Brit Press Amplifies the Lie of “Taliban Independence From Pakistan”

[Taliban (religious students) have always been tools of the CIA and the ISI, there to project Pakistan’s power into Afghanistan, without projecting blame for the murderous war crimes committed by them (SEE:  Taliban Have Always Been ISI Foot Soldiers, Working For the CIA).  There can be no independence from their parent paramilitary institutions in Islamabad. 

Afghan Pres. Ghani is just like Hamid Karzai, in that, both of them were there because the Pentagon/CIA wanted them there, to serve Western will.  It is a calculated seduction, intended to seduce the Afghan people into surrendering to Taliban fascism once again, and to seduce the American people into surrendering to Pentagon plans for permanent war in Southeast Asia and a permanent US presence in Afghanistan.  The Western peace ploy was never intended to foster peace in Afghanistan, but merely to make possible the placement of (some other nations’) military forces along planned pipeline routes and highways, in sufficient numbers to limit property damage to Western and Arab-financed development projects.  Everything else is just play-acting and media disinformation, intended to push the broadway production, disguised as “war” to people in love with war and Hollywood-style entertainment.  War movies have always fascinated the American public.]

In Secret Meetings, Taliban Rejected Pakistan Pressure On Peace Process

Reuters

File photo: A member of Afghan security forces holding up his rifle as he walks at the site of an attack in Kabul, Afghanistan February 27, 2016. (Reuters Photo)

Islamabad/Peshawar, Pakistan:  Pakistani officials threatened to expel Afghanistan’s Taliban from bases in Pakistan if they did not join peace talks this month, but the militants rebuffed their traditional patron, two officials said, casting doubt on how much influence Islamabad retains over them.

After the secret meetings with Pakistani officials about two weeks ago, the Taliban’s Supreme Council met at an undisclosed location and voted to reject the talks scheduled for early March with the Afghan government, according to a council member.

Instead, the insurgents are now pouring back into Afghanistan for what they say will be a fierce spring offensive to be launched soon.

Pakistan’s influence over the insurgents is the lynchpin to the peace plan developed over last few months by Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United States and China to bring an end to the 15-year-old war in Afghanistan.

A Pakistani official in Islamabad said the Taliban’s recent success on the battlefield inside Afghanistan had changed the equation.

“They no longer need their Pakistan bases in the same way, so if Pakistan threatens to expel them, it does not have the same effect,” said the official, a retired military officer close to the talks.

The insurgents have won new zones of influence – if not outright control – from Afghan security forces since the United States and its allies pulled most combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, Afghan and Western officials acknowledge.

“Pakistan’s trump card – safe havens on its soil – is in danger of being snatched away,” said Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“The Taliban have little incentive to step off the battlefield now, given recent gains and those likely to come in the next few months. In effect, why quit while you’re ahead?”

Nafees Zakaria, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Office, said he had no knowledge of meetings with the Taliban but added, “We usually don’t know who has met with whom” in the sensitive and high-level peace initiative.

In Kabul, however, members of the Afghan government were sceptical about Pakistan’s assertions.

“Pakistan’s honesty and sincerity with regard to the Afghan peace process has always been a question,” said an Afghan cabinet member, echoing the sentiment of several officials interviewed there.

Pakistan’s military has long been accused of fostering the Taliban as a way of pursuing regional rivalry with India.

Pakistani officials, however, deny the charge and insist the government and military recognise that Afghanistan’s war threatens their own security .

“Their Dream”

A member of the Taliban’s leadership council, or shura, whose members are mostly based in Pakistan and Afghanistan but also travel between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, said rebel representatives met in Islamabad with Pakistani officials a little more than two weeks ago.

“They have asked our representatives to bring more decision-making people to the next meeting … to the meeting with U.S. and Afghan officials. This is their dream, but they will not be able to see our senior commanders,” the Taliban council member said.

A senior Pakistani security official with knowledge of the talks said: “I don’t think the talks are dead, but they are definitely plagued by a serious illness.

“The ones who are in Pakistan … We have told them repeatedly that they will have to leave if they don’t participate in the process,” the Pakistani official said..

“We have done what we can … but influence does not mean control. Those days are long gone.”

The Taliban source had knowledge of, but did not attend, the meeting with Pakistani officials in Islamabad. He was at the subsequent Taliban council meeting to decide on whether to join the peace talks.

The pro-talks camp largely comprised supporters of nominal Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour, believed to be hiding in Pakistan after being shot in a leadership dispute last year and rumoured killed, and his chief rival, Mullah Mohammad Rasoul, who is believed to be in Afghanistan.

“I personally feel that Mullah Mansour and some other leaders are in favour of peace talks and they don’t want to annoy Pakistan … but they can’t make decisions without approval of other shura members,” said the Taliban council member.”

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid declined to comment on any meetings with Pakistani representatives. He confirmed the Leadership Council meeting but would not give details.

Publicly, both the Afghan and Pakistani government are expressing hopes that peace talks can begin before the traditional Taliban spring offensive .

Pakistan’s top diplomat Sartaj Aziz spoke last week of progress in restarting talks “in coming days”.

However, Taliban commanders told Reuters that with the council’s decision, they are focusing on launching their annual fighting season with the hopes of grabbing more territory.

“We already have started focusing on the spring offensive, and that’s why the majority of the fighters and commanders are going there (Afghanistan),” said a senior Taliban figure, based in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

© Thomson Reuters 2016

Comic-Strip Nation

[SEE:  Guts & glory: the making of the American military image in film ; One Minute to Zero: Camp Carson ;‘LET THERE BE LIGHT,’ JOHN HUSTON VS. THE ARMY ]

Comic-Strip Propaganda

How Washington officials inserted ideas into the funny pages

Jesse Walker

The U.S. government has a history of inserting propaganda into popular culture, sometimes overtly and sometimes behind the scenes. Comics historian Jeet Heer has dug up a particularly interesting example: Roy Crane’s strip Buz Sawyer. Crane not only coordinated his storylines with Washington during World War II and the Cold War, but he sometimes allowed officials to dictate the details of his plots.

In 1952, for example—just a year before a CIA-assisted coup in Iran—Crane set a story in that country. As part of the process of producing it,

 

Roy Cranea State Department official named Eugene V. Brown sent Crane a ten-page memo, explaining in precise detail the plot points the government wanted for Buz Sawyer, along with what purpose those points served. These included finding a way to “stress [the] importance of Private Enterprise” and to portray “the manner in which Communism attempts to discredit development and improvement programs of the West.” Crane, meanwhile, should do his best to steer clear of certain delicate topics. “It would be best to avoid any reference to OIL in discussing Iran.” Because winning hearts and minds was key, Brown wanted a story showing “a strong bond of friendship” between Buz and an Iranian pilot named Sandhu, the purpose of which was to “provide entry of Buz into local situation on common level with indigenous forces.” (Crane followed this direction, although he used the name Ali instead of Sandhu.) Other plot points were designed to provide “further evidence of machinations of Communism” and “display American individual’s ingenuity in coping with operations.” Six months after the strip appeared, Crane praised Brown’s contribution in a letter to Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state and one of the key architects of the cold war…

As Heer notes, the “millions of Americans who read Buz Sawyer in 1952 would have gotten a very distorted image of Iran. They would have seen a country where Americans were chiefly helping to avert a famine, where the major threat of disorder came from Soviet spies, where Americans were good-hearted aid officials, where control of the oil supply wasn’t a factor, and where the U.S. government had no conflict with the democratically elected government.” Such storylines weren’t good for the cartoonist’s craft either, Heer argues: “As Crane became more concerned with tailoring his strips to a political message, they lost the spark that had once made them special.”

To read Heer’s whole article, go here. To read about the government’s efforts to influence radio programs during World War II, go here. For a more recent story of this sort—the messages that the Clinton-era Office of National Drug Control Policy inserted into prime-time TV shows—go here.

US Judge Rules Saudi Arabia Has Complete Immunity for Sept. 11, 2001

Saudi Arabia has sovereign immunity from 9/11 damage claims, judge rules

Information from imprisoned Zacarias Moussaoui ruled irrelevant due to immunity

By Nate Raymond, Thomson Reuters

This undated file photo provided by the Sherburne County Sheriff Office shows Zacharias Moussaoui, who figured in the lawsuit by the families of 9/11 victims. (Sherburne County, Minn., Sheriff’s Office/AP)

A U.S. judge on Tuesday dismissed claims against Saudi Arabia by families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, who accused the country of providing material support to al Qaeda.

U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan said Saudi Arabia had sovereign immunity from damage claims by families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks, and from insurers that covered losses suffered by building owners and businesses.

“The allegations in the complaint alone do not provide this court with a basis to assert jurisdiction over defendants,” Daniels wrote.

The victims had sought to supplement their case with new allegations to avoid that result, including based on testimony they secured from Zacarias Moussaoui, a former al-Qaeda operative imprisoned for his role in the attacks.

Daniels said even if he allowed the plaintiffs to assert those new claims, doing so would be “futile, however, because the additional allegations do not strip defendants of sovereign immunity.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they would appeal. Sean Carter, one the lawyers, said he believed the ruling was also the consequence of the U.S. government’s decision to keep classified evidence that could be favourable to their cause.

“Obviously, we respectfully disagree with Judge Daniels’s ruling,” he said

A lawyer for Saudi Arabia declined comment.

The ruling came just over 14 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in which airliners hijacked by al Qaeda militants brought death and destruction upon the United States.

Most of the 19 attackers were Saudi nationals who hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers revolted.

The case against Saudi Arabia has had a complicated history, with trial judges including Daniels twice before ruling that Saudi Arabia was entitled to immunity under the federal Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

But in 2013, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York revived the lawsuit, in light of a 2011 decision that allowed similar claims to proceed against Afghanistan.

The case is In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 03-md-01570.

© Thomson Reuters, 2015

The Imperial Demolition of the Middle East—Western ace in the hole

[The author of the following does an excellent job of laying-out the primary strands of the Middle East knot.  The architects of the “Arab Spring” understood these strands and many more, giving them intimate knowledge of the primary “buttons” to be pushed, in order to set the Middle East on fire.  This is what the amazing CIA psywarriors did, by intention, NOT by accident. 

The problem has been in getting Western leaders to admit that their policies have been wrong since the beginning of the terror war, following policies which multiplied terrorism wherever US counter-terrorism took hold.  It is not just that Obama’s policies which have been misguided, because he has continued to follow the same Pentagon policies which managed Bush’s war.  American policies in general, since 2001, have been to tear countries apart, without consideration for what would come next. 

Now that the contradictions between America’s words and actions have become apparent to the people of the world, popular opinion is turning against the Empire, breaking the American global dictatorship (new world order).  Next comes worldwide realization that this has all been intentional, NOT by accident, or through a series of devastating mistakes.  The objective of the “Arab Spring” has always been to create chaos throughout the Muslim world, to be achieved through total destruction.

Convincing Western leaders to admit that the demolition of the existing order has been intentional all along will prove to be an existential struggle for anyone willing to make the attempt to reason with power.  The power elite can never admit that their objective has been to sow chaos in foreign lands, because doing so would create conscious linkage to our own Nation’s internal demolition.  We stand a better chance of witnessing a global realization about American intentions to create disorder, than we do of seeing changes arising from within.  It has now become clear to the rest of humanity that there has been NO real “regime change,” only regime destruction. The world is about to rightfully blame America for everything

The emergence of new, more rational world leadership comes in the person of Vladimir Putin.  Screams of outrage and urgency immediately rise-up against him from the usual warmongering crowd, while a hushed silence descends upon the rest of the world, where saner minds join together to pray, once more, for WORLD PEACE.  Putting an end to the Imperial destruction of Syria, Libya and Yemen is the first step towards finding that lasting peace in the Middle East.]

The Roots of Conflict in the Middle East 

• By   Aras Ahmed Mhamad 

Only rule of law and a culture of diversity can overthrow autocracy and religious fundamentalism in the Middle East.

One fundamental problem for Middle Eastern countries is that a majority of the rulers are illegitimate. While each country has its own history and trajectory, common patterns prevail across the region: Those in power have not received their positions from a fair and transparent electoral process. They see themselves as above the law and misuse their absolute power.

These autocrats act as a guardian of the people or treat them as an enemy. Sets of tribal and religious convictions replace law in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and power is fundamentally linked to tribalism or religion.

How have power struggles, religious conflict, discrimination, security issues, colonialism and Western hegemony, values and intervention shaped the Middle East? This author spoke to PhD students, academics and university lecturers to learn more.

Muhammad Waladbagi, a PhD candidate at Durham University working on Turkey-Iraqi Kurdistan relations, states that the modern history of the Middle East has witnessed frequent interstate wars, numerous revolutions, coup d’états, civil wars and economic problems:

“These are signs of fundamental problems in the region’s political culture that at times has set the ruling regimes against their people. It is quite difficult to identify and explain the reasons behind such phenomena in a few sentences as the origins of the problems differ in each specific case, and Middle Eastern states are not homogeneous as they have many differences.”

The role of religion

The feeling of attachment to tribalism and fake patriotism under the umbrella of religion is stronger and more apparent than respect for human rights and pluralism in the Middle East. Patriotism is used as a tool to accumulate wealth and oppress the rights of minorities, while religion and tribalism are often militarized, making the use of violence legitimate and normal.

Sabir Hasan, a lecturer at the University of Human Development and a PhD student at the University of Leeds, says religion—specifically Islam—is an inseparable part of Middle Eastern society, and it is one of the most influential domains of Kurdish social life:

“It is not surprising that different tribal and so-called patriotic groups resort to religion to gain legacy and popularity. As for ‘fake patriotism’, as you termed it, we need a simple glance at the contemporary history of Middle Eastern regimes, including Kurdistan, to see what abuses and scandals have been committed in the name of patriotism. It is axiomatic that those who first claimed to be loyal patriots have eventually become millionaires, all at the expense of the public. Those who misuse religion and patriotism can be regarded, at best, as opportunists.” 

In a region where exchange of power often causes destruction and chaos, the psychology of the rulers is structured in such a way that they consider themselves to always be right, thus there is no need for an election. Humans are not seen as humans, but as either friend or foe. Ironically, one has to act like an enemy to be a friend and a friend to be an enemy. That is to say, one has to be the enemy of freedom to be the friend of an oppressor, and to be a protector of an oppressor to be the enemy of democracy.

Power struggles

Analyzing the issue of power struggles from a psychoanalytic perspective, Mohammed Akoi, an assistant lecturer in Raparin University in Sulaymaniyah, says:

“Sigmund Freud talks in detail about the Oedipus complex; that is, the unconscious rivalry between the father and the son. I see a similar type of complex when it comes to rulers in the Middle East. There is a myth in Kurdish folklore that could say a lot about father-son rivalry in the Middle-Eastern context.

“The story goes that a father, after having lost all his sons but one, arranges a wedding for his last son, Saidawan. As the party ends, Saidawan goes hunting to the mountains, and so does his father. Saidawan dresses in a wild goat’s clothing in order to attract other goats and thus hunt them. His father, on the other hand, seeing a supposed wild goat and not knowing it is his son in disguise, kills him and thus loses his last son.

“The story is often told as a tragic misfortune on the part of the father. However, approaching the incident from a Freudian interpretation, it is the father who kills his son unconsciously. Much has been said about the Middle Eastern father as an example of divine authority who is always there to punish the son.”

Akoi argues that rulers in the Middle East play the role of a typical superior who enjoys the authority of the father. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that democracy, the product of Western consciousness, always fails to shake the Middle Eastern father’s position.

The dictators of Middle Eastern countries see armed struggle as a pathway to their eternal need for power. Instead of promoting coexistence, they embrace war and military confrontation; instead of building legitimate institutions, they destroy the country’s infrastructure; and instead of organizing an inclusive, lawful military force, they establish militia units for the sake of adding fuel to the sectarian disputes. This paves the way for the dictators to remain in power as long as they want or until they are forcefully deposed.

For Sarkawt Shamsulddin, a political analyst at the Kurdish Policy Foundation specializing in governance and security and NRT TV’s bureau chief in Washington DC, two issues are of pivotal importance: the abuse of religion and a lack of good governance. The focus here is on governance.

“The rulers in the Middle East have been oppressing their people for decades and they have used different means to do so, such as undermining human rights, democracy, freedom of speech and civil society as a whole. They have undermined opposition groups. They have mostly invested in military and security institutions. Therefore, when revolutions or what is called the ‘Arab Spring’ emerged, they use their military capability to stay in power.”  

In the underdeveloped countries of the Middle East, security and military forces are dominated and ruled by tribal chiefs and religious figures. Infringement of political rights is authorized through elastic rules, and the confiscation of democratic values is fallaciously considered a religious duty. The public sphere is in total chaos, and the government has too much influence through the media, economy, education and even on the private lives of the people. This abuse of power has become an inherent part of governments’ mechanism to uproot any kind of freedom—be it freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience or freedom of the press.

Zubir Rasool, a PhD candidate of Middle East politics at the University of Exeter, argues that there are numerous problematic issues that can contribute to the structure of current conflict in the Middle East. The main issue in this regard has to do with the structure of the so-called “nation-state” on the one hand, and its political, social and economic functions on the other hand.

“The evolution of the nation-state did not come from a natural process in the Middle East. Large groups of Middle Eastern countries were the results of colonial operations—whether it was from the Ottoman Empire or European colonialism. Both of these historical moments’ legacies share a responsibility for the creative chaos in the Middle East nowadays. The terms nation-building or state-building was just a figurative cover for the combination of different ethnic, tribal, linguistic and cultural identities. The legacy of the Ottoman Empire is based on the distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims; also, non-Muslims were divided among their ethnicities and religious sects.”

The middle-class has deteriorated and the professional workforce is almost non-existent. A lack of public facilities, low income and high unemployment keep people frustrated. A lack of food quality and stable electricity, poor health care and stagnant education keep people over-occupied and struggling. This way, people do not have the means to revolt. They are more occupied with providing the basic needs to survive, let alone the strenuous dangers of migration and the perpetual challenges of resettlement, identity, discrimination and cultural integration.

Refugees

Ramyar Hassani, a human rights observer in Latin America, Europe and Kurdistan, says that in a Middle East that is burning because of sectarian wars and extremist organizations, being a refugee has become a normal phenomenon.

“On the one hand, the proxy wars of regional powers have forced thousands of Middle Easterners to flee and leave everything behind. On the other hand, the wrong policies of Western and world powers led the Middle East into a clash of extremists, which resulted in thousands of refugees [heading] to a safer country [and] dreaming of a life without violence.”

With that in mind, whenever there is a revolution, the faces change, but the mentalities are the same. That is to say, a new despotic clan will take over power, establishing the same sort of mechanism to replace and then rule in the same manner as the ousted autocrat. Each clan or tribe controls a certain territory with their own armed force and militia in hand and their own rules in place.

That being said, constitutional legitimacy is threatened by political outbidding and revolution. The legitimate exchange or handover of power and social justice are vulnerable in the face of political and economic corruption, which is why disorder, instability and war have always been part of the autocrat’s culture and mentality.

Sherko Kirmanj, a visiting senior lecturer at the University of Utara Malaysia and the author of Identity and Nation in Iraq, believes the question of legitimacy is one problem that faces the Middle East.

“One of the major problems confronting Middle Eastern societies is that the process of modernity in the region is not home-grown, but rather an imposed one. Modernity with all its dimensions and outcomes, including the nation-state, secularism, democratization, freedom, etc, were alien concepts introduced into Middle Eastern societies in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The introduction of these concepts and the values that embrace such equality, justice, fairness, freedom of speech and freedom of religion—just to name a few—led to a clash with local and traditional values of these societies.”

In the End

Western leaders and institutions have a limited understanding and familiarity with Middle Eastern societies, cultures and politics. This often leads to a focus on increasing arms and ammunition supplies and offering military training, especially in times of a violent insurgency, instead of the much-needed humanitarian, educational and developmental aid. This creates an ongoing cycle, wherein whoever has the most military strength holds power and steps into the same pattern of governmental rule.

What has blinded the West is the age-old misconception that Middle Eastern societies are anti-civil society, anti-democracy and anti-multiculturalism. This thinking leads to the conclusion that these societies are doomed to remain in bloodshed, where the best treatment is the importing of more and more weapons. This approach fails to address the root problems and instead contributes to the cycle of violence.

The West must realize that the real danger lies in the empowerment of religious fanatics and systemic corruption that have replaced true critical thinking, quality education and effective institutions.

By publishing and glamorizing radical groups’ propaganda on media platforms such as YouTube, the West can demonstrate how significant a culture of diversity and rule of law is for consolidating democracy. These two elements—rule of law and a culture of diversity—are the only means through which autocracy and religious fundamentalism can be overthrown.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Robert Hale / Strels / Shutterstock.com

Aras Ahmed MhamadAras Ahmed Mhamad is a freelance journalist and regular contributor for Fair Observer.

Destroying the Syrian Nation For the Sake of Gas

Migrant Crisis & Syria War Fueled By Competing Gas Pipelines

By Mnar Muhawesh

Don’t let anyone fool you: Sectarian strife in Syria has been engineered to provide cover for a war for access to oil and gas, and the power and money that come along with it.

Refugees and migrants wait to cross the border from the northern Greek village of Idomeni to southern Macedonia, Monday, Sept. 7, 2015. Greece has borne the brunt of a massive refugee and migration flow of people heading into the European Union. (AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos)

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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect recent Wikileaks revelations of US State Department leaks that show plans to destabilize Syria and overthrow the Syrian government as early as 2006.  The leaks reveal that these plans were given to the US directly from the Israeli government and would be formalized through instigating civil strife and sectarianism through partnership with nations like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and even Egypt to break down the power structue in Syria to essentially to weaken Iran and Hezbolla. The leaks also reveal Israeli plans to use this crisis to expand it’s occupation of the Golan Heights for additional oil exploration and military expansion. 

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MINNEAPOLIS — Images of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who washed up dead on Mediterranean shores in his family’s attempt to flee war-torn Syria, have grabbed the attention of people around the world, sparking outrage about the true costs of war.

The heart-wrenching refugee crisis unfolding across the Middle East and at European borders has ignited a much needed conversation on the ongoing strife and instability that’s driving people from their homes in countries like Syria, Libya and Iraq. It’s brought international attention to the inhumane treatment these refugees are receiving if — and it is a major “if” — they arrive at Europe’s door.

In Syria, for example, foreign powers have sunk the nation into a nightmare combination of civil war, foreign invasion and terrorism. Syrians are in the impossible position of having to choose between living in a warzone, being targeted by groups like ISIS and the Syrian government’s brutal crackdown, or faring dangerous waters with minimal safety equipment only to be denied food, water and safety by European governments if they reach shore.

Other Syrians fleeing the chaos at home have turned to neighboring Arab Muslim countries. Jordan alone has absorbed over half a million Syrian refugees; Lebanon has accepted nearly 1.5 million; and Iraq and Egypt have taken in several hundred thousand.

Although it’s not an Arab nation or even part of the Middle East, Iran sent 150 tons of humanitarian goods, including 3,000 tents and 10,000 blankets, to the Red Crescents of Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon via land routes to be distributed among the Syrian refugees residing in the three countries last year.

Turkey has taken in nearly 2 million refugees to date. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan made international headlines for opening his nation’s arms to migrants, positioning himself as a kind of savior in the process.

Meanwhile, Gulf Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have provided refuge to zero Syrian refugees.

While there’s certainly a conversation taking place about refugees — who they are, where they’re going, who’s helping them, and who isn’t — what’s absent is a discussion on how to prevent these wars from starting in the first place. Media outlets and political talking heads have found many opportunities to point fingers in the blame game, but not one media organization has accurately broken down what’s driving the chaos: control over gas, oil and resources.

Indeed, it’s worth asking: How did demonstrations held by “hundreds” of protesters demanding economic change in Syria four years ago devolve into a deadly sectarian civil war, fanning the flames of extremism haunting the world today and creating the world’s second largest refugee crisis?

While the media points its finger to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s barrel bombs and political analysts call for more airstrikes against ISIS and harsher sanctions against Syria, we’re four years into the crisis and most people have no idea how this war even got started.

This “civil war” is not about religion

Citing a lack of access on the ground, the United Nations stopped regularly updating its numbers of casualties in the Syrian civil war in January 2014. Estimates put the death toll between 140,200 and 330,380, with as many as 6 million Syrians displaced, according to the U.N.

While there is no question that the Syrian government is responsible for many of the casualties resulting from its brutal crackdown, this is not just a Syrian problem.

Foreign meddling in Syria began several years before the Syrian revolt erupted.  Wikieaks released leaked US State Department cables from 2006 revealing US plans to overthrow the Syrian government through instigating civil strife, and receiving these very orders straight from Tel Aviv.  The leaks reveal the United State’s partnership with nations like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and even Egypt to use sectarianism to divide Syria through the Sunni and Shiite divide to destabilize the nation to weaken Iran and Hezbolla.  Israel is also revealed to attempt to use this crisis to expand it’s occupation of the Golan Heights for additional oil exploration.

According to major media outlets like the BBC and the Associated Press, the demonstrations that supposedly swept Syria were comprised of only hundreds of people, but additional Wikileaks cables reveal CIA involvement on the ground in Syria to instigate these very demonstrations as early as March 2011.

 

Just a few months into the demonstrations which now consisted of hundreds of armed protesters with CIA ties, demonstrations grew larger, armed non-Syrian rebel groups swarmed into Syria, and a severe government crackdown swept through the country to deter this foreign meddling. It became evident that the United States, United Kingdom, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey would be jumping on the opportunity to organize, arm and finance rebels to form the Free Syrian Army as outlined in the State Department plans to destabilize Syria. (Just a few months ago, WikiLeaks confirmed this when it released Saudi intelligence that revealed Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had been working hand in hand to arm and finance rebels to overthrow the Syrian government since 2012.)

These foreign nations created a pact in 2012 called “The Group of Friends of the Syrian People,” a name that couldn’t be further from the truth. Their agenda was to divide and conquer in order to wreak havoc across Syria in view of overthrowing Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The true agenda to hijack Syria’s revolt quickly became evident, with talking heads inserting Syria’s alliance with Iran as a threat to the security and interests of the United States and its allies in the region. It’s no secret that Syria’s government is a major arms, oil and gas, and weapons ally of Iran and Lebanon’s resistance political group Hezbollah.

But it’s important to note the timing: This coalition and meddling in Syria came about immediately on the heels of discussions of an Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline that was to be built between 2014 and 2016 from Iran’s giant South Pars field through Iraq and Syria. With a possible extension to Lebanon, it would eventually reach Europe, the target export market.

Perhaps the most accurate description of the current crisis over gas, oil and pipelines that is raging in Syria has been described by Dmitry Minin, writing for the Strategic Cultural Foundation in May 2013:

“A battle is raging over whether pipelines will go toward Europe from east to west, from Iran and Iraq to the Mediterranean coast of Syria, or take a more northbound route from Qatar and Saudi Arabia via Syria and Turkey. Having realized that the stalled Nabucco pipeline, and indeed the entire Southern Corridor, are backed up only by Azerbaijan’s reserves and can never equal Russian supplies to Europe or thwart the construction of the South Stream, the West is in a hurry to replace them with resources from the Persian Gulf. Syria ends up being a key link in this chain, and it leans in favor of Iran and Russia; thus it was decided in the Western capitals that its regime needs to change.

It’s the oil, gas and pipelines, stupid!

Indeed, tensions were building between Russia, the U.S. and the European Union amid concerns that the European gas market would be held hostage to Russian gas giant Gazprom. The proposed Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline would be essential to diversifying Europe’s energy supplies away from Russia.

Turkey is Gazprom’s second-largest customer. The entire Turkish energy security structure relies on gas from Russia and Iran. Plus, Turkey was harboring Ottoman-like ambitions of becoming a strategic crossroads for the export of Russian, Caspian-Central Asian, Iraqi and Iranian oil and even gas to Europe.

The Guardian reported in August 2013:

“Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar and Turkey that would run a pipeline from the latter’s North field, contiguous with Iran’s South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets – albeit crucially bypassing Russia. Assad’s rationale was ‘to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally, which is Europe’s top supplier of natural gas.’”

Knowing Syria was a critical piece in its energy strategy, Turkey attempted to persuade Syrian President Bashar Assad to reform this Iranian pipeline and to work with the proposed Qatar-Turkey pipeline, which would ultimately satisfy Turkey and the Gulf Arab nations’ quest for dominance over gas supplies. But after Assad refused Turkey’s proposal, Turkey and its allies became the major architects of Syria’s “civil war.”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/G1p_tFnKqMA?rel=0&showinfo=0

Much of the strategy currently at play was described back in a 2008 U.S. Army-funded RAND report, “Unfolding the Future of the Long War”:

“The geographic area of proven oil reserves coincides with the power base of much of the Salafi-jihadist network. This creates a linkage between oil supplies and the long war that is not easily broken or simply characterized. … For the foreseeable future, world oil production growth and total output will be dominated by Persian Gulf resources. … The region will therefore remain a strategic priority, and this priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war.”

In this context, the report identifies the divide and conquer strategy while exploiting the Sunni-Shiite divide to protect Gulf oil and gas supplies while maintaining a Gulf Arab state dominance over oil markets.

“Divide and Rule focuses on exploiting fault lines between the various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts. This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations (IO), unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces. … the United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch proxy IO campaigns to discredit the transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace. … U.S. leaders could also choose to capitalize on the ‘Sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict’ trajectory by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world…. possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran.”

The report notes that another option would be “to take sides in the conflict, possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran.”

This framework crafted an interesting axis: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, U.S., Britain and France vs. Syria, Iran and Russia.

Divide and conquer: A path to regime change

With the U.S., France, Britain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — aka, the new “Friends of Syria” coalition — publicly calling for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad between  2011 and 2012 after Assad’s refusal to sign onto the gas pipeline, the funds and arms flowing into Syria to feed the so-called “moderate” rebels were pushing Syria into a humanitarian crisis. Rebel groups were being organized left and right, many of which featured foreign fighters and many of which had allied with al-Qaida.

The Syrian government responded with a heavy hand, targeting rebel held areas and killing civilians in the process.

Since Syria is religiously diverse, the so-called “Friends of Syria” pushed sectarianism as their official “divide and conquer” strategy to oust Assad. Claiming that Alawites ruled over a majority Sunni nation, the call by the “moderate” U.S.-backed rebels became one about Sunni liberation.

Although the war is being sold to the public as a Sunni-Shiite conflict, so-called Sunni groups like ISIS,  the Syrian al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (the Nusra Front) and even the “moderate” Free Syrian Army have indiscriminately targeted Syria’s Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Jews. At the same time, these same foreign nations supported and even armed the Bahraini government, which claims to be Sunni, in its violent crackdown on the majority Shiite pro-democracy demonstrations that swept the nation.

The Syrian government army itself is over 80 percent Sunni, which indicates that the true agenda has been politically — not religiously — motivated.

In addition to this, the Assad family is Alawite, an Islamic sect that the media has clumped in with Shiites, though most Shiites would agree that the two are unrelated. Further, the Assad family is described as secular and running a secular nation. Counting Alawites as Shiites was simply another way to push a sectarian framework for the conflict: It allowed for the premise that the Syria-Iran alliance was based on religion, when, in fact, it was an economic relationship.

This framework carefully crafted the Syrian conflict as a Sunni revolution to liberate itself from Shiite influence that Iran was supposedly spreading to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

But the truth is, Syria’s Sunni community is divided, and many defected to join groups like the Free Syrian Army, ISIS and al-Qaida. And as mentioned earlier, over 80 percent of Assad’s military is Sunni.

As early as 2012, additional rebels armed and financed by Arab Gulf nations and Turkey like al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood, declared all-out war against Shiites. They even threatened to attack Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s government after they had overthrown the Assad government.

Soon after, the majority of the Muslim Brotherhood rebels became part of al-Qaida-affiliated groups. Together, they announced that they would destroy all shrines — not just those ones which hold particular importance to Shiites.

Hezbollah entered the scene in 2012 and allied itself with the Syrian government to fight al-Nusra and ISIS, which were officially being armed and financed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. And all the arms were actively being sold to these nations by the United States. Thus, US arms were falling into the hands of the same terror group the US claims to be fighting in its broader War on Terror.

According to reports, Hezbollah was and has been been active in preventing rebel penetration from Syria to Lebanon, being one of the most active forces in the Syrian civil war spillover in Lebanon. Despite this, the U.S. sanctioned both the Syrian government and Hezbollah in 2012.

Also that year, Russia and Iran sent military advisers to assist the Syrian government in quelling the terror groups, but Iranian troops were not on the ground fighting during this time.

What was once a secular, diverse and peaceful nation, was looking more like it was on its way to becoming the next Afghanistan; its people living under Taliban-style rule as jihadists took over more land and conquered more cities.

Effects of foreign meddling outweigh self-determination

If you think that was hard to follow, you’re certainly not alone.

Most sectarian civil wars are purposely crafted to pit sides against one another to allow for a “divide and conquer” approach that breaks larger concentrations of power into smaller factions that have more difficulty linking up. It’s a colonial doctrine that the British Empire famously used, and what we see taking place in Syria is no different.

So, let’s get one thing straight: This is not about religion. It might be convenient to say that Arabs or Muslims kill each other, and it’s easy to frame these conflicts as sectarian to paint the region and its people as barbaric. But this Orientalist, overly simplistic view of conflict in the Middle East dehumanizes the victims of these wars to justify direct and indirect military action.

If the truth was presented to the public from the perspective that these wars are about economic interests, most people would not support any covert funding and arming of rebels or direct intervention. In fact, the majority of the public would protest against war. But when something is presented to the public as a matter of good versus evil, we are naturally inclined to side with the “good” and justify war to fight off the supposed “evil.”

The political rhetoric has been carefully crafted to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Ultimately, no matter the agendas, the alliances or instability brought on by foreign meddling, the calls for freedom, democracy and equality that erupted in 2011 were real then and they’re real today. And let’s not forget that the lack of freedom, democracy and equality have been brought on more by foreign meddling to prop up brutal dictators and arm terror groups than by self-determination.

The people in the Middle East once stood united and strong together against foreign meddling, exploitation and colonialism no matter their religious or cultural background. But today, the Middle East is being torn to shreds by manipulative plans to gain oil and gas access by pitting people against one another based on religion. The ensuing chaos provides ample cover to install a new regime that’s more amenable to opening up oil pipelines and ensuring favorable routes for the highest bidders.

And in this push for energy, it’s the people who suffer most. In Syria, they are fleeing en masse. They’re waking up, putting sneakers on their little boys and girls, and hopping on boats without life jackets, hoping just to make it to another shore. They’re risking their lives, knowing full well that they may never reach that other shore, because the hope of somewhere else is better than the reality at home.

