MP George Galloway, in a moving speech on Press TV defends the Christians of the Maaloula Town in Syria against Al Qaeda forces hired by Obama. George Galloway is a British politician, writer, and broadcaster, and the Respect Party Member of British Parliament for Bradford West. Mr. Galloway is known as a brave man, who tells the truth no matter what the consequences...

 

  By readers’ request, this is a reposting of a translation of a Pakistani National TV interview with an eyewitness to the alleged SEAL Team Six attack that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. I made the translation available two years ago in an article prior to the creation of this website. Before you believe “your” government’s lies about Syria, remember “your” government’s lies about...

 

  In 2011 when Muhammar Qaddafi refused to leave quietly as ruler of Libya, the Obama Administration, hiding behind the skirts of the French, launched a ferocious bombing campaign and a “No Fly” zone over the country to aid the so-called fighters for democracy. The US lied to Russia and China with help of the (US-friendly) Gulf Cooperation Council about the Security Council Resolution on Libya and used it to illegally justify the war. The doctrine, “responsibility to protect” was used instead, the same doctrine Obama wants to use in Syria. It’s useful to look at Libya two years after the NATO humanitarian intervention...

 

...Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, stated that the Oslo peace agreement is a big failure, and that Israel is the only party that benefits from this treaty. Barghouthi said that agreement was transitional and partial, and did not carry any characteristics of the main goal of peace talks. “This allowed Israel to implement a system of apartheid, by significantly escalating its settlement activities, and the theft of Palestinian lands, Israel is using the peace deal as a cover-up for its violations”..

Read more...

 

  Palestinians protest against the Judaization of Jerusalem and al-Aqsa...

 

  Five days after his death, the family and friends of Ihsan Abu-Sitta are still in shock. The Palestinian worker died in Tel Aviv after his boss tossed him to the side of the road when he was injured at work; he was left to bleed to death. People came from all over the occupied West Bank, the Negev Desert and Jaffa to attend his funeral in Askar refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus. Amira Hass, writing in Haaretz newspaper, said that family and friends from Gaza are still waiting for permits from the Israelis to allow them to travel to pay their respects...

 

   The United States and Russia reached an agreement on Thursday on a draft U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at ridding Syria of its chemical weapons arsenal. Following is the text of this draft resolution...

 

  Iran’s New President Hassan Rouhani has requested that Israel to sign and become a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as he spoke for a second time at the United Nation General Assembly. “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the threat of their use exists,” Rouhani said, citing the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  Rouhani is calling for “nuclear-free zone” in the Middle East.  Israel is the only country in the Middle East that had not and will not sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Israel would use nuclear weapons if it felt it was threatened by any nation in the Middle East...
Read more...

 

...a new book claims to have solved the riddle of the flight to Britain in 1941 of Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy. Hess’s journey to Britain by fighter aircraft to Scotland has traditionally been dismissed as the deranged solo mission of a madman. But Peter Padfield, an historian, has uncovered evidence he says shows that, Hess, the deputy Fuhrer, brought with him from Hitler, a detailed peace treaty, under which the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over the imminent attack on Russia...

 

...Kenya’s intervention against Al-Shabaab in Somalia was bound to attract blow backs and retaliatory strikes from the increasingly isolated fundamentalist group, but the ferocity and attrition with which the Nairobi rampage was carried out is a clear reflection of Al-Shabaab’s shifting strategy and the senseless cruelty that has become its new hallmark...

 

  European diplomats are holding Israel accountable over an incident where IDF servicemen attacked a EU humanitarian convoy in the West Bank on Friday. So far Tel Aviv has left the scandal in limbo, offering no official explanation for the incident. Diplomats from several EU countries have spoken out against the shocking incident of harassing a person with diplomatic immunity, clearly awaiting some sort of official reaction from the state of Israel. After disturbing photos of the French diplomat.. spread on the ground with IDF soldiers standing around her hit international news, the scandal over hijacked EU aid to homeless Bedouins from demolished villages in the West Bank has gained momentum.....

 

 

...In the remote future, few people would fight for winning the role of Netanyahu during the UNGA 68, a movie to be produced by Bollywood. It is not only the role of a loser watching all other actors laughing at him, but also one of a fool threatening to bomb everybody not agreeing to his bestial bullying. That is not a role that wins Boscars...

 

  Roy Bard is a known figure within Britain’s far left, anti-war and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. He is a member of the Indymedia UK collective, a leading British anti-capitalist media outlet. I first encountered Bard five years ago.  At the time the site was subjected to an international Jewish ‘anti’-Zionist campaign: a cabal of ethnic activists demanded that Indymedia delete my articles.  Being a principled man, Bard didn’t bow to their pressure. Bard has been subjected to a malicious slanderous campaign ever since...

 

...The extreme arrogance of government started a long time ago. During the Truman Administration the Black Budget was authorized. Not one informed vote has been cast in the United States since then. Think about that. If there ever was democracy in the USA, it died with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947. Place a call to your Congressman. Ask about the Black budget, or better yet, ask about the CIA system of Black Prisons around the world. Citizens are routinely denied any information. That is bad. Congressmen are also routinely denied access to information. That is even worse...

