1 debacle in Baluchistan was in many ways a metaphor for a looming crisis that NATO and the United States seem totally unprepared for: with the clock ticking down on removing most combat troops by 2014, there are no official negotiations going on, nor does there seem to be any strategy for how to bring them about.

But what about the legendary Obama surge of 2009? When George W. Bush left the White House, there were 38,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Shortly after taking office, Obama sent about 30,000 more. As he said at the time, “The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qa’ida supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe haven along the Pakistani border.” Then in November 2009 he announced that he would send around 30,000 more, bringing the total, the New York Times reported, to about 100,000. “There is no imminent threat of the government being overthrown, but the Taliban has gained momentum,” Obama said. The administration has always been a bit vague about the numbers, and the term “surge” has only been applied to the second deployment. In fact, Obama roughly tripled the U.S. troop strength, before later reducing it by a third. At this point, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is almost double the number present when Bush left office.

And what has been the result? Hallinan writes,

When the Obama administration sent an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in 2009 as part of the “surge,” the goal was to secure the country’s southern provinces, suppress opium cultivation, and force the Taliban to give up on the war. Not only did the surge fail to impress the Taliban and its allies, it never stabilized the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Both are once again under the sway of the insurgency, and opium production has soared. What the surge did manage was to spread the insurgency into formerly secure areas in the north and west.

With the exception of the current U.S. commander in Afghanistan, virtually everyone has concluded that the war has been a disaster for all involved.

(This is not the first time we’ve heard this. Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis made a detailed report to that effect after spending 2011 in Afghanistan. “What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground,” Davis wrote.)

The facts don’t stop Obama from giving the same rosy reports while promising to have the troops out by the end of next year. NATO has a withdrawal treaty with the government of President Hamid Karzai (the same one who proudly acknowledges accepting buckets of cash from the CIA), but that doesn’t mean the U.S. government will have zero presence come 2015. Hallinan writes that “several thousand U.S. Special Forces, military trainers, CIA personnel, and aircraft will remain on nine bases until 2024.”

To give you an idea of how well things are going, a May 16 suicide bomb in the capital killed six Americans and 16 Afghans. As though that were not enough of a commentary on conditions there, the political wing of the group that claimed responsibility for the bombing, Hezb-i-Islami, “is a major player in the Karzai government, with its members holding down the posts of education minister and advisor to the president.”

With allies like that.… And let’s not get started on “insider attacks,” in which Afghan troops and police kill the American and NATO troops who train them.

But Americans believe all is well and peace will prevail come 2015. Not so fast, Hallinan writes.

In theory, ISAF combat troops will exit Afghanistan in 2014 and turn the war over to the Afghan Army and police, organizations that have yet to show they can take on the insurgency. One of the Army’s crack units was recently overrun in eastern Afghanistan. Given the fragility of the Afghan government and its army, one would think that the White House would be putting on a full court press to get talks going, but instead it is following a strategy that has demonstrably failed in the past.…

Part of the problem is that the call for talks is so heavily laden with caveats and restrictions — among them that the Taliban must accept the 2004 constitution and renounce violence and “terrorism” — that it derails any possibility of real negotiations.

Obama apparently is looking for a way to bring home most of the troops without the place collapsing in chaos, which would be bad for his legacy. But, as Hallinan asks, “If the United States couldn’t smother the insurgency during the surge, how can it do so now with fewer troops?”

The lesson? Fish swim, birds fly, and people who run governments lie. They will say anything to achieve their political objectives. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental.

One trusts them at one’s peril.

This article originally appeared at The Future of Freedom Foundation

 

Sheldon Richman is vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of Future of Freedom, FFF’s monthly publication.

Did Obama Intententionally Disrupt the Sunni/Shia Equilibrium, Or Did the CIA Do An Endrun Around Him?

[We have tipped the centuries-old balance between Sunni and Shia Muslims; where will it all lead?  None of us will be happy with the results.  By deputizing the Saudis/Qataris/Turks to enforce American order in the Middle East, Obama has enabled the Sunnis to organize their own terrorist army, dedicated to the proposition of "enforcing Sharia" and killing the unbelievers.  They are not fighting in Syria to help the Syrian people, but to create another Saudi-Wahhabi state.  Their imminent defeat there (due in large part to the entry of the Hezbollah Shia resistance fighters on the side of Bashar al-Assad), has created a sense of panic, causing them to issue an urgent call to "holy war" to all of the Sunni Ummah, all 1.6 billion of them.  According to the author of the following report (Islamist fighters flood into Syria, sometimes clashing with rebels ) many Sunni nut-jobs are answering the call, even though many of them are even attacking the FSA people that they are supposed to be in helping. 