About the author
Mnar Muhawesh

Mnar Muhawesh is founder, CEO and editor in chief of MintPress News, and is also a regular speaker on responsible journalism, sexism, neoconservativism within the media and journalism start-ups. In 2009, Muhawesh also became the first American woman to wear the hijab to anchor/report the news in American media. Muhawesh is also a wife and mother of a rascal four year old boy, juggling her duties as a CEO and motherly tasks successfully as supermom. Follow Mnar on Twitter at @mnarmuh

Barbaric Saudi Bastards Set To Behead and Crucify Shia Boy

Prisoner Ali Mohammed al-Nimr facing death by crucifixion in Saudi Arabia

IN many respects, Saudi Arabia is one of the most advanced nations in the world.

It’s the world’s largest oil producer and its cities are glitz and glamour — thriving metropolis’ in the middle of the desert.

In other ways, the desert kingdom is far from advanced, a place where barbaric rituals still occur and where the country’s citizens are subjected to horrific punishments.

It’s hard to imagine that in Saudi Arabia this week preparations are being made to not only execute a young man but to crucify him. Literally.

The world is pleading with the Saudi government to reconsider. Advocates say what’s about to take place makes them feel physically ill.

The boy at the centre of it all — Ali Mohammed al-Nimr — says he’s done nothing wrong.

Ali Mohammed al-Nimr has been sentenced to death by crucifixion.Source:Facebook

‘BARBARIC, INHUMANE, MERCILESS’

Al-Nimr was 17 when he went to an anti-government protest in the Saudi Arabian province of Qatif.

He was accused by the government of carrying a firearm, attacking security forces and even armed robbery. None of those charges could be proven but he confessed nonetheless. He didn’t have a lawyer and some say the confession was drawn from the teenager via torture.

He was demonstrating at the wrong time in the wrong place — in the middle of a violent government crackdown against detractors.

That was February, 2012. Fast forward three years and the charges have stuck, despite a recent appeal.

His sentence is due to be carried out by beheading and crucifixion, a method that involves removing the head of the prisoner and tying their headless body to a cross.

Often, the crucifixion is carried out in a public place. It sends a strong message to others: We will not stand for criticism, no matter who the person and no matter what their age.

‘HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN IN 2015?’

A Scottish politician raised al-Nimr’s case in parliament this week. She spoke eloquently and she spoke in strong opposition to a practice that has no place in our modern world.

“How in 2015 can a supposedly civilised country impose such an inhumane and merciless penalty on any of its citizens, let alone one so young?” MP Margaret Ferrier said.

“It’s an absolute outrage and I intend to write to the minister and ask for urgent action to be taken.

“Ali’s sentence is due to be barbarically carried out by crucifixion. I feel for this young man and his family. Reading Ali’s story this morning filled me with grief for his life about to be savagely and abruptly ended.”

Savagery is nothing new in Saudi Arabia, a country which between 1985 and 2013 executed more than 2000 people. In 2013, 79 people were put to death. Most of them had their heads cut off with large, sharp swords.

In January this year, a woman protested her innocence until the final moment when a sword fell across her neck. She was writhing on the hard ground in a very public place trying to escape her executioner. Not once but twice did the sword fall upon her neck, the first blow clearly not getting the job done.

Elsewhere, blogger Raif Badawi was jailed for 10 years recently after starting a website for social and political debate in Saudi Arabia. Raif will receive 50 lashings a week for a year for setting up the Saudi Arabian Liberals website.

The prosecution first called for him to be tried for apostasy (when a person abandons their religion), which carries a death sentence in Saudi Arabia. Then, in May this year, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a fine of over $300,000 AUD and 1000 lashes. When he is finally released, Raif faces a 10-year travel ban which would keep him from his wife and three young children in Canada, according to Amnesty International.

A spokesman for Amnesty International told news.com.au the last time men were strapped to crosses and killed was in 2013.

“Five Yemeni men were beheaded and crucified, with pictures emerging on social media showing five decapitated bodies hanging from a horizontal pole with their heads wrapped in bags.

“The beheading and ‘crucifixion’ took place in front of the University of Jizan where students were taking exams.”

The Saudi city of Riyadh.Source:AP

DOES SAUDI ARABIA HAVE AN AXE TO GRIND?

Ali Mohammed al-Nimr is not the only family member under the careful watch of the Saudi government.

Ali’s uncle Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was arrested in July, 2012. A self-described campaigner for human rights for minorities, the 53-year-old has a strong following online where a website and Facebook page have been set up to rally support for his defence.

His crimes, including speaking out against the government, carry the death penalty.

Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at legal charity Reprieve, told the International Business Times nobody should have to go through what Ali is going through.

“Ali was a vulnerable child when he was arrested and this ordeal began. His execution — based apparently on the authorities’ dislike for his uncle, and his involvement in anti-government protests — would violate international law and the most basic standards of decency. It must be stopped.”

force West Asian nations to “stop deadly politics in the name of Islam”

Refugee crisis: RSS hits out at ‘oil-rich’ Arab nations

New Delhi: Amid the ongoing refugee crisis, RSS mouthpiece ‘Organiser’ has called for building international opinion to force West Asian nations to “stop deadly politics in the name of Islam”.

It also hit out at Arab nations including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for refusing to help the refugees from strife-torn Syria despite having capacities and resources.

“…Not only Europe but even countries like Bharat (India) and China cannot afford to sit back and wait for the crisis to subside. The time is ripe to build international opinion and force West Asian countries to stop deadly politics in the name of Islam,” it said.

An editorial, “Refuge behind refugees”, in the RSS organ also said Indian “clerics issuing fatwa against the inhuman actions of IS is exemplary in this regard”.

Hitting out at the Arab countries, it said, “The worst culprits are the Arab countries. After financing terrorist groups in many countries, the oil rich West Asian countries have shamed the ‘Arab Conscience’ by refusing to take in any refugee.”

“…Why are some Muslim governments seemingly indifferent to the plight of refugees? They have all the capacities, resources and space but for them the cause espoused by IS is greater than the humanitarian concerns,” it said.

The organ said Saudi Arabia has openly declared that it will not allow any Syrian refugee into the kingdom, while Kuwaiti official argued that ‘they would not fit in’ with the Kuwaiti culture.

The ‘Organiser’ said European powers, who are planning refugee quotas and are now vouching for the humanitarian laws, cannot forget the fact that the situation in Syria or other West Asian countries is the outcome of their colonial legacy.

“They had redrawn the boundaries and created Assads and Saddams under the US leadership. Taliban and IS are their ‘liberal’ contributions to the world. Now when the humanitarian crisis is at the zenith, they cannot overlook the real menace that is barbarism of IS,” it said.

It said the Syrian conflict has created over four million refugees and two million more are expected to flee due to persecution in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen.

“There are reports that Islamic State (IS) militants are being smuggled in Europe in the guise of refugees. The IS operative claimed some 4,000 fighters were already waiting in Europe aiming to attack around the globe,” the RSS organ said.

Noting that more than 2,50,000 people have already died and many are being tortured, it said asylum to refugees can be a temporary solution but not a permanent one.

“Europe cannot hide behind the garb of refugees and neglect the real problem,” it said.

Syrians Unwelcome In Arab Lands, Just As Were the Palestinians Before Them

“It is no surprise that refugees fleeing Syria have no ambitions to settle in any Arab country. They know that their fate in the Arab world will be no better than that of Palestinians living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and other Arab countries.”

Jordan: We Do Not Want Palestinians

by Khaled Abu Toameh

• “Improve the living conditions of the Palestinian refugees. Allow them to settle down. Give them citizenship so that they can live as human beings.” — Dr. Ahmad Abu Matar, an Oslo-based Palestinian academic, blasting Arab the world for its continued mistreatment of Palestinians.
• The Arabs do not care about the Palestinians and want them to remain Israel’s problem. Countries such as Lebanon and Syria would rather see Palestinians living as “animals in the jungle” than grant them basic rights such as employment, education and citizenship.

A recent decision by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to cut back its services has left Jordan and other Arab countries extremely worried about the possibility that they may be forced to grant citizenship rights to millions of Palestinians.

During the last few weeks, many Jordanians have expressed deep concern that the UNRWA measures may be part of a “conspiracy” to force the kingdom to resettle Palestinian refugees.

According to UNRWA figures, more than two million registered Palestinian refugees live in Jordan. Most of the refugees, but not all, have full (Jordanian) citizenship, the figures show. The refugees live in 10 UNRWA-recognized camps in Jordan.

The “Cyber City” refugee camp in Jordan, where a number of Palestinians are being housed. (Image source: ICRC)

Jordan is the only Arab country that has granted citizenship to Palestinians. Still, many Jordanians see their presence in the kingdom as temporary.

Although there is no official census data for how many inhabitants are Palestinian, they are estimated to constitute half of Jordan’s population, which is estimated at seven million. Some claim that the Palestinians actually make up two-thirds of the kingdom’s population.

Over the past few decades, the Jordanians’ biggest nightmare has been the talk about resettling the Palestinians in the kingdom by turning them into permanent citizens. The talk about turning Jordan into a Palestinian state has also created panic and anger among Jordanians.

Jordan’s “demographic problem” resurfaced last week when a senior Jordanian politician warned against plans to resettle Palestinian refugees in the kingdom.

Taher al-Masri, a former Jordanian prime minister who is closely associated with the ruling Hashemite monarchy, sounded the alarm in an interview with a Turkish news agency.

Commenting on UNRWA’s severe financial crisis, which has resulted in cutting back services to Palestinian refugees living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, al-Masri said: “I believe this is part of a plan to turn the issue of the Palestinian refugees into an internal problem of Jordan. UNRWA is paving the way for liquidating the Palestinian cause.”

Al-Masri, whose views often reflect those of the monarchy, expressed fear that the UNRWA cutbacks would prompt the world to consider the idea of turning the Palestinians in Jordan into permanent citizens, especially as most of them already carry Jordanian passports.

Al-Masri and other Jordanian officials maintain that Jordan is entitled to protect its “national identity” by refusing to absorb non-Jordanians.

Earlier this week, Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour raised many eyebrows when he announced that there were more than two million Palestinians living in Jordan who are not permanent citizens. Ensour was apparently referring to those Palestinians who carry temporary Jordanian passports.

Jordanian and Palestinian political analysts described Ensour’s comments about the Palestinians in Jordan as “fuzzy” and “controversial.” They noted that Ensour mentioned the Palestinians together with Iraqi and Syrian refugees who have found shelter in the kingdom in recent years, and that therefore the Jordanians consider the Palestinians’ presence in their country only temporary.

“The remarks of the prime minister are ambiguous, controversial and very worrying,” commented Bassam al-Badareen, a widely respected journalist in Amman. “He referred to the Palestinians as being part of the foreigners and Iraqi refugees in Jordan.”

Ensour’s remarks, like those of al-Masri, are further proof that Jordan and the rest of the Arab world are not interested in helping solve the problem of the Palestinian refugees. Jordan, Lebanon and Syria — the three Arab countries where most of the refugees are living — are strongly opposed to any solution that would see Palestinians resettled within their borders.

That is why these countries and most of the Arab world continue to discriminate against the Palestinians and subject them to Apartheid laws and regulations. Although Jordan has granted citizenship to many Palestinians, it nevertheless continues to treat them as second-class citizens.

In the past few years, the Jordanian authorities have been revoking the citizenship of Palestinians in a move that has been denounced as “unjust” and “unconstitutional.”

The Arab countries have consistently justified their discriminatory policies against the Palestinians by arguing that this is the only way to ensure that the refugees will one day return to their former homes inside Israel. According to this logic, the Arab countries do not want to give the Palestinians citizenship or even basic rights, to avoid a situation where Israel and the international community would use this as an excuse to deny them the “right of return.”

But some Palestinians reject this argument and accuse the Arab countries of turning their backs on their Palestinian brothers.

Dr. Ahmad Abu Matar, a Palestinian academic based in Oslo, blasted the Arab world for its continued mistreatment of Palestinians.

“All the Arab countries are opposed to resettlement and naturalization of Palestinians not because they care about the Palestinian cause, but due to internal and regional considerations,” Abu Matar wrote. “We need to have the courage to say that improving the living conditions of Palestinian refugees in the Arab countries, including granting them citizenship, does not scrap the right of return.”

Noting that Palestinians have long been deprived of their civil rights in the Arab world, particularly in Lebanon, where they are banned from working in many professions and live in camps that do not even suit “animals in the jungle,” Abu Matar pointed out that the U.S .and Europe have opened their borders to Palestinians and even given them citizenship.

Addressing the Arab countries, the academic wrote: “Improve the living conditions of the Palestinian refugees. Allow them to settle down. Give them citizenship so that they can live as human beings.”

But Abu Matar’s appeal is likely to fall on deaf ears in the Arab world. The Arabs do not care about the Palestinians and want them to remain Israel’s problem. Countries such as Lebanon and Syria would rather see Palestinians living as “animals in the jungle” than grant them basic rights such as employment, education and citizenship.

It is no surprise that refugees fleeing Syria have no ambitions to settle in any Arab country. They know that their fate in the Arab world will be no better than that of the Palestinians living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and other Arab countries.

Refugees Flee American Aggression

“It must be stated unequivocally that these are regime change refugees.”

Freedom Rider: Refugees Flee American Aggression

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Americans are made uncomfortable by pictures of drowned refugee children, but most cannot accept that their own government’s “unrelenting effort at regime change in Syria is the cause of this crisis.” U.S. corporate media parrot Washington’s lies, keeping tally of the displaced and doomed, but blaming Syria’s government for defending itself against western-backed jihadists. Rather than demand the West leash its dogs, “they call for more war.”

The ongoing migrant crisis in Europe is a direct result of American and NATO interventions and aggressions in the Middle East. Had those partners in crime not exacted regime change in Libya, that country would not be a magnet for human trafficking and an embarkation point for desperate people. The plan to produce the same result in Syria has failed thus far but there is still chaos and suffering on a mass scale. These refugees exist because of imperialism which has laid waste to nation after nation.

Millions of people around the world are asking how they can help the refugees now streaming into Europe. Personal generosity may seem commendable but in this case it ought to be discouraged. The individuals who want to help should instead spend time demanding that their governments cease intervening in the affairs of other nations. They should also demand that the truth of imperialist guilt be exposed.

Americans were largely unaware of the growing crisis until images of dead children appeared in the media. In particular the photograph of two year-old Aylan Kurdi, who drowned on a beach off the coast of Turkey, will go down in history as an image which brought this crisis to international attention. The Kurdi family were trying to flee a region of Syria overrun by ISIS when the mother and two children drowned. An estimated 2,500 others have also died in attempts to reach Europe.

The corporate media cover the journeys of the would-be migrants and act as though the cause of the catastrophe is somehow mysterious. They never state what is true and obvious, that the western nations created this misery. They and their allies among the Persian Gulf monarchies are entirely to blame.

“These refugees exist because of imperialism.”

The United States and other NATO governments have not been shy in exposing their support for so-called rebels in Syria and continue to utter the loathsome phrase, “Assad must go.” In the topsy-turvy immoral universe of the United States it is acceptable to destroy Syria without one word of condemnation coming from the nation’s editorial pages. Instead politicians and the press repeat their lies and when they speak of war at all they lay blame at the feet of the Syrian government which has a right to defend its territory and sovereignty.

The sight of the dead child seemed to galvanize what other horror stories could not. More than 200 people drowned near the Libyan city of Zuwarah at the same time that the Kurdis attempted their escape. Some 70 bodies of refugees were discovered suffocated in a truck in Austria. The reactions of horror are understandable but they must be met with simple but powerful actions. First, it must be stated unequivocally that these are regime change refugees. They would be living peacefully in their native lands if NATO and their henchmen hadn’t destroyed their countries.

Secondly, call out the liars. The politicians, so-called journalists and “humanitarian” organizations have political agendas which never blame the true culprits. While the corporate media print and broadcast false tales about Russian troops in Syria the lies must be labeled as such. Racism must be exposed as well. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban openly said, “Please don’t come” and added for good measure that he didn’t want too many Muslims to enter his country. Orban said out loud what other European leaders say behind closed doors. He has merely expressed in public what others say in private. Non-white people need not apply.

“In the topsy-turvy immoral universe of the United States it is acceptable to destroy Syria without one word of condemnation coming from the nation’s editorial pages.”

While officials In Washington, London and Paris dissemble because their hands are dirty, the corporate media ratchet up the call to “do something.” If they did their job they would tell readers and viewers why families with small children risk their lives in unseaworthy boats. Instead they all call for more war. They repeat official propaganda and make up some of their own. The unrelenting effort at regime change in Syria is the cause of this crisis and more destruction will only increase the awful toll on human beings.

Sending money to aid organizations is an easy out. Democratic nations are supposed to respond to popular demand. The people of Europe and the United States should therefore start demanding that their nations cease the entire imperial project, and not just in Syria. Aylan Kurdi is not the only child killed by intervention and invasion. Children are dead in Somalia and Gaza and Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and in Syria too. Sadly, there will be more unless those who claim to be horrified actively oppose their own leaders who are all accessories to many crimes.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

• Margaret Kimberley’s blog

Lying Saudis Boast of Taking-In “MILLIONS” of the Syrians They Have Made Into Refugees

[SEE:  EXPOSED: How Oil-rich Gulf states have failed to resettle a SINGLE Syrian refugee]

Saudi Arabia Says Accepted ‘Millions’ of Syrians, Facts Disagree

A Syrian refugee prays on a rail track at the Greek-Macedonian border, near the village of Idomeni, August 22, 2015 | Photo: Reuters Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia dismissed criticism over having zero Syrian refugees, saying it has welcomed millions. However, all of them are temporary workers.

Saudi Arabia defended itself Friday against mounting criticism the government is facing for not accepting Syrian refugees since the conflict began four years ago. The criticism come after photos of the dead body of Syrian three-year-old boy Aylan Kurdi went viral and prompted international outcry against Europe and other rich countries around the world for refusing to admit Syrian refugees. The Saudi Press Agency (SPA) cited an unnamed official source in the foreign ministry as saying that the kingdom found it “important to clarify these efforts with facts and numbers in response to media reports, which included false and misleading accusations about the Kingdom.” RELATED: Negative Freedom, US Liberals and Saudi Arabia People around the Arab world took to social media and Twitter using the hashtag “Arab conscience,” in English and Arabic languages, to express their outrage over the fact that Saudi Arabia and the other five Arab Gulf states from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman – were hosting no Syrian refugees. The Saudi official said that the Kingdom “has received around 2.5 million Syrians since the beginning of the conflict. In order to ensure their dignity and safety, the Kingdom adopted a policy that does not treat them as refugees or place them in refugee camps.” However, the country and its five allies are not signatories of the United Nation’s convention on refugees, which has governed international law on asylum since World War II. Thus, those countries do not have a legal category for refugees. In fact, the GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia, accepted those Syrians as well as those of other nationalities only on temporary work visas, which they must have before they arrive to the country, or on temporary residence visas for minors as dependents on their close relatives who have already been residing there. Jane Kinninmont, the assistant head of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said in a recent article that those Syrians allowed in GCC countries were on temporary visas, which are hard to obtain in most cases. “The lack of recognition for refugees has far less to do with attitudes to the Syrian crisis than with the potential claims that could arise from larger migrant populations—many of whom come from unstable or repressive countries—and the general reluctance of Gulf governments to give permanent residency to anyone beyond a small pool of citizens, with few exceptions,” said Kinninmont. RELATED: Saudi Arabia – Facing A Serf Revolt In the GCC, those who are not citizens are treated as expatriates even after working in those countries for decades. They are also forced to leave the country whenever they lose their jobs or reach a retirement age. Minors, who are dependents on their parents, are required to leave the country by the age of 18 even if they were born in the country, as they also have temporary residence visas since the day they are born. Migrants make up the majority of the workforce in all the Arab Gulf countries, and in the UAE and Qatar, more than 80 percent of the population are migrants who lack civil rights despite having lived in the country for years. In addition to not taking refugees, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and regional Arab nations have been bombing Yemen for the past six months, producing millions of refugees and internally displaced people. This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
“http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Saudi-Arabia-Says-Acepted-Millions-of-Syrians-Facts-Disagree-20150911-0049.html”. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. http://www.teleSURtv.net/english

Saudi Scum Bans Adoption of Syrian Or Iraqi Orphans Who Manage To Survive Wahhabi Terror Onslaught

Ban on adopting Syrian, Iraqi orphans

 

DAMMAM — The Ministry of Social Affairs has prohibited Saudi families from adopting children of foreign or Arab nationalities and said the ministry is only concerned with taking care of Saudi orphans. According to Al-Hayat newspaper on Thursday, the ministry said the children who lose their parents in areas of conflicts such as Iraq and Syria are the concern of the international humanitarian organizations. Latifa Al-Tamimi, director of the women social supervision office in the Eastern Province, said the ministry is also looking after children of Saudi fathers with foreign wives abandoned abroad.

The USA and NATO have destroyed Iraq and Libya with their military intervention, bombs and missiles

Leader of Austria’s Far-right Blames Migrant Crisis on U.S., NATO

Heinz-Christian Strache says intervention in Iraq and Syria created infrastructure for ISIS.

Michael Shields and Shadia Nasralla

Austrian Freedom party leader Heinz-Christian Strache delivers a speech during a protest against an Islamic mosque in Vienna May 14, 2009.Reuters

REUTERS – The leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO) has blamed the United States and the NATO Western military alliance for triggering the refugee crisis that has overwhelmed Europe.

“The USA and NATO have destroyed Iraq and Libya with their military intervention, bombs and missiles; provided financial, logistical and military support to the opposition against President Assad in Syria, and thus made possible the destruction, chaos, suffering and radical Islamism (IS) in the region,” Heinz-Christian Strache said on his Facebook page.

Strache’s opposition FPO party, which leads opinion polls ahead of the centrist Social Democrats and People’s Party coalition partners, typically espouses anti-Muslim and isolationist approaches to dealing with foreign policy.
Refugees at Westbahnhof station in Vienna, Austria. September 5, 2015.
Strache, who is running for mayor in Vienna elections next month, scoffed at what he called U.S. President Barack Obama’s suggestions that Europe is primarily responsible for handling the wave of migrants flooding the continent from crisis spots in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

“The USA for decades has started fires in the Middle East and then has then the chutzpah to claim that responsibility for the flood of refugees unleashed lies with Europe. That’s geostrategic destabilization at its finest,” he wrote.

In a separate interview with Austrian broadcaster ORF, he called for erecting an army-patrolled fence along neutral Austria’s eastern border with Hungary and for letting in Christian and Jewish refugees rather than Muslims.

“We don’t want an Islamisation of Europe. We don’t want our Christian-Western culture to perish,” he said.

Obama’s Presumed Innocence In Projecting Middle Eastern Refugees To Pressure Europe

[Putin is not the only one, nor is he the first, to grasp the obvious fact that wars of aggression inevitably drive entire populations to the roadways, forcing sane families to do the insane, in order to increase their odds for survival.  Obama has always understood this hard fact and he has consistently used it to his advantage, using refugees as another passive weapon, to be used against our European allies.]

The War Crime of Intentional Refugee Creation

Obama’s War-Generated Tsunami of Dark-Skinned People Turning Mediterranean Into Massive Watery Cemetery

Who Will Save America from Obama’s “Responsibility To Protect (R2P)” liberal Ideals?

The Humanitarian Disaster Named Barack Obama

British Claim Mediterranean Refugee Rescue Operation “Bad Example” Which Invites Others To Drown

EU Plans To Streamline Illegal Immigration Operations–Increasing Rescues and Repatriations

Obama’s Human Flotsam Washes Ashore In Macedonia—Repelled By Tear Gas

Securing the Fate of Refugees Will Pull the Plug On the Terror War

“Pushing Back” the Boat People In Asia and In Europe, Symptom of Universal Insanity

The True Cost of War On Terror Can Be Measured By the Number of Refugees

Obama’s Wars Have Created More Refugees Than Hitler and Tojo Combined

Destroy Countries, Create Refugees—NOW DEAL WITH THEM

Turkish Plans To “Weaponize” Refugees from Syria, Exporting Them To Europe

EU refugee crisis ‘absolutely expected’ – Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin © Evgeny Byatov / RIA Novosti

 

Russia has frequently warned of major problems which Europe would face as a result of Western policies in the Middle East and North Africa and jihadist groups terrorizing people, so the current refugee crisis in the EU doesn’t come as a surprise, said the President of Russia.

“I think the crisis was absolutely expected,” President Vladimir Putin told journalists at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

“We in Russia, and me personally a few years ago, said it straight that pervasive problems would emerge, if our so-called Western partners continue maintaining their flawed … foreign policy, especially in the regions of the Muslim world, Middle East, North Africa, which they pursue to date,” said Putin.

LIVE UPDATES: Worst refugee crisis since WWII

According to the Russian president, the main flaw of Western foreign policy is the imposition of their own standards worldwide without taking into account the historical, religious, national and cultural characteristics of particular regions.

The only way to reverse the refugee flow streaming into Europe is to help people resolve problems at home. And the first step should be by creating a common and united front against jihadist groups such as Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) and fighting them at their core.

“We really want to form some kind of an international coalition, therefore we conduct consultations with our US partners,” Putin said, noting that he spoke about it with President Obama.

However it is premature to discuss “direct” Russian involvement in military actions against ISIS, needless to say joining the US-led coalition, as Moscow is currently considering “other options,” said Putin.

The issue of rebuilding local economies and social spheres to convince terrified people to move back would only arise after terrorism is rooted out, Russian President said. But international support for rebuilding the statehood of the countries which have suffered at the hand of ISIS should only occur with full respect for history, culture and local traditions.

“But if we act unilaterally and argue about the quasi-democratic principles and procedures for certain areas, that will lead us to an even greater impasse,” Putin concluded.

The Russian leader emphasized that he was being critical to figure out “what is happening, and what to do next,” rather than to tease or to point out that Western policies were “shortsighted.”

Putin noted that the US is not facing a refugee crisis of the same magnitude as the EU, which has been “blindly following American orders.”

Prior to Putin’s speech, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that the EU could actually learn something from Russia in terms of offering proper living conditions to those fleeing conflict zones.

Reminding Brussels of Russia’s experience in dealing with the influx of civilians fleeing Kiev’s so-called “anti-terrorist operation” in neighboring Ukraine, the ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova said that hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled to Russia were provided with “shelter, food and aid.”

Destroy Countries, Create Refugees—NOW DEAL WITH THEM

The Western Powers have created a global war refugee crisis through their Imperial adventures and now have to deal with the consequences of their actions.  Even though the United States is the primary creator of refugees in most of those wars, we are largely unaffected by this human tidal wave.  America’s European partners in crime in starting these criminal wars have no choice but to confront the immorality of the situation set in motion by Western governments. 

Since the EU is incapable of finding a consensus opinion on the proper course for getting these Syrian, Libyan, Yemeni, Somali refugees to safety, the matter must be resolved by the individual countries of Europe.  Where the EU and NATO have failed to establish a common border, the states are erecting individual barriers to the human flow.  Claiming that the walls steer the refugees to established safe zones (Schengen areas), everybody “passes the buck” on individual responsibility to help our fellow man, whenever collective responsibility would solve Europe’s refugee problem.

Fix settlement quotas in Europe, establish common control at the Mediterranean, systematically create safe corridors, safe sheltering and safe conduct to their designated settlement areas.  Anything less than that is immoral and inhumane.  

BETTER YET—END THE WAR….STOP CREATING NEW REFUGEES.

Africa: Calais Migrants – a Microcosm of a Misunderstood Crisis

analysis

By Anne Hammerstad

If tabloid headlines are anything to go by, the United Kingdom is fighting off the greatest invasion force threatening the island since the Blitz. The invaders this time are migrants and asylum seekers sneaking a ride on lorries, trains and ferries to get across – or underneath – the English Channel.

News footage of groups of young men climbing fences and breaking into trucks at Calais look dramatic, but the ‘swarm’ of migrants at Calais, as depicted by British Prime Minister David Cameron, is in fact 3,000 to 5000 people, many of whom are not actually trying to get into the UK at all. A sizeable minority have applied for asylum in France and are staying in the informal settlement near Calais known as the Jungle while waiting for the outcome of their application.

All over Europe, fences are going up, physically and metaphorically. Hungary expects to complete its new border fence by the end of August. Macedonia announced a state of emergency and deployed riot police at the border last week. Until then it had dealt with the influx by giving migrants 72-hour transit papers, enough time for them to buy a ticket, cram onto a train and cross further into Europe to become somebody else’s problem. First among those ‘somebody else’ is Germany, which expects to receive more than 750,000 new asylum applications in 2015.

A Europe unable to cope?

The challenge is certainly great for Germany, where new arrivals are sleeping on floors in makeshift accommodation. But it is in southern Europe that a real humanitarian crisis is unfolding. The EU border agency, Frontex, have recorded 340,000 ‘migrants detected’ from January to July this year, almost three times as many as the same period last year. Of those, around 160,000 have taken the relatively new route from the Middle East and Turkey to the easternmost islands of Greece. More than 50,000 have arrived in Greece in the month of July alone. Wracked by economic and political crisis, Greece is rife with xenophobic attitudes towards migrants.

But the people arriving on Greek holiday islands in leaky dinghies are not migrants. While those taking the route from Libya to Italy have tended to be a mix of refugees, especially from Syria and Eritrea, and economic migrants, particularly from West Africa, the composition of the boat people arriving in Greece this August has been, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, over 80% Syrians, 15% Afghans and the rest mostly Iraqis. The vast majority will qualify for refugee status.

The crisis Europe is not facing

The United Kingdom is not facing an invasion of illegal immigrants launched from Calais. Nor is the rest of Europe facing a migration crisis. Certainly, there are well-established economic migration routes from the poorer parts of the world to the richer. Since there are no longer any legal ways for low-skilled migrants to enter Europe, many choose to travel irregularly.

The journey they make has been made both easier and more dangerous for the migrants by the political collapse of Libya and turmoil in Egypt. Human smuggling networks can work with near impunity in both countries, mistreating migrants en route, before packing them onto unseaworthy vessels and steering them towards European waters in hope of rescue. An estimated 2,500 people have perished in the attempt so far this year.

A humanitarian crisis

Southern and South-Eastern European countries, particularly Greece, are facing a humanitarian crisis, where saving lives and providing food and shelter must take precedence over immigration control, regardless of whether those arriving are ‘illegal’ economic migrants or refugees. Despite the rush to build fences, secure borders and pass the buck, there is a growing appreciation across European capitals that ‘illegal migration’ is not a crime punishable by a watery death sentence. Prompted by one of the largest Mediterranean disasters in history, where 800 people drowned, the EU relaunched a large-scale search-and-rescue operation in April.

A global displacement crisis needs global solutions

The reason for the enormous rise in the number of people making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean is not economic migration, but war, persecution and violence. In short, Europe is experiencing its share of a global displacement crisis driven by an upsurge in conflict across the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. The world has not seen so many people uprooted by conflict and persecution since the end of World War Two.

More than 80% of all refugees remain in their near region, many in refugee camps, others self-settled in nearby urban centres. But life in camps is getting increasingly destitute and devoid of hope for many refugees, particularly those fleeing never-ending conflicts, like those in Somalia, Syria and Iraq. Syria’s neighbours are coping with around four million refugees – in Lebanon refugees make up one in four of the country’s population. Humanitarian aid, while at record levels, does not cover the basic needs of refugees.

If European governments want to see a sustainable and ethically viable end to the chaotic and deadly passage across the Mediterranean, a first step would be to provide more financial support to refugee hosting countries, not only to support refugees, but to bolster domestic stability in host-countries. Beyond that, a global burden-sharing mechanism for resettling refugees would both alleviate the pressure on countries of first asylum and make refugee arrivals in Europe more orderly and manageable.

For this to happen, European governments must first acknowledge that the situation at Calais, Lampedusa and Kos are not a European migration crisis, but a global refugee crisis.

Dr Anne Hammerstad is a research associate of the South African Institute of International Affairs, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Politics and IR, University of Kent, Canterbury. She is the author of The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor: UNHCR, Refugee Protection and Security.

Saudis Foot the Bill for Zionist TV Campaign Against Iran

Wave of TV Ads Opposing Iran Deal Organized By Saudi Arabian Lobbyist

Lee Fang

Photo: Kaster Pool/Reuters /Landov

Television stations across the country are being flooded with $6 million of advertisements from a group called the “American Security Initiative” urging citizens to call their U.S. Senators and oppose the nuclear deal with Iran.

Though the American Security Initiative does not reveal donor information, the president of the new group, former Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., is a registered lobbyist for Saudi Arabia. Coleman’s firm, Hogan Lovells, is on retainer to the Saudi Arabian monarchy for $60,000 a month. In July 2014, Coleman described his work as “providing legal services to the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia” on issues including “legal and policy developments involving Iran and limiting Iranian nuclear capability.”

The co-chairs of the American Security Initiative include former Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., former Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and former Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. Chambliss works at DLA Piper, another lobbying firm retained to influence U.S. policy on behalf of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.

The advertising effort is part of a fierce lobbying campaign to convince senators to support legislation expressing disapproval of the international accord with Iran, which will lift economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for inspections of the Iranian nuclear industry to ensure that it remains peaceful. The vote is scheduled to take place in September.

Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-led Persian Gulf governments have long viewed Iran as a regional adversary. The rivalry stems from the Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide, and experts also believe Iranian oil exports could challenge Saudi Arabia’s dominance in the market. The crises in Syria and in Yemen have become proxy wars between the two nations as Saudi Arabia and Iran are playing an active role in fueling opposing sides in both conflicts.

Last month, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that senior Saudi officials have reversed course and now express support for the Iran deal.

But analysts believe that Saudi Arabia is still trying to kill the deal, just not in public. As Newsweek reported, Saudi officials speaking on condition on anonymity have attacked the deal. And Saudi media outlets tied to the royal family have also widely condemned it.

Photo: (L-R) U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter meets with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdul Aziz and his security leadership at the Al-Salam Palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 22, 2015 to reassure the kingdom of America’s support after Washington struck a nuclear deal with Iran.

Saudi War In Middle East Aims To Forcefully Convert Or Kill All Shia Muslims and Christians

[Anyone who can’t see by now that the real “Sunni Caliphate” will be “Greater Saudi Arabia” has not been paying attention to Saudi aggression in the region.  This has been Obama’s goal from the beginning, to hand control over the problematic Middle East to his Saudi patrons. 

(This seems to confirm the normally scoffed-at conspiracy theory, that it has been the Saudis, NOT THE JEWS, who have controlled this so-called “war on terror” from the beginning.)

  War-mongering king Salman has been arrogantly open about his intentions to cleanse the Middle East of Shiites and other religious apostates (this would include Christians, obviously), even whike he pretends to be fighting against the Caliphate of ISIS.  The Saudi royals and their Gulf subordinates have been creating their own Sunni Caliphate, right before our eyes.  The fact that the world’s only hope for humanitarianism, the United Nations, would allow a tribal Arab king to murder thousands of Shia Houthis while conducting its religious ethnic-cleansing operation on the rest of them is proof that human compassion is just another commodity that can be bought and sold like anything else.]

 “We will destroy the Houthis if they do not come to reason [i.e., convert to Sunni Islam–ed.].”–Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel Al-Jubeir

[Such is the human condition, when laid bare before us. 

Where is God in this equation?]