 

...As someone who worked within the federal and state political system for a long time I am totally convinced that the American political system has become a farce, actually an evil system for the vast majority of Americans. Why?  Because this political system has become the tool for sustaining the upper, wealthy class and is destroying the middle class and succeeding in creating a two-class society. Economic inequality is now at its highest level. This has resulted because the rich, upper class controls the political system through money that more than earns a terrific return on the funds invested.. We desperately need a second American revolution...

 

...According to Oren, contrary to appearances, Israel has been far from ambivalent about who emerges victorious from the fighting between Bashar Assad’s regime and the rebels — a ragbag of secular and Islamist groups, some of the latter allied with Al-Qaeda. Rather than preferring “the devil we know”, as many Israeli officials have observed of Assad and his father (“devils” who kept the border with Israel remarkably quiet for decades) Oren says Israel has been quietly cheering on the rebels from the outset and that it was in fact hoping for Assad’s downfall “well before the outbreak of hostilities”..

...It’s WAVE time. WAVE as in World Against Violence and Extremism. Not in Farsi, lost in translation; in English. “I propose as a starting step… I invite all states… to undertake a new effort to guide the world in this direction … we should start thinking about a coalition for peace all across the globe instead of the ineffective coalitions for war.” So the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, has just invited the whole planet to join the WAVE. How come no “coalition of the willing” leader ever thought about that?..

 

  The Edward Snowden March 2009 memo which reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) is illegally spying on American citizens and then passing the raw information it obtains on to Israel is particularly shocking because it demonstrates with documentary evidence just how Washington’s inside the beltway crowd places its relationship with Israel above its responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States. But equally interesting is the tale of the dog that did not bark in the night...

 

 

 

...this is by far the single most important foreign-policy move that Obama has made during the past 5-year period in office. Some draw parallel with Richard Nixon’s opening to China in the early seventies. But at the very least, Obama’s overture goes far beyond a tentative move – although he realizes that the «difficult history» of US-Iranian standoff cannot be «overcome overnight.»  He said if a way forward can be found on the nuclear issue, it would constitute a «major step down a long road towards a different relationship, one based on mutual interests and mutual respect.» Obama literally borrowed the diplomatic idiom from the Iranians...

 

  Abdelaziz Salame, the highest political leader of the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo, has issued a statement online where he claims to speak for 13 different rebel factions.. The statement is titled “communiqué number one” – making it slightly ominous right off the bat – and what it purports to do is to gut Western strategy on Syria and put an end to the exiled opposition...

 

...their argument that Israel defends America’s interest in the world’s most oil-rich region is easily falsified. Israelis do not fight in America’s wars. It it were in US interests to support Israel, it would not need a multi-million dollar lobby working day and night to undermine any squeak of defiance, corrupting and intimidating politicians from the president down. Real friends don’t need lobbies...

 

  Here’s a piece of disgusting news, so disgusting in fact that it beggars belief. Israel and its army of occupation are not just brutal, inhuman and utterly devoid of morality. They also have no self-respect.. The Israelis have chosen to stoop to levels hitherto unexplored by humanity. It is up to us to make sure that the innocent do not suffer as the “chosen ones” continue their downward journey to hell...

 

...Defeating the Israel lobby and changing U.S. policy in the Middle East from a policy of bullying, sanctions and bombing to a policy of diplomacy and compromise would not put an end to capitalism, to the military-industrial complex or to U.S. imperialism.  But such a victory would be a good basis for going on to oppose the huge network of overseas U.S. military bases, the encircling of Russia and China, the exploitation of Africa and any return to the traditional imperialist treatment of Latin America...

 

...in the last decade-plus, power and military power have come to be essentially synonymous in Washington, the pure goodness of firing missiles or dropping bombs has been deified. On that basis, it’s indisputable that the bragging rights to American exceptionalism are Washington’s. For those who need proof, what follows are just eight ways (among so many more) that you can proudly make the case for our exceptional status, should you happen to stumble across, say, President Putin, still blathering on about how unexceptional we are...

 

...Asking about Rouhani’s take on the Holocaust, Amanpour noted that his predecessor, President Ahmadinejad, infamously denied the Holocaust. "Do you accept what it was, and what was it?" the US journalist asked. However, according to Iran’s Fars News Agency (FNA), the news channel made up parts of Rouhani's answers, adding the word 'Holocaust' among other placatory remarks to its translation from the answers given in Farsi...

 

...“One of Netanyahu’s minions, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, appeared to be just as panicked as Netanyahu by Rouhani’s ‘charm offensive’ and its promise of peace. Giuliani spoke at a rally organized by the terrorist group Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) outside the UN in protest of Rouhani’s visit. The former New York mayor and 9/11 suspect, speaking to the terrorist group, charged that President Rouhani was involved in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “The irony of suspected 9/11 terrorist Giuliani, speaking to one of the world’s most reviled terrorist groups, charging the moderate president of Iran with terrorism, is extreme...

 

  Born in West Jerusalem in 1935. Exiled in December 1947. Said was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1991, a malignant cancer of the bone marrow and blood. At 6:45AM on September 25, 2003, he succumbed (at age 67) after a painful courageous 12 year struggle. Tributes followed and resumed a year later. In a testimony to his teacher, Professor Moustafa Bayoumi called him "indefatigable, incorruptible, a humanist and devastatingly charming....leav(ing behind) legions of followers and fans in every corner of the world. I am lost without him....I miss him so."..

