MONITORING THE AGE OF DARKNESS, IGNORANCE, GREED AND STUPIDITY
& THE ZIONIST WARS FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE.
SETTING STRAIGHT THE RECORD OF HISTORY.
KALI YUGA REPORT 120331
1 - Engaging Gilad Atzmon : The Video
''Jewish Survival Greatest Miracle in History''
2 - Empires Then and Now - Paul Craig Roberts
3 - Bibi : First We’ll Take Tehran, Then We’ll Take Istanbul - Richard Silverstein
Double Speak from Benjamin Netanyahu - Philip Giraldi
4 - Was Gaddafi really a bad guy ??
5 - FABRICATING A "SMOKING GUN" TO ATTACK IRAN ? Israeli Spies Disguised as Iranian Soldiers on Mission Inside Iran - Julie Lévesque
The Art of Warfare : Iran and The Gas Pipeline Battle" - Manlio Dinucci
6 - Foreign Troops Inside Syria : The Failed UN Brokered "Peace Plan" Sets the Stage for War ? - Michel Chossudovsky
7 - Eight children from Beit Ummar facing suspension from their village of residence
Settlers Attack Internationals Accompanying School Children on Shuhada Street
Israeli settlers storm into Palestinian home, occupy residence
Confined Cruelty : Israeli Treatment of Palestinian Minors - Graham Peebles + LINKS
8 - On the Death of Shaima Alawadi, Murdered by a decade of militarist demagoguery - Justin Raimondo
9 - U.N. gets reports of child soldiers with Syria rebels
Shocking Report Reveals Terrorists' Crimes in Syria
WESTERN PSY-OPS AGAINST SYRIA : When Mrs Assad’s "Shopping" Becomes a "Crime Against Humanity" - Finian Cunningham
10 - U.S. Leaders Had Better Heed Israel's Warnings on Iran - Ari Shavit
11 - Who Is Normal ? - Lawrence Davidson
12 - Imperial Ignorance - Aijaz Zaka Syed
13 - Mohamed Merah : Secret Service Informant ?
14 - THE PENTAGON'S SECRET NUCLEAR AGENDA : "Privatizing Nuclear War", Review of Michel Chossudovsky's Book - Sherwood Ross
15 - Pentagon Wants More of Your Money to go to Israel - Bob Johnson
16 - The Massacre of the Afghan 17 and the Obama Cover-Up - Prof.James Petras,
17 - TBTF Get TBTFer : Top 5 Banks Hold 95.7% Or $221 Trillion Of Outstanding Derivatives - Tyler Durden
18 - The Ascendence Of Sociopaths In US Governance - Doug Casey
19 - MALI : US BEHIND MILITARY COUP, Mali coup led by US-trained captain
20 - Symmetry of Slaughter - Gwynne Dyer
21 - Good Night, America, and Good-Bye - Philip Giraldi
22 - PAKISTAN OBSERVER : Billions in cash smuggled out of Afghanistan
23 - Obama Takes Bush’s Secrecy Games One Step Further - Glenn Greenwald
24 - Mom of Murdered Obama Gay Lover Speaks Up - Dr. Eowyn
WHITE HOUSE RAMPS UP DAMAGE CONTROL OVER OBAMA CHICAGO GAY HISTORY - Wayne Madsen
25 - Greek Government Robbed Public Institutions to Complete the Bond Swap - John Ward
26 - YUGOSLAVIA, 78 DAYS 1999 NATO AIR RAIDS : Thirteenth Anniversary Of NATO As Global War Machine
27 - INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW
28 - Legislating Greater Wall Street Theft - Stephen Lendman
29 - Barack Obama and the KGB - Mikhail Kryzhanovsky
30 - HURT : Obama’s ‘flexibility’ to lie after election
31 - 450 Million More Reasons, To Isolate Zionist-Israel - Jim Kirwan
32 - Israel Surrenders Credibility - Jim Kirwan
33 - Hitler's First Murder - Henry Makow Ph.D.
34 - Hitler's favorite Jew : The strange case of Dr. Eduard Bloch
35 - Stalin Funded Hitler - Henry Makow Ph.D.
36 - A LUCID LOOK AT LUCIFER - Dr. Harrell Rhome
All articles are reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and are for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. The material presented underneath does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the editor. Then : everybody should do research of his own and check for deception or some 'agenda', as always it is : 'Caveat Lector'!
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1 - Engaging Gilad Atzmon : The Video
Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon, one of Europe’s finest jazz musicians, was in Washington, DC in mid-March for the first time at the end of a multi-city North American grassroots tour to discuss his recently published and highly controversial book, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics.
As Atzmon was speaking on the East Coast at the end of his tour, Israel ended several months of calm in Gaza by assassinating Zuhair al-Qaisi, head of the Popular Resistance Committee, on March 9. The Israeli assassination provoked rocket attacks from Gaza militants. Subsequent Israeli air strikes on Gaza killed 27 Palestinians, including two children, and destroyed 32 homes, a school, a playground and an office of the Red Crescent. Two days after a March 12 truce was declared Israeli missiles struck again….
Regrettably, instead of uniting to criticize Israel for launching its lethal attacks on Gaza, 23 respected Palestinian writers and activists used their talents and energy to gather signatures on a statement calling for “The Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon,” published on March 13.
Atzmon wrote a response the following day—the very day the Washington Report sponsored a hard-hitting interview with Atzmon by Prof. Norton Mezvinsky, Connecticut State University Professor of History Emeritus, in Washington, DC. Many activists told friends on our staff they were afraid to come to the discussion after reading the anti-Atzmon statement by the Palestinian activists.
We hope you’ll watch the video of Atzmon addressing the charges frequently levied against him in his March 14 interview with Prof. Mezvinsky. Decide for yourself—should Atzmon continue his frank discussion of Jewish identity, or should his voice be silenced?
Large numbers of activists have already made up their minds, and have written letters and articles in support of Atzmon. In fact, people who had never heard of him have now flocked to Atzmon’s Web site, www.gilad.co.uk, to discover for themselves what he has to say.
The video of the entire event is now posted, in four segments, on the Washington Report’s Web site,
www.wrmea.com.
''Jewish Survival Greatest Miracle in History''
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Itroduction by Gilad ATzmon : The following is taken from Arutz 7, the Israeli right wing news outlet. It is a glimpse into Jewish ideological supremacy and exeptionalism. It also proves a clear continuum between Jewish right wing nationalist and expansionist philosophy and some Rabbinical teaching.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/
Jewish Survival Greatest Miracle in History
South Africa's Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein: Jewish survival in the sweep of history is a greater miracle than the Red Sea splitting.
South Africa's Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein's message for Passover is that Jewish survival is the greatest open miracle in history.
"To see the Jewish people alive and well and thriving is to witness a greater miracle than even the splitting of the sea," Rabbi Goldstein said, quoting Torah luminary Rabbi Yaakov Emden. The Book of Exodus describes the miraculous splitting of the Red Sea to allow the Jews to cross it while walking on dry land, thereby escaping the Egyptians (ED : There was NO Red Sea splitting, because the Israelites - NOT the Khazars from the Caucasus, who now call themselves ashkenazi jews - escaped from Egypt via the Sea of Reeds in the Nile Delta).
"In our lifetimes, we have witnessed some of the most remarkable miracles of Jewish history," the Rabbi said. "After the devastation of the Holocaust (ED : The Holocaust was a holohoax with 273.000m victims, which allowed the Zionists to get a part of Palestine and to scare a large number of Ashkenazim out of Europe, into Israel), a rational observer could have said, 'that is a death blow for the Jewish people. They're finished. What sort of future can there be?'"
"Yet within three years of that, Jewish sovereignty is established in the land of Israel. In 1948, on a tiny strip of land, six hundred thousand Jews joined by millions of Holocaust survivors had to ward off ferocious attacks by enemies (ED : killing unarmed Palestinian civilians) on all sides - and did so in one military victory after another.”
"With great miracles and signs and wonders... The reunification of Jerusalem, the recapture of the Temple Mount. And in the midst of all of these military dangers, absorbing millions of immigrants from all over the world... from Russia, from Ethiopia.
“Building a thriving economy… (ED : laundering money, facilitating organized crime, & white slavery, stealing technology from the USA and running an extortion racket that brings in 3 B USD per year from the USD alone) and becoming leaders in technology and medicine – and all fields of human endeavor,” Rabbi Goldstein proclaims, "What a remarkable divine miracle from Hashem before our very eyes!"
But the rabbi was not content to stop there, saying, "The other open miracle of our times is the rebirth of Torah learning.”
“The Holocaust destroyed everything – all of the great yeshivas of Europe...the Hassidic dynasties. Everything was laid waste. What chance was there for Torah learning to revive itself and come back to the world?
"And yet we see the most remarkable rebirth of Torah learning right across the world,” Rabbi Goldstein said.
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2 - Empires Then and Now
By Paul Craig Roberts
March 27, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.
The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.
In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.
Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.
America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars. So what is it all about?
The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.
The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the puppet government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.
In the New Empire success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty.
This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined.
Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens.
This truth doesn’t mean that the objects of American military aggression have escaped without cost. Large numbers of Muslims have been bombed and murdered and their economies and infrastructure ruined, but not in order to extract resources from them.
It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to extract lives from the targeted foreign populations. Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are victims of the American empire.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. www.paulcraigroberts.org
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3 - Bibi : First We’ll Take Tehran, Then We’ll Take Istanbul
By Richard Silverstein
March 29, 2012 "Tikun Olam" -- Yesterday, brought ominous news regarding yet another aggressive Israeli projection of its military power in the Mideast. Since 1967, with but a few exceptions (Osirak being one), Israel has mainly satisfied itself by retaining dominance over its frontline neighbors and not attempting to meddle in affairs of more far-flung states. But with Bibi Netanyahu’s new policy of projecting Israeli power far outside Israel’s immediate sphere and threatening Iran with attack, we have an Israel ready and willing to step far outside its former comfort zone.
To show that Bibi’s aggressive, interventionist approach isn’t a fluke, UPI reports that Israel is negotiating with Greek Cyprus for placement of an Israeli air base on the island, ostensibly to protect the new Israeli-Cypriot joint gas exploration project:
Israel is already preparing to launch a major security operation to protect the offshore fields and the attendant facilities in its waters.
This will involve missile-armed patrol vessels, round-the-clock aerial surveillance by unmanned drones and other naval detachments, primarily to defend the energy zones against attack by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed force in neighboring Lebanon.
This field is in dispute with Lebanon, which also claims title. Turkey too disputes the area on behalf of Turkish Cyprus. This certainly is one reason for the Israeli move.
But an even more important one in the long-term, is Israel confronting Turkey with its power. It’s a rather naked move. A flagrant invasion of Turkey’s sphere of influence, which can only bring a Turkish response. The response will likely come within an area under Israel’s sphere of influence. Oh say, like Gaza. Someone with a cool head ought to start looking at this developing rivalry and see where it could lead (or end).
There is only one way to resolve territorial disputes of the nature of the one concerning the Cypriot gas field, negotiation. Israel, however, doesn’t believe it negotiation. It believes in naked projections of military strength. An Israeli base on Cyprus would be a forward projection of Israeli power in the same way that the U.S. base in Diego Garcia is our forward projection of power into the Mideast (currently threatening Iran, but previously used to bolster invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan).
It’s bad enough with the U.S. making a pretense of being the cop of the world and getting itself mired in places it should never be. But do we want Israel, with its history of wars and endless bloodshed, tangling not just with Palestinians or Arab militant groups like Hezbollah, but with full-fledged regional powers like Turkey? Let’s not forget that country’s age-old rivalry with Greece which has also led to centuries of historic conflict. Now Israel is playing footsie with the Greeks and becoming best friends with the current economic basket case of Europe. Greece is only too happy to oblige and take advantage of the power Israel has to offer.
Do we really want Israel playing with fire in this way? I fear this can only end badly.
Another related matter that concerns me is the economic bonanza that this new-found oil portends for Israel, one of the most economically striated nations in the world. The new gas and oil deals promise to make the Israeli elite even richer. It will bring untold billions to Israeli politicians and generals who will flock to consult for the new enterprises (as has Meir Dagan). One place this wealth will not go, is into the pockets of those who need it most inside Israel: the poor, the disenfranchised, etc. The Haredi and Israeli Palestinian poor will stay poor. There will be few, if any programs to share the wealth or provide benefits to those in need. After all, this is Bibi Netanyahu, a disciple of Milton Friedman, an economic Hobbesian. It’s dog-eat-dog in the Likud world. Just as long as Bibi and his party cronies are taken care of, little else matters.
In truth, this would likely happen whoever was in power. The only thing that would change is the names and faces of those benefitting. Labor and Kadima would be no better as anyone who knows about Ehud Barak’s wealth-producing consulting jobs while he was out of power, is aware. So for any who believe in the dreams of liberal Zionism and the Declaration of Independence, that Israel is a nation meant to realize a vision of brotherhood, tolerance and human dignity, the coming oil boom will frustrate you. But undoubtedly, if you’re a liberal Zionist, you’ll, as Tim Hardin wrote, “still look to find a reason to believe.”
Double Speak from Benjamin Netanyahu
By Philip Giraldi
Global Research, March 29, 2012
The Passionate Attachment - 2012-03-28
The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem on March 20th described Israeli government rage at a comment made by the European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton relating to the killing of three Jewish children in Toulouse France on the previous day. Ashton decried the killing but then tied it in to equally unfortunate deaths of children in other places, including Gaza. Her comment caused Netanyahu to explode, saying he was “infuriated” by the “comparison between a deliberate massacre of children and the defensive, surgical actions” of the Israeli Defense Forces hitting “…terrorists who use children as a human shield.” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman quickly joined in, saying that Ashton should instead be thinking about the “children of southern Israel who live in constant fear of rocket attacks from Gaza.”
Where to begin? Israel’s surgical attacks have killed thousands of Gazans, including many children, and the stories about children as human shields comes from – you guessed it – Israeli government sources. The Goldstone report uncovered no evidence that there had been any use of civilians by Hamas militants. Israel has deliberately attacked schools and refugee camps, with little regard for who ends up dying. In its most recent bombings of Gaza, Israel has killed 26 Palestinians, including two children. No Israelis were injured when the Palestinians responded with homemade rockets. In 2011, 105 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, at least 37 of whom were undeniably civilians. This was up from 68 killed in 2010.
In Operation Cast Lead in January 2009, the Israelis killed at least 1100 Palestinians, using phosphorous shells and other weapons considered to be forbidden under international law. Ten Israeli soldiers died as well as 3 civilians, a Palestinian-to-Israeli rate of mortality approaching 100 to one.
The fact that Netanyahu and Lieberman can be taken seriously and reported in the New York Times when they rant about how humane the Israeli Army is demonstrates that there is an operating assumption in the media that the American public can believe just about anything when it comes to Israel. It recalls the foppish French “philosopher” Bernard Henri-Levy’s assertion that the Israeli Army is the world’s most moral. After years of being subjected to intense propaganda, maybe it’s true that the public in Europe and America have been completely brainwashed when it comes to Israel’s bad behavior.
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A MUST READ FOR ALL THE IGNORANT FOOLS IN THE PARLIAMENTS OF EUROPEAN NATO COUNTRIES
4 - Was Gaddafi really a bad guy ??
This question was asked on one of the biggest internet websites, Yahoo, two months ago.
And the best answer chosen by Voters was:
No, he was not a bad guy. In fact, Gaddafi was a hero.
He was a once-poor nomad who rose up to overthrow a brutal pedophilic monarch, fought for the rights of the poor and the women in Libya, and fought for the rights of the African continent against Western imperialism.
If it wasn't for the western propaganda machine we call the "media", Gaddafi's incredible accomplishments would have easily won him a Nobel Peace Prize and ranked him among the greatest world leaders of the past century.
Something the media would not tell you is the fact that Gaddafi largely succeeded in creating the first true modern direct democracy , unlike the fake representative democracy we have been ruled by in most so called "democratic" nations today (which are , in reality, oligarchies.)
Unlike our so called "democratic" nations where it is the politicians and banks that have all the power rather than the people, it was truly the people who had power in Libya. Gaddafi's Libya had a democracy superior to our own, which no doubt annoyed many Western nations who cannot bear the thought that a third world country could possibly have a superior political system than their own.
If anything, it is our Western nations that are much closer to dictatorships. In Libya, Gaddafi had very little real power, but he was just a leader by name . He was a leader, not a ruler, leading by example. In Libya, the people did not elect representatives or even governments but rather the people were directly involved in every decision, like a true democracy. In contrast, the people in Western nations have no say in political matters, but it is our corrupt "representatives" who call the shots, not us.
In addition, all the citizens of Libya, including women, had access to free education, free healthcare, the largest free fresh water pipe system in the world, an architectural marvel unrivalled by any Western nations, their own telecom satellite (which Gaddafi shared with all of Africa, freeing the continent from the extortionate debt that the US and EU were imposing on them for using their satellites), and Libyans were even allowed the right to bear arms.
Let us also not forget the fact that Libya was one of the poorest and most illiterate countries in the world until Gaddafi come along and developed it into the most developed nation in all of Africa, with the highest HDI in the continent, and a literacy rate rivalling the US, despite the sanctions that the UN imposed on Libya for many years. And let us also not forget that it was Gaddafi who supported Nelson Mandela in his struggle against the Apartheid regime in South Africa, at a time when the Western nations were supporting the apartheid regime and were vilifying Mandela as a terrorist. If it was not for Gaddfi's help and aid, South Africa may never have won its freedom from the apartheid, for which Mandela has thanked Gaddafi plenty of times.
Gaddafi was planning to take his ideals a step further by sharing all the oil wealth equally among the Libyan people, an idea that the rebels disagreed with, since it would mean a lot of wealthier people could lose their jobs, as well as establishing a unified Gold Dinar currency across the African Union which would be measured directly in terms of gold. Considering the large gold reserves in Libya and across Africa, such a move would have brought an end to Western capitalist imperialism in Africa, paving a better future for the continent but in turn disrupting the dollar dominated world economy which the IMF and World Bank thrive on.
The main reason why the Western world wants Gaddafi out and will resort to whatever lies possible is because he gave the third world hope for an alternative solution, one where they do not need to follow the Western capitalist "democracy" model and become victims of extortionate loans from the World Bank or IMF, but can become self dependent and have a true direct democracy that benefits the poor rather than the rich. This is something that the World Bank, IMF, or NATO, clearly did not want so they can continue exploiting Africa and the Middle East. This was reason enough to take out Gaddafi, while making up plenty of lies and propaganda to justify it like NATO always does.
Gaddafi's death is a sad day for not only Libya and Africa, but the world as a whole. For the next few years, I am sure NATO's media propaganda machine will try its best to cover up the truth and portray Gaddafi as a tyrant/dictator/boogieman he never was and attribute all sorts of heinous crimes he never committed (like the lies about him targeting civilians for which there is no evidence at all, in fact Russians monitored Libyan airspace from satellite and saw no planes taking off to bomb civilians) but the truth cannot stay hidden forever. One day in the future, the world will know the truth that Gaddafi was a hero who stood for freedom and democracy against the tyrannical capitalist imperialism of NATO and the World Bank, and more "Gaddafis" will one day rise in his place to continue his struggle against imperialism.
Lord God we pray, raise up 1000 Gaddafis to save the world.
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5 - FABRICATING A "SMOKING GUN" TO ATTACK IRAN ?
Israeli Spies Disguised as Iranian Soldiers on Mission Inside Iran
By Julie Lévesque
Global Research, March 27, 2012
A report published in The Sunday Times on March 25 suggests that “Israel is using a permanent base in Iraqi Kurdistan to launch cross-border intelligence missions in an attempt to find ‘smoking gun’ evidence that Iran is building a nuclear warhead.” (Israeli spies scour Iran in nuclear hunt, The Sunday Times, March 25, 2012)
Western sources told the Times Israel was monitoring “radioactivity and magnitude of explosives tests” and that “special forces used Black Hawk helicopters to carry commandos disguised as members of the Iranian military and using Iranian military vehicles”. The sources believe “Iranians are trying to hide evidence of warhead tests in preparation for a possible IAEA visit”. (Cited in Report: Israeli soldiers scour Iran for nukes, Ynet, March 25, 2012)
The number of Israeli intelligence missions at the Parchin military base in Iran has increased in the past few months, according to the article. During that period, Tehran has been negotiating with the IAEA which had requested to visit Parchin. According to Iran's permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, both parties had agreed in early February that the visit would take place in March. (Gareth Porter, Details of Talks with IAEA Belie Charge Iran Refused Cooperation, IPS, March 21, 2012)
The IAEA requested to visit Parchin in late January and late February, after having agreed to a visit in March. The IAEA thus requested to visit the military complex exactly at the same time Israel was intensifying its secret operations to allegedly search for a “smoking gun”.
A few years ago it has been suggested that Israel was the source of fake intelligence, a stolen laptop, related to Iran’s alleged nuclear program. The New York Times reported in 2005 on what was presented as “the strongest evidence” Iran was building nuclear weapons:
American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.
They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East. (William J. Broad and David E. Sanger Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims - New York Times, November 13, 2005)
In 2010, an investigative report suggested that those documents were fake:
The warhead shown in the schematics had the familiar "dunce cap" shape of the original North Korean No Dong missile, which Iran had acquired in the mid-1990s [...]
The laptop documents had depicted the wrong re-entry vehicle being redesigned [...]
The origin of the laptop documents may never be proven conclusively, but the accumulated evidence points to Israel as the source. As early as 1995, the head of the Israel Defense Forces' military intelligence research and assessment division, Yaakov Amidror, tried unsuccessfully to persuade his American counterparts that Iran was planning to "go nuclear." By 2003-2004, Mossad's reporting on the Iranian nuclear program was viewed by high-ranking CIA officials as an effort to pressure the Bush administration into considering military action against Iran's nuclear sites, according to Israeli sources cited by a pro-Israeli news service." (Gareth Porter, Exclusive Report: Evidence of Iran Nuclear Weapons Program May Be Fraudulent, Global Research, November 18, 2010).
The fact that Israeli intelligence officers were on a secret mission in Parchin, dressed up as Iranians and driving Iranian military vehicles, while the IAEA was pressuring Tehran to visit that precise location, raises serious questions. The stated goal of those secret missions is the search for a smoking gun. The smoking gun allegations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have proven that such evidence can be fabricated and used to launch so-called pre-emptive wars.
The Art of Warfare : Iran and The Gas Pipeline Battle"
By Manlio Dinucci
Global Research, March 29, 2012
ilmanifesto.it
Two major pipeline projects are at present vying to secure future energy supplies to Pakistan, India and China. One originates in Iran while the second one draws on reserves in Turkmenistan. The latter is promoted by an Israeli group and is supported by Secretary of State Clinton. According to Manlio Dinucci, an attack against Iran could cripple the Iranian project, which is currently ahead of the game. The question remains whether US leaders are still really in line with this strategy, as hinted in recent statements by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.
On the Washington stage, under the world’s media spotlight, Obama stated that: "As president and commander in chief, I prefer peace to war." But, he added, "Israel’s security is sacrosanct," and to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, "I will not hesitate to use force, including all elements of American power."
US nuclear weapons and their preemptive use are part of the options. Words worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. That’s the scenario. To find out what it is really all about, we need to go behind the scenes.
Leading the anti-Iranian crusade is Israel, the only country in the region which possesses a nuclear arsenal and, unlike Iran, refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Then we have the United States, the World's greatest military power, whose underlying political, economic and strategic interests, will under no circumstances allow that a state in the Middle East, namely Iran, escape its influence.
It is no coincidence that the sanctions promulgated by President Obama last November ban the supply of equipment and technologies which would "enhance Iran’s ability to develop its own oil resources." The embargo has been joined by the European Union, buyer of 20% of Iranian oil (of which about 10% is imported by Italy), and Japan, which imports a similar amount and whose need for oil has further increased as a result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This embargo constitutes a flying success for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who convinced America's allies to freeze energy imports from Iran at the expense of their own interests.
The embargo, however, is not working. Defying Washington’s ban, Islamabad confirmed on March 1st that it will complete the construction of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline. More than 2 000 km long, the Iranian section will soon see the light of day whereas the Pakistani side of the pipeline will be finished by 2014. It could, at a later stage, be extended by 600 km to reach India. Meanwhile, Russia has expressed interest in participating in the project, whose estimated cost is $ 1.2 billion. And China, which currently imports 20% of its oil from Iran, signed an agreement with Tehran in February, which contemplates an increase of half a million barrels per day in 2012. Pakistan is also expected to boost its imports of Iranian oil.
Furious, Hillary Clinton has stepped up pressure on Islamabad, using the carrot and the stick: on the one hand the threat of sanctions; on the other the offer of a billion dollars in support of Pakistan’s energy requirements. In exchange, Islmabad should abandon the pipeline with Iran and rely solely on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline, backed by Washington. Its cost is estimated at 8 billion, twice as much as originally foreseen.
In Washington, however, it is the strategic motivation that ultimately prevails. The Turkmen natural gas deposits are largely controlled by the Israeli Merhav Group, headed by Mossad agent Yosef Maiman, one of the most influential figures in Israel. But the construction of the pipeline, which in Afghanistan passes through the provinces of Herat (where the Italian troops are stationed) and Kandahar) is behind schedule. As things stand, it is the Iran-Pakistan pipeline which has the upper edge.
Unless, of course, the cards are reshuffled by a war against Iran. Even if President Obama "prefers peace."
Italian : L’arte della guerra : Iran, la battaglia dei gasdotti
Translation from Italian : voltairenet.org
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6 - Foreign Troops Inside Syria : The Failed UN Brokered "Peace Plan" Sets the Stage for War?
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, March 29, 2012
"How you define your role, and where and how you decide to pursue it, is of vital interest to the United Nations, given the long tradition of cooperation and coordination between NATO and the UN in matters of war and peace." (Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General, Address at NATO headquarters in Brussels on UN-NATO collaboration in the context of the 50th anniversary of NATO, January 1999)
In late February, 13 French military officers were arrrested in Homs at the height of the armed insurrection, pointing to the presence of foreign troops on Syrian soil in derogation of international law. The Daily Star (March 5, 2012) report suggested that the arrested officers could have been part of "a larger contingent" of French special forces operating within the ranks of the rebel Free Syria Army (FSA):
"It was not clear why the officers were in Syria, when they had arrived or whether they were part of a larger contingent in the city [Homs].
Strategic Homs was targeted in a 26-day shelling bombardment by the Syrian Army, which overran the city where anti-Assad protests and Free Syrian Army operations have been focused. (The Daily Star March 5, 2012)
The French government initially denied the report, insisting that "not a single French soldier is on Syrian soil." Yet sources confirmed that negotiations between Paris and Damascus were held, in all probability regarding the repatriation of the French military officers:
"A French Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "We deny the idea that there are French troops on the ground in Syria. A Defense Ministry spokesman added: "We have no information on this. We neither confirm nor deny it."
According to various reports in the British media, the Daily Star ... the supposed French captives were being held in a field hospital in Homs."(Report: 13 French officers captured in Syria - Israel News, Ynetnews, emphasis added)
While this arrest of military officers from a NATO member country was barely mentioned by the Western media, it is by no means an isolated incident. This is not the first time that foreign forces are arrested in Syria since the outset of the insurgency.
There is evidence of large numbers of foreign troops on the ground inside Syria including British, French, Turkish and Qatari special forces, British MI6 intelligence operatives as well a large numbers of mercenaries from Arab countries:
"As the unrest and killings escalate in the troubled Arab state, agents from MI6 and the CIA are already in Syria assessing the situation, a security official has revealed. Special forces are also talking to Syrian dissident soldiers. They want to know about weapons and communications kit rebel forces will need if the Government decides to help.
“MI6 and the CIA are in Syria to infiltrate and get at the truth,” said the well-placed source. “We have SAS and SBS not far away who want to know what is happening and are finding out what kit dissident soldiers need." " (Syria will be bloodiest yet, Daily Star). (emphasis added)
The Elites Forces UK website acknowledges that:
"British Special forces have met up with members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA)... The apparent goal of this initial contact was to establish the rebel forces' strength and to pave the way for any future training operations. ... More recent reports have stated that British and French Special Forces have been actively training members of the FSA, from a base in Turkey. Some reports indicate that training is also taking place in locations in Libya and Northern Lebanon. British MI6 operatives and UKSF (SAS/SBS) personnel have reportedly been training the rebels in urban warfare as well as supplying them with arms and equipment. US CIA operatives and special forces are believed to be providing communications assistance to the rebels." Elite Forces UK, January 5, 2012 (emphasis added)
NATO Recruits Mujahideen Mercenaries
Mercenaries from Arab countries are operating within highly trained terrorist brigades, financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In this regard, Israeli intelligence sources (August 2011) point to the direct involvement of NATO in the recruitment of jihadist "Muslim Volunteers", in coordination with the Turkish military:
"Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (,http://www.debka.com/article/21255/ Debkafile, August 31, 2011 emphasis added)
In Homs, the Al Qaeda Faruq Brigade which includes mercenaries from Libya and Iraq have been involved in terrorizing the civilian population. They "have succeeded in expelling most of the Christians in Homs and have seized their homes by force". "Snipers were stationed in the street ... preventing people from leaving their homes for two months, targeting passers-by and cars and anything that moved in the streets, adding that the terrorists also robbed houses, committed massacres, murders and kidnapping."
The Kofi Annan "Peace Plan"
The arrest of the French military officers (circa 22nd of February) --which coincided with the beginning of Kofi Annan's peacemaking mandate (February 28th)-- was hushed up by the Al Assad government, largely with a view to avoiding undue controversy within the sphere of United Nations diplomacy.
Yet the decision by the Al Assad government to avoid raising the issue of Western military support to "opposition" forces has provided Washington and its allies with the upper hand. While claiming to represent the "international community", the Atlantic Alliance is not only behind the armed insurrection, it is providing support and training to Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist brigades.