[SEE:UN Capitulation To Saudi Demands Equals Partnership In Ethnic-Cleansing of Middle East]

Religious eugenics

How Saudi Arabia is sponsoring a frightening new movement in the ME

Catherine Shakdam

© Khaled Abdullah / Reuters

Blanketed by its wealth and protected by political alliances, Saudi Arabia has covertly run and promoted a new movement in the Middle East: religious eugenics, under the false pretense of opposing the rise of Iran. From Syria to Bahrain and Yemen the evidence is overwhelming.

Earlier this August, the Red Cross added its voice to those of other humanitarian and rights groups in its condemnation of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, lifting the lid on Riyadh’s little house of horrors in southern Arabia.

In no uncertain terms Peter Maurer, the head of the international Red Cross told reporters he had seldom witnessed such degree of devastation. He said: “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years … The images I have from Sanaa and Aden remind of what I have seen in Syria.”

He stressed “the firepower with which this war is fought on the ground and in the air is causing more suffering than in other societies, which are stronger and where infrastructures are better off and people are wealthier and have reserves and can escape.”

A country in ruins, Yemen is also a nation in permanent mourning, as every day its people are relentlessly slain – casualties of a violent and murderous colonial war – the latest victims of Riyadh’s expansionist military campaign in the Middle East.

According to official UNICEF tallies, “close to 2,800 people have been killed and almost 13,000 people injured (including 279 children killed and 402 injured, respectively). An estimated 1 million people have been internally displaced (an increase of 122 percent since the crisis began), and some 400,000 people have sought protection in neighboring countries.”

While such figures are horrifying, they fall short of the truth. Agencies on the ground have already said that well over 500 children have been killed in Saudi-led air raids, most specifically in northern Yemen, where the war has been most devastating and aggressive. On average, children account for a quarter of all deaths and casualties.

For those who have managed to find shelter, living conditions are catastrophic. With no water, no electricity, little food and no access to health facilities ten million children are at risk of disease and starvation – again, North Yemen has suffered the brunt of this crisis.

Never in its history has Yemen experienced such a degree of pain and utter despair. But while wars are generally ugly affairs since they require their fill of blood before the canons finally fall silent, Saudi Arabia’s campaign in Yemen is far from ordinary.

But not only that, Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy in the Middle East is betraying a disturbing and rather ominous covert agenda, one which resonates with ethnic engineering and religious eugenics.

And if so far few have connected the dots, their hands tied by Riyadh’s overbearing and overarching control on media outlets and the grand political narrative, it is high time we learn to recognize Al Saud’s campaign for what it really is: a concerted effort to cleanse the region of all religious minorities, beginning with Shia Islam, its self-appointed nemesis.

To put it in simple terms – under Saudi Arabia’ suffocating grip, religious minorities are dying a slow and painful death.

From Syria to Bahrain, the kingdom’s eugenics campaign threatens the region’s religious and ethnic patrimonies, in a fashion reminiscent of Nazi Germany, when Jews and Gypsies were labeled undesirables.

Saudi Arabia is now building 600 mile wall to keep dangerous people out. What a concept! #tcot#pjnet#FoxNewspic.twitter.com/u056SB7HxW

— Michael A Nöthem (@mikandynothem) August 21, 2015

In an interview this April, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel Al-Jubeir lifted the veil on Riyadh’s determination to carry through its agenda, no matter the price, no matter the impact. He asserted: “This campaign is having a huge impact in Yemen and it is not over yet. For us failure is not an option. We will destroy the Houthis if they do not come to reason.”

If subtitles were running they would read – the Houthis will be destroyed because they represent a religious challenge to Wahhabism’s hegemony in the region. The Houthis, and the majority of all northerners in Yemen are Zaidis, a branch of Shia Islam.

Is it then a surprise that while South Yemen has benefited from humanitarian aid, North Yemen has witnessed a spike in violence, its seaports targeted to prevent food and medicine to be ferried in? Riyadh is quite simply profiling aid to carry out its religious cleansing, punishing millions for their rejection of Riyadh’s religion.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute theocracy, and as such its very raison d’ être is rooted within its violent and reactionary interpretation of Islam: Wahhabism, the ideology which inspired the likes of Al Qaeda and Islamic State. One of the main tenets of Wahhabism actually calls for the destruction of all religious sects, Islamic or otherwise. For Wahhabis there can be no greater glory than to massacre “apostates.”

And while Riyadh’s neo-eugenics movement has taken on different forms, operating under various denominations depending on the countries it has targeted, the underlying current has been the destruction of religious pluralism.

Let me ask you this: Is there a real difference between Manama’s campaign to strip Shia Bahrainis from their nationality because the House of Al Khalifa seeks to eliminate all political and religious competition, and Islamic State’s murderous rampage against religious minorities in Iraq and Syria? And though Bahrain’s campaign might appear more “elegant” in that it is more covert and pernicious, the intent remains the same.

From the language used to the policies it has carried out in the Middle East, Riyadh has pushed the sectarian card, christening the resistance movement against its eugenics movement, the so-called Shia crescent threat.

The real threat here lies with Riyadh’s twisted crusade and sickening sectarian agenda.

Catherine Shakdam is a political analyst, writer and commentator for the Middle East with a special focus on radical movements and Yemen. Her writings have been published in world-renowned publications such as Foreign Policy Journal, Mintpress News, the Guardian, Your Middle East, Middle East Monitor, Middle East Eye, Open Democracy, Eurasia Review and many more. A regular pundit on RT, she has also contributed her analyses to Etejah TV, IRIB radio, Press TV and NewsMax TV. Director of Programs at the Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies and consultant for Anderson Consulting, her research and work on Yemen were used by the UN Security Council in relation to Yemen looted funds in 2015.

US Navy Eager To Pick A Fight With China To Create Mission For Useless Littoral Combat Ship

[The US Navy might as well dream-up its own missions, to justify their place in the war of terror, the Army has been doing it since the beginning of this global disaster.  The Army, Marines and CIA have been training terrorists and posing as terrorists in order to justify their fight against terror, why shouldn’t the Navy do the same in its shift to the Pacific?  Compounding tensions in the shallow S. China Sea to keep Congress from cancelling the LCS program is merely par for the course.  (SEE:  What Price Freedom? Questions Surround LCS-1 ;  US Navy’s First Littoral Combat Ship Enters Dry Dock for Repairs)]

LCS to Boost U.S. Presence in Disputed South China Sea

By Kris Osborn

The speed, maneuverability and shallow draft of the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship makes the platform well suited for the South China Sea, Pentagon leaders said while releasing a new Asia-Pacific maritime strategy document.

“The LCS is ideally suited for a role in the South China Sea. It is fast, light and flexible and it has a fifteen foot draft so it can go places other vessels cannot go. We plan to have four LCS ships in Singapore on a rotational basis by 2018,” David Shear, assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, told reporters on Friday.

The service has long planned to rotate the ships through Singapore as part of the Pentagon’s shift to the Pacific. However, the increasing LCS fleet size underscores the potential value of the platform in the South China Sea region, where there are many shallow ports inaccessible to larger-draft ships.

The Navy is preparing to receive four more of its shallow-water Littoral Combat Ships between now and February, effectively doubling its current fleet and paving the way for more deployments.

On Aug. 11, the Navy formally accepted delivery of LCS 6, the USS Jackson, during a ceremony at the Austal USA shipyard in Mobile, Ala.

Following this delivery, the service is preparing to accept delivery of LCS 5, the USS Milwaukee, in October of this year and the USS Montgomery, LCS 8, in December of this year, Naval Sea Systems Command spokesman Chris Johnson recently said.

On the heels of these deliveries, the Navy plans to receive the USS Detroit, LCS 7, in February of next year, he added.

“By early next year, the Navy will be operating eight littoral combat ships and we’ll be accepting four more by the end of 2016. The Navy will continue to accept ships at that rate for the next several years making the LCS class the second largest surface combatant class in the fleet and the key to our ability to operate in shallow, coastal waterways around the world,” Johnson recently told Military​.com.

Shear explained that stepping up LCS missions in the South China Sea is part of a broader strategic effort to maintain presence and patrol the area in light of China’s recent efforts to build artificial land structures in the contested Spratly Islands.

China’s island building, referred to by Pentagon officials as land reclamation, has been ongoing effort to further fortify their territorial claims in the region. Pentagon officials have said the China has reclaimed over 2,000 acres of area over the last 18 months, more than all other claimants in the region combined.

In June, Pentagon officials publicly acknowledged that China was placing weapons on the reclaimed islands.

“Our approach to the South China Sea has been robust. We have engaged China repeatedly at the highest levels to implement a permanent halt to reclamation. We of course have a very strong and persistent military presence designed to maintain peace and stability,” he said.

The Spratly Islands includes an area of more than 750 reefs, small islands and atolls in the South China Sea off the coasts of the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. Highly disputed for centuries, the area is rich in oil and natural gas. Countries claiming rights to territory in the Spratly Islands include China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, and Brunei.

Shear referenced an ongoing congressional effort to add funds to the 2016 defense bill slated for arming and training U.S. allies in the Pacific.

The South China Sea includes strategically vital waterways, important to international trade. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has criticized China’s artificial island-building and said the U.S. would not be deterred by China’s moves.

“China has said it has stopped reclamation but it is not clear to us if they have stopped or are just finishing up. There is the potential for militarization of these features. We call for a permanent halt to all of these activities. The U.S. does not recognize the sovereignty claims of these artificial islands,” Shear said.

Under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, negotiated in the 1980s and updated in the 1990s, an island is defined as a “naturally formed area of land above the water at high tide.” Also, article 60 of the U.N. Convention says “artificial islands are not entitled to territorial seas.”

Shear added that the U.S. would continue to step up its military presence in the area and work closely with allies in the region. He cited the deployment of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and two new missile-defense capable destroyers to Japan. Furthermore, the Navy’s new high-tech DDG 1000 Zumalt-class destroyer is slated for the Pacific.

“US forces currently present in the South China Sea conduct a variety of presence operations. We are in the South China Sea on a regular basis,” Shear said.

Shear also added the Navy’s new P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane will also continue to help military efforts in the Pacific. “We have a vested interest in ensuring that territorial claims are resolved peacefully,” he explained.

State Terrorism Is State Terrorism, Even When It Is Made By America

[This is a blast from the past, one of the first articles posted on No Sunglasses, 8-19-2008.  The message remains the same,

even though Barack Obama has since replaced the Bush dictatorship and multiplied US state terrorism exponentially. 

When read in tandem with the following piece, the message seems highly relevant today (SEE: Escaping The Age Of Mass Delusion—Humanity’s Only Hope).]

If We Could Speak to the People, What Would We Say?

Peter Chamberlin

If we could reach beyond the news filter that keeps real news from the
American people, what would we say? If we figured-out how to get one message
out to the people, what could we say that would actually motivate them to
take a stand for themselves, for their families, for their country and their
world?

The same studies that power the social planners claim that barely 10% of any
group of people follow reason, meaning they cannot be reasoned with. The
same studies also predict that a clear majority of any targeted population
will respond to fear in a shock scenario. We might try reasoning with the
sleeping sheeple, but we would have better odds if we tried to scare them
awake. If we can convey a true image of the evil being done with our
consent, then we might shock the people into the harsh light of reality.

Our leaders are about to allow the economic collapse of the United States,
without telling you beforehand, or helping American citizens to make
emergency preparations.

Their solution to the problem is to seize control of the post-collapse world
militarily, eliminating everyone who gets in the way. This military solution
accepts a very large loss of human lives as necessary “collateral damage” to
the brave plan to take control of the world. When the American people are
overwhelmed by the economic catastrophe, they will hardly notice large
planned population reductions.

All of this is an acceptable solution to our government. For those who try
to protest after the “hammer goes down,” there are hundreds of detention
camps, capable of holding thousands of dissidents, waiting to accept your
silent screams.

But until we get to that point of no return, steps are being taken to reduce
and eventually eliminate all protests to governmental violence.
The Constitution is being reduced piecemeal to a powerless piece of paper.
The courts are bowing down to executive decrees.

Mankind is being kept in check by his own fear. In the face of fear we react
like herd animals, bunching together in search of elusive safety, making us
easily manipulated by those who have mastered the psychology of fear.

Terror is a key element of American politics. Votes are obtained by
frightening the people into your corner, or away from your “unsafe”
opponent. Candidacies are won and lost by negative campaigns of lies and
half-truths that paint your opponent as an unreasonable madmen and yourself
as a heroic messianic figure. US leaders depend upon political terrorism to
get their way in the world, from the local level of “Homeland Insecurity,”
to the international arena, where acts of bloody terrorism are routinely
committed to frighten the locals into political compliance.

“Terrorism–n. The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a
person or an organized group against people or property with the intention
of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological
or political reasons.”

State terrorism has been an integral part of American government for many
decades. Beginning with the terror campaign of carpet-bombing and
fire-bombing of civilian centers in Germany at the end of World War II (and
the a-bombs), American and British scientists have studied the psychology of
mass fear. This wholesale terror campaign was a new type of warfare,
targeting civilians, instead of concentrating on government centers. The aim
was political terrorism, to turn the citizens of Germany into political
tools to be used to force the German government into submission. By studying
the socio-economic repercussions of the fire-bombing, the American and
British psychologists and sociologists learned how to herd entire
populations through the tactics of fear.

Acts of violent terrorism for political and economic gains have continued
since “the Great War,” against both friend and foe.
Historically, American terror operations like “Operation Gladio” have been
aimed at our allies in Europe even more than against our enemies.
In “Gladio,” (as in all American terror campaigns committed under the banner
of “democracy”), public figures and officials are assassinated, attacks are
carried-out upon police and military forces of sympathetic governments,
trains are bombed with great loss of life, and “madmen”
go on public shooting sprees, all for the sake of scaring European national
opinion into America’s corner.

As always, American terror is hidden by the use of proxies and mercenary
forces, who are blamed for attacks committed covertly by our military and
intelligence agencies. The “war on terror” itself is probably the world’s
longest-running terrorist operation, intended to create the impression that
American-sponsored terror attacks are really the work of a new non-existent,
highly-organized global terrorist adversary. In simpler terms, the United
States government is the center of world terrorism. Our own government, our
“defender”
against terrorism, is responsible for most terrorist attacks upon innocent
people in the world, that thousands of American troops are defending
against. American-trained forces are killing American soldiers who then
retaliate further against innocent civilian populations where the terrorists
choose to hide.

“Our government” is not really ours at all, having long ago surrendered our
national sovereignty to a consortium of global financiers through the
Federal Reserve System that controls the US.

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes her laws.”
Mayer Amschel Rothschild

In the process of bringing the US under the control of the international
financiers, represented by the Rothschild interests centered in Europe,
American industry has been destroyed (except for the military-industrial
complex, needed to pound the recalcitrant world into submission), while the
sham called “democracy” was constructed to create the impression amongst the
unruly people that they actually have power. When the self-appointed
American aristocracy allowed the common man the “right” to vote, it was done
to stave-off more violent opposition and to deceive with the impression of
shared power. Today, decent folk, believing in the illusion of “fair
elections,” remain a real obstacle to saving American freedom from the
hidden dictatorship, which owns all the candidates produced in the
“two-party” system. As long as the majority believes in the system and
continues to empower its candidates, the dictatorship can remain hidden. In
order to expose the hidden machinations of the secret dictators we have to
burst the bubble of illusory democratic power.

At the same time, the fact that the dictatorship wishes to remain hidden,
playing the game of democracy, pretending to seek the counsel of the people,
then they are vulnerable. If they choose to continue the charade of
democratic government, then they have to limit their actions to those which
appear to be “freely” granted by the people through their “representatives.”
As long as those representatives hold the seats of power given them by the
overlords, they will answer only to them. But if enough people call the
representatives to task for failing American democracy they can at least be
forced to publicly answer the charges of failure. If the masses put the fear
of democracy and righteous retribution into the minds of the Congressional
slaves of the money-powers, then they too will begin to retreat from their
open support for measures calling for more war and less freedom. If the
people fully use the First Amendment powers to make democracy work then we
can turn the tide against the center.

They cannot openly carry-out the violent measures required for creating a
world dictatorship and a permanent state of war, taking the brazen violent
steps that have been planned, such as launching nuclear first strikes, or
using biologic attacks to “cull the herd.” As long as the real terrorists
are pretending to be democrats they must act accordingly. Until the world
rises-up against the American imperialist forces in sufficient numbers to
frighten the American people into becoming willing participants in the
genocide of half the earth, other lesser, though equally as threatening,
provocations will continue to be found to frighten us into authorizing the
slaughter.

By placing the will of the people into their formula, they have created a
time lag between cause and effect, where the planned actions must be
preceded by a provocation that motivates the people into consenting to their
own destruction. By incorporating a basically moral people into a completely
immoral plan for world domination, the master controllers have constructed a
flawed plan that depends upon a scientific effort to change good people into
bad. In a country as religious-natured as this one, the great leaders may
have falsely calculated that they can make a nation fear so much for its
life that it would sell its soul for a little peace of mind.

American state terrorism has also been directed against the citizens of the
United States themselves, through more subtle “silent weapons.”
For the entire duration of American terrorist operations against the world,
our government has waged war upon the minds of its loyal citizens through an
arsenal of psychological, economic, and legislative weaponry. The purpose of
these attacks has always been to destroy the American economy and the minds
of the people, while using the economic destruction to justify the full use
of the American military power against the rest of the world.

American leaders consistently work against American interests, while
enriching themselves and their wealthy sponsors who reap opportunity from
our Nation’s demise. In order for these anti-American power-brokers to force
the world into a global dictatorship with them at the helm, they have to
play the “democracy” card, while simultaneously undermining it. Our leaders
have to persuade us into allowing them to destroy democracy in the name of
preserving it. We the People have to be persuaded to peacefully allow the
planned destruction to take place before it can take place. We have to
accept our bleak fates, before it can become our fates.

But the scary truth about the American state terrorist acts that have been
committed so far is that they have provided the needed practice for the
despicable acts that are yet to come. The American war upon the human race
will utilize every weapon in our arsenal, once the way for their use has
been cleared. Weapons of mass destruction come in many forms. In a war for
control of the earth’s resources it would seem more logical to use the
weapons that kill, such as biological weapons, as opposed to those which
merely destroy everything. Instant Death is about to enter the world through
American hands.

The tragedy of our time, perhaps the ultimate tragedy of all time, is
roaring down the highway of life right at us, or is the greater tragedy the
weakness of the mind of man which is allowing this to happen? If we have the
power of change within us and we do nothing, inaction is an act of suicide.

We have to overcome this innate human weakness to prepare our fellow man for
the things that are about to befall this battered planet. So many things are
avoidable in this existence through the use of foresight; if only it was a
common human trait. Any sane person who sees oncoming danger will
automatically step out of its way. As a rule, we humans rarely choose to
step out of the way. Mankind has never been called “sane,” by anyone’s
definition. We must secretly harbor a deep desire to become “road kill” on
the cruel highway of life.

peter.chamberlin@hotmail.com

Escaping The Age Of Mass Delusion—Humanity’s Only Hope

“Human rebellion and dissent cannot be forever suppressed: ‘They await only one breath of freedom in order to awake once more.’”

[How about uniting the non-delusional thinkers around the idea of impeaching our dictator?  (SEE: Bringing Barack Obama To Justice For War Crimes Committed and Crimes In Progress).]

How To Escape The Age Of Mass Delusion

By Stella Morabito

Mass delusion is an important tool of oppressors because they can’t survive free expression. That’s why the First Amendment’s a target.

Nearly 100 years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote about “the manufacture of consent” in his classic work, “Public Opinion.” On the heels of that book, Edward Bernays penned a little volume called “Propaganda,” in which he stated that an elite would always be responsible for making the public aware of “new ideas” which the public would then act upon as the elite nudged them into it. Related, but more in-depth is Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.”

Political propaganda aims to mobilize the masses to move an agenda forward. That’s most effectively done when the masses are unaware of the process. It’s what “community organizers” work towards, whether they know it or not. Once the masses are mobilized to push for a cause, the propagandists’ goals can be put into law.

In fact, many newly propagandized ideas seem to have taken America by storm just in the past decade or so. Same-sex marriage is only one of those ideas. Transgenderism is now eclipsing that notion, and its propaganda techniques—wrapped in the language of civil rights—are getting Americans on board with the idea of erasing all sex distinctions in law, including their own. It’s as though Americans are buying into a fast-talking sales pitch without being allowed to read the print, whether it’s large print or small.

There’s more on the horizon: a singles’ rights movement that promises to end legal recognition of all marriage. Then there is transhumanism, which includes a push to end “fleshism” by enacting laws that protect non-biological entities from discrimination.

Propaganda Is Directing Us Leftward

American conservatives are by and large clueless about propaganda methods and tactics. And it shows. There are virtually no conservative social psychologists around. You’d think once a liberal social psychologist hits the public over the head with this fact some on the Right would take notice and at least try to get clued in.

American conservatives are by and large clueless about propaganda methods and tactics. And it shows.

Meanwhile, the Left has been employing social psychology and depth psychology on the masses for decades. President Obama’s campaign staff was filled with social psychologists. In this context, those who believe conservatives can subsist on reason and logic alone are kidding themselves. It’s no wonder GOP leaders are caving on so many principles, and being absorbed so easily into the Left’s machine.

A lot of people are scratching their heads today, wondering how life got to be so surreal, so fast in the United States of America. Based on the silencing tactics revealed by the LGBT lobby, many observers are likely now thinking: “Gee, I thought marriage equality was merely a gay rights movement. I didn’t realize that fascism was part of that package.” The Great Unraveling continues at a rapid clip when slipping on a pronoun in these days of transgender rule could cost you your career or earn you massive social media rallies chanting “hater” at you.

Even benign reminders of the First Amendment—embodied in Religious Freedom Restoration Acts—are quickly dispatched by mob hysteria. One day a supposedly principled leader like Indiana Gov. Mike Pence promotes the RFRA, and the next day he folds and essentially signs on with the mob.

Even benign reminders of the First Amendment are quickly dispatched by mob hysteria.

There seem to be few independent thinkers left. But even they don’t seem to know what hit them. A woman gets banned by her gym and labelled a bigot because she told management that a man—who she only later learned “identified as female”—entered the locker room while she was getting undressed. Comedians who dare tread into trans territory are shut down. Never before have the media and pop culture dictated in such a draconian manner how each and every one of us is supposed to think about identity. Our own identity.

The list goes on. The unrest and rioting from Ferguson to Baltimore seem to be happening on cue also, with media propaganda that urges it on. There is no real debate on the merits of policies that depend on a blind faith in man-made global warming: those who disagree are labelled “deniers.”

Our Age of Mass Delusion and Logicide

But it was all so predictable.

One of the best books that cracks the code on what we are living through was written by Dutch psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo about 60 years ago. Mull over the first line of his book’s forward, and you will think he is writing about today: “This book attempts to depict the strange transformation of the free human mind into an automatically responding machine – a transformation which can be brought about by some of the cultural undercurrents in our present-day society as well as by deliberate experiments in the service of a political ideology.”

When it comes to understanding the inner workings of social psychology and political correctness, we seem to be at a loss.

That’s from “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing” (1956). There is indeed a war on the private mind, as Kevin Williamson explained in a recent National Review column. Unfortunately, too many Americans have been sleeping through most of its propaganda battles, and for a very long time. When it comes to understanding the inner workings of social psychology and political correctness, we seem to be at a loss.

Meanwhile, the power elites who now control the media, academia, and Hollywood seem to understand social psychology well enough to exploit it on a massive scale. They have engaged in psychological warfare against the private mind by inducing “collective belief formation.” There’s really nothing new here. Conditioning and nudging the masses into groupthink is a very old trick of all wannabe dictators. The bloody twentieth century is filled to the gills with examples.

Yet it feels like we’ve awakened to an ambush. A lot of Americans watched in shock while cultish mobs suddenly attacked the RFRA that Pence initially defended. But the groundwork for mass hysteria like this was stealthily laid for decades, and the minefields sown.

The groundwork for mass hysteria like this was stealthily laid for decades, and the minefields sown.

Family breakdown led to community breakdown, which we can see in the decline of trust in society. Ignorance was cultivated in the schools through political correctness and squashing free debate. The academy’s disparaging of western civilization virtually wiped out respect for any serious study of history and civics, as well as for the Socratic method and the rules of civil discourse. Political correctness sewed confusion into the language, particularly regarding identity politics. Youth are now set to be programmed for conformity through the K-12 “Common Core” curriculum mandates.

All of that and more promotes the semantic fog that allows for mind rape. It amounts to an act of “logicide,” to borrow a term from Meerloo, whom I will continue to quote below. To kill logic and reason that might stand in their way, wannabe dictators “fabricate a hate language in order to stir up mass emotions.” Leaders in Indiana, Arkansas, and Louisiana have been unable to understand this tactic and are grossly unprepared to deal with it. So they simply surrendered. In effect, they joined the mob, further endangering everybody’s freedom.

The Link Between Crowds and Power

The whole image of such mass delusion in America is surrealistic, especially to comfortably insulated Americans who believe our first freedoms could never really be thrown away in the face of such a full-frontal, PC-induced attack. Most cannot grasp that such mobs are mentally detached from reality. And participants in the mob action cannot comprehend that they are actually cutting off their own freedom of expression, as well as everybody else’s.

Why would anyone want to build such a culture of coercion? In a word, power.

Why would anyone want to build such a culture of coercion? In a word, power. “Equality” is not the reason for what is happening with such mobs. It is the pretext for what they are doing. Like all such deceptions, its sole purpose is as a vehicle to transfer power from individuals to an increasingly centralized state. The fuel, as usual, is the emotional blackmail of people of goodwill, the uses of mass mobilization to exploit that goodwill, then, finally, to render all such goodwill meaningless.

Most who protest the RFRA laws are more likely pawns than true believers. Like the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, they tend to be atomized individuals who are drawn to the psychic thrill of being part of a mobilized mass that feeds on emotions and can feel a sense of righteousness in the stated pretext. (In the RFRA case, it’s the semantic device of “marriage equality,” but it’ll just as easily be something else tomorrow.) “The ecstatic participation in mass elation is the oldest psycho drama in the world,” wrote Meerloo.

“Crowds and Power,” by Elias Canetti, is a classic work that explores in detail the draw of the crowd for human beings. With the continued chipping away of the organic family of mother-child-father, human relationships inevitably become diluted and more subservient to a mass state. This detachment cultivates human alienation, which draws more people to answer to the call of the mass state’s mob.

Detachment cultivates human alienation, which draws more people to answer to the call of the mass state’s mob.

Such protesters and their scores of clueless apologists in the media are also utterly detached from the reality of the meaning of laws such as an RFRA. The RFRA only clarifies that the government doesn’t get to coerce us in private thought or to dictate what we are allowed to feel, believe, think, and express. In other words, the First Amendment is not negotiable if we are to have any semblance of freedom in this country.

But the emotional stew in which we are now boiling doesn’t allow logic or reason to prevail. We can never fight back as long as we are in the dark about how our minds can be manipulated. So we absolutely must try to fully understand the methods and tactics of mental coercion and share that knowledge with others as much as possible.

Brainwashing—Mind Rape—Is for Real

Meerloo published “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide and Brainwashing” in 1956 after years immersed in the study of social psychology and countless interviews with victims of mental coercion, including Nazi officers and American prisoners of war in Korea. This treasure of insights was written for the layman. It is an absolute must-read for anyone who hopes to uphold the dignity of the individual. The book offers the psychic defenses so lacking among those who submit to logicide.

‘The transformation of the free human mind to an automatically responding machine’ is essentially the story of the transformation of the United States.

“The transformation of the free human mind to an automatically responding machine” is essentially the story of the transformation of the United States of America we are watching in real time today. Delusion is an important element, because tyrannies do not stand up to logic. It seems very sudden, but it’s not. We’re only at this tipping point because we let our defenses down. In fact, if the First Amendment collapses, it would simply indicate a return to humanity’s tribal default position, in which a sort of Nietzschean “Will to Power” rules the day.

Mass delusion is an important tool of oppressors because they can’t survive where free exercise of expression and association is practiced. Unfortunately, delusion can be induced anywhere.

“It is simply a question of organizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way. If one can isolate the mass, allow no free thinking, no free exchange, no outside correction and can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and television, with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be instilled.”

Free Speech Is the Only Antidote to Mass Delusion

“The Rape of the Mind” could have served as a terrific manual to inoculate many against political correctness and groupthink, had it not collected so much dust since it was published in 1956. More of us could have learned how free speech is essential to preventing mass delusion.

Free expression is always the prime target of tyrants because it promotes logic, the search for truth, and friendship.

Free expression is always the prime target of tyrants because it promotes logic, the search for truth, and friendship. America is exceptional precisely because it rejects the tyrants’ rule.

Yet as our speech becomes more restricted, we end up more separated from one another and more susceptible to mass delusions. As Meerloo wrote: “Where thinking is isolated without free exchange with other minds, delusion may follow.” He added, chillingly, “Is this not what happened in Hitler Germany where free verification and self-correction were forbidden?”

In his book, Meerloo also shows immense compassion for our human frailties. He understood just how difficult it is to push back against the social pressures to conform. When it comes to brainwashing, every one of us has our breaking point. But we absolutely must push back once we understand those tactics: “The totalitarian potentate, in order to break down the minds of men, first needs widespread mental chaos and verbal confusion, because both paralyze his opposition and cause the morale of the enemy to deteriorate – unless his adversaries are aware of the dictator’s real aim.”

Of course, it’s really hard for control freaks to do their work on us if we are speaking freely with one another in friendship, and especially if we all understand what they are up to and can call them on it in one voice. So their first order of business is to separate us. A sense of enforced isolation is a cruel and effective tool for instilling loneliness and then delusion in people.

According to Meerloo, manipulators accomplish this through the knowledge that “far below the surface, human life is built up of inner contradictions.” Our hopes and fears and longing to avoid social rejection are exploited through the dictates of political correctness, which is the tool that separates people today, especially in that one place where ideas and ideals are supposed to be tested most vigorously in adulthood: the university.

A sense of enforced isolation is a cruel and effective tool for instilling loneliness and then delusion in people.

By squashing free thought in the one place where it is supposed to be especially respected, political correctness circumvents Meerloo’s warning that “the only way to strengthen one’s defenses against an organized attack on the mind and will is to understand better what the enemy is trying to do to outwit him.”

Of course, the fear of isolation isn’t always enough to silence some people. So manipulators repeat lies and sloganeer endlessly to condition their subjects to repress unauthorized speech and thought: “The techniques of propaganda and salesmanship have been refined and systematized; there is scarcely any hiding place from the constant visual and verbal assault on the mind. The pressures of daily life impel more and more people to seek an easy escape from responsibility and maturity.”

It’s sobering to realize that the above words predate the Internet by nearly half a century. They describe perfectly how transgenderism has become such a “thing” and why so few are willing to admit that the emperor has no clothes.

Love and Laughter Dissipate Delusion

As more people succumb to PC conditioning and cede their freedom of thought, it becomes more difficult for the rest of us to maintain integrity of mind. Our audience shrinks. As we encounter more and more drone-like personalities in daily life, the world seems to sink into surrealism, like so many in Rod Serling’s old “Twilight Zone” episodes.

‘The totalitarian mind does not observe and verify its impressions of reality; it dictates to reality how it shall behave, it compels reality to conform to its fantasies.’

Meerloo testified to this feeling of disorientation: “Many victims of totalitarianism have told me in interviews that the most upsetting experience they faced in the concentration camps was the feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion in which they had been brought – the state in which nothing had any validity.”

That’s because in the mass centralized state, “peaceful exchange of thoughts in free conversation will disturb the conditioned reflexes and is therefore taboo.” On a hopeful note, Meerloo writes that “love and laughter break through all rigid conditioning.”

I think the reason there is so little “comedy” that’s funny today is the genre itself has been hijacked by the humorless PC crowd. Why is their humor so unamusing and so dependent upon mean-spiritedness? Consider this possibility: “The totalitarian mind is like the schizophrenic individual; it has a contempt for reality. Think for a moment of Lysenko’s theory and its denial of the influence of heredity. The totalitarian mind does not observe and verify its impressions of reality; it dictates to reality how it shall behave, it compels reality to conform to its fantasies.”

Along these lines, Meerloo offers a prescription: “We must learn to treat the demagogue and aspirant dictator in our midst just as we should treat our external enemies in a cold war – with the weapon of ridicule. The demagogue himself is almost incapable of humor of any sort, and if we treat him with humor, he will begin to collapse. Humor is, after all, related to a sense of perspective. If we can see how things should be, we can see how askew they can get, and we can recognize distortion when we are confronted with it.”

Freedom Requires Self-Awareness

Before human beings can preserve true freedom, they must first be aware of their individual inner contradictions: “Democracy, by its very nature will always have to fight against dictatorship from without and destructiveness from within. Democratic freedom has to battle against both the individual’s inner will to power and his urge to submit to other people . . . Essentially, democracy means the right to develop yourself and not to be developed by others. Yet to develop yourself is impossible without the duty of giving your energy and attention to the development of others.”

Freedom means cultivating the art of friendship, boldly exercising our rights to free association and to communicate our thoughts to others.

So, in the end, freedom truly depends upon breaking down the walls of separation that tyranny builds. It means cultivating the art of friendship, boldly exercising our rights to free association and to communicate our thoughts to others. It means cultivating knowledge instead of cultivating ignorance.

After all, political correctness is primarily a tool for crushing people’s ability to have open conversations in friendship and mutual respect. In this context, it seems very much like a tool to bring all personal relationships under state control. And it shouldn’t surprise us that this is being done today in the name of equality for certain kinds of personal relationships. Tyrannies always pretend to promote the very thing they seek to destroy.

Resistance Is Not Futile

So, where do we go from here? We need to take philosopher George Santayana’s warning to heart, that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. We need to remind leaders who are tempted to cave in to mob hysteria that resistance to tyranny is not as futile as submission to tyranny.

Resistance to tyranny is not as futile as submission to tyranny.

Nearly 60 years ago, Meerloo warned his readers that we absolutely must equip ourselves for this war on the private mind: “In the future, as our psychological understanding grows, leading politicians will have to be better educated in the principles of modern psychology. Just as a soldier must know how to handle his physical weapons, so the politicians must know how to face and handle the mental strategy of human relationships and diplomacy. He will have to become aware of the pitfalls in all human communication and the frailties of his own mind.”

In retrospect, it’s tragic that virtually all well-positioned people of goodwill seem to have been unaware of that warning, or able to effectively act on it. Worse, many end up caving to tyrants because they are unaware of the tactics on the propaganda battlefield.

Our hope, as Meerloo concluded, is in the reality that human rebellion and dissent cannot be forever suppressed: “They await only one breath of freedom in order to awake once more.”

Ankara’s Lies On Syria Contradicted By Washington’s Liars

Ankara disinformation on Syria causes diplomatic fiasco with Washington

Washington has had to dismiss statements from the Turkish Foreign Ministry three times in the past two weeks pertaining to developments concerning Syria and the coalition efforts against ISIL.

