World Opinion Turning Against Saudis/Qatar/American Sponsorship of International Terrorists Within Syria

UN General Assembly Vote Reflects Shift in Syrian Public Opinion

 

by FRANKLIN LAMB

 

Homs, Syria

It’s not hard to find critics of the Assad government in the Governorate (Muhafazat) of Homs or for that matter, to varying degrees in Syria’s other thirteen Governorates according to Syrian analysts interviewed by this observer and reports from human rights groups including lawyers representing dissidents in Syria. However, after nearly 27 months of turmoil, the public opinion pendulum is markedly shifting back in support of the current regime.

One international political result was registered at the United Nations this past week when a US-Qatari-Saudi drafted General Assembly Resolution that was designed to increase pressure on the Assad government stumbled badly and fell far short of what the Saudi Ambassador to the UN and other US allies predicted would be an overwhelming vote in favor.

Effect of shift in popular opinion in Syria

Over the past four or five months it has become increasingly clear that public opinion in Syria is shifting for reasons that include, but are not limited to the following:

While inflation at the grocery stores in probably the most common complaint heard from a cross-section of society here, the population is adapting somewhat to higher prices and it appears to credit the government for efforts, some successful, to soften the impact of the illegal US-led sanctions that target this same Syrian population for purely political reasons to achieve regime change.

While Syrians demand dignity and freedom from oppressive security forces and an end to corruption, as all people do in this region and beyond, they are witnessing a return to near normalcy with respect to supplies of electricity, benzene, mazout fuel oil, bus schedules, schools, and a host of public services such as garbage collection, street sweeping, park maintenance, and sympathetic traffic cops who are rather understanding of short-cuts taken by drivers and pedestrians due to “the situation”.

In addition, public service announcement and even text messages demonstrate that the government is aware of the degree of suffering among the population, accept partial blame, and are focusing on remedial measure and crucially, ending the crisis with its horrific bloodshed. One observes here a definite trend of the pulling together of a high percentage of Syrians who share a very unique history and culture and who are deeply connected to their country and who are increasingly repelled by the continuing killing from all sides including the recent barbarisms of body mutilations and summary executions videotaped and broadcast on Utube by jihadist elements. The latter who these days come from nearly three dozen countries, paid for and indoctrinated by enemies of Syria’s Arab nationalism and deep rooted pillar of resistance to the occupation of Palestine.

In addition, many among Syria’s 23 million citizens, who initially supported the uprising following government reaction to event in Deraa in March 2011, now have serious second thoughts about who exactly would replace the current government. Events in Syria are also making plain that the army is still loyal to the Assad government, and according to Jane’s Defense Weekly, is actually gaining experience and strength as well as the well-known fact that as western diplomats are admitting, the “opposition militias” are hopelessly fractured, turning one another, many essential mafia outfits, and beginning to resemble their fellow jihadists from Libya, Chechnya and in between.

Opinion in Damascus and surrounding areas visited this past week, confirms this observers experience the past five months of a sharp and fairly rapid shift in opinion that now strongly favors letting the Syrian people themselves decide, without outside interference, whether the Assad regime will stay, and indeed, whether, the Baathist party will continue to represent majority opinion, not through wanton violence but rather via next June’s election. Many express confidence in the run up to this critical vote, noting that the election will be closely monitored by the international community to assure fairness.

Perhaps aided by the current glorious May weather, a certain optimism, that was more scarce in the past, pervades many neighborhoods.

For different reasons, foreign powers, including the USA, Turkey, European Union, the UK Jordan and even the majority population of the six Gulf Cooperation Council family run countries, according to Pew Research, are shifting their earlier positions which were based in part of the US administration, NATO, and Israeli assurances that the Assad government would surely fall quickly, “A matter of days, not weeks” US President Obama promised. That was two years ago.

As noted above, this trend has accelerated since the UN General Assembly vote with last weeks which did not go as planned on the biased and politicized non-binding draft resolution on Syria.

The public reaction in Syria and across the Middle East is substantially that the “Friends of Syria” non-binding GA resolution contradicts the reality on the ground, backs terrorism in Syria and hinders the international efforts to help achieve a political solution to the crisis in this country. Only 107 states voted in favor of the resolution, 12 against while 59 countries, mostly from Africa and Latin America, abstained from voting.

One reason the vote fell short of the 130 favorable votes that the basically same resolution garnered the past two times is that it is widely viewed as ignoring the crimes and atrocities committed by the armed jihadist groups in Syria and the flow of thousands of international terrorists backed by the West, the Gulf states and Turkey who provide them with weapons and money. According to the Russian delegate, backed by several other speakers, “the resolutions ignores all the terrorists’ heinous crimes and denounces what it called the escalation of the attacks by the Syrian government”. Afterward one Latin American Permanent Representative told Inner City Press that the count would have been below 100 if not for some “last minute arm-twisting.” As it turned out, 15 countries didn’t vote at all, opting to “get coffee,” as one African Permanent Representative put it before the vote.

Syria’s Ambassador al-Jaafari exposes a hoax in the Gulf

Syria’s permanent Envoy to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari said his country regretted the adoption of a biased and unbalanced UN resolution, thanking the countries that rejected the resolution “for their responsible positions which support the UN principles and the international law articles”. He noted that the decrease in the number of countries that voted in favor and the increase of numbers of those who abstained from voting indicates the growing international understanding of the reality of what is happening in Syria due to the foreign interference, support of terrorism, the spread of extremism and incitement besides the refusal of dialogue.

“We rely on the UN and its member states to support Syria and its people against the culture of extremism and terrorism, and to encourage the comprehensive national dialogue to peacefully resolve the Syrian crisis.” he said. In a statement released after the vote on the UN draft resolution on Syria, al-Jaafari He said that the French delegation had foiled the issuance of a number of UN press releases to condemn the terrorist acts committed by al-Qaeda-linked armed groups in Syria which claimed the lives of thousands of Syrians as it foiled a UN release to condemn the attempt of assassination of the Syrian Premier.

After Qatar’s ambassador spoke in favor of the resolution his country drafted (and re-drafted several time), Ja’afari revealed that there existed an e-mail, from the representative of the Syrian opposition given to Syria’s embassy in Qatar, showing Qatar’s involvement in the kidnapping of UN peacekeepers by the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade. He read out a phone number from the e-mail as several Gulf diplomats grimaced or scowled, and three left the Chamber.

Visibly stunned, the UK Permanent Representative Lyall Grant called the whole matter “deeply confusing”. Another Permanent Representative, from a militia contributing country, said that if true, it’s “very problematic.” The reasons include the fact that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had just thanked Qatar for its roles in the release of the UN Peacekeepers the earlier kidnapping of whom the Qatari government may have planned, paid for and executed.

Meanwhile, Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Martin Nesirky said he would not disclose any more about the “negotiations to free the peacekeepers or who was behind the crime.”

Score a major diplomatic victory for Syria’s UN Ambassador al-Jaafari as public opinion shifts in favor of the Assad government and both pressure as well as optimism build in the run-up to the Geneva II conference being organized by the White House and the Kremlin.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Syria and Lebanon and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com

“Al-Qaeda” Is Anybody the President Chooses To Call Al-Qaeda

Obama War Powers Under 2001 Law ‘Astoundingly Disturbing,’ Senators Say

 

WASHINGTON — The war authorization that Congress passed after 9/11 will be needed for at least 10 to 20 more years, and can be used to put the United States military on the ground anywhere, from Syria to the Congo to Boston, military officials argued Thursday.

 

The revelations came during a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee and surprised even experts in America’s use of force stemming from the terrorist attacks in 2001.

 

“This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told four senior U.S. military officials who testified about the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force and what it allows the White House to do.

 

King and others were stunned by answers to specific questions about where President Barack Obama could use force under the key provision of the AUMF — a 60-word paragraph that targeted those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

 

“I learned more in this hearing about the scope of the AUMF than in all of my study in the last four or five years,” said Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith, who was called by the committee to offer independent comments on the issue. “I thought I knew what the application [of the AUMF] meant, but I’m less confident now,” he added later.

 

Concerns emerged largely from questions by senators who approve of an aggressive strategy to combat terrorism, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who asked if the AUMF gave Obama the authority to put “boots on the ground” in Yemen or the Congo.

 

 
Robert Taylor, the acting general counsel for the Department of Defense said yes, as long as the purpose was targeting a group associated with al Qaeda that intended to harm the United States or its coalition partners.

 

“Would you agree with me, the battlefield is anywhere the enemy chooses to make it?” asked Graham.

 

“Yes sir, from Boston to FATA [Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas],” answered Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense who oversees special operations.

 

Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) later raised the specter of the AUMF being used to intervene in Syria, where the group Al Nusra, believed to be affiliated with Al Qaeda, is active. Al Nusra has not been linked to 9/11.

 

Sheehan said yes, if defense officials determined the group was becoming a threat. The same criteria applied to other groups, even if they were locally focused and operating in other nations. Taylor confirmed that AUMF also would cover individuals, even those who had not been born by 9/11, if, as Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) asked, they someday were to “become associated with a group that associates with Al Qaeda.”

 

When asked about an expiration date for the war authorization, Sheehan said it would be when al Qaeda had been consigned to the “ash heap of history.” “I think it’s at least 10 to 20 years.”

 

While none of the senators suggested dialing back efforts to stop terrorists, they were clearly disturbed at the power being asserted by the military.

 

“I’m just a little old lawyer from Brunswick, Maine, but I don’t see how you can possibly read this to be in comport with the Constitution,” King said, arguing that the defense officials’ interpretation of the AUMF makes the war power of Congress “a nullity.” “Under your reading, we’ve granted unbelievable powers to the president and it’s a very dangerous precedent.”

 

Kaine found the suggestion that the AUMF could be used to go into Syria especially disturbing. “The testimony I hear today suggests the administration believes that they would have the authority to do that,” Kaine said. “But I don’t want us to walk out of the room leaving an impression that members of Congress also share the understanding that that would be acceptable.”

 

The DOD officials repeatedly defended the authority they’ve claimed, noting that al Qaeda is not a traditional enemy, and that it shifts locations and changes its tactics. The broad interpretation of the AUMF, they argued, gives them the flexibility to deal with the changing threat in a lawful, effective manner.

 

But even Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who generally agrees with Graham in pursuing a vigorous war on terror, said the AUMF has been stretched past the breaking point.

 

“This authority … has grown way out of proportion and is no longer applicable to the conditions that prevailed, that motivated the United States Congress to pass the authorization for the use of military force that we did in 2001,” McCain said.

 

“For you to come here and say we don’t need to change it or revise or update it, I think is, well, disturbing,” McCain said, noting that the AUMF also is used to justify things like drone strikes that were never contemplated by Congress. “I don’t blame you because basically you’ve got carte blanche as to what you are doing around the world.”

 

No one suggested specific solutions, but did say the Senate will deal with the problem later this year when the committee takes on the National Defense Authorization Act for 2014.

 

The broad assertion of authority by the military is likely to disturb civil libertarians on the left and right who have complained that the AUMF and a previous version of the NDAA give the military power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens. Obama has issued orders banning such practices, but DOD officials apparently believe the law grants them the power to act anywhere.

Israel Preparing New Syrian Airstrikes, Warns Assad Against Retaliation of Any Kind

[If, after all the stink that has been raised over the previous Israeli aggressions upon Syria in the midst of the US/Saudi war to destroy Syria, Israeli bombers attack again, and Assad fails to retaliate again, then it will prove some level of Israeli control over Assad (SEE: When the Hummus Hits the Fan, Israel Will Choose Bashar al-Assad Over Radical Islamists).  Such a Zionist revelation, coupled with recent news of an Israeli/Saudi alliance, will also reveal the true Patron/Client relationship between the Fascist Shit-hole and the Arab royal dictatorships, who have been the traditional alleged "protectors" of the rights of the Palestinian people.  The Mideast monarchies have given hope that one day they would avenge the "Nakba" ethnic-cleansing of Palestine by returning millions of refugees back to their rightful homes. 

Such is the nature of the "Bizarro world" that we live in. 

Good always turns-out to be evil in the end.  The power of weakness is a Christian delusion.  When we are meek before the enemies of the human race, then the most bloodthirsty criminals will determine the vile nature of the next step in the spiritual/psychological evolution of mankind.]

 

Report: Israel warns Assad not to retaliate to airstrikes

Israeli senior official tells New York Times Israel considering further military strikes on Syria to stop transfer of weapons to Hezbollah. ‘If Assad reacts, he will risk forfeiting his regime,’ he says

A senior Israeli official signaled on Wednesday that Israel was considering further military strikes on Syria to stop the transfer of advanced weapons to Islamic militants, and warned Syrian president Bashar Assad, that his government would face crippling consequences if it retaliated against Israel, the New York Times reported.

“Israel is determined to continue to prevent the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah . The transfer of such weapons to Hezbollah will destabilize and endanger the entire region,” the official said in an interview.

“If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies,” the official said, “he will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate.”

The newspaper noted that the Israeli official has been briefed by high-level officials on the Syria situation in the past two days and had contacted The New York Times on Wednesday.

The paper considered the timing of the statements. “The precise motives for Israel’s warning were uncertain: Israel could be trying to restrain Syria’s behavior without undertaking further military action, or alerting other countries to another strike. That would ratchet up the tension in an already fraught situation in Syria,” the report said.

Foreign reports claim Israel carried out a total of three airstrikes in Syria since the civil war there began two years ago. The first allegedly took place in January when a convoy was bombed near the Syria-Lebanon border.

The target was reported to have been an arms shipment to Hezbollah that included Russian-made SA-17 missiles – possibly “game changing” weapons in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Damascus later conceded there had been an attack claiming the target was a military research center in Jamraya.

The second airstrike allegedly occurred in early May and was reported by US media. The target was an arms shipment from Iran to Hezbollah. Another strike was reported 48 hours later. According to Syria, the Jamraya military center had been bombed again.

Israel did not comment on the reports.

Zbig Admits That Global Political Awakening Is Roadblock To Elite Domination

The more that the people “awaken” to the fact that a small segment of the human race considers the rest of us as their “cattle,” the faster that their power over us erodes.  Brzezenski is not sounding a prophetic message of hope to the world’s masses, he is warning the elite that their window of opportunity is slipping away.  That is the great part of True Democracy–the righteous, self-igniting outrage which is a natural bi-product of learning about grievous injustice or the intentional, institutional abuse of our rights or those of our fellow man.  The more we learn, the more dangerous we become to the elite. 

[If they hope to survive their great social experiment involving all of our lives, then they will move against us while they still can.--Peter]

Another American Death Squad Leader Gone Berserker?

[I thought that Karzai had already run the bastards out of Wardak.]

Afghanistan demands arrest of ‘American’ death squad leader

US soldiers near the village of Qol-e-Botonin the mountains of Wardak Province. (Reuters / Shamil Zhumatov)

The US and Afghanistan are at loggerheads again after new accusations that an American citizen has ‘disappeared’ fifteen people in the province of Wardak, where continued NATO presence has been hotly opposed. Washington has denied any involvement.

Afghan officials say that a man by the name of Zakaria Kandahari, allegedly an ethnic Afghan, but a US citizen, has led a pro-government death squad that has terrorized locals in Wardak, New York Times reports. The newspaper says three officials have confirmed that he is being sought on charges of torture and murder. A key piece of evidence is a video tape of Kandahari torturing a local, while speaking English with an American accent.

Over the past year, Kandahari and his soldiers have also been seen throughout the area wearing NATO uniforms while riding on quad bikes in search of alleged insurgents, at least one of whom, Afghans say, has been found dismembered in a garbage container just outside the US base in the province, which is located just to the west of the capital Kabul.

Washington does not deny the existence of the video, but claims Kandahari operates a rogue Afghan unit, and is not a US citizen.

“Everybody in that video is Afghan; there are no American voices,” an unnamed American official told the newspaper.

The official said that Kandahari was an interpreter for a US A-Team, based in the Nerkh district, and “went on the lam” as soon as his extrajudicial anti-Taliban campaign was discovered by the Americans, following a tip from Afghan officials.

“We would have no reason to try to harbor this individual,” said the source. “We have done three investigations down there, and all absolve ISAF [NATO] forces and Special Forces of all wrongdoing.”

Allegations of extrajudicial justice by the US Nerkh-based Special Forces unit, which consists of a small core of American commandos aided by local support staff, in the region first surfaced in February when President Hamid Karzai said that the mixed teams had unleashed a reign of terror over the locals and ordered them out of the province.

When the Hummus Hits the Fan, Israel Will Choose Bashar al-Assad Over Radical Islamists

Peter Chamberlin

Once again (just as in the recent US Embassy bombing in Ankara) a spectacular terrorist attack takes place in Turkey and the government immediately blames another obscure Marxist terrorist group, that they have conveniently resurrected from Turkey’s distant past.  The individual faction of this group has also allegedly been identified, as “Mirhac Ural,” who has recently been named by the Syrian opposition as the man behind the latest alleged “ethnic cleansing” in a town called Banias, along the Syrian coast (SEE:  Syria: Enter the ethnic cleanser of Banias).

Ural was originally a founding member of TPLP-C (Acilciler), a Marxist/Leftist/revolutionary group which was formed to fight US imperialism within Turkey, specifically, to act as a counter-force to US “Gladio”/”Gray Wolves” operations.  The TPLP-C supported its sister organization, the DHKP/C, which was blamed for the recent bombing outside the American Embassy in Ankara.

Ural is also a close friend of terrorist PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.  He allegedly introduced Bashar al-Assad to Ocalan.  It was allegedly Ural who persuaded Assad to play the “Kurdish” card against Erdogan.  Erdogan thought that he had trumped this move when he negotiated the latest peace agreement with the PKK, until Iraq’s government refused to accept the expatriated Kurdish guerillas.  The Kurds cannot be blamed for using Syrian-based assets against Turkey in this terror bombing in Reyhanli over the denial of new sanctuary in northern Iraq, because the attack was clearly intended to help the Turkish Prime Minister to persuade Obama to intervene in Syria on Turkey’s behalf, and this would not help the Kurds in any conceivable way.

It is claimed in the Saudi/Arab press that Bashar Assad has become desperate in his resistance to the Imperial terrorist invasion, choosing at this time to gather his forces to him in the center of his Alawite home turf, as he ethnically cleansing Syria of the majority Sunnis.  They have reinforced this ethnic cleansing theme in the reports emerging from the Imperial press Turkish outfit, Zaman, about an alleged “Banias massacre.”  This massacre supposedly took place the day after Ural was quoted on YouTube, saying, “We need to cleanse Banias of traitors at the earliest.”

From the video, if it is genuine, it seems that Ural could be a legitimate leader of a Syrian counter-terrorist cell.  If that is true, then he would certainly have plenty of reasons to want to close the supply lines from Turkey.  But there is much more to this incident than this simple explanation.  If Ural is an anti-Islamist fighter, then why would he be immortalized in the Islamist press?  The story about an “Alevi rump state” along the coast of Syria, builds upon Sunni fears that they are about to also be ethnically cleansed from around Hatay, Turkey–Giving them a good reason to fight a sectarian war.  This benefits the Saudi-Israeli alliance, up unto the point where the destabilization plot it increases ethnic tensions on the wrong side of the border.  Proper conflict management prevents the various sub-plots from getting out of control and, as a consequence, over-driving the main destabilization plot and thereby, unintentionally causing the opposite effects, instead of the planned reactions.

Always, in these destabilization plots, there are two primary parties working the target–the destabilizing power and a patsy partner within the target entity (corporation, organization, state) that is to be destabilized.  Since the Saudis and Israel are obviously working together to carry-out the Imperial diktat for the Middle East, then it is clear that it is the Saudis who will eventually be the losing party.  Whether they will lose more than they can afford to pay is the risk that they are willing to take to eject Assad.  It is not in Israel’s interests to see an Islamist victory in Syria, but the Saudis and friends erroneously believe that it is in theirs.  It is unlikely that the Saudis would support an effort to divide Syria if it would harm Turkey, or make it harder to get weapons over the Syrian border to the terrorist front.