 

  The National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States eavesdropped on civil rights icon Martin Luther King and heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali as well as other leading critics of the Vietnam War in a secret programme later deemed "disreputable," declassified documents have revealed. The six-year spying programme, dubbed "Minaret," had been exposed in the 1970s but the targets of the surveillance had been kept secret until now...

 

  In this hard-hitting, hour-long broadcast, host Karen Kwiatkowski and Mark Weber discuss historical revisionism, US-Israel relations, the background of US support for Israel, including Pres. Truman's fateful decision to recognize the new Zionist state, and the corruption of politicians who put their careers ahead of US and world interests. Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., is a retired US Air Force Lt. Colonel who was with the Pentagon's Near East/South Asia bureau, and worked on policy papers for the Secretary of Defense...

 

  Perpetual mass-media deception and pervasive surveillance encompass a never ending train of abuse that won’t end any time soon. As long as armaments factories continue producing weapons of death for the Fortune 500 Wall Street elite who reside in U.S. capitalist society, war and threats of war will continue to expand and take on an ever deadlier character...

...if the problem of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence is ever to be solved, it must be redefined and clearly understood. Those who truly seek justice and peace in the Middle East must dare to speak openly and honestly of the “Zionism problem” and then to draw the moral, ethical and practical conclusions which follow...

 

...It is farcical to talk about the impending death of the two-state solution—it’s been long dead and decomposing before our eyes, yet few have had the common decency to bury it...

 

...the post-theistic core of religious devotion in this reworking of tradition becomes almost synonymous with spirituality and awe as experiential realities, having more in common with the thought of Alfred North Whitehead [and, I would add, the spiritual traditions of the East], as well as most indigenous views] than with the institutional religions...

 

...Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed the Israeli delegates to boycott Iranian President Hassan Rohani during his address Tuesday at the UN General Assembly in New York...

 

  Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other regional countries backing Syria's rebels must acknowledge their failures to bring down the Syrian government, and join efforts for a political solution to end the two and a half year civil war.. Nasrallah said on Monday. Nasrallah said dialogue is the only option to bring an end to a conflict that has already left over 100,000 people dead and threatened to exacerbate tensions across the region. "I call on Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other Gulf states to revise your stance," he said. "You won't reach anywhere by relying on a military victory. Put this hatred (for Hezbollah) aside and think with your minds. Think about your interests, the interests of the region, the survival of the region."..

 

...I do feel compelled to break VT’s new rule and publish a fascinating new op-ed piece that recently crossed my cyber-desk. The author -  an obscure neocon hack who landed a job at PNAC thanks to being a distant cousin of George W. Bush – has stripped the niqab issue down to its bare essentials…and crafted a plan to win the clash of civilizations, build a nude American century, and establish the long-awaited nude world order...

 

...What are the chances that Al Qaeda is armed and funded by the US from Afghanistan in the 1980's, to Libya in 2011, and now Syria to undermine enemies of Wall Street and London, but not in Somalia to undermine neighboring Kenya whose new president won partly due to a popular backlash against the West's discredited International Criminal Court (ICC)?..

 

  A jailed member of Russia's punk band, Pussy Riot, has been moved to a solitary confinement cell after she went on hunger strike to protest against what she called "slave labour" at the prison. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who has been imprisoned for two years over a "Punk prayer" protest against Vladimir Putin in a Moscow cathedral in August 2012, was moved into isolation on Tuesday. The head of a public supervising committee in the remote region where she is confined, Gennady Morozov, denied the transfer was punishment. He described her cell as a "safe place" where she would be shielded from threats from fellow inmates...

 

...US officials "always mention that plans to punish Damascus remain in force. We draw certain conclusions from that and assume that the threat of aggression in violation of international law is so far only delayed, not dismissed fully." Ryabkov slammed the "illogical" position of the US and its Western allies for seeking to threaten the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the resolution.  Ryabkov reiterated that Russia would not accept a resolution that would trigger automatic punitive measures in the event of Syrian non-compliance with its obligations...

 

...Washington, where both the Republican and Democratic parties politically reside, is warped around the Zionist matrix, which always promises to fight terrorism and protect the American people but inexorably ends up delivering something else, i.e., giving allegiance to the Israeli regime in America and deliberately censoring out dissident voices in academic institutions in countries such as Canada, supporting and training radical terrorist cells such as the Syrian rebels under the Obama administration (even though they knew that the rebels are terrorists) and the Mujahideen under Bush, killing innocent and dissident voices such as Rachel Corrie, [etc.]..

 

...It seems that the Saudis and CIA recruiting of all the low life Arab criminals and gangsters to go fight in Syria…maybe that well is running dry. They are bringing up reserves from the Congressional low lifes. Russian bank sanctions are the new diversion being put in front of the American and world publics in an attempt to take some of the heat off Obama-the-Bomber, and Bully America...

 

  In early 2035, the thirty-fourth year of the war against Al Qaeda, the Pentagon issued a White Paper saying that the F35 Raptor, the front-line fighter plane of the United States, was nearing the end of its useful life and needed to be replaced. Not everyone agreed. Various budget-cutting organizations argued that the Raptor had never been used and thus no one could tell whether it had a useful life. Anyway, the job of the Air Force, killing third-world peasants and their families, had been co-opted by drones. America didn´t need a new fighter, said the critics. The Air Force countered that the new plane would look feral and make loud, exciting noises.. Design studies began...