On Thursday, a day after Pentagon spokeswoman Commander Elissa Smith said that the United States launched air raids against ISIL from the İncirlik airbase in southern Turkey, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu caused controversy when he proclaimed to the press that, “The US has yet to hit Daesh [ISIL] through Turkey,” adding that only “reconnaissance flights” started from the base.

Later in the day, both the US Central Command and the Turkish Military confirmed that the strikes took place. Çavuşoğlu’s aide claimed the prior statement was a “misunderstanding.” He added, “Mr. Minister had wanted to say that there were no Turkish jets [hitting ISIL targets].”

The safe zone that never was

Thursday’s back and forth between Ankara and Washington served only as a mirror for Wednesday.

Another controversy erupted when foreign ministry undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu claimed that both sides had agreed that a safe zone was to be created in Syria. “The control and protection of this region cleared of (ISIL) will be conducted by Syrian opposition forces and the necessary air defence and support for this … will be provided by the United States and Turkey.”

The response from Washington came with Mark Toner from the US State Department emphasizing “We’ve been pretty clear from the podium and elsewhere saying there’s no zone, no safe haven—we’re not talking about that here. What we’re talking about is a sustained effort to drive ISIL out of the region.”

The PYD and YPG

Another point of difference between Turkey and the United States regarding tackling ISIL has been the role of Syrian Kurdish Groups such as The Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed structure, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), with Ankara against the principle of supporting the groups.

The state-run Anatolia News Agency was on the forefront saying that Turkey and the US agreed not to allow the PYD to enter any area cleared off from ISIL. When asked if the US will allow a potential attack from Turkey against the PYD and the YPG, Toner answered back “No, no, our understanding with Turkey is that they will not attack, and we would not agree to that.”

August 13, 2015 | BGNNews.com | Istanbul

Bringing Barack Obama To Justice For War Crimes Committed and Crimes In Progress

Where is the hope for humanity when “the leader of the free world” actually leads a global war of aggression?

What else could you call the war on terror but a war of aggression, when it is clearly a war of the wealthiest nations against the poorest, a class-war of nations?

What do you call it when the richest nations use their modern militaries to devastate poor, backward (Third World) nations, pounding them into dust in order to subjugate them?

When there is no power on earth capable of stopping, or reversing this global process of dehumanization, then what hope do our children and grandchildren really have in this world?

In this brave new world, all of them will either be one of the wolves, or one of the sacrificial lambs.  Is it humane or moral to will such a legacy to our own children, or to the children of other fellow human beings?

Is it time to pray for divine intervention, or time “MAN UP” and do the right thing for a change?

therearenosunglasses@hotmail.com

Obama’s Participation In the Ongoing War Crimes In Yemen

Yemen: A Tale of Western Hypocrisy With Dire Consequences

On July 30, 2015, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, famous for decrying genocide as the greatest scourge of humanity, feigned concern over the desperate plight of millions in Yemen who currently risk starvation due to the Saudi-led air strikes and siege upon that country. Thus, Power (@AmbassadorPower) sent out the following tweet:

7/30/15, 8:15 AM
.@UNReliefChief described the critical situation in #Yemen: Of a population of 26m, 21m are in need of aid bit.ly/1Mu1wDm

This message by Ambassador Power, written as it is in the passive tense, is quite curious in that it attempts to put distance between Power herself and the Yemeni crisis, though, in fact, the very author of this crisis is none other than Power’s own boss, the U.S. President.

As the LA Times reported today, the

Saudi-led military offensive against Houthi rebels in Yemen has scored major gains this month . . . after the Pentagon more than doubled the number of American advisors to provide enhanced intelligence for airstrikes.

The role of about 45 U.S. advisors, up from 20, at joint military operations centers in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain has been vastly overshadowed by the far larger U.S.-led air war against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. So has Yemen’s toll of civilian casualties and refugees.

The LA Times further relates that:

The Obama administration is providing intelligence, munitions and midair refueling to coalition aircraft, and U.S. warships have helped enforce a blockade in the Gulf of Aden and southern Arabian Sea intended to prevent weapons shipments from Iran to the Houthis. . . .

Human rights groups say the sea cordon also cuts Yemen off from imports of basic commodities, including food and fuel, adding to the nation’s miseries.

Indeed, the Saudi-led war against Yemen for which the U.S. is providing critical support cannot be understated. Thus, as Reuters just reported:

“The humanitarian situation is nothing short of catastrophic. Every family in Yemen has been affected by this conflict,” [International Committee of the Red Cross President] Maurer said in a statement.

Some 4,345 people have been killed and 22,110 injured since March 19, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, citing figures from Yemeni health care facilities.

Moreover, the airstrikes and blockade the U.S. is assisting with may actually constitute war crimes, in that they appear to be a means of intentionally starving out the Yemeni population. Again, Reuters relates that

Hilal Elver, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, said 12.9 million people in Yemen lacked basic food supplies and 850,000 children faced acute malnutrition.

Sieges in a number of governorates, including Aden, Al Dhali, Lahj and Taiz, have been preventing staple food items, such as wheat, from reaching the civilian population, while air strikes have reportedly targeted local markets and trucks laden with food items,” Elver said in a statement.

She said the “deliberate starvation of civilians” caught in armed conflict might constitute a war crime.

In short, the U.S. is contributing to the deaths of quite possibly millions of civilians in Yemen, including nearly a million children. And yet, one barely hears a peep from the mainstream media over this. And meanwhile, you have the curious figure of Samantha Power — for me, the symbol of the U.S.’s moral hypocrisy — who claims to be a warrior for human rights, at least when U.S. enemies are allegedly violating them, but who remains silent in the face of the U.S.’s role in gross human rights abuses.

As a human rights lawyer and instructor, I am deeply concerned about how human rights is increasingly being used by the West, and especially by the U.S., as a bludgeon to justify armed intervention against other nations (e.g., Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine) while these interventions generally result in a worse humanitarian situation than existed prior to the intervention, and while the human rights violations of countries like the U.S. are generally ignored if not outright tolerated. Yemen is a quintessential example of such a destructive “human rights” doctrine, and Samantha Power is the quintessential apologist and enabler of it.

Obama’s “Shock and Awe”—Skeletonized Human Beings Line the Beach Near Tripoli, Libya

EXCLUSIVE: The Mediterranean’s grim tide – shocking never before seen pictures of migrants’ bodies washed up on beach in Libya

• WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
• Bodies of hundreds of migrants who drowned trying to reach Europe by sea are washing up on Libyan beaches
• Volunteers from the Libyan Red Crescent Society collect the remains every day along a 100-mile coastline stretch 
• Remains, some just piles of bones, handed to authorities who record the deaths and bury them in unmarked graves

By Jenny Stanton

The dead bodies of desperate migrants who were bundled onto overcrowded boats destined for Europe, which capsized killing those on board, are washing up on Libya’s beaches.

Their bones, half submerged in the sand, will be buried in unmarked graves, their relatives unaware their loved ones have perished.

 

Volunteers from Libyan Red Crescent Society collect the bodies which were swallowed and spat out by the Mediterranean Sea as they risked their lives on the perilous journey from Libya bound for the island of Lampedusa off the Italian coast.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 men, women and children who were able to survive treacherous journeys to Europe continued to be rescued off the coasts of Italy and Greece each day.

Remains: Some of the bodies have been reduced to just piles of bones after they were swallowed and spat out by the Mediterranean sea

Bodies: Migrants desperate to reach Europe take on the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean but hundreds of their bodies have washed up on the beaches of Libya

Heartbreaking: Many migrants are forced to board dilapidated boats with their children, knowing that they may not reach their destination

Buried: The migrants’ bones poke out from under the sand after they drowned while desperately trying to flee their war-torn homelands

Shocking new photographs taken in Zuwara, on the west coast of Libya close to the Tunisian border, show the true extent of the migrant crisis.

Bodies, some of which are barely more than a pile of bones, are being picked up on a 100-mile stretch of the war-torn country from Garaboli to Zuwara.

One heartbreaking picture is of a skeleton, which has been washed up on the beach with the still wearing the pair of yellow trousers and black leather belt they set off in.

Taha Sultan, head of health at Libyan Red Crescent Society, an organisation working on the ground to help the country’s vulnerable population, said hundreds of bodies had been washing up over the past year.

Speaking to MailOnline from Benghazi in the east of the country, he said: ‘We have been dealing with this for more than a year along the west coast.

‘It happens every day. These kind of things happen all the time in Libya.’

Desperate: More than 1,000 people are rescued off the coasts of Italy and Greece every day, but many don’t manage to finish their journeys

Unidentified: Bodies of the migrants are collected by volunteers along the Libyan coastline and are buried by authorities in the country

Record highs: The number of migrants who have successfully arrived in Europe by sea so far this year is already approaching 250,000

Explaining the mindset of the people who board the boats, sometimes with their young families, Mr Sultan said: ‘People are desperate to leave because it’s dangerous, or they fear for their lives.

‘We have war – people get killed and there is no help coming. We also have ISIS here now. It’s very dangerous to live here.’

Libya is split between two governments backed by armed factions fighting each other but which control limited territory.

Islamic State and other armed groups have exploited a growing security vacuum on the ground to expand.

Libya Dawn, an alliance of armed groups, drove the internationally recognised government out of the capital, Tripoli, and declared its own government a year ago, leaving the oil-rich country on the verge of anarchy.

Libya: Bodies are washing up on a 100-mile stretch of the west of the war-torn country from Garaboli to Zuwara, near the Tunisian border

Volunteers: Workers from the Libyan Red Crescent Society, an organisation working on the ground, are collecting more bodies every day

Tragedy: Many of the migrants attempting to gain access to Europe are fleeing violence, natural disasters and poverty in their homelands

Mr Sultan said that those who try to leave the country by legal means are unable to get visas, so opt for dangerous trips across the sea on rickety ships.

Migrants who have arrived in Italy say human traffickers based in lawless Libya charge them between £770 and £1,150 for a place on the deck of boats. Those crammed in the hold pay about half as much as those above.

On Saturday, more than 40 migrants died in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast after suffocating below the deck of an overcrowded boat.

The vessel was carrying around 400 people when it was intercepted south of the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Footage of the rescue showed two navy vessels helping men, women and children off the dangerously overcrowded ship.

The boat was ‘starting to sink’ when it was spotted by an Italian navy helicopter, around 21 miles off the Libyan coast.

Rescuers discovered the dead migrants when the boarded the boat.

Italian navy attempts rescue as 40 migrants die on boat

Collected: The bodies are removed from the beaches and are handed over to the authorities in the country to be buried in unmarked graves

Deaths: On Saturday, 40 migrants died off the Libyan coast after suffocating below the deck of an overcrowded boat, carrying 400 people

Frequent loss: Hundreds of bodies of migrants have washed up on the beaches of the western coast of Libya over the past year

Survivors of such hazardous journeys have told of how traffickers lock migrants who paid less for the journey in the hold underneath.

These people endure extreme heat in the ship’s hold and there is a high risk of death if it capsizes.

And around 200 migrants were presumed killed earlier this month off the coast of Libya when their boat capsized.

According to the International Organization for Migration, the number of migrants and asylum seekers who have arrived in Europe by sea so far this year is approaching 250,000.

The death toll has risen to at least 2,300, but the figure is likely to be higher because some of the dead are never recovered.

Mr Sultan explained that the bodies are handed over to authorities, which photograph them and document the deaths before burying them.

More than 100,000 migrants have crossed the Channel of Sicily from Libya to reach safety in Italy so far this year.

Emotional footage shows tragic events on the Mediterranean

Death toll: At least 2,300 migrants are known to have died this year while trying to reach Europe by sea, but the real figure will be higher

Frequent fatalities: About 200 migrants were presumed killed earlier this month off the Libyan coastline when their boat capsized

Route: An estimated 102,000 migrants have successfully crossed the Channel of Sicily from Libya to reach safety in Italy this year

The Impulse Towards Fascism and the Homogenized Society

Why aren’t we living in H.G. Wells’ scientific dictatorship?

Rick Searle

By Rick Searle
Utopia or Dystopia

 

One of the more depressing things to come out of the 2008 financial crisis was just how little it managed to effect our expectations about the economy and political forms of the future. Sure, there was Occupy Wall Street, and there’s been at least some interesting intellectual ferment here and there with movements such as Accelerationist Marxism and the like, but none have really gone anywhere. Instead what we’ve got is the same old system only now with even more guarantees and supports for the super rich. Donald Trump may be a blowhard and a buffoon, but even buffoons and blowhards can tell the truth as he did during last Thursday’s debate when he essentially stated that politicians were in the pocket to those with the cash, such as himself, who were underneath it all really running the show.

The last really major crisis of capitalism wasn’t anything like this. In the 1930’s not only had the whole system gone down, but nearly everyone seemed convinced that capitalism, (and some even thought the representative democracy that had emerged in tandem with it) was on the way out.

Then again, the political and economic innovation of the early 20th century isn’t the kind of thing any of us would wish for. Communists, which to many born after 1989 may seem as much like antiquated creatures from another world as American revolutionaries in powdered wigs, was by the 1930’s considered one of the two major ways the society of the future would likely be organized, and its’ competitor over the shape of the future wasn’t some humane and reasoned alternative, but the National Socialism of Hitler’s dark Reich.

If one wants to get a sense of the degree to which the smart money was betting against the survival of capitalism and democracy in the 1930’s one couldn’t do much better than that most eerily prescient of science-fiction prophets – H.G. Wells. In many ways, because he was speaking through the veneer of fiction Wells could allow himself to voice opinions which would have led even political radicals to blush. Also, because he was a “mere” fiction author his writings became one of the few ways intellectuals and politicians in liberal societies could daydream about a way out of capitalism’s constant crises, democracy’s fissiparousness and corruption, and most importantly for the survival of humanity in light of the nation-state’s increasingly destructive wars.

Well’s 1933 The Shape of Things to Come,
published not long after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, is perhaps his best example of a work that blurs the boundaries between a work of fiction and a piece of political analysis, polemic, and prediction. In the guise of a dream book of a character who has seen the future of the world from the 1930’s to the middle of the beginning of the 22nd century, Wells is able to expound upon the events of the day and their possible implications- over a century into the future.

Writing six years before the event takes place Well’s spookily imagines World War II beginning with the German invasion of Poland. Also identifying the other major aggressor in a world war still to come, Wells realizes Japan had stepped into a quagmire by invading China from which much ill would come.

These predictions of coming violence (Wells forecast the outbreak of the Second World War to be 1940- one year off) are even more chilling when one watches the movie based upon the book, and know that the bombings of cities it depicts is not some cinematographer’s fantasy, but will no doubt have killed some of those who watched the film in theaters in 1936- less than five years later.

Nevertheless, Wells gets a host of very important things, not only about the future but about his present, very wrong. He gets it ass backwards in generally admiring the Soviet Union and seeing its’ problem not being the inhuman treatment by the Communist regime of its citizens, but the fact that they have wed themselves to what Well’s believes is an antiquated, dogmatic theory in Marxism.

Indeed, Wells will build his own version of dictatorship in The Shape of Things to Come (though versions of it can be seen in his earlier work) using the ideas of two of Soviet communism’s founders- Trotsky’s idea of a global revolutionary movement which will establish a worldwide government and Lenin’s idea of an intellectual nucleus that will control all the aspects of society.

Nor, did Wells really grasp the nature of Nazism or the strange contradiction of a global alliance of fascist regimes that ostensibly worship the state. Wells saw Hitler as a throwback to a dying order based on the nation-state. His only modernity being

“…control by a self-appointed, self-disciplined élite was a distinct step towards our Modern State organization.” (192)

Wells therefore misses the savagery born of the competition between world shaping ideologies and their mobilization of entire societies that will constitute the Second World War and its aftermath.

Ironically, Wells mistakenly thinks WWII will be short and its fatalities low because he gets his technological predictions right. He clearly foresees the role of the importance of the tank, the airplane, and the submarine to the future war and because of them even anticipates the Nazi idea of blitzkrieg. At one point he seems to have a glimmer of the death spirit that will seize over humankind during the war when he compares the submarine to a sacrificial altar:

The Germans supplied most of the flesh for this particular altar; willing and disciplined, their youngsters saluted and carried their kit down the ladder into this gently swaying clumsy murder mechanism which was destined to become their coffin. (70)

Nevertheless, he fails to see that the Second World War will unleash the kinds of violence and fanaticism formerly only seen in religious wars.

Two decades after Wells’ novel many would think that because of the introduction of nuclear weapons wars would be reduced to minutes. Instead conflict became stretched out across multiple decades. What this is should teach us is that we have no idea how any particular technology will ultimately affect the character of war – especially in terms of its intensity or duration- thus those hoping that robotic or cyber weapons will return us to short decisive conflicts are likely seeing a recurrent mirage.

Wells perhaps better understood than other would be revolutionaries and prophets of the time just how robust existing societies were despite their obvious flaws. The kind of space for true political innovation had seemingly occurred only during times of acute stress, such as war, that by their nature were short lived. A whole new way of organizing society had seemingly revealed itself during World War I in which the whole industrial apparatus of the nation was mobilized and directed towards a particular end. Yet the old society would reassert itself except in those societies that had experienced either defeat and collapse or Pyrrhic victory (Italy, Japan) in the conflict.

Wells thus has to imagine further crises after economic depression and world war to permanently shatter Western societies that had become fossilized into their current form. The new kind of war had itself erased the boundary between the state and the society during war, and here Wells is perhaps prescient in seeing the link between mass mobilization, the kinds of wars against civilians seen in the Second World War and insurgency/terrorism. Yet he pictures the final hammer blow not in the form of such a distributed conflict but coming in the form of a global pandemic that kills half of the world’s people. After that comes the final death of the state and the reversion to feudalism.

It is from a world ruled by warlords that Wells’ imagined “Air Dictatorship” will emerge. It is essentially the establishment of global rule by a scientific technocracy that begins with the imposition of a monopoly over global trade networks and especially control over the air.

To contemporary ears the sections on the Air Dictatorship can be humorously reminiscent of an advertisement for FedEx or the US Navy. And then the humor passes when one recalls that a world dominated by one global straddling military and multinational corporations isn’t too far from the one Wells pictured even if he was more inspired by the role of the Catholic Church in the Dark Ages, the Hanseatic League or the what the damned Bolsheviks were up to in Russia.

Oddly enough, Wells foresaw no resistance to the establishment of a world-state (he called it The Modern State) from global capitalists, or communists or the remnant of the security services of the states that had collapsed. Instead, falling into a modernist bias that remains quite current, Wells sees the only rival to the “Modern State” in the form of the universal religions which the Air Dictatorship will therefore have to destroy. Wells’ utopians declare war on Catholics (Protestants oddly give no resistance) forcefully close Mecca and declare war on Kosher foods. And all this deconstruction to be followed by “re-education” Wells thinks could be done without the kinds of totalitarian nightmares and abuses which are less than two decades away from when he is writing The Shape of Things.

I am not particular fan of the universal confusion called post-modernism, but it does normally prevent most of us from making zingers like Wells’ such as this:

They are going to realize that there can be only one right way of looking at the world for a normal human being and only one conception of a proper scheme of social reactions, and that all others must be wrong and misleading and involve destructive distortions of conduct. (323)

Like any self-respecting version of apocalypse, Wells imagines that after a period of pain and violence the process will become self sustaining and neither will be required, though most honorably for the time Wells thinks this world will be one of racial equality that will never again suffer the plague of extreme want.

Analogous to the universal religions, after the establishment of the Modern State all of humankind will become party to ultimate mission of the scientific endeavor which the protagonist in the movie version sums up manically in this crazy speech at the end of the film:

For man, no rest, he must go on. First this little planet and its’ winds and ways, and then all of the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets above and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he conquers all the depths of space and all of time still he will not be finished.

All the universe or nothing! Which shall it be?

(As a side note Ken Stanley Robinson seems to think this modernist’s dream that the destiny of humanity is to settle the stars is still alive and kicking. In his newest novel he is out to kill it. Review pending. )

To return to our lack of imagination and direction after 2008: we, unlike Wells, know how his and similar modernist projects failed, and just how horribly they did so. Nevertheless, his diagnosis remains largely sound. It might take a crisis the scale none of us would wish for to engender real reform let alone the taking of radically new directions. Given historical experience such crises are much more likely to give rise to monsters than anything benign.

Anarchists seem to grasp the shape of the time but not its implications. In a globalized world power has slipped out of the grasp of democratic sovereignty and into the hands of networked organizations- from multinational corporations, to security services, to terrorists and criminal groups able to transcend these borders. Yet it is tightly organized “machine like” organizations rather than decentralized/anarchic ones that seem to thrive in this feudal environment, and whereas that very feudalism and its competition makes achieving a unified voice in addressing urgent global problems even more difficult, and where despite our current perceptions, war between the armed groups that represent states the gravest existential threat to humanity, we, unlike Wells, know that no one group of us has all the answers, and that it is not only inhumane but impossible to win human unity out of the barrel of a ray gun

---

Rick Searle, an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET, is a writer and educator living the very non-technological Amish country of central Pennsylvania along with his two young daughters. He is an adjunct professor of political science and history for Delaware Valley College and works for the PA Distance Learning Project.

The Dismemberment of Syria

Syria’s new diplomacy

Iran and Saudi Arabia have put forward rival peace plans for Syria, but their aims are irreconcilable and no end to the conflict is in sight.

Syrian President Bashar Assad waves to supporters in Damascus. (photo credit:REUTERS)

As the civil war over the ruins of Syria grinds on into its sixth year, the fighting seems nowhere near an end.

Indeed, there is no longer a single war taking place in the country. Rather, as Syria physically divides into separate entities, so the conflict, too, further subdivides, spawning new conflicts.

There are today no less than five conflicts taking place within the borders of the country: the contests between the Sunni Arab rebels and the Assad regime/Hezbollah/Iran (the original war which brought about the others); the Kurdish YPG’s fight against Islamic State; intermittent clashes between the Sunni Arab rebels and Islamic State; Islamic State’s own war against the Assad regime; and now the renewed war between Turkey and the PKK, which is being played out partly on Syrian soil.

The presence of these five interlocking conflicts notwithstanding, efforts to make diplomatic progress toward some form of settlement, or at least freezing of the conflict, are under way.

Recent days have seen details emerge of two rival “peace plans” for Syria. One of these is sponsored by the Iranians, the main supporters of the Assad regime, the other is the handiwork of Saudi Arabia, which wants the removal of the regime and supports elements among the Sunni Arab rebellion against it.

Neither plan stands much chance of implementation. But the content of the plans and their very existence demonstrate that the Syrian situation is not static. They also indicate the extent to which the aims of the backers of the combatant sides are currently irreconcilable.

The Iranian proposal, according to a report in the Araby al-Jadid newspaper on Monday, constitutes a plan for the freezing of the conflict in place and the subsequent de facto partition of Syria. According to the newspaper, the plan is being promoted by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif during his current round of meetings with regional officials.

The plan proposes that each side would hold on to its current areas of control, except for the city of Aleppo, which would come under international supervision.

The regime and the rebels would then cooperate with the international coalition in the fight against Islamic State. Negotiations between the sides would continue, with the intention of forming a “national government, writing a new constitution and holding nationally monitored elections.”

The regime, according to the plan, would keep control of “Damascus, the Syrian-Lebanese border, Qalamoun, western Ghouta, Zabadani, Homs and the area to its west all the way to the Syrian coast, and Tartus Port.”

This is in essence the area controlled by the regime today. The apparent willingness of the regime’s backers to “settle” for this area rather than to continue to hold out for the eventual reconquest of the entire country (Syrian President Bashar Assad’s aim throughout the war) reflects the declining military fortunes of the Assad regime.

The regime now controls only just over 20 percent of the area of Syria.

In the north, it is reeling from the hammer blows inflicted by the Jaysh al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) rebel coalition.

This coalition includes some of the strongest Islamist rebel forces in Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaida, is a component part of it, as is Ahrar al-Sham, the most powerful of the homegrown Salafi groups on the Syrian battlefield.

It is supported by Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi provision of US Tow antitank missiles, transported across the border from Turkey, is playing a telling role in the fighting, reducing the regime’s advantage in heavy weaponry.

As of now, Jaysh al-Fatah is attempting to destroy the final regime positions on the Al-Ghab plain. Loss of these positions raises the frightening prospect for the regime of the front line moving into the populated parts of Latakia province, the heartland of its support.

Already, the Alawi villages in Latakia are within range of the rebels’ missiles. Entry into Latakia would effectively end Assad’s hopes of preserving intact a safe area of the country for the members of his sect and other supporters of the regime.

Should the pivotal Joureen base in Ghab fall to the rebels, the regime would then face the possibility of its supply lines to the city of Hama further south being cut off.

The regime is therefore fighting desperately to hold its positions on the flat, barren Sahel al-Ghab. Hezbollah fighters are there, fighting alongside Shi’ite “volunteers” from as far afield as Afghanistan.

The motley collection of regime defenders in Ghab reflect the key difficulty which Assad has faced since the commencement of the war. The narrow base of support of his regime has meant that he has faced severe challenges in mustering sufficient manpower to defend the areas under his control.

The solution until now has been to reduce these areas. At a certain point, of course, the shrinking size of the regime’s domain raises the question of its continued viability.

This point may now be approaching.

The Saudis, however, have made clear that the current Iranian proposals are unacceptable. The sticking point, as Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir outlined in a statement this week, is that Riyadh wants Assad’s immediate departure from power rather than a continued role for him in any transitional phase.

“There is no place for Assad in the future of Syria,” Jubeir said, speaking in Moscow after meeting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“Assad is part of the problem, not part of the solution.”

Saudi counterproposals, as reported in the Al-Hayat newspaper this week, envisage the immediate cessation of Iranian and other outside support for the regime and the departure of Hezbollah fighters from Syria, followed by new, UN-supervised presidential and parliamentary elections, after the stepping down of Assad.

The differences are familiar and not yet close to being bridged. The diplomacy, as ever, mirrors the military situation on the ground.

Assad’s fortunes have declined.

This is leading to reduced ambitions and consequently increased flexibility on the part of his backers.

But there are no signs yet that his allies are about to desert him, nor that their reduced demands are anywhere close to being acceptable to the forces behind the rebels. So the fight goes on.

More important, it should be remembered that the war between Assad and the Sunni rebels is now only one of the several conflict systems that have torn Syria apart. So even if Assad’s declining fortunes were to lead to his departing the scene, the war for Syria’s succession, and the suffering of its inhabitants, would almost certainly not be at an end.

Turkish Civil War?

[SEE:  “We Have A Civil War”: Inside Turkey’s Descent Into Political, Social, And Economic Chaos ]

Huge explosion as police safely detonate bomb-laden vehicle in eastern Turkey

Turkish police department safely detonated a bomb-laden vehicle parked along the Diyarbakır-Batman highway on Friday. (Photo: DHA)

TODAYSZAMAN.COM / ISTANBUL

‘Controlled’ bomb explosion causes panic in Turkey

AFP  |  Istanbul

Turkish bomb disposal experts were taken aback on Friday when the controlled explosion of a car bomb in the Kurdish-dominated southeast caused a massive blast that scattered debris and caused panic amongst bystanders.

After sealing off the area in the southeastern region of Batman, experts transported the abandoned car to an open space and set off a controlled detonation, the private Dogan news agency reported.

But the blast unleashed a huge ball of fire and smoke, with video footage by Dogan showing bystanders running in panic.

The powerful explosion shattered the windows of nearby buildings and one person was wounded by broken glass, Dogan said.

There was no immediate claim for who set the bomb but the incident comes amid a spate of daily attacks in Turkey carried out by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Police were alerted after a car rental company’s owner called to report a suspicious person who had hired a vehicle.

The suspect said he was renting the car to travel to Hasankeyf, a major historic site on the Tigris River now partially flooded by dam waters.

Police were still searching for the suspect.

Ankara is waging a two-pronged offensive to bomb Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria and PKK rebels in northern Iraq and southeast Turkey following a series of deadly attacks.

So far, the operation has focused largely on the Kurdish rebels, who have responded by tearing up a 2013 ceasefire and waging a bloody campaign against the security forces.

Obama Now Erdogan’s “Bitch” Over ISIS/KURD Deception

“A Turkish officer entered the allied headquarters in the air war against ISIS and announced that the strike would begin in 10 minutes and he needed all allied jets flying above Iraq to move south of Mosul immediately,” the source said. “We were outraged.”

Senior US military official: Turkey ‘needed a hook’ and tricked us on ISIS

• Natasha Bertrand

REUTERS/Umit BektasA woman after having her nails painted with the colors of the flag of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), during a gathering celebrating Newroz, which marks the arrival of spring and the new year, in the border town of Suruc, Sanliurfa province, on March 17.

A senior US official has accused Turkey of pulling a bait-and-switch by using a recent anti-Islamic State agreement with the US as a “hook” to attack the Kurdish PKK in northern Iraq, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“It’s clear that ISIL was a hook,” the senior military official told The Journal, referring to the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh).

“Turkey wanted to move against the PKK, but it needed a hook.”

On Tuesday, an American military source told Fox News that US military leaders were “outraged” when Turkey began its bombing campaign, giving US special forces stationed in northern Iraq virtually no warning before Turkish jets started striking the mountains.

“A Turkish officer entered the allied headquarters in the air war against ISIS and announced that the strike would begin in 10 minutes and he needed all allied jets flying above Iraq to move south of Mosul immediately,” the source said. “We were outraged.”

The confrontation highlights the tension growing between the US and Turkey, which became a reluctant ally in the fight against ISIS after years of turning a blind eye to the militants’ illicit activity on its southern border during the Syrian civil war.

Ankara officially joined the coalition fight against ISIS on July 24, striking ISIS (and the PKK) on the same day. It also recently began allowing the US to use the Incirlik airbase in Turkey to carry out strikes against ISIS.

But Turkey has conducted 300 strikes against the PKK and three against ISIS since July 24, according to data compiled by IRIN news. All three ISIS strikes occurred on the first day of the campaign.

Nearly 400 Kurdish militants have been killed, IRIN reports, compared with nine ISIS militants.

When asked about Turkey’s commitment to fighting ISIS, a senior defense official said “there are still question marks out there. Our folks are very eager to put it to the test.”

And if Turkey keeps going after the PKK while trying not to provoke ISIS, “it will leave the US without a Syria strategy,” geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer told Business Insider by email.

“Access to Incirlik airbase matters, but the additional bombing it enables will only help contain ISIS, not roll it back,” Bremmer added. “And it will leave Washington without the improved relations with Ankara that the Obama administration is hoping for.”

Reuters

The ongoing bombing campaign against PKK strongholds in northern Iraq came as a surprise, but it probably shouldn’t have: Turkey has long seen the PKK — a designated terrorist organization that waged a three-decade insurgency inside Turkey — as more of an existential threat than ISIS, which refrained from launching attacks inside Turkey even as its militants lived and operated along the border.

“The PKK is a bigger threat to us, as it is active within the country,” a Turkish official told The Wall Street Journal. “They stage attacks on our security forces on a daily basis, in many cities. ISIS is more active in Syria, and is therefore less urgent now.”

REUTERS

Moreover, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bombing campaign — capitalizing on the nationalist, anti-Kurd sentiment that has been steadily growing inside Turkey — could help him regain his AKP party’s absolute majority in parliament now that coalition talks have failed and snap elections are likely.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, also a member of the AKP, said on Thursday he would prefer an election to be held “as soon as possible”, Reuters reported.

“The AKP needed the Kurdish angle to sell the war to ultranationalists inside Turkey,” whose main priority is to curb Kurdish territorial gains along its southern border, Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider last month.

But Erdogan’s gamble has come at a price: Nearly 40 Turkish police officers and military officials have been attacked and killed by PKK militants since the war began, and that number is increasing every day.

REUTERS

Erdogan has also complicated his party’s relationship with Washington further: While the White House was relieved when Turkey announced it would allow the US to launch airstrikes against ISIS from Incirlik airbase in its southeast, the PKK is a politically contentious target.

The militia was working with US-backed Kurdish fighters to repel ISIS from northern Iraq and is also closely linked to the Kurdish YPG militia, which, backed by US airstrikes, has proved to be the most effective force fighting ISIS on the ground in northern Syria.

Now the US is reportedly embracing an all-out partnership with the YPG to make up for the failures of its $500 million Syrian train-and-equip program — a move that is sure to anger Ankara and inflame tensions even further.

“To fully embrace a Kurdish force would complicate an already fragile strategy, two [US] defense officials concluded,” Nancy Youseff of The Daily Beast reports.

“The Turks … would not welcome an emboldened Kurdish force on its southern border. Neither would many of America’s Arab allies, who are also threatened by Kurdish sovereignty movements.”

Preparing for the Final War—Bringing Our Worst Fears To Life

Preparing for the Worst: Are Russian and NATO Military Exercises Making War in Europe more Likely?

By Ian Kearns

Director, ELN

By Łukasz Kulesa

Research Director, ELN

By Thomas Frear

Research Fellow, ELN

Over the last 18 months, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the relationship between Russia and the West has deteriorated considerably. One aspect of the confrontation, as previously documented by the ELN, has been a game of Russian-instigated dangerous brinkmanship which has resulted in many serious close military encounters between the forces of Russia and NATO and its partners over the last 15 months.  Another aspect, however has been the increased scope and size of the military exercises conducted by both Russia and by NATO and its partners in the Euro-Atlantic area since the Ukraine crisis began.

To assist the public and wider policy community in understanding the realities of this new and dangerous security environment in Europe, the ELN has prepared a short policy brief and two interactive maps presenting in detail the anatomy of two recent, large scale military exercises.

The two exercises profiled are:

• A Russian ‘snap exercise’ conducted in March 2015, which brought together 80,000 military personnel.
• The NATO ‘Allied Shield’ exercise conducted in June 2015, which brought under one framework four distinct exercises taking place along the Eastern flank of the Alliance, totalling 15,000 personnel from 19 Members states and three partner states.

 

Anatomy of a Russian Exercise

Anatomy of a NATO Exercise

Both exercises show that each side is training with the other side’s capabilities and most likely war plans in mind. Whilst spokespeople may maintain that these operations are targeted against hypothetical opponents, the nature and scale of them indicate otherwise: Russia is preparing for a conflict with NATO, and NATO is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia. 

We do not suggest that the leadership of either side has made a decision to go to war or that a military conflict between the two is inevitable, but that the changed profile of exercises is a fact and it does play a role in sustaining the current climate of tensions in Europe. These tensions are further aggravated and elevated into a sense of unpredictability when the exercises are not pre-notified or publicly announced beforehand, as is apparently the case with a number of Russian exercises.

In our view, the implementation of the following four recommendations could help to defuse or at least minimize the tensions connected with the increased frequency and scale of the military exercises now taking place:

• It is vitally important to increase NATO – Russia communication with regards to the schedule of exercises;
• Both sides should utilize OSCE channels as much as possible, along with the existing catalogue of Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) included i.a. in the Vienna Document  to increase military predictability;
• The politicians on both sides should examine the benefits and dangers of intensified exercising in the border areas. If Russia or NATO decides at some point that they want to reduce tensions, showing restraint in terms of size or scenarios used in exercises might be a good place to start;
• Conceptual work on a new treaty introducing reciprocal territorial limitations on deployment of specific categories of weapons, backed by robust inspections, should commence as soon as possible.