If the bombing of Turkey is clearly not in the Islamists’ interests, but does no harm to Israeli interests, then it may mean that Israel is using another PKK-related terror group to rein-in Prince Bandar’s Islamist attack dogs, in order to save Assad, in order to maintain the quagmire in Syria.  Consider the points raised in this piece from Zaman (SEE:  Opposition commander: Assad defeated, we are fighting Iran, Hezbollah).  The Gulenist mouthpiece Zaman interviews an alleged Syrian rebel commander,  of the al-Tawhid Brigade, Commander Abdulkader Saleh.  He makes the extraordinary claim that Israel and Iran are secretly working together against the Syrian terrorists:

“Bashar al-Assad’s regime does not have the strength to carry on its battle against opposition fighters, adding that Iran and Hezbollah are the forces behind the protracted war….Iran and Hezbollah are the ones who are continuing the war in Syria,”  

“Furthermore, Iran and Hezbollah are cooperating with Israel to be able to support Assad. Assad has protected Israel’s border for 40 years,”

“The opposition was going to take over arms, so Israel attacked. There is evidence pointing to this. There were some high-ranking officers with whom [the opposition forces] got into contact. [Those officers] were going to defect from [the Assad administration], handing over arms to the opposition. Israel hit these posts in fear that the opposition would take over the arms. The arms included heavy artillery as well as air defense systems. This assault, of course, was intended to support the Assad administration,” Saleh explained.

The first time I read the Saleh interview, I laughed it all off as nonsense, until I read the article in Foreign Affairs magazine, written by former head of Mossad, Efraim Halevy (1998 to 2002).  He affirmed to the world that Bashar Assad is Israel’s Man in Damascus (or “Why Jerusalem Doesn’t Want the Assad Regime to Fall”).

It is obviously in Israel’s interests to preserve the Assad dynasty, as opposed to the radical, unpredictable Islamists.  It may be impossible to determine the truth about Israeli conniving with Arab leaders until someone makes a big messy mistake.  If there were any honest news sources in the Middle East, then maybe we could figure-out just exactly who has benefitted from Israel’s latest bombings of Syria.  Would the Zionist state really have committed an “act of war” against Syria and Lebanon, just to prevent Hezbollah forces from upgrading a few of their missiles?  Was the Syrian military or government informant/traitor warning Israel about the imminent acquisition of “game-changing weapons” by Hezbollah, or by the Free Syrian Army?

If all of this proves to be true, that Israeli bombers were destroying heavy weapons and killing a lot of Syrian soldiers, in order to keep the weapons out of the hands of Syria’s terrorists, or that Mossad manipulated PKK-related killers to murder more than 40 innocent people in Reyhanli, then what does that say to the rest of the world, which is drowning in despair over the Syrian conflict?   What advantage is there in a Saud/Israeli alliance, when the Israelis are there to play the part of “spoiler” to all of the Islamist plans?  Above all else, Mossad/Israeli objectives are constant and unwavering, to establish Jewish dominance over every square inch of the Middle East, as a stepping stone to Jewish world dominance.  This justifies the spoiler role for Israel, support the Goyim’s plans, until the advantage shifts to Jewish interests, at which time all partners are double-crossed.  

the Saudi Gazette (SEE: Israel’s strategy in Syria ).

“But the bigger threat to Israel is the growth of democracy in the Arab world. If the Arab world were ever to become a democracy, it would expose Israel as the democracy fraud that it is.

Israel fears the Arab Spring because the Arab Spring augments the voices of freedom and calls for freedom throughout the region, not just in the Arab world, but in Israel too. And Israel is one of the most oppressive country’s in the Middle East. Although most Jewish citizens of Israel enjoy unprecedented freedoms and benefits from the state, non-Jews suffer simply because they are non-Jews. Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs are victimized by Israel both as so-called “citizens” and as imprisoned victims in the occupied lands.”

If the Syrian terrorist forces have suffered devastating losses because of Israeli actions, then they will know the truth–That they have just been attacked by “friendly” forces allied to the Arabs and to the West….This can be expected to be reflected in the spirit of the anti-Assad forces and in their communiques to the outside world.  If they have been demoralized by these betrayals, then they can be expected to show that in subtle ways.  Their positive response to Western calls for an international Syrian peace conference, to be organized jointly by the US and Russia, may be just such a sign.

“Syria’s opposition will consult with backers Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey before it decides whether to take part in a peace conference proposed by the United States and Russia, its acting chief said Monday.”  Syria opposition to consult backers on peace talks.  This is a complete reversal to all previous dismissals of negotiations with Assad out of hand.  Such a conference confirms Obama’s complete reticence in expanding the Syrian conflict into a regional war.  If Erdogan was hoping that the terror bombings in Turkey would sway Obama’s opinion about bringing-in American or NATO support against Syria, then he is likely to be disappointed when they meet in DC this week.

As far as the possibility that Turkey will escalate the confrontation with Syria on its own (SEE: Turkey says it won’t be drawn into Syria conflct), there is very little chance that Erdogan will make this misstep, especially when he cannot really be certain exactly who is on his side.

therearenosunglasses@hotmail.com

Congress Votes To Restart Deception Operations Against American Public

NDAA 2013: Congress approves domestic deceptive propaganda

Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

Reauthorizing the indefinite detention of US citizens without charge might be the scariest provision in next year’s defense spending bill, but it certainly isn’t the only one worth worrying about.

An amendment tagged on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 would allow for the United States government to create and distribute pro-American propaganda within the country’s own borders under the alleged purpose of putting al-Qaeda’s attempts at persuading the world against Western ideals on ice. Former US representatives went out of there way to ensure their citizens that they’d be excluded from government-created media blasts, but two lawmakers currently serving the country are looking to change all that.

Congressmen Mac Thornberry (R-TX) and Adam Smith (D-WA) introduced “The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012” (H.R. 5736) last week during discussions for the NDAA 2013. It was voted on by the US House of Representatives to be included in next year’s defense spending bill, which was then voted on as a whole and approved. The amendment updates the antiquated Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1987, essentially clarifying that the US State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors may “prepare, disseminate and use public diplomacy information abroad,” but while also striking down a long-lasting ban on the domestic dissemination in America. For the last several decades, the federal government has been authorized to use such tactics overseas to influence foreign support of America’s wars abroad, but has been barred from such strategies within the US. If next year’s NDAA clears the US Senate and is signed by President Obama with the Thornberry-Smith provision intact, then restrictions on propaganda being force-fed to Americans would be rolled back entirety.

Both Congressmen Thornberry and Smith say that the amendment isn’t being pushed to allow for the domestic distribution of propaganda, but the actual text of the provision outlines that, if approved by the Senate and signed by President Barack Obama, that very well could be the case.

“We continue to face a multitude of threats and we need to be able to counter them in a multitude of ways.Communication is among the most important,” Rep. Thornberry explains in his initial press release on the bill.“This outdated law ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible and transparent way. Congress has a responsibility to fix the situation.”

On his part, Rep. Smith says that al-Qaeda is infiltrating the Internet in order to drive anti-American sentiments ablaze. If the amendment he co-sponsors is passed, the US government would be able to fight fire with fire.

“While the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was developed to counter communism during the Cold War, it is outdated for the conflicts of today,” Rep. Smith says in his official statement. “Effective strategic communication and public diplomacy should be front-and-center as we work to roll back al-Qaeda’s and other violent extremists’ influence among disaffected populations.An essential part of our efforts must be a coordinated, comprehensive, adequately resourced plan to counter their radical messages and undermine their recruitment abilities. To do this, Smith-Mundt must be updated to bolster our strategic communications and public diplomacy capacity on all fronts and mediums – especially online.”

Does that mean that the anti-Nazi and damning communism adverts that were a hallmark of America during the Second World War and the Cold War, respectively, will be updated to outrage Americans against the country’s alleged enemies? It isn’t ruled out, for sure. Both Congressmen Thornberry and Smith have tried to dull the American public’s quickly surmounting outrage by saying that the act won’t be used for brainwashing purposes, but by letting Uncle Sam’s propaganda-spewing communication machine have free roam on the Web and elsewhere, it would absolutely be allowed.

“Clearly there are ways to modernize for the information age without wiping out the distinction between domestic and foreign audiences,” Michael Shank of the Institute for Economics and Peace in Washington tells Buzzfeed, who broke the news of the amendment. “That Reps Adam Smith and Mac Thornberry want to roll back protections put in place by previously-serving Senators – who, in their wisdom, ensured limits to taxpayer–funded propaganda promulgated by the US government – is disconcerting and dangerous.”

Responding to the quickly escalating backlash, Rep. Smith attacked allegations that he is encouraging pro-American propaganda on US soil. “This amendment is intended to ensure that the US government can get factual information out in a timely manner to counter extremist misinformation and propaganda,” he writes in a follow-up statement. “It does not and is not in any way intended to ‘legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences’ and, in fact, specifically ensures that the content to be rebroadcast or republished domestically by the Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) shall not influence public opinion in the US. It clearly states, no funds authorized to be appropriated to State Department or BBG for any activity shall be used to influence public opinion.”

Regardless of his or Mr. Thornberry’s intentions, the text of the legislation speaks for itself.

Rep. Smith contributed to this year’s NDAA with another provision, submitted with co-author Congressman Justin Amash (R-Michigan). With that amendment, the two lawmakers proposed that the US military be stripped of their power to indefinitely detain US citizens without charge, a right granted to them under last year’s defense spending bill. Unlike the amendment Rep. Smith introduced with Thornberry, the House shot down that proposal.

NAZI AMERICA

 

NAZI AMERICA IMPRISONS CHRISTIANS

aangirfan

 

Sister Megan Rice

On 8 May 2013, “an 83-year-old nun, Sister Megan Rice, who broke into a Tennessee depleted uranium storage facility in 2012 …. exposing a massive security hole at the nation’s only facility used to store radioactive conventional munitions, was convicted and sentenced to a term of up to 20 years in prison.”

83-year-old-nun-gets-20-year-sentence-for-symbolic-nuclear-facility-break-in

Victim of the US government’s depleted uranium.

Victim of the US government’s depleted uranium.

Victim of the US government’s depleted uranium.

Victim of the US government’s depleted uranium.

Victim of the US government’s depleted uranium.

The USA is a Nazi state.

The USA has very bad karma.

If there is a Hell, it will be mainly filled with Americans, especially those from Tennessee.

Tennessee is filled with Nazis.

Lynching of an innocent black kid in the USA. aangirfan: DUMB WHITE PEOPLE

In 1889 the husband of Jessie Woolen confessed that he had killed his wife.

Earlier, in 1886, Eliza Woods, an African-American woman, was lynched in Jackson, Tennessee, after being wrongly accused of poisoning and killing Jessie Woolen.

A crowd of 1,000 was reportedly present when Woods was hanged naked.

Reportedly, the Nazi CIA tortures innocent Moslems to turn them into mind-controlled al Qaeda operatives to fight in Syria.

Israel’s Secret Alliance with The Persian Gulf’s Arab States Against Iran

• ayatoilet1

Since Saddam Hussein’s Invasion of Kuwait, GCC states have collectively established a strong alliance with Israel. This alliance is currently focused on the destruction of Iran and the elimination of Iranian influence throughout the Middle East (and Central Asia). Both Israel and GCC countries are scared livid of the Iranian regime, its influence in their states and are therefore necessarily committed to this common goal. But this is a strategic mistake – for both GCC states and Israel. They have confused Iran’s regime with ordinary Iranians. Their beef is with the Mullahs NOT Iranians. This is a strategic blunder.

The Palestinian Factor

For decades Israel and the ‘whole’ Arab world were blood enemies.  Arab league members provided over $250 Million in funds to support the Palestinians since the ‘60s, and successfully organized an embargo with their oil supplies in the 1970’s to place pressure on Israel (and its allies: US and Europe).

But, in 1990, there was a tidal shift in alliances. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Yasser Arafat (then PLO Chairman) came out and publicly supported Hussein; and Kuwait’s Palestinian population rose in support of the Iraqis during the invasion.  And not long after the U.S. led liberation, the Kuwaitis expelled 450,000 Palestinians.  The Palestinian population in these booming Persian “Gulf Arab” states has now dwindled by about 90% since 1990, replaced by Pakistanis and Filipinos.

Kuwait’s allies: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and other Persian Gulf Monarchs or Sheikhdoms or dictators (depending on your point of view) have rationalized that Palestinians were and still are a national security risk and should not be trusted – nor supported.

Payback against Saddam Hussein did not take long. Ironically, Saddam Hussein who was once supported to the tune of billions of dollars by these same states in his war with Iran was also in their cross hairs. And within a decade, or so the U.S. stationed itself in Qatar, and transported troops through Kuwait to decimate his regime. Hussein had not only failed to follow to destroy Iran, but had turned against them!

In politics it seems – the enemy of my enemy is my friend!  In fact, the opening with Israel came on the heels of the Madrid Conference in 1991 that contributed to the countries’ official, rapprochement with Israel. Most of the ‘brokerage’ in these relationships has developed through close relations with Jewish organizations in the United States. There is now an odd sense of solidarity arising out of the knowledge that Iraqi Scud missiles had fallen on both Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

In 1994, the GCC canceled its boycott of companies and countries that maintained economic ties with Israel. In 2005 the same Gulf States announced normalization measures with Israel. The Bahraini foreign minister confirmed that his country had decided to cancel the boycott of Israeli goods, and the Qatari foreign minister called on Arab nations “to respond positively to the step taken by Israel.” He noted that “full diplomatic relations between Qatar and Israel may be possible even before a comprehensive Israeli withdrawal from the territories.”

And while this decade long strategic shift was occurring, the British government sold its stake in BP basically to a combination of Jewish Bankers (Rothschilds Holdings 39%) and Gulf State Investment Organizations like for example the Kuwait Investment Organization  (21.6% by 2005). BP now, is basically an arm of these states, while employing and banking primarily British executives and banks.

And Israel’s government, for its part is enabling Israeli companies to indirectly contribute to the security of these dictatorships through training of local armed forces and by offering advanced (homeland security-related) advanced products, as long as they are perceived not to harm Israel’s strategic competitive advantage. Israel already has access to markets in the Gulf; the boycott is not applied if the products do not carry an Israeli label.

Israel’s covert relations with the United Arab Emirates were partially exposed by the late-November 2010 leak of diplomatic cables by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks that uncovered the “secret and persistent dialogue” between the two countries.

There are numerous formal and informal visits between the nations (and with Turkey among the crowd). Whether or not there are formal relations, i.e. embassies, it’s very clear that there is a strong alliance in place. Israelis and Sheikhdoms are ONE.

The Iran Factor

Iran’s Mullahs have long been an adversary to these Arab dictators. It is not clear why? It is true that Shiites comprise the majority of the populations in most of this region – including Saudi Arabia’s oil rich Eastern provinces. Democratic reforms, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain …you name it…would result in Shiite led majorities, just like Iraq. There is real fear in these ruling Arab elites when it comes to ‘democratic reforms’.  But what exactly the Mullahs did to deserve this status is unclear? Yes, Iran did bomb Kuwaiti tankers – but that was during the war when Kuwait was exporting Iraqi oil…and Iraq had just bombed Iranian oil installations. And okay, there is a territorial dispute over islands in the Persian Gulf. So what??

What is strange for me is that there is frequent intermarriage, migration, bilingualism, and commerce between Iranians and many of these GCC states and citizens. Indeed besides the indigenous Shiite populations in the states around the Persian Gulf, there are over 400,000 Iranians residing in places like Dubai, roughly one third of its urban population…performing core functions in the area. Iranians, (the people of Iran), are a huge regional asset.

Despite all this, in recent years what has tied the Gulf states to Israel more than anything else is their ever-growing mutual fear of Iran. Israel today, represents the enemy of not only the Palestinians but also Iran’s Mullahs. An alliance between these “(Persian) Gulf Arab” states and Israel has been established with a clear objective of undermining Iranian influence and “suppressing” Palestinian ambitions.

According to Wikileaks published US State Department cable, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, repeatedly implored Washington to target the Iranian nuclear sites—in his words: to “cut off the head of the snake while there was still time.”

It is an open secret that these Gulf countries maintain contacts with Israel—mainly through the sharing of intelligence. In the summer of 2010 it was again reported (although the reliability of these claims is uncertain) that Saudi Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs V : 1 (2011)   Arabia would allow Israeli warplanes to use its airspace in the event of an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. Israeli military gear was even delivered to Saudi Arabia in preparation for an eventual attack on Iran.

Sami al Faraj, president of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies and a consultant to Kuwait and other GCC states, said recently that the “GCC states have been engaged in consultations and intelligence exchange with Israel, particularly regarding the Iranian threat.” Indeed, in the eyes of Arab rulers of the Gulf, it may seem that Israel can be vital to Gulf security, as the US is now leaving Iraq and Afghanistan.

Containing Iran’s quest for what is viewed as a ‘hegemonic role’ in the Persian Gulf is the main concern of the Arab monarchies, committed as they are to the preservation of their regimes. After the Islamic Revolution, terror and subversion became Tehran’s primary means of enforcing its regional policy and boosting its influence. In most cases, as with the covert Iranian “sleeper cell” uncovered in Kuwait (with links to Bahrain) in April 2010, it was hard to prove Iranian involvement; thus, Iran can deny any connection to such activity, while maintaining open diplomatic relations with the Gulf states it is covertly targeting.

On the one hand, the Mullahs have conveyed that they see themselves as partners for all Gulf States. On the other, their actions have been hardly reassuring on the western side of the Gulf. Iran has questioned the legitimacy of regimes, explicitly threatened to shut the straits of Hormuz, and to target strategic facilities in the Gulf States. It has conducted ominous military maneuvers and played a negative role in events in Iraq and Yemen. Moreover, Iran has occupied what the GCC consider to be their land (Abu Musa and the Tunb Islands). The Mullahs even went so far as to declare Bahrain as the fourteenth district of Iran (reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s rhetoric regarding Kuwait).

For their part, the GCC governments recognize the difficulties facing the international community in stopping Iran on its way to nuclear weapons capability and want to avoid angering their increasingly powerful neighbor—and prefer to do what is necessary behind the scenes – indirectly if you will. Netenyahu’s brazen verbal attack on Iran is heralded by its ‘tacit allies’ and further amplified on Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV throughout the Middle East during peak viewing periods.

There is a genuine concern that an Iranian bomb will enable the Mullahs to set the future political, economic, and strategic agenda in the region. Similar concerns stem from the possible outcome of an Israeli and/or American military operation aimed at thwarting Iran’s nuclear capability, namely, a massive and widespread Iranian retaliation. Although GCC countries support a ‘comprehensive’ diplomatic solution to the crisis with Iran, they fear it will be at the expense of their interests and result in American recognition of Iran’s dominance in the Gulf.

Today’s Proxy Wars

In the absence of an overt war, Israel and its Arab allies have decided to fight Iran’s mullahs by proxy. The overall plan is to ‘contain’ Iran – i.e. surround Iran while ensuring Iran’s economy is held back with sanctioning. This is a systematic policy of weakening Iran and sucking Iranian blood. Meanwhile, of course they (and their surrogates) are running off with Iran’s treasure in the Caspian Sea and limiting Iranian oil and gas exports in favor of their own exports. In addition, sanctions have served to enable GCC countries to act as trading points for ‘sanction busting’ – reselling sanctioned goods to Iran at inflated prices and essentially profiting from Iran’s demise.

Interestingly, Israel and GCC states enjoy excellent relations with Azerbaijan. And BP, their joint prime investment vehicle, owns (and operates) the key oil pipeline across Azerbaijan and is the major operator of oil and gas platforms in the Caspian Sea (in what is actually Iranian water).

It is reported that Israel has a number of air bases inside Azerbaijan, with fighter jets ready for orders to attack Iran at any time. Azerbaijan now also is tacitly supporting Azeri separatists inside Iran.

GCC states have begun funding Al-Ahwazi separatists and Jundallah (Baluchi) separatists. While Israel too, has been funding Kurdish separatists.