 

...The campaign in Syria to destabilize the Damascus government has deployed the full gamut of terrorist tactics, from no-warning car bombs in civilian neighborhoods, to wholesale massacres of villages, including beheadings and the use of toxic chemicals against civilians. The latest incident of alleged chemical weapons near Damascus on 21 August is reliably attributed to the Western-backed militants, according the Russian government and others – not the Syrian armed forces as the Western capitals and media have asserted. That attack is most likely a deliberate provocation to justify Western military intervention in Syria...

 

...In the eyes of the USA, the original “red line” transgressed by the Syrian government was in coming to power 40 years ago as an Arab nationalist state. It wanted to challenge the lack of sovereignty in the Arab world because the West had already established its interest in controlling the region. Syria wanted the Arab nations to unite and become an independent force in world politics. To achieve this, it needed a power that could stand up to Israel, which aimed to weaken the new Arab states...

 

...At the time this article was being written, Prime Minister Netanyahu had not yet released a formal statement. Considering the situation, he will issue one only after the death of Rabbi Yosef. Yet, his position is known. Since the late 1980s, Shas has been targeted by the State of Israel as an undesirable party. Since its views are legal, the State adopted a different tactic. In the Zionist Paradise, entrapment is the State's favorite way of achieving revenge, its highest and apparently only value...

  Not only is it an act of criminal aggression against an innocent country - the supreme crime according to Nuremberg Principles - but that transgression would itself be based on another vile crime - the deliberate killing of children for propaganda purposes. The notorious videos purporting to show the half-clothed bodies of dozens of lifeless Syrian children are the central component of US claims for launching a war against Syria.. On close examination of the alleged gas attack videos that came out of Syria on 21 August, the blunt assessment is that the footage is nothing less than a snuff movie...

 

  Meet the ‘Crisis Actors’ of the Syria”FSA” – the same bunch who helped (try) to make the Damascus “gas attack” look real. Their job today – to con the western world into another pointless war in support of terrorism...

 

...How do we know if we are doing something to make a difference, or we are unable to make a difference? “God grant me the courage to change the things I can, patience for those I can’t change and wisdom to know the difference.” How can we find this wisdom to know. We struggle with these questions daily because we see so much destruction, death, hypocrisy, and stupidity. Here are just seven examples from many that occurred to us this week under occupation:..

 

...An extensive documentary showing the lengths Zionists went to in order to bring about their goal of achieving the illegal state of Israel...

 

  As he has demonstrated by his bellicose rhetoric on Syria, John Kerry has made complete his 180-degree transition from an anti-war Vietnam veteran who in 1971 threw his navy medals back onto the White House lawn and who testified to Congress on the immorality of war, to a belligerent warrior without a cause. Tracing the causes of this shift is perhaps pointless, but a comparison between the 1971-Kerry and the 2013-Kerry will reveal the corrupting influence of the combination of money and power with its necessary consequence of surrendering what Kerry himself calls one’s “moral compass.”..

 

  Peter Beinart is a “liberal Zionist” who has written a piece in the NY Review of Books of 26 September 2013 entitled “The American Jewish Cocoon.” In this essay he laments, “The organized Jewish community [is] a closed intellectual space.” By this he means that most American Zionist Jews (it is important to remember that not all Jews are Zionists) know little or nothing about those who oppose them, particularly Palestinians. They also seem to have no interest in changing this situation. For these Zionists the opposition has been reduced to an irredeemably anti-Semitic “them.”..

 

  President Vladimir Putin had a very busy and successful past week on the heels of a successfully hosted G-20 Summit . The President has been key to averting another act of aggressive war by a certain western power, and for those efforts alone is truly worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. President Putin took part in the yearly Valdai Discussion Club, an event where top experts and some of the sharpest minds from Russia and abroad meet in the context of a global dialogue about Russia...

 

...Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks with NBC News anchor/correspondent Ann Curry about the need to remove mistrust and suspicion between nations; and he addresses the recent threat of U.S. airstrikes in Syria in response to the use of chemical weapons...

 

  “Our American partners are starting to blackmail us: ‘If Russia does not support a resolution under Chapter 7, then we will withdraw our support for Syria’s entry into the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). This is a complete departure from what I agreed with Secretary of State John Kerry',” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Channel 1's Sunday Time program. Chapter 7 of the UN charter would allow for potential military intervention in Syria...

 

  George Galloway and former General/aide to Ariel Sharon debate the state of Iraq after war...

 

  While the Assad regime in Damascus has denied responsibility for the sarin gas missiles that killed around 1,400 Syrians in the suburb of Ghouta on 21 August, information is now circulating in the city that Russia's new "evidence" about the attack includes the dates of export of the specific rockets used and – more importantly – the countries to which they were originally sold. They were apparently manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1967 and sold by Moscow to three Arab countries, Yemen, Egypt and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya...

 

...Dale is under mounting pressure for writing this article by third parties. She notified Mint Press editors and myself on August 30th and 31st via email and phone call, that third parties were placing immense amounts of pressure on her over the article and were threatening to end her career over it. She went on to tell us that she believes this third party was under pressure from the head of the Saudi Intelligence Prince Bandar himself, who is alleged in the article of supplying the rebels with chemical weapons...