With Western forces and military advisers inside Syria, the so-called peace plan brokered by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has all the appearances of a staged event.
Peace Plan with Whom? A "Cease Fire" cannot be implemented without clearly identifying the identity of the parties involved. A real peace plan would require addressing the illegal presence of foreign military personnel on Syrian soil.
The Kofi Annan peace plan called for a cease-fire on "both sides", while failing to acknowledge that foreign forces from NATO countries are directly involved in the conflict, on the "side" of the "opposition".
Not surprisingly, immediately upon the adoption of the UN Arab League brokered Peace Plan, the "opposition" forces including the terrorist brigades, under the guidance of their foreign military handlers, decided to ignore the peace plan: renewed attacks by opposition gunmen directed against Syrian forces and civilians were reported in several cities immediately following the adoption of the peace plan. Meanwhile, the Al Assad government was urged to "halt the killings" and Damascus was casually blamed for "breaking the ceasefire".
This "scenario" had been carefully planned in advance of the adoption of the six points Peace Plan.
The Kofi Annan Peace Plan, which was endorsed by Syria, China and Russia was slated to fail from the outset. It was also intended to be used as a propaganda ploy against the Al Assad government. Immediately following the endorsement of the Annan Peace Plan, a new wave of baseless accusations was directed against the Al Assad government, accusing "Syrian forces [of] deliberately attacking children in horrendous tactics ordered directly by President Bashar al-Assad, the UN human rights chief has claimed."
The Western Military alliance is not committed to peace.
A "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) intervention under a NATO mandate remains on the drawing board of the Pentagon. Dimitry Rogozin, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister intimated last September that NATO is planning a military campaign against Syria, with specific attack scenarios. More recently, in January 2012, two months prior to the outset of the Kofi Annan Peace Initiative, Britain's Ministry of Defence confirmed that it "is drawing up secret plans for a NATO-sponsored no-fly zone [for Syria] [in coordination with its allies] "but first it needs backing from the United Nations Security Council." (Syria will be bloodiest yet, Daily Star).According to these secret plans: "fighting in Syria could be bigger and bloodier than the battle against Gaddafi". (Ibid ).
What is the role of Kofi Annan. Is it an agenda for peace? Or is a Peacemaking Psyop which is intended to set the stage for and R2P NATO "humanitarian intervention".
Prior to becoming Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan as Undersecretary of of UN Peacekeeping, faithfully served the interests of Washingon, upholding the legitimacy of US and NATO military interventions. "He was elevated to the post of Secretary-General by U.S. preference, with the U.S. vetoing a second five-year term in 1996 for his less amenable predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali...":
"As the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping for Yugoslavia, [Kofi Annan] sanctioned Operation Deliberate Force, NATO's bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. Annan's prominent support for NATO's 1999 war was significant. In an address he delivered at NATO headquarters in Brussels two months before the war, he urged NATO members to "recall the lessons of Bosnia" -- "particularly those with the capacity to act." NATO's 1999 bombing war against Yugoslavia was an early but clear example of what R2P means in the real world, long before the phrase "responsibility to protect" had entered common usage. (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson , The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus, Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights, Global Research, August 2009, emphasis added)
Lest we forget, Kofi Annan was one of main architects of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine. Under his helm as UN Secretary General, R2P was unanimously endorsed in 2005 at the U.N. World Summit. The decision, which essentially set the stage for NATO's R2P "humanitarian intervention" in Libya, called upon the international community to use all “appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means … to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” (See Carrie Crawford, The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Global Research, November 24, 2011)
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7 - Eight children from Beit Ummar facing suspension from their village of residence
by aletho
International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
March 26, 2012
Eight children between the ages of 14 to 17 years old were arrested in Beit Ummar during night raids from 6th to 11th of March conducted by the Israeli occupation forces following a nonviolent solidarity demonstration for the hungerstriker Khader Adnan on the 21st of February.
On Tuesday 20th of March the youth went to court at the Israeli military court at Ofer and faced a sentence of being banned from Beit Ummar, where they live with their families, for a period of 6 months. The youth are being accused of throwing stones at Israeli military installations. The detainees are Ayesh Khalid Sabri Awad (17 years), Basil Khalid Hassan Abu Hashim (15 years), Zain Hisham Khalil Abu Maria (15 years) Sami Amer Ahmed Abo Joudeh (16 years), Emad Mohammed Saed Solaiby (16 years), Mohab Jawdat Adi (14 years), Bilal Mahmud Awad Ayyad (16 years), and Ahmed Ali Mahmoud Solaiby (16 years).
The announcement of the sentence aroused opposition on the part of family members of the accused, leading to removal of the family members from the court and adjournment until the 25th of March. Issa Solaiby, father of Ahmed, says his son was also beaten by 4 soldiers in the court.
Hisham Abu Maria, father of Zain, claims that the children are being pressured to agree to false accusations. He said, “They made him (Zain) say he threw rocks at the soldiers even though there were no soldiers” present at the time noted in the charges.
The village of Beit ummar has around 17000 inhabitants and is surrounded by illegal, Zionist settlements. According to Issa Solaiby a member of the local Popular Committee, Beit Ummar used to consist of 33 000 dunams of land. The building of the separation wall by Israel and a road that is closed off to Palestinians took 13 000 dunams of the village land.
Since then an additional 3000 dunams have been stolen by settlers living in illegal Israeli settlements. The inhabitants of Beit Ummar suffer from violence from the settlers living in the surrounding settlements. Issa Solaiby also complains that the settlers prevent the farmers from access to their own land and destroy olive trees and grape vines.
In March the settlers living in the illegal Beit Ain settlement destroyed 14 olive trees, 21 grape vine plants, and 2 citrus trees from the village in an act of incitement.
According to Issa the settlers also enter the village with soldiers and guns to make the villagers aware of their aggressive presence. One year ago 17-year-old Yousef Ikhlayl was shot and killed by Israeli settlers as he was farming with his father. His killers remain unpunished.
Many of the villagers have been arrested and gone to jail. Imprisonment is a problem especially with young people. According to Muhannad Abu Awwad 10,000 villagers have gone to jail and at present 30 inhabitants, most of them under 16, are serving time in Israeli occupation prisoners.
Muhannad himself went to jail for two years from the age 21 until 23 and is now studying law.
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Settlers Attack Internationals Accompanying School Children on Shuhada Street
by aletho
28 March 2012
International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
Today at around 1 PM extremist settler Anat Cohen attacked a Canadian woman accompanying school children, and a few minutes later sent two teenage settlers to throw rocks at the Canadian woman and a Finnish man. The attack occurred at the bottom of the stairs connecting the Qordaba Girls School with the section of Shuhada street where Palestinians are allowed to walk.
Cohen passed the internationals in her car and stopped to talk to soldiers at the nearby checkpoint. She then reversed her car, parked next to the internationals and proceeded to shove, kick and scream at the Canadian women while soldiers looked on. Eventually a soldier came to force the internationals up the stairs, but did nothing to stop Cohen from harassing them.
A few minutes later two children who Cohen had just spoken with ran up a parallel staircase and threw rocks at the internationals from less than a foot away, hitting the Finnish man in the ear. Two soldiers watched the second attack, then turned in the opposite direction and refused to intervene. Cohen then called the police, who demanded the passports of all the internationals present, who detained them for several minutes, and then told them they were not allowed to stand at the bottom or top of the stairs. When asked why the police were doing nothing about the attacks, a soldier responded that Anat Cohen is “well known to the police” and there was “nothing to be done.”
The staircase that connects Palestinian schools and houses with Shuhada street has been a site of frequent settler attacks, particularly on girls from the nearby Qordaba school who have been stoned by settlers many times on the stairs and the area leading to it.
Internationals have been accompanying children in this area to try and prevent attacks by settlers and harassment from soldiers.
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Israeli settlers storm into Palestinian home, occupy residence
by aletho
Al Akhbar
March 29, 2012
Israeli settlers invaded a home in a Palestinian-owned building in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron and took up the apartment as their own, residents and Israeli security forces said on Thursday.
"At 1:30am we heard noises and it was the settlers," Montasser Abu Rajab, who lives on the first floor of the building in Hebron's Old City, said.
"They broke the main door and brought their furniture in, accompanied by the army, who locked us in our house," he said.
Palestinian sources in Hebron said that the property belonged to the Abu Rajab family, who had sold the second floor of the house to another Palestinian family.
But the Israeli army – who confirmed the incident – claimed that “the title to the property is contested.”
"The area has been declared a closed military zone, and soldiers have been put in place to keep the calm," a spokeswoman for the Israeli army said.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said "police have been dispatched to the scene to verify the legal status of the house and the property titles that are apparently the subject of litigation."
The settlers also claimed that they had titles to the property, which is located near a prominent religious site for both Muslims and Jews.
Speaking to Israeli public radio, right-wing Israeli lawmaker Michael Ben Ari, of the National Union party, said it was "time to recover all the Jewish homes in Hebron stolen by the enemy."
Right-wing Israeli politicians and figures often incite violence against Arabs, with Palestinians frequently attacked and harassed by settlers as well as the Israeli military, often with impunity.
House demolitions and evictions are among the serious threats indigenous Palestinians face on their native land, as Israel continues to build Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank, including in Hebron, in defiance of the international community.
Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal under international law, with the territory being only a fraction of historical Palestine on which the Israeli state is now situated.
Israel maintains a military occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, imposing harsh restrictions on native Palestinians while providing privileges to illegal Jewish settlers.
(Al-Akhbar, AFP)
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Confined Cruelty : Israeli Treatment of Palestinian Minors
by aletho
By Graham Peebles
Palestine Chronicle
March 24, 2012
For many Palestinian children their childhood is lived under a cloak of fear, and the threat of violence and abuse at the hands of an armed force that stalks the streets of their homeland.
In the eleven years since 2000, Israeli forces have killed “1,471” (1) children in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the bulk of which are aged between 13 and 17 years old. The children of Gaza have been and continue to be at greater risk, with almost a thousand murdered in the last twelve years, on the streets of their city, on their way to and from school, whilst playing with friends, shopping for their family or simply relaxing in their homes. Most are shot randomly, indiscriminately, or killed as a result of Israeli air and ground attacks. Around 50 were taken prematurely from their families by unexploded ordnance.
This latest attack on the people of Gaza began on Friday 9th March, “killing 25 Palestinians.” (2) The Israeli air force fired missiles from the comfort of their warplanes at civilians in an arbitrary way, shooting onto the streets of Gaza and into people's homes, “in the Jabaliya refugee camp that were mostly full of women and children,” (PM) The faceless attackers even shot at mourners attending a funeral. Such is the callous, vicious nature of the Israeli security forces, that kills, injures and intimidates innocent women and children, destroying all hope of living peaceful decent lives, and all in the name of ‘security’. Nonsense, this is criminal violence nothing more or less. These most recent atrocities come on the back of the massacre that took place in December ‘08/January’09, when a total of “1417” (IOAK) Palestinians were murdered, of which ‘318” (IOAK) were children and 116 women. Fresh in the children’s young memories lie the echo of that horrendous time, the constant bombardment, the loss of loved ones, and the shootings. In addition to the deaths around 1000 children were injured in the three-week assault, many children were left with severe physical disabilities and deep psychological wounds. The mental/emotional effects more difficult to see and or to treat than broken bones and scared flesh. “The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half of Gaza's children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.” (3) This is staggering but unsurprising, and the attacks this March on unarmed civilians, will serve to intensify the mental suffering and anguish that these children are living with, “both parents and psychologist fear that Gaza children could be affected psychologically in the long run.” (OP)
Children make up around 45% of the four million or so total Palestinian population in the occupied territories (4) – a fact that terrifies an aging Israel. And what impact does living under the brutal Israeli occupation have on them, are they inclined towards peace and brotherhood, is tolerance fostered in their hearts and minds or are the seeds of hate and the desire for revenge being carefully sown. Does violence ever bring peace, or perpetuate conflict. Violence we see begets not harmony but further violence. Colonel Travers: “we spoke to a psychiatrist in Gaza,” (5) who said, "We already see in our schools in Gaza the next generation of Hamas revolutionaries, children exposed to so much violence, they have no option but to terminate their childhood and move into a different frame, and the likelihood is that they will never stabilize."(Ibid) In order to justify the unjustifiable, the unjust Israel needs to instil hate into another generation of Palestinians - to maintain their (Israel’s) position as the ‘enemy within’, thereby excusing in some perverted distortion of the facts, their continued aggression, violence and violation of international laws, too many to count.
Intimidation and Torture
Palestinian children living in the West Bank and the Gaza strip under the illegal Israeli occupation are subjected to brutal treatment, illegal imprisonment, torture and intimidation by the Israeli security forces. Defence for Children International states “a pattern of systematic ill-treatment [of Palestinian children] emerges, [from their report ‘Bound, Blindfolded and Convicted’] much of which amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, as defined in the UN Convention against Torture, and in some cases, torture – both of which are absolutely prohibited.” (6) Since 1967 Palestinian children as well as adults have been subjected to Israeli Military Law, a legal system based on prejudice and short on justice. In the time since this emergency system was instigated 726,000 Palestinians have been arrested and detained. The numbers of children arrested and taken from their homes is shocking. “In the past 11 years alone, around 7,500 children, some as young as 12 years, are estimated to have been detained, interrogated, and imprisoned within this system. This averages out at between 500-700 children per year, or nearly two children, each and every day.” (BBCC) Mostly the arrested children live in villages in areas of tension, “friction points, namely settlements built in violation of international law, and roads used by the Israeli army or settlers.” (Ibid) The situation seems to be escalating particularly in certain areas of the West bank. “The extreme Golani Unit of the Israeli military is escalating its arrests of Palestinian children in Al Khalil (Hebron), targeting boys between the ages of 12 to15 years old with at least 10 reported cases of child arrests made (in early February 2012) just in the span of one week.” (7)
As well as arrests, incarceration in solitary confinement has also increased, with almost a quarter of all children arrested being held in isolation. Children, mainly boys, aged from 12 to 17 years old are forcefully taken from their family, often at night, imprisoned in a tiny, dank cell, illegally beaten and tortured, intimidated and on occasion subjected toelectronic shock treatment. Most children are detained for the terrible crime of throwing stones at soldiers armed with M16 rifles and tear gas, all courtesy of the American arms industry. Like 15-year-old Yahia, who, with four friends was arrested and taken to the [illegal] Israeli settlement of Zuffin, where their “hands tied behind their backs, they were blindfolded, before being forced to kneel on the ground for several hours.” (BBCC) The inevitable insults then began to rain down on the children. “After about two and a half hours the boys were loaded into a truck and transported to a police station ... the boys were interrogated ... the interrogator grabbed the boys head and slammed it against the wall, slapping him twice, a short time later he returned holding a small electric shock device [Taser]. ‘He placed the device on my body and I felt a great powerful shock and my body started shivering’. This shock treatment continued until ‘I couldn’t feel my arms or legs and I felt extreme pain in my head. I felt I was going to be paralysed, so I decided to confess” (BBCC) In another example of torturous abuse at the hands of the Israelis, there is 16-year-old Mohammad Shabrawi from the West Bank town of Tulkarm, arrested in January 2001, again accused of throwing stones. His ordeal mirrors in part that of Yahia - taken to a settlement, his hands tied and being forced blindfolded to kneel on the asphalt for an hour or so, before being taken to “Cell 36, deep within Al Jalame prison in northern Israel.” (8) The Guardian reports: “It is one of a handful of cells where Palestinian children are locked in solitary confinement for days or even weeks. One 16-year-old claimed that he had been kept in Cell 36 for 65 days.” (Ibid) Mohammad spent “17 days in solitary, apart from interrogations. He first saw a lawyer 20 days after his arrest, he said, and was charged after 25 days” and the effect of this terrible ordeal on the boy, since his release, he said, he was "now afraid of the army, afraid of being arrested." His mother said he had become withdrawn.” (Ibid)
The use of hand ties and blindfolds is extensive, in 2010 the UN documented 90 cases of “ill treatment” of Palestinian children in Israeli detention (9), of which 75 had their hands tied behind their backs and were also blindfolded. Almost a third of children were under 15 years of age. Of the 90 detained “62 children reported being beaten, 35 children reported position abuse and 16 children were kept in solitary confinement. In three cases, children reported the use of electric shocks on their bodies. Particularly concerning was the fact that there was an increase in documented cases of sexual violence” (UNDOPI). All of this contravenes international law and conventions signed and ratified by Israel and the democratic principles Israel so loudly proclaims. Mark Regev, the chief Israeli purveyor of propaganda and deceit, and Spokesman for Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu said, according to the Guardian, “The test of a democracy is how you treat people incarcerated, people in jail, and especially so with minors.” (TG) Democracy damned by words of duplicity. Much of the mistreatment exercised towards Palestinian children not only contravenes international law, but also violates Israel’s own domestic laws. According to Israeli Law, “Interrogation of a minor may be conducted only by an interrogator who is trained as a youth interrogator. A parent is allowed to be present at all times,” (10) and ”Minors have the right to consult with the parent before the interrogation.” (BTSR)
When in Israeli custody, children are violently interrogated; they are shackled, blindfolded and bound to a chair whilst being questioned. They are verbally insulted "You're a dog, a son of a whore is common. Many are exhausted from sleep deprivation. Day after day they are fettered to the chair, then returned to solitary confinement.” (TG) Eventually the majority of children sign confessions that they later state were coerced, “Children under interrogation unsurprisingly eventually admit to the ‘crimes’, DCI “in the end at least 90 percent will plead guilty, as this is the quickest way out of a system that denies children bail in 87 percent of cases.” (BBCC) Accusations of crimes justifying these illegal detentions are commonly, throwing stones, or occasionally Molotov cocktails at soldiers or settlers – both of whom, let us remember, are illegally present upon Palestinian land. A few are arrested for “more serious offences such as links to militant organisations or using weapons,” states the Guardian.
Major Violation, Minor Insecurity
And what ‘National security information’ is being elicited from the interrogation of these children, who the Israelis are abusing? “They are pumped for information about the activities and sympathies of their classmates, relatives and neighbours.” (TG) Within walls of intimidation a child can be forced to betray their friends and families, eliciting the names of other stone throwers is a primary aim of the torturer. B’Tselem: “One method the police use to identify juvenile stone throwers is incrimination: the police arrest one or more youths, they are required to give names of other youths whom they saw throwing stones, and these youths are then arrested and required to provide the names of others, and so on.” (BTSR) The children under interrogation in a frightening isolated place, far from home, are under great emotional stress and inevitably give up the names of friends, the experience then iscompounded by the added trauma of guilt.
Children are mostly held inside Israel itself, which restricts access to legal support and excludes family members from visiting, their freedom of movement is constrained under the occupation, the necessary permit to visit the prisons is often impossible to obtain. Families are therefore unable to support their children through the ordeal of confinement. Holding children in prisons inside Israel is in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits such transfers. According to DCI, “testimonies [from 310 children] reveal that the majority of children are taken away to an unknown location for interrogation.” (BBCC) This process of arrests, detention and torture operating inside Israel and outside international and national law, offers the victims no legal recourse, DCI states that “there is a general absence of effective complaint mechanisms.” (Ibid)
Legally Binding, Illegally Bound
The Israeli judicial system as it currently pertains to Palestinian children, allows illegal practices to take place within the walled settlements – themselves illegal, inside police stations and Israeli prisons. International law on the rights of the child, to which Israel is bound, is clear and extensive: “The main document establishing the rights of children is the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the UN in November 1989. Israel signed the Convention in July 1990 and ratified it in August 1991.” (BTSR) In the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, we find: “Condemning the targeting of children in situations of armed conflict and direct attacks on objects protected under international law, including places that generally have a significant presence of children, such as schools and hospitals.” (11) Schools are repeatedly targeted by Israeli security forces, according to the UN in 2010 there was an increase in the number of attacks on education institutions. The UN continues its findings, “these attacks resulted in damage to schools or interruption of education, placing the safety of the children in Gaza and the West Bank at risk. The majority of cases involved the presence of Israeli security forces within school compounds following raids, forceful entry, and search and arrest operations, including the use of tear gas on students.” (UNDOPI) All international treaties and conventions signed by the lawbreaker, Israel, safeguard children in conflict, and Israel ignores them all. DCI: “These treaties relevantly provide that: in all actions concerning children their best interests shall be a primary consideration; children should only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time;” (BBCC) Held for ‘17 days in solitary’ as Mohammed was, is neither short nor appropriate, indeed it is illegal. It is one example within a catalogue of atrocities that sees Israel contravening another convention, breaking yet another international law and doing so with impunity. This must stop, urgent action is required to safeguard the children of Palestine and protect them from the tyranny that is Israeli policy in the OPT’s.
In order to fuel what is a raging furnace of legal standards raging around Israel, let us add The Fourth Geneva Convention, which “grants special protections to minors” (IOAK) and provides 146 articles that protect in law the lives of all Palestinians living under the illegal Israeli occupation. Israel is in breach of them all. Indeed ‘grave breaches’, which in itself constitutes war crimes, “the world has seen those [grave breaches] inflicted every day by Israel against the Palestinian people living in occupied Palestine: e.g., willful killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army and Israel’s illegal paramilitary settlers.” (Ibid) Israel is guilty of ‘grave breaches’ of the convention and the more serious offense of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ against Palestinians “as determined by the U.N. Human Rights Commission” (Ibid), which is the “legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” (Ibid) The argument that Israel is or has in fact already committed the crime of genocide, is powerful and to many indisputable.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, crimes against humanity; titles that all fit Israel bespoke. Call it what you will, the actions of Israel in the OPT’s are vile, murderous, calculated and illegal. It is for the international community acting in unity, and led by the UN to finally stand up and act to protect the lives of the innocent men, women and children of Palestine, lifting the shadow of constant fear, intimidation and aggression from their lives. Humanity is one. Together we must stand in the face of injustice, violence and hate to safeguard the lives of the innocent, the oppressed the defenceless.
Notes:
(1) If only Americans Knew. (IOAK) http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/dec08.html
(2) The Palestine monitor (PM) 13th March 2012 http://www.palestinemonitor.org/?p=4401
(3) Occupied Palestine (OP) 17th March 2012
(4) See Wikipedioa.
(5) See Mondoweiss.
(6) Defence for Children International report, bound-blindfolded-and-convicted-children-held-military-detention-2012 (BBCC)
(7) See International Solidarity Movement.
(8) The Guardian (TG) The Palestinian children – alone and bewildered – in Israel's Al Jalame jail
(9) United Nations Developments in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel (UNDOPI)
http://www.un.org/children/conflict/english/palestine.html
(10) B’TSELEM report No Minor Matter: Violation of the Rights of Palestinian Minors Arrested by Israel on Suspicion of Stone-Throwing (BTSR)
(11) OHCHR Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc-conflict.htm
- Graham Peebles is Director of The Create Trust (www.the createtrust.org), a UK registered charity Supporting fundamental Social change and the human rights of individuals in acute need. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: graham@the createtrust.org.
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New book shows how the PA enriched an elite and normalized occupation
Hana al-Shalabi's hunger strike: Listen to Ali Abunimah interview on Flashpoints
Plan for Negev mass expulsions moves forward
BDS victory: Ahava products dropped by major retail chain in Norway
Inside the home of Hana Shalabi her pain, struggle and absence are deeply felt
Video: Brandeis students disrupt panel by anti-Palestinian lawmakers
BDS roundup: Gearing up for a global BDS day of action
South Africans recall their own history during Israeli Apartheid Week
8,000 West Bank children arrested since 2000, says new report
Imperfect revolution: Palestine's 15 March movement one year on
Video emerges of Israeli mob shouting "Death to the Arabs" that attacked Palestinians at Jerusalem mall
British MP links Toulouse killings to movement to boycott Israel
In Canadian first, Carleton University students pass Israel occupation divestment resolution by large margin
Palestine, on World Water Day
Book review: "Patriot Acts" tells shocking stories of post-9/11 injustice
New report documents systematic abuse of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention
"Dismayed" B'Tselem scolds Palestinian rights groups for "conduct," speaking out over Olmert gala
Obfuscation never helped anyone: the Palestinian fiscal crisis
WATCH: Solidarity with hunger striker Hana al-Shalab
Poverty drives Palestinian children to work in Israel's agricultural settlement industry
B'Tselem role in J Street's gala featuring Olmert "incredibly damaging" says Palestinian rights group PCHR
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8 - On the Death of Shaima Alawadi
Murdered by a decade of militarist demagoguery
By Justin Raimondo
March 26, 2012 "Antiwar" -- It sickens me to write this, to report on the latest manifestation of the hate that has enveloped my country and spread out across the world like a giant oil spill, but the death of Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi woman and mother of five, is a moral obscenity – a crime for which the War Party must take responsibility.
On Wednesday, in the quiet San Diego suburb of El Cajon, California, the teenage daughter of Shaima Alawadi returned home to find her mother drowning in a pool of blood. There were signs of forced entry at the back of the house. Someone had broken in and beaten her mother nearly to death with a tire iron.
Next to her body was a note: “Go back to your own country, you terrorist.”
A similar note had been found tacked to the family’s door a few weeks earlier, but Shaima had dismissed it as a kid’s prank.
This kind of hate is nothing new for San Diego. In 2010, a plan to build a mosque in nearby Temecula resulted in a series of protestdemonstrations by local nut-jobs. A woman in a hijab was hauled off a Southwest Airlines flight in at San Diego airport in 2011 by TSA agents, and told the captain didn’t “feel comfortable” with her on the flight: this was around the same time braying demagogue Peter King(R-New York) was holding hearings on the “Muslim fifth column in America.” Last year, a similar “go back to where you came from” message was delivered by someone who repeatedly punched a Muslim cab driver, who had been observed praying. See here, here, andhere for more evidence of the climate of hate darkening the otherwise sunny skies of this California redoubt of bigotry and military families.
If you want some idea of what’s going on in Southern California, these days, take a look at this video of a demonstration in Yorba Linda,
where an inter-religious charity event for the homeless was surrounded by hundreds of screeching banshees, screaming their hatred of Muslims. And lest you think this is just a fringe phenomenon, note that no less than three elected officials addressed this hate-fest: congressmen Ed Royce and Gary Miller, and Villa Park councilwoman Debra Pauly – all three of them Republicans, naturally.
As children and women in hijabs walk with quiet dignity into the charity venue, the crowd unleashes its fury of hate: “Go home, go home, go home!” they yell. Is it a coincidence that this is the very same message in the note from Shaima’s killer?
While Ms. Pauly is clearly deranged – as she herself admitted onstage, in a moment of candor (just compare this and this) – the two congressmembers tried to give their hate a relatively reasonable façade. Now that the rhetoric they endorsed has claimed the life of an innocent woman in a grisly nightmarish attack, one wonders if they’ll apologize, or take some responsibility for what occurred. They have blood on their hands: they might as well have bashed that tire iron into Shaima’s skull themselves.
But of course there will be no apology, no remorse from these hate-filled cretins: justice will have to wait for the day they meet their Maker and he hurls them into eternal darkness.
This latest violent outrage against decency and morality underscores a point I have been making for quite some time: that we are living in a society where sickness is rapidly becoming the “norm.” Yes, mental sickness – and, more than that, a moral sickness, eating like a cancer at our very core. One symptom: no one is surprised by these outbreaks of violent evil. Not even an intelligent evil, one that picks its victims with care: there have been acts of violence committed against Sikhs – who are from India, and are very far from being Muslims – because they wear turbans. That’s the mentality we’re dealing with here: the mentality of ill-educated and all-too-typical Americans, who are so bathed in their own poisonous excretions that they actually consider themselves Christians. If you listen to Pauly’s remarks at the hate rally, linked above, you’ll note she actually has the nerve to reference God and the Bible, of all things, in the midst of her tirade.
How is this possible? How is it that a religion supposedly based on “love” and “turn the other cheek” is invoked by a woman who exudes hatred, and who wants to profit politically by appealing to the basest instincts? It’s as if the leader of a lynch mob had invoked the Sermon on the Mount.
As one watches the video of the entire protest, one cannot help but compare the Muslim attendees at that charity event to the earlyChristian martyrs: they, too, endured the spittle of the leering, jeering mob. Why can’t Pauly see what is so visible?
Although I believe in individual responsibility, I don’t really blame Pauly any more than practically anyone else: like most people, she takes on the colors of her environment. She merely embodies a larger phenomenon – a polity in the final stages of moral degeneration, a mindless mob looking for a scapegoat and a pretext to victimize. “I have a son in the Marines,” she shouted triumphantly – as if that imbued her with some kind of moral immunity, and gave her a blank check to incite violence against a defenseless minority.
She knew she was inciting violence: listen to the hooting crowd and tell me they aren’t itching to kill. Congressman Royce knew it, too: so did Gary Miller, who looked a bit uncomfortable up there on the podium as the hate rose up and filled the air like a poison gas.
We saw it in Norway, when Anders Breivik slaughtered his victims in the name of a holy war against Islam, and we are seeing it today here in America in the heinous murder of a defenseless woman whose only “crime” was to seek refuge in the nation that had decimatedher homeland. She and her husband – who provided “cultural sensitivity” training to US troops deployed to Iraq – lived in this country for 15 years, but had only moved to El Cajon in the past few weeks.
Unfortunately, no amount of cultural sensitivity training is going to solve the problem at the heart of this incident, because nothing can erase the record of the past decade or so, in which the foreign policy of the United States has been focused like a laser on the task of subjugating much of the Muslim world. The war of vengeance we are waging, in Afghanistan and around the world, necessarily nurtures the kind of hate that motivated Shaima’s killer.
Constantly reinforcing and ratcheting up hatred of Muslims, per se, is not just the work of the neoconservatives who led us into Iraq and preached a doctrine of perpetual war. It is also the work of alleged “liberals” like those in the Obama administration who, when asked to justify the continued wars, refer back to the 9/11 attacks as readily as George W. Bush ever did. These same “liberals” cavil at every criticism of Israel, and join with the neocons in smearing anyone who dares raise this forbidden topic. Like Carl Levin, the powerful Democratic Senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who is calling for a naval blockade of Iran, the prospect of another war of conquest in the Middle East has them licking their chops – convinced it’ll be yet another great victory in the war on terrorism for Barack Obama.
