Comment : Who was the genius that packed explosives,missile fuel and radioactive materials together on a ship destinated to a mayor port in Northern Europe ?
The German city of Hamburg likely avoided a major technological disaster on May 1, when a freighter ship caught fire. It had several tons of radioactive material and explosives among its cargo, it was revealed.
It took 200 firefighters working for several hours to douse the fires on the Atlantic Cartier. The ship’s most visible cargo was some 70 cars, 30 of which were damaged in the incident. But now it was revealed that the vessel also had highly dangerous substances on board as well, which posed the threat of radioactive contamination to the area.
Fire broke out the ship several hours after it arrived in the port of Hamburg. Three tugs and two fireboats were involved in fighting with the blaze, as firefighters unloaded shipping containers while cooling down the hull of the vessel with water. The ship was seriously damaged by the fire and remains in Hamburg.
The Atlantic Cartier was transporting around 9 tons of uranium hexafluoride, a radioactive highly violate and toxic compound most commonly used as an intermediate material in the production of nuclear fuel. The vessel also had 180 tons of flammable ethanol and 4 tons of explosives at the time the fire broke out.
The news of the averted disaster in Hamburg was broken by the opposition Green Party. It criticized the city authorities for not reporting the full details of the incident on its own initiative.
“It is an outrage that the Senate has not informed the public about this near catastrophe,” Greens’ member of the Hamburg parliament Anjes Tjarks said. “Here one must speak of a cover-up.”
The city responded by saying that the firefighters were informed of the dangerous nature of the cargo promptly, which is the reason why the containers in question were quickly removed from the ship.
“Thanks to the quick intervention, the harbor and the people in the area suffered from no hazard,” said city spokesman Frank Reschreiter. “There was no leak of the dangerous material.”
Hamburg regularly receives shipments of radioactive material, German media report. It is a convenient transit point to deliver them to the uranium-enriching facility in Lingen, Lower Saxony.
As the Arab world’s bloodiest conflict grinds on, Qatar has emerged as a driving force: pouring in tens of millions of dollars to arm the rebels. Yet it also stands accused of dividing them – and of positioning itself for even greater influence in the post-Assad era. FT investigation by Roula Khalaf and Abigail Fielding-Smith
Qatar’s Sheikh Hamad and his wife (centre) being greeted by Bashar and Asma al-Assad in Syria, 2008
A short drive from the rising skyscrapers of Doha’s West Bay, emblems of the once-sleepy Qatari capital’s frenetic growth, the three-starred flag of the Syrian revolution can be seen fluttering over a modern villa guarded by police cars. The villa is the new Syrian Arab Republic embassy in Qatar, representing not the regime of Bashar al-Assad, but opponents fighting for his removal. It is the only such embassy in the world, inaugurated by a Qatari minister two months ago with the usual diplomatic pomp, after hard lobbying by Qatar led the 22-member Arab League to hand over Syria’s seat to the opposition.
The diplomats working inside have recourse to neither a government nor a bureaucracy to serve Syrians abroad, lacking even the means to renew a passport. “Maybe soon,” mutters a hopeful junior diplomat. But Qatar is not a country that allows details to get in the way of ambition.
The opening of the embassy was a theatrical expression of this small, massively rich country’s single-minded lurch into Syria’s crisis. When it comes to backing Syria’s rebels, no one can claim more credit than the gas-rich Gulf state. Whether in terms of armaments or financial support for dissidents, diplomatic manoeuvring or lobbying, Qatar has been in the lead, readily disgorging its gas-generated wealth in the pursuit of the downfall of the House of Assad.
Yet, as the Arab world’s bloodiest uprising grinds on into its third year, Qatar finds itself pulled into a complicated and fractured conflict, the outcome of which has a decreasing ability to influence, while simultaneously becoming a high-profile scapegoat for participants on both sides. Among the Syrian regime’s numerous but fragmented opponents the small Gulf state evokes a surprisingly ambivalent – and often overtly hostile – response.