 

...From an ethical and universal perspective Israel is at a dead end. Yet, he still fails to grasp that Israel is only part of the problem. More and more thinkers are now regarding Israel as a mere symptom of Jewish identity politics. More and more, commentators are becoming aware of a tribal ideological and spiritual continuum between Israel, Zionism, the so-called Jewish anti Zionists and the Left in general. It is no longer a secret that, like Zionists, Jewish ‘anti Zionists’ invest most of their political energy chasing the so-called ‘anti Semites’ – those who analyze Israeli and Zionist politics within the context of Jewish culture and philosophy...

 

...a standoff between attackers allegedly belonging to al-Shabab and the Kenyan Government is taking place in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. The complex is owned by Israelis and Israeli media reports that Israeli officials are already in place attempting to manipulate the event. At least two Kenyans claim to have been evacuated from the mall by Israeli security forces...

 

...I never cease to be amazed by the hypocrisy of our leaders and their governments. Early this month the Obama administration accused Russia of holding the Security Council “hostage” for vetoing a resolution to authorize the U.S. to attack Syria. The truth is that no country holds the Security Council hostage more often than America. It has, for example, cast 42 vetoes to prevent the Zionist state of Israel being called and held to account for its crimes)..

 

  Israel’s mean-spirited response to Iran’s olive branch actually illuminates its own aggressive posture. Along comes Hassan Rouhani, the new Iranian president, and instead of applauding his initiatives to meet with President Obama and resolve outstanding issues by diplomacy, Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz says “there is no more time for negotiations.” And although Rouhani only just took office last month, his appeal for negotiations was dismissed by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as a deceitful “charm offensive.”..

 

...Obama enlisted public support. He repeated his Big Lie. He wrongfully accused Syria of using chemical weapons. No evidence whatever suggests it. Plenty links US-enlisted death squads to using them multiple times. Obama lied claiming otherwise. He's a serial liar. Everything he says lacks credibility. He wants war. He intends  getting it. He won't be denied. He may have another major false flag in mind to do so...

 

...Yugoslavia, like Iraq, has a long history of defying outside interference in its affairs. Its economy, like Iraq’s, has tilted toward socialism ever since Marshall Tito routed the Nazi Utashe during WWII. Moreover, Yugoslavia became a world leader in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a large group of nations traditionally led by India who chose not to align themselves with either the US or the Soviets during the Cold War. The international bankers despised NAM because its members tended to be left-of-center nationalists who guarded their resources from Big Oil and other multinationals...

 

  A short, pithy demonstration of the ugly truth about the role of the US in recent history (roughly the last 125 years)...

  The US intelligence community has been put to shame by the dedication and determination of a lone Christian nun. Her modest study of the videos of the Syrian chemical attack shows they were productions involving staged bodies...

 

  Modeled on US covert ops in Central America, the Pentagon’s “Salvador Option for Iraq” initiated in 2004 was carried out under the helm of the US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte (2004-2005) together with Robert Stephen Ford, who was appointed US Ambassador to Syria in January 2011, less than two months before the beginning of the armed insurgency directed against the government of Bashar Al Assad. “The Salvador Option” is a “terrorist model” of mass killings by US sponsored death squads...

 

  The espionage scandal which broke out after NSA employee Edward Snowden's disclosures and which has strained relations between Brazil and the United States is gaining momentum.  More and more new details are coming to light about routine electronic spying  by U.S. intelligence on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and those surrounding her, including relatives and the leadership of the foreign ministry, the ministry of defense, and intelligence agencies. Rousseff was especially indignant that the NSA and CIA tapped all her telephones in the presidential office and in her residence...

 

  An article in The New York Times links the ban on Press TV to two consecutive complaints made by the Anti-Defamation League, the global arm of Zionist propaganda. According to The New York Times, in late July, shortly after the Anti-Defamation League complained to YouTube that the Iranian broadcaster was using its channel as a “propaganda tool to promote a wide range of pernicious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in English to a worldwide audience,” Press TV reported that it had lost control of its official channel and was no longer able to post new video reports there...

 

  Gerald Steinberg is a hasbara warrior for Israel. He’s on permanent war footing, ready to do battle with everyone: Wikipedia, the European Union (EU), the United Nations, human rights NGOs.  Israel is his sacred mission, his jihad, if you will. He teaches at Bar Ilan University and founded the right-wing group, NGO Monitor (NGOM).  Its mission is to engage in political combat with Palestinian and Israeli human rights and peace groups...

 

  Israeli officials are reported to be increasingly nervous that international efforts to destroy of Syria’s chemical weapons might serve as a prelude to demands on Israel to eliminate its own, undeclared weapons of mass destruction...

 

...The U.S.-based Islamophobia network’s inner core is currently comprised of at least 37 groups whose primary purpose is to promote prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims. An additional 32 groups whose primary purpose does not appear to include promoting prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims but whose work regularly demonstrates or supports Islamophobic themes make up the network’s outer core...

 

  Tunisian women have traveled to Syria to wage "sex jihad" by comforting Islamist fighters battling the regime there, Interior Minister Lotfi ben Jeddou has told MPs. "They have sexual relations with 20, 30, 100" militants, the minister told members of the National Constituent Assembly on Thursday. "After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of 'jihad al-nikah' - (sexual holy war in Arabic) - they come home pregnant,"..