Murder, murder everywhere – in Afghanistan, where a rampaging US soldier killed 16 Afghan civilians, half of them children, and in a quiet Southern California suburb, where Shaima’s 17-year-old daughter found her mother on the floor, her brains bashed in, next to a note that echoed the slogans shouted by Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Pamela Geller, Rep. King, Rep. Royce, Rep. Miller, Newt Gingrich, and all the rest of the Republican haters and militarists.
They all have Shaima’s blood on their hands. What’s ugly is that, lacking any moral instinct, they aren’t even trying to wash it off. They feel no more remorse for the death of an innocent woman than a hawk feels after it has killed a rabbit. This is where a decade of constant warfare, and – arguably – the modern trend toward moral relativism and nihilism, has led us.
A decadent culture, in its last stages of decomposition, nearly always exhibits signs of a false vitality, a faux resurgence centered around defeating largely imaginary enemies and entertaining fantasies of martial greatness. But this is no more indicative of real living energy than the spasmodic twitching of a recently decapitated corpse. The old America is dead, if it ever existed: in its place is Zombie America, which is animated only by the memory of past greatness. Bankrupt both financially and philosophically, with a political class that long ago lost any sense of responsibility and is rapidly driving us over a cliff, America is no longer “the land of the free and the home of the brave” – it’s the land of willing slaves and the home of the walking dead. Dead, that is, to the heritage and spirit of what had once been the greatest of republics, and is now an empire in the last throes of its decline.
Shaima was killed because she wore the hijab, and yet we are living in a world where a major Western country has outlawed this religious garb. Amid all the debate over campaigning by some “progressives” to boycott products from Israeli settlements, we hear nothing of any campaign to boycott French products for singling out a particular religious minority. What if they had banned the wearing of yarmulkes?
The President recently remarked that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon [Martin],” the young African American recently killed by an overzealous member of a “neighborhood patrol.” One wonders what it takes to get the President to notice a victim of a vicious racist murder that doesn’t involve someone who looks like a member of his own family. Al Sharpton and MSNBC may not be whipping the public up into a frenzy over the murder of Shaima Alawadi, but then again, that’s a good reason to notice it, and come out with a strong statement against this kind of hate. President George W. Bush, for all the evil he wrought, had the moral sense to condemn the sentiments that motivated Shaima’s killer (or killers) the moment they reared their ugly heads. Will Obama have the basic decency to do the same? Or is he so afraid of the zombies who believe he’s a secret Muslim that he doesn’t dare speak up?
I’m betting on the latter, but I’m open to being surprised.
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard(Prometheus Books, 2000), Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (ISI, 2008), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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9 - U.N. gets reports of child soldiers with Syria rebels
Mon, Mar 26 2012
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Syrian rebels fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad have been accused of using children as fighters in violation of international conventions banning the recruitment of child soldiers, a senior U.N. official said on Monday.
The U.N. concern about the possibility that Syria's opposition may be using child soldiers follows last week's report from the New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch that armed Syrian opposition groups have kidnapped, tortured and executed members of supporters of Assad and members of his security forces.
"We are receiving allegations of children with the Free Syrian Army," Radhika Coomaraswamy, U.N. special representative for children and armed conflict, said in response to a question about Syria's rebels. She gave no details.
"We haven't been able to verify or check" the veracity of those allegations, Coomaraswamy added.
Earlier this month the International Criminal Court in The Hague convicted Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of using child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Coomaraswamy said on Monday that she welcomed that guilty verdict.
The main focus of her news conference was South Sudan, Africa's youngest country and a region that has long been a concern for those opposed to the use of child soldiers.
Coomaraswamy said was encouraging that the South Sudanese army, the SPLA, has released some 3,000 children from its ranks and expects to free another 2,000 in the near future.
(Reporting By Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Doina Chiacu)
© Thomson Reuters 2011.
Shocking Report Reveals Terrorists' Crimes in Syria
Global Research, March 28, 2012
Fars News (FNA)
A new report published by a German daily revealed the violent and shocking crimes committed by the terrorists fighting President Bashar Assad's government in Syria.
The report revealed that the Syrian rebels have formed their own laws, courts and death squads in Baba Amr neighborhood in the restive city of Homs and beheaded the captured army soldiers.
The report, published by Spiegel Online on Monday, discloses violent measures by the anti-government armed groups, laying bare the other side of the unrest in the Middle Eastern country.
Hussein, one of the rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad, is quoted in the report as saying that he himself decapitated four army soldiers who had been detained by gunmen.
Hussein said that he beheaded the first victim, a Shiite soldier in mid-October, 2011. He had simply grabbed a knife and beheaded the soldier who had knelt down in front of him.
The soldier had been captured out of sheer "bad luck", said Hussein.
While he is a member of a rebel death squad killing government forces in the name of the "Syrian revolution", there are others who are responsible for torturing captured soldiers.
Many rebels can torture, but not everyone can kill, admits Hussein, who is now receiving treatment in a hospital in the Lebanese city of Tripoli where he and his fellow companions are openly talking about torturing and killing Syrian army soldiers.
"But I do not know why killing is not difficult for me," he added.
Hussein's life story demonstrates the course of actions rebels have taken during more than a year in the Arab state.
The report further divulges that Syrian rebels in Homs have since August, 2011 begun regular execution of Syrian soldiers.
"As of last summer, we have executed 150 men, which constitutes only 20 percent of our prisoners," claimed another hospitalized rebel identified as Abu Rami.
"Moreover, when we realize that a Sunni is spying against us we then hold a brief trial for him," Abu Rami said, adding that they have executed between 200 and 250 people in such cases.
Syria has been experiencing unrest since mid-March with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against Syrian police forces and border guards being reported across the country.
Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed, when some protest rallies turned into armed clashes.
The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.
In October, calm was eventually restored in the Arab state after President Assad started a reform initiative in the country, but Israel, the US and its Arab allies are seeking hard to bring the country into chaos through any possible means. Tel Aviv, Washington and some Arab capitals have been staging various plots in the hope of stirring unrests in Syria once again.
WESTERN PSY-OPS AGAINST SYRIA : When Mrs Assad’s "Shopping" Becomes a "Crime Against Humanity"
By Finian Cunningham
Global Research, March 27, 2012
Michelle Obama, the fashion style icon wife of US President Obama, is to have travel sanctions imposed on her by member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, including Russia, China and SCO associate state Iran.
Mrs Obama’s annual six-figure budget for designer clothes and accessories is seen as an affront to moral decency at a time when her husband is overseeing foreign wars of aggression, mass murder in several territories using aerial drones, and ordering the assassination of individuals such as nuclear scientists in Iran.
The equally fashionista-conscious wives of British and French premiers, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, are also reportedly lined up for sanctions in several Middle East and Central Asian countries owing to these leaders supporting the illegal and murderous US-led NATO bombing campaign on Libya.
By now, the reader will have spotted the above “report” to be a spoof.
However, when it comes to the real world, the European Union is applying such unprecedented measures against the wife of Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad.
“EU slaps Sanctions on Assad’s Wife,” read several newspaper headlines after Europe’s foreign ministers banned British born Asma Assad from traveling to EU states, and ordered the freezing of her personal assets.
Describing the 36-year-old Syrian First Lady as stylish, glamorous, even sexy, the combined lurid portrayal was aimed at presenting Mrs Assad as an insensitive bimbo in the face of her country’s ongoing violence and misery.
The Washington Post called her Syria’s Marie Antoinette, alleging that “while bloodshed continues, she shops for crystal-encrusted shoes”.
Despite the defamatory wording in the mainstream media written as if it were factual, it turns out that the hype about Mrs Assad, is based on “a trove” of emails obtained by the British Guardian newspaper allegedly from the private correspondence of the Assad family. Even the Guardian puts in a disclaimer about the veracity of the emails, which it says were supplied by “Syrian oppositionists”. There is more than a fair chance that the emails are bogus and forged by intelligence groups well-versed in the black arts of slander, such as MI6.
Suspicions are raised even further when such banal, personal matters such as a woman’s alleged internet shopping habits become the subject of foreign ministerial diplomacy.
British-born Mrs Assad is reputed to have splurged more than €40,000 on household and fashion items. Following the EU sanctions, which came into effect at the weekend, British foreign minister William Hague said: “It’s a sign of the determination of all the nations of the European Union and of the European Union as a whole to intensify the pressure, the diplomatic and economic stranglehold on this regime.”
Meanwhile, France’s foreign affairs minister Alain Juppé commented: “We had a certain number of indications — I am sure it has not escaped you — how the wife of president Assad uses her money. It is perhaps this that pushed us to toughen the sanctions.” Juppé’s concern with financial probity is particularly rich given that he was convicted in 2004 by a French court of “abusing public funds” and sentenced to an 18-month suspended jail term.
When one newspaper’s highlighting of a dodgy dossier of emails is regurgitated by all and sundry in the mainstream media, including so-called quality titles, and when that dodgy dossier forms the basis for EU ministerial sanctions, then there is the unmistakable whiff of a psy-ops job.
This is all the more so perceptible given that the Western governments and the slavish mainstream media have spent the most part of a year grossly distorting the reality of violence and conflict in Syria, with a view to destabilizing the alliance between Damascus and Tehran. President Bashar Al-Assad has been relentlessly accused of “butchering” his own people, despite growing evidence that his government’s forces are more accurately acting to protect the civilian population from terrorist groups armed and directed by the US, Britain, France, Israel, Turkey and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Gulf monarchies.
The Western campaign of demonizing the government of Syria has now been extended somewhat ludicrously to portraying Mrs Assad as a “callous shopaholic” who must be banned from the High Streets of all decent, law-abiding civilizations.
The irony is that the derisory cynical move by the European Union should actually be applied against known war criminals. There is ample evidence to convict past and present American and European leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity regarding military aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and ongoing towards Iran.
On the basis of legal and criminal facts, sanctions against Michelle Obama, Samantha Cameron and Carla Bruni make far greater sense.
Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa Correspondent
cunninghamfinian@gmail.com
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10 - U.S. Leaders Had Better Heed Israel's Warnings on Iran
On the one hand, we cannot exclude the possibility that the senior Israeli officials briefing us are bluffing. On the other hand, what we journalists hear in closed rooms is staggering.
By Ari Shavit
March 27, 2012 "Haaretz" -- Something quite extraordinary has been happened in recent months: Israeli leaders have taken to openly threatening to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before Christmas 2012.
In public speeches, such as the one given by Prime Minister Netanyahu at the AIPAC Conference in Washington three weeks ago, an analogy is being made between 1944 and 2012.
In private meetings there is even more direct talk of the need to take military action later this year. The message conveyed by Israeli decision makers is clear and blunt: Time is up. It’s now or never. If the international community doesn’t stop Iran by summer, Israel will soon strike.
As the current Israeli leadership is rather isolated, only a handful of journalists have been directly exposed to this somber message.
The unique situation puts us professionals in a moral dilemma. On the one hand, we cannot exclude the possibility that the senior Israeli officials briefing us are bluffing. They have a vested interest in doing so, in order to put pressure on the American administration and the world powers.
The direct talk of imminent war sometimes seems too surreal to be real.
On the other hand, what we journalists hear in closed rooms is staggering. The officials talking to us seem to be genuine and earnest. The sources are top-notch and what they say is consistent with what we know of the preparations being made by the IDF. There are no blunt lies here. There is no cheap spin. So are we to self censor priceless information indicating war might break out soon?
The latest victim of the publish-or-censor dilemma is Jeffrey Goldberg. For years, Goldberg has been the leading American journalist covering the Israel-Iran crisis. In September 2010, he published a remarkable piece in the Atlantic Monthly, forecasting an Israeli air strike on Iran. In early March 2012, he conducted an in-depth interview with President Barack Obama regarding Israel and Iran.
In his Bloomberg columns, Goldberg monitors the unfolding Mideast drama with precision and insight. And yet, distinguished columnists such as Roger Cohen of the New York Times dismiss Goldberg’s information and analysis. They claim that an Israeli attack on Iran (with no American support and cooperation) is insane and therefore would never happen.
Personally, I hope Cohen is right. An Israeli air strike on the Islamic Republic is the worst way to stop its nuclear project. But up to this point, all diplomatic attempts to stop the Ayatollahs have failed. Recently imposed sanctions are biting, but they do not really discourage the Shiite fanatics. By 2013, Israel might lose its military potency vis-à-vis Iran.
So temperatures are rising in Jerusalem. As time is running out the Goldberg scenario becomes more and more likely. What he hears from his sources, and what I hear from my sources, lead us to believe the coming summer is a crucial one. If senior Israelis are now shouting gewald, American decision makers and opinion leaders had better pay close attention.
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11 - Who Is Normal ?
By Lawrence Davidson
The “Locally Normal”
March 27, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- The vast majority of people in any given society are “locally normal.” By this I mean that they conform to the accepted outlooks and behaviors of their local society. They fit comfortably with their neighbors who fit comfortably with them. Their opinions are majority opinions that reflect local societal norms. Those norms may or may not espouse racism and a wide variety of other prejudices. It does not matter. They will be adhered to just the same because the are culturally imbedded. The “locally normal” will also adhere to their country’s standard history and mythology. Collectively, all these traits are what produce “good” citizens and so act as the glue that maintains social solidarity.
The fact that most people are “normal” in this fashion is not a mistake. There is probably a genetic inclination for such behavior. After all, if most people did not behave this way you could not maintain stable societies.
Still, there are drawbacks to being “locally normal.” For one thing, the more “normal” you are the less independent a thinker you are (at least in socio-political terms). The strange thing is that the “locally normal” would not agree that thinking outside the community box is a legitimate act of independence. Such a stance would appear, from inside the box, as not being independent so much as being antisocial and perhaps unpatriotic. And, such behavior is going to make “normal” folks suspicious and fearful. That is the genetic impulse again. Stay with the group and you stay safe. Safe from what? Safe from people on the outside, of course. If you are really looking for a “locally normal” definition of independence it is going to be an economic one: having a good job, paying your own bills, and not living with their parents.
Part II – Refuseniks – The “Locally Abnormal”
It is against this background that we might consider the plight of Israel’s refuseniks. These are Israeli Jewish citizens who are “locally abnormal” either because they refuse to serve beyond the 1967 borders (that is they refuse to go into the Palestinian Occupied Territories) or refuse induction into the Israeli military altogether. There are only between one and two thousand individuals in this group–a figure small enough to make them rare.
While there is evidence of some sympathy for the refuseniks on the far left side of the Israeli political spectrum, nothing but condemnation can be found in other quarters. Almost all Israeli politicians have labeled the refuseniks “dangerous” and some have described their behavior as treasonous and “helping the enemy.” The Israeli courts, of course, have declared that refusal to serve in the military (by all but the Ultra Orthodox) for any reason other than conscientious objection is illegal. Interestingly, one of the reasons used by the Israeli high court to condemn the actions of those who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories is that such behavior ”weakens the ties that bind us as a nation.” Thus Refuseniks are so “locally abnormal” that they usually get thrown into jail.
Nonetheless, the refuseniks continue to pop up, albeit at slow intervals. The most recent one is Noam Gur (the first refusenik in 2012). She is an 18 year old Israeli Jew who has just announced that she will refuse mandatory military service. In an open letter she announced that “I refuse to join an army that has, since it was established, been engaged in dominating another nation, in plundering and terrorizing a civilian population that is under its control.”
Ms Gur is not sure how she came by these (for Israel) “abnormal” sentiments. At the age of 15 she started trying to make sense of the Nakba of 1948. This led her to join the small number of other “abnormal” Israeli Jews taking part in Palestinian led protests in the West Bank, thus “seeing what was going on with my own eyes.” By 16 she knew that she could not “take part in these [Israeli] crimes [against Palestinians]” and that meant she could not go into the army. She has gotten plenty of negative feedback from “locally normal” Israelis securely situated within their community box, yet Ms Nur does not find this response intimidating. “I am following what I believe in,” she says, “I don’t really care what other people might have to say about it.”
Though she has little faith that Israeli society can change from within, she still urges her peers to “look into what they are doing.” As it stands now, “most 18 year olds” bound for military service “don’t really know what they’re going into. They don’t really know what is going on in the [West Bank and Gaza Strip]. They only…see Palestinians for the first time…once they are soldiers.” The vast majority of “normal” military age Israelis refuse to look before they leap into the army.
What Gur is describing is a closed Israeli society. Much like the U.S., it doesn’t matter if there is freedom of the press and speech because education and personal interaction reinforces a broad set of perceptual norms which, over time, literally come to dictate the parameters of thought. These parameters define “normality” within the nation’s local space. If, for whatever reason you find yourself outside of the box, you’re a social mistake.
Part III – Reversing the Perceptual Frame
Is it possible to defy the socially constructed definition of “local normality” that exists in Israel, or any other state for that matter, and declare on the basis of good evidence criteria for a “universal civilized normality”? Perhaps one way to do this is to play that old religious card and “appeal to a higher power.” But in this case we do not have to look to the heavens or some divine source. All we have to do is draw our criteria of behavior from sources such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Here are some criteria for “universal civilized normality” taken from the UDHR:
1. A society’s citizens are normal and civilized when they do not support their government’s practice of “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” (UDHR, Article 5)
2. A society’s citizens are normal and civilized when they do not support their government’s practice of “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” (UDHR Article 9)
3. A society’s citizens are normal and civilized when they accord all elements of their population “the right to freedom of movement and residence…. (UDHR Article 13)
4. A society’s citizens are normal and civilized when they accord all “men and women of full age,” residing within their country “the right to marry and found a family” “without any “limitation due to race, nationality or religion.” (UDHR Artical 16)
5. A society’s citizens are normal and civilized when they do not support the “arbitrarily taking of [another resident’s] property.” (UDHR Artical 17)
6. A society’s citizens are normal and civilized when they demand that all residents have “the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being….including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age…”. (UDHR Article 25).
Part IV – Conclusion
Considering this sampling of criteria for “normal, civilized behavior,” where would we rank the citizens and supporters of the Israeli state? Well, a recent poll of Israeli high school students found that fully half of them “opposed equal rights for Arabs.” Another video poll revealed that “racism is rampant among Israeli youth.” As it turns out, many Israelis do support the state’s use of torture, arbitrary arrest, restriction of movement, the arbitrary confiscation of property, placing barriers in the way of marriage, and the purposeful maintenance of less than adequate standards of living for the Palestinians under their jurisdiction. Thus, one must conclude that there is a wide gap between what we might consider to be “universal standards for civilized normality” and those standards of “local normality” in place in Israel. Therefore, it turns out that Noam Gur and other Israeli Jews like her must actually defy the majority in order to preserve “civilized normality”
Maybe it is a thousand years of stress culminating in the Holocaust that turned today’s Jewish Zionists into such obsessively insecure people that they cannot accurately judge their own national interests. Maybe it is a variant on “the battered child syndrome” that has led the Israelis to batter the Palestinians and then, when they resist, call them anti-Semites*. Maybe the problem is that they have allowed religious fanatics and political bigots to run their country (hardly a problem unique to Israel). Whatever is going on in the heart of the “Holy Land” it certainly has not produced a majority of “normal and civilized” people. But it has allowed for a small minority of them. And with this minority lies whatever hope there might be for a “normal and civilized” future for Israel.
Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic work is focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He also teaches courses in the history of science and modern European intellectual history.www.tothepointanalyses.com
*ED NOTE : THERE WERE NO ''THOUSAND YEARS OF STRESS'', THERE ARE TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF LIES.
1) 95% OF JEWS ARE ASHKENAZIM, DESCENDANTS FROM THE KHAZARS FROM THE CAUCASUS, WHO ORIGINALLY SPOKE KUWASH. THIS WAS TRADED FOR JEWISH-GERMAN = SHID-DEUTSCH/JIDDISH AFTER THEY MOVED INTO POLAND. MUSLIM UIGUR IN CHINA ARE NOT ENTITLED TO A PART OF SAUDI-ARABIA AND MECCA. JUST BECAUSE THEIR ANCESTORS ONCE EMBRACED THE FAITH ORIGINATING THERE. ASHKENAZIM HAVE NO BUSINESS IN PALESTINE.
2) THERE WERE EXPULSIONS OF JEWS FROM MANY EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AND CITIES. THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH CHRISTIANS BEING JEALOUS OF THE SUCCESSES OF JEWS, BUT WITH THEIR USURY, WHITE SLAVERY AND RITUAL KILLINGS. PLENTY OF BOOKS - ALSO WRITTEN BY JEWISH AUTHORS - PROVE THIS.
3) IN JEWISH GETTO'S THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A REIGN OF TERROR, IN WHICH THE RABBIS AND THE RICH JEWS OPRESSED THE OTHERS.
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12 - Imperial Ignorance
By Aijaz Zaka Syed
March 26, 2012 "The News" -- So this is how the cookie crumbles. From burning books to butchering babies, it seems everything is fair game as the victors near their tether. Four years after Barack Hussein Obama offered a “new way forward”; the gulf between America and the world’s Muslims is at its widest.
The horrific details of the Panjwai massacre, with first person accounts recounting how the brave US soldiers coolly went about killing women and sleeping children, have poured fuel over a land already ablaze. Obama has condemned the massacre but chose to describe it as “an isolated incident.”
Is it really now? Why do I feel we have been here before? From bombing wedding parties to striking funeral processions and even cemeteries, there’s been a long trail of such ‘isolated incidents.’
Interestingly, the latest in Yankee shenanigans coincides with a groundbreaking book that seeks to make sense of Uncle Sam’s worldview. Andrew Alexander’s America and the Imperialism of Ignorance is a damning critique of the US foreign policy over the past six decades and offers a cogent analysis of the military-industrial complex mindset that commands and dictates the actions of the most powerful nation on the planet.
Armed with facts and arguing from a historical perspective, the Daily Mail columnist elucidates how America and the West spent trillions of dollars in taxpayer’s money for decades in fighting – or pretending to fight – an enemy whose threat proportions, intentions and capabilities were ludicrously exaggerated to justify the absurdly inflated defence budgets and militarisation of the US and Europe.
During the Cold War, Europe and virtually the whole world was divided into two perpetually bickering camps with everyone being forced to take sides. Germany was split between the two camps with Berlin, divided by that obscene wall, becoming the theatre of the proxy war and intrigues and machinations of the two superpowers.
The proxy war was only part of the story. For nearly half a century the world teetered on the edge of a nuclear catastrophe as the US-Nato and Soviet nuclear arsenals targeted each other, promising assured destruction of life on the planet in a matter of minutes. Scores of millions of soldiers and gigantic war machines on either side remained in perpetual battle mode, ever ready to annihilate each other.
Alexander argues that all that could have been avoided and was totally avoidable as the Russians never posed a serious threat to the West. For all his savagery towards his own people, sending tens of thousands of them to their death in Siberia, Stalin knew his limits and had no intentions of stepping out of Eastern Europe to take on the West.
If it weren’t for America’s “imperial ignorance,” suggests Alexander, “coupled with its arrogance and immense naivety,” the world would have been a safer place and would never have witnessed the dangerous uncertainty that it did during the Cold War years, constantly living under the shadow of a nuclear cloud.
President Truman, the small town politician who found himself in the big shoes of the visionary Roosevelt on his death, ignored the close partnership of the US, Soviet Union and Britain during World War II, as they took on Hitler’s Germany, to conjure up a Soviet Armageddon and the fantasy of red tide flooding the world. (By the way, it was Truman who defying his advisers and global public opinion rushed to recognise the new state of Israel on the Palestinian land.)
So from the end of World War II to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, it was America’s awesome power coupled with its paranoia that made the world a much more dangerous place than it ought to have been, posits Alexander.
You would think this would have changed with the end of the Cold War and the elimination of the threat that the “evil empire” allegedly posed. But two decades after the Cold War ended, the US and Russia are yet to stand down and eliminate the deadly payload at their disposal, even a quarter of which is enough to destroy the planet many times over.
What is more, trillions of dollars in taxpayer’s money continue to be poured into the bottomless pit that is America’s all-consuming war machine, which now lords over the whole planet with military bases and presence in almost all parts of the world. America’s war hasn’t stopped for a moment since it stepped out of its borders to join the Great War.
First, it was Communism. Now the enemy is Islam, or Islamist terrorism, as the euphemism goes. With the demise of Soviet Union and the worldview that it represented, the military industrial complex and the gargantuan corporate war industry needed a new enemy and where none existed they had to invent one to justify their existence. Which Samuel Huntington promptly did for them, fashioning Islam as the new enemy of the West. And the 9/11 provided the ready excuse.
So as part of this constant tilting at the windmills, Washington had to invent Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The tyrant who had to crawl into a hole to save himself when they came for him was painted as the greatest threat to the civilised world. And it’s no coincidence that soon after the ‘shock and awe’ of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the target shifted next door with the talk of Tehran’s mythical nukes targeting Europe and America’s allies in the Middle East.
Predictably, the first major deal that the free and democratic Iraq has clinched is the purchase of 36 F16 fighter jets from its benefactor at a cost of $6 billion dollars even as the war weary people are still yearning for luxuries like clean water, electricity, schools, hospitals and, above all, security. There will be more such business opportunities tomorrow if the much sanctioned Iran goes the Iraq way after Washington and Israel are done playing good cop-bad cop. Meanwhile, with the constant talk of Iran’s military ambitions, nervous neighbours are goaded into buying more and more military junk from you know who.
Alexander explains it all as the “imperial ignorance.” But is it ignorance? It’s more like imperial hubris combined with single-minded, old-fashioned pursuit of commerce. Uncle Sam, or the corporate military machine that drives him, knows full well what is going on. In the end, it all comes down to business. And there’s nothing like a good war in distant lands to drive your business and fill your coffers, consequences for the rest of the world be damned.
Most reasonable people, including those in the West, know that it’s not “Islamist terrorism” but unfair Western policies and wars that gave birth to groups like Al-Qaeda and are the real threat and impediment to world peace.
“The American folk hero is the swaggering gunman. Let loose in the wider world, he is a threat to peace,” says the veteran British foreign affairs commentator, urging Britain and Europe to intervene. “It is our duty to warn him off this course, not trail along in his wake.”
You would think old Europe would do that after all that it lived through in the last century. However, instead of talking some sense into their Atlantic cousin, they joined in the fun. Clearly, the two disastrous wars weren’t enough to teach the continent the right lessons.
The writer is a commentator on Middle East and South Asian affairs. Email: aijaz.syed@hotmail. com
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video's
13 - Mohamed Merah : Secret Service Informant ?
Media Watch France 24
Was Mohamed Merah a French secret service informant? So says a former head of an intelligence agency here in France.
Also, an Italian paper says Merah travelled to Israel in 2010 - with the support of French spy agencies.
March 29, 2012
Mohamed Merah: secret service informant? por tvnportal
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30938.htm
VIDEO: The Nature and Significance of NATO-US-Israeli War Crimes
Special interview with Gilad Atzmon
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/atns-special-interview-with-gilad-atzmon.html
Excerpt: Rare peek at nightly raids of West Bank village (Nabi Saleh) with English subs (video)
Middle of the night in Nabi Saleh, one Palestian family, one Israeli raid
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/excerpt-rare-peek-at-nightly-raids-of-west-bank-village-nabi.html
Israeli mob shouting 'death to Arabs' (video)
Notorious for their racist chants at soccer matches, hooligan supporters of the Israeli team Beitar Jerusalem flooded a Jerusalem mall this week and beat up several Arab employees, Israeli media reported.
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/israeli-mob-shouting-death-to-arabs.html
VIDEO: Palestine: A Time To Cry
Watch this moving video on GRTV
VIDEO: US/NATO Proxy War in Syria Follows Precedent Set in Bosnia
Find out more on GRTV
VIDEO: Cocaine Unwrapped: An In-Depth Look at the "War on Drugs" Today
See the trailer for this groundbreaking documentary on GRTV
VIDEO: Nuclear Testing and America's Continued Nuclear Arms Race
Find out what's really being tested at the Lawrence Livermore Lab on GRTV
VIDEO: Tokyo Soil Samples Would Be Considered Nuclear Waste in the US
Get all the information on GRTV
VIDEO: Responsibility to Protect (R2P): Imperial Conquest by Another Name
Find out more in this week's GRTV Feature Interview
- by Pepe Escobar, James Corbett - 2012-03-26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpO3PArAoUQ&feature=player_embedded
Vladimir Putin - Russia Issues International Arrest Warrant For Rothschild & Soros
Israel did 9/11
http://wikispooks.com/wiki/9/11:Israel_did_it
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=21166&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=
http://www.forbiddenknowledgetv.com/videos/911/911-suspects-explosive-connections.html
Jim Stone on Project Camelot Radio with Kerry Cassidy - March 28th, 2012 - Inside Fukushima
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzQM6x-t8sw
ROTHSCHILD AND THE FEDERAL RESERVE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzLIz27GqWs&feature=related
Larry Silverstein Makes 7 Billion from WTC 9-11 insurance policy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=qLK0c-pgJBQ
"I Am No Longer the Monster I Once Was" - Video
"The reason I am doing this," said former Marine Jon Turner, Until people hear what is going on with this war, it will continue to happen, and people will continue to die.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30913.htm
Humor Quantitative Easing Explained - 2 Minute Video
"Avery Largenumber, Economist" Originally aired on ABC TV http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30919.htm
Read the report that could have cleared Megrahi of Lockerbie-bombing : pdf format - File may take a moment to download. http://bit.ly/GRN5s4
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14 - THE PENTAGON'S SECRET NUCLEAR AGENDA: "Privatizing Nuclear War"
Review of Michel Chossudovsky's Book
By Sherwood Ross
Global Research, March 27, 2012
U.S. corporations that reap billions from making nuclear weapons have "a direct voice" as to "their use and deployment," according to professor Michel Chossudovsky in a recently released book.