The opening of the Syrian Arab Republic embassy in Qatar, March 2013
In the shell-blasted areas of rebel-held Syria, few appear to be aware of the vast sums that Qatar has contributed – estimated by rebel and diplomatic sources to be about $1bn, but put by people close to the Qatar government at as much as $3bn. However, a perception is taking root among growing numbers of Syrians that Qatar is using its financial muscle to develop networks of loyalty among rebels and set the stage for influence in a post-Assad era. “Qatar has a lot of money and buys everything with money, and it can put its fingerprints on it,” says a rebel officer from the northern province of Idlib interviewed by the FT.
Khalid al-Attiyah, Qatar’s minister of state for foreign affairs, and the point man on Syria, dismisses this criticism as nothing more than noise. “We’re a state, we’re mature … If we were concerned about what people say, we wouldn’t be here today and Qatar wouldn’t be as prosperous.” But Qatar’s role in Syria seems uncharacteristically prominent for a country that lacks the diplomatic experience and traditional heavyweight status of a more discreet Saudi Arabia.
Former Syrian coalition leader Moaz al-Khatib (left) and the Qatari minister for foreign affairs Khalid al-Attiyah opening the Syrian Arab Republic embassy in Qatar, March 2013
To some extent, the fact that Qatar is so exposed reflects the reluctance of western governments to intervene in Syria. However, for Qatar, Syria is also the culmination of an opportunistic foreign policy which saw Doha become the unlikely backer of other Arab revolts in north Africa – and a friend of those who emerge as winners, in most cases Islamists.
Qatar’s ruling family, the al-Thanis, have no ideological or religious affinity with the Islamists – they are simply not choosy about the beliefs held by useful friends. Qatar has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Tunisia’s Islamist al-Nahda party, which won the first elections after the popular revolts. Some politicians in the region believe the emir is trying to position himself as the “Islamist [Gamal] Abdel Nasser”, as one Arab politician put it, referring to the late Egyptian president and the Arab world’s only true pan-Arab leader.
Most of Doha’s neighbours in the Gulf are hostile to the Islamist trend in the region, but this is of little consequence to a state that takes pleasure in being contrarian. Nor are the al-Thanis embarrassed by the contradictions of an autocracy cheerleading for revolution. “The Qataris say if there’s a tsunami coming your way you ride it, not let it hit you,” says a western diplomat describing Qatar’s attitude towards Islamists.
It is this kind of dynamism and risk-taking at an executive level that has enabled Doha to act as a regional power only a few years after being a diplomatic nobody. But the military stalemate of the Syrian uprising, in which more than 70,000 people have died, has also revealed the recklessness and political impotence that ultimately undermine Qatar’s objectives.
“The Qataris are overextended – their system runs on a few people at the top, and there isn’t much in terms of a bureaucracy,” comments another diplomat. In the case of Syria, those key players have been the emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, his son and crown prince, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad, the prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim, plus Attiyah, the minister for foreign affairs.
As the Qataris have attempted to unite the political opposition by championing the formation of the Syrian National Coalition (the main front) they have been accused of dividing it – just as their efforts to shape a fragmented rebel army into a more coherent form by helping to unify the brigades under one command have contributed to its incoherence.
Not all of the criticism is fair. Partly it is driven by the irritation of many Arabs, at both state and street level, with what they see as an ambitious, nouveau riche state overreaching itself. “You can criticise them for hijacking the opposition but who else is helping?” acknowledges an independent-minded Syrian opposition member who, like many others in the region who were interviewed for this article, requested anonymity.
But the disapproval levelled at Qatar is pervasive. A senior rebel commander who has dealt with the Qataris suggests that Doha should look long and hard at why its role has also sparked so much animosity. “After two years it is time for everyone involved in Syria to review their actions and engage in self-correction,” he says.
. . .
For Sheikh Hamad, the 61-year-old emir who has ruled Qatar since 1995 after deposing his father, the road to Damascus has involved a spectacular U-turn. It wasn’t long ago that Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma were regular visitors to Doha, as guests of the emir and his second wife, Sheikha Moza. Qatari institutions were big investors in Syria, with a $5bn joint holding company set up in 2008 to develop everything from power stations to hotels. The emir also championed the international rehabilitation of Assad during his gradual ostracisation by the US, Europe and his Arab peers; Sheikh Hamad was instrumental in restoring Syrian relations with France in the years before the uprising, when he counted the former president Nicolas Sarkozy as a friend. Back then Syria was part of an alliance – with Iran and Lebanon’s Hizbollah – that seemed on the ascendant, and Qatar, with typical pragmatism and opportunism, saw a chance to ride the wave as well as to moderate Assad’s policies.