But the clearest expression of this proxy effort is in Syria. I will grant you that the Syrian affair is much more than a proxy fight with Iran. Yes, both Israel and GCC states (like Qatar) have a clear objective of running major gas pipelines across Syria (and Lebanon too) to the Turkey to export their newly discovered resources. And yes, Turkey too has partnered with them and built the Nabucco pipeline to Europe with 40% excess capacity with this objective in mind.

What apparently started as a legitimate attempt to join the Arab spring and fight for democratic rights in Syria has transpired into a mercenary led ‘civil war’, with considerable entry of ‘foreign fighters’ in the fray. The Syrian government recently handed a list of names of citizens from 19 countries accused of joining Syria’s rebels: Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Chad, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, Yemen and Chechnya. Since Chechnya is not a country, but a republic of the Russian Federation, the list likely contains names of Russian citizens…too. According to CNN reports, the strangest part of all of these fighters is that Jabhat al-Nusra — the radical Islamic group that has become the opposition’s best fighting force. The lead author of a new analysis of the group, which is backed by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), told CNN that al-Nusra now has 5,000 fighters and is willing to watch Syria burn to secure an al-Qaeda foothold in the region!

In July, Dutch photo journalist Jeroen Oerlemans and British photographer John Cantlie were captured and held hostage in Syria for a week by rebel militants. They claimed that several of their captors spoke English with recognizable regional British accents, like Birmingham and London. And in August, Syrian rebel commanders reportedly became concerned over the numbers of hardline Islamists entering Syria from other Muslim-majority countries.

Beyond these proxy wars, there is clear indication that a direct war may in fact be in the cards. This past year, both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have opened new pipelines bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.  The new links more than double the total pipeline capacity bypassing the strait to 6.5m barrels a day, or about 40 per cent of the 17m b/d that transits Hormuz. GCC states are clearly preparing for a conflict, although their preparations are NOT yet complete. Interestingly, Iraq too has a pipeline across Saudi Arabia to al Muajiz on the Red Sea to deliver its oil and by pass the Persian Gulf. One fascinating fact is that Saudi Arabia’s Al Muajiz Port on the Red Sea was developed for a total shipping capacity of 10 Million barrels a day!

A Major Strategic Blunder

The problem with this complete strategic realignment is that core populations of these GCC states are inherently pan-Arabist. Which means that once the ‘people’ of these states figure out that there is an ‘overt’ realignment between their leaders and Israel, there is the potential for a massive back-clash domestically. This could be further fueled by natural ‘Arab Spring” type democratic yearnings among the populations of these GCC states – and not only might there be a massive shift in government in the GCC states, but Israel too risks losing partners that it has invested heavily in.

Secondly, an overt war with Iran would only accelerate the demise of these regimes – not sustain them. The deal so far with their suppressed populations has been to exchange economic gains for political gains. If war breaks out there will naturally be rationing and military drafts. This sort of instability will only make them further vulnerable.

Thirdly, I believe a calculation that makes Iran their enemy is fundamentally flawed. The Mullahs in Tehran do not represent Iran or Iranians. In fact the Mullahs in Iran are enemies of Iranians too. In fact most Iranians see the Mullahs as ‘Arabs’ i.e. imposed on Iran; and indeed many senior regime leaders were born in Iraq – not even Iran.

These sheikhs need to remember that Iran’s current role in the region is a derivative of wars ‘started’ by GCC states – not Iranian aggression.  Remember, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran – with support, encouragement and financial backing from GCC states. The minutes of his meetings with King Fahd in Egypt is now public record. The loan balances Iraq had to GCC states is also public record that came out as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. You can’t hide it. And any insecurity these monarchs feel from the legitimate demands of their populations should NOT be confused with Iranian meddling.  Iranians have become a scapegoat – when the real problems are elsewhere. Iranians did NOT put the Mullahs in power – the West did. That is public record too.

Fourthly, Iran (especially after the war with Iraq and two neighboring wars) has now developed a formidable defense establishment, and its own (in house) weapon systems. This strategic posture cold provoke an outright war, and just like the war with Iraq – there is a real possibility that the GCC states could come out on the short end of their own stick. After two years of a proxy war versus Iran in Syria, there is no clear conclusion. Assad remains in power. The joint Israeli/GCC/Turkey plan is to then extend the war to Lebanon and then Iran. But what if the GCC states get ‘stuck’ in Syria? Have they succeeded? Will the west come to the rescue again? Or let’s put it another way, is there a vital strategic interest in Syria that the U.S. must defend? Will the U.S. risk bankruptcy for Syria? I doubt it.

The truth is, that while this all seemed like a good idea (and everyone was angry at Saddam Hussein the Palestinians) it may not be a great idea today. Once one domino starts to fall through a public uprising for democracy – with ‘no’ push from Iran (May I add, there are many radical actors in the Middle East – Hamas, Hizbullah, al Qaeda, you name it…) – in any single one of these GCC countries, all these Sheikhs, or Monarchs or Dictators could all fall. This is something they need to learn from the former “Shah of Iran” – who had grandiose strategic ideas but did not establish a strong domestic political infrastructure that was vitally necessary to carry out his ambitions.  The Sheikhs need to understand that they can do NOTHING without the heartfelt support of their citizens.

These GCC countries need to understand what their core strategic interest is. Does Iran represent a strategic threat? If so, why? And does that mean that GCC states need to align with Israel?

I would argue that it is in the “world’s” national interest to topple the regime in Iran – but not do anything to alienate the people of Iran or cause division among Iranians. That to the extent GCC states can be aligned with Israel or indeed any other country (Indonesia, Brazil etc.) to topple the regime in Tehran – that this would a fundamental strategic win for everyone. But beyond that any permanent alliance with Israel will be counterproductive to their interests and stability. This is not meant as a negative statement about Israel, it’s just a strategic reality. Israel has nothing to offer these regimes except exposure to radical forces. (Look at who they are partnering with in Syria?) And in fact Qatar could have pumped its natural gas across Syria – even without a proxy war in Syria or the balkanization of Syria, or the death of 60,000 Syrians. When the dust settles on all this, it will not be pretty. There were other ways to bring democracy to Syria without arming these sorts of rebels and radicals.

In fact, the most vital strategic ally every GCC state can have is a transformed Iranian government – their neighbor – that can police the neighborhood with them and help them make democratic transitions without a great deal of pain. Petty fights over small deserted islands, or sectarian considerations should not distract quality strategic thinking. Iran can offer them a huge market, can offer them regional stability, and also access to even bigger markets in Central Asia. Israel on the other hand is a strategic liability. So what if the Jewish lobby in Europe or the U.S. is helping them get access to cable TV distribution, and helping them buy soccer (football) teams – how is that of value to the people (the actual citizens) of GCC states? The Sheikhs are being shaked down for cash, buying over-priced assets.  There is no real strategic, sustainable gain in getting VIP seats to major games.

It is true that before the West toppled the Shah, Britain persuaded America to align strategically with it and invest in Alaskan Oil while Britain exploited North Sea oil – both of which were expensive to extract, AND needed sustained high oil prices. Toppling the Shah also meant shutting off Iran’s exports for over 10 years! Today, America is being ‘pushed’ into becoming an energy ‘power house’ with net energy exports for the first time in over 30 years. But it is a mistake to believe that this will result in a strategic realignment. The Obama administration so far has refused to ‘play’ in Syria in concert with Israel, Turkey or the GCC. And the Obama administration is focused on ‘reducing imports’ NOT maximizing exports i.e. reducing America’s oil dependency. The GCC is mistaken if they believe “Saudi-Americanization” will shift U.S. policy. And if the GCC are really shrewd, they will notice that in fact the U.S. has been protecting Iran’s Mullahs – not undermining them…and vice-a-versa. Iran today lists Iraq and Afghanistan as major export clients (both dominated by the U.S. military, while apparently there are global sanctions on Iran). The Mullahs are an expression of U.S. foreign policy.

What do these Sheikhs really have to show for all the money they have invested in the West? Indeed, governments in the West view them as great candidates for hosing, and use all these opportunities to sell the Sheikhs billions of dollars of inflated priced arms – and junk government bonds to undermine their own domestic spending. They are being hosed. They are the ones being used…by Israel and the West!

And they have to face it, democratic yearnings in the region are unstoppable. The Mullahs will fall, and their dictatorships are at risk (and it is not because of Iran). These dictators can become Monarchs like the Queen of England – even if there are a ton of Catholics in Britain!

There is a better path to peace, stability and prosperity – they need to see it – but their strategic calculations are completely wrong.

Turkey vs Iraq–We Are Witnessing the Next Regional War Setting-Up In The Middle East

[Obama and all previous American presidents like to lead, until plans go sour, then it becomes advantageous to let our underlings take the heat for us.  We are now letting Turkey "take one for the team" all over the Middle East and in parts of Central Asia, as they become the focal point for the anti-Iranian ambitions of the Gulf/Israeli coalition, who carry the ball for Western interests in the Mideast.  The Sunni Gulf States help provide the black ops financing to the Saudi Islamist project (otherwise known as "al-Qaeda"), which supplies the foot soldiers for Israel's terrorist operations throughout the Muslim world.  The Mossad, helps the CIA and the Pentagon to locate and acquire the weapons needed by this Sunni "Islamist" army, which facilitates CIA plans for a regional war, stretching from Central Africa into Pakistan.  In both Iraq and in Syria, Turkey is fully prepared to accept global oppobrium for having led the charge straight into a grand civil war within Islam itself. 

opprobrium \uh-PRO-bree-uhm\ , noun:
1. Disgrace; infamy; reproach mingled with contempt.
2. A cause or object of reproach or disgrace.

Perhaps the saddest part of this grand tragedy is that the tragic civil war unfolding in Iraq was always part of a cleverly crafted plan, a plan designed to amplify the great conflict within Islam, the never-ending argument between the Sunni and Shia faiths.  One side teaches that the Quran's authority and the mantle of The Prophet (PBUH) rests upon the actual bloodline of Mohammad (PBUH), the Shia opinion, the other side teaches that the Muslim elite should choose the most popular scholar of the Quran (Sunni).  The Sunnis even elevate the teachings of these Islamic scholars to a level of prominence equal to that of the Sacred Book itself. 

The American/British/Israeli "Zionist" plan to throw all of our weight behind the Sunnis in this conflict (intending to force a violent resolution of the issue) is obviously immoral, thus necessitating the American need for cover, whenever this ugly fact threatens to be revealed, that Christian/Judaic powers are waging a covert "Crusade" against Islam.  This Judeo-Christian Crusade to destroy Islam would never have been possible without the Sunni collaborators from the Middle East who have actually executed the plan.  Turkey stands at the top of this long list of Islamic traitor nations, who have collaborated intimately with the West to destroy the faith of 1.3 billion Muslims.  As long as the great Muslim majority can be kept in the dark about the Arab/Israeli union at the center of this Crusade they can be expected to allow all of this to continue indefinitely, enabling Turkey to escape that well-deserved popular revulsion for its acts of treachery.]

Saadun al-Dulaimi: Turkey controls Sunni protests against Maliki

BAGHDAD – Acting Defence Minister Saadun al-Dulaimi on Sunday accused Turkey of controlling Sunni anti-government protests in Iraq, saying the demonstrations are a haven for “terrorists and killers.”

“There are foreign agendas controlling these sites,” Dulaimi said of the protests.

“It is like Anbar, or Mosul or Samarra are part of the Ottoman Empire,” he said, referring to Sunni areas in Iraq.

Areas of what is now Iraq were part of the Ottoman Empire, which was governed from Istanbul in what is now Turkey, before the empire’s dissolution after World War I.

Ties between Baghdad and Ankara have been strained by issues including Turkey hosting Tareq al-Hashemi, Iraq’s fugitive former vice president who has been sentenced to death on charges including murder.

Dulaimi also had harsh words for the protesters themselves.

“Shame… on those sites that are opening their doors to Istanbul or any other country,” he said.

“Protest sites have become a safe haven for terrorists and killers and those who call for strife, sectarianism and hate.”

The protests broke out in Sunni areas of Shiite-majority Iraq more than four months ago.

Demonstrators have called for the resignation of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite, and criticised authorities for allegedly targeting their community with wrongful detentions and accusations of involvement in terrorism.

On April 23, security forces moved on protesters near the town of Hawijah in Kirkuk province, sparking clashes that killed 53 people.

Dozens more died in subsequent unrest that included revenge attacks targeting security forces, raising fears of a return to the all-out sectarian conflict that claimed tens of thousands of lives between 2006 and 2008.

 

 

Irregular Army –the Poisonous Legacy of Donald Rumsfeld’s Privatization Plans

Irregular Army: A Conversation With Matt Kennard

Michael Busch, Lecturer, Departments of Political Science and International Studies, The City College of New York

This past March marked the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a decade of fighting, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, destroyed an entire country, and destabilized the broader Middle East. As journalist Matt Kennard argues in his new book, Irregular Army, the war in Iraq — as well as that in Afghanistan — also had deleterious consequences for the U.S. military itself. Faced with declining enlistment numbers as fighting dragged on year after year with no clear end in sight, Kennard shows that the American armed forces looked for alternatives to populate its ranks. In the process, regulations were weakened, rewritten and in some cases, not enforced.

The results are disturbing. According to Kennard, the military was suddenly tolerating the open presence of white power extremists and street gang members in the rolls, and actively recruiting physically and psychologically unfit Americans to fill enlistment gaps. While evidence suggests that these lax recruitment standards have already resulted in death and murder on the battlefield, the consequences could prove equally upsetting here at home. If the Sikh temple massacre is any indication of what may be in store, Kennard’s argument that the United States faces an uncertain future as these veterans return from home from war couldn’t be more urgent.

I recently spoke with Kennard about his research into these issues, how government brass has responded to these threats to the integrity of its armed forces, and what the irregular American army might mean for Americans in the years to come.

The 10th anniversary of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq just passed this week. Give us a sense of how the American military has changed in the last decade, and what it looks like today.

What happened to the American military, and I’m not the only one to point this out, during the War on Terror and up to this day constitutes in some ways the biggest change the American military has ever gone through, at least since the beginning of the 20th century. What was implemented during the War on Terror was a massive restructuring of the Pentagon under the aegis of Donald Rumsfeld, who had this plan to eviscerate the civilian U.S. military and replace it with private contractors. This has come to be called “transformation” in specialist circles. He made this famous speech the day before 9/11 where he said that he wanted to “modernize” the military, corporate speak for privatization of the military. “We have to update our enlistment techniques, our training techniques,” and the like. Under all the rhetoric was a plan to really scale down the Department of Defense, and replace it with companies like Blackwater and other groups.

There was also a strategic shift that was part of this transformation that recognized that as the cold war wound down the United States no longer needed large land armies. Many of the so-called neo-conservatives had grown apoplectic during the 1990s with Clinton’s “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo, and earlier Somalia. They believed that the U.S. military should be used only to secure U.S. national interests, without even the patina of altruism. (Ironically, of course, Clinton’s wars were not the beneficent operations that the neocons made out.) The new threats facing the United States were asymmetrical, they were no longer state-based in nature but came instead from non-state terrorist groups.

Anyway, there were significant disagreements with this new proposed posture. Colin Powell, who had previously been the highest ranking officer in the military, argued that Washington needed to maintain a serious, large land army that could be deployed quickly in the case of emergency. In the end, Rumsfeld won out and the invasion of Iraq happened with many less troops than Powell and Eric Shinseki, chief of staff the army at the time, wanted.

Eventually, after Iraq failed to go as planned, Powell and Shinseki were proved right — that the American army really couldn’t just go into a place like Iraq, smash the place up, and then get out within a couple of years. They were in a quagmire there, and this was shown to be the case again in Afghanistan. As the wars got worse over time, and in the absence of conscription, the military found itself needing more and more personnel — precisely the opposite of what Donald Rumsfeld had wanted or foreseen. In order to do this, to pump up its numbers, the military began to change its regulations. They did this with some groups quite openly. For example, they raised the ceiling age for enlistment, from 35 to 40, and then again to 42, because they didn’t get the numbers they needed the first time.

The stuff that I looked into were the groups that the military was a little more embarrassed about — from white supremacists to street gang members to criminals. For some reason, I’m the only journalist who’s done serious work on the presence of gangs and neo-Nazis in the American military. There’s been quite a lot of work done on criminals in the army. Henry Waxman investigated the presence of serious criminals in the military, and prized important information from the Pentagon that they had been trying to hide. Over the last 10 years, you’ve seen a complete realignment of who can qualify as a soldier in the United States military.

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of the military adventures of the United States, but everyone knows that the standards in the U.S. military were always quite high. This was especially the case after Vietnam — 25 years were spent basically rejigging the military so that the standards were high. During the War on Terror, all of this was completely jettisoned. So what we have now is a military that is not held up as an exemplar of professionalism around the world, but as an example of what happens to a military when there aren’t enough troops and the government is too scared to institute conscription.

There are questions, of course, about how this will play out moving forward. Take the Libya intervention by NATO, for example: the whole debate was rehashed again. Barack Obama and his Defense Secretary Robert Gates actually endorsed the Rumsfeldian idea that the United States needed to slim down, while George Casey, the chief of staff of the Army, warned against “hollowing out” the U.S. military. If some state-based enemy rises again and the U.S. military has to deal with it, you’ll probably see the exact same issues crop up once more. And in fact, if you look into it, you’ll find that many of the standards haven’t been restored to their former levels even though recruiting quality troops has gotten easier with the current economic crisis. The military is unrecognizable now from what it was when the War on Terror started. And that’s not a mistake. It’s basically become exactly how Rumsfeld envisioned it: a hallowed out military replaced by private contractors working alongside special forces. Jeremy Scahill’s new book, Dirty Wars, documents how JSOC, assorted elite units are now carrying out many of the tasks that were previously the responsibility of the American military, often with “black budgets” out of sight of Congress and U.S. citizens. Everyone says that the war on Iraq was a massive personal failure for Rumsfeld, but in fact, in many ways, his vision has won out.

The most disturbing finding of your research is the extent to which white power extremists have penetrated the United States military, something which first came to light as far back as the mid-1970s. How do they get in? What happens when they get discovered? What have been the most immediate consequences of their presence in war zones?

It is important to note that there are a raft of regulations that govern the presence of white supremacists, both during the recruitment phase, and then afterwards if they are discovered within the ranks. But the trouble with these regulations is that they’ve always been reactive. So you have cases where white supremacist cells have been exposed on different bases, dating back to the 1970s. And every time this happens, whether that is a neo-Nazi killing another soldier, or killing someone in a nearby town to a base, every time there is a short-term outpouring of anger, the military responds by saying that they have tightened regulations. The first time something like this happened, in 1976, the military said being in a white supremacist organization was inconsistent with service. That can be interpreted any way you want. To my mind, the ambiguity related to the regulation of white supremacists is deliberate, i.e., the military doesn’t want these people in the military, but in times when they can’t afford to kick troops out, the regulations allow them enough leeway to ignore it, or have enough plausible deniability, to leave these people in.

During the War on Terror, regulations were not adhered at all. So, for example, you had people who were able to get into the military with swastikas tattooed on their skin. I spoke with the head of recruitment for the United States army about this, he said, “well, there’s first amendment rights.” If someone says they like the way swastikas look, or claim that they are Indian symbols which look very similar, then the commander can basically blow it off. So, there are regulations on tattoos — which are frequently the best indicators for recruiters of extremism — that were broadly ignored.

And then you had the other side, when these people are discovered after they are already in, there are other regulations to deal with that. So, if you are caught posting messages on websites like StormFront, or writing racist messages on places like the New Saxon, a sort of neo-Nazi Facebook, you can be disciplined, and maybe even kicked out of the military altogether. But that didn’t happen, either. In fact, I received reports from the Criminal Investigative Command (CID), which is the criminal investigative arm of the Army, about what happened to white supremacists when they were caught. Some of it is really shocking. In one instance, a soldier passed a military explosives manual to the leader of a white supremacist group. In the report I received from the CID, the military terminated the investigation because the soldier in question had been shipped off to Iraq. This is somebody who may have been planning a domestic terrorist attack! Jaw-dropping.