What's more, he says, if nuclear weapons are integrated with conventional armaments, a decision to use nuclear weapons could be made by battlefield generals.
On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held at U.S. Strategic Command headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base, Omaha, Neb., that brought together more than 150 "senior executives from the nuclear industry and military-industrial complex," writes Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.
"This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima". According to a leaked draft of the agenda, the secret session included discussions on "mini-nukes" and "bunker-buster" bombs with nuclear warheads "for possible use against rogue states," Chossudovsky writes in his new book, "Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War," (Global Research, 2012)
The meeting was intended to set the stage for the creation of a new generation of "smaller," "safer," and "more usable" nukes for use, in America's 21st Century "in-theater nuclear wars", Chossudovsky writes. No members of Congress representing the public were in attendance.
Barely a week prior to this meeting, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) disbanded the advisory committee that had "independent oversight" over the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including the testing and/or use of new nuclear devices.
The nuclear industry -- which makes both nuclear devices and their missile delivery systems -- Chossudovsky writes, is controlled by a handful of defense contractors, led by Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, BAE Systems Inc, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Boeing. The sales of these six largest US defense contractors (including the UK-US conglomerate BAE Systems Inc) was in 2010 of the order of 242.6 billion dollars, with recorded profits of $16.4 billion.
Meanwhile, "the Pentagon has unleashed a major propaganda and public relations campaign with a view to upholding the use of nuclear weapons for the 'defense of the American homeland'," Chossudovsky writes. He points out:
"In an utterly twisted logic, nuclear weapons are presented as a means to building peace and preventing ‘collateral damage.’ The Pentagon had intimated that the ‘mini-nukes’ with a yield of less than 5,000 tons are harmless to civilians because the explosions ‘take place under ground.’ Each of these ‘mini-nukes,’ nonetheless, constitutes -- in terms of explosion and potential radioactive fallout -- between one-third and six times the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945."
Based on the twisted notion that the "mini-nukes" are "not dangerous for civilians," the U.S. Congress in 2003 gave the Pentagon the "green light" to use tactical nuclear weapons in "conventional war theaters" (such as the Middle East and Central Asia) alongside conventional weapons, Chossudovsky writes.
This new nuclear doctrine, he goes on to say, turns reality upside down not only by denying the horrific impact of nuclear weapons but by asserting "in no uncertain terms that nuclear weapons are 'safe' and their use in the battlefield will ensure 'minimal collateral damage' and reduce the probability of escalation." Chossudovsky notes, "The issue of radioactive fallout is not even acknowledged with regard to tactical nuclear weapons; neither is the issue of 'Nuclear Winter'."
To justify pre-emptive military actions, U.S. National Security Doctrine (NSD) requires the fabrication of a terrorist, or "outside enemy," threat, the author writes. As well, the doctrine needs to tie said terrorist threats to "state sponsorship" by so-called rogue states. Here, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) directed against Al Qaeda fits right in as essential building blocks in the Pentagon’s GWOT campaign.
Under the latest nuclear doctrine, the Pentagon discards the policy of fighting in "self-defense" in favor of "anticipatory action." This war would allow the use of nuclear weapons against a "rogue enemy" who is alleged to plan to develop WMD at some undefined future date, Chossudovsky writes.
"Nukes would serve to prevent a non-existent WMD program (e.g Iran) prior to its development," the author explains. "This twisted formulation goes far beyond the premises of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review and NPSD 17, which state that the U.S. can retaliate with nuclear weapons if attacked with WMD."
And by integrating nuclear with conventional armaments on the battlefield, "there is the risk that tactical nuclear weapons could be used without requesting... presidential approval," Chossudovsky writes. He asserts, "combat commanders would be in charge of Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO), with a mandate not only to implement but also to formulate command decisions pertaining to nuclear weapons."
Moreover, because these "smaller" tactical nuclear weapons have been reclassified by the Pentagon as "safe for the surrounding civilian population," thereby allegedly "minimizing the risk of collateral damage," there are no overriding, built-in restrictions to prevent their use, Chossudovsky writes. Stockpiled tactical nuclear weapons, he concludes, are now considered to be an integral part of the battlefield arsenal, "part of the tool box," so to speak, used in conventional war theaters.
Order your SIGNED copy of "Towards a World War III Scenario" by Michel Chossudovsky
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15 - Pentagon Wants More of Your Money to go to Israel
by Bob Johnson
The Pentagon is pressuring Congress to take even more money out of the pockets of American tax payers and send it to the Jewish state of Israel. This particular demand for more cash for Israel is so Israel can buy more Iron Dome anti-rocket systems. And it is in addition to the over $3 BILLION the political prostitutes are already giving Israel every year!
Since Congress is overflowing with opportunistic career political whores who only live for their own advancement and who know who calls the shots, the Pentagon should find no resistance to their demand for yet more tax payer money for Israel.
The Iron Dome is built by the Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. which means 100 percent of the American tax dollars will go directly to Israel and be paid by the Israeli government to an Israeli company and will NOT benefit any American whatsoever. This demolishes the empty argument kosher conservatives like Rush Limbaugh use to justify American welfare to Israel because the money is spent buying American weapons. Even if the money was spent buying American weapons, it would still be wrong arming an aggressive nuclear armed and Old Testament believing nation who steals from and murders its neighbors with those weapons. Add to this moral violation the additional moral violation of taking the cash from the American people to give to corporations for the Jewish state’s benefit and it is wrong any way you look at it.
To think that during an economic depression which we are currently in in which millions of Americans are out of a job or have a job that doesn’t even pay them enough to live on, with thousands of veterans and children living on the streets, with austerity measures and cuts aimed at working people being promoted and taking place that the traitors of both parties and the United States military/Pentagon would even consider committing such treason against the American people and the American ideal is beyond comprehension.
In 2011 Israel sold American missiles to Communist China. Fortunately, they were discovered in Finland on their way to be delivered to the Communists. In spite of this betrayal by Israel, U.S. politicians continue to put Israel’s interests way above America’s interests.
The Iron Dome system is promoted as Israel protecting itself from unwarranted rocket attacks from the Palestinians. However, the most recent Palestinian attacks were caused by Israel’s assassination of a Palestinian leader. Israel claims the Palestinian, Zuhair al Qaissi. Like the neoconservative war on Iraq, this Israeli assassination of al Qaissi was preemptive. He was not threatening Israel, he was simply driving in his car when he was murdered by Israel.
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16 - The Massacre of the Afghan 17 and the Obama Cover-Up
By Prof.James Petras
March 27, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- The March 11 Massacre of the 17 Afghan citizens, including at least nine children and four women, raises many fundamental issues about the nature of a colonial war, the practices of a colonial army engaged in a prolonged (eleven-year) occupation and the character of an imperial state as it commits war crimes and increasingly relies on arbitrary dictatorial measures to secure public compliance and suppress dissent.
After the cold-blooded murder of the 17 Afghan villagers in Kandahar Province the US military and the ever-complicit Obama regime constructed an elaborate cover-up, exposing the Administration up to charges of conspiracy to suppress the essential facts, falsify data and obstruct justice: All are grounds for criminal prosecution and impeachment.
This massacre is just one of several hundred committed by US armed forces according to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. It could ruin the Obama presidency, by putting him on trial for conspiracy to obstruct justice and arguably send him to jail for war crimes.
Obama’s deliberate lies about the events surrounding the massacre and the fundamental responsibility of the high military command for the crimes committed by its troops underscores the breakdown of the occupation of Afghanistan, the very centerpiece of Obama’s war policy. The President of the United States has personally played a major role in the cover-up. From a political vantage point, the executive conspiracy charge has wider and deeper implications than the massacre itself, as horrible as it is.
The Massacre, the ‘Official’ Story (1st version) and the Cover-Up
According to the US military command in Afghanistan and the Obama regime, at 3am on March 11, 2012 a deranged soldier walked off a Special Forces Base in rural Kandahar Province and without command authority entered two villages (two miles apart), shot and killed 17 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children and wounded an unspecified number of villagers; then he doused their bodies with gasoline, set them on fire and hiked back to base to surrender himself to his commanders.
This ‘surrender’, the Pentagon claims, was recorded on video and no less than the President of the United States, Barack Obama, vouched for its authenticity as conclusive proof for the story of a lone, unbalanced mass murderer. The military command quickly whisked the initially unnamed murderer out of the Afghanistan to the maximum security federal prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and only then identified the madman as a 38-year old, multi-decorated, 11-year army veteran, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. The US has rejected all attempts by the Afghan President, the Afghan Army Chief and members of the Afghan Parliament to interview Sgt Bales, gather testimony and bring the suspect to trial in Afghanistan.
According to an independent Afghan parliamentary investigation led by Sayed Ishaq Gillami, and initial investigations by General Sher Mohammed Karimi of the Afghan Army, who interviewed residents of the two villages, there are significant contradictions in the US military’s and President Obama’s “official story”. Eye witnesses have testified that up to 20 soldiers were involved, aided by a helicopter. What they described was typical of a US Special Forces’ night time raid, which involved the systematic breaking down of doors, rousing the sleeping families and shooting Afghan victims.
Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, finds the villagers’ version of events quite plausible for the following reasons: The villages, where the murders occurred, were two miles apart, making it highly unlikely that a lone, fully armed solder could haul a multi-gallon jerry can of gasoline from his base to the first sleeping village, break down the doors of one or more homes, commit the murders, douse and burn his victims and then proceed on foot two miles further on to the second village, shoot, kill and burn the next set of unarmed villagers and then walk back to his base and surrender.
It makes far more sense that a heavily armed group of Special Forces troops, engaged in village ‘pacification’ operations, left their base inmilitary vehicles, passed through the gate in the wee hours of the morning, on a routine official operation, authorized by the bases military command and something went wrong. What was supposed to have been a typical midnight assault on a “pacified” village in search of Taliban supporters, turned into the mass murder of children and their mothers in bed with virtually no adult males (husbands, fathers, uncles or brothers) present to protect them. Typically, all Afghan farmers keep weapons in their homes, but these villages had been disarmed by the Special Forces and the adult men had either been detained in earlier sweeps or were in hiding from just such brutal operations in the expectation that their wives and children would not be attacked.
Whatever triggered the mass murder of mothers and children in their nightclothes in those villages in Kandahar, one thing is clear: the President of the United States conspired with the US military command to obstruct justice in the cover-up of a heinous war crime, afelony punishable with impeachment.
When the implausibility first ‘official’ story became embarrassingly evident to the most superficial observer, the Obama ‘cover-up’ crew released a new version on March 26: According to the revised version of events, the lone, deranged Sgt. Bales committed the first massacre in the early morning hours of March 11, walked back to base for breakfast and lunch and then walked out again to a second village for another round of mass murder – before returning and turning himself in to his commander posing for the video.
Why the Obama Cover-Up: Military Demoralization and the Iran War
Why would President Obama engage in such a clumsy cover-up further eroding US relations with the Afghan President Karzai, the Afghan military and especially the Afghan people? Why would he risk charges of conspiracy to protect war criminals by insisting on an easily refutable cover-up?
The story of the alleged assassin, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, provides some leads about the larger crisis facing the imperial military. Bales is a ‘decorated’ soldier rewarded for his three tours of combat duty in Iraq and his more recent Afghan assignment where he would have participated in similar types of Special Pacification Operations among civilians in the countryside in Afghanistan. In the days after news of the massacre leaked out, a furious Afghan President Karzai claimed that “hundreds” of similar massacres had been perpetrated by US and NATO forces and had gone unreported in the Western media and unpunished. Karzai has repeatedly called for an end to US Special Forces’ night raids on sleeping villages. But, until now, there had been no need for a US Presidential cover-up up.
With the approaching US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the growing expressions of militant Afghan nationalism, the Obama regime must hide the true nature of the occupation. Washington’s Afghan clients can no longer ignore US war crimes against innocent children and women and other non-combatants. This is especially true in the so-called ‘pacified’ villages where the adult Afghani men have already been arrested in sweeps or driven into hiding and with the few remaining, disarmed and ‘under the control’ of the US Special Forces.
Considering even the US official story, why would the Special Forces commanders in charge of the Sgt. Bales base ignore the loud bursts of gunfire and screams of women and children in a village within 100 meters of its perimeter at 3 am? According to their official version, the base command only became aware of the massacres when Sgt. Bales walked back to base, raised his hands high for a video-op and confessed to killing and desecrating the bodies of 17, mostly children and women.
Obama has tried to sell the ‘confession’ video as proof of the ‘official version’ of events to a skeptical Afghan President Karzai who contemptuously demanded the ‘alleged’ video be turned over for a detailed examination for authenticity. Obama’s refusal to release the video tends to confirm his role in the cover-up. Obama’s contention that a ‘lone unbalanced gunman’ committed the crime is completely self-serving and exposes serious and deep structural problems with the war in Afghanistan.
US combat troops in Afghanistan are demoralized and angry because their military commanders have marched them into a cul de sac – a dead end. They are engaged in a long, losing war where every dead US soldier is accompanied by scores who are maimed, blinded and mentally traumatized. In Obama’s war, the wounded are patched up and recycled back into the same meat grinder in an increasingly hostile environment, where rape, torture, maiming and murder become their only ‘recreation’. Sgt. Bales was coerced into multiple tours of duty in Iraq and then shipped off to Afghanistan, contrary to his expectations of a promotion and an end to overseas combat assignments.
There is a huge gap between the world of the political warlords in Washington and their accomplices among the warmongering ‘lobbies’ and that of the soldiers who risk their lives in imperial wars of occupation. These dispensable soldiers are repeatedly deployed to brutal colonial wars thousands of miles from their homes to confront an ‘enemy’ they cannot possibly understand. They end up brutalizing the families, friends, neighbors and compatriots of the elusive Afghan anti-colonial fighters – who are everywhere. Back in Washington none of the political war-mongers ever experience the pain and suffering of a prolonged war, which for any soldier on the battlefield, is ever present, everywhere. Soldiers, like Sgt. Bales, operate in a very hostile environment where, a roadside bomb or a grenade thrown from a motorcycle, or even a ‘trusted’ Afghan ally, who might turn his gun on his US ‘mentors,’ are omnipresent threats to their ever returning home in one piece.
Obama has to conspire with the Pentagon in covering up this mass murder, defending the officers in charge of these ‘pacified’ villages, because there are no alternatives, no back-ups, no new recruits eager to engage in the 12th year of war in Afghanistan. There are only the re-cycled killers, willing to pursue their career in ‘Special Forces’ involving ‘kill and destroy’ operations. Furthermore, Obama cannot rely on the international allies who are rushing to withdraw their own troops from this quagmire. And Obama has a problem with his allied Afghan warlords and kleptocrats, who managed to run off with over $4.5 billion dollars in 2011 (half of the entire state budget) (Financial Times, 3/19/12, p. 1). President Obama cannot allow an entire garrison, including their commanding officer to be put on trial for the war crimes in this massacre. Holding anyone, besides the hapless Sgt. Bales, accountable for the massacre would incite a general rebellion within the armed forces, or, at a minimum, further demoralize the elite Special Forces who are expected to man these long-term engagements after the regulars withdraw, which in the case of Afghanistan could last until 2024.
This issue has implications far beyond Afghanistan: Obama has developed his entire new counter-insurgency strategy centered on the easy entry and bloody exits of US Special Forces targeting over seventy-five countries. The Special Forces figure prominently in Obama’s military preparations for Syria and Iran, which have been developed at the behest of his Zionist overlords.
In the final analysis, the entire imperial military apparatus of the Obama regime, while formidable on paper, depends on the ‘Special Operations’ formations. As such, they are the centerpiece of the new imperial warfare, developed as a response to the demands for reduced ground forces, budgetary constraints and growing domestic discontent. Their ‘actions’ are designed to leave no witnesses and no embarrassments. They may be the butchers of children, women and unarmed civilians but they are the White House’s butchers.
Despite all their crimes and cover-ups, the Obama regime’s priority is to defend the empire with whatever personnel is available at his disposal. So while Sgt. Bales is in Leavenworth, the Afghan elite cry injustice, the families in Kandahar mourn their dead and the Taliban plan their revenge.
On the domestic front, Obama faces strong popular opposition to the costly unending wars, which have destroyed the US economy, and growing anger and demoralization in the armed forces. As a result of the massive popular discontent among the American people with politicians of both parties who have recklessly sent troops into anachronistic colonial wars, which serve the interest of foreign powers, the President has issued an executive decree, allowing him to assume dictatorial powers in order to militarize the entire economy, its resources and its work force. On March 16, 2012 Barak Obama issued an Executive Order-National Defense Resource Preparedness in order to sustain the global empire.
Clearly prolonged colonial wars cannot be sustained through the consent of the citizens and such wars cannot be prosecuted according to military manuals and the Geneva Conventions. At this point, only Presidential ‘rule by decree’ can secure compliance of the citizens at home and only massacres and cover-ups can sustain the colonial occupations abroad. But these are desperate and temporary: When the extreme measures have run their course there will be nothing to fall back on and nothing can save the president of a collapsing empire from the revolt of its citizens and soldiers.
James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books).
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TOO BIG TO FAIL (TBTF)
17 - TBTF Get TBTFer : Top 5 Banks Hold 95.7% Or $221 Trillion Of Outstanding Derivatives
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/26/2012
Every quarter the Office of the Currency Comptroller releases its report on Bank Derivative Activities, and every quarter we find that the Too Big To Fail get Too Bigger To Fail. To wit: in Q4 2011, of the total $230.8 trillion in US outstanding derivatives, the Top 5 banks (JPM, BofA, Morgan Stanley, Goldman and HSBC) accounted for 95.7% of all Derivatives. In some respects this is good news: in Q2, the Top 5 banks held 95.9% of the $250 trillion in derivatives. Unfortunately it is also bad news, because $220 trillion is more than enough for the world to collapse in a daisy chained failure of bilateral netting (which not even all the central banks in the world can offset). What is the worst news, is that the just released report indicates that in addition to everything else, we have now hit peak delusion, as banks now report to the OCC that a record high 92.2% of gross credit exposure is "bilaterally netted." While we won't spend much time on this issue now, it is safe to say that bilateral netting is the biggest lie in modern finance (read How US Banks Are Lying About Their European Exposure; Or How Bilateral Netting Ends With A Bang, Not A Whimper for an explanation of this fraud which was exposed completely in the AIG collapse). And just to put this in global perspective, according to the BIS in the first half of 2011, global derivative gross exposure increased by $107 trillion to a record $707 trillion. It will be quite interesting to get the full year report to see if this acceleration in gross exposure has increased. Because if it has, we will now know that in 2011 European banks were forced up to load up on several hundred trillion in mostly interest rate swap exposure. Which can only mean one thing: when and if central banks lose control of government bond curves, an rates start moving wider again, the global margin call will be unprecedented. Until then we can just delude ourselves that central planners have everything under control, have everything under control, have everything under control.
Top 5 bank derivative exposure:
Read Full Story
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18 - The Ascendence Of Sociopaths In US Governance
Submitted by Doug Casey of Casey Research
The Ascendence Of Sociopaths In US Governance
An International Man lives and does business wherever he finds conditions most advantageous, regardless of arbitrary borders. He's diversified globally, with passports from multiple countries, assets in several jurisdictions and his residence in yet another. He doesn't depend absolutely on any country and regards all of them as competitors for his capital and expertise.
Living as an international man used to be just an interesting possibility. But few Americans opted for it, since the US used to reward those who settled in and put down roots. In fact, it rewarded them better than any other country in the world, so there was nothing pressing about becoming an international man.
Things change, however, and being rooted like a plant, at least if you have a choice, is a suboptimal strategy for surviving and prospering. Throughout history, almost every place has at some point become dangerous for those who were stuck there. It may be America's turn.
For those who can take up the life of an international man, it's no longer just an interesting lifestyle decision. It has become, at a minimum, an asset saver, and it could be a life saver. That said, I understand the hesitation you may feel about taking action; pulling up one's roots (or at least grafting some of them to a new location) can be almost as traumatic to a man as to a vegetable.
As any intelligent observer surveys the world's economic and political landscape, he has to be disturbed – even dismayed and a bit frightened – by the gravity and number of problems that mark the horizon. We're confronted by economic depression, looming financial chaos, serious currency inflation, onerous taxation, crippling regulation, developing police states and, worst of all, the prospect of a major war. It seems almost unbelievable that we are talking of the US – which historically has been the land of the free.
How did we get here? An argument can be made that miscalculation, accident, inattention and the like are why things go bad. Those elements do have a role, but it is minor. Potential catastrophe across the board can't be the result of happenstance. When things go wrong on a grand scale, it's not just bad luck or inadvertence. It's because of serious character flaws in one or many – or even all – of the players.
So is there a root cause of all the problems I've cited? If we can find it, it may tell us how we personally can best respond to the problems.
In this article, I'm going to argue that the US government, in particular, is being overrun by the wrong kind of person. It's a trend that's been in motion for many years but has now reached a point of no return. In other words, a type of moral rot has become so prevalent that it's institutional in nature. There is not going to be, therefore, any serious change in the direction in which the US is headed until a genuine crisis topples the existing order. Until then, the trend will accelerate.
The reason is that a certain class of people – sociopaths – are now fully in control of major American institutions. Their beliefs and attitudes are insinuated throughout the economic, political, intellectual and psychological/spiritual fabric of the US.
What does this mean to the individual? It depends on your character. Are you the kind of person who supports "my country right or wrong," as did most Germans in the 1930s and 1940s, or the kind who dodges the duty to be a helpmate to murderers? The type of passenger who goes down with the ship or the type who puts on his vest and looks for a life boat? The type of individual who supports the merchants who offer the fairest deal or the type who is gulled by splashy TV commercials?
What the ascendancy of sociopaths means isn't an academic question. Throughout history, the question has been a matter of life and death. That's one reason America grew; every American (or any ex-colonial) has forebears who confronted the issue and decided to uproot themselves to go somewhere with better prospects. The losers were those who delayed thinking about the question until the last minute.
I have often described myself, and those I prefer to associate with, as gamma rats. You may recall the ethologist's characterization of the social interaction of rats as being between a few alpha rats and many beta rats, the alpha rats being dominant and the beta rats submissive. In addition, a small percentage are gamma rats that stake out prime territory and mates, like the alphas, but are not interested in dominating the betas. The people most inclined to leave for the wide world outside and seek fortune elsewhere are typically gamma personalities.
You may be thinking that what happened in places like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia and scores of other countries in recent history could not, for some reason, happen in the US. Actually, there's no reason it won't at this point. All the institutions that made America exceptional – including a belief in capitalism, individualism, self-reliance and the restraints of the Constitution – are now only historical artifacts.
On the other hand, the distribution of sociopaths is completely uniform across both space and time. Per capita, there were no more evil people in Stalin's Russia,Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Amin's Uganda, Ceausescu's Romania or Pol Pot's Cambodia than there are today in the US. All you need is favorable conditions for them to bloom, much as mushrooms do after a rainstorm.
Conditions for them in the US are becoming quite favorable. Have you ever wondered where the 50,000 people employed by the TSA to inspect and degrade you came from? Most of them are middle-aged. Did they have jobs before they started doing something that any normal person would consider demeaning? Most did, but they were attracted to – not repelled by – a job where they wear a costume and abuse their fellow citizens all day.
Few of them can imagine that they're shepherding in a police state as they play their roles in security theater. (A reinforced door on the pilots' cabin is probably all that's actually needed, although the most effective solution would be to hold each airline responsible for its own security and for the harm done if it fails to protect passengers and third parties.) But the 50,000 newly employed are exactly the same type of people who joined the Gestapo – eager to help in the project of controlling everyone. Nobody was drafted into the Gestapo.
What's going on here is an instance of Pareto's Law. That's the 80-20 rule that tells us, for example, that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your salesmen or that 20% of the population are responsible for 80% of the crime.
As I see it, 80% of people are basically decent; their basic instincts are to live by the Boy Scout virtues. 20% of people, however, are what you might call potential trouble sources, inclined toward doing the wrong thing when the opportunity presents itself. They might now be shoe clerks, mailmen or waitresses – they seem perfectly benign in normal times. They play baseball on weekends and pet the family dog. However, given the chance, they will sign up for the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, the TSA, Homeland Security or whatever. Many are well intentioned but likely to favor force as the solution to any problem.
But it doesn't end there, because 20% of that 20% are really bad actors. They are drawn to government and other positions where they can work their will on other people and, because they're enthusiastic about government, they rise to leadership positions. They remake the culture of the organizations they run in their own image. Gradually, non-sociopaths can no longer stand being there. They leave. Soon the whole barrel is full of bad apples. That's what's happening today in the US.
It's a pity that Bush, when he was in office, made such a big deal of evil. He discredited the concept. He made Boobus americanus think it only existed in a distant axis, in places like North Korea, Iraq and Iran – which were and still are irrelevant backwaters and arbitrarily chosen enemies. Bush trivialized the concept of evil and made it seem banal because he was such a fool. All the while real evil, very immediate and powerful, was growing right around him, and he lacked the awareness to see he was fertilizing it by turning the US into a national security state after 9/11.
Now, I believe, it's out of control. The US is already in a truly major depression and on the edge of financial chaos and a currency meltdown. The sociopaths in government will react by redoubling the pace toward a police state domestically and starting a major war abroad. To me, this is completely predictable. It's what sociopaths do.
There are seven characteristics I can think of that define a sociopath, although I'm sure the list could be extended.
Sociopaths completely lack a conscience or any capacity for real regret about hurting people. Although they pretend the opposite.
Sociopaths put their own desires and wants on a totally different level from those of other people. Their wants are incommensurate. They truly believe their ends justify their means. Although they pretend the opposite.
Sociopaths consider themselves superior to everyone else, because they aren't burdened by the emotions and ethics others have – they're above all that. They're arrogant. Although they pretend the opposite.
Sociopaths never accept the slightest responsibility for anything that goes wrong, even though they're responsible for almost everything that goes wrong. You'll never hear a sincere apology from them.
Sociopaths have a lopsided notion of property rights. What's theirs is theirs, and what's yours is theirs too. They therefore defend currency inflation and taxation as good things.
Sociopaths usually pick the wrong target to attack. If they lose their wallet, they kick the dog. If 16 Saudis fly planes into buildings, they attack Afghanistan.
Sociopaths traffic in disturbing news, they love to pass on destructive rumors and they'll falsify information to damage others.
The fact that they're chronic, extremely convincing and even enthusiastic liars, who often believe their own lies, means they aren't easy to spot, because normal people naturally assume another person is telling the truth. They rarely have handlebar mustaches or chortle like Snidely Whiplash. Instead, they cultivate a social veneer or a mask of sanity that diverts suspicion. You can rely on them to be "politically correct" in public. How could a congressman or senator who avidly supports charities possibly be a bad guy? They're expert at using facades to disguise reality, and they feel no guilt about it.
Political elites are primarily, and sometimes exclusively, composed of sociopaths. It's not just that they aren't normal human beings. They're barely even human, a separate subspecies, differentiated by their psychological qualities. A normal human can mate with them spiritually and psychologically about as fruitfully as a modern human could mate physically with a Neanderthal; it can be done, but the results won't be good.
It's a serious problem when a society becomes highly politicized, as is now the case in the US and Europe. In normal times, a sociopath stays under the radar. Perhaps he'll commit a common crime when he thinks he can get away with it, but social mores keep him reined in. However, once the government changes its emphasis from protecting citizens from force to initiating force with laws and taxes, those social mores break down. Peer pressure, social approbation and moral opprobrium, the forces that keep a healthy society orderly, are replaced by regulations enforced by cops and funded by taxes. Sociopaths sense this, start coming out of the woodwork and are drawn to the State and its bureaucracies and regulatory agencies, where they can get licensed and paid to do what they've always wanted to do.
It's very simple, really. There are two ways people can relate to each other: voluntarily or coercively. The government is pure coercion, and sociopaths are drawn to its power and force.
The majority of Americans will accept the situation for two reasons: One, they have no philosophical anchor to keep them from being washed up onto the rocks. They no longer have any real core beliefs, and most of their opinions – e.g., "We need national health care," "Our brave troops should fight evil over there so we don't have to fight it over here," "The rich should pay their fair share" – are reactive and comforting. The whole point of spin doctors is to produce comforting sound bites that elude testing against reality. And, two, they've become too pampered and comfortable, a nation of overfed losers, mooches and coasters who like the status quo without wondering how long it can possibly last.
It's nonsensical to blather about the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave when reality TV and Walmart riots are much closer to the truth. The majority of Americans are, of course, where the rot originates – the presidential candidates are spending millions taking their pulse in surveys and polls and then regurgitating to them what they seem to want to hear. Once a country buys into the idea that an above-average, privileged lifestyle is everyone's minimum due, when the fortunate few can lobby for special deals to rake something off the table as they squeeze wealth out of others by force, that country is on the decline. Lobbying and taxation rather than production and innovation have never been able to sustain prosperity. The wealth being squeezed took centuries to produce, but it is not inexhaustible.
In that light, it was interesting to hear Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, speak about the lower, middle and upper classes recently. Romney is an empty suit, only marginally better than the last Republican nominee, the hostile and mildly demented John McCain. In any event, Romney is right about the poor, in a way – there is a "safety net," now holding 50 million people on Medicaid and 46 million on food stamps, among many other supposed benefits. And he's right about the rich; there's no need to worry about them at the moment – at least until the revolution starts. He claims to worry about the middle class, not that his worries will do anything to help them. But he's right that the middle class is where the problem lies. It's just a different kind of problem than he thinks.
People generally fall into an economic class because of their psychology and their values. Each of the three classes has a characteristic psychological profile. For the lower class, it's apathy. They have nothing, they're ground down and they don't really care. They're not in the game, and they aren't going to do anything; they're resigned to their fate. For the upper class, it's greed and arrogance. They have everything, and they think they deserve it – whether they do or not. The middle class – at least in today's world – is run by fear. Fear that they're only a paycheck away from falling into the lower class. Fear that they can't pay their debts or borrow more. Fear that they don't have a realistic prospect of improving themselves.