When the Syrian revolt erupted in March 2011, Qatar, like Turkey, reacted cautiously; Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned television channel, was criticised for downplaying the first protests. Behind the scenes, both the emir and crown prince Sheikh Tamim advised Assad against a military solution. But when prime minister Hamad bin Jassim went to visit Assad a month after the outbreak of protests, it became clear to Qatar that the Syrian hardman wanted “to kill people”, as bin Jassim recently recalled at a Brookings Institution meeting.
Free Syrian Army fighters in central Aleppo, August 2012
One person who influenced the emir’s thinking at the time is Azmi Bishara, a prominent former Arab Israeli MP, exiled in Qatar (like many other Arab dissidents) after the Israeli government accused him of passing information to the Lebanese group Hizbollah during Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon in 2006 – a charge Bishara denies.
An adviser to the emir and the crown prince, Bishara has become something of a court intellectual in Doha. He is said to have been involved in the formation of the Syrian National Coalition, now the main opposition umbrella group, and to have been used to “test” opposition figures. He, too, had known Bashar al-Assad well, but then became an avid enthusiast of Arab revolts and the people’s thirst for democracy. Writing in July 2011, Bishara said that Assad could have stayed in power had he led the reforms that people wanted: “The regime chose not to change, and so the people will change it.” (Bishara was not available for comment.)
Although the emir did not make his position public until Saudi Arabia broke its silence over Syria in August 2011, the conviction took hold in Qatar throughout that bloody first summer that Syria’s was as much a revolution as anywhere else in the region. Following the pattern of the other Arab uprisings, Qatar’s instinct was to bet on the opposition. In January 2012, the emir told a US television network that Arab troops should be sent to Syria “to stop the killings”.
Doha’s leaders were particularly emboldened by the revolt in Libya, where Qatar had played the lead Arab role in the Nato-led intervention. Although they knew that Assad’s downfall would not be as easy as Muammer Gaddafi’s, they expected western partners would eventually step in on the side of the opposition. One senior Qatari official suggested in late 2012 that Syria would go the way of Libya, but over a much longer term. Assad’s removal, after all, served the strategic purpose of weakening Iran, his closest regional ally. So far at least, this gamble has proved a miscalculation. “We didn’t want to take the lead. We begged a lot of countries to start to take the lead and we’ll be in the back seat. But we find ourselves in the front seat,” lamented prime minister bin Jassim recently.
A portrait of Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo after parts of the city were captured by rebels, March 2013
Even within the Arab world, Qatar found much stronger resistance to action than was the case with Libya. “Before we get disappointed by the west, we should ask ourselves as an Arab nation what we’ve done – it [Syria] is an Arab issue in the first place,” says Attiyah, the minister for foreign affairs.
In the years before the Arab uprisings, Qatar had cultivated its role as a mediator, capable of talking to all sides on the divisions that polarised the Middle East. It hosted the US’s biggest military air base in the region, while maintaining cordial relations with Iran; it held contacts with Israel while simultaneously backing the Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hizbollah. On Syria, Qatar soon emerged as one of the few angry voices at Arab summits, pushing for a tougher line. “In Syria, Qatar became an active protagonist,” says a western diplomat. Having worked to become a kind of Norway of the Gulf, he adds, it also wanted to be “the Gulf version of the UK and France, and you can’t be both at the same time”.
. . .
Ahfad al-Rasoul is a source of envy among other brigades fighting in Syria. A relatively new player put together from several fighting groups, it is often linked to the gas riches of Qatar. Ahfad al-Rasoul is one of the few fighting coalitions in Syria that can be considered “effective”, boasts Khaled, a smartly dressed, laptop-carrying “liaison” officer for the group, interviewed by the FT in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border.