There are obviously first amendment rights. But if you are training, equipping and then sending white supremacists to a country of brown people, I think that really does trump first amendment rights. I focus on the War on Terror, but there is also the case of Michael Wade Page, who carried out the Sikh Temple Massacre last August. He was serving in the 1990s, a period during which there was supposedly a harsh crackdown on white supremacists in the military, by the military, following the Oklahoma City bombing. Well, Stars and Stripes interviewed friends of Page, who told the paper that he was completely open about his Neo-Nazism while in the Army.

But it’s not just white power groups that are populating the military. Other gangs have also colonized the American armed forces. Can you talk about what other gang activity exists within the military?

It’s tempting to focus on the problem of white supremacists in the military when thinking about undesirable elements in the armed forces. It makes sense — these people often have goals which are terrorist goals. They want to kill people to further the cause of racial holy war. But in terms of numbers, and everyday violence, the street gangs problem in the military is much more serious. I have spoken with security experts who estimate that up to 10 percent of the American military is made up of gang-affiliated troops.

During the height of the War on Terror, we saw it all along the border, where active duty soldiers carried out the murders of other soldiers, not to mention of the enemies of local drug traffickers nearby to the bases. Gangs see the military as a good way to traffic drugs — when soldiers are on a base, they are not subject to the same rigorous law enforcement as you are when you are civilian. Cartels look to recruit soldiers who are on bases, or recruit soldiers especially those stationed at Fort Bliss and Fort Hood, both in Texas and hotbeds of this kind of activity.

We’ve seen evidence of this up to this day. Recently, there was a case in which the DEA carried out a sting operation on a group of soldiers. DEA officers posed as a representative of a Mexican drug cartel, and offered the soldiers money in return for carrying out hits against rival factions. The soldiers agreed. The DEA knew this was a good tack to take, because they’re very aware that trafficking groups are in constant contact with active duty personnel.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on, you show that the military increasingly focused on recruiting kids and older adults to serve in the armed forces. How did they go about doing this, and what have been the consequences?

The most serious consequences have been the number of people who have died. I focus on older people and the young in my book. The military has regulation on the issue of age. It used to be that no one over the age of 35 could be recruited into the military. That changed during the War on Terror when the age was raised, first to 40 and then to 42 years of age, because they were struggling to find troops. That regulation wasn’t arbitrary. When soldiers are older than 35, they face higher risks on the battlefield related to psychology and physical fitness. I discuss a couple of soldiers in the book who died during their service, likely as a result of their relatively advanced age. For example, Staff Sergeant William Chaney, a Vietnam War died of a blood clot aged 59 during Operation Iraqi Freedom, after surgery for a medical condition and appendix problem that had necessitated his evacuation from Iraq. Another soldier, Steven Hutchison, who was a veteran of Vietnam and had experienced the Tet Offensive — died in an IED attack in Iraq after being recruited on the “retiree recall” program. He was killed a month shy of his 61st birthday. So that’s the most serious consequence — people have died as a result of these changes.

The other consequence has to do with the moral issue of colonizing the high schools of America. It’s not well-known about, but No Child Left Behind Act — which was passed with great bipartisan fanfare in 2001 — has a small caveat which mandates that schools turn over the phone numbers and addresses of all their students to military recruiters or face funding cuts if they refused. At first, this wasn’t used much because the War on Terror hadn’t yet started. But when troop deficits became a chronic issue, it began to be used all the time. Recruiters spent a decade terrorizing high school students — cold calling them, turning up at their houses, turning up at their schools — trying to persuade them to go to war.

There was one famous case where a high school student recorded a recruiter telling him that his life would be finished if he exited the Delayed Enlistment Program (DEP). Under the DEP, students can sign up for the military while still in high school — basically promising to join the military upon graduation. But it is not binding. But many students aren’t told it isn’t binding. In this case, the student recorded the recruiter telling him that if he failed to honor the DEP, he wouldn’t be able to get loans for college, wouldn’t ever be able to find a job, and the like. It didn’t work on this one kid, because he was smart and decided to record his conversations with the recruiter. But you can imagine how often these sorts of tactics, and this kind of manipulation, do work on young people. And you can imagine how many of these young people were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, and in all likelihood some of them have died. In combination, then, these two sides of the age issue highlight an overriding moral issue, and that is the fact that tons of people who should have never been sent to war, were — many to their deaths.

You suggest that the full consequences of the irregular army cobbled together by the United States haven’t yet been fully realized. Are we in for an irregular future? If so, how?

In my opinion, the War on Terror — which was fought mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in other places as well — is now coming home. All of the extremists that the Pentagon allowed into the military during the War on Terror are coming back to the United States, and not to become priests. These people have their own goals, and they will spend the next decade or two attempting to bring these goals forward. We see this in smaller scale following the first Gulf War. Take the Oklahoma City bombing, which took place a few years after the United States withdrew from Iraq the first time. These things have a fairly long incubation period. My sense is that because the military has trained so many crazy people in advanced weaponry and tactics over the past ten years, there will be cases — hopefully not as serious as the Oklahoma City bombing — like the Sikh Temple Massacre, cases where the violence of disgruntled veterans with a racial bone to pick, or any other really, will be taken out on random civilians.

We are seeing that slowly. Recently, there was a case in which a group of soldiers had formed their own militia at Fort Stewart in Georgia and were planning to assassinate President Obama and poison Washington State’s apple crop. According to prosecutors the soldiers had spent nearly $90,000 on guns and bomb components. Thankfully, this plan was busted, but we have to ask ourselves: how many similar cells like this are in the United States, and how long will it take for us to see them act out their fantasies? I’m not particularly optimistic about the future on this front. There’s another point that must be made, as well. It is sometimes said that a country’s military is a reflection of the population from which it is drawn. Many problems we witnessed in military during the War on Terror were reflections of a society that was changing under the stress of fear that was inflicted on the American population. We can point to the rising numbers of convicted felons allowed into the military, but that was merely a reflection of the increasing number of people being locked up across the country. We can point to the increasing numbers of overweight soldiers allowed to serve in the military, but again, this is just a reflection of an increasingly obese American society. So in a sense, many of the troubles experienced by the U.S. military right now are a reflection of a society which is going backwards in key respects, not forwards. Hopefully this will change. But there are very few indicators right now to suggest this is likely to happen.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-busch/irregular-army-book_b_3135051.html?utm_hp_ref=books

THATCHER (AND REAGAN) GOT IT ALL WRONG

[SEE: The Supply-Side Fraud: Republican Economics Don’t Work ]

THATCHER GOT IT ALL WRONG

AANGIRFAN

Bill Roache (left) has been arrested on suspicion of raping a young girl in 1967. Thatcher, on the right, always seemed to be surrounded by alleged child abusers.

In May 2013, Margaret Thatcher’s party, the Conservatives, performed rather badly in local elections.

The Thatcher funeral, in April 2013, reminded lots of voters that Thatcher got it all wrong, especially on the economy.

Thatcher with Conservative Member of Parliament Nigel Evans who has just been arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting two teenage males. Deputy Speaker Arrested On Suspicion Of Rape

Oxford historian David Priestland recently wrote about Thatcher:

History Magazine

“Since 2008, it has become increasingly evident that she did not lay the foundations for a prosperous Britain…

“It was only in 2008 that the true economic state of affairs became evident : the model built by Thatcher was being sustained by debt.”

Thatcher. (Geoffrey White / Daily Mail / Rex Features)

David Priestland, referring to the economic problems of the 1970s, writes:

“Some governments – like the Germans and the Swedish – sought to create a social consensus behind a programme of gradual restructuring…

“But Thatcher, like her fellow militant Ronald Reagan, … accelerated … the ‘deindustrial revolution’.”

Thatcher and Reagan.

Britain’s growth rate in the 1960s, before Thatcher, averaged well over 3%, in spite of strikes.

The average growth rate between 1979 and 1990, under Thatcher, was well below 3%, and, according to Priestland: “would probably have been lower without the North Sea oil windfall.”

Thatcher

Because of high unemployment under Thatcher, productivity rose temporarily.

But, in Germany, productivity rose more than twice as much, and they didn’t have the high unemployment!

Child abuser Savile was invited to stay with Thatcher many Christmases in a row. 

Historian Dominic Sandbrook writes of Thatcher:

History Magazine

“She promised to restore law and order, yet she presided over the worst riots Britain has ever seen.

Thatcher’s gay friend DEREK LAUD

“She talked of bringing back Victorian values, yet her decade in office saw divorce, abortion and illegitimacy reach unprecedented heights…

“She unleashed casino capitalism…”

“Public spending actually rose in all but two of her years in office.”

Austerity is not necessarily the answer when an economy is in touble.

Howe and Thatcher

“In late 1979, Thatcher’s economic minister Sir Geoffrey Howe told Thatcher that inflation was unlikely to fall below about 15 per cent.

“What actually happened in 1979-1981 was that the monetary targets were always overshot and inflation raced away regardless.

“The most obvious effect of the high interest rates that were supposed to tame M3 was, instead, to push up the sterling exchange rate, pricing British manufacturing exports out of world markets.”

Sir Geoffrey Howe then introduced a policy of severe austerity.

http://www.ft.com/

Alleged child abuser Sir Peter Morrison (left) was Thatcher’s closest aide.

Economists Paul de Grauwe and Yuemei Ji have pointed out that Eurozone countries that have introduced the most severe austerity since 2010 have experienced the largest falls in GDP and hence the greatest increases in debt to GDP ratios.

Panic-driven austerity in the Eurozone and its implications | vox

THATCHER’S FATHER LIKE JIMMY SAVILE?…

The Thatcher government pocketed “one-off gains from the sale of public assets as current income.

“Together with the tax receipts from North Sea oil (again a temporary bonanza), this pushed the budget briefly into surplus at the peak of the boom under chancellor Nigel Lawson in the late 1980s.

“After the resignation of Lawson in 1989, and of Thatcher a year later, later chancellors were left to repair their financial legacy.”

Mexico Removes the American Abscess from Its Law Enforcement Operations

[SEE: Mexicans raise questions over CIA role in drug war]

Mexico ends open access for US security agencies

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexico is ending its unprecedented open relationship with U.S. security agencies that developed in recent years to fight drug trafficking and organized crime.

All contact for U.S. law enforcement will now go through “a single window,” the federal Interior Ministry, the agency that controls security and domestic policy, said Sergio Alcocer, deputy foreign secretary for North American affairs.

Alcocer confirmed the change to The Associated Press on Monday, three days before U.S. President Barack Obama visits for his first bilateral meeting with his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Pena Nieto, who took office Dec. 1.

The new policy is a dramatic shift from the direct sharing of resources and intelligence between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement under former President Felipe Calderon, who was lauded by the U.S. repeatedly for increasing cooperation between the two countries. FBI, CIA, DEA and border patrol agents had direct access to units of Mexico’s Federal Police, army and navy and worked closely with Mexican authorities in major offensives against drug cartels, including the U.S.-backed strategy of killing or arresting top kingpins.

Alcocer said the changes are in the interest of Mexico.

“The issue before is that there was a lack of coordination because there was not a single entity in the Mexican government that was coordinating all the efforts,” he told the AP in an interview. “Nobody knew what was going on.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies deferred comment to the State Department, which said it looks forward to “continued close cooperation.”

Security and the economy will be the top themes for the meeting between Obama and Pena Nieto on Thursday in Mexico City, as Mexico seeks to change its message from drug trafficking and violence to its emerging status as a world economic player.

Mexico says it will expand its bilateral agenda with the United States and change the security strategy to one emphasizing crime prevention.

“For us the security theme is one of our top priorities, but it’s not the only one,” Alcocer said. “The relationship has issues such as the economy and trade, advanced manufacturing, infrastructure, energy.”

Mexico and the U.S. share one of the world’s longest borders and a history of distrust, even as the two countries’ economies are intimately intertwined.

Relations opened up under Calderon, who took office in 2006 and waged a six-year offensive on organized crime. Some 70,000 people were killed in drug violence during his term, and at least 25,000 disappeared, according to government estimates.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press

Bhutto Prosecutor Murdered After Charging Musharraf with Murder–Military Blames “Militants”

["Zulfikar was probably a marked man because he had been prosecuting militants who were jailed in connection with Bhutto's death."--Reuters]

BB murder case prosecutor shot dead in Islamabad

The Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) special prosecutor in the Benazir Bhutto murder case Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali.—Photo by AFP

AFP

ISLAMABAD: Two unknown assailants on motorcycle killed The Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) special prosecutor in the Benazir Bhutto murder case Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali on Friday, DawnNews reported.

According to the police, state prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar was shot multiple times by gunmen in Islamabad’s G-9 area as he was driving to the next hearing in the murder case of the former prime minister, who was assassinated more than five years ago. Following the attack, he was taken to Islamabad’s main government-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) hospital in a severely injured condition where he succumbed to his injuries.

Doctors said he had been killed with ten bullets targeting his chest and shoulder.

Zulfiqar had been given extra government security last year after police investigators working on the Benazir Bhutto case received threats, which also named him.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the shooting.

“I cannot comment. I’m in a state of shock,” Zulfiqar’s deputy Azhar Chaudhry told AFP when asked to comment.

Moreover, the firing incident also killed a woman and injured Chaudhry Zulfiqar’s guard Rehman Ali when he lost control of his vehicle.

Later, Zulfiqar’s body was shifted to the hospital’s morgue and a medical team was being constituted to perform postmortem. Wasim Khawaja, spokesman for PIMS, confirmed that his bodyguard was out of danger.

Police subsequently cordoned off the site of incident and started a search operation in the area.

Rawalpindi and Islamabad High Court (IHC) Bar Association’s lawyers announced a strike in the wake of the attack.

Interior Minister Malik Habib Khan has also taken notice of the incident.

The US Government War Against the People–ALL People

[It is not often that I find myself in agreement with VA editor Gordon Duff, but in the following article from PressTV,  he nails the dire issues we face squarely on the head.  It really takes a military man to understand the criminal activity associated with his everyday job.  He understands that the Pentagon/CIA mission is no longer to "protect freedom," but to destroy all remaining human freedom.  This should be becoming obvious to every serious observer of world events, because of America's new foreign policy of fomenting civil wars (Gordon's topic).  How could the Pentagon seriously claim to be the protector of our freedom, when they have weaponized religion itself, perhaps our most treasured human freedom?  The "Gangsters" who run this big show have promoted religious civil war from N. Africa to Pakistan, using their networks of private contractors.  This has been accomplished through multiple , false flag terror attacks upon Shia, hoping to ignite Shiite vendettas.  Wherever there is division within a targeted population, of any kind, then the CIA super-sleuths have ferreted it out, in order to exacerbate it.  What else should we expect in an "intelligence-driven war"? 

Kudos to Duff.]

America’s unspoken civil war

Over the past decades, America has planned and executed civil wars across the globe, turning nation after nation into a cesspool of blood, as “tool of foreign policy.” Now the cabal that has kept the world aflame for a lifetime or longer has now turned inward, targeting America.

Far from “conspiracy theory,” the highest levels of America’s military and intelligence are, not just aware, aided by privatization of key security functions now “outsourced” to what can only be described as America’s real enemies.

The term those assigned the hopeless task of protecting America from the vast criminal empire that has seized “the high ground” in every aspect of society and culture use to describe what may well have already destroyed America is “bifurcation.”

Deep divisions within the military, intelligence and law enforcement organizations, divisions that now extent into the hundreds of “contractor” groups run by retirees, is now nearing open warfare.

The treasonous group, calling themselves “right wing patriots,” a bizarre combination of adherents to the “Dominionist” apocalypse death cult, “middle management” of the drug cartels and Bolshevik “Neocons” totalitarians, have proven themselves willing and capable of any outrage.

Turning away from freedom

Since the appointment of Bush (43) by the Supreme Court, a move increasingly accepted as a coup de etat by legal experts, a “nation within a nation” was established, answerable to no laws, domestic or international, no controls, no regulations, a government that faces no elections, no limitations on power, a “criminal gang” capable of waging war, controlling currencies and crashing economies.

The “Bifurcated Government of the United States,” a conglomeration of political extremists, secret societies and corporate criminals, has now turned “inward” after a decade of staging terror attacks, waging wars, looting economies and murdering millions.

Gangster rule

When president Obama, last week at the White House Correspondents Dinner, spoke of Sheldon Adelson’s $100,000,000 personal “contributions” meant to buy the American presidential election, it was an admission of the “bifurcation” threat.

Who “they” can’t buy, they smear or bankrupt or imprison or murder. With control of several special operations commands and most military and “intelligence” (read “narcotics smuggling”) contractors, murders, packaged as suicides, illnesses, accidents or “street crimes,” have become commonplace.

America’s second government

Even the drones America has used to keep Afghanistan aflame as a cover for its $100 billion narcotics empire, stretching from Kabul to Bagdad to Dubai to Baku to Tel Aviv to Kosovo to Zurich, have now been brought home, armed and operating over America.

While the pop-culture media, very much a part of the mechanism of entropy, is tasked with its smears and deceptions, very real conspiracies, many highly classified, are now “on the radar” as a “clear and present danger” to America’s security.

Today’s story on Syria, another hoax claiming the US has announced plans for military intervention, is “business as usual” for America’s “not so secret” criminal masters.
Even when the American government refuses to accepted falsified intelligence or to be bullied or blackmailed into treason, the controlled media plants hoax articles too often used as “open source intelligence” by world leaders whose “handlers” are blind to internal struggles in the US.

The recognized threats

From the list of “official” threats that can never be spoken of:

1. Five acts of terrorism against America are officially recognized, under highest security classification, as “false flag.” Among these are Oklahoma City, 9/11, Sandy Hook and Boston.
2. The United States Supreme Court is controlled, a combination of bribery, blackmail and mental instability, allowing, not just the Bush 943) coup but the suspension of all constitutional rights and full control of America’s electoral process by drug cartels. (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 -2010)
3. A Bush policy of forced integration of defense and intelligence firms with partner companies in Israel has created a “superhighway” for espionage, placing America’s most sensitive military “tech” on the world market.
4. Erosion of individual rights and a dramatic increase in unrestricted private data-mining, not just Google, but literal control of America’s communications infrastructure by foreign corporations tied to intelligence services, has quietly brought the long feared Orwellian threat to full fruition, shielded by its control of all information that would expose its capabilities and dire purpose.
5. Key defense mechanisms, originally seized by the Bush/Cheney administration and moved outside accountability have allowed extremist political groups inside the US to wage war using government resources. Most notable was the 2007 Barksdale/Minot nuclear incident where a religious cult seized a B-52 bomber armed with nine thermonuclear missiles, some of which are unaccounted.
6. Under the guise of a secret protocol with Mexico to protect both nations from powerful drug cartels, heavily armed drones have been deployed up to 1000 miles inside the US. These missions are both unauthorized by any constituted authority and quite likely represent a form of “piracy.”“Bifurcation” groups working with cartels can, at will, use these lethal systems to simulate disasters, terror plots or eliminate potential opposition.
7. Due to, not just massive political bribery through “Citizens United” but illegal redistricting called “Gerrymandering,” the US House of Representatives has been fully compromised, using its legislative role to war against America on behalf of criminal groups that now control all leadership positions in that legislative body. Their role has been to paralyze the American government, protecting the interests of the criminal elements thatare, at times, themselves shocked and sickened at the excesses of American politicians whose moral and ethical standards would leave even Roman Emperor Caligula uneasy.

Background

During the 1930s, Marine General Smedley Butler, spoke out against the use of America’s military might by organized crime. In 1934, a treasonous cabal from the American Legion (a veterans groups tied to Italy’s Mussolini), Dupont Corporation and Merrill Lynch, tried to hire Butler to lead an insurrection, arresting the president and establishing a police state under Wall Street control.

No student of American history is ever taught of this. Even the internet has been cleansed of any mention of it, any mention that resembles the truth, that is.

Butler is unique in that he is the first and only military leader, a two time Medal of Honor winner, to speak out openly against, not just “gangsterism,” but the control Wall Street has had over the American military and, through the service academies, the officer corps, typically feudal, typically resentful of America’s dwindling freedoms.