 

Policy Brief: Preparing for the Worst

Russia – West Dangerous Brinkmanship Continues

Statement by NATO Deputy Spokesperson Carmen Romero on NATO military exercises.

The ELN response to NATO Deputy Spokesperson Carmen Romero’s statement on the ELN report.

Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger’s response to NATO Deputy Spokesperson Carmen Romero’s statement on the ELN report

 

An overview of prominant media coverage for this report is available here. 

No matter what Erdogan Says…NO TURKISH STREAM, NO ISIS FIGHT

Turkey has no intention to challenge Islamic State terrorists within Syria or within Turkey itself.  Obama and Ergodan participated in formulating a big lie to misinform the world about their insincere intentions to combat ISIL terrorism in northern Syria, when, in reality the real plan has always been to continue steering ISIL into troubled states, in order to bully them into thinking our way.  In hindsight it is easy to see that they have fed the world pure “bullshit,” in their insincere proclamation to jointly “fight terrorism” in northern Syria, made evident by their unified dissembling from that point, ever since.  Obama can continue to pretend to be fighting ISIS in Syria and “defending Kurds” (without actually threatening Assad) and Erdogan can pretend to be fighting ISIS (while killing selective Kurds).  Both Obama and Ergodan can safely hide behind their big lie as they work together to kill the opposition to ISIS in Syria.

 

US Sends Fighter Jets to Turkey and Lets Ankara Off the Hook in Islamic State Fight

Nusra Front Withdraws From Frontline Against ISIS in Syria

Al Nusra claims attack on U.S.-trained rebels in Syria

The Anatomy of A Psywar

Intra-Taliban Warfare Hits the Streets of Kabul

[SEE: Huge Truck Bomb Blast Strikes Kabul ]

The latest series of bomb blasts in and near Kabul has exposed large holes in the official reporting on the war, including the mission itself.  Nothing is as it seems in Afghanistan.  If anything, the bombings have exposed the two official lies in the previous statement—that the bombings are by the actual “Taliban”— and that Mullah Mansour is the successor to Mullah Omar.  The bombings are evidence of the authors of the Kabul bombs and proof that Akhtar Mansour is NOT the legitimate, elected successor to Mullah Omar.

Mansour made his public debut in 2010, posing as “Mullah Omar’s second in command,” allegedly conducting “reconciliation” negotiations with the US.  He entered peace talks with American negotiators, under his real name, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.  The charade continued until the counterfeit Mullah had served his purpose, at which time, another person was brought in to claim that Mansour was an imposter.  At which time, Mullah Omar released the following statement:

“The cunning enemy which has occupied our country, is trying, on the one hand, to expand its military operations on the basis of its double-standard policy and, on the other hand, wants to throw dust into the eyes of the people by spreading the rumors of negotiation.”

Mullah Omar announced, once again, that there would be no peace negotiations with any occupying power…period.  Any talk of peace with the Taliban, while remaining in Afghanistan, have been one-sided productions, offering various former Taliban as “negotiators,” to advance some new shift in the strategy, in order to reinforce the false image of a “peace-seeking” American, while making it possible for the war to drag on.  Prolonging the current war, until it can be transmuted into a completely new war.

Within 24 hrs, Friday, three major suicide-attacks strike in or near Kabul.  Western media sources are already crediting their man Mansour

with these massive, deadly blasts, but there has as yet been no evidence offered to substantiate these claims.  But the evidence that is offered, which is incontrovertible, is that all of these bomb blasts were directed at American or Afghan targets.  This means that America’s Mullah Mansour, is definitely NOT behind them.

The first massive truck-bomb (retro-fitted water tanker) hit a Special Forces base in Pul-i-Alam, Logar Province, on Friday night.

The Taliban said its targets were military and paramilitary units in Puli Alam

The next bombing that night was a massive Taliban suicide assault by at least one terrorist wearing a suicide-belt against the Logar police compound of the Afghan quick reaction force.

“Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack on the Police Academy but made no mention of the other two attacks on Friday…killed more than 100 security personnel”

“Taliban spokesman” Zabihullah Mujahid has apparently worked for Afghans/CIA since they arrested him in 2011.  He has served as the conduit for the dead Taliban leader and for his CIA replacement, Mullah Mansour.

Last attack, occurring within 24 hrs, CIA/NDS Afghan Intelligence base, SPECIAL FORCES Camp Integrity,  KABUL.   All of the targets were Western, either intelligence or special forces, or both.  That rules-out every CIA puppet, like Mansour.  These attacks were intended to physically hurt the occupation forces and to embarrass Mansour’s pretend Taliban leadership, by demonstrating their inability to control their organization or their turf.  Someone brought these huge bombs into Kabul from somewhere, but as far as we know, the source of the bombs is already solved in the latest version of “evil personified,” Akhtar Mansour.

These are the known facts in the Kabul bombing investigations…,yet none of this will appear on any nightly news.  The news is too busy weaving the new story line, that the bombings were inter-Taliban warfare over peace negotiations.  Nobody will dwell upon the source of the bombs, which had to be state-supported, since all possible suspect governments are also parties to the pretend peace negotiations.  “Negotiating peace” with the Taliban does nothing for peace, while buying time for the Americans to push their terror war across new borders.

A successful psy-op would leave its targets confused and uncertain about the real war.  For those living under such a weaponized media, it would be impossible to know whether news reportage was factual, or even if there was a war at all.  We know that people die in Afghanistan everyday…beyond than we don’t really know anything.  All of our reported conflicts are thousands of miles away, buried deep inside undeveloped countries, too secluded and too treacherous for any but the most foolhardy reporters.  This means that all news comes through military censors, who relay information to the outside world, or through biased Imperial sources dispatched by Britain or America.  If the war being reported is being waged against the local government (AfPak), either directly or through proxies, then the military middle-men, who relay war news to the international community are hostile sources, who will twist the news to suit their current psywar strategy.  This makes ALL NEWS about Afghanistan or Pakistan, or news coming from the region, completely unreliable, even dangerous to the person reading it, in that it is corrosive to the truth.

This is the news environment prevailing over ALL Imperial wars.  We cannot believe ANY reporting we receive in its entirety, making it necessary for us to dissect all news into its component parts, so that we might identify obvious truths which have been buried under half-true or false information.

We have entered a new phase in the war against the Taliban, characterized primarily by major escalations in the propaganda war.  The American intelligence war has abandoned the real Afghan battlefield, in favor of the battlefield of the mind.   Thus begins a new, more intense form of psychological war, waged by CIA psy-warriors, using their inhuman, weaponized psychology, to twist the minds of the Taliban, the Afghans, the Pakistani and American peoples.  Deceptions, greed and betrayal have been combined, to form a new type of offensive weapon, calculated to overcome all resistance to America’s real plans for Afghanistan…the ones involving pipelines, vast fields of hydrocarbons and transport corridors stretching deep into Central Asia, from the Arabian Sea.

The Afghan war has been basically running on cruise-control, since the Iraq invasion, until now.  The sudden revelation on the death of Mullah Omar and the potential death of Jalaluddin Haqqani have exposed the man behind the curtains, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, who has been issuing orders under the dead leader’s name since 2013.  Mullah Mansour has been leading the anti Omar Taliban for a long time, working secretly for The Empire, taking credit for terrorist attacks (SEE: Karzai reportedly suspects US hand in recent Afghanistan attacks—Jan 28, 2014), promoting fake Taliban initiatives and fake “peace talks,” with “former Taliban” agents who were really representing no one.

By issuing orders under the name of the dead leader Omar, Mansour has managed to maneuver himself into the Taliban driver’s seat, were it not for the opposition of Omar’s family and the Taliban faithful.  Mullah Omar’s son is now leading the anti-Mansour opposition.  According to one group of the most faithful Taliban, who calls itself, Afghanistan Islamic Movement Fidai Mahaz, Mansour and his minions murdered the Emir of the Taliban, by getting counterfeit medicine for him from Dubai.

The Fidai Mahaz are the remnants of the original followers of Mullah Dadullah, before he moved to Pakistan to jump-start the Tehreek i-Taliban (SEE:  The Dadullah Front And The Assassination of Arsala Rahmani May 14, 2012 ).  According to them, news about Omar’s death in 2013 was released by the Mansour gang, because the emir of the Fidai Mahaz revealed the results of their research into his death, which led directly to Mansour’s inner circle.  Mansour’s CIA masters hoped to hide the matter of the poisoning beneath the false counter-claim that Omar, like bin Laden, had died under the watchful eyes of the Pak. military.

Fake Taliban negotiations began with a Western initiative, despite Mullah Omar’s clear rejection of negotiations as long as Afghanistan was an occupied country.  Afghan Taliban sabotaged the US initiative by killing the High Peace Council representatives.  Later on, Pakistan helped sabotage the talks when Mullah Baradar and friends were arrested for making side deals with the CIA.  Baradar’s arrest cut-off the American liasons.  After that, the US and collaborators established the fake Taliban office in Doha, in order to carry-on the charade elsewhere.  The real Mullah Omar spoke-up and condemned the fake negotiations.  Shortly after that, he was dead.

 It was then, that Pakistan and China got into the peacemaking mood, by starting their own fake Afghanistan/Taliban negotiations in Pakistan.

Taliban’s head of Qatar office resigns over leadership dispute–4 August

The Fidai Mahaz are leading the opposition to Pakistan and the new fake peace talks.

therearenosunglasses@hotmail.com

Hiroshima—haunting humanity for 70 years

The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Hiroshima survivors: haunted 70 years on, determined to remember

REUTERS

HIROSHIMA–Hiroshi Harada remembers how his leg sank into one of the bodies blocking a narrow Hiroshima street 70 years ago, as he fled the spreading fire ignited by the atomic bomb.

“My leg slid deep into one of them. Then it was very hard to pull my leg out … To escape, I had no choice,” said Harada, the 75-year-old former head of an atomic bomb museum.

Later that day, a woman grabbed Harada, then just 6 years old, by the leg and asked for water. He stepped back in horror to find a chunk of flesh from her hand sticking to his leg.

As the 70th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack approaches, many survivors still find it too painful to talk about. But with their ranks dwindling, others are determined to pass on their experiences to younger generations.

“The number of survivors will be shrinking and their voices getting smaller,” Harada said. “But Hiroshima needs to keep on sending a message to the world that things like this should never happen again.”

Hiroshima survivors often refrain from talking about their experiences even with their own children, some from a feeling that the past is too horrific and others from fear of discrimination against themselves and their offspring.

This year’s anniversary comes as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to ease the constraints of Japan’s postwar, pacifist constitution on the military.

Critics fear that could lead the nation again down a mistaken path to war, while proponents argue the change is needed to deter growing regional threats.

FEELING OF SHAME

A U.S. bomber dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, killing about 140,000 by the end of the year, out of the 350,000 who lived in the city. The city still has some 60,000 survivors but their average age is approaching 80.

The United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15.

Shortly after the bombing, 15-year-old Shigeo Ito was hurrying home and was asked by a woman to help rescue a person trapped under a collapsed house. He ignored the plea since fire was approaching the bridge he needed to cross to get home.

“Even long after that, I could not help feeling ashamed of myself every time I saw that bridge,” said the 84-year-old Ito, who now lectures to school children about his experience.

Shuntaro Hida, 98, was an army surgeon at the time of the bombing. When he first went out after the explosion, he saw a woman with what he thought were tattered clothes hanging from her torso. Then he realized he was seeing her sloughed-off skin.

For Hida, however, the real horror of the nuclear attack lay in its often invisible health effects. “The cruelest aspect of a nuclear attack is not the savage destruction of human bodies or visible burns, but its life-destroying after-effects,” said Hida, who treated and advised some 10,000 atomic bomb survivors.

Hiroshima began to see an increased number of leukemia patients five year after the bombing.

Fumiaki Kajiya, 76, lost his sister to the atomic bomb blast. Their parents had moved her to a rural area to keep her safe, but just before the bombing, they brought her back to the city, succumbing to her pleas to stay with the family.

Kajiya’s mother would weep for hours on end in front of the Buddhist alter as Aug. 6 came around every year. Kajiya now performs “picture shows” for children with hand-drawn art to pass on the horror of the atomic bomb.

“If we forget Hiroshima, the world would be a dangerous place,” Kajiya said.

Royal Yemen War Destroys Saudi Drug Market, Fueling Unrest and Antiwar Sentiment

[SEE:  CAPTAGON—Saudi Mind Control Drug of Choice]

72 kilos of hashish seized by Saudi border police. (Photo from Althawra newspaper’s website)

Hash Highway to Saudi Arabia Dries Up as Coalition Bombs Yemen

Saudi Arabia’s four-month-old bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen has been widely supported in the kingdom, but it’s had an unintended consequence: It has almost choked off the supply of amphetamines and hashish smuggled from across the border.

Saudi guards peering from concrete towers along the Yemeni border say the war has shut down trafficking, while 530 miles (850 kilometers) away in Riyadh residents have seen their supplies dry up.

“Smuggling has stopped,” Adel al-Aroosi, a major in the border guard in the southern province of Najran, said as he watched for rebel movements across a wide expanse of desert ringed by arid mountains.

Heavy drug consumption is surprisingly common in this austere kingdom with ample cash, high unemployment and harsh punishment for offenders. A United Nations report said amphetamines seized by Saudi authorities in 2011 accounted for more than a third of all global seizures.

Since the war began in March, seizures along the southern border have plummeted, down 75 percent for hashish and 95 percent for amphetamines, according to the interior ministry.

A Riyadh psychotherapist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her patients’ privacy, said drug abuse is spurred by a lack of physical activity as well as increased self medication and boredom. Hashish is consumed like cigarettes, she said, with little awareness about addiction.

Last year, Saudi authorities nabbed a record 100 million tablets of an amphetamine called Captagon, according to Nizar Alsalih, a consultant for Saudi Arabia’s National Narcotics Control Commission. Most Captagon is smuggled from Jordan and Iraq, he said.

No Syringes Needed

Captagon, known on the streets of Riyadh as “roush,” is widely used in the Gulf but negligible in the rest of the world. It is popular because it doesn’t “require the paraphernalia of real narcotics — no need for smoking or syringes or rolled up 50 riyal notes,” said Justin Thomas, a U.A.E.-based psychologist.

The 1,100-mile border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia — similar to that between Mexico and the U.S. — is described by Western security officials as the hash highway. The region’s poorest country, Yemen has a weak central government and poorly trained police, so traffickers move with near impunity. Saudi Arabia has long struggled with its drug trade and the thousands of East Africans and Yemenis who work as smugglers.

A Saudi-led coalition started bombing the Iranian-backed Houthis in March to stop them from seizing the southern port city of Aden. Recently, the coalition was able to push the group out of most of the city, the first significant gain for the government forces.

Maritime Blockade

As part of the Yemen war, Saudi Arabia has not only bolstered its troops on the border but also imposed a maritime blockade around Yemen’s ports, cutting illegal drug routes.

But smugglers are inventive. Authorities recently broke up a gang using a drone to supply hashish and Captagon to prison inmates in Jeddah, Arab News reported last month.

Saudi Arabia’s Wahabbi interpretation of Islam prohibits single men and women from mixing in public and bans cinemas and other forms of entertainment common throughout the Middle East. It is also unforgiving of violators. This year, 47 people were executed for non-violent drug offenses, according to Human Rights Watch.

The restrictions help fuel drug addiction, according to James Dorsey, a senior fellow in international studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “It is a reflection of a society that fails to meet expectations and aspirations of important segments of the population,” he said.

Raising Awareness

Years of ignoring the issue and a conservative culture reluctant to discuss addiction have made facts about drug abuse hard to pin down. Now, the kingdom’s National Commission for Drug Control is trying to raise awareness through a public campaign.

The government is using social media and reaching out to universities to do so, said Alsalih, the consultant who is also a psychology professor at King Saud University. Young adults, he said, don’t think of using Captagon as “abuse.” They take tablets for “energy to stay awake” and aren’t aware that they are altering their brain chemistry.

Kentucky Pig Shackles Traumatized Little Boy With ADD For 15 Minutes

Kentucky deputy sheriff sued for handcuffing school children

 

© acluvideos / YouTube

 

A deputy sheriff is being sued for shackling two Kentucky school children with learning disabilities as punishment for not following directions, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The children, an eight-year-old boy, and a nine-year-old girl, barely more than 50 pounds in weight, were so small that the school resource officer, Kenton County Sheriff’s deputy Kevin Sumner, locked adult-sized handcuffs around their biceps and forced their hands behind their backs, the lawsuit charges. The incidents happened in autumn 2014.

“Shackling children is not okay. It is traumatizing, and in this case it is also illegal,” said Susan Mizner, disability counsel for the ACLU, in a statement about Monday’s lawsuit.

A disturbing 0.28-second video taken by a staff member at an elementary school in Covington, Kentucky shows a third-grade Latino boy, identified as SR, being shackled and crying out in pain. Despite having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a history of trauma, he was handcuffed for 15 minutes.

“You can do what we asked you to, or you can suffer the consequences,” the deputy says in the video.

“Ow! That hurts!” the child replies, crying.

“Now sit down in that chair like I asked you to,” the deputy says, as the child continues to cry.

The child’s mother, identified in the complaint as TR, said it was heartbreaking to watch her boy suffer because of the experience.

“It’s hard for him to sleep, he has anxiety, and he is scared of seeing the officer in the school. School should be a safe place for children. It should be a place they look forward to going to. Instead, this has turned into a continuing nightmare for my son,” TR said about her son.

The second plaintiff in the suit, an African-American girl, identified as LG, was twice handcuffed, and held for 20 minutes and 30 minutes. She has ADHD and other special needs.

Both children were being punished for behavior related to their disabilities. Neither was arrested nor charged with any criminal conduct.

“Using law enforcement to discipline students with disabilities only serves to traumatize children. It makes behavioral issues worse and interferes with the school’s role in developing appropriate educational and behavioral plans for them,” said the ACLU’s Mizner.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, claims the sheriff’s office and its deputy not only violated regulations of the state’s board of education in using handcuffs, but also violated the Fourth, Eight and 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. Those rights provide protections against search and seizure, against cruel and unusual punishment, and provide equal protection under the law.

READ MORE: NYPD officers slammed autistic teen’s head against concrete – lawsuit

The lawsuit adds that the actions of the officer were a violation of the children’s rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Students with disabilities represent 12 percent of public school students but are 75 percent of all students subjected to physical restraint at school, according to the US Department of Education.

The ACLU said the deputy didn’t have adequate training to deal with students who have disabilities and they are seeking additional training for school resource officers, as well as unspecified damages.

READ MORE: Feds sue Florida for ‘serious, systemic and ongoing’ mistreatment of disabled children

Local channel WDRB News talked with the sheriff’s department, which said it had not yet received the suit, so it could not yet comment.

WDRB also contacted the school district, which says it’s aware of the incident and cooperating with the child’s family’s legal counsel – and that resource officers are “not called upon to punish or discipline students,” but to simply maintain safety.

The suit claims the move violated the children’s constitutional rights and the Americans for Disabilities Act.

Does Saudi Immunity For 911 Somehow Transfer Guilt To Iran?

[SEE:  Saudi Royals Request Removal From 911 Lawsuit ]

The Global Lawyer: Saudi Arabia, Iran and 9/11

Michael D. Goldhaber, The Am Law Daily

Photo by Sander Lamme via Wikimedia Commons

Victims of September 11, who seek to hold funders of the 2001 terror attacks accountable in court, came to Manhattan federal court in Foley Square on Thursday with serious evidence that Saudi Arabia supported the al Qaeda bombers. U.S. District Judge George Daniels promised to decide within 90 days whether to put the Kingdom on trial.

Saudi Arabia chided the 9/11 families that this hearing was “not a political seminar.” It was, however, a seminar on history and epistemology. After 12 years of halting progress against Saudi charities, the 9/11 plaintiffs have revived a powerful claim against the Kingdom. But the quest for historical truth threatens to founder on the judge’s futile desire for direct knowledge of espionage.

Much of the day turned on what exactly we know about a February 2000 chat between alleged Saudi spies Omar al Bayoumi and Fahad al Thumairy. Judge Daniels had no time for Saudi’s contention that it didn’t “technically” employ Bayoumi when it paid his salary for a no-show cover job. But at the heart of the Saudi spy plot posited by the 9/11 families, the judge seemed to struggle with the obvious.

“You don’t have any evidence as to what conversations [Thumairy] had with Bayoumi,” said Daniels. “What’s the factual basis for you to allege that when he met with Bayoumi he said, ‘Give lodging to the hijackers, assist them and give financial support to the hijackers so that they can carry out the 9/11 attacks?’”

What one spy said to the other can be inferred from the full circumstantial evidence, replied 9/11 attorney Sean Carter of Cozen O’Connor—and must be. Consider the timing and sequence of these events, as laid out by the plaintiffs.

Osama bin Laden sent the 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar to Los Angeles in mid-January 2000 knowing that they didn’t speak a word of English and would be helpless on their own. Two weeks later, the Saudi spy Bayoumi met with the Islamist diplomat-imam Thumairy at the Saudi consul’s Islamic Affairs section, which the FBI knew to serve as Saudi Arabia’s radical Islamist fifth column.

Bayoumi drove straight from this not-so-mysterious chat to meet the two hijackers at Thumairy’s mosque. Three days later, Bayoumi moved the two hijackers into his own family apartment in San Diego. Bayoumi proceeded to open bank accounts and rent new apartments for the hijackers with his own money. Bayoumi connected the hijackers with another alleged Saudi agent who procured them fake IDs and admission to language and flight school. Bayoumi’s wife allegedly channeled $150,000 in support payments from a Saudi princess to the hijackers. In early 2000 Bayoumi received a promotion at his no-show cover job, and a significant raise in the salary and stipend covered by the Kingdom. Over the same three months, he talked repeatedly by phone with Saudi diplomats in L.A. and D.C., not to mention the hijackers’ San Diego imam Anwar Aulaqi, who went on to become a senior al Qaeda leader.

When questioned by the 9/11 Commission under the watchful eye of the Saudi secret police, Thumairy clumsily denied knowing Bayoumi, and Bayoumi pretended to be surprised that Thumairy worked at the consulate.

Add it all up, and the two spies in L.A. were not chatting about the traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway. The judge must understand that historical intelligence doesn’t get any stronger. We go to war with Iraq over yellowcake, and we won’t go to a jury with two bad guys twirling their mustaches at Wahhabi central?

According to the complaint, a top FBI official has stated that “We [the FBI] firmly believed that he [Bayoumi] had knowledge [of the 9/11 plot], and that his meeting with them [Hazmi and Mihdhar] that day was more than coincidence.” It’s “implausible,” adds 9/11 commissioner John Lehman, “that the broad spectrum of evidence developed by the 9/11 Commission concerning the relationships among Omar al Bayoumi, Fahad al Thumairy, the Islamic Affairs Department of Saudi diplomatic missions, and 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar can be explained away as merely coincidental.”

To 9/11 victims like Matthew T. Sellito, who flew in for the hearing from Florida, the evidence is clear. Sellitto, whose 23 year-old son Matthew C. of Cantor Fitzgerald was the youngest victim of the twin towers, said it pained him that the U.S. held the wrong country accountable in the Iraq War.

What about the 9/11 Commission itself? According to Carter, the staffers who studied the evidence concluded that Saudi Arabia was implicated—but that conclusion was removed from the 9/11 Report at the eleventh hour because senior staff wanted 100 percent certainty for such politically explosive allegations.

Michael Kellogg of Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evans & Figel, arguing for the defense, prefers the final draft of the 9/11 Report. Even after 12 years, he says the 9/11 families can’t meet the high standard of evidence required by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. He also argued that the case against Saudi Arabia and the Saudi High Comission for Relief of Bosnia & Herzegovina must be dismissed because they do not satisfy the “whole tort” exception, the “discretionary functions” clause, or the causation requirement of the FSIA. Those legal arguments are likely to be resolved at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit—unless Congress steps in to resolve them first. But this case ain’t going to trial against Saudi unless Judge Daniels is willing to connect the dots.

The irony is that Judge Daniels already entered a $6 billion default judgment against Iran on far weaker evidence. The allegations that Iran helped Hezbollah to cooperate with al-Qaeda, and let al-Qaeda terrorists pass through Iran, would seem to fail the test that the whole tort occurred on U.S. soil.

Yet after 3 hours of agonizing over the Saudi spy evidence, the judge treated the contention that Iran is liable for another $150 billion as an afterthought.

At the end of Thursday’s hearing, James Kreindler of Kreindler & Kreindler announced that the 857 members of his 9/11 plaintiff group, headlined by the Ashton family, had a claim against Iran. And therefore, they were entitled to the same default judgment received in 2011 by the 47 members of the plaintiff group headlined by the Havlish family. Kreindler said that the $6 billion awarded in Havlish implied damages of $150 billion for the Ashton plaintiffs . But for fear of disrupting diplomacy, Kreindler said he was only seeking a finding of liability—to stake a claim in the political settlement likely to resolve Iranian terror claims. The judge said he’d hold a Jan. 14 conference and “see where we are.”

In the meantime here’s free advice from The Global Lawyer. Iran should show up in court before a mega-judgment jeopardizes its historic deal. And Judge Daniels should let a jury see the evidence against the nation that actually bears blame for 9/11. We owe it to Matthew T. and Matthew C. Sellitto.

The Global Lawyer is a regular column by American Lawyer senior international correspondent Michael D. Goldhaber.

Turkey Feigns Fight Against ISIS, Just As We Pretend To Fight “Al-Qaeda”

“Nobody ever knew what really happened. How many fighters or civilians killed to what effect…nobody knew any facts. In other words, it all seemed like theater for public consumption.”

[Is the quotation above about Turkish airstrikes or American drone strikes?  How do we know that any “legitimate media” war report is true?]

Instead Of Fighting ISIS, Erdogan Pushes Turkey Toward Chaos And Despotism

---

Melik Kaylan

I cover conflicts, frontiers and upheavals mired in history.

In Turkey, an ISIS suicide bomb kills 30 and wounds many more in the Kurdish area town of Suruc. The Kurdish insurgent terrorists, the PKK, then start killing Turkish policemen and soldiers while ISIS attacks a Turkish military border post. Peace demonstrations ensue in some cities which police put down with the, by now, familiar methods of severity against civilians. Ankara and Washington reach an agreement allowing the US to use its bases inside Turkey against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Erdogan’s spokesmen announce that Turkey’s air force has conducted raids against both PKK and ISIS targets across the border. Turkish authorities arrest some 900 people nationwide, mostly Kurds, for allegedly belonging to terror networks. Turkish tanks shell Kurdish villages in Syrian borderlands near Kobani. Meanwhile, news leaks that the US has solid evidence of Turkish collusion with ISIS in months past. Let us pause here and dispel some of the fog.

First, let us remember that Turkey conducted a national election on June 7 and still hasn’t formed a government. All these decisions in a time of crisis are being taken by somebody. Someone’s running the country. We’ll get to the full implications later but initiatives are being taken, orders given. The air raids for instance. Worth a little scrutiny. For example, you have to wonder, since the Turkish air force knew of PKK targets in Iraq, so quickly and easily neutralized, why didn’t it act before? And why attack Syrian Kurds near Kobani who, after all, are busy fighting off ISIS? Especially if you’ve declared ISIS the enemy because it has killed 30 people in a suicide bomb inside Turkey.

On the ISIS front, it’s worth viewing the video put out by Ankara of the air strikes against several sites by F-16s using laser-guided munitions. All the targets seem to have one thing in common: they’re each at a safe distance from residential complexes in ISIS territory. They’re set apart in open fields. They betray no marks of military activity. Now, humanitarian though this might seem – which itself begs the question – you still have to wonder. Does ISIS keep strategic targets clear of population centers? And, if so, why were such targets still so manifestly available. The US has waged its air war against ISIS since last September. They left a few for the Turks? The skeptic might ask if these were meaningful targets at all.

I remember during the Iraq war that Ankara would announce with fanfare various bombing sorties to hit PKK camps nestled in the Zagros mountains in retaliation against one or other PKK atrocity inside Turkey. Nobody ever knew what really happened. How many fighters or civilians killed to what effect? The PKK never slowed down. Barzani grumbled about territorial integrity. The White House mumbled about Turkey’s right to self-defense. I queried Kurds from Iraqi Kurdistan, from both Suleymaniah and Erbil, during those years about any publicly mooted information about those recurrent air strikes. While they expressed outrage at territorial violation by Turks, nobody knew any facts. In other words, it all seemed like theater for public consumption in Turkey.

Let’s keep firmly in mind the overarching attribute of Turkey’s AKP leaders throughout the last decade: they’re invariably long on demagogy and short on solutions. The goal always is to stay in power, mute criticism, corrupt all necessary institutions, suppress dissent, play the populist card. And play it so unscrupulously that the country polarizes step by step. Protestors are terrorists. Critical journalists are atheists. Gulenists serve a foreign power. Kurdish politicians are fronting for the PKK. The mayor of Ankara, a top Erdoganista, sued a journalist for accusing him of – wait for it – being Armenian!

Much of the time nobody knows what’s really going on after any eruption of internal conflict first gets reported – they only get exposed to propaganda and polemics. The media gets muzzled and social media suspended. It happened after two gas cylinder bombs exploded at a HDP Kurdish party rally ahead of the elections killing two and wounding over 100.

It has happened after the Suruc horror by ISIS. Erdogan’s main objective, to befog with theater when he can’t hide the reality, hasn’t wavered. Hence the display of signing the Incirlik Airbase deal with the White House. Hence the bombing runs against ISIS. These add up to a manifest U-turn as he and his party have publicly abetted ISIS in myriad snide ways, even giving cover to its foremost vociferous advocate in Turkey, the noisy and sinister Halis Bayancuk whom they’ve just re-arrested. Previously arrested in 2014, he was released by the authorities while the prosecutor and judge who had moved against him were demoted. The government then defended him publicly as a victim of the ‘deep state’ conspiracy, one of Erdogan’s favorite polemical bogeys.

Meanwhile, as many domestic commentators now say, Turkey is hovering on the brink. Similarly, others are pointing out that the country now faces total crisis not accidentally but in line with Erdogan’s plan to monopolize power, become the indispensible figure amid chaos. In the old days, when fractured elections led to paralysis and conflict, the military would step in and tidy up the mess, acting as last-chance custodians of the Republic. These days their role resides, democratically, with the President. Alas, the ‘honest-broker’ is also a dishonest protagonist in the fray, namely Erdogan himself. The office of the Presidency requires him to stand above politics. He hasn’t – even though the country voted away his party’s parliamentary majority for that reason, as a rebuttal of his ambition to make the Presidency paramount. He planned to re-enact the Putin/Medvedev tango, Turkish-style, moving between the position of PM and President to avoid term limits.

As I wrote here after the election produced no winner six weeks ago, Turkey has never fared well with coalitions. In this case, the coalition didn’t even materialize. While the various parties continue to negotiate on forming a government, they’ve left Erdogan in charge by default. What I warned then, is coming to pass (even quicker than expected) when I said, “and here’s the most scary part: as things deteriorate it will be up to the President to impose order by one means or another” and “a fundamental player in the equation (Erdogan) has no interest but to let things get very bad indeed”.

And so here we are. For Erdogan it’s even better that there’s no government. He rules by diktat. To do so, he needs crises. He’s busy creating them. Stoking the Kurdish conflict simply polarizes the country further, catalyzes civil war Assad-style. He will call a sudden election when things are bad enough. There’s some chance he might have miscued though. After all, he has no coalition to blame. Instead of seeing him as the indispensable strongman, the country might hold him responsible for all the chaos. If there is still a country by then.

Saudis Want Global Gag On Criticism of Wahhabism (Counterfeit Islam)

[If the Saudis can buy diplomatic immunity all over the world, it is but a small step for them to pay a little more bribe money, to extend that immunity to their counterfeit version of Islam (SEE: Saudi Royals Request Removal From 911 Lawsuit).]

Saudi Arabia laughably preaches against religious intolerance

By James Kirk Wall

Saudi Arabia, a world leader in religious, sexist, and political oppression, continued to beat the drums over a global ban of any religious criticism. They claim criticizing religious symbols and scripture is intolerance. In other words, a country that decreed all atheists to be terrorists, and persecutes anyone who dares criticize the government, is going to give the world a lecture on tolerance and free speech.

“We have made it clear that freedom of expression without limits or restrictions would lead to violation and abuse of religious and ideological rights,” said Abdulmajeed Al-Omari, director for external relations at the Ministry of Islamic Affairs.

“This requires everyone to intensify efforts to criminalize insulting heavenly religions, prophets, holy books, religious symbols and places of worship,” he added.

In truth, protecting religious rights has nothing to do with this proposed censorship. The United States has religious rights, far more than Saudi Arabia. People are free to worship any god they want per the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. People also have the right to change their religious beliefs, if they chose to do so, without threat of being murdered.

The U.S. also has freedom of speech whereas religion, politics, and all ideas are open to criticism. Having one’s beliefs open to criticism, or even ridicule, is not a violation of one’s rights to have that belief. Secure beliefs can withstand and tolerate scrutiny, insecure beliefs cannot.

The cowardly kings and clerics of Saudi Arabia don’t want any kind of free speech that would cause them to actually defend themselves and their ignorant policies. They arrogantly think that they’re above any kind of challenge. Anyone who defies their Wahhabi interpretation of Islam is considered to be a criminal.

The world knows all too well about Saudi Arabian intolerance and discrimination. The world knows how this extremist country treats those with different ideas within it’s’ borders. We all know about the sadistic persecution of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, and the numerous barbaric public beheadings. We know about the horrible restrictions against women such as not even having the right to drive a car, or anything that could be interpreted as “showing off their beauty.”

Saudi Arabia is a joke of human rights. When Saudi Arabia joined the United Nations, the UN became a joke of human rights. The Saudi government directly and repeatedly violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is the United Nations’ charter of human dignity of all people. In direct and constant violation of these rights, Saudi Arabia stands unashamed and unaccountable.

And what about the education system in Saudi Arabia? Does it teach children to be tolerant and open minded? Quite the opposite, according to a study the textbooks promote the following:
• Condemn and denigrate the majority of Sunni Muslims who do not follow the Wahhabi understanding of Islam, and call them deviants and descendants of polytheists.
• Condemn and denigrate Shiite and Sufi Muslims’ beliefs and practices as heretical and call them “polytheists;”
• Command Muslims to “hate” Christians, Jews, “polytheists” and other “unbelievers,” including non-Wahhabi Muslims, though, incongruously, not to treat them “unjustly”;
• Teach that “Jews and the Christians are enemies of the [Muslim] believers” and that “the clash” between the two realms is perpetual;
• Instruct students not to “greet,” “befriend,” “imitate,” “show loyalty to,” “be courteous to,” or “respect” non-believers.