Not so, says Abu Samer, a commander from a rival group, who complains about shortages of weapons and ammunition. “If I was getting 15 per cent of what they’re getting, I’d do a lot,” he grumbles. Though Khaled insists his battalion’s good fortunes are thanks to a mix of funding sources, others such as Abu Samer see the hand of Qatar at work.
Supporting the armed rebellion was the inevitable next stage of Qatar’s deepening involvement in Syria. By early 2012, as peaceful protests gave way to an armed opposition, Qatar was scouring around for light weaponry, buying arms in Libya and in eastern European states, and flying them to Turkey, where intelligence services helped deliver them across the border. At first, say people with direct knowledge of the arms shipments, Qatar worked through Turkish intelligence to identify recipients, and then, as Saudi Arabia joined the covert military effort, through Lebanese mediators. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms transfers, says that between April 2012 and March this year, more than 70 military cargo flights from Qatar landed in Turkey.
Elizabeth O’Bagy, an analyst at the US Institute for the Study of War, which has published extensive studies of Syria’s fragmented rebel movement, says that as the conflict progressed, the Qataris worked through members of the exiled Muslim Brotherhood to identify rebel factions that should be supported. For example, she says, that is how they linked up with the Farouq brigades, one of the largest and more mainstream factions. Meanwhile, opposition sources say the Qataris have also sent their own special forces to find insurgent groups, and people involved in the weapons business say a Qatari general has been the point man on arms deliveries, travelling to the “operations” room that was set up first in Istanbul and then in Ankara.
However, it is difficult to point to rebel brigades that are exclusively Qatari-funded or backed. Ahfad al-Rasoul, for example, is also thought to be receiving support from Saudi Arabia. Equally, the erratic and limited nature of weapons shipments means that even recipients of Qatari support are not always aware of Doha’s role. Mahmoud Marrouch, a young fighter from Liwaa al-Tawhid, the rural Aleppo group that is believed to have been a major recipient of Qatari arms, says Qatar is like the rest of the world – promising weapons but not delivering. What the fighters have, he says, was seized from regime bases, or purchased on the black market. “The Qataris and the Saudis need a green light from America to help us,” he adds.
A rebel leader in the northern Aleppo province, who works with Liwaa al-Tawhid, says he has also received a Saudi intermediary who goes around rebel-held areas distributing funds. “Groups get funding from both Qatar and Saudi Arabia and they deceive sponsors sometimes,” comments O’Bagy. Indeed, if Qatar is, as its detractors say, seeking to build up a proxy force in Syria to implement its regional agenda, it is doing so in an environment which is not conducive to either loyalty or cohesion. With so many different outside sources of sponsorship and no stable organisational structures, rebel groups lurch from alliance to alliance and continually rebrand themselves in the search for support.
Ironically, although the relationship between Riyadh and Doha has long been characterised by mutual suspicion, in many ways they have worked very closely on Syria. However, a crucial division over the Muslim Brotherhood has undoubtedly led to the pursuit of divergent agendas on the Syrian battlefield, with harmful consequences for an opposition in desperate need of unity. For the Saudis, the handful of secular rebel factions, plus the Salafi groups that espouse a stricter Wahabi Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, are vastly preferable to the Brotherhood, a more organised political group and therefore a greater political threat. “The Saudis say ‘No to the Brotherhood,’” says Riad al-Shaqfa, the leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Qataris, on the other hand, are “playing a positive role”, though Shaqfa insists that his group’s funding is from its own members, not from Doha.
Khalid al-Attiyah denies any tensions with Saudi Arabia, saying co-operation is much closer than people assume, with daily consultations. However, rebel sources and analysts say that by September last year, the rivalry had intensified to the point where the Qataris and Saudis were creating separate military alliances and structures. As complaints poured in from opposition leaders and western officials, the two states agreed to bring the structures together under the supreme military command, headed by the western-backed general Selim Idriss.
However, commanders who work with Idriss say that neither country is following through with its promise to bolster the supreme military command, instead continuing to work independently. One reason could be that the Gulf states worry that their limited supplies would be distributed too broadly by the supreme command, instead of reaching only the most effective factions.