From 1933, Smedley butler:

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Clearly, Butler foresaw the current state of affairs. America’s military had been used at home many times, to rout veteran “bonus marchers,” to wage war on workers seeking unionization and a living wage and today, a “bifurcated” America, with key elements of taxpayer funded agencies and private “contractors” tirelessly waging a treasonous war on America’s people and their last remaining freedoms.

GF/JR

 

 

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, a combat infantryman, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today. His career has included extensive experience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic representative for UN humanitarian and economic development efforts. Gordon Duff has traveled to over 80 nations. His articles are published around the world and translated into a number of languages. He is regularly on TV and radio, a popular and sometimes controversial guest. More Press TV articles by Gordon Duff

 

Bolivia announces expulsion of CIA (USAID)

Bolivia announces expulsion of USAID

President Evo Morales announced the expulsion of USAID from Bolivia, accusing the US development agency of meddling in the country’s internal affairs.

• Bolivian President Evo Morales speaks with the press at the Palacio Quemado presidential palace in La Paz. Morales announced the expulsion of USAID representatives from Bolivia, accusing the US development agency of meddling in the country’s internal affairs. (AFP/Aizar Raldes)

LA PAZ: President Evo Morales on Wednesday announced the expulsion of USAID from Bolivia, accusing the US development agency of meddling in the country’s internal affairs.

The United States quickly dismissed the allegations as baseless, and said Bolivia’s action showed it did not want good ties with Washington.

In a fiery speech to workers on May Day, the leftist president of South America’s poorest country said the US Agency for International Development was in Bolivia “for political purposes, not social ones.”

“No more USAID, which manipulates and uses our leaders,” Morales said in the address in La Paz’s Plaza de Armas.

He did not specify exactly how he felt the US agency was interfering in Bolivian affairs. USAID has operated in the Andean nation since 1964.

Morales, a populist and Bolivia’s first indigenous president, has been in power since 2006 and has followed a sometimes nationalist agenda hostile to Western governments and companies.

In 2008 he expelled the US ambassador and agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, accusing them of meddling in Bolivia’s internal affairs.

Bolivia is a major producer of coca leaves, the raw material of cocaine.

During this previous crisis, the United States responded by expelling the Bolivian ambassador and ending trade privileges that it had granted Bolivia.

After a long period of frosty ties, the two countries in 2011 signed a framework agreement to normalize relations and exchange ambassadors again. but tensions remained.

“With the government of the United States we have profound differences of an ideological, cultural and, especially, policy-related nature,” Morales told the La Paz diplomatic corps last year.

“I hope that with the new framework agreement we can improve things, but I doubt it,” he said.

US State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said Wednesday that all USAID had done in Bolivia was simply to try to help people live better. Washington deeply regrets the decision by Bolivia, he said.

“We deny the baseless allegations made by the Bolivian government,” he added.

After five years of efforts to normalize relations after the 2008 crisis, he said, “this action is a further demonstration that the Bolivian government is not interested in that vision.”

The new US Secretary of State John Kerry had encouraged improved relations with Bolivia.

But bilateral ties suffered another blow recently when Morales said the United States was conspiring against the new government that has taken over Venezuela after the death of his ally Hugo Chavez.

And in early April, the United States announced it was ending the financial and logistical support it had given to Bolivia’s struggle against drug traffickers, although it did donate several aircraft.

In his speech Wednesday Morales said Bolivia was offended by recent Kerry comments to the effect that Latin America was the United States’ backyard.

The United States, he said, “probably thinks that here it can still manipulate politically and economically. That is a thing of the past.”

Morales instructed Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca to inform the US embassy of the expulsion of USAID, “that tool which still has a mentality of domination.”

In Bolivia, USAID has worked to help Bolivia improve its health care system and also runs a sustainable development and environmental program.

Specific goals include boosting farm productivity and food security, expanding access to social services and enhancing the competitiveness of small and medium sized companies, according to the USAID web site.

During Wednesday’s speech, Morales also announced several laws to benefit workers and recalled the seventh anniversary of his nationalization of the hydrocarbon sector, which affected nearly a dozen foreign oil companies.

- AFP/ac

Zionist Wahhabis

[SEE:  Saudi Arabia working with Mossad against Iran, WikiLeaks suggests ;  Saudi Arabia is Israel’s last hope: report ]

The Saudi/Israeli Alliance

deLiberation

by Dean Henderson
Monday, April 9th, 2012

(Excerpted from Chapter 5: Persian Gulf Rent-a-Sheik: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

Iran’s Press TV reported yesterday that both the US and the Saudis began funding Syrian rebels eight months ago. After funding Libyan Islamist rebels to overthrow Qaddafi, the Saudis and their fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) despots have moved on in an effort to bring down Syria’s Assad government on their road to Tehran.

Both the Muslim Brotherhood House of Saud and Cabalist Israel share a long history with their Freemason brethren at British intelligence dating back to the Egyptian Mystery Schools.

The inbred Illuminati banker oligarchy runs all three secret societies and controls the global economy via central bank monopoly and hegemony over oil, arms and drug trades.

This Rothschild-led cabal of trillionaire Satanists manufacture fanatics within the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths to divide the people and maximize war profits.

Since Chevron discovered oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938, the House of Saud monarchy has increasingly served as paymaster for Rothschild covert military adventures.  It’s part of an oil for arms quid pro quo.

The Saudis sent over $3.8 billion to the CIA-trained Afghan mujahadeen.  Their emissary to the Americans was Osama bin Laden.

They gave $35 million to the Nicaraguan contras. Northrup/Lockheed bribe recipient Adnan Khashoggi played a key role in supplying Richard Secord’s Enterprise with House of Saud funding.  But while contra and mujahadeen efforts got the most newsprint, the House of Saud was busy bankrolling counterinsurgency around the world.

In Africa the Saudis provided support decades ago for the National Front for Salvation (NFS), which operated from bases in Chad in its attempts to overthrow Libyan President Mohamar Qaddafi.

Chad has long been an important country in Exxon Mobil’s North Africa oil production schemes.  In 1990- following a successful Libyan-backed counter-coup against the Chad government which was sponsoring NFS- the US evacuated 350 NFS leaders with Saudi financing.  The US restored $5 million in aid to the dictatorial Kenyan government of Daniel Arap Moi so Kenya would house the NFS leaders, whom other African governments refused to take in.  Arap Moi later aided CIA covert operations in Somalia, which the Saudis financed.

The Saudis bankrolled Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels in Angola in their brutal effort to topple the socialist government of MPLA President Jose dos Santos.  Upon CIA request, the Saudis sent millions to Morocco to pay for that country’s training of UNITA.  Angola has huge oil reserves.  In 1985 Chevron Texaco accounted for 75% of Angola’s oil revenue.  In 1990 29% of Exxon Mobil’s US-bound crude came from Angola. An annual report of De Beers- the Oppenheimer-family tentacle which monopolizes the world diamond trade- bragged of buying up UNITA diamonds.  Savimbi was welcomed at the White House by President Reagan.

The Saudis funded RENAMO in their CIA-backed Pink Plan terror campaign against the nationalist government of Mozambique.  In the mid-1980s both the Saudis and Oman sent weapons to RENAMO through the Comoros Islands on behalf of Israel and apartheid South Africa.  Two Comoros Presidents- Ali Soilah and Ahmed Abdullah Abderemane- were assassinated by mercenaries who were protecting the arms traffic.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – formerly Zaire- Illuminati puppet Mobutu Sese-Seiko ruled with an iron fist for nearly four decades. He served as City of London guard dog of Zaire’s rich cobalt, uranium and molybdenum reserves- all of which are vital to the US nuclear weapons program.  Zaire is also rich in copper, chromium, zinc, cadmium, tin, gold and platinum.  While Mobutu amassed over $5 billion in Swiss, Belgian and French bank accounts, Zaire’s people lived in squalor.

Mobutu was installed in the early 1960’s after CIA agent Frank Carlucci- later Reagan and Bush Defense Secretary and now chairman of bin Laden family investment advisor Carlyle Group- worked with gangsters to assassinate the first prime minister of the Congo Patrice Lumumba.  Under Mobutu’s reign the US had military bases at Kitona and Kamina- from where the CIA prosecuted covert wars against Angola, Mozambique and Namibia with House of Saud funding.  Mobutu’s DSP palace guard was trained by the Israeli Mossad.  In the late 1970’s the Saudis paid for imported Moroccan troops to save Mobutu from Katanganese secessionists led by Laurant Kabila.

Mobutu was deposed in 1998 by forces loyal to Kabila- a friend of Fidel Castro.  The Saudis began financing military forays into the Congo by the governments of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. This destabilization of the Lake’s region led to the Rwandan genocide.  Kabila was assassinated in 2000, after he refused to play Illuminati ball.  Over four million people have died in the DRC over the past decade.

Lumumba and Kabila weren’t the first African nationalists targeted for elimination by the inbreds.  During the 1950′s and 1960′s the CIA and French intelligence assassinated Moroccan nationalist Mehdi Ben Barka- whose Union Nationale de Forces Populaire threatened US puppet monarch King Hassan II.  Giunea’s leftist President Sekou Toure and Tunisian socialist Habib Bourgiba were also assassinated by Western intelligence agencies.

In 1993 Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir accused the Saudis of providing arms to Johnny Garung’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).  The southern part of Sudan- which the SPLA is trying to partition- is rich in oil.  Mossad has supplied the SPLA for years through Kenya.  In 1996 the Clinton Administration announced military aid to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda. The aid was funneled into an SPLA offensive on Khartoum.  The crisis in Darfur is a direct result of Saudi/Israeli/US meddling on behalf of Big Oil.

Algerian President Chadli Benjladid accused the Saudis of bankrolling the barbarous Armed Islamic Group (AIG) who- after Algeria protested US ignition of the Gulf War- launched a reign of terror targeted at the Algerian people. Benjladid was forced to resign. This was followed by hasty passage of the Hydrocarbon Law- which opened the historically socialist country’s oilfields to the Four Horsemen.  The CIA then helped AIG terrorists travel to Bosnia, where they helped destroy socialist Yugoslavia.

Algeria has a long history of defying Big Oil. President Houari Boumedienne- one of the great Arab socialist leaders of all time- initiated calls for a more just international economic order in fiery speeches at the UN. He encouraged producer cartels as a means to Third World emancipation from the London bankers.  Independent Italian oilman Enrico Mattei began negotiating with Algeria and other nationalistic OPEC states who wanted to sell their oil internationally without having to deal with the Four Horsemen.  In 1962 Mattei died in a mysterious plane crash.  Former French intelligence agent Thyraud de Vosjoli says his agency was involved.  William McHale of Time magazine, who covered Mattei’s attempt to break the Big Oil cartel, also died under strange circumstances.

In 1975 the US sent $138 million in military aid through Saudi Arabia to Yemen, in hopes of heading off a Marxist revolution there.  The effort failed and the country split into North and South Yemen for two decades before merging again in the 1990’s. US/Saudi aid to both Yemen and Oman continues to this day in an effort to stamp out nationalist movements in those countries, which border the Kingdom and its vast Four Horsemen-controlled oilfields.

During the US-led effort to partition Bosnia from Yugoslavia, Saudi King Faud led calls for an end to the UN arms embargo.  When the embargo was lifted, the Saudis funded Bosnian Muslim arms purchases.  Later the Saudis bankrolled the heroin-kingpin Kosovo Liberation Army, as well as NLA Albanian separatists attacking the nationalist government of Macedonia. The Saudis even funded CIA covert operations in Italy, where they plunked down $10 million in 1985 to help destroy the Communist Party.

Recently Saudi Prince Bandar donated $1 million to the Bush Sr. Presidential Library and another $1 million to a Barbara Bush literacy campaign. On the evening of September, 11, 2001- Prince Bandar smoked cigars in the White House with President Bush, while members of the bin Laden family were evacuated from the US in airspace shut down to all other traffic.

Were the Saudis simply playing their historic paymaster role in the prosecution of 911?

The largest shareholder in News Corporation – parent of both the banker mouthpiece Wall Street Journal and the Fox News psyop – is Rupert Murdoch. The 2nd largest owner is Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal.

Is Fox News a covert Rothschild mind control operation against the American people?

Sources:

1. “Mercenary Mischief in Zaire”. Jane Hunter. Covert Action Information Bulletin. Spring 1991.
2. Hot Money and the Politics of Debt. R.T. Naylor. The Linden Press/Simon & Schuster. New York. 1987. p.238
3. Hunter
4. Earth First! Journal. Vol. 26, #1. Samhain/Yule. 2005
5. “US to Aid Regimes to Oust Government”. David B. Ottaway. Washington Post. 11-10-96
6. The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism. Henrik Kruger. South End Press. Boston. 1980. p.43
7. The Gulf: Scramble for Security. Raj Choudry. Sreedhar Press. New Dehli.
8. 1983. p.14
9. Dude, Where’s My Country. Michael Moore. Warner Books. New York. 2003.
10. ABC News Online. 10-19-04

Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries and Das Kartell der Federal Reserve. Subscriptions to his Left Hook blog are FREE at www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Qatar-Brotherhood Alliance Key Component of CIA Scheme To Rule Greater Middle East

[SEE: GCC official slams Muslim Brotherhood’s UAE threats ;  UAE uncovers Muslim Brotherhood cell, arrests its members] The controversial Qatar-Brotherhood alliance

By Andrew Hammond

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) listens to Qatar Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thaniat at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, April 23, 2013. REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES – Tags: POLITICS)

DUBAI: Of all Qatar’s policy innovations since a coup brought the emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to power in 1995, its overt alliance with Islamist movements linked to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has perhaps been the most controversial so far. There is deep unease in Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over the ascendancy of the Brotherhood, a well-established political outfit that seeks power through democracy, following the uprising that brought down Hosni Mubarak two years ago. And since last November, when President Mohammad Mursi adopted sweeping powers and then rushed the completion of an Islamist-friendly constitution, Egypt has seen civil strife between various Islamist and non-Islamic factions that is grinding the economy into the Nile mud as tourists stay away, industry slows down and the government cannot pay its bills. So it has become rather fashionable in many circles to predict the imminent demise of Qatar’s alliance with the Brotherhood. The question of Qatar – whose natural gas wealth has transformed the small Gulf state’s fortunes – has become a favorite parlor game from Cairo to Dubai. Influenced by this pervasive anti-Brotherhood atmosphere in their host countries, diplomats, analysts, policymakers and journalists wonder if Qatar as a state will be forced to change tack, or whether there could be backlash against certain members of the ruling elite themselves for the insolence of their dissonant tone. Inside Qatar itself, however, there is little sense that Islamists are about to be knocked off their pedestal. A notable presence in university departments, think tanks and other non-governmental organizations, they also form a constant stream of visitors for seminars and forums. Although there is no official Brotherhood branch in Qatar, leading Brotherhood-linked preacher Yousef al-Qaradawi has been in Doha for decades and is a key reference for many Qataris. “Qaradawi is not new in Qatar and the Brotherhood is not new in Qatar. When the modern state was established, the Education Ministry and other institutions were set up by many Muslim Brotherhood people,” said Jassim Sultan, a Qatari who runs the Islamist, pro-Brotherhood website 4nahda.com. Like others, he believes the close circle around the emir responsible for policy is driven by a strategic vision of how to secure independence from Saudi Arabia rather than ideological affinity for the Islamists per se. Salah Elzein, a Sudanese who heads the Al-Jazeera Center for Studies, agreed and said Qatar had played a key role in making the Brotherhood acceptable to Western powers. “The Qatari leadership realized Islamists would be a power to reckon with. At same time, Qatar was in good relationship with Israel and West. There is a huge difference in the way the United States deals with Islamists compared to 10 years ago,” he said. “People miss that Qatar invested a lot [in Islamists]. It started way before, it didn’t happen just now as mere opportunism with the Muslim Brotherhood.” Qatari rulers have traditionally promoted Saudi Salafism. The founder of the modern state, Sheikh Jassim, who died in 1913, was a follower of the puritanical Wahhabi school of Saudi Arabia. The presence of Qaradawi and Brotherhood cadres from Egypt since the 1960s was seen as a moderating force, and liberals have gained in recent years as the leadership plots to turn Doha into a world city that will host sports fans from around the world for the 2022 World Cup. A large mosque in the name of Mohammad Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, the Salafist ideologue who helped found the modern Saudi state, was opened in 2011 in Doha, in an apparent effort to mollify Salafists over liberal and Brotherhood gains. “The Salafi hard-liners are not happy about the opening [to other groups], but they are quite free here, there are no restrictions against them,” said Mohammad Alahmari, a Saudi who runs a Doha think tank. There is unease over the Brotherhood policy among liberals. “The Muslim Brotherhood is running the show. They have a monopoly and you get attacked if you attack the Brotherhood. It’s new and it became more clear that Al-Jazeera is backing them in the last five years,” said Najeeb al-Nuaimi, a former justice minister. Tensions with the UAE have led to some Qataris being barred from entry at airports and an official from Qatar Petroleum has been held in detention this year for undeclared reasons (SEE: As family frets, Qatari doctor’s detention in Dubai stretches on). “Maybe most people support it, but intellectuals ask, where will this lead to?” said Hassan al-Sayed, a constitutional law professor at Qatar University. “Some think it could lead to disasters, politically, financially, even on a personal level.” Dissent among the public has focused more on the breakneck growth of Doha and plans to expand the country’s population to some 5 million people, although Qatari nationals form less than 300,000 of a 1.9 million population at present. Little more than a sleepy backwater in the 1990s, the city has been transformed beyond all recognition. The sleepy downtown area of the old Souq Waqef faces off against the otherworldly skyscrapers of the West Bay district, which, arising out of the sea on reclaimed land, give the impression of floating on air. “There is no precise information about reasons and justifications for controversial public policies. This means that Qataris are always surprised by policy decisions, as if they were a private affair that citizens have no right to know about or take part in,” wrote academic Ali al-Kuwari in a book published last year called “The People Want Reform In Qatar Too,” the result of a year of monthly salons among intellectuals organized by Kuwari. And the jailing of poet Mohammad Ibn al-Dhaib al-Ajami after a poem that attacked Arab rulers in the wake of the uprisings in 2011 revealed a certain regime jitteriness. Even if Qatar wanted to, decoupling from a widespread and influential organization like the Brotherhood would not be an easy task. Nuaimi says it will depend on the fate of Islamist rule in Egypt and Tunisia: “They think the Brotherhood is the political future of the Arab world. I think they are wrong. I predict that in five years they will be out in Egypt and Tunisia and then Qatar will put them aside.”

CIA Bribery Squandered Every Potential Gain of Operation Enduring Freedom

Millions in CIA “ghost money” paid to Afghan president’s office: New York Times 

Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a news conference in Kabul January 14, 2013.              Credit:   Reuters/Omar Sobhani

(Reuters) – Tens of millions of U.S. dollars in cash were delivered by the CIA in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade, according to the New York Times, citing current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

The so-called “ghost money” was meant to buy influence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan, the newspaper quoted U.S. officials as saying.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan“, one American official said, “was the United States.”

The CIA declined to comment on the report and the U.S. State Department did not immediately comment. The New York Times did not publish any comment from Karzai or his office.

“We called it ‘ghost money’,” Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai’s chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York Times. “It came in secret and it left in secret.”

For more than a decade the cash was dropped off every month or so at the Afghan president’s office, the newspaper said.

Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the CIA in Afghanistan since the start of the war.

The cash payments to the president’s office do not appear to be subject to oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or the CIA’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies, and do not appear to violate U.S. laws, said the New York Times.

There was no evidence that Karzai personally received any of the money, Afghan officials told the newspaper. The cash was handled by his National Security Council, it added.

U.S. and Afghan officials familiar with the payments were quoted as saying that the main goal in providing the cash was to maintain access to Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the CIA’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralized government.

Much of the money went to warlords and politicians, many with ties to the drug trade and in some cases the Taliban, the New York Times said. U.S. and Afghan officials were quoted as saying the CIA supported the same patronage networks that U.S. diplomats and law enforcement agents struggled to dismantle, leaving the government in the grip of organized crime.

In 2010, Karzai said his office received cash in bags from Iran, but that it was a transparent form of aid that helped cover expenses at the presidential palace. He said at the time that the United States made similar payments.