Should Saudi Arabia be preaching to the world about religious tolerance and free speech? The only examples they have to give is the promotion of religious oppression and fanatical censorship. They wish to pervert all forms of human expression. The real supporters of human rights and dignity must stand up against these despicable frauds.

-James Kirk Wall

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 18.
• Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.
• Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

References:
AL Arabian News – Saudi Gazette – Saudi official: Criminalize vilification of religious symbols

Saudi Royals Request Removal From 911 Lawsuit

[Every news report about this Saudi request for immunity begins with the same disclaimer.]

“Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with the 11 September, 2001, attacks and should be dismissed from lawsuits.”

 

UN Capitulation To Saudi Demands Equals Partnership In Ethnic-Cleansing of Middle East

“the U.N. de facto institutionalized aid segregation by allowing humanitarian relief to be conditional to certain criteria: political affiliation and religious orientation.

With Yemen set as a precedent, who’s to say that a similar setup will not be replicated in other countries in the region — mainly, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Libya?”

source

[This is the standard by which Middle Eastern human beings will be granted the right to eat by the Royal Saudi Caliphate.  Anyone who can’t see the real “Sunni Caliphate” by now has not been paying attention to Saudi aggression in the region.  War-mongering king Salman has been arrogantly open about his intentions to cleanse the Middle East of Shiites and other religious apostates (this would include Christians, obviously). even whike he pretends to be fighting against the Caliphate of ISIS.  The Saudi royals and their Gulf subordinates have been creating a Saudi Caliphate, right before our eyes.  The fact that the world’s only hope for humanitarianism, the United Nations, would allow a tribal Arab king to enforce Draconian standards on simple aid intended to keep civilians alive (amidst a hot, desert war), is proof that human compassion is just another commodity that can be bought and sold like anything else. 

Such is the human condition, when laid bare before us. 

Where is God in this equation?]

Saudi Arabia Weaponizes Humanitarian Aid In Yemen

Saudi Arabia opened its checkbook in response to a U.N. appeal for funds to cover the most urgent humanitarian aid to Yemen. But that aid would come at a steep price and with more than a few strings attached.

By Catherine Shakdam

SANAA, Yemen — Five months have passed since Saudi Arabia declared war on Yemen, and for all its might, political resolve and military arsenal, the kingdom has yet to bring the poorest nation on the Arabian Peninsula to heel.

Its institutions in tatters, its military apparatus reduced to rubbles, and with no economy to speak of, Yemen’s imminent collapse has been foretold time and time again by experts and state officials. Yet these predictions have not quite come to fruition.

In its match against Goliath, David is resisting. In rallies, demonstrations and even an open letter signed by 18 Yemen scholars and experts living in the United States and Britain, tens of thousands of Yemenis and others around the world have decried Riyadh’s actions, calling for an end to all violence.

Yet this dedication to opposing Riyadh’s actions doesn’t mean Yemenis aren’t suffering. The World Health Organization issued a statement in June, warning that a “major health crisis is unfolding in Yemen, where hospitals have been destroyed, health workers killed and critical shortages of food, medical supplies and fuel are causing large-scale suffering.”

In early July, the United Nations declared the situation in Yemen to be the highest level of humanitarian emergency. According to a U.N. report published July 7, over 1,500 civilians have been killed, 3,600 have been injured, and over a million have been displaced in the ongoing conflict.

A “major health crisis is unfolding in Yemen, where hospitals have been destroyed, health workers killed and critical shortages of food, medical supplies and fuel are causing large-scale suffering.”

-World Health Organization

By U.N. estimates, about 80 percent of all Yemenis — more than 20 million people — are in need of humanitarian aid.

In late March, Amnesty International confirmed the deaths of at least six children under the age of 10 during a Saudi-led air raid that killed 25 people. The report read: “The organization spoke to medical personnel at four different hospitals where the dead were taken after being pulled from the rubble of 14 houses that were hit in a residential neighbourhood near the city’s international airport.”

Already the poorest and most vulnerable population in the Peninsula and arguably the Greater Middle East, Yemenis have seen their livelihoods and freedom of movement disintegrate under Saudi Arabia’s war momentum. In late April, Saudi Arabia bombed Sanaa International Airport, effectively trapping civilians within Yemen’s borders.

Despite mounting evidence of abuses and war crimes, it would take the international rights community several months to stand up to the oil giant. On July 27, Human Rights Watch unequivocally slammed Saudi Arabia for a litany of human rights violations. The report reads:

“Saudi-led coalition airstrikes that killed at least 65 civilians, including 10 children, and wounded dozens in the Yemeni port city of Mokha on July 24, 2015, are an apparent war crime. Starting between 9:30 and 10 p.m., coalition airplanes repeatedly struck two residential compounds of the Mokha Steam Power Plant, which housed plant workers and their family members.”

With fierce battles raging across Yemen, and as warplanes continue to rain lead onto heavily populated areas, Saudi Arabia has been looking for innovative ways to exert pressure onto the resistance movement. It is now withholding humanitarian aid to Yemen’s civilians to tame the growing insurrection movement against its rule and thus secure victory in the face of international law — all under the guise of the United Nations.

The kingdom is holding hostage not just Yemen but to some extent the international community, using the United Nations’ humanitarian institutions to wage war. It’s using institutions meant to offer relief as a means of weaponizing aid.

Hassan Jayache, a senior leader of the Houthi movement, which took control of Yemen earlier this year, told MintPress News that local NGOs have found themselves caught in a political web, forced to surrender their neutrality to secure not just funding but access to areas where aid is needed.

“The Saudis have exerted political pressures onto local NGOs and international aid organizations, demanding that aid be restricted to pre-approved segments of the population, based on political affiliations and according to religious criteria,” Jayache said.

“In other words, Al Saud has decided to starve the Shias of Yemen, hoping to break the Houthis’ momentum.”

Turning aid agencies into weapons of war

Mohammed Al-Emad, a Yemen-based journalist and political commentator, says Saudi Arabia called on several media organizations in the Middle East, the United States and Europe, demanding that “coverage on Yemen be sanitized and in keeping with Riyadh’s chosen political narrative.”

While Al-Emad’s claims could be considered bias, WikiLeaks published a series of confidential cables pointing to systematic media/PR manipulation on the part of the Saudis.

But if the international community had been standing silent before Saudi Arabia’s war crimes, exploiting what Al-Emad describes as a convenient media blackout to avoid addressing some sticky legal points, Riyadh’s move against the U.N. might prove one indiscretion too many for anyone to ignore.

The work of King Salman and his allies to sabotage U.N.-organized aid to Yemen started on April 17 in the wake of a U.N. emergency flash appeal for $274 million to respond to the most pressing humanitarian needs over the following three months.

Speaking on Yemenis’ hardship, Humanitarian Coordinator Johannes Van Der Klaauw stressed:

“The devastating conflict in Yemen takes place against the backdrop of an existing humanitarian crisis that was already one of the largest and most complex in the world … Thousands of families have now fled their homes as a result of the fighting and airstrikes. Ordinary families are struggling to access health care, water, food and fuel – basic requirements for their survival.”

Saudi Arabia immediately volunteered the exact amount requested. But the aid would come with strings attached.

Vice News reported in June that Saudi officials leaned on U.N. officials to sabotage aid deliveries, threatening to close the kingdom’s checkbook should U.N. agencies deny Riyadh’s requests.

Based on a U.N. memo obtained by Vice, the media outlet reported that the Saudi government imposed unprecedented conditions on aid agencies, demanding that assistance be limited to Saudi-approved areas and confined to strictly Sunni civilian populations.

“If such despicable logic can somehow be expected from a power which has wielded sectarianism to sow discord and from chaos rise a tyrant, what of the UN, an institution which claims itself impartial and fair?” Hasan Sufyani, a leading political analyst at the Sana’a Institute for Arabic Studies, asked MintPress.

He added:

“If humanitarian organizations are to be subjected to the rules of realpolitik then truly the world has reached a dark chapter in its history and reverted back to organized barbarism.

Still, no well-thinking Western powers has thought to challenge Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen. In a world system where capitalism reigns king, the rich and haughty stand above the pettiness of the rule of law.”

As a rule of thumb, and to avoid political entanglements, humanitarian organizations tend to shy away from donations which come with strings attached, especially when they fall under the umbrella of the OCHA.

Meant as a supranational institution, OCHA was never intended to be manipulated as an instrument of pressure, legal absolution or, in the case of Yemen, a weapon of war.

$244M, split nine ways

Playing aid as both a military tactic and a PR exercise to redeem its atrocious human rights record and whitewash its war crimes in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has held the U.N. hostage to its policies.

Such shadowing and lobbying on the part of Saudi Arabia had Yemeni officials waving the political red flag.

Ali al-Bukhaiti, a prominent member of the Houthis’ political arm, told MintPress his office has vehemently denounced Riyadh’s attempts to “buy the U.N. out to better corner Sana’a government and foil the resistance movement.”

Yet it appears the train was already far too out of the station for anyone to hit the brakes.

By late June, amid reports of a worsening humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, the Saudi government finally announced that out of its initial pledge of $274 million, $244 million would be divided among nine U.N. agencies.

On the heels of this announcement Stephen O’Brien, the U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, sent a letter to the Interagency Standing Committee, a global humanitarian coordinating body, which includes both U.N. humanitarian agencies and outside NGOs.

Vice News confirmed the letter was attached to a Saudi press release announcing the nine-way cut, explaining how the funds would go through the recently created King Salman Center for Relief Humanitarian Works (KSC).

“Having agreed to the overall envelopes, however, the KSC would like to negotiate individual Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with each recipient agency,” O’Brien told Vice, openly admitting to Riyadh’s lobby.

“Interestingly few media outlets picked up on this Orwellian development! After unilaterally and, let’s be frank, after illegally declaring war on Yemen, the Saudi government wants also to dictate how humanitarian relief is distributed in the very country it is attacking,” Sheikh al-Matari, the head of Yemen’s Rasoul Akram Foundation, an aid organization, told MintPress.

Vice News quoted a U.N. aid official in Yemen as saying: “The UN has punted and handed off the problems to these agencies. I’ve never seen that before.”

The official continued:

“The charitable way of saying it is this is a compromise — the less charitable way of saying it is that they folded. It’s really unusual for a single donor to have any substantive role once they contribute funds, let alone negotiate individual MoU’s with agencies.”

When asked about this very public U.N. capitulation before Al Saud’s millions, O’Brien attempted to rationalize the situation by arguing a massive deficit funding gap.

O’Brien wrote: “With regard to NGOs, I am aware that there are sensitivities in receiving funding directly from the KSC and we therefore must work actively to mobilize additional funds to be allocated directly, or via the Pooled Fund, to our front-line partners.”

Yet, as al-Matari noted:

“That’s only half of the story. What O’Brien is not telling is that by accepting Saudi Arabia’s conditions on aid distribution and aid funding in relation to Yemen, the U.N. de facto institutionalized aid segregation by allowing humanitarian relief to be conditional to certain criteria: political affiliation and religious orientation.

With Yemen set as a precedent, who’s to say that a similar setup will not be replicated in other countries in the region — mainly, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Libya?”

‘Institutionalizing war crimes’

“From the onset of this conflict King Salman has walked outside international law. There is nothing remotely legal about attacking a sovereign nation. The argument Saudi Arabia aimed to preemptively strike Yemen in order to stop the so-called ‘Shia crescent’ from further strengthening its hold on the region is both legally erroneous and redundant. What is troubling is the speed at which the kingdom is institutionalizing war crimes,” Al-Emad, the journalist and political commentator based in Yemen, told MintPress.

Al-Emad added: “It is one thing to declare war against a country and another to select a segment of population for annihilation. How long before Saudi Arabia’s ill intentions against all Zaidis and Shias in Yemen are understood for what they are? Genocidal.”

Although no legal action has been taken against Saudi Arabia, the kingdom’s humanitarian and human rights violations in Yemen have come to define the very nature of its war on the tiny, impoverished nation.

Even the sectarian aspect of Riyadh‘s wrath has transpired in official reports, giving weight to Yemenis’ mounting accusations of ethnic cleansing. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights raised concerns in this area, as well, as a U.N. report issued in July notes: “The UN rights office is also acutely worried about increasing attacks against places of worship, pointing to the targeting of five Zaydi mosques with car bombs over the past few weeks as an alarming trend to create sectarian divisions.”

Additionally, Cécile Pouilly, spokesperson for the OHCHR, confirmed mounting abuses against civilians when she explained: “Since 17 June, there has been further destruction of civilian infrastructure, with at least 36 buildings, including hospitals, schools, court houses, power generation facilities and communications institutions partially or totally damaged in the governorates of Sana’a, Aden, Taiz, Al-Jawf, Al-Mahwit, and Hajjah.”

The Saudis have not been alone in violating international law, though. The Houthis have also committed their share of war crimes. In May, for example, Human Rights Watch accused pro-Houthi forces of killing civilians and holding aid workers hostage in the southern seaport of Aden. But it is the sectarian intent and systematicity behind Riyadh’s military campaign which has rights activists ringing the alarm.

Speaking to MintPress, Hussain Abu Salem, a human rights activist based in Saada, a northern province of Yemen, located south of Saudi Arabia, who personally documented Saudi air raids against identified Zaidi-targets in northern Yemen, compared Riyadh’s actions against Yemen’s Zaidi community to Israel’s attacks against Palestinians:

“Saudi Arabia knowingly and willingly targets Zaidi villages and Zaidi monuments. It seeks the destruction of Yemen Zaidi heritage. It wants to surgically remove all Zaidi Yemenis from political, religious, economic and social life. The kingdom is following in the footsteps of Israel in all impunity. It is exactly the same logic, the same methods and of course the same justifications.”

“This is the thing about right violations,” he added, “when the world does nothing to impose the law, when the powerful can oppress the weak, then injustice becomes the rule of law.”

Erdogan Launches Witch-Hunt Against Democratic Kurdish Opposition Leader

Turkish prosecutors open probe against Kurdish leader Demirtas

The leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas answers a question during an interview with Reuters in Ankara, Turkey, July 30, 2015. REUTERS/Umit Bektas

ISTANBUL: Turkish prosecutors on Thursday opened a probe against the leader of Turkey’s main Kurdish party over bloody October 2014 protests, the official Anatolia news agency reported.

Prosecutors in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir have started an investigation against Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) leader Selahattin Demirtas for inciting people to take up arms during the protests that left dozens dead, the agency said.

If the case comes to court, he could face up to 24 years in jail, it added. The investigation comes as Turkey presses on with a military campaign against Kurdish militants.

The investigation comes as Turkey presses on with a military campaign against the Kurdish militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq.

Should the investigation conclude that Demirtas should be charged, prosecutors will ask that his parliamentary immunity be removed, the report said.

The news comes hours after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a fierce personal attack on Demirtas, telling him to “know his place” and referring to the presence of his elder brother Nurettin among the PKK fighters in Iraq.

“He would run there [too] if he found the opportunity,” Erdogan said on a visit to China.

This is the first such probe to be opened against Demirtas, whose party upset the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) with a strong performance in June 7 elections.

The probe refers to a statement made by the executive committee of the HDP on October 6, 2014, urging its supporters to take to the streets to protest the policies of the Turkish government in Syria.

According to the official toll, 35 people including two police were killed in three days of rioting across the country.

The demonstrations were over the fate of the mainly Kurdish Syrian town of Kobani, which at the time was falling into the hands of ISIS jihadis. The HDP has long accused the government of collaborating with ISIS, allegations it denies.

Ban Ki-moon Calls On Nations To Cut-Off Arms and Foreign Fighters Into “proxy battleground”

Price of Continuing Syria Civil War Too High, UN’s Ban Says

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday said that the more than four-year-old Syrian conflict, which has left at least 250,000 killed and turned more than 4 million people into refugees, “is a shameful symbol of the international community’s divisions and failure.”

“The price of continuing the civil war is simply too high. In the name of humanity there is no alternative to the negotiating table,” Ban added.

He said international support is critical to UN point man on Syria, Staffan de Mistura’s new peace effort and urged the international community to build on the political momentum generated by the recent nuclear agreement between Iran and six major powers to work on resolving the conflict in Syria.

Ban also urged the Security Council to endorse de Mistura’s recommendations and convince the Syrian parties to participate in the proposed talks. He further urged the council, Syria’s neighbors and regional sponsors of the parties fighting in Syria “to stem all flows of arms and foreign fighters pouring into the country” and “to stop using the country as a proxy battleground.”

Over the last 2 1/2 months de Mistura held talks with over 200 individuals — Syrians and non-Syrians — on finding a political solution.

He said the talks revealed a shared sense of urgency given recent gains by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group and the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, and “talk about fragmentation, radicalization and sectarianism.” He said there was also wide support for “a managed, phased, gradual or controlled transition, avoiding a repeat of Libya or Iraq.”

De Mistura said the two past peace conferences in Geneva in 2012 and 2014, which failed to bring peace, still got opposing Syrian parties to start talking to each other, even indirectly.

He said his aim was now to hold simultaneous discussions among Syrians on addressing key aspects of the 2012 Geneva roadmap and Ban said the UN hopes to get four working groups operational in September.

De Mistura said they will tackle safety and protection of civilians, medical access and the release of detainees, political and constitutional issues, combatting terrorism, as well as reconstruction and development.

After closed consultations, secretary-general Ban said he was “encouraged by the many expressions of strong support” for De Misutra’s plan from council members.

Syria’s UN Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari said de Mistura’s proposals will be sent to Damascus and will be studied thoroughly.

He stressed that combatting terrorism is a top priority for his government and welcomed the emphasis by UN leaders on the negative roles by neighboring countries in supporting “the so-called foreign terrorist fighters.” Syria has often accused neighboring Turkey and the Persian Gulf countries, especially Qatar, of supporting “terrorists” inside the country.

“We cannot go ahead with the political track and put aside the issue of combatting terrorism. We need stabilization of the country … and then we engage peacefully on the other tracks,” Ja’afari said.

Neoconservative Pathology Still Dominates US Government

Meet The Kagans: Seeking War To The End Of The World

Submitted by Robert Parry, via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

If the neoconservatives have their way again, US ground troops will reoccupy Iraq, the US military will take out Syria’s secular government (likely helping Al Qaeda and the Islamic State take over), and the US Congress will not only kill the Iran nuclear deal but follow that with a massive increase in military spending.

Like spraying lighter fluid on a roaring barbecue, the neocons also want a military escalation in Ukraine to burn the ethnic Russians out of the east, and the neocons dream of spreading the blaze to Moscow with the goal of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. In other words, more and more fires of Imperial “regime change” abroad even as the last embers of the American Republic die at home.

Much of this “strategy” is personified by a single Washington power couple: arch-neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and an early advocate of the Iraq War, and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who engineered last year’s coup in Ukraine that started a nasty civil war and created a confrontation between nuclear-armed United States and Russia.

Kagan, who cut his teeth as a propaganda specialist in support of the Reagan administration’s brutal Central American policies in the 1980s, is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post’s neocon-dominated opinion pages.

On Friday, Kagan’s column baited the Republican Party to do more than just object to President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal. Kagan called for an all-out commitment to neoconservative goals, including military escalations in the Middle East, belligerence toward Russia and casting aside fiscal discipline in favor of funneling tens of billions of new dollars to the Pentagon.

Kagan also showed how the neocons’ world view remains the conventional wisdom of Official Washington despite their disastrous Iraq War. The neocon narrative gets repeated over and over in the mainstream media no matter how delusional it is.

For instance, a sane person might trace the origins of the bloodthirsty Islamic State back to President George W. Bush’s neocon-inspired Iraq War when this hyper-violent Sunni movement began as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” blowing up Shiite mosques and instigating sectarian bloodshed. It later expanded into Syria where Sunni militants were seeking the ouster of a secular regime led by Alawites, a Shiite offshoot. Though changing its name to the Islamic State, the movement continued with its trademark brutality.

But Kagan doesn’t acknowledge that he and his fellow neocons bear any responsibility for this head-chopping phenomenon. In his neocon narrative, the Islamic State gets blamed on Iran and Syria, even though those governments are leading much of the resistance to the Islamic State and its former colleagues in Al Qaeda, which in Syria backs a separate terrorist organization, the Nusra Front.

But here is how Kagan explains the situation to the Smart People of Official Washington:

Critics of the recent nuclear deal struck between Iran and the United States are entirely right to point out the serious challenge that will now be posed by the Islamic republic. It is an aspiring hegemon in an important region of the world.

 

It is deeply engaged in a region-wide war that encompasses Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf States and the Palestinian territories. It subsidizes the murderous but collapsing regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and therefore bears primary responsibility for the growing strength of the Islamic State and other radical jihadist forces in that country and in neighboring Iraq, where it is simultaneously expanding its influence and inflaming sectarian violence.

The Real Hegemon

While ranting about “Iranian hegemony,” Kagan called for direct military intervention by the world’s true hegemonic power, the United States. He wants the US military to weigh in against Iran on the side of two far more militarily advanced regional powers, Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose combined weapons spending dwarfs Iran’s and includes – with Israel – a sophisticated nuclear arsenal.

Yet reality has never had much relationship to neocon ideology. Kagan continued:

Any serious strategy aimed at resisting Iranian hegemony has also required confronting Iran on the several fronts of the Middle East battlefield. In Syria, it has required a determined policy to remove Assad by force, using US air power to provide cover for civilians and create a safe zone for Syrians willing to fight.

 

In Iraq, it has required using American forces to push back and destroy the forces of the Islamic State so that we would not have to rely, de facto, on Iranian power to do the job. Overall, it has required a greater US military commitment to the region, a reversal of both the perceived and the real withdrawal of American power.

 

And therefore it has required a reversal of the downward trend in US defense spending, especially the undoing of the sequestration of defense funds, which has made it harder for the military even to think about addressing these challenges, should it be called upon to do so. So the question for Republicans who are rightly warning of the danger posed by Iran is: What have they done to make it possible for the United States to begin to have any strategy for responding?

In Kagan’s call for war and more war, we’re seeing, again, the consequence of failing to hold neocons accountable after they pushed the country into the illegal and catastrophic Iraq War by selling lies about weapons of mass destruction and telling tales about how easy it would be.

Instead of facing a purge that should have followed the Iraq calamity, the neocons consolidated their power, holding onto key jobs in US foreign policy, ensconcing themselves in influential think tanks, and remaining the go-to experts for mainstream media coverage. Being wrong about Iraq has almost become a badge of honor in the upside-down world of Official Washington.

But we need to unpack the truckload of sophistry that Kagan is peddling. First, it is simply crazy to talk about “Iranian hegemony.” That was part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rhetoric before the US Congress on March 3 about Iran “gobbling up” nations – and it has now become a neocon-driven litany, but it is no more real just because it gets repeated endlessly.

For instance, take the Iraq case. It has a Shiite-led government not because Iran invaded Iraq, but because the United States did. After the US military ousted Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, the United States stood up a new government dominated by Shiites who, in turn, sought friendly relations with their co-religionists in Iran, which is entirely understandable and represents no aggression by Iran. Then, after the Islamic State’s dramatic military gains across Iraq last summer, the Iraqi government turned to Iran for military assistance, also no surprise.

Back to Iraq

However, leaving aside Kagan’s delusional hyperbole about Iran, look at what he’s proposing. He wants to return a sizable US occupation force to Iraq, apparently caring little about the US soldiers who were rotated multiple times into the war zone where almost 4,500 died (along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis). Having promoted Iraq War I and having paid no price, Kagan now wants to give us Iraq War II.

But that’s not enough. Kagan wants the US military to intervene to make sure the secular government of Syria is overthrown, even though the almost certain winners would be Sunni extremists from the Islamic State or Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front. Such a victory could lead to genocides against Syria’s Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other minorities. At that point, there would be tremendous pressure for a full-scale US invasion and occupation of Syria, too.

That may be why Kagan wants to throw tens of billions of dollar more into the military-industrial complex, although the true price tag for Kagan’s new wars would likely run into the trillions of dollars. Yet, Kagan still isn’t satisfied. He wants even more military spending to confront “growing Chinese power, an aggressive Russia and an increasingly hegemonic Iran.”

In his conclusion, Kagan mocks the Republicans for not backing up their tough talk: “So, yes, by all means, rail about the [Iran] deal. We all look forward to the hours of floor speeches and campaign speeches that lie ahead. But it will be hard to take Republican criticisms seriously unless they start doing the things that are in their power to do to begin to address the challenge.”

While it’s true that Kagan is now “just” a neocon ideologue – albeit one with important platforms to present his views – his wife Assistant Secretary of State Nuland shares his foreign policy views and even edits many of his articles. As she told The New York Times last year, “nothing goes out of the house that I don’t think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.” [See “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’”]

But Nuland is a foreign policy force of her own, considered by some in Washington to be the up-and-coming “star” at the State Department. By organizing the “regime change” in Ukraine – with the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 – Nuland also earned her spurs as an accomplished neocon.

Nuland has even outdone her husband, who may get “credit” for the Iraq War and the resulting chaos, but Nuland did him one better, instigating Cold War II and reviving hostilities between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States. After all, that’s where the really big money will go – toward modernizing nuclear arsenals and ordering top-of-the-line strategic weaponry.

A Family Business

There’s also a family-business aspect to these wars and confrontations, since the Kagans collectively serve not just to start conflicts but to profit from grateful military contractors who kick back a share of the money to the think tanks that employ the Kagans.

For instance, Robert’s brother Frederick works at the American Enterprise Institute, which has long benefited from the largesse of the Military-Industrial Complex, and his wife Kimberly runs her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

According to ISW’s annual reports, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by a host of national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provided training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplied software to US military intelligence in Afghanistan.

Since its founding in 2007, ISW has focused mostly on wars in the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, including closely cooperating with Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded US forces in those countries. However, more recently, ISW has begun reporting extensively on the civil war in Ukraine. [See “Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War.”]

So, to understand the enduring influence of the neocons – and the Kagan clan, in particular – you have to appreciate the money connections between the business of war and the business of selling war. When the military contractors do well, the think tanks that advocate for heightened global tensions do well, too.

And, it doesn’t hurt to have friends and family inside the government making sure that policymakers do their part to give war a chance — and to give peace the old heave-ho.

Mullah Dadullah Faction Exposes All the Fake Taliban Negotiations

[The CIA has been so successful in dividing the Afghan Taliban with their fake peace process and “office” in Qatar that there really is NO ORGANIZED TALIBAN anymore.  The following comes from Fidai Mahaz faction,a.k.a., the Mullah Dadullah faction of Taliban (SEE:  Talks Divide Taliban, Herald An End To Its Relationship With Islamabad).  The recent announcement that Mullah Omar is long dead, exposes the elements who have been posing in his name to take control over the rebel alliance (SEE:  Taliban leader Mullah Omar dead, Afghanistan confirms).  Pakistan’s usage of the fake negotiations ploy in its arrests of Mullah Baradar and other leaders, to reintroduce them today as intercessors exposes the degree of Pakistani hypocrisy and manipulations of Taliban and the truth (SEE: Arresting Taliban To Cover America’s Ass).  If anything, it proves that the Pak Army has been using proxies in Afghanistan, who happened to be fighting US and coalition forces.]

 

A message for some faith selling advisors in the Islamic Emirate.

In the name of Allah
A message for some faith selling advisors in the Islamic Emirate
Dear muslim countrymen and the defenders of the Islamic fronts
Asalam u Alikum WRWB
Brothers, By reading this message of the Fedayeen Front of the Islamic Movement of Afghanistan a curtain would be unveiled which has been hidden from people to date, a few men with vested interest had been trying to conceal this from mujahideen but with the grace of Allah these hypocrites working only for own interests were unmasked and we would like you to know about the details:
The Faith selling advisors in the Islamic Emirate with the financial assistance of crusaders were able to hijack the home of the mujahideen and fedayeen under the white flag appeasing them and also trying to attain objectives being laid down for them.
The Fedayeen Front of the Islamic Movement has tried time and again to reform and release these men from them and divert their attention from dollars and power to the duty (Jihad) but on every occasion we were greeted with a negative response. The Mujahideen has the right to know these facts and issue their own verdict.
Mujahid Nation!
A warning was issued through media to the Faith sellers mainly Ishaaqzais and not the Islamic Emirate who were responsible for creation of the Qatar office and giving birth to the Qatari militias. The bloodshed of the mujahideen, ulema and religious scholars could not be tolerated and we cannot be silent spectators.
With sorrow and grief We have to inform you about the unfolding situation that our warnings were ignored and we did not see any change time and again after requests. They carried on with their agenda of killing fellow mujahideen on directives of their bosses in CIA and MI6 thus compelling us to inform you about their secret relationship with crusaders. Assassinations of ulema and mujahideen with confidence and responsibility of authenticity till the day of judgment.
The Faith selling advisors in the Islamic Emirate and their colleagues like former defense minister Muallah Obaidullah,Mullah Abdul Ghani Beradar former deputy to the Ameer ul Momineen, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor who now claims to be the current deputy to the Ameer, Mullah Gul Agha also known as Hidayatullah and Mullah Naanai and Mulla Abdul Salam Sani known as Hamdullah based on their foreign relations has been divided into two main branches drawing salaries of upto 50000 USD for the branch head and 10000 USD each for members. These are being paid by CIA through their great agent Mansoor and with the help of Michael Sample to Naanai financed by MI6 providing 20000 USD for each member in Qatar and also luxurious cars. We would now let the nation make the judgment based on the information provided.
2. The Shahadat of the star of Jihad and hero Mullah Dadullah!
In the year 2006 he developed differences with the Faith selling advisors in the Islamic Emirate when he found out that letters were being exchanged through messengers between Mullah Obaidullah and agents based in KAF (Kandahar Airfield). He managed to obtain a copy of one of the letters, warning them to sever ties with CIA resulting in verbal clash between him and Dadullah which lead to his assassination with the assistance of traitors namely Mullah Abdullah,Mullah Deen Mohammad and Mullah Naseem who were assigned to get rid of Dadullah posing as his protection squad coordinating and sharing his movement details with CIA and MI6 . The relation between them and the agencies started in 2004. Ina Lela he wa Ina elaihe rajeuoon.
3. Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor alias Nazeer while travelling with his spouse to the UAE capital Abu Dhabi had series of meetings with CIA men in end of June 2013 after which he was gifted with a Rolex watch worth around 50000 USD custom made for spying purposes identifying his location to the bosses. And two weeks back he had another travel plan which he executed meeting Qatari officials and CIA men also asking Tayyab to come from Germany alongside Royal members of UAE and Qatari hosts. The details of the meetings and decisions would be released at the right time.
4. The head of the military commission of the Islamic Emirate was forced to resign and then arrested in day light with the help and assistance of a dozen men and four vehicles. His whereabouts unknown to date. It merits to be mentioned that the Faith selling advisors in the Islamic Emarat have always been blaming the spy agency of Kabul for their coward acts and killings of fellows regarded as adversaries and some other western intelligence services. They offer condolence message and also put another fellow on trial choosing the divide and rule approach to carry on their hidden agenda. The news which has spread that Mullah Abdul Qaym Zakir has been apprehended by some agency of any state is completely false and he is spending uncertain times with his own fellows now his captors. We have all the evidence regarding the circumstances in which Abdul Qayum Zakir’s disappearance and if desired by public we can share them as well.
5. The head of The Fedayeen Front of the Islamic Emirate Alhaaj Mualavi Najeebullah Umer Khitaab visiting Quetta on 08/06/2014 on a secret visit for treatment was targeted in the similar way by the Ishaaqzai’s Emirates killing squad. He was travelling along with five men in a car. Armed men from several directions cardoned off the area while others came in cars and bikes trying to assassinate the head of the Front. After a brief fire fight only one fellow got injured while a great Mujahid and brother of Maulavi Najeebullah Umer Khitaab Hafiz Taimur Shah embraced martyrdom. The killing squad head for the Faith selling advisors in the Islamic Emirate Gulalai was shot dead by our men along with seven other killers and one sustaining serious injury showing a clear picture that Allah was with us.
Before this the killers would blame the head of police in Kandahar Abdul Razaq for these kind of actions and would get away with the crime, had they succeeded in this coward act they would have done the same, but with the grace of Allah the unfolding situation on that particular day not only exposed them but also proved who was right!
6. Recently they issued a press release in which Ameer ul Momineen has thanked the secular government of Qatar for the exchange deal of the prisoners. With great confidence and based on evidence we claim that no statement has been issued by the Amir ul Momineen in the past four years and in these years all statements issued from the address of the Amir ul Momineen were forged by them including the order making Mansoor the deputy . These four year statements do not reflect the image and personality of the Amir ul Momineen as he was a determined and devoted muslim believing in a single stance in which he gave up the Emirate for the principles he believed in.
Oh Great Nation!
In which court, what law and legal system it allows that those getting 10,20, and 50 thousand dollars should have a lavish lifestyle and killing Afghans in uniform getting 1,2 or 3 hundred dollars also targetting those who are fighting a defensive Jihad against crusaders. The funeral prayers of those in uniform and getting nominal pays are termed unislamic while they are given titles of Deputies to Amir ul Momineen and members of the ruling council.
The way Amir ul Momineen believes and has a single stance on issues pertaining to Jihad we are determined to follow that principle and for us there is no difference between these killers and vested interests and those in uniform inside Afghanistan.
We are inviting the the Faith selling advisors in the Islamic Emirate once again to offer Toba and Astaghfaar and sever ties with western intelligence agencies and stop killing fellows under different pretexts and join hands with us and rest of Mujahideen bringing unity in our ranks.
The Fedayeen Front of the Islamic Movement is calling upon all its fighters in the front to form unity in their ranks and work like brothers sidelining linguistic, regional and factional differences and deal with crusaders and their allies with an iron fist. Inshallah very soon truth would prevail over false and these invaders would soon see the faith of the soviets.
Long live Islam and heroes
Long live great Afghans
Success and life for Islamic fighters
The head of the Fedayeen Front of the Islamic Movement and a raising star of Afghanistan
“Alhaaj Maulavi Najeebullah” (Umer Khitaab) Hafaza hu Allah
July 10, 2014 ·

UN Warns Turkey Over Loose Talk About Unprotected Syrian “Safe Zone”

[Turkey plans to run the Syrian refugees out of Turkey, into this “safe zone,” if the humanitarians of this world allow it.]

United Nations warns Turkey against calling buffer a ‘safe zone’

1.7 million Syrian refugees are currently sheltering in Turkey after fleeing their country’s four-year civil war

By Michelle Nichols

United Nations aid chief Stephen O’Brien warned Turkey on Tuesday against calling its planned buffer in northern Syria “a safe zone” unless there is a guarantee of protection for civilians who are likely to flood the area for help.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said earlier that a “secure zone” would pave the way for the return of 1.7 million Syria refugees currently sheltering in Turkey after fleeing their country’s four-year civil war.

“What you don’t want to do is call something a safe zone, people flee to it, but it hasn’t got sufficient protection,” O’Brien told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Syria.

“As our primary objective is the protection of civilians we need to make sure there is protection in place and that is not always the role of the humanitarians, it needs to be established by others,” he said.