The problem is that fear is a negative, dangerous and potentially explosive emotion. It can easily morph into anger and violence. Exactly where it will lead is unpredictable, but it's not a good place. One thing that exacerbates the situation is that all three classes now rely on the government, albeit in different ways. Bankruptcy of the government will affect them all drastically.
With sociopaths in charge, we could very well see the Milgram experiment reenacted on a national scale. In the experiment, you may recall, researchers asked members of the public to torture subjects (who, unbeknownst to the people being recruited, were paid actors) with electric shocks, all the way up to what they believed were lethal doses. Most of them did as asked, after being assured that it was "alright" and "necessary" by men in authority. The men in authority today are mostly sociopaths.
WHAT TO DO
One practical issue worth thinking about is how you, as someone with libertarian values, will manage in a future increasingly controlled by sociopaths. My guess is poorly, unless you take action to insulate yourself. That's because of the way almost all creatures are programmed by nature. There's one imperative common to all of them: Survive! People obviously want to do that as individuals. And as families. In fact, they want all the groups that they're members of to survive, simply because (everything else being equal) it should help them to survive as individuals. So individual Marines want the Marine Corps to survive. Individual Rotarians want the Rotary Club to prosper. Individual Catholics leap to the defense of the Church of Rome.
That's why individual Germans during World War II were, as has been asserted, "willing executioners" – they were supporting the Reich for the same reasons the Marines, the Rotarians and the Catholics support their groups. Except more so, because the Reich was under attack from all sides. So of course they followed orders and turned in their neighbors who seemed less than enthusiastic. Failing to support the Reich – even if they knew it had some rather unsavory aspects – seemed an invitation to invading armies to come and rape their daughters, steal their property and probably kill them. So of course the Germans closed ranks around their leaders, even though everyone at the top was a sociopath. You can expect Americans to do the same.
Americans have done so before, when the country was far less degraded. During the War Between the States, even saying something against the war was a criminal offense. The same was true during World War I. In World War II, the Japanese were all put in concentration camps on groundless, racially based suspicions of disloyalty. During the early years of the Cold War, McCarthyism was rampant. The examples are legion among humans, and the US was never an exception. It's even true among chickens. If a bird has a feather out of place, the others will peck at it, eventually killing it. That out-of-place feather is deemed a badge of otherness announcing that its owner isn't part of the group. Chicken Autre must die.
Libertarians, who tend to be more intelligent, better informed and very definitely more independent than average, are going to be in a touchy situation as the crisis deepens. Most aren't going to buy into the groupthink that inevitably accompanies war and other major crises. As such, they'll be seen as unreliable, even traitors. As Bush said, "If you're not with us, you're against us." And, he might have added, "the Constitution be damned." But of course that document is no longer even given lip service; it's now a completely dead letter.
It's very hard for an individualist to keep his mouth shut when he sees these things going on. But he'd better keep quiet, as even HL Mencken wisely did during both world wars. In today's world, just keeping quiet won't be enough; the national security state has an extensive, and growing, file on everybody. They believe they know exactly what your beliefs, desires, fears and associations are, or may be. What we're now facing is likely to be more dangerous than past crises. If you're wise, you'll relocate someplace where you're something of an outsider and, by virtue of that fact, are allowed a measure of eccentric opinion. That's why I spend an increasing amount of time in Latin America. In truth, however, security is going to be hard to find anywhere in the years to come. The most you can hope for is to tilt the odds in your favor.
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19 - MALI : USA BEHIND MILITARY COUP, Mali coup led by US-trained captain
Global Research, March 24, 2012
Russia Today
A US Africa Command official confirmed on Friday the leader of military coup d’état in Mali has visited the US on several occasions, receiving professional military education.
Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo participated in the America’s International Military Education and Training program, sponsored by the US State Department, Public Affairs representative Patrick Barnes revealed to The Washington Post.
Foreign officers are handpicked for the program by US embassies in respective countries. The Malian army is very small, consisting of only 7,000 personnel. With the given small number of officers in this army, it is no wonder that Sanogo had a good chance to get to the US.
On March 22, just a month before a presidential election in the country, Sanogo and soldiers loyal to him stormed the presidential palace in the capital Bamako and overthrew President Amadou Toumani Toure.
The reason for the rebellion was stated as the existing leadership’s relaxed attitude towards Touareg tribes’ insurrection in this north-western African country.
The coup claimed three lives, leaving about 40 wounded.
Amadou Haya Sanogo has made a statement saying he is not going to stay in power for long. He promised that as soon as the army manages to contain a Tuareg insurgency in the northern part of the country a new election will be called.
The captain said he will be glad to continue to serve in the army after the election.
He also claimed the country’s deposed president is being held safely not far from the capital, and promised to bring Amadou Toumani Toure to court.
Rebel soldiers are currently busy looting throughout the city of Bamako. Sanogo denounced their actions, blaming the looting on "ill-intentioned individuals" trying to turn public opinion against the coup.
Despite condemning the coup, the US is not planning to reconsider its $140-million aid program to Mali in 2012.
Conversely, on Friday the African Union suspended Mali’s membership of that organization.
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20 - Symmetry of Slaughter
By Gwynne Dyer
March 29, 2012 "Cyprus Mail" -- AFTER Mohamed Merah died in a hail of French police bullets last Thursday, people who had known him talked about “a polite and courteous boy” who liked “cars, bikes, sports and girls.” His friends had trouble believing that he had murdered seven people, including three children, in a ten-day killing spree in the city of Toulouse, and none of them believed his claim to be a member of al-Qaeda. “Three weeks ago he was in a nightclub,” one said.
The following day, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was charged with murdering seventeen Afghans, including nine children, in a lone night-time attack on sleeping civilians in two villages near Kandahar two weeks ago. “I can't believe it was him,” said Kasie Holland, his next-door neighbour in Lake Tapps, Washington. “There were no signs. It's really sad. I don't want to believe that he did it.”
There are startling parallels in these cases, right down to the fact that Mohamed Merah held a little girl by the hair as he shot her in the head, and that Robert Bales allegedly pulled little girls from their beds by their hair to shoot them. And there is, of course, the underlying symmetry of the motives: both men were responding, in confused ways, to the “war on terror” that former US president George W Bush launched after the 9/11 attacks.
In Bales’ case, the trigger may have been a fourth deployment to a combat zone after three one-year deployments in Iraq since 2003, during which he suffered concussion and lost part of a foot. He also had money problems, but it was Afghans he shot, not bankers. In his mind it was Afghans, Muslims, whatever, who were causing his problems.
Both men had had run-ins with the law: Bales for assault in 2002, Merah for stealing a woman’s handbag in 2007. But Merah spent two years in prison for the mugging, and while there, as is often the case with teenage Muslim thugs, he was converted to the extremist Islamic ideology called Salafism.
Mohamed Merah videotaped his attacks, so we know that just before he shot his first victim, an unarmed French paratrooper, Merah told him: “You kill my brothers, I kill you.” He was an unemployed small-time criminal with delusions of grandeur, and he wanted to “bring the French state to its knees” in retaliation for French participation in America’s war in Afghanistan. His claim to belong to al-Qaeda, however, was probably just a private fantasy.
Predictably, Marina Le Pen, leader of the extreme right National Front, called on French voters to “fight...against these politico-religious fundamentalists who are killing our Christian children, our Christian young men.” (She is running in next month’s presidential election, after all.) The incumbent right-wing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, says much the same thing, but less bluntly.
Yet two of the three French paratroopers Merah killed were Muslims. The other dead soldier, a Christian of West Indian origin, just had the bad luck to be in the street with two Muslim comrades when Merah found them. (He was deliberately targeting French Muslim soldiers as traitors to his cause.)
Merah was hunting another Muslim soldier when he found himself outside a Jewish school and seized the chance to murder a young rabbi, his 5- and 3-year-old sons, and 8-year-old Myriam Monsonego. It was a monstrous act, but in his disordered mind he believed that he was taking revenge for the Muslims who had been killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s no excuse, but it is an explanation. And the more relevant fact is that only one out of perhaps two million young Muslim French males has committed such an atrocity. What happened is appalling, but it is statistically insignificant. It should also be politically insignificant, but that may be too much to ask in the midst of a presidential election campaign. The United States is also heading for a presidential election this year, but the only role that the war in Afghanistan has in the campaign is ritual accusations by Republican candidates that President Obama is “soft on terror.” (On the contrary, he has become the willing prisoner of the Washington foreign policy consensus that still defends the profoundly misconceived Afghan adventure.)
As for the Bales atrocity, it is already being written off by the American media and public as a meaningless aberration that tells us nothing about US foreign policy or national character. Not so. It tells us that the character of American soldiers is no better or stronger than anybody else’s, and it is a reminder that ten years occupying a foreign country will make any army hated from without and rotten within.
The army will become even more demoralised and undisciplined if it is a professional force that rotates the same soldiers through repeated combat tours with no visible success on the horizon. Recent instances of American soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters and burning Qurans are symptoms of the same malaise that finally drove Bales around the bend. Obama should not wait until 2014. It’s time to go home.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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21 - Good Night, America, and Good-Bye
By Philip Giraldi
March 29, 2012 "Antiwar" -- It is interesting to note just how well this imperialism thing has worked for the American people. At the end of last year the U.S. was kicked out of Iraq after spending some trillions of dollars and producing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Americans. Al-Qaeda, which was not present in Iraq when the U.S. arrived, has lately been responsible for bomb attacks that have killed hundreds of Iraqis, mostly civilians. As a result of the ham-handed American intervention, Iraq’s closest friend now is not the U.S. It is Iran.
Appalled by the excesses of the U.S. military, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has followed suit, initially demanding that the U.S. restrict its soldiers to their bases, a move that would mean that the American presence in Afghanistan could well end in short order after the loss of another trillion dollars and the deaths of some tens of thousands of coalition soldiers and Afghan civilians. Even if Karzai accepts a continued U.S. presence that is more managed by his own “sovereign” government, the writing is on the wall, and all that is needed is a firm departure date. Oh, and the Taliban will definitely be coming back in one form or another.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Pakistan, the parliament is debating ending all cooperation with the United States because of the continuing drone campaign, which, true to pattern, kills mostly civilians. Pakistan is nuclear-armed and actually has real terrorists roaming its tribal regions. The departure of Pakistan from the game enables the manifest waste of the past 11 years to become completely clear, with Washington leaving Central Asia in far worse shape than it was when the U.S. Army and the CIA arrived.
How can a great nation with vast intelligence and diplomatic resources be so tone deaf and absolutely clueless? An article in last week’sWashington Post illustrates perfectly the utter futility of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The article begins:
President Obama delivered his annual message to the Iranian people on Tuesday, using a far more confrontational tone than usual to say that he will seek ways to break through the electronic curtain that Tehran has thrown over the Internet and other forms of communication. “I want the Iranian people to know that America seeks a dialogue to hear your views and understand your aspirations,” Obama said in his message to mark Nowruz, the Persian new year. “The United States will continue to draw attention to the electronic curtain that is cutting the Iranian people off from the world” he said. “And we hope that others will join us in advancing a basic freedom for the Iranian people: the freedom to connect with one another and with their fellow human beings.” Since taking office, Obama has used his Nowruz message to speak directly to Iranians in an attempt to stake out common ground between the United States and the Islamic republic.
Unfortunately, the Iranian people do not control Iran’s foreign policy, their government does. President Obama’s concern for their aspirations is as phony as his claimed desire to deliver genuine statehood to the Palestinians. Does he understand what is going on inside Iran or is he really speaking to some domestic audience? And talking about freedom of the Internet is the utmost in hypocrisy, as there is no nation that meddles more in cyberspace than the United States of America. And a more accessible Internet does not necessarily impede the march toward a war, particularly at a time when both the Israelis and Congress seem to be intent on violent confrontation no matter what Iran does. Unwillingness to talk directly to the officials who actually can make a difference is what the White House is all about because Obama intends to get re-elected and he is not about to rock the boat with the Israel Lobby. It means that nothing will happen this year, unless Israel decides to drop the first bomb. No war, no peace is precisely what the administration desires.
Who but the gaggle of foreign policy experts surrounding the three leading Republican presidential candidates, all of whom are salivating for war, can deny that America is in steep decline? If generally reliable client states such as Iraq and Afghanistan can summon up the courage to pull the plug on Obama, anyone can. Indeed, everyone should, following the model of the Egyptians, who imprisoned the usual crowd of National Endowment for Democracy activists intent on bringing the American form of government to the rest of the world. Russian President Vladimir Putin would agree with the Egyptians, wondering why there are so many American and European NGOs running around in his country telling his people what kind of pastel revolution they need to vote him out of office. U.S. democracy is just what the world needs, apparently, judging from Attorney General Eric Holder’s rationalizations for killing citizens overseas and his explication of the niceties of drone warfare. And then there is the National Defense Authorization Act’s declaration that the entire world is a battlefield and anyone can become an enemy combatant. Or the recent executive order from the White House that will enable the government to take control of all national resources in a state of emergency. And who decides when there is an emergency? The White House, of course!
When everyone finally figures out that they don’t really need what former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright dubbed the “necessary nation” that “sees far,” they will be able to take steps to put their own houses in order. A Middle East without meddling from Washington would mean that the Israelis and their neighbors might actually have to talk to each other and establish a modus vivendi. Afghans and Pakistanis would have to work things out. Iran might even decide that no one is threatening it anymore and lose some of its paranoia. Likewise for the North Koreans. Americans could go back to doing what they used to be really good at: making things, being inventive and inclusive, and living decently without having to invade anyone or tell a government or two how to behave. It would be good-bye to all the things we don’t need and good night, America, finally in a good sense.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
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22 - PAKISTAN OBSERVER : Billions in cash smuggled out of Afghanistan
Kabul—In the busy street markets of Kabul, stacks of cash sit in piles as moneychangers shout the day’s exchange rate to shoppers bustling by. Currency is bought and sold in the open air. But all the money changing hands on the streets is barely a drop in the bucket compared to all the cashbeing siphoned out of the country in suitcases, and that is not a metaphor.
“It’s hard to estimate exactly how much is going out of Afghanistan, but I can tell you in 2011, 4.5 billion was (flown) out of Afghanistan,” said Khan Afzal Hadawal, deputy governor of the bank of Afghanistan. That is just what is moving out of the Kabul airport. It is estimated $8 billion in cash was lugged out of the country last year by car, private jets and border crossings. That is almost double the entire country’s budget for 2011.
The government is trying to stop the outflow of money to other countries and encourage investment in Afghanistan. It has capped the amount ofcash that can be taken out of the country at $20,000. “We are very serious on this. It is not an easy job. Definitely there are challenges. People will try to use other channels but we will not let anybody take the physical cash out of Afghanistan,” Hadawal said.
At a dusty construction site on the outskirts of Kabul, workers use everything from a hand-powered rebar cutter to a huge tractor and loader. They are building a multimillion-dollar community. It is the dream of Afghan developer Haji Hafizullah Caravan, who hopes the government’s plan works. He and his family have made a huge investment in the capital, Kabul, constructing large self-contained communities c with mosques, schools and hospitals. The idea is to make people feel safer by creating a tiny city within a city. The price per apartment starts at $70,000. “Kabul was mostly destroyed in wars. There is need for construction in Afghanistan and the amount of housing that is needed is not being fulfilled,” Caravan said.
The projects have created dozens of jobs for people like Abdul Wahab, who has 13 family members to provide for. “It’s hard to find work and to find good work,” Wahab said after using all his body weight and strength to lean on a lever linked to a device that cuts rebar. If it wasn’t for this job, he said, his family would suffer greatly. Caravan said he wants others to help rebuild instead of storing their cash in already posh Dubai.
“We are Afghans and should build up our own country by any means. We should be proud of our country,” he said. But he said he understands whypeople have moved out large sums of cash. There is a looming fear that when NATO forces leave, so will any semblance of security, both physical and economic. “We are worried about security, that it doesn’t get worse. We want a stable system here in Afghanistan after foreign troops’ withdrawal. We worry about this and nothing else,” Caravan said.—Newswire
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23 - Obama Takes Bush’s Secrecy Games One Step Further
By Glenn Greenwald
March 27, 2012 "Salon" - - The ACLU is suing the Obama administration under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), seeking to force disclosure of the guidelines used by Obama officials to select which human beings (both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals) will have their lives ended by the CIA’s drone attacks (“In particular,” the group explains, the FOIA request “seeks to find out when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how the United States ensures compliance with international laws relating to extrajudicial killing”). The Obama administration has not only refused to provide any of that information, but worse, the CIA is insisting to federal courts that it cannot even confirm or deny the existence of a drone program at all without seriously damaging national security; from the CIA’s brief in response to the ACLU lawsuit:
. . .
What makes this so appalling is not merely that the Obama administration demands the right to kill whomever it wants without having to account to anyone for its actions, choices or even claimed legal authorities, though that’s obviously bad enough (as I wrote when the ACLU lawsuit was commenced: “from a certain perspective, there’s really only one point worth making about all of this: if you think about it, it is warped beyond belief that the ACLU has to sue the U.S. Government in order to force it to disclose its claimed legal and factual bases for assassinating U.S. citizens without charges, trial or due process of any kind”). What makes it so much worse is how blatantly, insultingly false is its claim that it cannot confirm or deny the CIA drone program without damaging national security.
Numerous Obama officials — including the President himself and the CIA Director — have repeatedly boasted in public about this very program. Obama recently hailed the CIA drone program by claiming that “we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied,” andadded that it is “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases and so on.” Obama has told playful jokes about the same drone program. Former CIA Director and current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also likes to tell cute little jokes about CIA Predator drones, and then proclaimed in December that the drone program has “been very effective at undermining al Qaeda and their ability to plan those kinds of attacks.” Just two weeks ago, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech purporting to legally justify these same drone attacks.
So Obama officials are eager to publicly tout the supposed benefits of the CIA’s drone programs in order to generate political gain for the President: to make him look like some sort of Tough, Brave Warrior single-handedly vanquishing Al Qaeda. The President himself boasts about how tightly controlled, precise and effective the CIA drones are. Everyone in the world knows the CIA has a drone program. It is openly discussed everywhere, certainly including the multiple Muslim countries where the drones routinely create piles of corpses, and by top U.S. Government officials themselves.
But then when it comes time to test the accuracy of their public claims by requesting the most basic information about what is done and how execution targets are selected, and when it comes time to ask courts to adjudicate its legality, then suddenly National Security imperatives prevent the government even from confirming or denying the existence of the program: the very same program they’ve been publicly boasting and joking about. As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer put it after Obama publicly defended the program: “At this point, the only consequence of pretending that it’s a secret program is that the courts don’t play a role in overseeing it” – that, and ensuring that any facts that contradict these public claims remain concealed.
This is why the U.S. Government’s fixation on secrecy — worse than ever under the Obama administration, as evidenced by itsunprecedented war on whistleblowers — is so pernicious. It not only enables government officials to operate in the dark, which inevitably ensures vast (though undiscovered) abuses of power. Worse, it enables the government to aggressively propagandize the citizenry without challenge: Obama officials are free to make all sorts of claims about how great and targeted the drone program is and how it Keeps Us Safe™, while simultaneously suppressing any official evidence or information that would test those claims and/or contradict them (even as some evidence suggests these assurances are false).
Worse still, it literally removes our highest political officials from the rule of law. The sole purpose of these vast claims of secrecy around the drone program — the absurd notion that they cannot even confirm or deny its existence without harming National Security — is to block courts from reviewing the legality of what they’re doing, which is another way of saying: they have removed themselves from the rule of law. Even Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith, a vociferous advocate of executive authority and secrecy powers, understands how abusive this is:
First, it is wrong . . . for the government to maintain technical covertness but then engage in continuous leaks, attributed to government officials, of many (self-serving) details about the covert operations and their legal justifications. It is wrong because it is illegal. It is wrong because it damages (though perhaps not destroys) the diplomatic and related goals of covertness. And it is wrong because the Executive branch seems to be trying to have its cake (not talking about the program openly in order to serve diplomatic interests and perhaps deflect scrutiny) and eat it too (leaking promiscuously to get credit for the operation and to portray it as lawful).
Indeed, one of the worst abuses of the lawless Bush presidency was that Bush officials repeatedly invoked secrecy powers (the State Secret privilege) to shield their most controversial and lawless programs from judicial review: warrantless eavesdropping, rendition, and torture. One of the earliest alarms about what the Obama presidency would be was when the Obama DOJ told courts early in 2009 that it would continue to assert those same radical secrecy claims: thus telling courts that the very programs which candidate Obama long denounced as illegal were now such vital State Secrets that courts must not risk their disclosure by adjudicating their legality. Beyond Obama’s decree that the DOJ must not investigate Bush-era crimes, that was the instrument used by Obama to shield Bush’s criminal policies from judicial challenge: through Kafkaesque claims of secrecy whereby programs that everyone in the world knows exist were Too Secret even to let courts examine. In sum, there is only one place in the entire world where these policies of warrantless eavesdropping, rendition, torture, and CIA drones cannot be discussed: in American courts, when it’s time to review their legality and/or allow its victims to vindicate their legal rights.
Now, in this ACLU/FOIA case, the Obama administration is taking these warped secrecy games one step further. They boast publicly about the programs to lavish themselves with praise, only to turn around once they’re sued in court and insist that the programs are too secret even to acknowledge. So extreme is the fixation on secrecy from the Most Transparent Administration Ever™ that they are routinely reduced to this type of self-parody; behold how they are insisting in response to a separate FOIA lawsuit from The New York Times that they cannot even confirm or deny the existence of the OLC memo which authorized the assassination of Anwar Awlaki — even though the NYT reported on its contents. More amazingly still, the Obama administration continues to insist that they cannot confirm or deny the memo’s existence even after Eric Holder talks about the memo in a Senate hearing.
This would be laughable if it were not so destructive. It results in the government’s most consequential actions being completely shielded not only from public scrutiny, but also from the rule of law. It enables the most powerful political officials to inculcate the public with claims about their actions while preventing any form of checks and suppressing any contrary information. It literally means that the Obama administration is able to conduct multiple secret wars around the world, ones conducted by drone attacks, the very existence of which they refuse to acknowledge. And it is yet another way the Obama presidency is cementing the worst abuses of the Bush presidency: the very same ones he so inspirationally vowed to reverse.
UPDATE: Just this weekend, The Washington Post published a lengthy, glowing profile of the anonymous CIA official who oversees the CIA drone program. We learned how the drone program has slain countless Al Qaeda leaders with such precision and force: the same program the Obama administration insists cannot be acknowledged without seriously harming national security. Given that claim, will the anonymous officials who enabled this hagiography by talking to the Post about this glorious official and all that the drone program has accomplished be prosecuted under espionage statutes? Yes, that question is rhetorical, and further highlights how severely secrecy powers are manipulated and exploited by this administration.
Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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24 - Mom of Murdered Obama Gay Lover Speaks Up
Posted on July 25, 2010 by Dr. Eowyn
Donald Young
In late May, Wash. DC-based investigative journalist Wayne Madsen had a bombshell revelation about Obama’s membership in a Chicago gay club, Man’s Country. Madsen also reported on Obama’s sexual relationships with other men, including named D.C. politicians and Donald Young, the openly-gay choir-director of the church in Chicago of which Obama was a member for some 20 years — Jeremy Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ black liberation theology. Obama’s relationship with Young was confirmed by Larry Sinclair, who claims to have had two sex-cocaine trysts with Obama.
Larry Bland
There were two other openly gay men in Wright’s church: Larry Bland and Nate Spencer. In late 2007, as Obama began his ascent to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, in a span of 1½ months, all three men “conveniently” died:
Bland was murdered execution-style on November 17, 2007;
Young was murdered execution-style on December 24, 2007;
Spencer reportedly died of septicemia, pneumonia, and HIV on December 26, 2007. (Death certificates of Bland and Young, HERE.)
Nate Spencer (r)
Now, Young’s elderly mother is speaking out about her suspicions that her son was murdered to protect Obama’s reputation and assure his political future as President.
~Eowyn
WHITE HOUSE RAMPS UP DAMAGE CONTROL OVER OBAMA CHICAGO GAY HISTORY
An exclusive Wayne Madsen Report – July 19, 2010
The story about President Barack Obama’s bi-sexual past will not go away. Now, in an exclusive interview with The Globe, Norma Jean Young, the 76-year old mother of the late Trinity United Church of Christ choir director Donald Young, has spoken out and declared that persons trying to protect Obama murdered her son at the height of the 2007 Democratic presidential primary to protect Obama from embarrassing revelations about his homosexual relationship with her son. Donald Young’s bullet-ridden body was found in his Chicago apartment on December 23, 2007, in what appeared to be an assassination-style slaying.
Norma Jean Young revealed to The Globe that her son Donald, who was openly gay, was a “close friend” of Obama. Mrs. Young also believes the Chicago Police Department has not placed a high priority on finding the killers of her son. Mrs. Young, who is, herself a former employee of the Chicago Police Department, told The Globe that, “There is more to the story,” adding, “I do believe they are shielding somebody or protecting someone.”
The Globe’s revelations are consistent with information obtained by WMR during a May investigation conducted in Chicago. On May 24, WMR reported:“President Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are lifetime members of the same gay bath house in uptown Chicago, according to informed sources in Chicago’s gay community, as well as veteran political sources in the city.” The report added, “WMR spoke to several well-placed sources in Chicago who reported that Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Obama’s former church of 20 years, Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) on Chicago’s south side, ran what was essentially a matchmaking service for gay married black professional members of the church, including lawyers and businessmen, particularly those with children. The matchmaking club was called the ‘Down Low Club’ but references to it over the phone and email simply referred to the group with the code phrase ‘DLC.’ The ruse, according to our sources, was to make anyone who was eavesdropping on the communications [FBI wiretaps in the Rod Blagojevich case likely contain such references] believe that the references were to the Democratic Leadership Council, also known as the DLC . . . Among the members of the gay ‘DLC’ were Obama and TUCC’s choir director, Donald Young, an openly gay man who reportedly had a sexual relationship with Obama. Two other gay members of the church were Larry Bland and Nate Spencer. Young and Bland were brutally murdered, execution style, in late 2007. Bland was murdered on November 17, 2007 and Young on December 24, 2007. The latter was killed by multiple gunshot wounds. Spencer reportedly died on December 26, 2007, official cause of death: ‘septicemia, pneumonia, and HIV.’”
Larry Sinclair, the gay man who claimed to have had two sexual encounters with Obama in Chicago in 1999, wrote a book, “Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder,” in which he states that Obama was linked to Young’s murder. Sinclair wrote that he was in contact with Young shortly before his murder and Young revealed his relationship with Obama. At the time of his revelations about Obama at a National Press Club news conference, WMR doubted the veracity of Sinclair’s story due to the absence of corroborating evidence coupled with a bizarre news conference. However, since that time, WMR has received corroboration from a number of sources in a number of locations, including Chicago, Alabama, Georgia, and Washington, DC. WMR has received information that various competing camps, including the Hillary Clinton and John McCain campaigns, attempted to co-opt Sinclair and his revelations for their own political purposes. Sinclair, it should be noted, has not deviated from his original story or charges against Obama.
On June 19, 2008, WMR reported: “WhiteHouse.com held a news conference following Sinclair’s at which a video of Sinclair’s polygraph was to be shown. After experiencing technical difficulties with the video presentation, Parisi abruptly canceled the news conference and took no questions.” The aborted news conference was as bizarre as Sinclair’s. Sinclair was arrested by Washington, DC police following his news conference based on a warrant from Delaware issued by Vice President candidate Joseph Biden’s son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden. The Delaware charges against Sinclair were later dropped.
Sinclair’s book is now the subject of a defamation lawsuit [Daniel Parisi, et al v. Lawrence W. Sinclair a/k/a "Larry Sinclair," et al] brought by Dan Parisi, the proprietor of the website, Whitehouse.com, who is mentioned in Sinclair’s book with regard to his involvement in polygraphs administered to Sinclair after he made his allegations against Obama public during the 2008 presidential campaign. The lawsuit is being handled by the politically powerful Patton & Boggs law firm, the same firm that represented George W. Bush’s top political adviser Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame Wilson/CIA leak, and has been filed against Sinclair, his publishing company, and distributors, including Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Sinclair is currently a resident of Florida.
The lawsuit against Sinclair has been assigned to Judge Richard Leon, the Republican deputy chief minority counsel on the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, aka, the Iran-contra scandal. From 1988 to 1989, he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General and from 1992 to 1993 was the Republican chief minority counsel on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s October Surprise Task Force investigating the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign’s secret dealings with Iran to ensure the defeat of President Jimmy Carter. Leon Leon was nominated for the federal bench by President George W. Bush on September 10, 2001. Leon’s involvement in so many high-level cover-ups of White House misconduct makes him an illogical choice to hear a case involving serious allegations against President Obama.
Note: Blagojevich’s defense in his federal corruption trial is slated to begin today in Chicago. Judge James Zagel has denied the defense’s request for all the government’s wiretaps to be played. The tapes, as previously reported by WMR, contain some earthy references to Obama’s and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s homosexual habits.
Sinclair has told WMR that he believes the Obama White House is trying to have his book withdrawn from circulation to avoid any further embarrassments about Obama’s homosexual past and the possible involvement of his top lieutenants in Young’s murder. The Globe reported in May 2008 that a top Chicago private detective said he believed Young was “rubbed out” because of his relationship with Obama. Sinclair has echoed the private eye’s beliefs about Young and Obama. The Globe reports that before his death, Young was planning to flee to Africa to teach. The information was provided to The Globe byYoung’s mother, who also now fears for her life and plans to leave her Peoria, Illinois home for a secret location. Mrs. Young said the Chicago police have warned her that her life is in danger.
UPDATE (1.20.2012):
Wayne Madsen has this to say in an exclusive-to-subscribers report on Jan. 19, 2012:
WMR has learned from a source who is an official of Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) in Chicago, President Obama’s former church, that congregants are afraid of discussing the brutal execution-style murders of two of the church’s members.