The latest New York Times report said much of the Iranian cash, like the CIA money, went to pay warlords and politicians.

For most of Karzai’s 11-year reign, there has been little interest in anti-corruption in the army or police. The country’s two most powerful institutions receive billions of dollars from donors annually but struggle just to recruit and maintain a force bled by high rates of desertion.

(Additional reporting by Alistair Bell and Sarah Lynch in Washington; Writing by Michael Perry; Editing by Mark Bendeich)

The American Plan To Liberalize “Islam”

[In 2003, long before any hint of an "Arab spring," the RAND Corp. produced the following document (click on title for pdf).  This is the strategy which has been followed by Barack Obama since Day One.  If the strategy is not a crime against humanity, or at least against religion itself, then it should be, since no man has the right to alter someone else's religion.  That is exactly what this strategy proposes and Obama has been fully committed to, changing Islam itself, from the inside out.  Liberalize it, so that it becomes as acceptable to the international community as any other religion.  This means removing all of the bloody parts of Islam, in order to manufacture a new liberalized product which resembles Sufi Islam, which is an acceptable substitute for Wahhabism. 

RAND proposes that we now introduce this Sufi-like anti-Wahhabism, in order to undo what we have done with the CIA's grand experiment in using American military power as a tool for social engineering.  The weaponized "Islam," followed by the weaponization of the Afghan "mujahedeen," who had received the new synthetic "Islam," produced the first generation of "jihadi" "holy warriors."   The incalculable damage which has been done to peace-loving Islam since then, by the introduction of the CIA's weaponized Wahhabi Islam to the Muslim world over the past three-and-a-half decades, is now to be undone in just one "Spring," or a half-dozen?  The scale of the arrogance shown by the American meddlers in purposely doing this, and now attempting to undo what they have done, in order to gain further advantage, is on the level of a Hitler, or a Mussolini. 

When is Obama, or some other evil wise ass going to straighten-out the deficiencies in Christianity, or (God forbid!) Judaism?  We have no right by any stretch of the imagination to do what has been laid-out in the 88-pages of Civil Democratic Islam.]

Civil Democratic Islam

RAND CORP.

2003 RAND Corporation

iii
PREFACE
The Islamic world is involved in a struggle to determine its own nature and values,
with serious implications for the future. What role can the rest of the world,
threatened and affected as it is by this struggle, play in bringing about a more
peaceful and positive outcome?
Devising a judicious approach requires a finely grained understanding of the
ongoing ideological struggle within Islam, to identify appropriate partners and
set realistic goals and means to encourage its evolution in a positive way.
The United States has three goals in regard to politicized Islam. First, it wants to
prevent the spread of extremism and violence. Second, in doing so, it needs to
avoid the impression that the United States is “opposed to Islam.” And third, in
the longer run, it must find ways to help address the deeper economic, social,
and political causes feeding Islamic radicalism and to encourage a move toward
development and democratization.
The debates and conflicts that mark the current Islamic world can make the
picture seem confusing. It becomes easier to sort the actors if one thinks of
them not as belonging to distinct categories but as falling along a spectrum.
Their views on certain critical marker issues help to locate them correctly on
this spectrum.
It is then possible to see which part of the spectrum is generally compatible
with our values, and which is fundamentally inimical. On this basis, this report
identifies components of a specific strategy.
This report should be of interest to scholars, policymakers, students, and all
others interested in the Middle East, Islam, and political Islam.

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

Chapter Three
A PROPOSED STRATEGY

The problem of Islamic radicalism—its manifestations, its underlying causes,
and its propensity to meld with other social and political conflicts—makes this
an extremely complex issue. There is no one correct approach or response, and
there certainly is not one identifiable “fix.” Instead, what is called for is a mixed
approach that rests on firm and decisive commitment to our own fundamental
values and understands that tactical and interest-driven cooperation is simply
not possible with some of the actors and positions along the spectrum of
political Islam but that possesses a sequence of flexible postures suitable to
different contexts, populations, and countries.
This approach seeks to strengthen and foster the development of civil, democratic
Islam and of modernization and development. It provides the necessary
flexibility to deal with different settings appropriately, and it reduces the danger
of unintended negative effects. The following outline describes what such a
strategy might look like:
• Support the modernists first, enhancing their vision of Islam over that of the
traditionalists by providing them with a broad platform to articulate and
disseminate their views. They, not the traditionalists, should be cultivated
and publicly presented as the face of contemporary Islam.
• Support the secularists on a case-by-case basis.
• Encourage secular civic and cultural institutions and programs.
• Back the traditionalists enough to keep them viable against the fundamentalists
(if and wherever those are our choices) and to prevent a closer
alliance between these two groups. Within the traditionalists, we should
selectively encourage those who are the relatively better match for modern
civil society. For example, some Islamic law schools are far more amenable
to our view of justice and human rights than are others.
• Finally, oppose the fundamentalists energetically by striking at vulnerabilities
in their Islamic and ideological postures, exposing things that neither the youthful idealists in their target audience nor the pious traditionalists
can approve of: their corruption, their brutality, their ignorance, the bias
and manifest errors in their application of Islam, and their inability to lead
and govern.
Some additional, more-direct activities will be necessary to support this overall
approach, such as the following:
• Help break the fundamentalist and traditionalist monopoly on defining,
explaining, and interpreting Islam.
• Identify appropriate modernist scholars to manage a Web site that answers
questions related to daily conduct and offers modernist Islamic legal opinions.
• Encourage modernist scholars to write textbooks and develop curricula.
• Publish introductory books at subsidized rates to make them as available as
the tractates of fundamentalist authors.
• Use popular regional media, such as radio, to introduce the thoughts and
practices of modernist Muslims to broaden the international view of what
Islam means and can mean.

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

Appendix C
STRATEGY IN DEPTH

The following describes, in somewhat more detail, how the recommendations
in Chapter Three could be implemented.
BASIC POINTS OF THE STRATEGY
Build Up a Modernist Leadership
Create role models and leaders. Modernists who risk persecution should be
built up as courageous civil rights leaders, which indeed they are. There are
precedents showing that this can work. Nawal Al-Sadaawi achieved international
renown for enduring persecution, harassment, and attempts to prosecute
her in court on account of her principled modernist stand on issues related to
freedom of speech, public health, and the status of women in Egypt. Afghan
interim minister of women’s affairs Sima Samar inspired many with her outspoken
stance on human rights, women’s rights, civil law, and democracy, for
which she faced death threats by fundamentalists. There are many others
throughout the Islamic world whose leadership can similarly be featured.
Include modern, mainstream Muslims in political “outreach” events, to reflect
demographic reality. Avoid artificially “over-Islamizing the Muslims”; instead,
accustom them to the idea that Islam can be just one part of their identity.1
Support civil society in the Islamic world. This is particularly important in situations
of crisis, refugee situations, and postconflict situations, in which a democratic
leadership can emerge and gain practical experience through local NGOs
and other civic associations. On the rural and neighborhood levels, as well, civic
associations are an infrastructure that can lead to political education and a
moderate, modernist leadership.
______________
1This idea is more extensively developed in Al-Azmah (1993). Al-Azmah is himself a “Euro-Muslim.”

 

Develop Western Islam: German Islam, U.S. Islam, etc. This requires gaining a
better understanding of the composition, as well as the evolving practice and
thought, in these communities. Assist in eliciting, expressing, and “codifying”
their views.
Go on the Offensive Against Fundamentalists
Delegitimize individuals and positions associated with extremist Islam. Make
public the immoral and hypocritical deeds and statements of self-styled fundamentalist
authorities. Allegations of Western immorality and shallowness are
a cherished part of the fundamentalist arsenal, but they are themselves highly
vulnerable on these fronts.
Encourage Arab journalists in popular media to do investigative reporting on
the lives and personal habits and corruption of fundamentalist leaders. Publicize
incidents that highlight their brutality—such as the recent deaths of Saudi
schoolgirls in a fire when religious police physically prevented Saudi firefighters
from evacuating the girls from their burning school building because they were
not veiled—and their hypocrisy, illustrated by the Saudi religious establishment,
which forbids migrant workers from receiving photographs of their newborn
children on the grounds that Islam forbids human images, while their own
offices are decorated by huge portraits of King Faisal, etc. The role of “charitable
organizations” in financing terror and extremism has begun to be more clearly
understood since September 11 but also deserves ongoing and public investigation.
Assertively Promote the Values of Western Democratic Modernity
Create and propagate a model for prosperous, moderate Islam by identifying
and actively aiding countries or regions or groups with the appropriate views.
Publicize their successes. For example, the 1999 Beirut Declaration for Justice
and the National Action Charter of Bahrain broke new ground in the application
of Islamic law and should be made more widely known.
Criticize the flaws of traditionalism. Show the causal relationship between
traditionalism and underdevelopment, as well as the causal relationship
between modernity, democracy, progress, and prosperity. Do fundamentalism
and traditionalism offer Islamic society a healthy, prosperous future? Are they
successfully meeting the challenges of the day? Do they compare well with
other social orders? The UNDP social development report (UNDP, 2002) points
clearly to the linkage between a stagnant social order, oppression of women,
poor educational quality, and backwardness. This message should be energetically
taken to Muslim populations.

Build up the stature of Sufism. Encourage countries with strong Sufi traditions
to focus on that part of their history and to include it in their school curricula.
Pay more attention to Sufi Islam.
Focus on Education and Youth
Committed adult adherents of radical Islamic movements are unlikely to be
easily influenced into changing their views. The next generation, however, can
conceivably be influenced if the message of democratic Islam can be inserted
into school curricula and public media in the pertinent countries. Radical fundamentalists
have established massive efforts to gain influence over education
and are unlikely to give up established footholds without a struggle. An equally
energetic effort will be required to wrest this terrain from them.
SPECIFIC ACTIVITIES TO SUPPORT THE STRATEGY
Thus, to accomplish the overall strategy, it will be necessary to
• Support the modernists and mainstream secularists first, by
— publishing and distribute their works
— encouraging them to write for mass audiences and youth
— introducing their views into the curriculum of Islamic education
— giving them a public platform
— making their opinions and judgments on fundamental questions of
religious interpretation available to a mass audience, in competition
with those of the fundamentalists and traditionalists, who already have
Web sites, publishing houses, schools, institutes, and many other vehicles
for disseminating their views
— positioning modernism as a “counterculture” option for disaffected
Islamic youth
— facilitating and encouraging awareness of pre- and non-Islamic history
and culture, in the media and in the curricula of relevant countries
— encouraging and supporting secular civic and cultural institutions and
programs.
• Support the traditionalists against the fundamentalists, by
— publicizing traditionalist criticism of fundamentalist violence and
extremism and encouraging disagreements between traditionalists and
fundamentalists
— preventing alliances between traditionalists and fundamentalists

— encouraging cooperation between modernists and traditionalists who
are closer to that end of the spectrum, increase the presence and profile
of modernists in traditionalist institutions
— discriminating between different sectors of traditionalism
— encouraging those with a greater affinity to modernism—such as the
Hanafi law school as opposed to others to issue religious opinions that,
by becoming popularized, can weaken the authority of backward
Wahhabi religious rulings
— encouraging the popularity and acceptance of Sufism.
• Confront and oppose the fundamentalists, by
— challenging and exposing the inaccuracies in their views on questions
of Islamic interpretation
— exposing their relationships with illegal groups and activities
— publicizing the consequences of their violent acts
— demonstrating their inability to rule to the benefit and positive development
of their communities
— targeting these messages especially to young people, to pious traditionalist
populations, to Muslim minorities in the West, and to women
— avoiding showing respect or admiration for the violent feats of fundamentalist
extremists and terrorists, instead casting them as disturbed
and cowardly rather than evil heroes
— encouraging journalists to investigate issues of corruption, hypocrisy,
and immorality in fundamentalist and terrorist circles.
• Selectively support secularists, by
— encouraging recognition of fundamentalism as a shared enemy, discouraging
secularist alliances with anti-U.S. forces on such grounds as
nationalism and leftist ideology
— supporting the idea that religion and the state can be separate in Islam,
too, and that this does not endanger the faith.

World View: Obama’s Meeting with Jordan’s Abdullah may Signal Troop Deployment

View Larger Map

[Mossad source Debkafile reports that Obama has ordered 20,000 US troops w/equipment to King Hussein Air Base Mafraq, near the border with Syria.  Mafraq is also the location of several refugee camps, holding hundreds of thousands of Syrians.  With the help of the little Jordanian king Obama may be about to try to tilt the scales of the Syrian civil war in favor of the so-called "moderate" faction.  If this is the case, then he probably informed the pig of Qatar of his decision this week, telling him to hold back on any further terrorist support until called upon to resume.  If Obama is foolish enough to pour his final conventional military resources "down a rat hole," into a futile attempt to prevent the total "Islamist" takeover of Syria, then he will not only turn Syria into another quagmire "ala Bush," but he will very likely enable the Saudis and Qatar to establish the dreaded "Caliphate" that the right-wing is constantly crying about. 

I don't know about you, but I don't think that I can peacefully withstand another round of Imperialist war.]

by John J. Xenakis 

• Demonstrators in Jordan protest American troop presence
• Jordan’s King Abdullah and Obama meet to discuss Syria
• Sunni Jihadists pour into Syria

Demonstrators in Jordan protest American troop presence

Anti-American protesters in Amman, Jordan on Friday (Al-Monitor)

Last week, we reported that the U.S. announced the formal deployment of 200 troops to Jordan. The troops will be “ready for military action” if President Barack Obama were to order it. On Friday, Jordanians rallied against the deployment of the U.S. forces in Jordan. Demonstrators also burned a mock American flag. At the end of the demonstration, they gathered in a circle and danced, chanting about Ali Baba and the forty thieves. Al-Monitor

Jordan’s King Abdullah and Obama meet to discuss Syria

The question of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad continued to draw worldwide attention on Friday. President Barack Obama met with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in the White House and said that “a line has been crossed” in Syria.

He said, “To use weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line in terms of international norms and laws… That’s going to be a game changer.” However, he declined to intervene militarily until a “vigorous investigation” had been completed to find more “direct evidence.”

However, Debka, which sometimes gets things wrong, is quoting its military intelligence sources as saying that the purpose of Obama’s meeting with Abdullah is to firm up an agreement for the U.S. to deploy a 20,000 troop “surge” into Jordan. The 200 troops announced last week are to lay the groundwork for the main body to take up quarters in the King Hussein Air Base Mafraq, near the borders of Iraq and Syria.

The purpose of the “surge” is to protect Jordan’s royal family both from jihadists from Syria and from an “Arab Spring” type revolt — a step that the Obama administration did not take with Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, or Yemen. The “surge” will be heavily coordinated with Israeli forces, and buffer zones will be set up on Syria’s borders to prevent attacks on both Jordan and Israel.

This “surge” comes at a time when thousands of fighters from Iran-backed Shia militias from Iraq and Hizbollah are aiding the al-Assad regime forces and are threatening to defeat the opposition rebels. The Hill and Debka

Sunni Jihadists pour into Syria

With thousands of fighters from Iran-backed Shia militias arriving in Syria to support al-Assad’s regime, it’s not surprising that thousands of Sunni jihadists are also arriving in Syria to fight the Shia militias. In particular, disaffected Muslims from Germany and elsewhere in Europe have been heading for Syria to receive training in weapons and terrorist techniques. German analysts are concerned that these fighters are gaining experience in Syria, making contacts, and will return to Germany and conduct terrorist attacks there. Spiegel

The West Masterminded Chechen War to Destroy USSR and Russia

[Armenia's unique history make it highly unlikely that an Armenian would convert to radical Wahhabi "Islam" (SEE: Did 'Misha' influence Tsarnaevs? In Watertown, doubts ).]

The West Masterminded Chechen War to Destroy USSR and Russia – June, 2010

 

It is now known that the twenty year old Islamic insurgency in the Caucasus (according to many experts an Al-Qaeda operation) and the arming of Georgia had been an integral part of a long-term Western plan to wrestle the northern Caucasus region away from Russian control and place it under what some experts refer to as an Islamic Caliphate. Ankara, Baku and Tbilisi, as well as a steady stream of Islamic militants trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan, were the active participants in this agenda throughout much of the 1990s. Its funding and organization was carried out by a consortium of special interests in Washington and London and, most probably, in Tel Aviv and Riyadh as well. It is also now known that Western intelligence agencies also conspired to force Russia out of the Balkans (Yugoslavia in particular) and Central Asia by targeting pro-Russian bastions in those regions.

As it has been since the early 1980s, radical Islam was always the readily accessible tool the West exploited to carryout its geopolitical agenda.

Why should this seemingly Russian problem concern us Armenians? Armenians in general, diasporans in particular, seem to be having a hard time accepting that a weakened Russia in the Caucasus poses a serious long-term threat for Armenia. Those amongst us that do not possess clearness of thought regarding this matter, I would just like to say that the Caucasus without an effective Russian presence would prove disastrous not only for Armenia but for the entire Eurasian continent. Joining three important geopolitical zones – Europe, Asia and the Middle East – the Caucasus region is the gateway to Russia’s vulnerable south, its soft underbelly. The region is also a major hub for the strategic transfer of Eurasian energy and trade. Strategic planners have long realized that those who are able to control this region could potentially impact much of Eurasia and beyond.

As we all know, the Caucasus is not a bastion of Christianity or western civilization. The heavily Turkic and Islamic cultural and ethnic makeup of the region in question would not tolerate a non-aligned, a non-Turkic or a non-Islamic power in their midst – without a major outside power acting as a guarantor or as a counter weight. Against this Islamic and Turkic center-of-gravity, the Russian presence has been the only counter-influence in the region for the past two hundred years. And it is precisely because of this geopolitical reality in the Caucasus that we Armenians have been able to establish nation-state.

It is quite frightening that unbeknownst to most Armenians, because our collective attention has naturally been drawn to the Caucasus region’s east-west geopolitical plane, the northern Caucasus was actually on the verge of a radical Islamic/Turkic transformation throughout much of the 1990s. There is no doubt today that had the northern Caucasus fell victim to this agenda it would have been the south’s turn not much long thereafter.

In short, without a Russian presence in the Caucasus, the region in question will eventually transform itself into a Turkic/Islamic cesspool; and not even a million of our “fedayees” would be able to stop it from happening.

Had Western intentions for the Caucasus succeeded not only would we Armenians be lamenting the lose of Nagorno Karabakh today we would most probably be lamenting the lose of our fledgling republic as well. Under such a geopolitical scenario for the region, a best case scenario for Armenia would have been if it simply become politically and economically subordinate to Ankara, Baku and Tbilisi.

Those who complain about Armenia’s current dependence on Moscow need to take this geopolitical prospect into serious consideration.

Although Vladimir Putin’s Russia succeeded in crushing the Islamic terror onslaught in the northern Caucasus in the early 2000s and managed to defeat the Western backed regime in Georgia in 2008, Moscow nevertheless realizes that a potential threat continues to remain in the region. As a result, as long as ethnic Russians run the show in the Kremlin, Moscow will do everything in its power to have a strong presence in the Caucasus. And needless to say, Armenia is pivotal to the Kremlin’s regional agenda. As a result of the major setbacks suffered by Islamists and the West, Ankara has more-or-less abandoned its pan-Turkic agenda in the Caucasus and Central Asia and is currently seeking to move closer to Moscow.

Nevertheless, despite Ankara’s best efforts to befriend the Bear, Turks continue to fear Russia’s resurgence.

The following video presentations and articles deal with this topic. Those interested in learning more about the Islamic insurgency in the Caucasus and the grave threat it posed to the entire Caucasus region should read the following book – Chechen Jihad: http://www.amazon.com/Chechen-Jihad-Qaedas-Training-Ground/dp/0060841702

Arevordi

West/Saudis Pushing “al-CIA-da” Into Losing Battle With Hezbollah

[SEE:  Al-Qaida threatens Hezbollah over its support of the Syrian regime]

Pushing Al Qaeda to Take on Hezbollah

by FRANKLIN LAMB

Beirut

(Beirut) – “This is one damn fine idea, what took us so long to see a simple solution that was right in front of our eyes for Christ’s sake”, Senator John McCain of “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” and “no-fly zones for Syria” notoriety, reportedly demanded to know from Dennis Ross during a recent Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) brain storming session in Washington DC.