 

...When President Obama went on national television on Tuesday, Sept. 10, and passionately evoked images of suffering Syrian children dying on hospital floors from a Sarin attack in Damascus, he might have looked sincere to some, but most of those US viewers probably didn’t realize that as commander in chief, he was asking them to support a bombardment of Syria which would have likely included thousands of similar bomblets that he surely knows would inevitably end up, over time, killing far more children in far more horrible ways than the Sarin attack that was his casus belli...

 

...The U.S. has not targeted kids! Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. President? Why do you apply double standards in judging crimes against humanity? How are the atrocities being committed in Syria any different from the carnage that the U.S. Administration has been committing for years? How could you possibly feign ignorance about the excruciating death and suffering that the U.S. Administration had inflicted on children as well as non-combatant adults especially in Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya?..

 

...To say the War Party is apoplectic at Obama for blowing this chance to get us into war with Syria, which held real promise of sucking us into a war with Iran, is an understatement. The worst peace scare in memory is sweeping through the think tanks of Washington. Conceding the incompetence of how Obama and Kerry got us into this mess, are we not in a far better place than a month ago?..

 

...below is the video of the 90-minute event I did this week at the Sydney Opera House on the war on whistleblowers and journalism, along with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning's lawyer David Coombs, the intrepid independent journalist Alexa O'Brien, and the Australian commentator Robert Manne, hosted by the Australian writer Bernard Keane. It was a great discussion and really covered in a broad way many of the issues discussed here over the last year, especially the last several months...

 

  Jeremy Scahill has emerged in 2013 as one of the most trenchant and scathing critics of President Barack Obama’s prosecution of an open-ended war and unprecedented tactical framework launched by George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney. “Obama,” Scahill writes.. has gone from a candidate campaigning against Cheney’s War on Terror abuses to a president guaranteeing “that many of those policies would become entrenched, bipartisan institutions in U.S. national security policy for many years to come.”..

 

  Russian President Vladimir Putin provoked widespread scorn among America's chattering class for employing The New York Times' editorial pages as a megaphone to scold the United States for hubris, i.e., a belief in its saintliness and destiny to lead the planet, a.k.a. American Exceptionalism. The pretentious pundits rebuked the messenger as ill-suited to deliver the message.. But Putin's detractors have been unable to answer his message...

 

...In the following piece, MJ Rosenberg courageously reports on a recent encounter with a bright American Jewish boy. “You may not realize it,” the boy tells Rosenberg,  “but your premise is Zionist. You think Jews are, by definition, connected to Israel and have to care about it. But that isn’t who I am.  I’m an American kid whose religion is Jewish.” It took more than a century for a Jewish boy to answer Weizmann; I am not a ‘Jew who lives in America’. I am actually an American Jew...

 

...Although further research and investigation is urgently needed by third-party organizations to establish the identity of the Ghouta attack victims and the whereabouts of the kidnapped Lattakian families, the reports, if true, are evidence of the most disgraceful war crimes imaginable and the most cold-blooded manipulations of evidence to suit an agenda...

 

...Where laws do not exist, Israeli courts often refer to British Mandate and Ottoman Empire laws. In the recent Prawer Law allowing the expropriation (i.e. "robbing by the State") of Bedouin lands, the State requested the landowners to find their Ottoman Empire "Kushan" ownership papers. Not one Bedouin has such documents. They can't be issued since that empire is kaput. "Great," said the Justice, "Let's expropriate!" In the West Bank, the situation is even more complex. The area's sovereign is Israel's Minister of Defense, the conquering army commander...

 

  Israeli troops have been accused of manhandling a group of European diplomats as they tried to hand out tents to Palestinian Bedouins whose West Bank homes were destroyed by the army. The troops used force to disperse the diplomats who had accompanied aid workers to the village of Makhul in the Jordan Valley, an AFP photographer said on Friday. Marion Fesneau-Castaing, a French diplomat, was dragged out of an aid vehicle, the photographer said. "They dragged me out of the truck and forced me to the ground with no regard for my diplomatic immunity," she said. "This is how international law is being respected here."..

 

...The most troubling aspect of the Jewish liberal Left is the attempt to divide the liberal Left into Jewish and non-Jewish. This conveniently removes a portion of the liberal Left from cooperating with others on the issue of U.S. foreign policy and specifically those concerning the Middle East. Noticeably, the thrust is to drown out the vocal opponents of Israel, who accuse Israel and Zionism (Beinart, Open Zion, J-street and the Americans for Peace Now are all outspoken Zionists) of being virulent nationalist, militarist, and racist, betraying the Jewish people and causing them grief...

 

  Syrian Deputy Prime Minister has said that neither the government forces nor the rebels are currently capable of outright military victory in the country's civil war. Qadri Jamil told the British Guardian newspaper that the government of President Bashar al-Assad would call for a ceasefire with the armed opposition if the peace talks in Geneva, sought by world powers, took place...

 

  These two articles are both about U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's Jewish ancestry...

 

  Al-Qaeda was established under the authority of President Reagan on March 27, 1985, with National Security Directive 166. This established a broad cover organization that could engage in arms and financial transactions otherwise prohibited by US law..  The fact is al-Qaeda militants are actively wiping out moderate rebel factions fighting the Assad regime, now clearly with Israeli backing. That means another “arc” exists: Tel Aviv, al-Qaeda and the globalist cabal of neocons, Zionists and financial criminals. Assisting them every step of the way is the controlled corporate media and the governments they have bought and blackmailed...