But the behaviour has bred resentment. “Qatar and Saudi Arabia … are playing out their rivalries here, they are dividing people,” says Abdul Jabbar Akaidi, the head of the Aleppo revolutionary military council. Speaking from one of his bases on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey, he adds: “People will remember those who gave without having an agenda. The Syrians are clever, they know when there is an agenda.”
. . .
By late 2012 a new factor was emerging in Syria, one that had the potential to complicate Qatar’s relationship with the west. The extremist group Jabhat al-Nusrah was gaining ground, playing a prominent role in dislodging the regime from military facilities in northern Syria. In December, the US felt sufficiently alarmed to add Nusrah to its global terrorist list.
Concerned that Qatar’s level of tolerance for radical Islamists was higher than theirs, western governments also wanted safeguards in place to ensure that weapons did not end up in the hands of jihadi groups like Nusrah. The problem, says one former senior US official, was that “the Qataris felt it didn’t matter who you give to, what’s important is to bring down Bashar.”
A fighter from the Islamist rebel group Jabhat al-Nusrah in Raqqa province, March 2013; Qatar says it has never backed the group
According to him, the objective in Washington became “to keep the Qataris from doing whatever they want”. So the US instituted a “consultative process”. Two “operations” rooms that oversee weapons deliveries were set up, one in Turkey, the other, more recently, in Jordan. They include representatives from nearly a dozen countries. The Qataris, says the former US official, were co-operative.
Yet allegations that the Qataris have – directly or indirectly – helped Jabhat al-Nusrah have not gone away. At least one Arab government recently said as much, although experts on jihadi movements say the extremist group’s funding comes from al-Qaeda in Iraq and from private donors in the Gulf, not from governments.
Yet even with the “consultative process” in place, leakage might be inevitable, whether through the funding of rebels or through the massive charitable contributions from the Gulf that reach Syria. “Because the Free Syrian Army [FSA] groups work so closely with non-FSA groups these weapons are spreading just because they are fighting side by side – and maybe the groups trade arms with each other as well,” says Eliot Higgins, who examines and records weapons used in the Syrian conflict on his well-followed Brown Moses blog.
Attiyah says Doha has never backed Nusrah, and blames the international community’s inaction on Syria for allowing it to flourish. “Is it the Security Council’s delay in taking a firm resolution against Bashar al-Assad and his regime that has made [Nusrah] emerge? In my opinion, yes,” he says. Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim, the prime minister, is even more dismissive of allegations of Qatari support for extremists, joking in his Brookings presentation that such rumours are spread by jealous neighbours to tease Qatar.
Beneath the quips, however, are signs that Qatar’s influence over military supplies to the rebellion may be waning, as its role in weapons deliveries takes second place to that of Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has more developed networks to source weapons and it has been working closely with Jordan to bolster rebel groups in southern Syria that are not tied to Nusrah.
. . .
Many Syrians have probably never heard of Mustafa Sabbagh, though he is considered the most powerful man in the political opposition. The owner of a building material and contracting company, the 48-year-old secretary-general of the National Coalition lived in Saudi Arabia for much of the past decade. He doesn’t make many speeches, or issue statements, but he does oversee the coalition’s budget, to which the Qataris are the biggest donors, and is responsible, as one western official says, “for writing the cheques”. While seen by both friends and detractors as a shrewd man who appealed to Qatar officials’ business-minded attitude, Sabbagh has come under criticism for supposedly using his position to control the opposition and further Qatari influence.
Tensions between him and some of the secular members of the coalition exploded into the open recently after the controversial election of an interim prime minister, Ghassan Hitto, in March. The row over Hitto’s appointment was so bitter it caused tension between Qatar and Saudi Arabia and pushed the Saudis to become more active in opposition politics, which they had largely left to the Qataris. According to pro-Saudi opposition figures, negotiations are now under way to resolve the dispute.