(Daniel Pipes, Photo:  left)

Ross, a founder of WINEP with Israeli government start up cash (presumably reimbursed unknowingly by American taxpayers) and currently WINEP’s “Counselor”, reportedly responded to the idea of facilitating Al Qeada to wage jihad against Hezbollah with the comment: “Shiites aren’t the only ones seeking death to demonstrate their ‘resistance’ to whatever. Plenty of other Muslims also want to die as we saw last week in Boston. Let ‘em all go at it and Israel can sweep out their s— when it’s over.”

One Congressional staffer attending the WINEP event emailed me, “Dennis spoke in jest — well I assumed he did — but who knows anymore? Things are getting ever crazier inside some of these pro-Israel think-tanks around here.”

Featured on the front page of its April 25 edition, the Zionist-compliant New York Times writes that the Assad regime is apparently recovering but, “it must be understood that for all of the justified worries about the (al Qaeda affiliated) rebels “Assad remains an ally of Iran and Hezbollah. “

The Times adopts the views of Islamophobe, Daniel Pipes, who recommends that the US try to keep the two sides in Syria fighting as long as possible until they destroy each other.  Pipes, now serving as an advisor to John McClain, wrote in the Washington Times on April 11, “Evil forces pose less danger to us when they make war on each other. This keeps them focused locally, and it prevents either one from emerging victorious and thereby posing a greater danger. Western powers should guide enemies to a stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong their debilitating conflict.”

Both Jeffrey Feltman, U.N. Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs and Susan Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N, have at a minimum impliedly joined in the intriguing idea of siccing Jabhat al Nusra on the Party of God. This scheme, if launched, would be Feltman’s 14th attempt to topple Hezbollah and defeat the Lebanese National Resistance to the occupation of Palestine since he first arrived in Beirut from Tel Aviv in 2005 to become US Ambassador to Lebanon.  This observer, among others in this region sense that given the aura still enveloping the American Embassy here,  that Jeffrey never really left his Lebanese ambassadorial post and continues to occupy this position from his new UN office.

This week Feltman warned that the spillover of Syria’s war continues to be felt in Lebanon as Susan Rice, echoed him and condemned Hezbollah for “undermining the country’s “dissociation policy.” The latter being a bit obscure in meaning but connoting something like sitting around doing nothing while this country is being shelled by jihadists from among the 23 countries currently fighting in Syria.  Feltman informed the media on 4/22/13 that “The Secretary-General is concerned by reports that Lebanese are fighting in Syria both on the side of the regime and on the side of the opposition, hopes that the new government will find ways to promote better compliance by all sides in Lebanon with the “disassociation policy.”

Given current divisions in Lebanon that will not happen anymore than Lebanon’s June 9th Parliamentary elections will be held on time.

For her part, Susan lectured the UN Security Council that “Hezbollah actively enables Assad to wage war on the Syrian people by providing money, weapons, and expertise to the regime in close coordination with Iran.” This position was expressed also through a statement by US. State Department spokesman , Patrick Ventrell, who said that Washington “has always been clear concerning Hezbollah’s shameful role and the support it is providing for the Syrian regime and the violence it is inducing in Syria.” Ventrell added: “We were clear from the start concerning the destructive role played by Iran as well as the Iranian role.”

Several Israeli agents in Congress are today promoting a Jabhat el Nusra-Hezbollah war even as the Obama administration terror-lists the jihadist group. Meanwhile, Senator Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), McCain’s neocon Islamaphobe acolyte, goes a bit further and explains to Fox News, once Assad falls and Hezbollah is out of the picture “We can deal with these (jihadist) fellas.”

Recent history in Libya instructs otherwise. As Turkish commentator Cihan Celik recently noted: “A divorce with al-Nusra will not be easy in Syria”

The past two years in Libya, that shadow of a country, reveals countless examples, three witnessed firsthand by this observer, during the long hot summer of 2011. What we saw was Gulf sponsors and funders offering young men, often unemployed, $ 100 per month, free cigarettes, and a Kalashnikov to do jihad.  Plenty down and out lads still accept these offers in Libya, as they do in Syria. One reason why the militias proliferated so quickly in Libya and never melted away was the phenomenon of a wannabe jihadists deciding to be a leader and recruiting perhaps a brother or two, maybe a few cousins or tribe members, and presto, they have created a militia with power they never dreamed of.

Their new life can offer many perceived benefits  from running rough shod over the civilian populations and setting up myriad mini but potent criminal enterprises specializing in kidnappings, robberies, drugs, trafficking in women, and assassinations for cash.  How many of these young men have turned in their weapons in Libya and returned to their former lives?   Or will do so when instructed by the likes of McCain or Graham?

On 4/24/13 Jabhat Al-Nusra Front intensified its threats to officials here including the Lebanese president by releasing a challenge from its media office: “…we inform you – and you may think of that as a warning or an ultimatum – that you must take immediate measures to restrain Hezbollah, otherwise, the fire will reach Beirut. If you do not abide by this within 24 hours, we will consider that you are taking part in the massacres committed by the Hezbollah members and we will unfortunately have to burn everything in Beirut.” In addition they are calling for Jihad and the establishment of the “Resistance Factions for Jihad against the Regime in Syria” and also in Saida and Tripoli, Lebanon.

Israeli officials appear to be in agreement with the Ross/Pipes proposal to arrange for Al Qeada to launch a war against Hezbollah.  The Director for External Affairs at “The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, repeatedly claimed that the Shia are the real threat to Israel, not the Sunni and with the least threat coming from the Gulf monarchs.  He offered the view recently that “Israel is now a partner of the Sunni Arab states.”  Indeed, Israel hopes that Hezbollah will forget Israel when tasked with trying repel Al Nusra and other al Qaeda affiliate attacks.

According to various Israel officials who have issued statements on the subject, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan and several other members of the Arab League constitute an “alliance of anxiety for Israel” because they claim that “Sunni Arabs are not as competent as the Shia and Iran and as a result they express doubts that Israel can rely on the Sunni states in the same way that the Sunni states can rely on Israel.”

In a documentary about the Iraq war, an American soldier explains:  “Actually, we don’t really have much of a problem with the Sunnis.  It’s the Shias who we are afraid of.  The problem has something to do with their leader who was killed centuries ago and these fellas are willing to lay their life down for the guy.  Anyhow, that is what they told us in Special Ops class.”

Al Nusra fighters currently occupying parts the south west areas of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in south Damascus, recently expressed eagerness to fight Hezbollah which they claim would give them credibility with Sunni Muslims and, oddly, in this observers view, “credibility with western countries”, who supposedly are al Qaeda’s sworn enemies. It’s sometimes hard to know who precisely is whose enemy these days in Syria as the rebels continue using areas east and southwest of Damascus as rear bases and as gateways into the capital.

Despite boasts to the contrary from Jihadist types in Syria and Lebanon, it is not clear to this observer if Jihadist and al Qaeda-affiliated groups living among Hezbollah communities in Lebanon like Fatah al Islam, Jund al Sham or Osbat al Ansar which have been here for years would actually join the Zionist promoted anti-Hezbollah jihad.

But it is evident that some Lebanese Islamists and jihadists directly connected to al Qaeda do have the ability to target Hezbollah.   Elements from each of these groups are startling to associate and identify with Jabhat al Nusra, inspired partly by their successful military operations in Syria.

Again, we saw the same thing in Libya.  Enthusiastic, ambitious young men who want to improve their lot in life try to go with a winner.  According to sources in the Ain al Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, jihadist leaders such as Haytham and Mohammed al Saadi, Tawfic Taha, Oussama al Shehabi and Majed al Majed are recruiting followers and fighters in Lebanon and offer a ticket out the the squalid army-surrounded, Syrian-refugee-inflated camp.

Homs-based media activist Mohammad Radwan Raad claims that “the embattled residents of the rebel-controlled Homs province town of Al-Qusayr welcome Saida, Lebanon-based Sunni Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir’s call for Jihad in Syria. Claims Raad, “Al-Qusayr residents welcome Assir’s call and hope the Lebanese people help kick out Hezbollah members in the area…We need anyone who can get rid of them.” This week Assir urged his followers to join Syrian rebels fighting troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. Al-Qusayr has been under rebel control for more than a year and on the scene reports indicate that it is about to be returned to central government control.

In response, two Salafist Sunni Lebanese sheikhs urged their followers to go to Syria to fight a jihad (religious war) in defense of Qusayr’s Sunni residents. “There is a religious duty on every Muslim who is able to do so… to enter into Syria in order to defend its people, its mosques and religious shrines, especially in Qusayr and Homs,” Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir told his followers. For now, experts say, such calls on the part of Lebanon’s Salafists are largely bluster because the movement is far from able to wield either the arsenal or the fighting forces of Hezbollah.

Local analysts like Qassem Kassir argue that Jabhat al Nusra and friends are not organized enough to fight against Hezbollah in a conventional war, but they could cause great damage by organizing bomb attacks against the Party of God’s bases and militants. The latter would be enough initially for Ross and WINEP and their Zionist handlers. Creating chaos in Lebanon being one of their goals but more importantly weakening the National Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah and also challenging Syria and Iran.

In a recent speech, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah offered his party’s view about a Western-promoted Sunni-Shia clash, with Al-Nusra, AlQaida and all the groups which flocked to Syria, saying that what was wanted of them was to kill and get killed in Syria, in a massacre which will only serve the enemies of the Arabs and Muslims.

The coming months will reveal to us if  the several pro-Zionist Arab regimes as well as Islamophobes, including those at WINEP and other Israel-first think-tanks, are delusional in believing that John McCain’s “simple solution” to those resisting the Zionist occupation of Palestine, would be to assist  Jabhat el Nusra type jihadists to make war against Hezbollah.

Whether they could defeat Hezbollah is uncertain but whether Jabhat al Nusra and friends are capable of igniting yet another catastrophe in this region is the looming question.
   Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and Syria and is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and Syria and is reachable c/o
fplamb@gmail.com

Obama Keeps Resisting Zionist “Red Lines,” Tripwires, Forcing His Hand On Syria

[Both Zionist Central in London and that shitty little Zionist cesspool in the Middle East urge Obama to accept whatever "evidence" that they produce of any chemical weapons's use within Syria as proof that the "red lines" have been crossed, even if the lines were violated by the terrorist rebels, instead of by Assad (SEE:  'Growing evidence' of chemical weapons use in Syria - UK).  They have managed to recreate the same scenario within Syria that they almost pulled-off in Iran, with the help of different terrorist friends of America, the anti-Shia MEK/Jundullah.  Just as he refused to cave-in to previous Zionist pressure to launch an airborne aggression against Iran, he is apparently resisting pressure to cross the line which he has drawn in the sand with his own hand.  This doesn't mean to imply that he is secretly a good guy, but that he does not like it when other people try to force him to take unpleasant, ill-advised actions.  Don't read this as hope on my part that Obama will choose to do the right thing when the time comes, because I still firmly believe that he will not hesitate to push the "big red button" when the time comes, probably with a big smile on his lips.  He will be smiling  when he follows his master's order to unleash Armegeddon, pleased with himself for having ignored the hyped screams of the Apocalyptic cheerleaders like McCain, Cameron and Netanyahu.  Mistakes have been made by all of the team players who have misjudged the resiliency of Assad and the core strengths of the Lebanese resistance forces, but jumping the gun on WWIII will not improve the Empire's chances of success.  The time for the Greater Middle East War has passed, since the momentum for that war has been missed by both Bush and Obama.  Bush missed it on several occasions, after Afghanistan, after Iraq and after Israel failed in Lebanon in 2006, failing yet one more time, after the failed Georgian tangent in 2008.  Obama's big failure was in his hesitation in the early days of the anti-Syrian war.   Failure to jump on the war wagon there gave Russia time to turn the tables.  Odds are, the American/world economies will be fully depleted before Obama can organize another attempt, meaning that nothing has changed except for the American ability to control the flow of future events.  World War III will probably happen by accident, the way it should all go down.  Taking steps to avoid such an extinction-level event should by the number one priority with all earthly governments.]

White House: Obama’s red line not crossed on Syria chemical weapons

(CBS News) For the first time, the White House says chemical weapons have been used in Syria’s civil war. The Obama administration said it believes President Bashar Al-Assad used sarin gas on people last month. That report is leading some to ask if the U.S. is ready to consider military action.

The White House said the evidence of Syrian chemical weapons attacks is still too thin and President Obama’s red line has not been crossed, and that means military intervention by the United States in the Syrian civil war is not imminent and not guaranteed but more study and investigation is needed.

Syria has likely used chemical weapons on a “small scale,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday.Hagel was the first to confirm the startling news. He read from a prepared statement: “The Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.”

But Hagel, consistent with administration policy, laced his announcement with carefully crafted caveats. Hagel said, “We still have uncertainties about what was used, what kind of chemicals was used, where it was used, who used it.”

Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers that Syria used chemical weapons twice last month, once near Damascus and once in Aleppo. Victims appeared to have been gassed.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a red line and could move the U.S. closer to military intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Mr. Obama said on Aug. 20, 2012, “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

But top White House advisers insist the red line has not been crossed. In letters to Congress, the administration said it needs more proof — in its words, “credible and corroborated facts.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has continuously pressed Mr. Obama to intervene, said the president is ducking his own standard. “The president of the United States said that this would be a red line if they used chemical weapons. The president of the United States has now told us that they used chemical weapons,” McCain said. “We must give the opposition the capability to drive out Bashar Assad once and for all.”

U.S. intelligence says it has “varying degrees of confidence” Syria used chemical weapons. But the U.S. isn’t the only nation hedging its bets. British intelligence says it has “persuasive information chemical weapons were used.” French intelligence says it has clues but no proof. However, CBS News’ Major Garrett reported, “Definitive proof may be very hard to find amid the raging Syrian civil war.”

© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Have You Ever Heard Of “Al-CIA-da” Attacking Iran?

[I, myself, have been one of the loudest voices in the past, protesting that "Al Qaeda is Sunni and hates Iran," but the longer this game goes on, the more I come to see that Shia Iran has been an ally of the real "al-CIA-da" all along.  After all, wasn't it Iran that supplied most of the first recruits from the Afghan mujahedeen to ship to Bosnia for Clinton? (SEE:  Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre).  Can anyone remember ever hearing of an "al-CIA-da" attack upon Iran, or Shiites, for that matter?  For Westerners to admit that previous murders and terrorist attacks have been committed by the same bunch of intelligence operatives that we normally would label "al-Qaeda" anywhere else, would be an admission of our own major guilt in international terrorism, or our ISI surrogates, or the Saudis. 

As far as the timely "al-CIA-da" plots to bomb trains in Canada, involving Iranian sources, anything is possible in this messed-up world    (SEE: Conservative anti-terror bill and arrests match up beautifully, don’t they: Mallick).  The big problem with this bit of terrorist news, which coincidentally supports currently debated Canadian anti-terror legislation, is that it is old news; the reported plot is at least one year old (dormant). Like all news concerning the terrorist phenomenon known as "al-CIA-da," it is all conveniently-timed hype, intended to ease the democratic transition into a total police state.  Canada is behaving like a good subservient government should act.  Ottawa is walking the rocky path to Fascism blazed by Cheney and Bush.]

“No attack was imminent and the tip was a year old.”

Iran’s unlikely Al Qaeda ties fluid, murky and deteriorating 

Reuters

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. — File photo

When Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri spoke in an audio message broadcast to supporters earlier this month, he had harsh words for Iran. Its true face, he said, had been unmasked by its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against fighters loyal to Al Qaeda.

Yet it is symptomatic of the peculiar relationship between Tehran and Al Qaeda that in the same month Canadian police would accuse “Al Qaeda elements in Iran” of backing a plot to derail a passenger train.

Shia Muslim Iran and strict Sunni militant group Al Qaeda are natural enemies on either side of the Muslim world’s great sectarian divide.

Yet intelligence veterans say that Iran, in pursuing its own ends, has in the past taken advantage of Al Qaeda fighters’ need to shelter or pass through its territory. It is a murky relationship that has been fluid and, say some in the intelligence community, has deteriorated in recent years.

“I wouldn’t even call it a marriage of convenience. It’s an association of convenience,” said Richard Barrett, former head of counter-terrorism for Britain’s MI6 Secret Intelligence Service and later head of the UN Security Council’s monitoring team maintaining the world body’s Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctions blacklists.

“It’s not a strategic alliance. An Al Qaeda presence may suit the Iranians because it allows them to keep an eye on them, it gives them leverage in the form of people who are akin to hostages,” he added.

“There has been a lot of travel between Iraq and Pakistan and I cannot imagine the Iranians are not aware of that,” he said. But it was unlikely that Iran would take the risk of actively collaborating with Al Qaeda against North America: “I don’t think the Iranians would take it kindly if it turned out that there had been plotting by Al Qaeda on their territory.”

Canadian police have said there was no sign the plot had been sponsored by the Iranian state. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Al Qaeda’s beliefs were in no way consistent with Tehran’s.

As yet, many details of the alleged plot remain unclear. However, a US government source cited a network of Al Qaeda fixers based in the Iranian city of Zahedan, close to the borders of both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The source said they served as go-betweens, travel agents and financial intermediaries for Al Qaeda operatives and cells operating in Pakistan and moving through the area.

Another Western source suggested that with relations deteriorating between Iran and Al Qaeda over the civil war in Syria, Tehran had acted recently to stop fighters crossing through from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) to join Islamist militants fighting to overthrow Assad.

“Although the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda has always been strained, this worsened after 2011 when the two sides lined up on opposite sides in the Syrian civil war,” said Shashank Joshi, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London.

“Syria’s strongest rebel group is allied to Al Qaeda, and both have sharply criticised Iranian support for the Assad regime.”

It is unclear whether the planning for the alleged Canadian plot, which Canadian police said had been in the works for some time, was carried out before Syria’s war deepened the strain between Tehran and Al Qaeda.

“There has been a loosening of the ties,” said Barrett, noting that documents released after US forces caught and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 showed the Al Qaeda leader saying he was not able to trust the Iranians at all.

“Since then we have Zawahri castigating Iran quite recently. So clearly something had gone wrong.”

Iranian control far from clear

If indeed the Al Qaeda network was based in and around Zahedan — which lies on the main road to Pakistan and is the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province — it is far from clear how easy it would be for Iran to control.

The region is home to a toxic mix of drug smuggling, illicit trade and gun-running by insurgents. Afghan refugees long ago crowded into poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Zahedan, although Iran, like Pakistan, periodically tries to push them out, arguing they are a security risk.

Iranian authorities have also been battling a Sunni insurgency of their own in recent years by ethnic Baloch complaining of discrimination. The Jundollah group has claimed several attacks including a bombing that killed 42 people in 2009 — there is no sign it is linked to Al Qaeda, though it is often confused with a Pakistan-based group of the same name.

At the same time, on the Pakistan side of the border, Pakistani security forces are fighting an insurgency by secular Baloch separatists, while Al-Qaeda linked militants in the Sunni sectarian Lashkar-i-Jhangvi group have carried out a string of attacks against the Shia population there.

Pragmatic approach

Despite a common Western misconception that Iran, as the pre-eminent Shia power, is motivated by religion, it has always been much more pragmatic in pursuing its national interest, analysts and diplomats say, allowing it to turn a blind eye to Sunni Al Qaeda using its territory.

“The thing that has stymied people is that ‘Al Qaeda is Sunni and the rest of the people we are talking about here are Shia. They don’t mix and match.’ Well, they do. And they do it whenever they want to. They just look the other way,” said Nick Pratt, a retired US Marines colonel and CIA officer now with the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

Before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Iran cooperated with India and Russia against the Pakistan-backed Taliban then in power in Kabul. When Al Qaeda members fled Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban, it detained them under house arrest in Tehran.

“Since 9/11 a number of senior Al Qaeda figures including one of Osama bin Laden’s sons and senior commander and strategist Saif al Adel made their way to Iran,” said Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for Britain’s MI6.