 

  Speaking in Tehran to NBC's Ann Curry in his very first interview with an American media outlet, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani again - and repeatedly, considering Ms. Curry kept asking him the same question over and over - asserted Iran's wholesale condemnation of nuclear arms and its commitment never to build or acquire such weaponry. Rouhani's statements were consistent with those of nearly every high-level Iranian official and diplomat over the past twenty years...

 

  In a 2010 alert, 'Beyond Hiroshima – The Non-Reporting Of Fallujah's Cancer Catastrophe', we noted the almost non-existent media response to the publication of a new study that had found high rates of infant mortality, cancer and leukemia in the Iraqi city. The dramatic increases in these rates exceeded even those found in survivors of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Independent's Patrick Cockburn was a lone exception in reporting these awful findings...

 

  The Western War on Syria is no less a Hollywood production than the unforgettable American war on Albania as rendered in Wag the Dog. Despite the latter being imaginary, its movie is one of the most significant depictions of war ever done.. Only yesterday, September 18, a coproduction of Human Rights Watch, the New York Times and Israeli military intelligence was disclosed. Like in the case of the above mentioned Albanian War, the scary effects were created by superimposing unrelated facts. A girl with a doll posing in a movies studio but seen in the movie escaping the Albanians ruthless attack...

 

  Assad said he has received estimates from experts, that destroying the stockpiles would cost $1 billion and would take roughly a year. The interview was conducted Tuesday, September 17th, by former Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Fox News contributor, and Fox News Channel Senior Correspondent Greg Palkot...

 

  Ultraconservative Liberal Party-National Party Coalition leader Tony Abbott was sworn in as the new Prime Minister of Australia on Wednesday 18 September 2013, replacing defeated Labor PM Kevin Rudd. Australia now has a new right-wing, ultraconservative, climate change denialist, pro-war, pro-Zionist, pro-coal, pro-gas, anti-environment, anti-science, anti-education, anti-equity, human rights-abusing; US lackey Coalition Government for the next 3 years...

 

...If anything, al-Qaeda has seemingly acted as a surrogate of the Israeli intelligence services all along. Now this can either be seen as a very, very bizarre coincidence or one could read something into Michael Oren’s statement today and perhaps assume that the relationship between Israel and al-Qaeda is one that is well over 15 years old...

 

  Syria threatens no one. It hasn't used chemical weapons against insurgents or its own civilians. Claims otherwise are fabricated. In contrast, Israel is nuclear armed and dangerous. It maintains large chemical and biological weapons arsenals...

 

...Contrary to the Western media pundits who attempt to paint this as a straightforward case against Assad, without evidence or without thought, one can point the finger to other more likely culprits who stand to gain a great deal from this heinous crime. The only way to narrow down the field is to consider ‘cui bono’..

 

  Britain, France and the United States are ready to back down from a demand that a Security Council resolution on removing chemical weapons from Syria include the threat of military force if the Syrian government does not comply, senior sources have indicated. The decision could smooth the path to the adoption of the resolution possibly as early as this weekend, and may remove the threat of Western intervention in the civil war there in the immediate future...

 

...After more than a decade of being spun on the lie that the Global War on Terror is a pre-emptive campaign aimed at protecting “the West” against the violent incursions of al-Qaeda jihadists, it is now being widely reported that the governments of USA, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, France and others are sponsors of al-Qaeda. What gives?..

 

...Obama’s supposed “dithering” on the question of military action has only been accentuated by Israel’s “daring” strikes on Syria – at least three since the start of the year. It looks as though Israel, while remaining largely mute about its interests in the civil war raging there, has been doing a great deal to pressure the White House into direct involvement in Syria. That momentum appears to have been halted, for the time being at least, by the deal agreed at the weekend by the US and Russia to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal...

 

..We had reported very early at Veterans Today that rigged Syrian army intercepts would probably be supplied by the Israelis to give Obama the ‘red line’ that he would need for an intervention. The fake radio traffic tactic has been used for decades. We were able to confirm and reported last week that the burst transmitters were used to supply the Israeli intercept team with actors impersonating Syrian officers discussing the gas attack...

 

...The UN commission report does not say how the chemical agent found in some of the investigated areas was distributed. It does not say that it came from rockets. It identified two impact sites of rockets and directions that allows to assume where those rockets were fired from. But one of those sites and rockets was never exposed to the chemical agent in question while the other site, and the ammunition debris found there, was. To conclude from these finds that ammunition carrying chemical agents were fired from a specific point or army unit or was fired by rockets at all is not legit but propaganda...

 

...Sweden’s military-industrial complex, which includes Saab and Bofors, is anything but peace-loving and neutral. The kingdom’s cloak of neutrality is most useful for Israeli interests, which have exploited Scandinavia’s clean image to skew international policy against the Palestinians and Arab states, as demonstrated in the half-baked Oslo Accords...

 

  The disastrous reality TV style bungle in which the White House led the nation to the brink of war without the consent of the legislature and the American people should be and is raising questions about the competency of the president of the United States. Bombing a country with which the United States is not at war in a situation in which no treaties either with the United Nations or NATO provide even a minimal fig leaf of legal cover has been described by the administration as a critical humanitarian mission even though it would not change facts on the ground in Syria and would only succeed in killing more civilians...
Read more...