Qatar’s involvement with Syria’s political opposition has generated even more controversy than its support of rebel groups. The dissidents are a fractious assortment of cliques, but they play an important role in shaping international policy. While it was Turkey that helped form the first credible opposition umbrella group, the Syrian National Council [SNC], in August 2011, Qatar quickly embraced it and contributed to its funding. The SNC, however, fell victim to infighting, which gave the Muslim Brotherhood, the only organised bloc within it, the greatest influence. As secular voices began dropping out of the SNC, western nations, led by the US, pressured the Qataris to help form a broader opposition based on an initiative proposed by Riad Seif, a well-respected Syrian dissident. The new body, the National Coalition, was announced in Doha in November 2012.
Sheikh Hamad with President Obama at the White House, April 2013
It was no secret that Qatari officials were less convinced of the need to improve the SNC. Their view appeared to be that dominance of the Muslim Brotherhood was neither as great as claimed, nor an issue. A former US official who tracked the process of the creation of the coalition said dealing with the Qataris at the time was like a “war of attrition”.
However, claims of Qatari dominance of the opposition persisted, even after the coalition was created. True, the Muslim Brotherhood was no longer the main component, but a new bloc of more than a dozen members, brought in by Sabbagh as representatives of local communities in Syria, sparked new disagreements. It was seen as another bloc that was loyal to Qatar.
Each of these members was supposed to represent a local council in Syria’s different provinces, and together the councils received $8m from Qatar soon after the formation of the coalition. Qatar was also the first – and possibly the only – country to provide funding for the coalition budget, to the tune of $20m, and it delivered the first $10m out of a pledged $100m package for the organisation’s new humanitarian assistance unit.
In an interview with the FT, Sabbagh said that the Qatar label that has stuck to him is inaccurate and unfair. Peppering his words with praise for Saudi Arabia’s contribution to the Syrian cause, he says his relationship with Qatar is confined to what he calls “logistics” support for a business forum that he founded after the revolt against Assad broke out. The forum had mobilised funds from merchants inside and outside Syria to support the Free Syrian Army. Sabbagh insists that the representatives of local councils that he invited into the coalition were an attempt, even if imperfect, to raise the representation of people inside the country in the main opposition front. “It’s inevitable [that there should be controversy about them] because there are no elections. It was an experience that needed maturing,” he says.
Attiyah, meanwhile, says he has no closer relationship with Sabbagh than anyone else in the coalition. He also points out that the coalition with its various components, including the local representatives, was not created by Qatar alone but with the help and blessing of Arab and western officials.
. . .
In Syria itself, the number of dead continues to rise and Bashar al-Assad is still stubbornly clinging on to power. Whether Qatar’s venture into Syrian opposition politics will have any returns will depend on whether Syria survives as a country – something that is by no means assured. Perhaps for the Qatari emir, the demise of Assad will be sufficient satisfaction. In theory, Qatar could also emerge with multiple points of influence through Islamists and loyal brigades. But it has already created many enemies inside Syria, and not just among pro-regime supporters. So torn apart is the fabric of Syria’s society, and so radicalised and suspicious its battered population, that the Qataris are more likely to find that they are neither thanked – nor even wanted – there.
——————————————-
Roula Khalaf is the FT’s Middle East editor; Abigail Fielding-Smith is the FT’s Lebanon and Syria correspondent
label used for an array of non-jihadi rebel groups
Farouq brigades
a powerful rebel formation originally from Homs, now spread out across the country
Ahfad al-Rasoul
a Syrian rebel brigade often linked with Qatar
Liwaa al-Tawhid
a coalition of fighters in the north Syrian province of Aleppo, also said to have received Qatari support
Jabhat al-Nusrah
an extremist Syrian rebel group linked to al-Qaeda
Supreme Military Command (SMC)
the most recent attempt at organising the armed opposition. Many groups are technically affiliated with it but it wields little influence on the ground
The following article originally appeared in the February 2002 issue of HIGH TIMES Magazine
Marley knew the drill – in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when music and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled into the island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization politics. Stories appeared in the local, regional and international press downsizing the achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government under Prime Minister Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was flooded with cheap guns, heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death squad rule and, as Grenada’s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it three years later, the CIA’s “pernicious attempts [to] wreck the economy.”
“Destabilization,” Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, “is the name given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence.”