Turkey and the United States are working on plans to provide air cover for Syrian rebels and sweep Islamic State militants from a strip along the Turkish border. But U.S. officials said the aim was not to create a civilian “safe zone.”

O’Brien said the United Nations was in constant contact with all the parties regarding new proposals.

Turkish warplanes attacked Islamic State targets in Syria for the first time on Friday, joining a U.S.-led coalition that has been bombing Islamic State targets in Syria for the past 10 months.

“We are facing this kind of escalation by the Turkish government, it’s an irresponsible action,” Syria’s U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari told reporters on Tuesday.

A Syrian government crackdown on a pro-democracy movement in 2011 sparked a civil war. Islamic State militants have taken advantage of a more the chaos to seize swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq and declare a caliphate.

The United Nations has said that some 220,000 people have been killed and 7.6 million are internally displaced in Syria. Another 4 million people have fled the country, which O’Brien said was the largest refugee population from a single conflict in more than 25 years.

“Syria today … is the most acute, unrelenting and shameful blot on the world’s humanitarian conscience,” said O’Brien, who hopes to visit Damascus next month.

Kyrgyzstan Blasts US State Dept. for “Human Rights” Award Attempt At Social Agitation

Kyrgyzstan Lambastes U.S. Over Rights Award

By RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service

July 15, 2015

BISHKEK — Kyrgyzstan’s Foreign Ministry has officially protested to the U.S. State Department over the latter’s decision to honor jailed Kyrgyz human rights defender Azimjan Askarov with a prestigious award.

In a statement issued on July 15, the Kyrgyz side said the move “seriously damages” bilateral ties between the United States and one of Central Asia’s more democratic post-Soviet republics.

It says that the “awarding of Askarov is considered a deliberate action against the strengthening of interethnic peace and harmony in our country.”

Askarov is an ethnic Uzbek, a group that accounts for more than 10 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s nearly 6 million people.

The Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry complained that “the State Department’s Award is being given to the wrong person.”

The U.S. State Department announced on July 14 that Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Tom Malinowski would present its 2014 Human Rights Defender Award to Askarov at the State Department on July 16.

Askarov’s son Sherzod will accept the award on behalf of his father, who founded a group more than a decade ago to monitor alleged police brutality but has been in jail for more than four years on charges relating to deadly ethnic clashes in southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010.

The State Department described Askarov as “a uniting figure in the human rights community, bringing together people of all ethnicities and backgrounds to urge the government of Kyrgyzstan to take effective action towards creating a sustainable peace between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz.”

The Kyrgyz statement stressed that Askarov was convicted by Kyrgyz courts of inciting ethnic hatred, organizing mass disorder, and complicity in the murder of a law-enforcement officer during the violence, in Kyrgyzstan’s southern regions of Osh and Jalal-Abad.

Bishkek also said that awarding Askarov the U.S. honor “would undermine the process of strengthening the unity of the people and harmony” in Kyrgyzstan.

The statement describes the State Department’s decision as a “U.S. move with the use of an interethnic element that seriously damages bilateral ties.”

Askarov, the leader of rights group Vozdukh (Air), was sentenced to life in prison after a court found him guilty of organizing the 2010 clashes and involvement in the murder of a police officer during the violence.

More than 450 people, mostly but not exclusively ethnic Uzbeks, were killed and tens or even hundreds of thousands more displaced by the unrest. Dozens of people are still missing.

The majority of those convicted for taking part in the deadly clashes have been ethnic Uzbeks.

Askarov insists he is innocent, calling his conviction an act of “retaliation” for his rights activism.

Turkey Intelligence (MIT) Trucks Carrying Ammunition Into Syria

imagine a ‘nuclear war’ of information

Russia vs. US: Total War is the Obliteration of Reality

By: Joaquin Flores

When the methods of Information War in Fourth Generation Warfare are used in Total War, it results in a war upon the psyche, a war upon cognition, a war upon our very conception and understanding of reality.  This will be an increasing feature of our relationship with reality.

As global conflict increases qualitatively and quantitatively, it is important to understand the new methods of warfare in which the conflict in Ukraine serves as an excellent case study.  Understanding these methods, in combination with a syncretic approach to various competing schools and across several otherwise or previously unrelated fields, has been the key to our ability to accurately forecast any number of events and dynamics in the situation in Ukraine.

The struggle between the Atlanticist and Eurasianist spheres not only acquires forms in the traditional areas of diplomacy, trade, intelligence, and military strength – but also in the increasingly dominating realm of synthetic, manufactured hyper-reality.  These are important elements of fourth generation warfare (4GW) in the realm of information war and also what is termed ‘hybrid warfare’ – a feature of 4GW which blurs the lines between civilian and military groups, and allows power groups to dissemble the reality of their role in support.  This creates the element of plausible deniability, that power groups are not involved when in fact they are.

Following the various media reports and statements from the various official spokespeople of the groups involved in the Ukrainian conflict, it is problematic to take these at face value and equate statements about their role or position as being the actual role or position.

In a manner similar to ISIS or Al Qaeda – which are largely US-Saudi-Israeli joint projects, it is typical to hear statements from the Pravy Sektor that they oppose NATO, imperialism (whether US or Russian), and propose instead other elements of platform which confuse the discourse and disguise their actual supporters.  Of course, like with ISIS and the like, most all of the commanders and all of the rank and file supporters and fighters completely believe they are opposed to the very power groups which support them.  It only requires one or two decision makers at the very top to align the actual activities with US control or influence.

Naturally like ISIS, Pravy Sektor and similar are also developed to be self-sustaining projects to a large extent, can subsist for long periods of time using the standard methods of apparent self-funding, including organized crime or the seizure of businesses and enterprises. They can also, as we have written previously, be used and swayed by other actors not including the US, and in certain moments may act – willingly or unwillingly – against the US’s actual interests (not just stated interests).  This may occur for reasons which are complex but imaginable.

US and Russian approaches to the conflict in Ukraine are based in discernible desired positions, but the strategies change in various stages based upon real-world changes and results, push-back, and the actions of the other players. Thus, strategies are employed in relation to changes, and tactics evolve in real-time.   This is why many contingency plans are built into general planning.  Indeed, the various and even contradictory contingencies themselves should be considered ‘the plan’.

The US exerts degrees of control and influence upon several distinct power groups in Ukraine, such as various volunteer battalions, the government itself, mainstreamed opposition to that government, and Pravy Sektor related groups up to and including Yarosh himself.  These wane and wax in relation either to the US’s need or to the US’s ability to exert its power.  These are not unidirectional; US attempts to exert influence or control do not necessarily result in a success in that endeavor: the targets of influence and control may be compelled to act – either in an instance or in a general pivot – contrary to the needs of the US for reasons of their own survival, and/or as a result of Russian successes to exert influence and control.

Difficulties in assessing the situation then arise from this: an established method in 4GW as it works through media and new-media (information war) is to dissemble actual reality, and to manufacture a new reality.  The US can exert fluctuating degrees of influence and control over its proxies.

It is difficult to use language to describe reality because words have definitions which often exclude that which they are contrasted with. Reality on the other hand is fluid and real situations can be simultaneously described by more than one word, even if such words when counterpoised to each other may seem to have opposite meanings.  Reality can morph into conditions that are better described by some words, only to shift at any time later into a condition which is better described otherwise.  Thus, without special care, a syllogistic or axiomatic approach will usually fail.

**

In October of 2014, we wrote:

“Problems in the Separation of Reality from the Simulacrum “

“From the syncretic work we have produced on this subject, drawing from numerous schools such as Baudrillard’s post-structuralism and Kuhn’s theory of the structure of scientific revolutions […] we have attempted to explain both some features of the information war and how the present schema or paradigm is constructed, and how that construct contains certain features which can be manipulated and exploited through the use of simulacrum and hyper-reality.”

“More to the point, we have based much of our understanding on the premise that societies composed of managers and the managed must create a paradigm which has exploitable features for the purpose of social control.  The Ukraine civil war is the first war in history in which both actual sides (US and Russia) struggle for supremacy using similarly derived theories of new media and their connection to 4GW.  While the use of proxies has long been a feature of war, that both sides use proxies in the sense of 4GW doctrines, and that the ‘stories’ being told extend from new media, is a new phenomenon.”

“There are some problems, however, for both the US and Russian information and reality managers.  Being able to create hyper-reality does not, in the first place, require having a solid footing in the actual reality.  In many ways, ‘actual reality’ may be an ever-elusive thing which can never fully be grasped.  We are, as human beings, a species which is already born into a reality comprised of the previous generation’s interwoven combination of actual reality and hyper-reality.”

“Our society, a social construct, is an outgrowth of our genetic potential.  The creation of various primitive forms of hyper-reality is as natural to humanity as the bird constructing its nest.  But just as the invention of the train or automobile changed forever our relationship with distance, and even the relative size of the earth, the invention of new media has changed our relationship with actual reality and the kinds of reality and hyper-reality we construct. “

“It is not difficult, then, for even the agent of social control, working at the think tank, to lose sight of reality itself.  What was that individual’s origin point?  Everyone working today on these projects was already born into a world of machines, production of the means of creation and destruction, automated wars, electricity, and mass media.”

“From an analytic point of view, this creates a conundrum.  Analysis, discourse, map-drawing etc. are themselves a form of hyper-reality creation.  Analysis is done in the mind of the analyst, and is drawn from, at best primary sources, but are generally not the primary source itself.  It must go through the medium of language and contrived/presented imagery (photos, etc.) before it gets to the analyst.  Additionally, even when the analyst is the witness percipient, their interpretations and written or spoken analysis reflect their prior biases, beliefs, prejudices, and thought processes; which in short can be described as defective by way of their subjectivity.”

“Thus from the analyst:  all words, language; things signifying and signified; which pertain to actual reality, are themselves indistinguishable from hyper-reality.  Analysis based on interpreting actual reality and analysis based in interpreting the simulacrum are both, in many ways, hyper-real presentations.  The map is not the terrain.”

“To problematize ‘objective’ reporting and analysis, is really to lay-out the problems with the concept of objectivity, which leaves us with only a remaining intersubjective agreement [20].  Therefore we can see the power of new-media (which is based on the echoing of information through many subjects, peer to peer), and the transformation of the simulacrum from being a distinct hyper-reality unto itself, into a totalizing entity which subsumes, devours, and overtakes reality into itself.  It becomes, then, within the liberal, emotional state, of the Popperian ‘critical rationalist’ paradigm, most appropriate and ‘reasonable’ to uphold the hyper-reality as the actual reality [21]. “

**

In conclusion, we might imagine a ‘nuclear war’ of information. The fall-out also contaminates information managers and builders.  In an increasing way, even the reality and information managers themselves are suffering from the ‘radiation poisoning’ of information war; they can no longer distinguish between the reality they are creating, or that was created by their opponent, from the reality which they began to work from.  It increasingly becomes one and the same.

If this is true for them, who have access to much more real information than we do, then it is even more true for us; we who have all along been working largely with information which by definition is manufactured and itself is a social construct.

Understanding the world then becomes increasingly difficult and creates very real epistemic problems.

Liberalism and its sub-ideology of pragmatism is steeped in anti-intellectualism and a misuse of Ockham’s razor or lex parsimoniae (law of parsimony).  It is wrongly used as an arbiter between two theories, in which the simplest theory is viewed as more accurate even when not accounting for all the information, as opposed to a heuristic technique in the development of a model.

It is an attractive idea that the complexities of war and strategy can be explained away as being the product of random accidents; that the divergence between stated aims and actual results are a product of blunder and incompetence and not intrigue and dissemblance.

Analyzing the motives of conscious actors is not like observing other phenomena in a few important ways; conscious actors may have a strong motivation to conceal their real aims or methods, whereas basic physical, chemical, or biological processes can be observed empirically and claims made about these are falsifiable.

Rather, we must look at circumstantial and other non-physical evidence; known theories, past practice, the body of scholarly work on the subject, and instead approach the questions from a prosecutorial perspective.

To understand one epistemic dilemma in the use of Ockham’s Razor to describe phenomena, let us look at these well known quotes about this heuristic tool.

“Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.” (William of Ockham)

“Nature operates in the shortest way possible.” (Aristotle)

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” (Albert Einstein)

Warfare does not generally operate on the basis of ‘nature’ in the sense that Aristotle describes – as there are consciously acting players being observed who do not want to be accurately observed, nor upon the economy of modeling that Ockham proposes.

In warfare, most entities should be multiplied and made as complex as possible for a number of reasons.  One radar tower may cover an entire area, but many radar towers for a single area are preferable because then radar coverage is not lost when the opponent successfully neutralizes one of them.

Likewise in strategy:  a simple strategy may at first seem preferable in terms of viability and execution,  but in the context of a conscious opponent, the complexity of a strategy will aid tremendously in keeping it from being understood and unraveled.  In that sense, as with the radar example, more layers are better.

The science of economy and efficiency takes on entirely different applications in the context of a struggle between strategic players.  One aspect of victory in a war is production, but not only physical production of soldiers and hardware, but in the production of complex strategy, relying on more virtual resources, theories, etc.  The side which can afford more inefficiencies has a strategic advantage in any number of scenarios.

We must not approach reality at face value, but as a consciously created illusion itself which is constructed specifically with the aim of pursuing a long-term strategic objective, one that includes both the accidental and intentional creation of a false, distorted, manufactured hyper-reality built upon layers of both real and hyper-real foundations.

**

Joaquin Flores is a Mexican-American expat based in Belgrade. He is a full-time analyst and director at the Center for Syncretic Studies, a public geostrategic think-tank and consultancy firm, as well as the co-editor of Fort Russ news service, and President of the Berlin based Independent Journalist Association for Peace. His expertise encompasses Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and he has a strong proficiency in Middle East affairs. Flores is particularly adept at analyzing ideology and the role of mass psychology, as well as the methods of the information war in the context of 4GW and New Media. He is a political scientist educated at California State University. In the US, he worked for a number of years as a labor union organizer, chief negotiator, and strategist for a major trade union federation.

Paris Court Finds Turkish Intelligence Agent Guilty In Murder of 3 PKK Leaders

Sultangazi police attacked the crowd gathered to walk Gunay Özaslan’s funeral was killed in an operation held yesterday in the Gazi district in Bağcılar. Tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd streets after the intervention was made ​​with water. (DHA)

SEE:  Marxist radical killed in Istanbul police raids: reports]

A female member(Günay Özaslan’) of a radical Turkish Marxist group was killed Friday in clashes with police during an operation to arrest suspected militants, the official Anatolia news agency reported.  The woman was a member of the far-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party Front (DHKP-C)

Police and Justice

Assassination of Kurdish activists in Paris: justice emphasizes the involvement of Turkish secret services

The coffin of one of three Kurdish activists murdered in Villiers-le-Bel (Val-d’Oise), 15 January 2013.

On 9 January 2013, at lunch time, three Kurdish activists are murdered in central Paris, in the Rue La Fayette apartment hosting a community association. Sakine Cansız, 54, a founding member of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), Fidan Dogan, 29, nicknamed “the diplomat” and Saylemez Leyla, 25, known as “the warrior”, were coldly shot several bullets in the head.

After two and a half years of investigation, the Paris prosecutor rendered on 9 July, the final indictment, that Le Monde was able to consult. He asks, as revealed by Le Canard chained in its edition of July 22, referral to an Assize Court of the main suspect, Omer Guney, for murder in relation to a terrorist undertaking. This document of over 70 pages is unique: for the first time, the French justice evokes the possible involvement of a foreign intelligence service, namely MIT (Turkish equivalent of the Directorate General of Internal Security) in a political crime committed in France.

Having failed to positively identify the sponsors of this crime, the prosecution remains cautious about the degree of involvement of MIT. This service is in fact run by a relative of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, engaged since 2012 in a peace process with the PKK that deeply divides the Turkish state apparatus. After the instruction, the trail of a conspiracy by factions opposed to negotiations is still on the table.

“Many elements of the procedure allow MIT to suspect involvement in instigating and preparing the killing, the prosecutor wrote. Indeed, it is established that Omer Guney had proven espionage, he had numerous secret contacts with or individuals located in Turkey (…). However, it should be noted that the investigation did not establish whether the MIT agents attended these facts officially, with the approval of their superiors, or if they did it to the Unbeknownst to their service, to discredit or undermine the peace process. “

Read also: Omer Güney was planning to escape from prison with the help of a Turkish officer

“Grey Wolf”

If an “uncertainty” remains on the identity of the originator, the performer, he was promptly arrested and imprisoned for ten days only after the fact: Omer Guney, a 32 year old Turk arrived in France to Age 9 years. Its presence in the streets of La Fayette apartment the alleged time of the crime is proven, traces of gunpowder were found on her purse and partial DNA of one victim on his parka. He has continued to deny the facts.

When arrested, the young man nevertheless commits an illuminating slip requesting that the Turkish Embassy in Paris is alerted. Surprising reflex on the part of an individual who continues to run the police as a “heart of Kurd” PKK sympathizer. His family, themselves, qualify it as “ultranationalist” fierce opponent of the Kurdish cause, and claim that it defined itself as a “gray wolf”, the name of the youth branch of the MHP, the Turkish nationalist party .

This feigned sympathy for the PKK had allowed him to infiltrate a year earlier the Kurdish community of Ile-de-France. French perfectly, he regularly acted as interpreter and driver in the movement of senior living in Paris. Thus he made the acquaintance of Sakine Cansız emblematic figure of the PKK, a political refugee in France after spending eleven years in Turkish jails. He was also responsible to escort the car to the street Lafayette apartment the day she fell under the bullets with his two comrades.

A “mysterious correspondent”

The investigation has established that Omer Guney made three trips to Turkey in the six months before the murders. He used the occasion of his travels a phone line “secret”, reserved for specific contacts. One particular interest to investigative services. A “mystery caller” who has never been identified, the Turkish authorities refused “strangely” to respond to the letters rogatory sent to this effect, makes it clear the floor. Which illustrates an understatement as the frustration of French justice that the disorder role of Ankara in this case.

In this context opaque, it is ultimately the Turkish press that will give a dramatic boost to education. Sign of violent conflict reveal that these murders within the state apparatus, innumerable information will in turn feed the thesis of state crime and internal conspiracy. Three weeks after the murder, a former Turkish intelligence agent said in a newspaper Güney Omer is an agent of MIT and that “the massacre of Paris is the business of the tough faction in the MIT.” Heard by the judge, it will return on all its declarations.

On 12 January 2014, a voice recording of three men is posted on YouTube from Germany. In voice-over, the author of the video says that this recording was made by Omer Güney himself, during a meeting in Turkey with two members of the MIT to “plan” its mission. We hear the three individuals mentioned targets among European Kurdish activists.

“Sabotage” peace process

Two months later, on 14 March, a Turkish website opens a new track: he says that the two unidentified voice on the record is that of a certain Omer Kozanli, billed as “the police imam Gülen movement “, a moderate Islamist current. The movement of Fethullah Gülen, exiled in the United States, supported the rise to power of Erdogan before taking his distance, while remaining very influential within the state apparatus.

peace, “Who did this? An individual of Pennsylvania, the servants of the individual, his supporters. Of course, these people have also infiltrated the judiciary. Unfortunately, they are also in the police and other state institutions … “

The efforts of Erdogan to distance themselves from the triple murder are partly ruined with the publication on 14 January 2014 another Turkish site of an internal note of MIT, presented as a project to assassinate PKK executives in Europe. The same day, MIT published a denial. Several sources confirm later the German newspaper Der Spiegel the document’s authenticity.

Who ordered the murder of three Kurdish activists in Paris on 9 January 2013? The Turkish government, to upset a peace process that he himself had committed? A hard MIT factions infiltrated by the Gülen movement? Or the MHP, the Nationalist Action Party, close to the army, which was said Omer Güney near?

Faced with this investigation without fulfillment, Antoine Comte, civil party lawyer, praised the quality of the work of French justice. “This is the first time that the judicial authority shall also clear position on the possible involvement of a foreign State in a political assassination. Political power, he has always been careful not to comment on the case. “

The PKK and the “process of Imrali”

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish nationalist organization, was founded in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan to promote the creation of an independent Kurdish state on the borders of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. A series of attacks earned him to be considered a terrorist organization by several European countries, including France in 1993. Captured in 1999, Ocalan is serving a life prison on Imrali Island. The PKK then engages in a peace process with Turkey and renounces the claim of a Kurdish state in favor of federalism recognizing Kurdish identity.

End of 2012, Ocalan from his cell launches the “process of Imrali,” a round of negotiations with the AKP, the ruling party in Turkey. This process is strongly criticized Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Turkish state apparatus, infiltrated by more radical currents. It is in this complex context that three Kurdish activists were murdered in Paris on 9 January 2013.

picture: http://s2.lemde.fr/image/2014/04/26/24×24/1100512122_4_cc4f_13985325317617-photo-5-bis-copie_41b05cf75dfd64085ec59f9ca778eae7.jpg
Soren Seelow
Reporter

Obama Capitalizes Upon Suruç Bombing Reactions To Seal Erdogan’s Free Syrian Army Enclave/NO FLY ZONE

“In cutting the deal, Barack Obama chose his moment well.”

[After Turkey drew its Mare-Jarablus line, and brainwashed ISIS-affiliated Turkish-Kurdish boys were used to bomb Kurds in Suruç, and Turkish forces began to bomb ISIS positions in Syria, Obama knew that Erdogan had begun to soften.  This is the moment O has been waiting for, implicating the CIA in the Suruç attack.]

Turkey was already preparing to carve-out a piece of Northern Syria, before the Suruç bombing.  The alleged ISIS attack facilitated that move.

[The following shot from Google Maps shows the new Mare-Jarablus line, a.k.a., the southern boundary of Erdogan’s shrunken Free Syrian Army enclave (SEE:  Partial no-fly zone included in US-Turkey consensus: Turkish sources).]

[One question remains…what will Assad do, whenever the Syrian Air Force is targeted?]

Turkey says west of Euphrates ‘red line’ in northern Syria

Turkey to consider any incursion west of Euphrates River in northern Syria by PKK affiliate Democratic Union Party as violation of ‘red line’ set by governmentTurkey will consider any incursion west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria along the Turkish border by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), as well as any attack north of Idlib by Syrian regime forces, as violation of a “red line.” The government made the decision  at a National Security Council (MGK) meeting on June 29, media reports say.The MGK released a statement saying that “developments in Syria were comprehensively discussed, possible threats were evaluated, and possible additional security measures were stressed,” following the meeting.The Turkish government aims to convey a strong message to both the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) and the PYD. Any move by these groups west of the Euphrates River, where the city of Jarablus is located, was declared a red line by Turkey because the river has become a natural border between ISIS and its nemesis PYD in northern Syria after Tal Abyad was captured by the Kurdish militia from ISIS on June 15.

The PYD is considered by Turkey to be the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). Both ISIS and the PKK are recognised as terrorist groups by Turkey.

Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin stated that, “It is not healthy to interpret the necessary measures which aim to ensure our border security as ‘Turkey is entering a war’,” speaking on Tuesday  at a press conference in Ankara.

Kalin also emphasised that Turkey has never used the terminology of a “buffer zone,” but spoke about a need to establish a no-fly zone and a safe zone in the area for civilians. Turkey’s stance on this issue remains unchanged and these possible moves are continuing to be discussed with its allies, he added.

The Turkish government has been alarmed by both ISIS’ moves near the Syrian towns of Azaz and Mare and the enlargement of northern Kurdish enclaves under the control of the PYD along its long border line with Syria.

ISIS reportedly recently attacked an area between Azaz and Mare, which are situated in northwestern Syria, which controlled by the Free Syrian Army (FSA). This move by ISIS came after it lost Tal Abyad to the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the militant wing of the PYD, which was able to join the Kobane and Jazira “cantons,” along the Turkish border by capturing the district.

ISIS already controls a zone between Jarablus and Mare, also along the Turkish border.

In the worst case scenario for Turkey, as it becomes further threatened by ISIS between Azaz and Mare, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) could ask for assistance from the YPG in order to protect the areas of northwestern Syria they hold. This might then allow the Kurdish group to extend its reach to Afrin, another isolated Kurdish “canton” declared by the PYD in the far west of Syria.

The PYD needs to overrun Jarablus and pass west of the Euphrates to reach the Azaz-Mare region if this scenario is to be realised. Then, the PYD might take full control of the Turkish-Syrian border, leading to fears in Turkey that it might end up neighbouring a hostile Kurdish state which could use its control of the border to undermine Turkey’s internal security.

These are reasons, Turkey has laid down a red line regarding advances by either ISIS or the PYD west of the Euphrates. According to the Turkish daily Milliyet, if the PYD undertakes  any operation past this point the Turkish Armed Forces will carry out a cross border operation without providing notice.

If ISIS captures the area it will able to take control of the Oncupinar border crossing with Turkey, and could get closer to reaching another border crossing at Cilvegozu. Therefore, Turkey would virtually lose control of its border to two hostile militant groups.

In addition, the fighting involved in capturing the crossings as well as any ethnic cleansing or massacres by the two groups could lead to a new wave of refugees from Syria to Turkey, another concern which is also behind Turkey’s decision to issue the second red line regarding any attack by the Assad regime attack north of Idlib, the Milliyet report said.

It is feared that if the Syrian regime launches an attack north of Idlib there will be another huge flow of refugees into Turkey, which already hosts more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees who fled the violence in their country after the escalation of the civil war there.

Turkey and the US-led anti-ISIS coalition forces appear to have differences in terms of priorities in northern Syria, despite mostly sharing the same interests. Turkey is concerned by the PYD’s activities in northern Syria along the Turkish border as much as it is concerned with the actions of ISIS and the Assad regime.

However, the US-led coalition is highly supportive of the PYD’s activities against ISIS, which has been heavily bombarded by the coalition in coordination with attacks by the PYD.

US State Department Spokesman John Kirby at  Washington’s daily press briefing on June 30 reacted to Turkish demands by saying that, “The Defense Department has made it clear that they don’t believe there’s a need for that at this time, and that the use of coalition military assets in trying to effect a zone like that would entail an awful lot in terms of logistics, time, resources, and effort.”

When asked about the difference between a buffer zone and a safe haven Kirby stated that, “In military terms, I’m not sure that there’s technical definitions for either one. I think it depends on the context in which you’re using it. I don’t know that there’s much – it depends on how you define it and how you want that area defended and protected.”

However, he also said, “They would have to decide how they would both make the decision, defend the decision, and implement it. That’s a national decision that they would have to speak to.”

 

Source: TRT World and agencies

Is Civil War Being Exported To Turkey, or Just More War Upon the Kurds?

[Reuters claimed that the guy was a disgruntled Kurd, but the Turkish press calls him “Sheikh” Seyh (Sheikh) Abdurrahman Alagoz.

Abdurrahman and brother Yunus Emre, according to this latest report from Turkey, both went to Syria for military training.  The two brothers had helped Orhan Gönder‘ with the previous bombing of HDPE rally in Diyarbakir.  They were all neighbors in ADIYAMAN.]

Abdurrahman Alagoz (left), Orhan Gönder (right)

Re-reviewed images pulled from Diyarbakır investigation.

[PKK says that ISIL was working for the State.  Police reportedly switched-off electronic sensing in border town Ceylanpinar, to facilitate movement of bomb from Syria to Suruc (SEE: PKK Claims Killing of ‘ISIL-linked’ Turkish Police).]

[The question becomes, “False Flag, or genuine Terrorist Attack?”  Considering Turkey’s previous frequent usage of the false flag, to implicate the PKK, makes it easy for outside powers to use the same M.O. in their attacks upon Turkey.  Is Turkey, once again, bombing the Kurds, or is someone pushing civil war upon Turkey (SEE:  The New Silk Road union and the terror game in Turkey )?  Are Turkish bombing runs and police crackdown upon IS militants for real?]

Turkey bombs Islamic State targets in Syria

Turkey arrests hundreds of suspected Kurdish, IS militants

PKK claims Turkish police killing in revenge for Syria border attack

© Ozan Koze, AFP | Turkish police are accused by many Kurds of collaborating with Islamist militants along the border with Syria

Text by FRANCE 24 

The military wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has claimed responsibility for the assassination on Wednesday of two Turkish police officers, describing it as retaliation for a suicide bombing blamed on jihadists that killed 32.

The People’s Defence Forces (HPG) said in a statement on one of its websites that the two police officers were killed at around 6am in the southeastern town of Ceylanpinar for “collaboration with the Daesh gangs” – the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State (IS) group.

Security sources earlier told Reuters the officers were found dead with bullet wounds to the head in the house they shared in Ceylanpinar, on the border with Syria some 160 km (100 miles) east of Suruc, the site of Monday’s suicide bombing.

The bombing, which targeted pro-Kurdish campaigners in Suruc, has been blamed on the IS group, which is locked in heaving fighting with Kurdish forces in northern Syria.

Many of Turkey‘s Kurds and opposition supporters suspect President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling AKP party of covertly backing IS militants against Kurdish fighters in Syria, something the government has repeatedly denied.

Anti-government protests after Monday’s bombing in Suruc erupted in several cities for a second night on Tuesday, with some of the demonstrators chanting “Murderer Islamic State, collaborator Erdogan and AKP”.

“Although Islamic State has been held responsible for this attack, Turkey’s AKP government, by resisting the taking of effective measures to prevent Islamic State and other reactionary forces, bears the real responsibility,” the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), whose support base is mostly Kurdish, said in a statement.

Turkey’s NATO allies have expressed concern about control of its border with Syria which in parts runs directly parallel with territory controlled by Islamic State. The prospect of conflict spilling onto Turkish soil, embroiling Kurds, Islamist militants and security forces will raise alarm inside and outside Turkey.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu rejected accusations that Turkey had tacitly supported the IS group and had unwittingly opened the door to the bombing; but he said initial evidence suggested the Islamist radical group was responsible.

Bombing suspect travelled to Syria

A senior Turkish official told Reuters there was “strong evidence” to suggest the bomber was a 20-year-old man born in the southeastern province of Adiyaman and of Kurdish origin, who had travelled to Syria last year with the help of a group linked to the IS militants.

“He was active in a Syria-linked group supporting the Islamic State. We know that he went to Syria illegally. It was not possible to track him during his time there,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.

He had links with another alleged bomber who attacked an HDP rally in the mostly Kurdish southeastern city of Diyarbakir days ahead of a June 7 parliamentary election, killing four people and wounding at least 200, the official said.

The Radikal newspaper quoted what it said was the man’s mother saying he was a former student at Adiyaman university who had worked as a painter with his 25-year-old brother before going abroad.

“I don’t know what they were doing abroad, they never said. They were just telling me they were fine,” Semure Alagoz told the newspaper. “I don’t know where he is now. I don’t know if they joined ISIL, if they went for jihad. They are both good kids, they wouldn’t harm anyone.”

‘One body yet to be identified’ – FRANCE 24’s Jasper Mortimer reports

According to FRANCE 24’s correspondent in Turkey, Jasper Mortimer, investigators are trying to identify the remains of a possible second bomber, whose body was blown to pieces.

“This might be the corpse of a second female bomber (…), we’ll have to wait until the identification is made,” he said.

Two lawmakers from the HDP submitted separate parliamentary motions on Wednesday naming a 20-year old woman as a suspect, and asking why police had released her from custody last month.

The turmoil comes at a difficult time for Turkey, with a caretaker government in charge while the AKP seeks a junior coalition partner after losing its majority in the June election for the first time in more than a decade.

Since Monday’s bombing, at least 51 people have been arrested in protests in Istanbul alone and police seized more than 200 petrol bombs and a rifle, the governor’s office said.

Anti-government groups have vowed further demonstrations and the HDP has called for supporters to converge on Turkey’s largest city for a mass rally this weekend.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

Saudi Arabia, Source of All Islamist Terror, Must Be Made “International Protectorate”

source

Maliki: Saudi Arabia Must Become International Protectorate

Iraqi Vice President Nouri al-Maliki said Wednesday the Al Saud regime must be placed in the international community’s custody for pursuing wrong policies and supporting terrorism.

In an interview with an Iraqi satellite channel, Maliki described Saudi Arabia as the breeding ground of terrorism, saying Takfir extremism is rooted in the Wahabbi ideology in the Saudi kingdom.

Maliki, a former Iraqi prime minister, said the international community should intervene to prevent the spread of extremist ideologies emanating from Saudi Arabia and put the monarchy under global supervision.

Otherwise, Maliki said, terrorism will continue to grow, fed by Saudi petrodollars.

“F” the EU Nuland Uses Doctored Wiretaps To Pull-Off Another Regime Change, This One In Macedonia

[SEE: Intelligence Agencies Behind “Bomba” Tapes In Macedonia ]

Warring political parties agree deal on new Macedonia government

Andrew Byrne in Budapest

Macedonia’s political leaders have reached agreement on an interim government and an independent investigation into allegations of illegal wiretapping, electoral fraud and state-backed corruption in the former Yugoslav republic.Political leaders said the deal brought to an end a poisonous political dispute in the EU candidate country, which had been gripped by mass demonstrations and deadly clashes that echoed the country’s 2001 violent inter-ethnic conflict.

Johannes Hahn, the EU enlargement commissioner who mediated the talks, told local reporters on Wednesday that the country’s leaders had brought Macedonia closer to its ambition of EU membership by reaching a deal.

The crisis began in February, when the opposition SDSM party began releasing thousands of secret recordings of government phone calls which revealed a “massive invasion of fundamental rights” according to an expert report produced for the European Commission in June.

Reinhard Priebe, author of the EU report, said the tapes suggested senior government officials appeared to be directly involved in “electoral fraud, corruption, abuse of power and authority, conflict of interest, blackmail, extortion, criminal damage.”

The government in turn accused opposition leaders of treason and espionage and said the tapes had been manufactured by foreign intelligence services.

Tensions reached a peak in May, when at least 18 people were killed in a special forces operation against an armed group in Kumanovo, a town in the north of the country.

The violence sparked fears of a return to unrest in the ethnically divided country of 2m, where an estimated 130 were killed in inter-ethnic strife in 2001 before a 3,500 strong NATO force arrived to quell the unrest. The latest violence prompted EU and US mediators to launch talks between Macedonia’s leaders in May.

The political parties agreed last month to prepare for early elections in April but the role of Nikola Gruevski as prime minister remained a key obstacle, with the opposition claiming free and fair elections would be impossible without his resignation.

Talks remained stalled for much of June but people familiar with the discussions said the arrival of Victoria Nuland, US assistant secretary of state, in Skopje this week added urgency to the efforts to reach an agreement.

Mr Gruevski has now agreed to resign in early January, allowing an interim leader 100 days to prepare for the elections on April 24. SDSM MPs will return to parliament at the beginning of September and nominate key ministers to take up positions in October. A special prosecutor will be appointed on September 15 to investigate the wiretap recordings.

Observers welcomed the agreement but warned that previous commitments had been discarded by both the government and opposition and urged the EU and US to hold the country’s leaders to their commitments.

“Without close and continuous monitoring of the deal, both by Brussels and member states, the government may well return to business as usual,” warned Goran Buldioski, co-director of the Open Society Initiative for Europe.