All of this is conceiveably creating conditions that are conducive for a rapidly-building catastrophe that may be of "Biblical proportions."  The cycle of retribution between "al-Qaeda" and Hezbollah, which Obama has set into motion with his cavalier approach to the use of "Islamist" terrorists as the lynchpin of his foreign policy, could , in the near future, bring together a force of more than one million fighters in the Middle East (if you count both Syrian and Saudi foot soldiers), perhaps enough to reenact the Armegeddon scenario of a 200million man army, as fortold in the Biblical prophecy of Rev. 9:16.  It would not matter in the end, which side would triumph, because the remaining Islamist fighters would certainly then set their sights on Israel.  Many of the lunatics now fighting in Syria actually think that they are there to fight against Israel.  Liberating Jerusalem will be "Item 2" on their hit list.  This will unite all Muslim nations in common struggle against the tiny Zionist nuclear power.  Surely, the atomic destruction of a 200 million man Islamist army would be recounted by any survivors or their relatives as the "Hand of God."]

 

Islamist fighters flood into Syria, sometimes clashing with rebels

SANA Rubble lines a street in Qusair, Syria, which fell last week to government forces and their Hezbollah allies after more than a year in the hands of resistance fighters.

By Hannah Allam

McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – Foreign Islamist extremists are streaming into Syria, apparently in response to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah’s more visible backing of Syrian President Bashar Assad, a development that analysts say is likely to lead to a major power struggle between foreign jihadists and Syrian rebels should the Assad regime collapse.

Researchers who monitor the conflict said last week that they have detected the influx of foreigners in firsthand observations on the battlefield, spotting them in rebel videos posted on the Internet, observing a recent spike in reported deaths of foreign fighters and studying their postings on social media sites.

And while many foreign fighters have been absorbed into established Syrian rebel groups, there are signs now that an increasing number are remaining in free-standing units that operate independently and are willing to clash with other rebels and Syrian communities to implement their own rigid vision of Islamist governance.

“The numbers are increasing, with more radical groups inside now,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center in Qatar.

Elizabeth O’Bagy, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who just returned from a two-week research trip to study rebels inside Syria, said that “without a doubt” she saw far more foreign fighters than on her previous trip two months ago, including foreigner-only fighting groups in northern Idlib province, near the border with Turkey.

“There were substantial groups of foreign fighters that we came across, way more than I remembered,” O’Bagy said. “And we heard a lot of commanders complaining about foreign fighters coming in and not working with other opposition groups.” Examples of those conflicts appear to be more frequent.

On Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition research center in London, posted a video from Aleppo on Facebook that purportedly shows members of the Nusra Front, a fighting group manned in large part by non-Syrians, replacing a Syrian revolutionary flag with the black flag associated with their al-Qaida-aligned movement. The Observatory noted that “local civil activists have voiced much anger as a result.”

Another illustration of jihadists pushing boundaries, O’Bagy said, was the attempt to rebuild a working courts system in a town in northern Idlib. After negotiations, she said, local administrators and Syrian rebels had agreed that ordinary criminal matters would pass through the civilian court system, while the rebel brigades would deal with regime defectors and other war-related cases.

The project – exactly the kind of nascent governance the U.S. and other powers want to see in opposition-run territories – was undermined when a group of foreign jihadists came to town and took over justice matters, trying suspects based on their own strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Shariah.

“They’d spent quite some time writing up agreements and then these foreign fighters came and disrupted it. They were going with Shariah and undermining the division of labor,” O’Bagy said.

Even more ominous was how O’Bagy said the villagers wanted to resolve the problem: “Give us weapons.”

While foreign combatants have long been a fixture of the Syrian conflict, analysts said they expected the Sunni Muslim influx to grow in reaction to the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah’s bigger role in shoring up Assad’s forces.

In May, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah pledged “tens of thousands of fighters” to defend Assad’s regime. Those fighters were considered crucial in the two-week-long battle over the strategic town of Qusair, which fell to Hezbollah and Syrian government forces last week after more than a year in rebel hands.

Nasrallah’s justification for joining the war made mention of all the foreign jihadists who have poured into Syria to fight for the rebels – an uncomfortable truth for the Obama administration as it struggles to come up with a Syria policy that bolsters moderates while isolating extremists.