In response to the fascistic machinations of the CIA, Marley wove his lyrics into a revolutionary crucifix to ward off the cloak-and-dagger “vampires” descending upon the island. June 1976: Then-Governor-General Florizel Glasspole placed Jamaica under martial law to stanch the bloody pre-election violence. Prime Minister Manley’s People’s National Party asked the Wailers to play at the Smile Jamaica concert in December. Despite the rising political mayhem, Marley agreed to perform.
In late November, a death squad slipped beneath the gates of Marley’s home on Hope Road in Kingston. As biographer Timothy White tells it, at about 9 PM, “the torpor of the quiet tropical night was interrupted by a queer noise that was not quite like a firecracker.” Marley was in the kitchen at the rear of the house eating a grapefruit when he heard the bursts of automatic gunfire. Don Taylor, Marley’s manager, had been talking to the musician when the bullets ripped through the back of his legs. The men were “peppering the house with a barrage of rifle and pistol fire, shattering windows and splintering plaster and woodwork on the first floor.” Rita Marley, trying to escape with her children and a reporter from the Jamaica Daily News, was shot by one of the men in the front yard. The bullet caught her in the head, lifting her off her feet as it burrowed between scalp and skull.
Meanwhile, a man with an automatic rifle had burst through the back door off the pantry, pushing past a fleeing Seeco Patterson, the Wailers’ percussionist, to aim beyond Don Taylor at Bob Marley. The gunman got off eight shots. One bullet struck a counter, another buried itself in the ceiling, and five tore into Taylor. He fell but remained conscious, with four bullets in his legs and one buried at the base of his spine. The last shot creased Marley’s breast below his heart and drilled deep into his arm.
The survival of the reggae singer and his entire entourage appeared to be the work of Rasta. “The firepower these guys apparently brought with them was immense,” Wailers publicist Jeff Walker recalls. “There were bullet holes everywhere. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, floors, ceilings, doorways and outside.”
There has since been widespread belief that the CIA arranged the hit on Hope Road. Neville Garrick, a Marley insider and former art director of the Jamaican Daily News, had film of “suspicious characters” lurking near the house before the assassination attempt. The day of the shooting he had snapped some photos of Marley standing beside a Volkswagen in a pool of mango-tree shade. The strangers in the background made Marley nervous; he told Garrick that they appeared to be “scouting” the property. In the prints, however, their features were too blurred by shadow to make out. After the concert, Garrick took the photographs and prints to Nassau. Sadly, while the Wailers and crew prepared to board a flight to London, he discovered that the film had been stolen.
Many of the CIA’s files on Bob Marley remain classified to the present day. However, on December 5, 1976, a week after the assault on Hope Road, the Wailers appeared at the Smile Jamaica fest, despite their wounds, to perform one long, defiant anthem of rage directed at the CIA – “War” – suggesting the Wailers’ own attitude toward the “Vampires” from Langley:
Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That now hold our brothers
In Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa
In subhuman bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war…
Only a handful of Marley’s most trusted comrades knew of the band’s whereabouts before the festival. Yet a member of the film crew, or so he claimed – reportedly, he didn’t have a camera – managed to talk his way past machete-bearing Rastas to enter the Hope Road encampment: one Carl Colby, son of the late CIA director William Colby.
While the band prepared for the concert, a gift was delivered, according to a witness at the enclave – a pair of boots for Bob Marley. Former Los Angeles cinematographer Lee Lew-Lee [his camera work can be seen in the Oscar-winning documentary The Panama Deception] was close friends with members of the Wailers, and he believes that Marley’s cancer can be traced to the boots: “He put his foot in and said, ‘Ow!’ A friend got in there… he said, ‘let’s [get] in the boot, and he pulled a length of copper wire out – it was embedded in the boot.”
Had the wire been treated chemically with a carcinogenic toxin? The appearance of Colby at Marley’s compound was certainly provocative. [And so was Colby's subsequent part in the fall of another black cultural icon, O.J. Simpson, nearly 20 years later. At Simpson's preliminary hearing in 1995, Colby - who resided next door to Nicole Simpson on Gretna Green Way in Brentwood, a mile from her residence on Bundy - and his wife both took the stand to testify for the prosecution that Nicole's ex-husband had badgered and threatened her. Colby's testimony was instrumental in the formal charge of murder filed against Simpson and the nationally televised fiasco known as the "Trial of the Century."]