“A key test of this [agreement] will be appointing the new special prosecutor to investigate the wiretapping revelations; will it be an independent outsider from the Balkan region or simply another insider?” he added.

Members of the Democratic Union for Integration party, Mr Gruevski’s ethnic Albanian coalition partner, said by agreeing to investigate abuses of power, the country had moved closer to EU membership.

“We need a catharsis of the political scene,” said Artan Grubi, a DUI member of parliament. “This is the key moment when we can embrace Europe by ensuring that corruption and abuse of power is unacceptable.”

The Frustration of American War Hawks

[SEE:  ‘Winning the Cold War with propaganda’: New Dutch-Polish ‘content factory’ to challenge Russia]

American war hawks are angry over the fact that RussiaToday is much better at getting “NEWS” out than “Radio Free Europe.”  RT is being condemned for serving the same purpose in Russia that AlJazeera served in the wars on Libya and Syria.  AlJazeera served as a tool of American “public diplomacy” in the propaganda war in the Middle East, just as RT serves Russian diplomacy in Russia and Eastern Europe.  RT doesn’t spread disinformation, it spreads NEWS that the Western powers actively suppress.  Radio Liberty and RFE do spread Western disinformation, instead of news.  Because people are able to understand this, they turn away from these NEWS sources.  War Hawks hate this (they hate everything).

RussiaToday helps Russians to avoid Western traps laid for them.  Russian and Moldavian crowds are harder to incite to violence because of RT.  This really pisses-off the hawks.  What makes them even madder, is that Americans cannot be agitated with war fever without first seeing mobs of civilians getting mowed-down by guns or tanks.

“Against the background of the aggressive anti-Russian rhetoric of many leaders of NATO member states, voters in these countries are not ready to support such a policy.  In particular, this contradiction between the official position and public opinion is most noticeable in Germany.”–Russian Information Agency

The majority of Americans have grown weary of war.  Most doubt the reasons given for prolonging our wars or for starting new ones.  No American with any measure of sense wants to go to war against Russia.  We have spent most of our lives dreading accidental war against Russia, so why would we support a decision to fight another European war?

“Russia’s aim, though, is not so much to accumulate its own “soft power” as to undermine the west’s ability to act against it.”–Guardian

The information war is needed to neutralize Russia’s ability to ignore and evade American provocations, without having to resort to violence to pacify seditious mobs.  Russian “propaganda” is really defensive, in nature, helping Putin’s govt defuse planned disruptions and social actions.  John McCain, Barack Obama, and other politicians of the American war party, are offended that Russia has cultivated this capability to defend itself against planned military aggression, using only the “NEWS” as its “soft” defensive weapon.  All Putin has to do to defeat war plans, which are based entirely upon lies, is to broadcast the truth.

Western Propaganda organs plan to fight this truth using only lies and half-truths as offensive weapons.  The first lie is that RussiaToday and others only broadcast disinformation.  The truth that comes from RT becomes “disinformation,” simply because American sources say so.  America’s information war is not fought to be won, but only until a path to war between Europe and Russia is opened-up.

The John McCains are pissed-off that they can no longer force new wars upon the American people without endangering their political immunity.  People like McCain, who claim to be “war heroes,” due to no action of their own (other than enlisting), are molded into leading politicians by the people who have laid all of that money at their feet.   Mad dogs like McCain get red-faced, fighting mad, whenever the American people dare to cross their war plans.

Pompous windbags cannot accept the fact that they have no authority of any kind, over other nations.

peter.chamberlin@hotmail.com

 

 

Obama To Disarm Disabled SS Recipients with “Representative Payees” As “Mental Defectives”

Obama pushes to extend gun background checks to Social Security

Relatives of gun violence victims and gun control advocates held a news conference in Washington on Dec. 10, 2014, two years after the Sandy Hook shooting, to urge lawmakers to expand background checks. (Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images)
By Alan Zarembo

 

Seeking tighter controls over firearm purchases, the Obama administration is pushing to ban Social Security beneficiaries from owning guns if they lack the mental capacity to manage their own affairs, a move that could affect millions whose monthly disability payments are handled by others.

The push is intended to bring the Social Security Administration in line with laws regulating who gets reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, which is used to prevent gun sales to felons, drug addicts, immigrants in the country illegally and others.

A potentially large group within Social Security are people who, in the language of federal gun laws, are unable to manage their own affairs due to “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”There is no simple way to identify that group, but a strategy used by the Department of Veterans Affairs since the creation of the background check system is reporting anyone who has been declared incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and assigned a fiduciary.

If Social Security, which has never participated in the background check system, uses the same standard as the VA, millions of its beneficiaries would be affected. About 4.2 million adults receive monthly benefits that are managed by “representative payees.”

The move is part of a concerted effort by the Obama administration after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., to strengthen gun control, including by plugging holes in the background check system.

But critics — including gun rights activists, mental health experts and advocates for the disabled — say that expanding the list of prohibited gun owners based on financial competence is wrongheaded.

Though such a ban would keep at least some people who pose a danger to themselves or others from owning guns, the strategy undoubtedly would also include numerous people who may just have a bad memory or difficulty balancing a checkbook, the critics argue.

“Someone can be incapable of managing their funds but not be dangerous, violent or unsafe,” said Dr. Marc Rosen, a Yale psychiatrist who has studied how veterans with mental health problems manage their money. “They are very different determinations.”

Steven Overman, a 30-year-old former Marine who lives in Virginia, said his case demonstrates the flaws of judging gun safety through financial competence.
State police lead students from Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., after a shooting. The Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at the school left 26 people, including 20 children, dead. (Shannon Hicks / Newtown Bee)

After his Humvee hit a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2007, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury that weakened his memory and cognitive ability.

The VA eventually deemed him 100% disabled and after reviewing his case in 2012 declared him incompetent, making his wife his fiduciary.

Upon being notified that he was being reported to the background check system, he gave his guns to his mother and began working with a lawyer to get them back.

Overman grew up hunting in Wisconsin. After his return from Iraq, he found solace in target shooting. “It’s relaxing to me,” he said. “It’s a break from day-to-day life. It calms me down.”

Though his wife had managed their financial affairs since his deployment, Overman said he has never felt like he was a danger to himself or others.

“I didn’t know the VA could take away your guns,” he said.

The background check system was created in 1993 by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, named after White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was partially paralyzed after being shot in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan.

The law requires gun stores to run the names of prospective buyers through the computerized system before every sale.

The system’s databases contain more than 13 million records, which include the names of felons, immigrants in the U.S. illegally, fugitives, dishonorably discharged service members, drug addicts and domestic abusers.

State agencies, local police and federal agencies are required to enter names into the databases, but the system has been hampered by loopholes and inconsistent reporting since its launch.

The shortcomings became clear in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, in which Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people. Cho had been declared mentally ill by a court and ordered to undergo outpatient treatment, but at the time the law did not require that he be added to the databases.

Someone can be incapable of managing their funds but not be dangerous, violent or unsafe. They are very different determinations. – Dr. Marc Rosen, Yale psychiatrist

Congress expanded the reporting requirements, but Social Security determined it was not required to submit records, according to LaVenia LaVelle, an agency spokeswoman.

After 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, 20 children and six school staffers in Newtown in 2012, President Obama vowed to make gun control a central issue of his second term.

The effort fell flat. Congress ultimately rejected his proposals for new gun control legislation.

But among 23 executive orders on the issue was one to the Department of Justice to ensure that federal agencies were complying with the existing law on reporting to the background check system.

One baseline for other agencies is the VA, which has been entering names into the system since the beginning. About 177,000 veterans and survivors of veterans are in the system, according to VA figures.

The VA reports names under a category in gun control regulations known as “adjudicated as a mental defective,” terminology that derives from decades-old laws. Its only criterion is whether somebody has been appointed a fiduciary.

More than half of the names on the VA list are of people 80 or older, often suffering from dementia, a reasonable criterion for prohibiting gun ownership.

But the category also includes anybody found by a “court, board, commission or other lawful authority” to be lacking “the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs” for a wide variety of reasons.

The agency’s efforts have been criticized by a variety of groups.

Rosen, the Yale psychiatrist, said some veterans may avoid seeking help for mental health problems out of fear that they would be required to give up their guns.

Conservative groups have denounced the policy as an excuse to strip veterans of their gun rights.

Republicans have introduced legislation in the last several sessions of Congress to change the policy. The Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, now under consideration in the House, would require a court to determine that somebody poses a danger before being reported to the background check system.

Social Security would generally report names under the same “mental defective” category. The agency is still figuring out how that definition should be applied, LaVelle said.

About 2.7 million people are now receiving disability payments from Social Security for mental health problems, a potentially higher risk category for gun ownership. An addition 1.5 million have their finances handled by others for a variety of reasons.

The agency has been drafting its policy outside of public view. Even the National Rifle Assn. was unaware of it.

Told about the initiative, the NRA issued a statement from its chief lobbyist, Chris W. Cox, saying: “If the Obama administration attempts to deny millions of law-abiding citizens their constitutional rights by executive fiat, the NRA stands ready to pursue all available avenues to stop them in their tracks.”

Gun rights advocates are unlikely to be the only opponents.

Ari Ne’eman, a member of the National Council on Disability, said the independent federal agency would oppose any policy that used assignment of a representative payee as a basis to take any fundamental right from people with disabilities.

“The rep payee is an extraordinarily broad brush,” he said.

Since 2008, VA beneficiaries have been able to get off the list by filing an appeal and demonstrating that they pose no danger to themselves or others.

But as of April, just nine of 298 appeals have been granted, according to data provided by the VA. Thirteen others were pending, and 44 were withdrawn after the VA overturned its determination of financial incompetence.

Overman is one of the few who decided to appeal.

He is irritable and antisocial, he said, but not dangerous. “I’ve never been suicidal,” he said. “To me that solves nothing.”

More than a year and a half after Overman filed his challenge, the VA lifted its incompetence ruling, allowing his removal from the background check system before the VA ever had to determine whether he should be trusted with a gun.

Overman, who hasn’t worked since leaving the military, said he and a friend are now thinking of opening a gunsmith business.

alan.zarembo@latimes.com

Clinton’s General Wesley Clark Calls For Mass-Arrests of “Radicalized Youth”

Ex-NATO commander suggests WWII-style camps for radicalized Americans

Military photo portrait of Wesley Clark. © Wikipedia

 

Retired US General Wesley Clark suggested that radicalized youth in America and other Western nations should be segregated the way Nazi sympathizers were held in camps during World War II.

America and its allies need to get tougher on young men, who may become radical Islamists, said Clark, who is best known for leading NATO troops during the Kosovo war. The former Democratic presidential candidate made the comments in an interview on MSNBC in response to the shooting at a recruitment camp in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that left four Marines killed.

“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning,” the retired general said. “I do think on a national policy level we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists.

“In World War II, if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war,” he said. “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine, that’s their right. And it’s our right and our obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”

Clark added that “not only the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.”

The suggested heavy-handed solution that implies punishing people not for criminal acts but for upholding radical beliefs came in contrast to Clark’s earlier criticisms of the excesses of the Bush administration response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, such as the torture of terror suspects.

He also spoke against “the politics of fear” in dealing with the threat of foreign fighters coming home from Middle East conflicts.

The interview sparked outrage on social media, which the former general called “blogosteria” on his Twitter account. He reiterated that “US Citz who choose #ISIS are spies, enemy combatants or both. Govt should separate them from the rest of us.”

 

Prosecutor Uncovers MIT (Turkish Intelligence) Truckloads of Weapons For ISIS

Prosecutor says weapon-laden MİT trucks made 2,000 trips to Syria

Syria-bound trucks operated by MİT were searched in January 2014 after prosecutors received tip-offs that they are illegally carrying arms to Syria. (Photo: DHA)

A pro-government prosecutor who was appointed to the case regarding the alleged transport of weapons and munitions to Syria via trucks belonging to Turkish intelligence filed for a verdict of non-prosecution regarding the case and admitted that weapon-laden trucks made 2,000 trips to Syria, according to the lawyer of one of the defendants of the case.

Lawyer Hasan Tok, the legal counsel for former Adana Provincial Gendarmerie Regiment Commander Col. Özkan Çokay, who was at the scene when trucks belonging to the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) were searched in January 2014, said that Prosecutor Ali Doğan stated in court that trucks owned by MİT made at least 2,000 trips to Syria.

Doğan is a known government loyalist and filed for a verdict of non-prosecution regarding the investigation into the trucks after he was appointed to the position of Adana chief public prosecutor. According to Tok, Doğan had asked the defendants in a previous hearing, “2,000 trucks have passed [into Syria] why was this one specially chosen?”

“We didn’t know there had been 2,000 trucks passing into Syria, may God bless Ali Doğan,” said Tok.

Ali Doğan’s reference to 2,000 trucks echoes an alleged statement by MİT head Hakan Fidan in which he said he “sent around 2,000 trucks [with] equipment” to Syria after General Staff Gen. Yaşar Güler complained that the region needed arms and ammunition to be saved. A voice recording was published online in March 2014 of a top-secret conversation between then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu, Fidan and Güler, revealing Turkey’s clandestine effort to aid certain groups in Syria.

 

Prosecutor Takçı: someone had sworn an oath to get us convicted

Aziz Takçı, one of the four prosecutors involved in an investigation of trucks belonging to the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) that were allegedly carrying weapons to radical groups in Syria, said in his defense statement to the Tarsus Second High Criminal court regarding the investigation of the MİT trucks, “Someone [in the government] had already sworn an oath to convict us [prosecutors investigating the MİT trucks]. We also know that some people [within the government] were pressuring the HSYK [Supreme Council of Judges and Prosecutors], saying, ‘Why aren’t the detentions [of prosecutors] happening sooner?’” said Takçı in his statement to the court, according to GriHat news portal.

Turkey has wanted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad removed from power ever since an uprising that started at the end of 2011 turned into a fully-fledged civil war in the neighboring country. Assad is a member of the Nusayri (Alawite) sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, whose members are a minority in both Syria and Turkey.

 

Prosecutor: trucks were full to the brim with weapons

Describing the events that unfolded on Jan. 19, 2014, when trucks later found to belong to MİT were stopped in the Ceyhan district of Turkey’s southern Adana province en route to Syria, Takçı said: “When I went to the scene there were two trucks. A few stubbly bearded men, claiming to be MİT operatives, were shouting, swearing. As I had gone to the scene of the search, I had to look at what was there. [The trucks] were full to the brim with weapons…155mm [howitzer] shells, anti-aircraft munitions; I also saw munitions of different types and sizes.”

“I told the gendarmerie [present at the scene] to record these items, what else can a prosecutor do? Then out of nowhere, the chief public prosecutor of Adana, the chief police officer, and Governor Hüseyin Avni Coş [all] came to the scene with 400-500 riot police. The governor told me that Prime Minister [current President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan had called him and had said, ‘These trucks belong to MİT, we sent the weapons and ammunition. The prosecutor must leave the trucks, we are going to lay the [necessary] legal framework,’ several times,” said Takçı.

“In the meanwhile, Hüseyin Avni Coş was saying that he was going to obstruct this [investigation] even if it would mean his death. I told him, Mr. Governor, you don’t need to say such things. The state has laws. No one needs to die, if [as you say] the Prime Minister [Erdoğan] has called. Then I asked him to present me a [official] document with only a few sentences, which I could sign, and told him repeatedly that if the individuals who claimed they were MİT operatives gave their IDs, they could be released,” said Takçı.

Takçı said that after he had the license plate of the vehicle carrying the people claiming to be MİT operatives checked, he found that it belonged to suspects known to have affiliations with al-Qaeda. “Al-Qaeda is recognized as a terrorist organization by the Supreme Court of Appeals. It [Al-Qaeda] is on the ministerial cabinet list and the world’s list [of recognized terrorist organizations],” he said.

MİT agent double-crossed Syrian colonel, while I’m being charged for espionage

Takçı also said in his statement to the court that MİT operative Önder Sığırcıklıoğlu, who sold out a Syrian colonel who had defected to the Free Syrian Army from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) controlled by Assad for $100,000, was absolved of espionage charges while he was being charged with espionage for investigating the trucks.

Three MİT officials, including Sığırcıklıoğlu, were arrested in 2012 for allegedly abducting Col. Hussein Harmush, one of the most senior Syrian military officers to have defected to the opposition Free Syrian Army, from a Turkish refugee camp in the southern province of Hatay near the Syrian border and handing him to pro-Assad forces in Syria for $100,000.

As the Adana Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office had formally charged five suspects, one of whom was a MİT regional official, for their supposed role in handing over Harmush to Syrian security forces, it appeared that MİT was deeply involved in the abduction. The suspects were sent to prison, where they face charges of political espionage.

Takçı: you don’t have to be a prosecutor to know that the case can be linked to terrorism

Stating that there is no need for suspicion and that only a shred of doubt is enough for public prosecutors to act, Takçı said: “They [prosecutors] are asking me why I took [members of] the law enforcement agency with me. Who am I supposed to undertake the investigation with as a public prosecutor? Of course, with members of the law enforcement agency. Moreover there is talk of a truck full of weapons.”

“Who can carry a truckload of weapons? You don’t have to be a public prosecutor to know that such a crime is being has the suspicion of being [affiliated to] terrorism,” he said.

Even if undersecretary to MİT had come, he’d have to prove his link to trucks

Pointing out that, after he had ordered the trucks to be stopped and searched, another vehicle carrying individuals claiming to be MİT agents came to the scene, Takçı stated that the newly arrived operatives started to argue with gendarmerie personnel at the scene, demanding the search be stopped, even using curses insulting Takçı’s mother. Takçı said, “I wanted to see their identification, but they refused, so I told [the gendarmes] to keep them under control while the search was going on.”

Admitting that one of the operatives had later complied with his request to show identification, Takçı emphasized: “The people in civilian vehicle, which came later, these weren’t the people in the trucks. I have to be frank: Even if the undersecretary of MİT had come, he would have had to make his connection to the trucks very clear.”

Takçı: Drug smugglers are convicted, while weapons smugglers are to be released

Even if the trucks were proven to belong to MİT, as the prosecutor, he would have had to collect any evidence before it was lost, Takçı explained, adding: “A MİT operative was caught in Van [province] with a substantial amount of drugs on his person, no one said to him, ‘Oh, you’re a MİT agent, [sorry].’ The evidence was put forward, and he was detained, arrested and later convicted… Those who are caught smuggling 50 kilograms of drugs are to be convicted, while those who are caught smuggling three trucks worth of weapons are to be let go? What a country to live in!

Takçı: Legal decisions influenced by ruling party are most dishonorable

“Is this [government] always going to remain? Is there always going to be this ruling party? In the future, the political landscape will change and another party will come [into power],” he remarked, continuing: “The [new] ruling administration will come and say to me: ‘Why did you not see these pieces of evidence? Why did you allow this car to leave? Come and account for your actions.’ Are we to change our decisions based on the political party in power right now? I consider this to be dishonorable. If a judge or a prosecutor renders a decision according to the [views of the] current political party, then that person is the most base, most parasitical, most dishonorable person there is, as I would be, if I had let my actions be influenced by the party in power.”

Prosecutor Karaca: Site where weapons were dropped now an ISIL base

Another of the four prosecutors involved in the investigation, and currently under arrest, Ahmet Karaca, said in his defense statement that, before the investigation into the trucks belonging to MİT had begun, an investigation into rocket warheads found in the province of Adana was already underway, adding: “The driver of [one of] the trucks said, ‘I’ve taken 2 loads like this before. I deposited them at the same spot,’ and the place he indicated, close to the Turkish-Syrian border, is, unfortunately the place where the terrorist organization [the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL)] now holds camp.”

A total of 935 rocket warheads, manufactured in Adana and Konya provinces, had been seized from a truck in the southern province, then-Governor of Adana Hüseyin Avni Coş told media in 2013.

Pointing out that 85 citizens had lost their lives in terrorist attacks between 2012 and 2013, and that the investigation into the trucks is now open to the public, Karaca stated, “Those trucks were full to the brim with weapons.” He expressed his grief at being persecuted for simply performing his duty, stating: “If you find one piece of evidence linking me to crime, I’m willing to serve time without even the need to submit a defense. Send me [to jail] and I’ll go without blinking an eye.”

Qatar Minister Bypasses Baghdad, To Mediate Between Kurds and ISIL In Erbil

Qatari Foreign Minister Visit to Erbil Causes Controversy

“Qatar is supporting Islamic State”, Iraqi MP claims

Qatari Foreign Minister visits Erbil on Monday

BAGHDAD – There is concern within the Iraqi central government that Qatari diplomats are making a direct trip to Erbil without visiting Baghdad officials first.

State of Law MP Aliyeh Nousaif claims that the Qatari Foreign Minister has violated diplomatic protocol by visiting Erbil directly and treating the Kurdistan Region President as the head of an independent state.

“Massoud Barzani is acting like the president of an independent country against the central government in Baghdad,” she said.

Qatari Foreign Minister Khaleed bin-Mouhammed al-Atiyyeh visited Erbil on Sunday 19th July to meet with senior Kurdish officials including President Massoud Barzani.

Aliyeh released which expressed his concerns, saying that the Qatari foreign minister violated international and diplomatic principles by visiting the region directly and neglecting officials in the capital.

Furthermore, Aliyeh accuses the Qatari government of supporting Islamic State (IS) and promoting the division of Iraq.

PKK Calls ISIS Turkish Intelligence Agents In Different Clothes

[SEE:  Kurdish Socialist Rally Bombed In Turkey, Near Kobani ]

“No longer possible to distinguish ISIS members from the Turkish intelligence agents.”

PKK Blames Turkish Government for Suruc Attack

Blast kills at least 28 people

The explosion happened during a demonstration

SURUC – The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in a statement blamed the recent suicide attack in Suruc on the Turkish government.The KCK, the executive council of the PKK, accused the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of creating the Islamic State threat in Syria and Turkey, and that it was ‘no longer possible to distinguish ISIS members from the Turkish intelligence agents’.

According to the PKK the AKP government supports ISIS in order to undermine the Syrian Kurds in Syria. “As a result of this policy, the border between Turkey and Syria became a haven for ISIS and gangs from all over the world used this border for logistical and mobilization purposes,” the PKK said.
“It is obvious that responsibility for this massacre is of the Turkish state that unrestrainedly commits massacres on the basis of animosity towards Kurds,” the PKK added.

The PKK finally called on the Kurds and democratic powers to enhance the struggle against the AKP government.

Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) called on Kurds on Monday to provide for their own security and also blamed the Turkish government for the attacks.

The Kurdish leader called on people to protest the massacre in Turkey everywhere.

At least 28 civilians were killed in suicide attack in the town of Suruc on Monday morning.

Turkish officials suggest the attack was carried out by the Islamic state.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned the bombing.

Deputy Prime Minister Yalçın Akdoğan condemned the “despicable” incident on Twitter, saying such terrorist attacks on Turkey’s integrity and peace would never reach their goal, the Daily Sabah reported.

Is ISIS/DAESH Just Another Name for Muslim Brotherhood/Ikhwan?

[Today, the Saudi press claims a major crackdown upon Daesh/ISIS cells, which had been dispensing the “deviant ideology” to local Saudis.  The Saudi authorities claim to have disrupted 6 ongoing attacks in a sectarian plan to raise-up squads of anti-Shia terrorists.  Were they really “ISIS,” or is ISIS just another handy lable, like “al Qaeda,” or “the Taliban”?]

Saudi Arabia Claims To Have Arrested 400 Islamic State Radicals-July 19, 2015

[This mass arrest in Saudi comes ten days after Dubai reveals arrest of Qatari intelligence in UAE.  It is claimed that the Qatari intelligence had been fundraising for multiple Sunni outfits in Iraq and Syria.]

Arrest of Qatari intelligence officials in the UAE

By Habib Al Sayegh  – July 09, 2014

Emirati source: What was published in Doha was an attempt to cover up a series of intrusions into the internal affairs of a country

A source from the UAE quoted by the Arabic daily, Al Khaleej, a sister publication of The Gulf Today, claimed that “the arrested Qatari men in the UAE were intelligence officials” whose arrest “confirmed that the neighbouring Qatar is still detached from respecting the internal affairs of her neighbours thereby breaching the Riyadh agreement signed early this year.”

Al Khaleej quoted the source as saying that the available information on the spy agents contradicted what the Qatari paper, Al Arab, had said that they were on a tourism trip.

Al Khaleej further quoted the UAE sources as dismissing Al Arab’s claim because “hundreds of Gulf citizens enter the UAE or move out daily without any encumbrance.”

“For that case, Qatar has to come out clearly and open in the execution of her foreign policies whether within the Gulf countries or in any other Arab nation other than opting for underhand methods that have eroded confidence in her political expedition,” Al Khaleej quoted the UAE source.

The source said that the recent congratulatory message sent by the Qatari Emir to the leaders in the GCC and other Arab nations meant to break the isolation Qatar is facing but the message “does not reflect the reality on the ground which is exemplified by the latest arrest of spies in the land of the UAE.”

The source further said; “It is, therefore, natural for the UAE to take strict measures in matters pertaining to espionage or threats to the country’s security and stability.
This in light of what Qatar has been involved in before particularly regarding the ambiguous relationship with one Abdulrahman Al Nuaimi of an Al Karama organisation that was bent at promoting the Brotherhood, a.k.a., “Al-Islah” militia and discrediting the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

“Similarly, there was another individual, Mahmoud Al Jaidah, who claimed in the Qatari media that he was a traveller passing by the UAE yet the fact is he was raising money to free some members of Islah aka Secret Organisation.”

“Qatari’s security operation deliberately undermines and creates a rift among the relationships of regional countries.”

American Police State Needs More Easy-Bake-Terrorists

FBI Tracked Chattanooga Shooter’s Family for Years

July 17, 2015 (Tony Cartalucci – LD) – Once again, another convenient shooting has helped supercharge anger, hatred, fear, and division across the Western World after an alleged “Islamist extremist” opened fire on and killed 4 US Marines at a recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Without any knowledge of how the US has in fact created Al Qaeda and its many global affiliates, including vicious terrorist groups plaguing Southeast Asia, and the most notorious to date, the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS), the American public will predictably react in a manner that will simply further justify America’s meddling across the globe amid its self-created and perpetuated “War on Terror.” It will also help in efforts to further tighten control over the American public itself, with increased justifications for expanding police state measures and future pushes to disarm the American people.

Yahoo News would report in their article, “Shootings at Chattanooga military facilities leave 4 Marines, gunman dead; act called ‘domestic terrorism‘,” that:

A U.S. official told the Associated Press that Abdulazeez had not been on the radar of federal law enforcement before Thursday’s shooting. 

But also added:

His father had been investigated several years ago for “possible ties to a foreign terrorist organization” and added to the U.S. terrorist watch list, according to a report in the New York Times, but that probe did not surface information about Abdulazeez, the paper said.

This means that yet another case of “domestic terror” has involved someone either investigated by the FBI, entrapped by an active FBI operation where FBI investigators posed as terrorist leaders and walked a patsy through every step of a terrorist attack before arresting them and thus “foiling” the attack, or linked directly to someone the FBI was investigating.

Ironically, the immense omnipresent police state the West has erected to combat the so-called “terrorist” threat, including the total surveillance of all communications online and across all telecommunication networks, at home and abroad under the National Security Agency (NSA) will only expand, despite it once again apparently failing, and despite attempts by special interests on Wall Street and in Washington to claim this latest attack “again” somehow circumvented these already sweeping measures.

Meanwhile, The US Continues Supporting Extremists Abroad

And while this latest attack is passed off as a “domestic terrorist attack” and the result of “Islamic extremists,” rather than a false flag event, the US continues to openly support the very “terrorists” it claims threatens its homeland and has inspired these sort of attacks.

Just recently, the Washington Post literally allowed a spokesman of Al Qaeda to defend his faction’s role in the fighting in Syria, and his condemnation of the United States for not rendering more aid for the cause of overrunning and destroying the Syrian nation – a goal the US itself is likewise pursuing.

Labib Al Nahhas, “head of foreign political relations” for terrorist organization Ahrar al-Sham, wrote in his Washington Post op-ed titled, “The deadly consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries,” that:

Stuck inside their own bubble, White House policymakers have allocated millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to support failed CIA efforts to support so-called “moderate” forces in Syria. But these “moderate” groups have proved to be a disappointment on nearly every count, not least of all in confronting the Islamic State.

He also states:

That question should prompt Washington to admit that the Islamic State’s extremist ideology can be defeated only through a homegrown Sunni alternative — with the term “moderate” defined not by CIA handlers but by Syrians themselves.

Essentially, the Washington Post afforded a terrorist organization space to make an appeal to the American public for military support. Ahrar al-Sham regularly coordinates with and fights within operations led by Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front, a US State Department designated terrorist organization from which ISIS itself sprung.

Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are described as the “closest” of allies by Western think-tanks and media reports. It is also revealed that Ahrar al-Sham worked along side ISIS itself.

A Stanford University report under “Mapping Militant Organizations” explained (emphasis added):

Ahrar al-Sham quickly became one of the largest military organizations operating in Syria, and it has been active in efforts to unite the Islamist opposition under a single banner. It rejects the idea of Western intervention but sometimes works alongside Free Syrian Army brigades. It routinely cooperates with al-Nusra and, until relations soured in 2013, also worked with ISIS. In February 2014, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence called Ahrar al-Sham one of the three most effective rebel groups in Syria.

The Washington Post isn’t the only voice in the Western media promoting Al Qaeda. Foreign Policy in 2012 abhorrently proclaimed, “Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists: So the rebels aren’t secular Jeffersonians. As far as America is concerned, it doesn’t much matter.” As much as an admission that the US is backing what is essentially terrorism in Syria, the Foreign Policy article attempted even then to promote the alleged “pragmatism” of supporting Al Qaeda to eliminate America’s foreign enemies.

Image: 100’s of trucks a day pass over Turkey’s border with Syria, destined for ISIS territory. NATO literally is supplying ISIS with an endless torrent of supplies, weapons, and fighters meaning that no matter how many token airstrikes the US carries out, many times more fighters and materiel will fill the void.

And while Foreign Policy and terrorists writing in the pages of the Washington Post demand more weapons and support from the West, it is already a documented fact that immense and constantly flowing supply convoys are streaming out of both NATO-member Turkey and US-ally Jordan’s territory, into Syria and Iraq, for the purpose of resupplying ISIS. This explains ISIS’ otherwise inexplicable ability to not only maintain its impressive fighting capacity as it simultaneously wages war against both the Syrian and Iraqi armies, but to expand its fighting to all fronts opposed to US regional hegemony.

This includes Yemen, Libya, and even Egypt where ISIS most recently managed to hit an Egyptian naval vessel with a missile. Foreign Policy would again weigh in. Their article, “Islamic State Sinai Affiliate Claims to Have Hit Egyptian Ship With Missile,” states:

The use of a guided missile to strike an Egyptian ship represents a higher level of technological sophistication than what has been previously observed in Sinai attacks. It is unclear, however, exactly what kind of missile was used in the attack, beyond the militant group’s claim that it was a guided munition.

Militant groups in the region have in the past used guided missiles to attack government ships in the Mediterranean. During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian anti-ship missile fired by the militant group struck the Israeli warship Hanit, badly damaging the vessel and killing four crew members.

Of course, Foreign Policy and others across the Western media will be quick to point out that Hezbollah is a state-sponsored militant organization which receives its weapons from Syria and Iran. The question then becomes how ISIS replicated this level of “technological sophistication,” and which state-sponsors put the missiles into their hands.

The US supporting Al Qaeda is not really news. Al Qaeda was initially a joint US-Saudi venture to create a mercenary army to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. This mercenary army would again fight Russian interests in Serbia and Chechnya before eventually being used as the pretext for US invasions and occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 onward. In 2007, it was revealed that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel sought to use the terrorist organization to raise a proxy military front to overthrow Syria and Iran. The resulting bloodbath in Syria beginning in 2011 is the operational execution of this documented conspiracy.

Al Qaeda and its various affiliates serve both as a proxy mercenary front to strike where Western forces cannot, and a pretext to invade abroad. It also serves as a constant justification for increased tyranny at home. With the most recent shooting carried out by yet another target of the FBI’s “investigations,” and the predictable divisive backlash that will follow, it is assured that the American public will be further blinded to the fact that this so-called “Islamic extremism” was born in Washington and on Wall Street, in Riyadh and Tel Aviv, not in a mosque or springing forth from the pages of the Qu’ran.

In fact, the vast majority of the world’s Islamic people are locked in mortal combat with the West’s mercenary terrorist forces, with tens of thousands of them having shed their blood fighting Al Qaeda everywhere from Libya to Egypt, to Iraq and Syria. While the US attempts to pose as the leading power in the fight against extremism, its token airstrikes deep within Syrian territory are quickly undone by the torrent of supplies it itself oversees flooding into Syrian territory. For every fighter killed by a US airstrike, 10 more are being trafficked in through US and NATO-run networks stretching as far afield as Xinjiang, China.

The US presence in Iraq and Syria serves simply as one of several planned stepping stones to eventually and directly intervene militarily in toppling either or both governments, before moving on to Tehran.

The “War on Terror” is a fraud, and each “terrorist attack” a carefully orchestrated means of further perpetuating that fraud.

“Cyber-Berkut” Hackers Capture Staged ISIS Beheading Video From John McCain Staffer In Ukraine

[SEE:  Al Jazeera’s fake Green Square; Syria: Qatar about to release “resounding fall” fake video]

Footage obtained from McCain staffer shows ISIL executions shot in studio

A screen grab from leaked footage showing the filming of ISIL execution videos being taken in a studio

Leaked footage obtained from a staffer of US Senator John McCain shows the making of an ISIL “execution” video similar to the videos portraying the beheading of James Foley and other victims.

In the three-and-a-half minute video, ISIL executioner Jihadi John (aka Mohammed Emwazi) can be seen standing in front of a green screen, beside a kneeling hostage wearing an orange jumpsuit and a green screen hood in a fully equipped studio in the presence of a production crew, the Leaksource website recently reported.

The desert style set and wind machine effects, share similarities to the beheading videos ISIL released of Steven Sotloff, David Haines, and Alan Henning.

The following is an example showing the similarities between the leaked footage and Foley’s alleged beheading.

 

According to the report, the video was obtained in Ukraine from the cellphone of a member of McCain’s staff by the Hactivist group, CyberBerkut.

“Dear Senator McCain! We recommend you next time in foreign travel, and especially on the territory of Ukraine, not to take confidential documents.

On one of the devices of your colleagues, we found a lot of interesting things. Something we decided to put: this video should become the property of the international community!” the group is quoted as saying in the report.

MacCain’s ironic response to the claims can be seen below.

 

According to British forensic experts, Foley’s execution was probably staged with the use of “camera trickery and slick post-production techniques.”

A terrorism expert stated that the videos of Japanese hostages Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa was probably taken in an indoor studio.

The ISIL video purporting to show the execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya is also fake, said Hollywood horror film director Mary Lambert.

“In the opening shot all the figures might be animated. They never had more than six men on the beach… The close-ups of jihadists on the beach are most likely green screen… The sea turning red is obviously FX,” she said.