The church’s choir director Donald Young was murdered on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2007, at the begining of the presidential campaign. Although the Chicago Police Department indicated there was a “person of interest” in the Young case, no one has been charged with Young’s murder. Another church member, Larry Bland, was murdered execution-style on November 17, 2007. [...]
When TUCC pastor Jeremiah Wright retired as pastor in early 2008, several church members left the predominantly African-American mega-church along with him, according to our TUCC source. The new pastor, Otis Moss III, has shown no interest in trying to find out the killers of Young and Bland, although the church is active in several community action programs, including those dealing with violence.
The TUCC source says there has been a “stand down” at TUCC in dealing with the Young and Bland murders. Although a service was held for Young at TUCC, the church, according to the source, “ignored the two murders,” adding, “there is no interest in pursuing the murderers.”
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25 - Greek Government Robbed Public Institutions to Complete the Bond Swap
By John Ward
Global Research, March 27, 2012
The Slog
“But Lucas my dear, if you run out of poor people, you can always steal from the sick”
REVEALED: HOW THE VENIZELOS GOVERNMENT SECRETLY REMOVED 70% OF MAJOR HOSPITAL, UTILITY & UNIVERSITY BANK ACCOUNT FUNDS TO PAY BONDHOLDERS
Bank of Greece complicit in broadscale embezzlement revealed by respectable Greek health site
The illegally denied default of Greece entered a dramatic new phase this afternoon with the revelation by mainstream Greek public health website Health News that, shortly before midnight on March 8th – the eve of Greece’s psi completion on Friday March 9th – on average 70% of public utility funds in various large, interest-bearing accounts at the Bank of Greece were raided. These included most of the State’s regional hospital budgets, various universities and (it is alleged) at least one utility company.
The shortfalls came to light late last week and this morning as various hospital purchasing cheques in particular began to bounce. The monies – estimated by one source to total some 1.4 billion euros – appear to have been used to pay off the tiny minority of private sovereign creditors who, under the original terms of their bond purchase, were entitled come what may to full payment of the bond’s yield entitlement.
Setting aside the amoral audacity of this act, it does yet again raise the issue of a Greece so utterly lacking in any real funds in the real world, that to pay off a minute proportion of the bondholders it had to resort to such a desperate measure.
“The Greek government used this money in order to purchase government bonds from various bondholders without getting permission from the bank account owners,” one reliable Athens source told The Slog in commenting on the story, “hospitals and universities have been robbed of hundreds of millions of Euros, absolutely essential for their core functionality.”
On being pointed at the Health News site, The Slog immediately contacted another of many Athens sources who have flocked to this website in recent weeks. This informant in turn offered access to a senior administrator in a major teaching hospital. The person thus contacted told me:
“There can be no doubt about this. It isn’t even very subtle. All the monies were withdrawn over a brief period of time on March 8th after normal banking hours. I have spoken to teaching contacts at Universities over the weekend, and it has been confirmed that they too have the same embarrassment. These people are criminals who should be brought to justice. But in the Greece of today, it will not happen”.
One final source told me shortly before posting,
“The Bank of Greece is naked in this matter. We ask them for the reasons why this has happened, and they claim to have no knowledge of such things. This is ridiculous. This could not have been done without their cooperation. There is nobody now in Greece we can trust”.
Equally, nobody should be surprised that senior politicians and government officials have conspired to do such a thing. The Venizelos elite has shown itself to be without ethics or remorse in many ways already. The European Central Bank, Brussels, the IMF and even Berlin have also shown a compliant willingness to look the other way or simply ignore the Law if it suits them so to do.
But now, I think institutions around the world – and their stakeholders – need to look at what’s happening in southern Europe and ask themselves, ‘Is this really right? Is any cause worth this amount of depravity and deprivation?’
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26 - YUGOSLAVIA, 78 DAYS 1999 NATO AIR RAIDS : Thirteenth Anniversary Of NATO As Global War Machine
Global Research, March 25, 2012
emg. rs
Nis pays tribute to bombing victims
Wreaths were laid at memorials Saturday as a tribute paid to the victims of the 1999 NATO bombing in the city of Nis, southern Serbia, where 56 people were killed and over 200 were injured in 78 days of NATO air raids.
Wreaths were laid at memorials Saturday as a tribute paid to the victims of the 1999 NATO bombing in the city of Nis, southern Serbia, where 56 people were killed and over 200 were injured in 78 days of NATO air raids.
The wreaths were laid at the monument in front of the Nis University building by families of the victims, city officials, representatives of the Serbian Armed Forces, delegations of war veterans' associations, and organizations for preserving the tradition of liberation wars.
A commemoration was also held in Mija Stanimirovic barracks at the monument to fallen soldiers.
The sirens marking the approaching of NATO aircrafts went off a total of 129 times from March 24 until the end of the bombing, and Nis inhabitants spent 52 days in shelters. In 78 days, Nis was bombed 40 times, 28 times at night and 12 during the day.
A total of 324 missiles were fired on the city, including 161 aerial bombs, 36 containers of cluster bombs, 71 cruise missiles and 8 graphite bombs.
About 120 buildings were razed to the ground, while 3,400 housing, business and military facilities were damaged.
On May 7, 1999 only, 15 Nis citizens were killed and several dozens were injured. The target was the city market place.
Nis was again under cluster bomb attack on May 12, 1999, when no one was injured, but people were later killed from unexploded bombs
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27 - INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW : News and Comment
March 30, 2012
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Court Ruling Suggests Berlin Synagogue Congregation Was a Fraud
JTA
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/03/25/3092314/court-ruling-against-historic-berlin-shul-suggests-congregation-is-a-fiction
On paper, it was one of Berlin's oldest shuls, a rare independent congregation on the east side of this once-divided city that with the help of government subsidies said it maintained services for 1,000 members. But in reality it's not clear how many Jews, if any, attended the Adass Yisroel synagogue, located behind a courtyard on Tucholskystrasse in this city's Mitte section. Nor is it clear what, exactly, the people behind the shul did with the money they received from the government of the state of Berlin. Last week, a Berlin court ruled that Adass Yisroel cheated the state and must pay back about $265,000 in state subsidies, as well as all legal costs resulting from a lawsuit filed by the congregation against the government in 2010.
U.S. Ranks Fifth On Global Execution Scale
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/27/capital-punishment_n_1381652.html
The United States was the only Western democracy that executed prisoners last year, even as an increasing number of U.S. states are moving to abolish the death penalty, Amnesty International announced Monday. America's 43 executions in 2011 ranked it fifth in the world in capital punishment, the rights group said in its annual review of worldwide death penalty trends. U.S. executions were down from 46 a year earlier. "If you look at the company we're in globally, it's not the company we want to be in: China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq," Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA, told The Associated Press. The United States seems deeply divided on the issue.
McCain, Lieberman and Graham: The Senate's Three War-Crazed Amigos
Alex Pareene - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/29/mccain_lieberman_and_graham_the_senates_three_war_crazed_amigos/
When John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman join forces, you can be sure of one thing: It will involve state-sponsored violence ... The Senate's three most predictable and least credible warmongering "moderates" frequently join forces to publish joint Op-Eds or hold press conferences and the one thing they always, invariably want is for the United States to have just a little bit more war than it currently has, somewhere far away.
Incarceration Nation
Fareed Zakaria - Time
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30910.htm
... The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That's not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to ten times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain - with a rate among the highest - has 153. This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.'s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults ... More than half of America's federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession.
New York City Welfare Recipients Speak Up
Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2kGPdxkofo
Welfare recipients in New York explain what they want and why in these on-the-street interviews by Alexandra Pelosi. Shown on "Real Time," with Bill Maher.
Hundreds of Israelis Rampage Against Palestinians
Haaretz (Israel)
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/hundreds-of-beitar-jerusalem-fans-beat-up-arab-workers-in-mall-no-arrests-1.420270
Hundreds of Beitar Jerusalem supporters assaulted Arab cleaning personnel at the capital's Malha shopping center on Monday, in what was said to be one of Jerusalem's biggest-ever ethnic clashes. "It was a mass lynching attempt," said Mohammed Yusuf, a team leader for Or-Orly cleaning services. Despite CCTV footage of the events, no one was arrested. Jerusalem police said that is because no complaint was filed. Witnesses said that after a soccer game in the nearby Teddy Stadium, hundreds of mostly teenage supporters flooded into the shopping center, hurling racial abuse at Arab workers and customers and chanting anti-Arab slogans, and filled the food hall on the second floor.
Israeli Mobs Attack Palestinians, Chant 'Death to Arabs'
The Independent (Britain)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/antiarab-soccer-fans-rampage-in-shopping-centre--but-no-arrests-7584089.html
Buoyed by a home win, Jewish fans of football club Beitar Jerusalem this week rampaged through a nearby shopping centre following an evening match, attacking Arab workers and shoppers in one of the worst racial brawls seen in the city in recent years ... Hundreds of fans, mostly teenagers, descended on busy Malha Mall, jumping on tables, waving scarves, and chanting "Death to Arabs" ... Many believe the shopping mall riot is part of a wider malaise in Israeli society, where the country's Arab minority, 20 per cent of all Israelis, is discriminated against, often with impunity.
The Myth of Israel's Favorable Treatment of Palestinian Christians
Fida Jiryis - Mondoweiss
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/03/the-myth-of-israels-favorable-treatment-of-palestinian-christians.html
.... I am one of those Palestinian Christians living inside Israel to whom Oren refers. At no time in my life have I ever felt the 'respect and appreciation' by the Jewish state, which [Israeli envoy] Oren so glowingly references. Israel's Christian minority is marginalized in much the same manner as its Muslim one or, at best, quietly tolerated. We suffer the same discrimination ... I would like to remind him and others that this founding [of Israel] expelled thousands of Palestinian Christians from their homes in 1948 and displaced them, either forcing them to flee across the border or making them internal refugees. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that comprised the founding of Israel is, too, an injustice of historic magnitude.
What Christians Don't Know About Israel
Grace Halsell
http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/what_christians.shtml
American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key positions in all areas of our government where decisions are made regarding the Middle East. This being the case, is there any hope of ever changing U.S. policy? ... The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East policy might lie elsewhere - among those who support Israel but don't really know why. This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning, fair-minded Christians who feel bonded to Israel - and Zionism - often from atavistic feelings, in some cases dating from childhood.
How Einstein Ruined Physics: A Review
Mark Green - Occidental Observer
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/03/review-of-roger-schlaflys-how-einstein-ruined-physics/
... Schlafly [in his new book, "How Einstein Ruined Physics"] presents compelling evidence that other leading physicists and mathematicians before and concurrent with Einstein made equally important breakthroughs in relativity theory and related fields. Further, [Roger] Schlafly suggests that Einstein may have purloined some of his most famous insights ... Schlafly contends that Einstein borrowed many ideas from others and claimed them as his own, including the postulate that the speed of light is constant as well as special relativity, the idea that energy and mass are interchangeable (E=MC2). "Einstein's understanding of special relativity ... was inferior to Poincare's. On every essential part of special relativity, Poincare published the same idea years earlier, and said it better."
The Jewish Bias of the Nobel Prize
Jan C Biro MD, PhD
http://www.janbiro.com/JEWISH_BIAS.html
... This expressed wish is largely ignored by the Nobel Foundation, who award excessive numbers of Prizes to Jewish scientists (who traditionally belong to "One Nation" even if they live in different countries around the World), thus creating the large Jewish-Bias (J-bias) ... Higher IQs and preferential choice of science as a profession among Jews do not fully explain this J-bias. It is more likely that extensive and well-organized personal networking of a marketing type among Jewish scientists, together with the egalitarian-liberal, nonchalant attitude of the Swedish representatives of the Donor, are responsible for this unfortunate phenomenon.
German-American 'Bund' Events in 1930s California
Rancho La Canada -- Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMTnXM0LwB0
During the 1930s German Americans in southern California met for social get-togethers and other events organized by the "German-American Bund," which supported Third Reich Germany. Runtime: 2:13 mins. From "Rancho La Canada: Then & Now," a documentary by John Newcombe about the history of the Crescenta-Canada Valley.
America's Great, Flawed Ideology of Individualism
Mark Weber - Podcast
http://reasonradionetwork.com/20120321/the-mark-weber-report-americas-great-flawed-ideology-of-individualism
America's ever more obvious cultural disintegration and social paralysis, and its erosion of national identity and purpose, are not minor or temporary problems, but are symptoms of a deep-rooted social-political illness and a systemic failure of the country's democratic-capitalist System. In large measure, this sickness is the predictable, inevitable consequence of America's basic ideology of "pursuit of happiness" individualism. This ideology, laid out in the US Declaration of Independence, greatly encouraged this country's astonishing dynamism, growth, inventiveness and prosperity, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the core outlook that once contributed to this country's development is incapable of sustaining a stable and healthy society.
For Obama, Many Countries Are 'Close Allies'
Detektor DR (Denmark) - Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erYpXzE9Pxs
President Obama likes to emphasize that the US has many "close and strong allies" in the world, and that all the smaller allied countries "punch above their weight." On the Danish television show "Detektor," host Thomas Buch-Andersen takes a humorous look at how the US President views the world.
Obama Reveals His Ignorance of History
Hans Bader - OpenMarket.org
http://www.openmarket.org/2012/03/16/obama-reveals-his-own-ignorance-of-american-and-world-history-while-denouncing-others-alleged-ignorance/
Even the liberal Talking Points Memo criticized a recent speech in which President Obama revealed his ignorance of U.S. and world history and disparaged a past U.S. President while denouncing the alleged ignorance of others. In a recent green energy speech, Obama mocked Republicans, "comparing their skepticism of alternative energy to the 'Flat Earth Society' in Christopher Columbus' day and President Rutherford B. Hayes' apparent dismissal of the telephone. But while Obama thinks the GOP is in need of a science lesson, he may need to bone up on history himself," TPM notes ...
No Imminent Iran Nuclear Threat, Intelligence Specialists Acknowledge
Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/special-report--intel-shows-iran-nuclear-threat-not-imminent.html
The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran's nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead. Those conclusions, drawn from extensive interviews with current and former U.S. and European officials with access to intelligence on Iran, contrast starkly with the heated debate surrounding a possible Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear facilities. ... That led to a bombshell conclusion in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate: American spy agencies had "high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003.
US' Double Standards
China Daily (China) -- Editorial
http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2012-03/23/content_14895211.htm
Once again the United States is trying to throw its weight around and impose its unilateral vision on other countries. The US imposed tough new sanctions at the turn of the year, aimed at preventing other countries from importing Iranian oil and conducting transactions with its central bank in a bid to reduce Iran's oil revenues, which the US claims Iran is using to fund a nuclear weapons program ... The US doesn't have right to impose its will on other countries in this way. It is only natural that the US' presumptuous demand that China should stop trading with Iran should meet with strong opposition from China.
Former US Government Scientist Sentenced For Offering State Secrets to Israel
The Associated Press
http://www.ktvu.com/ap/ap/aerospace/ex-govt-scientist-gets-13-years-in-espionage-case/nLYzj/
A former government space scientist has been sentenced to 13 years in prison after admitting he tried to sell space and defence secrets to Israel in what turned out to be an FBI sting operation. Appearing in federal court in a prison jumpsuit yesterday, Stewart Nozette said he was 'paying for a fatal lack of judgment.' 'I accept full responsibility,' Nozette told U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman. Prosecutors and Nozette's lawyers agreed to the 13-year sentence, with credit for the two years that Nozette has spent behind bars since his arrest.
Israel Must Not Bind Itself to Netanyahu's Vulgar Rhetoric on Iran
Haaretz (Israel) - Editorial
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-must-not-bind-itself-to-netanyahu-s-vulgar-rhetoric-on-iran-1.417453
Anyone who cares about Israel's future could not help but feel a chill upon hearing Benjamin Netanyahu's recent speech at the AIPAC conference - if not because of the gravity of the existential threat it described, then because of its sheer vulgarity and bad taste ... Netanyahu isn't the first Israeli prime minister, especially from the right, to harp on the trauma of the Holocaust. But in contrast to Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, who at the moment of truth also displayed diplomatic and leadership abilities, Netanyahu was and remains essentially a PR man: someone for whom words and rhetoric replace reality.
Israel Thanks Germany's Merkel For Sixth 'Dolphin' Submarine
DPA
http://en.europeonline-magazine.eu/israel-thanks-germanys-merkel-for-sixth-dolphin-submarine_198870.html
Israel thanked German Chancellor Angela Merkel Wednesday for selling the country its sixth Dolphin submarine at a subsidized price ... The Israeli Globes business daily reported the submarine will be delivered by 2018. At delivery, it will be one of the most advanced submarines in the world, and will be the most expensive weapon procured by the Israel Defence Forces, at a cost of 400 million euros. Germany will finance a third of the cost, it said. Israel currently has three submarines in its fleet, it said. The fourth and fifth Dolphin submarines are in advanced stages of construction in German shipyards and scheduled to arrive in mid-2013 and in the second half of 2014
Newborn Dies From Herpes Contracted in Jewish Ritual Circumcision
Daily News (New York)
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/family-stonewalling-authorities-newborn-dies-herpes-contracted-ritual-circumcision-article-1.1034585
Authorities are being stonewalled by the family of a newborn boy who died after contracting herpes through a controversial religious circumcision ritual, the Daily News has learned. Multiple sources in the Orthodox Jewish community said the two-week-old boy's parents were related to a herpes-infected rabbi who conducted the circumcision according to tradition - using one's mouth to remove blood from the wound. The Brooklyn District Attorney's Office is investigating the death and trying to identify the rabbi, or mohel, but family members have not been cooperative, sources said.
No to AIPAC, No to Israel and No to War
Sheldon Richman
http://www.fff.org/comment/com1203e.asp
Those who hoped President Obama might bring a new approach to foreign policy have been repeatedly disappointed. On Sunday, Obama had a chance to partially redeem himself. He failed ... Thus the idea that Iran - even if it managed to build a warhead - represents an "existential threat" to Israel or the United States is laughable ... In light of Obama's obeisance before AIPAC, he has now dashed all hope that he'd do what needs to be done: resist Israel and its lobby, and rescind the war threat, along with the immoral sanctions and CIA-sponsored terrorism.
For What, All These Wars?
Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.creators.com/conservative/pat-buchanan/for-what-all-these-wars.html
... But why, when the U.S. intelligence community still claims to have no hard evidence Iran has even decided to build a bomb? Since Ronald Reagan went home, the United States has attacked or invaded Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and Libya. How have Americans benefited from all this war? How have the Chinese suffered these 20 years by not having been in on the action?
The Three Amigos And The Misuse of History
Paul Pillar - The National Interest
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/the-three-amigos-the-misuse-history-6665
... The senators - Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and John McCain of Arizona - whom their staffers affectionately refer to as the "three amigos," are most immediately interested in getting the United States involved in the civil war in Syria. Not far behind that, they also are itching to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, with Graham and Lieberman being lead sponsors of a Senate resolution aimed at boxing the U.S. president into doing exactly that.
Can Halachah 'Jewish Law' Ever Be Wrong?
Dennis Prager
http://www.jewishjournal.com/dennis_prager/article/can_halachah_ever_be_wrong_20120111/
... Suppose you ordered an electric shaver from a store owned by non-Jews, and by accident the store sent you two shavers. Would you return the second shaver? Nine said they would not. One said he would. What is critical to understand is why they answered the way they did. The nine who would not return the second shaver were not crooks. They explained that halachah (Jewish law) forbade them from returning the other shaver. According to halachah, as they had been taught it, a Jew is forbidden to return a lost item to a non-Jew. The only exception is if the non-Jew knows a Jew found the item and not returning it would cause anti-Semitism or a Khilul Hashem (desecration of God's name).
The Weight of Tradition: Why Judaism Is Not Like Other Religions
Mark Weber
http://www.ihr.org/judaism0709.html
...Judaism is not just "another religion." It's unique among the world's major religions. The core values and ethos of Judaism are markedly unlike those of Christianity, Islam, and the other great faiths ...A core message of the Hebrew scriptures is that Jews are a divinely "chosen" people -- a unique community distinct from the rest of humanity ...The seemingly intractable Middle East conflict is more than just a problem of Zionism or politics, or a dispute over land. Israel's often arrogant policies, and especially its inhumane treatment of non-Jews, have roots in centuries-old attitudes that are laid out in ancient Jewish religious writings.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt (Introduction excerpts)
http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/product-description/0374177724
...Now that the Cold War is over, Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. Yet no aspiring politician is going to say so in public, or even raise the possibility. There is also no compelling moral rationale for America's uncritical and uncompromising relationship with Israel ...The real reason why American politicians are so deferential is the political power of the Israel lobby ...Democrats and Republicans alike fear the lobby's clout. They all know that any politician who challenges its policies stands little chance of becoming president ...The Israel lobby has successfully convinced many Americans that American and Israeli interests are essentially identical. In fact, they are not.
No To 'Holocaust Denial' Laws and Similar Bans on Free Expression
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/letters/la-le-0310-postscript-genocidelaws-20120310,0,1240501.story
We [Los Angeles Times] have editorialized consistently in recent years against laws that ban Holocaust denial and otherwise stifle free expression ... In 2009, we criticized Germany's law banning Holocaust denial along with another one making it illegal to publish "Mein Kampf," Adolf Hitler's autobiographical manifesto. We wrote: "Those rules were put in place with the best of intentions ... But liberal democracy cannot tolerate such bans on free expression indefinitely."
Israel Ex-Spy Chief Urges Caution On Iran Strike
The Associated Press
http://news.findlaw.com/apnews/b97822c94e2d44fa9f0e7cb0b5117287
Israel's recently retired spy chief says more time and efforts are needed before considering a military strike on Iran. Meir Dagan, who served as Mossad's head from 2002 to 2010, told CBS's 60 Minutes that he believes Tehran is being "rational" and "very careful" now, and is considering the consequences of continuing the country's controversial nuclear program. Dagan also says world powers should assist opposition groups in Iran to foment regime change. He would not say if Israel supported protest groups against the regime in the past. Mossad is thought to have played a role in the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and computer viruses that disrupted Iranian research facilities.
Israeli Plans for Attack Against Iran Go Back Years
The Associated Press
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/618/2371145/Israel-exspy-chief-urges-caution-on-Iran-strike
For more than a decade, Israel has systematically built up its military specifically for a possible strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. It has sent its air force on long-distance training missions, procured American-made "bunker-busting" bombs and bolstered its missile defenses. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's threats to strike Iran, voiced last week during a high-profile visit to the White House, were not empty bluster. Although a unilateral Israeli attack would probably not destroy Iran's nuclear program, it appears capable, at least for now, of inflicting a serious blow.
Ten Myths About Iran -- And Why They're Dead Wrong
Jasmin Ramsey - AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/world/154479/10_myths_about_iran_driving_the_insane_push_for_war_--_and_why_they%27re_dead_wrong/?page=entire
As the push for war with Iran rolls on, rhetoric demonizing the Iranian government is rampant, particularly among Israeli leaders and most Republican presidential candidates - so much so that former Israeli Mossad director Efraim Halevy recently complained that Mitt Romney is "making the [Iran] situation worse" with his statements ... Alarmist notions about Iran's foreign and nuclear policy that spread through the media perpetuate a negative image that is oftentimes inaccurate -- and help pave the path to war, which experts say would have disastrous consequences for Israel, the broader Middle East and the U.S. AlterNet decided to look at ten myths about Iran, many of them created by these alarmist notions - and explain why they're dead wrong.
Netanyahu Controls Obama's Fate
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/netanyahu-controls-obamas-fate/
If Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to seal President Obama's fate, all he has to do is to attack Iran. ... How ironic that Netanyahu, therefore, really controls Obama's fate. He can't re-elect his sworn enemy (I doubt anyone can do that) but he can defeat him and likely will do so. Netanyahu has to face the fundamental fact that Israel cannot survive another four years of an Obama presidency. Freed of the constraints that the need to get re-elected imposes, the president's anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian bias will come out in virulent form with likely lethal implications for Israel.
Egypt's Parliament Denounces Israel As 'Number One Enemy'
The Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/egypts-islamist-dominated-parliament-votes-support-expelling-israels-181323719.html
Egypt's Islamist-dominated parliament has unanimously voted in support of the expulsion of Israel's ambassador in Cairo and for a halt to gas exports to the Jewish state. The motion is largely symbolic because only the ruling military council can make such decisions, and it is not likely to impact Egypt's relations with Israel. But the move signals the seismic change in Egypt after the ouster of longtime leader and Israeli ally Hosni Mubarak a year ago. The Monday vote was taken by a show of hands on a report by the chamber's Arab affairs committee that declared that Egypt will "never" be a friend, partner or ally of Israel. The report described the Jewish state as the nation's "number one enemy."
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28 - Legislating Greater Wall Street Theft
By Stephen Lendman
3-29-12
Political Washington is Wall Street's best friend. Whatever crooked bankers want they get. Their business model features grand theft. Wealth’s amassed through fraudulent double-dealing.
Lawmakers facilitate their racketeering. They're rewarded in kind. Only fleeced households, investors, communities and nations lose out.
Their dirty game continues unobstructed. New legislation enhances what's on the books. Another bill will become law when Obama signs it. Wall Street's again celebrating, and why not. Business is better than ever, courtesy of complicit lawmakers.
At issue is the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (the JOBS Act). On March 8, the House passed it overwhelmingly 390 - 23. On March 22, Senate followed 73 - 26. Doing what he does best, Obama will sign it into law. He'll again betray America's 99% in the process.
When everything comes up roses for Wall Street, ordinary people get scammed. It's the same every time like loaded dice let the house win.
Former bank regulator/financial fraud expert Bill Black explained what's at stake in his article headlined, " ‘The only winning move is not to play’ - the insanity of the regulatory race to the bottom.”
He called the imminent JOBS Act passage reminiscent of the "worst anti-regulatory travesties in the financial sphere (that) had broad, bipartisan support." Don't they all, especially in recent decades.
He reviewed some of the worst past legislation and congressional actions, including:
(1) the 1982 Garn-St. Germain Act that gave S & Ls a license to steal.
(2) the 1987 Competitive Equality in Banking Act (CEBA).
Reflecting on the double-dealing chicanery behind it, Black said his "psyche still bears the scars of this combined onslaught. It was the political equivalent of being on the receiving end of a B 52 Arc Light (carpet bombing) mission in Vietnam."
(3) the 1993 "Reinventing Government" scam. It was premised on the view that anything government does, business does better, so let it. Deregulation went wild.
(4) the 1995 Public Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) made it harder for fraud victims to sue. As a result, the financial sector became "more criminogenic." CEOs were licensed to loot with impunity. The 1998 PSLRA amendment was even more hostile to fraud victims.
(5) the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It repealed Glass-Steagall. The 1930s law separated commercial from investment banks and insurers, among other provisions curbing speculation.
(6) the 2000 Commodities Futures Modernization Act. It's so bad, it was tucked away in an appropriations bill near the end of Clinton's tenure. It was his final public betrayal, and what a whopper to endorse.
It legitimized "swap agreements" and other "hybrid instruments" at the core of today's problems. It prevented regulatory oversight of derivatives and leveraging. It made Wall Street a casino operating on only the house wins rules.
Among other provisions, it contained the "Enron Loophole." Enron Online became the first Internet-based commodities transaction system. It rescinded regulations in place since 1922.
Derivative scams went wild. Enron fleeced investors and energy purchasers with impunity until its house of cards collapsed.
Alan Greenspan endorsed derivatives at the time. He lied calling them a way to share risks. They turned an economic downturn into the greatest Depression for most households. They're either impoverished, bordering on it, or heading for it before decade's end. A Clinton-Greenspan combo made it possible.
Black could have listed many more legislative and deregulatory public betrayal examples, including Obama's so-called financial reform only bankers could love. They should. They wrote it. It assures business as usual codified into law under a reform mantle.
Black moved on to the 2012 JOBS Act. He called it "the product of a feeding frenzy by lobbyists who are finally able to enact every fraud-friendly provision they ever dreamed of making law. The only kind of financial bill that can pass with overwhelming support is an anti-regulatory" one.
The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan. FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate) companies are their largest contributors. Whatever they want, they get. Through the ages, greasing palms worked like charms. In large enough amounts, they always work.
Black said financial crises embrace "three (bipartisan) 'de's' - deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization." They create epidemics of fraud. Real reform's impossible. Greater crises are assured. Each time, looser restrictions follow. Economies, households, and lives are destroyed for profit.
Since the late 1970s, America "trashed a regulatory system that was the envy of the world." Now it's a travesty.
Black called the JOBS Act "insane on many levels. It creates an extraordinarily criminogenic environment in which securities fraud will become even more out of control."
It continues a regulatory "race to the bottom. The only winning move is not to play...." The bill's rationale is deregulatory madness must be won. Otherwise the City of London and/or other financial centers will surpass us.
Its passage ignored the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's (FCIC) findings. It was established to determine the current crisis' cause. It explained the three "de's" problem. It specifically condemned "regulatory arbitrage." It revealed destructive deregulatory madness.
The JOBS Act ignored expert anti-fraud input. The best, brightest, and most honest unanimously condemned the bill. Enacting it also bypassed others "who designed and implemented successful means to limit the crises, who prevented problems through effective supervision from becoming crises, and who held" criminal bankers accountable.
Further, people who got everything wrong earlier designed the Act. Failure's institutionalized. So is fraud. What succeeds gets trashed.
The unique aspect of today's crisis is that criminal bankers most responsible got off scot-free to steal again. They gained massive wealth and stand to gain much more.
Earlier fraudsters were prosecuted. Not a single Wall Street boss or top official faced charges this time. The JOBS Act represents "the sick face of crony capitalism."
Western-style capitalism reflects FIRE sector dominance over industry involved in making things. Financial giants are predators. We're prey. Parasitism describes their business model. In other words, the grandest of grand theft.