 

...Assad’s military command and control structure has reportedly been penetrated not only by foreign agents but also by Syrian army defectors. There is as much evidence, if not more, that the sarin attack was conducted by Syrian army turncoats or foreign agents.. In addition, the UN inspectors could not ascertain from where the sarin-laden rockets were fired. The report merely stated that they were fired from the “northwest.” The U.S., France, and suspect non-governmental organizations financed by hedge fund tycoon George Soros, all suggested, without evidence, that the rockets were fired from Qassioun Mountain, a location of Syrian military bases...

 

  US senators have urged President Barack Obama to impose embargo on three major Russian banks, freeze their assets and prevent their employees from entering the US...

 

...The innovative move to remove Syria’s chemical weapons from the equation was also backed by China and Iran, both allies of Moscow and Damascus. And, seemingly increasing the prospects of success, the proposal was given a cautious welcome from Britain, France and Germany. Despite this emerging diplomatic common ground, what are the chances of a chemical weapons deal working?..

 

  Ruth Eglash, the Washington Post’s recently hired Jerusalem correspondent, has what could be a serious conflict of interest – her husband’s political and business ties to the Israeli government and its overseas propaganda apparatus. The newspaper, however, refuses to say if Eglash disclosed her husband’s activities to her bosses as company policy demands.. Eglash, who joined the Washington Post in April, was previously deputy managing editor of the far right-wing Jerusalem Post...

  Everyone is talking about the piece by Ian Lustick titled, “Two State Illusion,” that appeared on the front of the Times’s Week in Review section yesterday. An urgent appeal to leaders to stop the charade of a peace process that has failed to produce partition and to start to imagine other ways that the conflict can be ended, the piece is historic for its appearance in such a prominent place. It recalls Tony Judt’s one-state piece, Israel: The Alternative, of ten years ago in the NY Review of Books, though Lustick is less idealistic...

 

...It looks as though Israel, while remaining largely mute about its interests in the civil war raging there, has been doing a great deal to pressure the White House into direct involvement in Syria. That momentum appears to have been halted, for the time being at least, by the deal agreed at the weekend by the US and Russia to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. To understand the respective views of the White House and Israel on attacking Syria, one needs to revisit the US-led invasion of Iraq a decade ago...

 

  I was delighted to hear that today after months of contentious public debate Larry Summers has finally withdrawn his name from consideration to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Why am I happy for this? Because he is a very guilty economist! Let me explain:..

 

  Instead of embracing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal to save Washington from another disastrous war—his plan would put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control and destroy them—influential segments of the American political-media establishment are bent on discrediting him and thus in effect the alternative to war he represents. Still worse, purportedly liberal and progressive voices are playing a full-throated role in this mindless denigration of Putin, notably on CNN and MSNBC...

 

...Focusing on war instead of a trillion dollar debt, Obama's forte is to spread chaos not only in America but in the world. Like a fire bug his wake has left North Africa burning and he now supports terrorists the US once fought against. Bush once said that when Obama got into office that Barry would have to do the same and continue fighting in the Middle East. "Mr. I'll bring home the troops next summer" has broken that promise and kept his "YES WE CAN start more wars" pledge. As they say in America, "he's Bush on steroids"..

 

  The main specific feature of the resolutions N1970 and N1973 was total violation of the Libyans civil rights. No matter that both resolutions were allegedly  devoted to the protection of civilian population, it was made the main target in the most cynical way  Actually both documents recognized only rebels as “civilians.” At the same time it was evident that the population predominantly remained faithful to the government...

 

  Rania Masri: Both sides of the conflict are capable of such a war crime, but UN report does not settle who is responsible; bigger question is whether UN can achieve a ceasefire and a negotiated end to war...

 

  Dear Bishop Christopher, I have read with great sadness the complaint which came to you through the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Stephen’s response.  I am afraid there is a pattern across many sectors of society of mobilising such complaints against people who criticise Israeli policy.  I believe this to be a very misguided policy, the history of anti semitism, particularly in Europe, has caused enormous evil, persecution and suffering, but to accuse anyone who is critical of Israeli policy anti Semitic belittles the profound significance of anti semitism.  It is also being misused so widely that the accusation no longer has the power a well informed accusation of anti semitism should have...

 

  While many people are led to believe that U.S. support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests, the facts don't support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. foreign policy and defense experts opposed supporting the creation of Israel. They then similarly opposed the massive American funding and diplomatic support that sustained the forcibly established state and that provided a blank check for its aggressive expansion. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced...

 

...Trying to give credibility to the latest propaganda hoax, the HRW served Israel well. Yet, it was an immediate reminder that HRW and Amnesty International promote the "Relativity Theory of Human Rights." Not all humans have human rights, not all governments are requested to respect human rights.. UN and AP sources agree that the Syrian mercenaries were those who used chemical weapons. In order to fabricate the new case against Syria, Israel emphasizes that both WRH and the New York Times have achieved the same conclusions. They claim to have reconstructed backwards the flight of the chemical missiles used last month...

 

...This is the face of the creature, which Assad fights against. This is the face of the creature, which president Obama wishes to support. When Obama addressed America two days ago to try and rally support for a Syrian strike he made no mention of taking Al Qaeda’s weapons. In fact, he only mentioned them once in the entire 15 minute speech. Instead, he declared more than 10 times that Assad would be disarmed to give the upper-hand to the Al Qaeda backed, Free Syrian Army...