Latest figures from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is generally regarded as the most authoritative recorder of Syrian casualty figures, showed that 2,219 foreigners have been killed fighting on the rebels’ behalf since the conflict began. That’s more than the 1,965 dead who were identified as defectors from the Syrian army.

“Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s involvement was considered a foreign interference,” Nasrallah scoffed in his speech last month.

After Nasrallah’s speech, Sunni clerics across the region called for men to head to Syria to help their Sunni brethren against the Shiite “Party of Satan” – a play on Hezbollah’s name, which means “Party of God” – and Assad’s minority Alawite sect.

The most prominent was Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based cleric with a millions-strong following and close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. News reports quoted him as telling a rally in Doha that “every Muslim trained to fight and capable of doing that” should make himself available for jihad against Assad and Hezbollah.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ll see higher flows, especially after the statement of Qaradawi,” said Aaron Zelin, who researches militants for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and blogs about them at Jihadology.net. “He’s a pretty popular mainstream cleric in the region. He’s not fringe, he’s got weight behind him.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Sec. State Kerry Acting Like Taliban’s Lawyer In Discussions with Pres. Karzai

[Karzai appears to be the only world leader who clearly sees the truth about the so-called "war against terror" (SEE:  Hamid Karzai says US, Taliban are colluding )  He understands that this has never been a real "war," it has always been a series of staged events, or "false flags," intended to create the appearance of a real war.  Kerry is squirming in his hot seat, struggling to negotiate a place at the Afghan table for the very terrorists that we have allegedly been fighting against.  The terror war has always been the greatest hoax in human history, intended to deceive the American people into willingly, passively embracing an American police state.  Perhaps the growing anti-Obama backlash against revelations of widespread govt. surveillance and the wholesale abuse of American Constitutional rights will expand to encompass outrage for "synthetic terror war" (SEE: 911 SYNTHETIC TERRORISM, MADE IN USA---By Webster Griffin Tarpley).  No matter what happens in Afghanistan, Americans must now seize their own destinies, or surrender them to a US dictatorship.]

Karzai, Kerry spar over peace drive

By Pajhwok Report

KABUL (PAN): President Hamid Karzai and US Secretary of State John Kerry recently had testy exchanges on the issue of reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban, an official said on Friday.

During an hour-long telephonic conversation with Kerry a week back, Karzai made clear the Afghans would never allow their country’s return to instability and anarchy.

While acknowledging the need for national reconciliation, Karzai said his nation’s genuine desire for peace should not be misused as a tool of promoting outsiders’ nefarious designs.

One senior official familiar with the unusually long phone conversation confided to Pajhwok Afghan News that the discussion hotted up when Kerry tended to intercede with the president on behalf of the Taliban.

He recalled the US had adopted a similar pro-Taliban stance at meetings in Washington, London and Brussels. The Americans were pushing for opening Taliban’s political bureau in Qatar on terms and conditions that would make the office look like a diplomatic mission, the official said.

Afghanistan would run the risk of sliding back into warlordism and lawlessness if the Taliban and US terms were accepted, warned the source, who alleged some foreigners literally acted like representatives of the insurgent movement.

“We have been sparring with Western officials, particularly with Americans, over the past six months on why they have been throwing their weight behind the fighters. This is a pretty bizarre situation,” the official remarked.

mud

Saudis Can’t Hire Enough Head-Choppers To Carry-Out Barbaric Wahhabi Laws

Saudi Arabia’s jobs problem: Not enough executioners

• 

Saudi Arabia can’t find enough executioners to carry out its barbaric brand of justice, according to reports.

The Kingdom is actively soliciting applicants who can be trained to behead people sentenced to death under Sharia law, according to Vatican Insider. While the problem may shine a light on Saudi Arabia’s frightening justice system, it also could show a more humane population, according to the Asia Times.

“Fewer people are interested in a “career” in executing others, a task that requires a lot of cold blood and a lot of training to be able to swing a sword properly,” Asia Times reported.

The executioners who are on the job are doing double duty, as the number of death penalties meted out has not slowed. Some 76 people were put to death in 2012, and 40 have already been put to death this year. The most recent case took place on May 14 in the southwestern city of Najran, where a man was beheaded after being convicted of murdering a fellow tribesman. The ultimate penalty is applied in Saudi Arabia in cases of murder, armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, witchcraft and sodomy.

Human rights groups and western groups have tried to influence Saudi Arabia to implement more fair trials and less cruel methods of execution. It remains the only country in the world where beheadings are carried out in public places.