A system this bad can only get worse. Money power alone matters. It's fraudulently manipulated to make more of it at the public's expense. Jobs are destroyed for greater profits. So are economies and peoples' lives. They're expendable to be exploited and trashed.
The JOBS Act is "so fraud friendly that it will harm capital formation," create greater job losses, and raise poverty to record levels. At the same time, large-scale white-collar crimes are whitewashed. Instead of repudiating and prosecuting fraud, it's encouraged.
The Act's opaqueness makes it easier than ever. We know, said Black, "this increases fraud." Instead of living and dying by it, Wall Street crooks thrive on it, courtesy of political Washington.
Financial giants today are weapons of mass destruction. Freed from regulatory constraints, they extract wealth from households, investors, communities and nations. They operate like locust hordes consume vegetation with ease. Main Street feels their sting.
A Final Comment
In the 1980s, Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff appeared on US television. His tag line about America was calling it "What a country!" In Soviet Russia, the "government control(led) corporations. In America, corporations control the government."
Profiteering is a way of life, especially on Wall Street. "What a country" indeed, and the worst is yet to come. Bet on it!
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/
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29 - Barack Obama and the KGB
March 28, 2012
"Barack Obama with his brothers Samson and Ben in 1987 in Nairobi. I have a perfect memory and I state that I saw the man in the center of this picture in Moscow in 1987, where I've been trained at KGB Intelligence Institute."
Note Makow : This excerpt is from a 55-page document sent to me Tuesday by Kryzhanovsky, 53, left, who claims to be a former KGB Intelligence Officer and sniper. I find it confusing but worth posting for a discussion of Obams's background . The picture above, which appeared in the Daily Mail in Oct. 2009 doesn't look like Barack Obama. I have no way of knowing whether Kryzhansky is an impostor or not. The rest of the document is provocative but inconclusive. He has anyouTube presence and a blog. Keep in mind, there are credible reports that Henry Kissinger was also a Soviet agent. So was Victor Rothschild (1910-1990). The KGB may be the ultimate instrument of the NWO. ]
Update! March 27, 2012 - Obama Caught Conferring with his KGB Handler?
by Mikhail Kryzhanovsky (prof7prof@yahoo.com)
(henrymakow.com) (from Oct 13, 2011)
August 4, 1961- Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
If there's something very wrong with someone's birth certificate and if there's an indication that this someone used a birth certificate of a newborn child (Virginia Sunahara) who died at birth or soon after birth, we have to talk about the methods Russian intelligence (SVR, a former KGB) and its illegal espionage department. We have to talk about one of the illegal spy "documentation process" - using birth certificates to get legal documents in USA - SS#, driver license, passport.
There are two possibilities.
First is - Obama was exchanged by a professional illegal spy, because of the "birth certificate" issue (that's the #1 sign Russian illegal intelligence might be involved).
Second - Obama was recruited and trained in 1981-1983 years in Moscow ("lost" Columbia University years). Most probably, he was just recruited.
Now, let's reconstruct Obama's biography as I see it with my 30 years of espionage experience.
Illegal spy cover story works best if it's a mix of actual and fake facts. "Obama" (let's call him John Smith) was a child of a student from Kenya who studied in Moscow and dated a Russian girl. Such kids in Russia were often unwanted by both partners and were raised and educated at a special school.
Like Obama, John Smith was born in 1961 and, like him, graduated from high school in 1979. KGB paid attention to a very smart young man. Smith was an Intelligence Institute student in 1979-1981 in Moscow, not far from "Cosmos" Hotel. There are couple of buildings in the area and I got intelligence education myself in one of them back in 1987, (15 Yaroslavskaya Street, Moscow Russia).
Then a decision was made to train him individually as illegal intelligence officer .The "dacha" (Russian for small villa) not far from Moscow, provides an ideally isolated territory for training. 2-3 instructors live there to immerse the candidate completely into his American identity and supervise him all the time...
After special training candidate often goes through a special process:
a) illegal probation period abroad. A trip abroad through intermediate countries with numerous changes of passports and cover stories, jobs, personal connections. Then he gets to the target country, stays there for another 1-2 years and goes back to his country for additional training and correction of cover story -- actually, it's his first combat assignment. The most important part of this assignment is to check the reliability of the cover story and documents; the cover story has to be reinforced with new and old true facts, like short-term studies at universities or professional training courses).
b) intermediate legislation. On his way back the officer could stay in an intermediate country for another 1-2 years, make contacts with business, scientists, government employees, celebrities.
c) basic legislation. Officer comes to the target country, obtains genuine documents, gets a job which allows him to travel and talk to many people, recruit informants thus creating an illegal station).
At the same time, in 1979-1981, [the real] Barack Obama studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles where he became a socialist ready to transform the nation by redistributing wealth. KGB station in Washington, DC which was constantly looking for future secret sources at American top universities and colleges, like Columbia, Yale or Harvard, got information about young socialist. They sent his picture and info to Moscow where some resemblance was discovered between a college student from Los Angeles and a future illegal spy John Smith.
Barack Obama is KGB/SVR illegal spy
1981 - Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in India and Pakistan for 3 weeks. Then something happened in India, a good friend to Soviet Union and a perfect place to recruit foreigners. He was recruited and he disappeared. John Smith aka Barack Obama came back to the United States - change of agents, one of regular illegal espionage methods.
Obama's father , Barack Obama Sr., aged 46 died in a car accident in Nairobi. His mother, Ann Dunham, lived in Indonesia and might be just avoided or ignored by her "son" (Don Johnson, Dunham co-worker, said "Obama was distancing himself from her"). Russians approached her under a "false flag" ( National Security Agency or CIA) and explained that her son had to stay abroad for a secret mission for some time. They told her that she had to be ready to accept another person as her own son. For operation like that, espionage agencies often recruit close relatives and allow them to meet their son (daughter) from time to time outside USA. Money talks, there's nothing unusual, though for Dunham the pressure and depression was too big - she died in 1995 of cancer at 52.
Time changes people, so "Obama" had to stay away from his friends and do not show up in public too much.
1981 - He transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science and where nobody could remember him at all, and graduated with a B.A. in 1983.
"Obama" declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years. Wall Street Journal editorial in September 2008, titled "Obama's Lost Years" noted that Fox News contacted 400 Obama's classmates at Columbia and found no one who even remembered him. "Mostly, my years at Columbia were an intense period of study," Obama told Columbia College Today in a 2005 alumnus interview. "I didn't socialize that much. I was like a monk".
Perfect cover up ! Columbia has refused to release any records regarding Obama's attendance, including his application to attend, his grades, and his financial aid records, if any exist. Only one person could order Columbia to shut up - CIA Director Leon Panetta.
1983-1985
He worked at the [CIA Front] Business International Corporation and at the New York Public Interest Research Group. He worked in Chicago as community organizer in 1985-1988.
1987 - Barack Obama with his brothers Samson and Ben in 1987 in Nairobi. I have a perfect memory and I state that I saw the man in the centre of this picture in Moscow in 1987, where I've been trained at KGB Intelligence Institute.
1988 - He traveled to Europe to meet his KGB handlers and get new instructions. He had a choice - a safe variant (to make a political career in one of African countries), and a risky one of staying in America - KGB wanted him to be Martin Luther King #2 . But it appeared he could get much more which was Oval Office. It was decided he could stay in USA longer and it was a success : Illinois Senator (1997-2004) and U.S. Senator (2005-2008).
1988-1991 - In 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. During his summers he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.
1995 - Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, aged 52, died of cancer in Honolulu, Hawaii.
1997 - Obama was elected the Illinois State Senator
2004 - 1995 - Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, aged 52, died of cancer in Honolulu, Hawaii.
1997- Obama was elected the Illinois State Senator
2004 - Obama was elected the US Senator
August 5-7, 2005 - Senators Lugar and Obama in Russia -- "Obama" visited Russia (together with Senator R. Lugar) and met secretly his SVR (former KGB intelligence) handlers to discuss his prospectives for the U.S. presidency. It appeared that U.S. Senator Barack "Obama" was getting out of control and Russians decided to teach him a lesson and delayed his flight over technicalities.
February 10, 2007 - "Obama" announced his candidacy for President of the United States.
August 28,2008 - Nancy Pelosi conspiracy. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were nominated as Democratic candidates for the US President and Vice President. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew that Obama was not eligible under the US Constitution - that's why she wrote the first variant of nomination certification and then changed it . ..
November 4, 2008 - Obama won the race and became the first Russian illegal spy to be elected the U.S. President. The Congressional Research Service, a public policy arm of Congress, officially admits no one in the government ever vetted Obama's constitutional eligibility.
October 2, 2010 - He managed to fire Rahm Emanuel (I'll tell you why) and after that Russians humiliated him one more time - in April 28, 2011, he was forced to nominate Panetta to replace Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. Panetta would end all operations and withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq - that's another Russian intelligence order. Obama, actually, lost half of his power by giving two key Cabinet positions to Clintons team - that's how Russians punished their illegal spy for his independence.
Now he's a good Russian boy :
1.He's destroying America - its called "socialist intervention into the US economy". A person who wants to spend $1 trillion on health care reform which is not a priority at all in the middle of horrible economic crisis, is either an idiot or an enemy of America with a very well calculated plan to terminate the country. Obama did it - in March 2010 he signed Health Care Reform legislation into law.
2. He's into immigration reform which is a socialist intervention into American society - he'll turn 12 million poor illegal Latinos into US citizens-revolutionaries. In 2012 they'll get green cards, by 2016 they'll get citizenship and bring here all their family members (grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, brides and grooms) - around 50-60 million unemployed poorly educated people. And that will be the death of America, the end of American Constitution and the birth of a totalitarian "Obama - forever " Communist regime.
3.Rising unemployment and inflation, budget deficit at every state and city is another Obama's trick, planned by Russian intelligence - he's pushing big states like Texas, New York and California to a "boiling point" after which they might take serious steps towards independence - the beginning of America's death. USSR collapsed the same way - now Russians through Obama want revenge.
4.While Bill Clinton saved one Russian "mole" John Deutch, Obama saved 10 (ten) Russian illegal spies, arrested by FBI in June, 2010, sending them back to Russia in 2010 without any investigation - severe blow to American national security and priceless gift.
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30 - HURT : Obama’s ‘flexibility’ to lie after election
Turns out he’s not Kenyan after all. He’s KGB. All this time, people were worried that PresidentObama was born in Africa and that his radical agenda had been crafted by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Saul Alinsky on the streets of Chicago’s South Side.
Now we know his real radical hidden agenda is in service of the Kremlin.
Mr. Obama reached the darkest low of his presidency this week in South Korea when he was caught on an unseen mic plotting with the leader of one of our oldest adversaries to thwart the will of American voters and advance the interests of enemies who want to see the world’s last remaining beacon of freedom finally destroyed.
“On these issues — but particularly missile defense — this can be solved,” he tells Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, like in a scene from a Cold War spy movie.
But, Mr. Obama explains to his handler, he needs more time, and he needs to get into a position where he is no longer answerable to American voters.
“This is my last election,” he says. “After my election, I have more flexibility.”
Speaking in robotic Russian spy-speak, Mr. Medvedev promises to convey the message to incoming President Vladimir Putin: “I understand. I transmit this information to Vladimir.”
Not since the tapes of Richard Nixon has a U.S. president been caught uttering such sinister words in an unguarded moment. And, one could easily argue, Mr. Obama’s dishonest scheming puts Nixon to shame because it is American voters — not his political enemies — he is selling down the river.
It was particularly chilling to hear Obama’s words of betrayal uttered in such a familiar voice that has served to raise the hopes and inspire the dreams of so many of us. It is now official: We fell for a complete and total lie.
His cold, calculating message reveals a deep dishonesty many of us still did not dream Mr. Obama was capable of. It is a duplicity in allegiance unthinkable for an elected American president. Literally, he overrides the interests of American voters who will go to the polls with those of Moscow and Tehran, with whom he will deal after his re-election.
Understandably, our longest-standing and most steadfast friends in Poland and Israel shuddered with every deceitful word.
The question now is, Mr. President, what other secret deals have you made with our foreign enemies? What other tricks do you have up your sleeve that you plan to jump on us after you have been re-elected and we no longer have something you want?
Of course, don’t expect the press to ask any such questions. They largely laughed off the matter. “No shock or awe there,” Bloomberg News actually wrote in an editorial.
The stridently liberal and increasingly irrelevant Washington Post barely covered the story, except as just another technical goof-up with a microphone. The paper actually compared the incident to then-President George W. Bush inadvertently being caught calling a New York Times reporter a nasty name.
It is this incestuous and deeply un-American collusion between the press and Mr. Obama that gave the president the astonishing bravado to come out the next day and joke about the incident by asking: “Are the mics on?”
How do you say “hilarious” in Russian?
Is it any wonder so many people still do not believe Mr. Obama or the press when they say his birth certificate is real and he was born in the U.S.?
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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31 - 450 Million More Reasons To Isolate Zionist-Israel
Jim Kirwan
Yesterday: it was announced that ATK was awarded a contract to provide up to 450 MILLION hollow point bullets to the Department of Homeland Security over the next five years. The following is an excerpt from the official press release about this deal between ATK and the Department of Homeland Security....
ATK announced that it is being awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) agreement fromthe Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (DHS, ICE) for .40 caliber ammunition. This contract features a base of 12 months, includes four option years, and will have a maximum volume of 450 million rounds.
ATK was the incumbent and won the contract with its HST bullet, which has proven itself in the field. The special hollow point effectively passes through a variety of barriers and holds its jacket in the toughest conditions. HST is engineered for 100-percent weight retention, limits collateral damage, and avoids over-penetration.
"We are proud to extend our track record as the prime supplier of .40 caliber duty ammunition for DHS, ICE," said Ron Johnson, President of ATK's Security and Sporting group.
But this is not the only kind of ammo that the DHS is placing an order for.
Business Insider is also reporting that the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to buy 175 million rifle ammunition rounds....
We've also learned that the Department has an open bid for a stockpile of rifle ammo. Listed on the federal business opportunities network, they're looking for up to 175 million rounds of .233 caliber ammoto be exact. The 223 is almost exactly the same round used by NATO forces, the 5.56 x 45mm.
This all comes at a time when gun sales are absolutely going through the roof in the United States.” (1)
How does the acquisition of all this additional firepower affect relations with Zionist-Occupied-Israel? Look carefully at the illustration from David Dees above. Israel has been pulling America around like a children’s toy since it was artificially created back in 1948. But now they have decided to “get tough” with “stupid Americans” and just start killing us by the hundreds of thousands.
The ammunition and the rifles will be going to DHS, and to US Customs Enforcement (ICE): They will eventually be issued to the newly created American Federal Police Forces (the private US domestic-army) that will replace the so-called police we have now.
Throughout the last six months of OCCUPY demonstrations the public at those demonstrations tried to portray their actions as peaceful-protests, or non-violent confrontations that were needed to call attention to a great many issues that many still have with this illegal government. But the police in full riot gear changed all that to bloody confrontations and violent street confrontations wherein hundreds were arrested, but the police were never charged with any crimes, or excessive force despite all the videotape and the isolated reports of police-over-reactions. Then on March 16, 2012 Obama declared “a state of Martial Law is now in effect.”
We have yet to see the promised troops in the streets because we don’t have any available to do the job. TSA is going to help out the country by providing a privatized army of untrained robots that resemble people only because they still have bodily functions—all the rest of their attitudes are robotic in nature and hostile-by-design.
These are the creatures that the government is going to arm on the say-so of the Zionista-Israeli’s, Of course this is scary, but you have to remember that since most of these creatures have had no training in anything except perversion training they will need to learn how to use these weapons effectively (there goes at least half of the new ammunition). Add to this the probable fact that these people will have no experience of a life under fire or in combat zones; and it does not take much imagination to see that these 450 million bullets are not nearly as large a number as they at first might have seemed to be.
The reason for the hollow-point .40 caliber bullets is to enhance results; because if those bullets manage to just barely connect with a body part such as an arm or a leg, the hollow-point will literally tear off the affected limb: which makes the ammunition a superb choice for semi-skilled shooters. The hollow point is also the bullet of choice to affect maximum terror in the targeted victims because it is so very destructive of the human-beings that it tends to connect with.
There is however a non-violent solution to this problem. All we need to do is to focus the attention of the world on the literal conditions inside the Apartheid-Zionist State of Israel and do unto Israel what was done unto South Africa by the global population—which gave South Africa a modicum of relief so that the hammer-lock of Apartheid could finally be broken. What happened after the breakthrough was up to the whole of South Africa to solve, but this effort saw the global isolation of South Africa which forced an end to openly-Apartheid policies (the same polices that Zionist Israel still practices inside Zionist-occupied Israel.
The world needs the same kind of action immediately, to force the end of Israel’s policies of segregation and Apartheid practices before they finish their new Wall of Hatred & Repression. (2)
The problems include the fact of so many totally compromised leaders around the planet that have become terrified of acting against the global bully that lives behind their steel and concrete walls and continues to attack any nation that opposes them. Here is what Israel has done to the Palestinians since 1948:
If the people around the world could come together to force their countries to peacefully-evict Israeli Embassies throughout the world; then perhaps Israel might have to not just cease the construction of these walls of hatred and isolation; but maybe they might even be forced into changing their views of where and how Israel fits in with the rest of Community of Nations? This is an absolute necessity if there is ever to be any real peace anywhere in the world today; because the more you know about Israeli-foreign policies, the more clearly you can understand their real motivations behind everything which the Zionist Occupation has forced upon the world. It is not just the Middle-East that is about to burn in the thermonuclear blackmail threat that Israel maintains around the world, but every other nation of any size that is now being openly threatened by the Fourth Reich of Zionist-Occupied Israel.
There is also one other aspect to all of this and that is defined in the words of an IDF Colonel-Rabbi, who defines WAR this way:
“He claims war is a conflict between nations, not individuals, and that the individual has no importance at war. The raped woman is not a woman, is not a person, has no feelings and if she feels pain it is unimportant: she is not a woman or a person, just an individual of an enemy tribe whose misfortune was to be captured. Furthermore, Qarim says that rape during wartime is immoral if carried out by a rival tribe - but all Jewish wars are, by definition, mitzvah wars. If the rape of the defenseless is part and parcel of “Jewish morality,” it’s not hard to reach the conclusion it is inferior to all modern morality systems. It is also worth noting (Hebrew) that “Jewish morality” is a by-product of German blood and iron romanticism.” (2)
This means that Israel above all others on the planet can decide who lives and who dies in one of their wars. But the truly inhuman part of all of this lies in the fact that Israel shall DECIDE whose lives are important and whose do not matter at all: According to their self-proclaimed right to the powers which they have assigned to themselves as the world’s only super-race. The world must come together as ordinary people to stop this stone-age-concept that is based on self-serving lies and a Zionist global-deception. . .
If Israel is threatened with dissolution, then Obama’s orders might be delayed: Translation, we might not be attacked, by the about to be formed, Amerikan-Federal Police armed with their 450 million more reasons for all of us to work harder to stop this now!
kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net
1) ATK Secures .40 Caliber Ammunition Contract
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/atk-secures-40-caliber-ammunition-contract-with-department-of-homeland-security-us-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-dhs-ice-2012-03-12?reflink=MW_news_stmp
2) Israel Surrenders
http://www.rense.com/general95/surrenders.html
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32 - Israel Surrenders Credibility
By Jim Kirwan
3-28-12
Israel, specifically Zionist Occupied Israel, has surrendered any credibility they might ever have enjoyed to new walls of concrete and more barbed wire, to almost completely encircle the most belligerent and most HOSTILE state on the planet!
Paranoia inside that phobic place is running higher every day, while their policies AGAINST the world outside their borders are more and more often defined by all that steel and concrete than by anything that Israel says about its attitudes and policies, which now consist of nothing but lies. (1)
IDF Colonel-Rabbi implies: RAPE is permitted in War
“Answering a question from a concerned reader regarding the Torah’s position on rape during war, Colonel Eyal Qarim of the Military Rabbinate wrote nine years ago out of uniform that ‘prohibitions against immorality’ are removed during war.
Is it permitted for a Jewish soldier to rape a gentile woman during wartime? This question based on the biblical mitzvah of Eshet Yefat Toar (“a comely woman”) was referred to nine years ago (Hebrew) by Rabbi Eyal Qarim. The questioning party seemed anxious and worried, and wanted to know whether the iron-age mitzvah (religious deed) is applicable to IDF soldiers today.”
“The wars of Israel […] are mitzvah wars, in which they differ from the rest of the wars the nations wage among themselves. Since, essentially, a war is not an individual matter, but rather nations wage war as a whole, there are cases in which the personality of the individual is “erased” for the benefit of the whole. And vice versa: sometimes you risk a large unit for the saving of an individual, when it is essential for purposes of morale. One of the important and critical values during war is maintaining the army’s fighting ability […]
As in war the prohibition against risking your life is broken for the benefit of others, so are the prohibitions against immorality and of kashrut. Wine touched by gentiles, consumption of which is prohibited in peacetime, is allowed at war, to maintain the good spirit of the warriors. Consumption of prohibited foods is permitted at war (and some say, even when kosher food is available), to maintain the fitness of the warriors, even though they are prohibited during peacetime. Just so, war removes some of the prohibitions on sexual relations (gilui arayot in the original YZG), and even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter, it was permitted during wartime (under the specific terms) out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors. And since the success of the whole at war is our goal, the Torah permitted the individual to satisfy the evil urge (yetzer ha’ra in the original -YZG), under the conditions mentioned, for the purpose of the success of the whole.”(2)
If these questions are not indicative of a break with the global world view of what is permissible in contemporary warfare then most of the world would definitely be surprised: As this seems to go hand in hand with surrounding themselves behind barbed wire and concrete walls.
It would seem that the world ought to boycott everything Israeli, until Israel comes to a consensus about how other people are to be treated, by Israel, in times of war or peace. What is also remarkable is the staunch refusal of Israel to make peace with the nation and its people which they invaded in 1948. Instead of peace Israel wants to make permanent the status of slave-state, which they have assigned to the Palestinians; the only people in the entire world that ever gave refuge to the Jews down through all the centuries when the Jews were a hunted and ostracized people everywhere in the known world.
And this is the thanks Palestinians get, for all those centuries of shelter, given freely, when no one anywhere else would grant the Jews refuge from the hatred and the political-storms that swirled around them, dating from the time of Ancient Carthage. Today the Palestinian State is beset with hundreds of miles of dividing walls that have made a mockery of their villages and their lives, in the barbed wire and barbarity of segregated prison-camps that have literally ripped apart families and people from their lands and property: And the world has ignored the savagery of this illegal and oppressive occupation for 64 years now.
Checkpoints are everywhere and are maintained to humiliate and brutalize the Palestinians many of whom have died at those check points for no reason at all except to keep the psychological pressure upon anyone who has chosen to say in their own lands.
No nation on earth that has resorted to erecting WALLS to keep out the unwanted, has ever survived that effort. From the Great Wall of China through all of the Roman’s failed efforts in England and Scotland, all the way down to the Berlin Wall—no nation was ever saved by walling itself in when they have tried to protect an unwanted nation from its real enemies. Israel will not be an exception, despite what they continue to profess to the entire world about the “specialness” of their 'chosen' people. Those who supposedly defend this criminal-enterprise need to begin to withdraw their support which can be done by beginning to close their own embassies inside Israel, while they begin evicting Israeli Embassy’s from their own countries.
This needs to be begun sooner rather than later, but preferably in a direct response to the ugliness of the intention behind the building of these walls of steel and concrete; topped with razor wire and hatred for the world beyond those barriers!
Here’s more from the second link:
"Wow. Herein lies a hornet’s nest. The first is that according to Qarim, the rape of female prisoners is not just permitted, it is also essential to war; the success of the whole at war relies on it. Even Genghis Khan, who (according to tradition) said that the best thing in the world is “to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet — to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best” even he, who excelled at rape, did not see it as essential to warfare, just a satisfactory outcome. Stalin, likewise, dismissed complaints about rapes carried out massively by the Red Army by saying “a soldier has urges,” but he did not see it as an essential element of military life.
Qarim came up with a new military doctrine, which replaces Napoleon’s: an army marches on its phallus. According to this logic, perhaps the IDF should appoint to each unit not just a supply officer, but also a Comely Woman Officer (CWO), to make certain no soldier is left unsatisfied.
Another problem is that Qarim invokes here the usual apologetics of those who speak of “Jewish morality”: he claims war is a conflict between nations, not individuals, and that the individual has no importance at war. The raped woman is not a woman, is not a person, has no feelings and if she feels pain it is unimportant: she is not a woman or a person, just an individual of an enemy tribe whose misfortune was to be captured. Furthermore, Qarim says that rape during wartime is immoral if carried out by a rival tribe but all Jewish wars are, by definition, mitzvah wars. If the rape of the defenseless is part and parcel of “Jewish morality,” it’s not hard to reach the conclusion it is inferior to all modern morality systems. It is also worth noting (Hebrew) that “Jewish morality” is a by-product of German blood and iron romanticism.
Yet a third problem is that, essentially, Qarim says there is nothing which may be prohibited in war, if it is done “for the success of the whole.” We know that the killing of armed combatants is permitted (this is, after all, the essence of war), and we now learn that, for His Blessed Name, the rape of women is also permitted. Then we must ask ourselves whether it is also permitted, for the sake of victory, to also kill unarmed people. Children, for instance, who we have good reason to think may seek one day vengeance for the death of their fathers and brothers and the torturing of their mothers and sisters. The notorious book “Torat Ha’Melekh” answered in the affirmative; it would be interesting to know what Qarim thinks, and whether there is anything he thinks a Jewish soldier ought not to do for victory.
But the real problem here is that Eyal Qarim is an IDF colonel (Aluf Mishneh), and is a senior officer in the Military Rabbinate, i.e. is in a senior position in the IDF religious edicts apparatus. I’ve sent the following questions to the IDF Spokesman.” (2)
How much longer will the world continue to tolerate these barbarians in our midst? How many more nation states need to suffer the second-hand invasions of their countries to appease the unending appetites of these completely barbaric and primitive throw-backs to the Stone Age! The nations of the world must begin to reject the demands of Israel on every front, and force that place to release the Palestinians from their totalitarian grip upon the nation they are charged with protecting, because of the result of the 1948 war and the UN that created this mess in the first place. . .
kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net
1) Israel faces isolation as new border fence is erected 6 min video
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/mar/28/israel-border-fence-video
2) IDF Colonel-Rabbi Implies: Rape Is Permitted In War:
http://972mag.com/idf-colonel-rabbi-implies-rape-is-permitted-in-war/39535/
2) Depths of Deceptio
http://www.kirwanesque.net/2012/2561/depths-of-deception/
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33 - Hitler's First Murder
March 19, 2012
Hitler murdered his 24-year-old niece as result
of a bisexual love triangle involving the Nazi leader
and his Jewish chauffeur-bodyguard, Emil Maurice
by Henry Makow Ph.D.
To say Adolf Hitler was a psychopath and killer might seem redundant, but few know that he murdered his first victim with his own hands. It was swept under the carpet and has yet to see the light of day. Western historians are as determined as Nazis to protect the Fuhrer's reputation.
On Sept 18, 1931, he shot his beloved niece Geli Raubal, 24. The murder was ruled a suicide by the Bavarian Minister of Justice, a political ally.
(Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1938)
However, Raubal's body was badly bruised and her nose was broken. An unfinished letter indicated she was leaving her uncle's apartment to go to Vienna. She was buried in a Catholic cemetery that would bar suicides.
(The Münchener Post, 20th September 1931)
The bisexual love triangle that led to Raubal's murder reveals the true perverted character of a man that many "patriots" still worship.
Although a homosexual, Hitler still enjoyed the company of buxom young blonds and brunettes that fit the Nazi mold. Raubal was the daughter of Hitler's half-sister and cook. Nineteen years his junior, she was an unselfconscious extrovert who brightened every room she entered. Hitler seemed to relax when she was around.
"I love Geli and could marry her," Hitler told his friend Heinrich Hoffman. [But] "I want to remain single. So I retain the right to exert an influence on her circle of friends until such a time as she finds the right man." (Hoffman, Hitler Was My Friend, 1955.)
Hitler's rival was his own bisexual, Jewish chauffeur and bodyguard, Emil Maurice. In December 1927, Hitler prevented his niece from marrying Maurice and fired him. The following year, Raubal wrote to Maurice:
"Uncle Adolf is insisting that we should wait two years. Think of it, Emil, two whole years of only being able to kiss each other now and then and always having Uncle Adolf in charge. I can only give you my love and be unconditionally faithful to you. I love you so infinitely much. Uncle Adolf insists that I should go on with my studies." (Dec. 24,1928)
(The Jewish-looking Maurice and Hitler in Landsberg prison,1924)
EMIL MAURICE (1897-1972)
In Mein Kampf , Hitler describes a fracas at a beer hall when Communists tried to break up an event. He marveled at how his "storm troopers," although bloodied, "swept the enemy literally out of the hall...at their head, my splendid Maurice."
Maurice was a pioneer member of the SA and later the SS. He and Hess took Hitler's dictation ofMein Kampf; and like Hess, Maurice was one of Hitler's lovers. After their release from prison, Maurice became Hitler's personal bodyguard and chauffeur. He accompanied Hitler during the 1934 Purge and personally dispatched people who had become liabilities.
"It is absolutely inconceivable that Maurice was not known as Jewish," Dr. Judith Reisman writes. [Considering] "his appearance, his family, and the very high probability of his circumcision...homosexual lust easily overpowered anti Semitic hate."
When it later emerged that Maurice had a Jewish great grandfather, Hitler made an exemption for him and his family. Since one-sixteenth Jews were already exempt from the Nuremberg Laws, Maurice, who became an SS general, was probably more Jewish than that. Nazi race laws were a matter of expediency, mostly designed to persecute non-Zionist Jews and justify the formation of the Jewish State.