“They were detained under quite strict conditions by the Iranian authorities who subsequently sought to use them as a bargaining chip with the US government in their ongoing dispute about Iran’s nuclear program,” added Inkster, who is now director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Vahid Brown, a US-based researcher who has written extensively on Al Qaeda, said in an article on the Jihadica website earlier this year that the men who fled to Iran constituted a dissident faction within Al Qaeda, which in recent years had become increasingly vocal in their criticism of Osama and Zawahiri.

Divided by their views on the advisability of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, broadly speaking, “the pro-9/11 group, including bin Laden and Zawahiri, fled to Pakistan, while the anti-9/11 group ended up in Iran, where they were placed under house arrest by Iranian authorities,” he wrote.

Iran had been willing to cooperate with the United States on Afghanistan initially, but relations soured after Tehran was denounced by then President George W. Bush as part of the “axis of evil” in 2002 and worsened further after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Later, analysts say, Tehran allowed Al Qaeda members — among them Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — to transit through Iran.

But Iran has been vulnerable to Al Qaeda as well. After one of its diplomats was kidnapped in Pakistan some years ago it released some of the Al Qaeda members it had under house arrest in exchange for his freedom, according to Pakistani media reports.

“About 18 months ago the Iranians released most if not all of those they were holding, for reasons still not entirely clear,” said Inkster.

“There may well be a residual AQ presence in Iran though I would be cautious about presenting it as something very structured or hierarchic,” he added.

“AQ is far from being the organisation it once was and what matters more are relationships between like-minded individuals. And that may well be what we are seeing in the Canada case. There seems to be no evidence of Iranian official involvement.”

Strategic Overview Invisible Wounds of War–US ARMY Surgeon General

The Army Surgeon General and Medical Commander, LTG Patricia Horoho, and Command Sgt. Maj. Donna Brock, U.S. Army Medical Command Senior Enlisted Advisor, signed a new Army Medicine Healthcare Covenant. The covenant signed 2 Feb., during the Army breakout and final day of the Military Health System Conference is leadership’s commitment to the health, wellness and resilience of the Force and their Families.

STATEMENT BY PATRICIA D. HOROHO

THE SURGEON GENERAL UNITED STATES ARMY

MENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH

APRIL10, 2013

Strategic Overview Invisible Wounds of War

Afghan Massacre Trial On Hold Until the Pentagon Comes To Grips With Reality

[The Army trial of Staff Sgt Robert Bales of Ohio for the massacre of 16 Afghan civilians is in complete disarray.  The big point of contention is that "the Army is confused about how to deal with the issue of PTSD, formerly known as 'battle fatigue,' or 'shell shock."'  They consider it a disipline problem, men unwilling to grow-up on command."  The Big Brass are afraid to let this media trial proceed, if it will expose the shockingly cruel callous Pentagon culture of "machismo," which refuses to believe in or to accept the concept of "post-traumatic stress disorder."  It is the macho delusion that this Army possesses superhuman capabilities, which prevents its generals from accepting the high toll that their polices have exacted upon American personnel (SEE: Army Shuts-Down Unmanly “New Agey” Therapy At Madigan Army Center ).  This delusional mindset led America directly into a quagmire, before the first forces were ever deployed, because the Generals pretended that their "all-volunteer force" was sufficient to fight two full-scale ground wars, even though the volunteer force could not supply sufficient manpower for one major war, without calling-out all of the reserves.  

Staff Sgt. Bales did not want to deploy to Afghanistan, after serving three tours in Iraq.  If anybody ever had a reason to suffer traumatic stress, it was Sgt. Bales and every other overworked soldier like him.  Just like the case of My Lai and Lt. William Calley, how could they be faulted for civilian massacres, when they saw similar slaugter taking place everyday?  As far as they knew, they were just being "gung ho" in the service of their country.  Gooks, towelheads, Chincs, Japs, these are all derogatory racial epethets which were supplied by the Pentagon chain of command to the men on the front lines.  Killing as many of them as possible, has always been the soldiers' primary mission.]

Defense seeks new expert in Afghan killings case

Attorneys for the U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians during a 2012 rampage have asked that a new psychiatric expert be appointed in the case.

By GENE JOHNSON

Associated Press

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. —

Attorneys for the U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians during a 2012 rampage have asked that a new psychiatric expert be appointed in the case.

Emma Scanlan, an attorney for Robert Bales, made the request during a hearing Tuesday at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle.

Citing attorney-client privilege, Scanlan did not say why the request was made. The defense team provided its reasons to the judge – but not prosecutors – in a confidential court filing.

Prosecutors objected to the motion, saying it smacked of witness shopping.

Outside experts believe a key issue going forward will be to determine if Bales suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Bales served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A ruling on the defense team’s request will be made later.

At Tuesday’s hearing, attorneys also discussed which witnesses might be allowed to testify on Bales’ behalf, should the case reach a sentencing phase.

Defense attorneys also asked for a consultant to be appointed to help them pick jurors. The judge said he would rule on that later.

The defense also requested the handwritten notes of the first Afghan government officials who viewed the crime scene.

The defense team has received an official report about those findings, but lawyers said the notes could yield information left out of the report. Prosecutors said they so far have been unable to obtain the notes from the Afghans. At the judge’s request, they agreed to make another attempt through official channels.

“They took a lot of notes, and that’s what we want to see,” Major Greg Malson, one of Bales’ attorney, said after the hearing.

Bales is to be court-martialed on premeditated murder and other charges in the attack on two villages in southern Afghanistan.

The Ohio native and father of two is accused of slaying mostly women and children during pre-dawn raids on March 11, 2012.

Bales, 39, has not entered a plea. The Army is seeking the death penalty. The U.S. military has not executed anyone since 1961.

The slayings last year drew such angry protests that the U.S. temporarily halted combat operations in Afghanistan, and it was three weeks before American investigators could reach the crime scenes.

Bales’ defense team has said the government’s case is incomplete.

During a previous preliminary hearing, prosecutors built a strong eyewitness case against the veteran soldier, with troops recounting how they saw Bales return to the base alone, covered in blood. One soldier testified that Bales woke him up in the middle of the night, saying he had just shot people at one village and that he was heading out again to attack another. The soldier said he didn’t believe Bales and went back to sleep.

Afghan witnesses questioned via a video link from a forward operating base near Kandahar City described the horror of that night. A teenage boy recalled how the gunman kept firing as youths scrambled, yelling: “We are children! We are children!”

An Army criminal investigations command special agent testified earlier that Bales tested positive for steroids three days after the killings, and other soldiers testified that Bales had been drinking the evening of the massacre.

Gen. Kayani Speaks Fondly of Radical Islamist Militarism

Obsessive focus: Gen Kayani’s comments

PERHAPS it is a sign of the times that Gen Kayani’s comments at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul will attract little meaningful attention or comment. “Pakistan was created in the name of Islam and Islam can never be taken out of Pakistan … The Pakistan Army will keep on doing its best towards our common dream for a truly Islamic Republic of Pakistan,” Gen Kayani said. In truth, however, both the timing and the content of Gen Kayani’s speech ought to be parsed carefully. Given the recent travails of election candidates facing new, and unwarranted, scrutiny of their Islamic credentials and a debate being triggered on the true ideology of Pakistan, the army chief ought to have considered whether weighing in on such matters at this time was the appropriate thing to do or not. The political battle lines have already been drawn, with religious elements and anti-democratic forces beating the drum of an exclusionist version of Pakistan’s ideology and trying to make it an election issue. Has Gen Kayani, wittingly or unwittingly, given those religious elements and anti-democratic forces a boost going into next month’s election?

The substance too of the comments requires close examination. Who is trying to take Islam out of Pakistan; where is the threat to the public’s right to practise their Muslim faith? In fact, the threat is in the opposite direction: to those of other faiths who are also Pakistani and some of whom don’t even enjoy the theoretical right to practise their faith without fear or intimidation. If Islam is in fact the core of the Pakistani state, does that mean non-Muslim Pakistanis have no place in this state and society? Even among Muslims, from the early 1950s, the question of which of the many different interpretations of and schools of thought in Islam ought to be given precedence over the rest has been a dangerously divisive issue when the state has seen fit on occasion to tackle it. More relevantly to Gen Kayani’s institution, the exclusive, obsessive even, focus on using Islam to galvanise the armed forces is precisely where the origins of the tragic and disastrous policy of state-sponsored jihad has arisen. Gen Kayani and the army high command should stick to questions of national security and leave it to the politicians to sort out for whom and why Pakistan was created. The ideology of Pakistan should be an issue for politics, not the armed forces.

Two approaches to fighting terrorism

Irfan Husain

IN Boston, three people were killed in an act of terrorism earlier this week, and it’s still headline news in the United States. President Obama has denounced the attack, and an FBI official has promised to hunt the perpetrator to “the ends of the earth”.

In Pakistan, a terrorist attack that claimed “only” three lives would probably be buried on page three of our national newspapers. As for the search for the killers, we’d be lucky if the police even registered the case.

Why this difference in approach to terrorism? The reason lies in the seriousness with which the two states take their primary duty of protecting their citizens.

In the United States, the intelligence failures that permitted 9/11 to occur prompted American leaders to ratchet up security, change laws and become highly proactive in fighting the scourge of terrorism.

Undoubtedly, these steps, taken under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, have eroded personal liberties and human rights. But it is a fact that the Boston bombing was the first successful act of terrorism after 9/11, apart from the Fort Hood shootings by Major Nidal Hasan in 2009.

In a number of sting operations, the FBI and local police have entrapped a number of suspects — usually Muslim — who agreed to participate in bizarre attacks.

Through wiretaps on telephone conversations and email intercepts, American intelligence agencies have disrupted a number of terrorist plots.

As a result of this vigilance, terrorism in the US has virtually been stamped out. It is precisely because of this success that the Boston attack has caused so much fear and outrage.

Compare this muscular, no-nonsense approach with Pakistan’s hopelessly inadequate response to terrorism.

For over two decades, Pakistanis have suffered from murderous attacks from a lethal brew of gangs killing and maiming in the name of Islam. Frequently, these criminals boast of their deeds, and post videos of beheadings on the internet.

Almost invariably, the state is a mute onlooker. Intelligence agencies are either incompetent or occasionally collusive. While brave but ill-trained and poorly equipped policemen, militiamen and soldiers have died in their thousands, politicians and generals have been unable to get their act together.

Despite the heavy casualties suffered in this vicious war, Rehman Malik, our ex-interior minister, can still pass the buck to provincial governments in the wake of the atrocities Shias have been subjected to recently.

In the US, the FBI has primary jurisdiction over all cases involving terrorism. In Pakistan, we have been unable to create a federal force along the same lines.

The result is a mishmash of agencies, ranging from covert military outfits to the Intelligence Bureau to local police who arrive at the scene of terrorist acts.

With little coordination, it should not surprise us if investigations seldom lead anywhere.

And when a suspect is actually arrested, even with illegal arms in his possession, he is likely to be let off by our courts. Witnesses are scared of reprisals, and judges terrified of the consequences of a guilty verdict. The result is before us in the shape of an increasingly violent jihadi insurgency.

When faced with a major threat to their sovereignty and to their citizens, states normally respond with force. Pakistan’s response to the existential threat we face has been equivocal and half-hearted. While our army and paramilitary units have fought bravely when called upon to do so, both our military and political leadership has been ambiguous and confused.

There has been talk of an elusive consensus at GHQ and the presidency. But leadership is about forging a consensus and taking the nation along in difficult decisions, not heeding divided counsel.

As we have seen in the ongoing Taliban campaign of targeting candidates in next month’s elections, there are wide variations in how these killers are viewed by different political parties. The Taliban, too, differentiate between parties: witness their threats against candidates from the PPP, the MQM and the ANP, all mainstream secular parties.

Clearly, apart from the religious parties, PML-N and PTI are both acceptable to the Taliban and their ilk. This is one reason our politicians have been unable to unite on a single platform and condemn these killers in unequivocal terms.

In other countries, any political party seeming to side with terrorists, or seeking their support, would pay a heavy price at the polls.

Not so in Pakistan. This reveals the confusion among people that has been sowed by politicians and the media. People like Imran Khan have been pretending that Islamic militancy is the result of the US-led war against Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. By blaming the Americans and their drone campaign, our leaders absolve the Pakistani Taliban of their vicious crimes.

Elsewhere, no politician can get away with letting terrorists off the hook by saying their violence is motivated by extraneous factors. But by using terrorists for their own ends in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Pakistani establishment is reaping what it sowed. Over the years, various jihadi groups have gained legitimacy as well as support in our intelligence agencies.

Another reason for their growing self-confidence and success is the increasingly fanatical tilt in Pakistan’s public discourse.

Fuelled by a reactionary electronic media that demonises all things Western and openly justifies extremism, the deadly virus of Islamist violence grows ever more virulent.

No other country has provided as much space to terrorism as Pakistan has, and no other country has suffered as much as we have.

And yet, we continue to grope in the dark, unable to evolve a consensus or forge a strategy to confront and defeat the jihadi monsters we have ourselves unleashed.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

When Will We Learn?–Beirut Embassy Bombing Thirty Years Later

When Will We Ever Learn?

Franklin Lamb

Beirut — This observer has no idea if the American Ambassador here in Beirut, Maura Connelly or Secretary of State John Kerry has ever listened to Marlene Dietrich’s classic October 1965 performance of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone,” still stunning, deeply moving and available on the Internet.But on this 30th anniversary of the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut I found myself near the old embassy site on the sea front for personal reasons, and stepped down the block below the American University of Beirut to meet a friend at Starbucks. When I entered, maybe the 5th time in my life I have been to a Starbucks since I don’t drink coffee and for political reasons tend to avoid the chain, I noticed someone was playing Dietrich’s classic. Having just read reports in the Lebanese media  concerning  the American Ambassador and Secretary of  State’s political comments on the embassy events, three decades on, Marlene’s  enchanting, deep voiced, “When will they ever learn,?” numbed me. Kerry slammed Hezbollah in the Lebanese media, saying “On this 30th anniversary of the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, the United States celebrates 30 years of close cooperation with the people of Lebanon that proves the enemies of democracy failed,” he said from Washington, “especially at the people-to-people level, and this proves the terrorists’ goals were not achieved.” For her part, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Maura Connelly said the bombing opened a new chapter in America’s history in the Middle East. Connelly said the explosion taught Americans that “peaceful intentions were not enough to protect us from those who would use terror to achieve their aims in the Middle East.” What both officials avoid mentioning is the subject of who was committing the terrorism in Lebanon when these events, including the US Marine Barracks and the Embassy again in 1984, occurred. Regarding Hezbollah, which would not be a formed organization ready to announce itself publicly until 1985, CIA operative Robert Baer and his team assigned to investigate the Embassy bombing concluded there was not enough reliable evidence to support the theory that the Party of God was responsible. Among the more than three dozen militias of various persuasions operating in Beirut alone in the early 1980’s, only Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. The American officials also failed to take into consideration the fact, never denied by Washington, that at that time the US Embassy had the largest contingent of CIA agents working out of the Embassy and performing command and control functions for the US Marine base in South Beirut, more in fact than in any other capital city except Moscow. When the US Embassy became a command post, by the terms of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic relations it lost its protected status. The US Marines as a hostile military force in Lebanon never had adequate protection, and by targeting civilians, its base near the airport became a legitimate target. Contrary to the political spin put on the event, there was no terrorism involved in the operation. The reason is because, despite Reagan administration claims, and this week’s assertion by Ambassador Connelly, the US forces were not “a neutral peacekeeping unit” as hyped. Rather, they were enemy combatants fighting and killing on one side of a civil war conflict. When the battleship New Jersey’s shells killed hundreds of people, mostly Shiites and Druze, that fact was clear. It’s not surprising that in his memoir, General Colin Powell, at the time an assistant to Caspar Weinberger noted that “When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee’ had taken sides.” Some examples. On 14 December, 1983 the New Jersey fired 11 projectiles from three of her 16 inch (406 mm) guns at the rate of three per minute each at positions inland of Beirut. These were the first 16 inch shells fired for effect anywhere in the world since New Jersey ended her time on the gunline in Vietnam in 1969. photo:  US Pentagon. The New Jersey opens fire on an enemy position off the coast of Beirut 9 January 1984. New Jersey’s shells were sometimes fired from 16 inch (406mm) guns at the rate of four per minute and killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, mostly Shiites and Druze since arriving at Beirut on 9/23/82). The ships on board arsenal included 21,000 shells. According to news accounts by reporters in Beirut at the time, the New Jersey bombardment sometimes began at 1:25 P.M. and ended at 11 P.M. followed by American fighter-bombers which could be heard flying over Beirut in search of targets. On September 19, 1983, the New Jersey and other US warships began shelling Druze, Syrian and Palestinian positions in the Chouf Mountains outside Beirut. The battleship New Jersey with its 2,700 pound shells (“flying Volkswagens”) led the action. And on 8 February 1984, the New Jersey fired almost 300 shells at Druze and Shi’ite positions in the hills overlooking Beirut. More of the massive projectiles rained down on the Bekaa valley east of Beirut and constituted the heaviest shore bombardment since the Korean War. The inaccuracy of New Jersey’s guns was a scandal in US government circles and was consistently called into question. An investigation, led by Marine colonel Don Price, into New Jersey’s gunfire effectiveness in Lebanon found that many of the ship’s shells had missed their targets by as much as 10,000 yards (9,144 meters) and therefore may have inadvertently killed civilians. Records and oral hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the matter could not be clearer, and Secretary Kerry and Ambassador Connelly know this. Tim McNulty, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune based in Lebanon at the time wrote: “Everybody loved the New Jersey until she fired her guns. Once she fired, it was obvious she couldn’t hit anything,” Well, as the citizens of Lebanon know, it did indeed hit things mainly innocent civilians, their property and Lebanon’s infrastructure. As Secretary of State Kerrey knows well from his nearly three decades in the US Senate and his four years (2009-2013) as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee the actions of the USS New Jersey itself was arguably terrorism and some experts in the International Law Bureau of the Pentagon have said as much. This observer lived for more than a year in the Chouf village of Choueifat, a beautiful place set high above the remains of the US marine barracks, the Beirut airport and the Mediterranean Sea where the USS Jersey and other US Sixth fleet warships are normally positioned when they come calling on Lebanon. Neighbors still recall what some here call, “the terror days of USS New Jersey” and its shelling with both 26 inch and 19 inch shells, the former weighing up to 2,700 pounds. Clearly visible around Choueifat and dozens of other smaller towns, are the remains of houses and buildings not yet repaired from the devastation caused by the intense shelling. Also visible at various locations are indications that unexploded shells even now remain imbedded in the ground. One wonders if as part of the “special enduring friendship between the United States and Lebanon on a people to people level” that the president might order the Pentagon to defuse and remove these huge unexploded bombs. If so he would distinguish his administration from that of the occupiers of Palestine who for more than three decades have targeted various parts of Lebanon with American supplied and US taxpayer-paid weapons, including literally millions of US-made cluster bombs during the 33 day Israeli aggression in 2006. Photo: AFP with permission. The remains of an American journalist and her unborn son are removed from the rubble of the US Embassy on 4/18/82. Janet Lee Stevens, 32 years old at the time of her death, was Ph.D. student in Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania and she loved her experience in Lebanon and enthusiastically wrote her twin sister back in Atlanta, Georgia that in Lebanon, she was doing “the best writing I have done in my life, because here one must do one’s utmost.” “Devoted to the cause of Palestine. Humane, talented, self-reliant, ambitious, fearless, and rebellious,” is how one former Lebanese editor described Janet. It is certainly appropriate to honor the victims of the 1983 Janet Lee Stevens, hours before her death US Embassy bombing but it is no less appropriate to honor the other tragedies in Lebanon during this period under review that precipitated it. In her closing remarks this week, Ambassador Connelly noted that in her opinion, “the bombing of the US Embassy taught us the stakes of involvement in this region.” Has it? As we contemplate another “neutral peacekeeping presence” being planned in Washington for Syria, we gravely doubt that it has. When will we ever learn? Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and Syria and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com