Despite his prowess as a bouncer, Maurice, a watchmaker by training, had an artistic temperament, and played the guitar at Nazi gatherings. Raubal, also a musician, took a fancy to him during her visits to Landsberg Prison in 1924, at age 16. Thus began a passionate romance that blossomed over the years.
HITLER'S DEPRAVITY
For his book, Hitler and Eva (1974) Glen Infield interviewed Wilhelm Stocker, a SS Guard at Hitler's apartment. Stocker said that when her Uncle Adolf was away, Geli had many suitors.
Because he kept her secrets, Geli told him "that at times Hitler made her do things in the privacy of her room that sickened her but when I asked her why she didn't refuse to do them, she just shrugged and said that she didn't want to lose him to some woman that would do what he wanted."
Gregor Strasser, a Nazi leader who had a fling with Geli said she told him the Nazi dictator forced her to urinate and defecate on him. Strasser was one of the Nazi leaders who met in Hitler's apartment after the murder to decide on a story. Hitler wanted it called an "accident." But the word had already gone out that Raubel had committed suicide using Hitler's gun.
Strasser was murdered in the 1934 Purge.
RAUBAL'S MURDER
Michael Dean reports that after leaving Hitler's service, Maurice sued the Nazi Party for unlawful dismissal and won a tidy sum. He opened a watchmaker shop a few blocks from Hitler's apartment and resumed his affair with Raubal.
Apparently she became pregnant and wanted to go to Vienna to have the baby. Hitler was furious at this betrayal and refused permission. When she defied him, he killed her.
It is not clear which betrayal was greater to Hitler since he had feelings for both Raubal and Maurice.
In any case, Hitler's relationship with Maurice proved resilient. Maurice became a senior SS official and Hitler protected him against rivals resentful accepting orders from a Jew.
The take-away is that before Hitler indirectly killed millions of people, Jews and non-Jews alike, he first bloodied his hands on the young niece he supposedly loved. Millions of people chose to follow a murderer and psychopath. Nothing has changed.
Related - Jacob Hitler
The Hidden Hitler
http://www.salon.com/2002/01/14/machtan/
The First Time I Heard the Name Adolf Hitler
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/h/ftp.py?people/h/hitler.adolf/oss-papers/text/oss-sb-salad-days
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34 - Hitler's favorite Jew : The strange case of Dr. Eduard Bloch
SOME FOOTNOTES OF HISTORY are just that: random scraps of trivia that may well form part of the historical record but are of no real interest to anyone besides genuine buffs. Who was Napoleon's podiatrist? Who cares? That is why it might at first sound like groping at the very bottom of the historical bag of tricks to write a book about Hitler's family doctor. Unless, of course, that doctor happened to be a Jew whose remarkable life story has revealed a previously unknown side of the Austrian dictator's character.
In fact, there has never been any mystery about Dr. Eduard Bloch. He was repeatedly interviewed by the Office of Strategic Services or OSS after his arrival in the US in 1940 and also published an autobiography in Collier's Weekly in 1941. This information has been out there for generations, but so far no one has dared touch it.
Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann has finally gone ahead and tackled the good doctor's tale head on. Hamann, who is best known outside her home country for her 1999 book Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship, published her biography of Bloch in Germany in 2008. It has not yet appeared in the United States, but when it finally comes out we had all better be prepared to face what comes next.
"If all Jews were like him..."
Dr. Eduard Bloch, 1872-1945
Eduard Bloch was an assimilated Austrian-Jewish physician who first came into contact with the Hitler family in the town of Leonding on the outskirts of Linz when he treated Adolf's father, Alois Hitler, shortly before his death in 1903. If the future Führer was innately "crazy," there's no evidence of it in the doctor's memoirs. According to Bloch, young Adolf was
quiet, well mannered and neatly dressed. He had patiently waited in the waiting room until it was his turn, then like every fourteen or fifteen year old boy, made a bow, and always thanked the doctor politely. Like the other boys in Linz, he had worn short lederhosen and a green woolen hat with a feather. He had been tall and pale and looked older than he was. His eyes which were inherited from his mother were large, melancholy and thoughtful. To a very large extent, this boy lived within himself. What dreams he dreamed I do not know.
In 1907 Bloch diagnosed his mother Klara with breast cancer. Adolf was devastated. Bloch noted that the young man was utterly devoted to his mother, but not in any unwholesome way. "He slept in the tiny bedroom adjoining that of his mother so that he could be summoned at any time during the night. During the day he hovered about the large bed in which she lay." Upon Klara's death, Dr. Bloch asked for only a modest fee from the struggling family and refused to charge them for house calls and extra medications. A few days after the funeral, Adolf and his sisters came to visit the doctor at his office in Linz.
Adolf wore a dark suit and a loosely knotted cravat. Then, as now, a shock of hair tumbled over his forehead. His eyes were on the floor while his sisters were talking. Then came his turn. He stepped forward and took my hand. Looking into my eyes, he said: "I shall be grateful to you forever." That was all. Then he bowed. I wonder if today he recalls this scene. I am quite sure that he does, for in a sparing sense Adolf Hitler has kept to his promise of gratitude. Favors were. granted me which I feel sure were accorded no other Jew in all Germany or Austria.
Young Hitler:
"I shall be grateful to you forever"
In his testimony to the OSS, Bloch stated that during Hitler's Vienna days, when the frustrated artist was supposedly already a convinced anti-Semite, he mailed Bloch a postcard with the words: "From Vienna I send you my greetings. Yours, always faithfully, Adolf Hitler." Hitler also once sent New Year's wishes on one of his own self-painted post cards and even presented the doctor with one of his paintings. Many years later, Gestapo agents came to Bloch's home and politely confiscated the two postcards. He had lost track of the painting long before.
Bloch went on to tell the OSS that
in 1937, a number of local Nazis attended the party conference at Nuremberg. After the conference Hitler invited several of these people to come with him to his mountain villa at Berchtesgaden. The Führer asked for news of Linz. How was the town ? Were people there supporting him? He asked for news of me. Was I still alive, still practicing? Then he made a statement irritating to local Nazis. "Dr. Bloch," said Hitler, "is an Edeljude - a noble Jew. If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question."
Then in 1938, when Hitler entered Austria in triumph, he visited his hometown of Linz.
It was a moment of tense excitement. For years Hitler had been denied the right to visit the country of his birth. Now that country belonged to him. The elation that he felt was written on his features. He smiled, waved, gave the Nazi salute to the people that crowded the street. Then for a moment he glanced up at my window. I doubt that he saw me but he must have had a moment of reflection. Here was the home of the Edeljude who had diagnosed his mother's fatal cancer; here was the consulting room of the man who had treated his sisters; here was the place he had gone as a boy to have his minor ailments attended.... It was a brief moment, then the procession was gone.
During his visit, Hitler met up with his boyhood friends and made a point of asking former neighbors about Bloch's personal well-being.
In 1938, Bloch - like all other Jews in Austria - was forced to close his doctor's office. He then addressed a personal letter to Hitler recalling their earlier friendship and asking for help. Hitler immediately obliged and placed Bloch and his family under Gestapo protection. They were the only Jews in Linz to enjoy such a privilege and were soon practically the only Jews left in town. The authorities then allowed the Bloch and his wife Lilli to remain in their home without disturbance for nearly three years and even allowed Bloch to put up displaced Jews. In a time when nearly all Jews had their passports confiscated, Bloch was able to renew his repeatedly. In fact, throughout this period the Linz police department regularly informed Bloch that he had nothing whatsoever to fear. The doctor was certain that the local Gestapo office received regular instructions from the Reich Chancellery. But Bloch nevertheless feared for his safety and eventually arranged to emigrate to the United States.
Hamann's new book chronicles how Bloch was permitted to sell his house at a normal market price and keep the money. Later, Bloch sent a personal letter to the Führer via his own daughter and Hitler's sister asking to be allowed to take his life savings with him when he emigrated to America. This was a time when most Jews were robbed of all they possessed upon emigration. But this time Bloch received no preferential treatment. However, he did receive a letter of protection from the Reich Chancellery, which allowed him to cross the Reich border without any of the chicanery most Jews had to endure. He and Lilli then sailed for New York City a few days before Christmas, 1940, and settled in the Bronx. Bloch could not practise medicine in the United States with an Austrian license and lived in obscurity until his own death from cancer in June, 1945.
Klara Hitler, née Pölzl (1860-1907):
Was the "search for Lebensraum ... the outcome of an oral-aggressive fixation which Hitler acquired with his mother's milk"?
What are we to make of this account? It certainly topples one popular interpretation of Hitler's anti-Semitism. In the 1970s, noted psycho-historian Rudolph Binion constructed an entire career for himself out of arguing that "Hitler's mother cannot have escaped fatal poisoning from a given treatment applied to her by a Jewish doctor in her last weeks of life and ... Hitler's experience of her agony was the unconscious source of his deadly hate for the Jews." What's more, "The basic libidinal thrust behind Hitler's doctrine of 'feeding ground' [referring to Lebensraum] was entirely oral as far as I can see," even though, Binion admits, "the fact that Hitler was stuck on his mother's breast did not yield his designs on Soviet Russia." Since the publication of Hamann's book at the latest, this theory can safely be tossed onto the mounting dung heap of history.
But if such a scenario as that described by Dr. Bloch is possible, then just why did Hitler hate "the Jews" anyway? Entire libraries have been written about this question. The short explanation is that Hitler was not a classic racial anti-Semite, like Himmler or Heydrich, and actually regarded the whole notion of a genuine biological "Jewish race" as an expediency. Instead, Hitler viewed the cosmopolitanism and intellectualism he associated with Europe's Jewish community as an immediate threat to the worldview he had hammered together for himself out of four years of unrelenting wartime propaganda during his formative soldier days. The Führer saw militarism and conquest as being threatened by Jewish-organized pacifism and revolution, authoritarianism by Jewish democracy, male dominance by Jewish feminism and contraception, fanatical faith in "final victory" by the spirit of criticism and Freudian psychoanalysis, racial purity by Jewish tolerance and sexual freedom, traditional values and culture by Jewish modernism and atheism, and an organic and hierarchical social order by both Jewish capitalism andsocialism - the one-two sucker punch of the international Jewish conspiracy. As the carriers of this intellectual "infection," "the Jews" had to be physically liquidated before they contaminated the entire planet with what he called "Bolshevism" and what we today call "liberalism" and "globalization."
Hitler in his office at the Old Reich Chancellery, 1933:
Prophesying "the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe"
Well, at least Eduard and Lilli Bloch made it. Does the doctor's story affirm Hitler's underlying humanity or merely underscore his utter depravity? I would argue that Dr. Bloch's fate was the exception that proved the rule. There is nothing in the least bit uplifting about saving one couple's life and the lives of a handful of other "noble Jews" while ordering the murder of millions more. As a matter of fact, it was precisely this sort of arbitrariness that made the Third Reich so terrifying.
Nobody wanted to hear Bloch's recollections during the war, and a conspiracy of silence still surrounds him today. His potentially heart-warming story turned his contemporary readers' hearts to cold hard stone. But people back then were made of tougher stuff. Can we still resist the siren song of kitsch? What keeps me awake at night is the thought that once Hamann's nuanced book appears in English, some producer somewhere - say, the makers of the Hallmark Hall of Fame or even Steven Spielberg himself - will discover it and transmogrify its alarming contents into an uplifting Christmas movie for everyone's edification. I foresee a tearful secret reunion in Linz and an annual exchange of Christmas cards. The film's moral will be something like "Even Hitler was a good person deep down." [I have posted elsewhere about the hazards of "feel-good movies" about appalling subjects, particularly Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others.] Such a film would truly mean the end of an entire era of anti-Fascist education. But somehow I sense that our sentimental and brain-addled culture is just about ripe for such a project. Call it It's a Wonderful Reich.
This time you can't say nobody warned you.
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Sources:
Brigitte Hamann: Hitlers Edeljude - Das Leben des Armenarztes Eduard Bloch. Piper, Munich, 2008.
Office of Strategic Services, Hitler Source Book, Interview With Dr. Eduard Bloch (March 5, 1943).
Eduard Bloch: "My Patient Hitler," in Collier’s Weekly, 15-22 March 1941.
Rudolph Binion: "Springtime for Hitler," in The New York Review of Books,Volume 22, Number 10, June 12, 1975.
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ED : THE ROTHSCHILDS FUNDED STALIN AND ....
35 - Stalin Funded Hitler
March 16, 2012
Nazism and Communism were dialectical opposites,
constructed in the same Illuminati factory. Although supposedly enemies,
they assisted each other from Stalin's initial funding
of the Nazi Party until the eve of their fratricidal war.
by Henry Makow Ph.D.
After Hitler took charge of the fledgling Nazi Party on July 21, 1921, he spent lavishly on propaganda and recruitment.
There was no shortage of funds during this critical stage. The Nazis obviously had wealthy friends. But who were they?
Wall Street and German industry didn't kick in until the late 1920's. The German Army was financing the Nazis, but didn't account for the seemingly unlimited money at Hitler's fingertips.
In the book, "A Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II" (1981, pp. 245-246) ) the authors, Anthony Cave Brown and Charles MacDonald report that in 1923, Hitler returned from Zurich "with a steamer trunk stuffed with Swiss Francs and American dollars." There were other mysterious sources of funds in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Latvia.
(Chancellor for two mos. in 1932-1933, Von Schleicher was Time's "Man of the Year" in 1932)
After World War II, US Army intelligence officers took an affidavit from industrialist Arnold Rechberg who maintained that General Kurt Von Schleicher told him in 1933 that Stalin had provided Hitler with "substantial funds."
Von Schleicher was head of the Black Reichswehr program. The Black Reichswehr programwas dedicated to rebuilding the German army, contrary to the provisions of the Versailles Treaty.
According to Walter Schellenberg, Chief of SS Foreign Intelligence, Von Schleicher also advanced Hitler 42 million Reichsmarks during this formative period on instructions from Stalin!(Memoirs, p.43) (This probably why the Gestapo murdered Von Schleicher and his wife in the 1934 purge.)
Supposedly Stalin hoped Hitler would cause a civil war after which the Communists would take over Germany.
The truth is that Stalin and Hitler were both Illuminati. The Illuminati created Nazism as the dialectical opposite of Communism. In other words, the Illuminati created the "Jewish Marxist" world conspiracy and then created its antithesis, its supposed arch enemy, the Nazi movement, destined be annihilated.
While seemingly opposed to each other, they represented the same group of billionaire Satanists determined to enslave humanity in a world government. While the evil twins duked it out, millions of potential opponents of world government would be killed in a false cause.
NAZI-COMMUNIST COOPERATION
In April 1922, Stalin signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the Wiemar Republic. This began a massive German military build-up in Russia designed to evade the provisions of the Versailles treaty. It included training and factories for production of munitions, poison gas, tanks and aircraft. In return for Communist cooperation, the Germans provided know-how and investment. Two prizefighters were training in the same gym for a future championship match. Thus the Illuminati economized.
According to Schellenberg, from 1929 on, Stalin directed the German Communist Party to regard the Social Democratsand not the Nazis as their enemy. There is no question the Communists assisted the Nazis in attaining power. (p.43)
The final example of this secret alliance was the Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty of 1939 which paved the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland. Stalin ignored irrefutable evidence of the Nazi plan to attack and provided the Nazis with needed raw materials right up until the invasion.
Although both Germany and Russia invaded Poland, the Illuminati-controlled West declared war only on Germany!
Why? Because the plan was to embroil Germany in a two-front war with Stalin on the side of the West. The plan was for the dialectical devils to battle it out, and for Germany to be finished off as a nationalistic force. Both Hitler and Bormann were Illuminati agents assigned to lure Germany into a fatal trap.
In 1921, Russia and Germany were presented as two pariah states. The onerous conditions of the Versailles Treatywere designed to drive Germany into Russia's arms. But, this was only in preparation for Germany's revenge, WWII and the final knock-out blow.
CONCLUSION
We live in a mental and spiritual matrix created by the Illuminati bankers and their traitorous minions. They manipulate world events and our perceptions of them. They fund the historians and own the mass media. Google "Stalin funded Hitler" and you won't find one mention of this.
But occasionally the truth slips through the net, or used to. Today information seems more tightly controlled than ever. But "A Field of Red" was published 30 years ago when we were still basking in the twilight rays of Christian Civilization.
The take-away is that if we have another world war, it will be planned and orchestrated by the Illuminati who always control both sides.
See Comment from Danish Observer - OJ
"Hitler took Offer Ludendorff Refused"
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36 - A LUCID LOOK AT LUCIFER
By Dr. Harrell Rhome
This article originally appeared in Special Issue #10 (“Unexplained Mysteries and the Paranormal”) of NEW DAWN magazine, Melbourne, Australia. http://newdawnmagazine.com.au/
With the exception of illustrations this is Copyright ©2010 All Rights Reserved.
The Fallen Angel by Gustave Dore, one of his illustrations for Milton’s Paradise Lost.
LUCIFER IN THE BIBLE.
We have to literarily, philosophically and theologically deconstruct certain concepts before we can really understand them. This is a process where we look beneath and beyond the commonly assumed folklore. Some readers may think Lucifer is a clearly designated biblical character, the same figure as Satan. Lucifer is the Fallen Angel in the Bible, in the Book of Genesis. Right? Of course, the answer is no on all counts. Surprisingly, the word Lucifer appears only once in the Bible in Isaiah 14:12, translating the Hebrew wordhelel meaning shining one. In the Greek Septuagint translation, it was rendered as heosphoros (Ηωσφόρος) or light-bearer. This word comes from Hesperus, a Greek goddess of the dawn. When the Romans took over the Christian scriptures in the 300s, Jerome translated helel and heosphoros as Lucifer in his Latin Vulgate Bible. Whether in old Hebrew, Greek or Latin, the word was the common name for Venus, the brightest planet, the Morning Star, the Light-Bearer, the Day Star. So in the real meaning of Isaiah 14:12, Lucifer merely describes the vainglorious image that the arrogant King of Babylon would seek to affect.
Some Protestant translations from John Wycliffe and others followed the Vulgate. But the respected Protestant biblical exegete Matthew Henry (Matthew Henry’s Commentary, 1721) says nothing about Lucifer being Satan, focusing on the real meaning of the text, which has to do with the nation of Babylon and its rulers who oppressed the Old Testament Hebrews. It goes without saying that a simple Internet search will bring up mountains of material to the contrary, supporting the “traditional” view that Lucifer is the fallen angel, the Devil, the same as the Satan cited in Luke 10:18. But in truth, the very same term, Day Star, is also applied to the Christ himself in II Peter 1:19, Revelation 22:16, and in the ancient Latin Easter hymn, the Exultet. In an interesting coincidence, an early Christian theologian and bishop back in the 300s was named Lucifer, so it was obviously not a negative name back then. What’s more, I’m pretty sure Jerome would have known of him since they were contemporaries in the early Church. In some ways, the personification of Lucifer as Satan is crucial to certain versions of Christianity. Otherwise, if the so-called Fall of Lucifer does not account for the origin of Satan, then the Old Testament is silent on the matter. Regardless of that, only a few Bible versions follow Jerome’s translation. Early Protestants differed. The English King James version used Lucifer, but Martin Luther’s German translation did not. When Luther was in seminary, he studied the Vulgate, so he purposefully differed from Jerome by not using Lucifer. We begin with the King James Version,
"How art thou fallen from heaven O Lucifer, son of the morning? How are thou cut down to the ground which didst weaken the nations!” Isaiah 14:12, KJV.
“Quomodo cecidisti de caelo Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris corruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes?”Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.
“O Lucifer who didst rise in the morning! How art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations!” Douay Rheims English translation of the Vulgate.
“Du schöner Morgenstern.” (You beautiful morning star.) Luther Bible.
“O morning star, son of the dawn!” New International.
“O Day Star, son of the morning.” Revised Standard.
“Bright morning star.” New Revised Standard.
"O Day Star, son of Dawn!” New English Bible.
"O star of the morning, son of the dawn! New American Standard.
Lucifer or Dawn or Venus is also a figure in ancient Canaanite mythology, having nothing to do with Satan or evil beings.
“The dwelling of the gods and the riding of the clouds are both known to us from the Ras Shamra texts at Ugarit in N. Syria, and so too is Dawn a deity, of whom this figure is described as a son. The most high is Elyon, the title so often used of God…. All these elements may be paralleled in the Old Testament, suggesting how richly Canaanite religion and mythology have influenced Old Testament thought.”Interpreters One Volume Commentary of the Bible, 1971.
Old and new reference sources tell us more.
“Lucifer Isa. 14:12. This word, signifying light bearer, occurs but once in our Bible, and then applies to the king of Babylon to indicate his glory as a morning star, or figuratively, a son of the morning. Tertullian and some others suppose the passage to relate to the fall of Satan; and hence the term is usually applied in that way; though, as it seems, without specific warrant.” The Union Bible Dictionary, 1842
“Its application, from St. Jerome downwards, to Satan in his fall from heaven, arises probably from the fact that the Babylonian Empire is in scripture represented as the type of tyrannical and self-idolizing power, and especially connected with the empire of the Evil One in the Apocalypse.” Smith’s Bible Dictionary, 1884.
“In spite of this rendering, the proper name ‘Lucifer’ is not in the original Hebrew text. In Hebrew ‘Lucifer, son of the morning’ is helel ben shachar. It could be translated ‘shining one, son of the dawn.’ It is not a proper name, but an epithet for the king of Babylon.” Bryan Knowles, Who Is Lucifer?http://www.godward.org, 2009.
Hence, Jerome’s use of Lucifer as a capitalized proper name is not correct. The Roman Church concocted the Lucifer-as-Satan myth after they took over emergent Christianity in the early 300s, as evidenced by references to both Tertullian and Jerome. If Lucifer is so important, why is nothing else ever said? Light Bearer, Morning Star; nothing negative about that. Lucifer not only does not mean anything negative, as a matter of fact, it doesn’t really seem to mean anything at all, biblically speaking. Out of the over 800,000 words in the Bible and the Apocrypha, Lucifer appears once, and then in an ambiguous reference. Whatever it may mean to certain Christian sects, theosophical and metaphysical groups, or secret societies, as you can clearly see, does not come from the Bible!
THE PAGAN ORIGINS OF SATAN.
Satan (Hebrew השָׂטָן ha-Satan; in Arabic Shaitan) translates as adversary or accuser. In all three Semitic religions, Satan refers to the opposite of the good god, or the so-called Devil. This is, of course, a direct transplant from Persian Zoroastrianism into the ancient Hebrew religion then into the Talmud, Kabala, the New Testament and lastly into the Koran. Zoroastrianism poses two gods, one responsible for good and another responsible for evil. The polyglot god traditions found in Genesis reflect this Persian pagan influence. For some, the image and persona of the Satan is quite fascinating, indeed, perhaps even noble. As readers of English literature know, John Milton addressed this theme in his famous 1667 poetic magnum opus,Paradise Lost. Consider the following hypothesis, based on the multiple Semitic deities portrayed in Genesis.
“El in Egyptian is also the Child, who in the early Sabean age, was Sut, the planetary type, Saturn. Later El was transformed into Satan, whom Job introduces as one of the sons of god. Satan was accounted a son and an Angel of God by all Semitic nations. The learned Kabalist, Eliphas Levi, speaks of Satan thus: It is the angel who is proud enough to believe himself god; proud enough to buy his independence at the price of eternal suffering and torture; beautiful enough to have adored himself in full divine light; strong enough to reign in darkness amidst agony, and to have built himself a throne on his inextinguishable fire.’ He further says that the true name of Satan is that of Jehovah reversed, for Satan is not a black god but the negation of Deity.
The Devil of the early Christians, with horns, hoofs and tail was introduced from Babylon through the Jewish Talmud. The Christian religion transforms Satan into an enemy of God, whereas in reality by Satan the highest divine spirit or Occult Wisdom on earth is meant.” E. Valentia Straiton, Celestial Ship of the North.
Levi also says Lucifer is the Holy Spirit.
“What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil, The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the Paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism. To personify evil and exalt it into an intelligence which is the rival of God, into a being which can understand but love no more - this is a monstrous fiction. To believe that God permits this evil intelligence to deceive and destroy his feeble creatures is to make God more wicked than the devil. By depriving the devil of the possibility of love and repentance, God forces him to do evil. Moreover a spirit of error and falsehood can only be a folly which thinks, nor does it deserve indeed the name of spirit. The devil is God’s antithesis, and if we define God as He who is we must define His opposite as he who is not.” Eliphas Levi, The Mysteries of Magic.
“The Yahwists and Elohists reflected a very early stage of the Israelite religion. This is when it was still essentially a nature/fertility much the same as as the other pagan religions of the same time and region. It contained things like angels (in the text called Elohim), talking animals, dreams, and the idea of an anthropomorphic deity. This deity brought forth both good and evil as any anthropomorphic deity does. There was no Satan to bring the natural disasters. It was God. It was God also when (he was) displeased with someone simply ‘removed’ him by taking his life. So it was necessary to propitiate and worship this deity in order not to anger him in any way. It was later, after the Babylonian ‘captivity’, that this God became patient, just, and merciful, just like [the Zoroastrian good god called] Ahura Mazda.” Alexander S. Holub, The Gospel Truth, the Heresy of History, 2004.
So then, when we deconstruct the words, symbols and images, it turns out that Lucifer-Satan-Devil, the source of all evil, is originally neither a Hebrew, Christian nor a Muslim concept, springing directly from much earlier Persian pagan roots. Naturally, all this biblical revisionism is not popular with the priests and preachers. If they couldn’t scare you with Lucifer, the Devil and visions of burning with Satan in Hell, there might be fewer donations. We can’t have that!
LUCIFER IN THEOSOPHY AND SECRET SOCIETIES.
Now that we understand more about the real origins of the word as misused in the Vulgate Bible, we see that various metaphysical groups, Illuminati orders and secret societies essentially created their own deity centered on the image of Lucifer as Light Bearer. Madame Blavatsky, like Eliphas Levi, said the Holy Spirit and Lucifer are the same entity.
“Lucifer represents, Life, Thought, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence; Lucifer is the Logos, the Serpent, the Savior. …
It is Satan who is the God of our planet and the only God. …
The Celestial Virgin which thus becomes the Mother of Gods and Devils at one and the same time; for she is the ever-loving beneficent Deity but in antiquity and reality Lucifer or Luciferius is the name. Lucifer is divine and terrestial Light, 'the Holy Ghost' and ‘Satan' at one and the same time.” Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 1888.
Moving beyond this, the magical rituals of some Illuminati secret societies seem sinister and evil. A lot of commentary is not needed; the quotations speak clearly. For those wanting to explore beyond this, all the sources cited, and lots more, are not hard to find. Neither have we dealt with the myriad of modern belief systems called Satanism, yet another complex and diverse topic, but that will have to be at another time. But right now, just read on and see what the secret initiatic orders and their high adepts have to say about their god/demigod/demon-god/holy spirit.
"First Conjuration Addressed to Emperor Lucifer: Emperor Lucifer, Master and Prince of Rebellious Spirits, I adjure thee to leave thine abode, in what-ever quarter of the world it may be situated and come hither to communicate with me. I command and I conjure thee in the Name of the Mighty Living God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to appear...." Arthur E. Waite, Book of Black Magic, 1913.
"I hereby promise the Great Spirit Lucifuge, Prince of Demons, that each year I will bring unto him a human soul to do with as it may please him, and in return Lucifuge promises to bestow upon me the treasures of the earth and fulfill my every desire for the length of my natural life. If I fail to bring him each year the offering specified above, then my own soul shall be forfeit to him. Signed.... Invocant signs pact with his own blood." Manly P. Hall, 33rd Degree Freemason, The Secret Teaching Of All Ages, 1978.
“When The Mason learns that the Key to the warrior on the block is the proper application of the dynamo of living power, he has learned the Mystery of his Craft. The seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands and before he may step onward and upward, he must prove his ability to properly apply this energy.” Manly P. Hall, Lost Keys of Freemasonry, 2006.
“That which we must say to a crowd is - We worship a God, but it is the God that one adores without superstition. To you, Sovereign Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the Brethren of the 32nd, 31st, and 30th degrees – The Masonic Religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian Doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonay whose deeds prove his cruelty, perfidy and hatred of man, barbarism and repulsion for science, would Adonay and his priests, calumniate him? Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also god.”
“For the eternal law is that there is no light without shade, no beauty without ugliness, no white without black, for the absolute can only exist as two gods: darkness being necessary to the statue, and the brake to the locomotive. Thus, the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy; and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil.” …
“Lucifer, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the son of the morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with it's splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual or selfish Souls? Doubt it not!” Albert Pike, 33rd Degree Freemason, Morals and Dogma, 1871.
LU
CIFER IN SUMMARY.
Several conclusions present themselves. Firstly, the Lucifer of the Bible is but a minor character at best, mentioned only once, not really standing out or signifying much of anything. The real character portrayed in the Isaiah text is an arrogant Babylonian monarch who oppressed the Hebrew people. Secondly, the mystical interpretations about Lucifer as Satan were added by Kabalistic rabbis, Catholic priests, Islamic mullahs, and Protestant preachers, all with clearly vested self-interests. Thirdly, various occult philosophers and metaphysicians explored and enlarged the Lucifer persona and paradigm, creating an odd godlike figure.
Lastly, on the outer fringes of this magic and mysticism are the secret societies and Illuminati initiatic orders, especially Freemasons of one kind or another. Remember, there are secret lodges, degrees and covert rituals, unknown outside the upper level adepts of the Illuminati orders. Their peculiar Luciferian doctrines and dogma always have had and still do have a significant impact on world history and geopolitical affairs. Not so much because of the rituals themselves, but because of the people who practice this strange cultic religion. Like any belief system, its basic teachings, its morals and values color the decisions made by the truly devoted believers. Certain ones are in very high positions in the government, the churches and the social order.
I hope some of you will continue your explorations into the occult underground and its impact on the world around us. If my deconstruction of the Lucifer legends and lore has been a literary Light Bearer, then let it be!