Seventeen years after the Hope Road assault, Don Taylor published a memoir, Marley and Me, in which he alleges that a “senior CIA agent” had been planted among the crew as part of the plan to “assassinate” Marley. It’s possible that this lapse in security allowed Colby entrance to the compound. It’s clear that the CIA wanted Marley out of the picture. After the assassination attempt, a rumor circulated that the CIA was going to finish Marley off. The source of the rumor was the agency itself. The Wailers had set out on a world tour, and CIA agents informed Marley that should he return to Jamaica before the election, he would be murdered.
Taylor and others close to Marley suspect that it was more than a threat. Lew-Lee recalls: “I didn’t think so at the time, but I’ve always had my suspicions because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer, and when the bone wouldn’t mend the doctors found that the toe had cancer. The cancer metastasized throughout his body, but [Marley] believed he could fight this thing.”
British researcher Michael Conally observes: “They certainly had reasons for wanting to. For one, Marley’s highly charged message music made him an important figure that the rest of the world was beginning to notice. It was an influence that was hard to ignore, least of all because everywhere you went you saw middle- and upper-class white people sprouting dreadlocks, smoking spliffs and adopting the Rastafarian lifestyle. This sort of thing didn’t sit well with traditionalists and authoritarian types.”
The soccer game took place in Paris in 1977, five months after the boot incident, Marley took to the field with one of the leading teams in the country to break the monotony of the Wailers “Exodus” tour. His right toe was injured in a tackle. The toenail came off. At first, it wasn’t considered a serious wound.
But it would not heal. Marley was limping by July and consulted a physician, who was shocked by the toe’s appearance. It was so eaten away that doctors in London advised it be amputated. Marley’s religion forbade it: “Rasta no abide amputation,” he insisted. He told the physician, “De living God, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Ras Tafari, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah…He will heal me wit’ de meditations of me ganja chalice.” No scalpel, he said, “will crease me flesh… C’yant kill Rasta. Rastamon live out.”
He flew to Miami and Dr. William Bacon performed a skin graft on the lesion. The disease lingered undiagnosed and spread throughout his body.
Isaac Fergusson, a friend and devotee, observed the slow death of Bob Marley firsthand. In the three years separating soccer injury from cancer diagnosis, Marley remained immersed in music, “ignoring the advice of doctors and close associates that he stop and obtain a thorough medical examination.” He refused to give up recording and touring long enough to consult a doctor. Marley “would have to quit the stage and it would take years to recoup the momentum. This was his time and he seized upon it. Whenever he went into the studio to record, he did enough for two albums. Marley would drink his fish tea, eat his rice-and-peas stew, roll himself about six spliffs and go to work. With incredible energy and determination, he kept strumming his guitar, maybe 12 hours, sometimes till daybreak.” Reggae artist Jimmy Cliff observed after Marley’s death: “What I know now is that Bob finished all he had to do on this earth.” Marley was aware by 1977 that he was dying, and set out to condense a lifetime of music into the few years remaining.
The CIA Rocks Trenchtown
In 1975, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on a diplomatic junket to the island, had assured Prime Minister Manley in a private meeting that there was “no attempt now underway involving covert actions against the Jamaican government.” But in the real world, something of a Caribbean pogrom was underway, overseen, of course, by the CIA. As Kissinger croaked his denials to Manley, the destabilization push was already afoot. The emphasis at this stage was on psychological operations, but in the election year of 1976 a series of covert interventions – employing arson, bombing and assassination as required – completely disrupted Manley’s democratic-socialist rule.
An arsenal of automatic weapons somehow found their way to Jamaica. The CIA’s thugs, directed by a growing coven of pinstriped officers reporting to the US embassy in Kingston, quietly organized secret-police cadres to stoke political violence. Huge consignments of guns and advanced communications gear were smuggled onto the island. One such shipment was intercepted by Manley’s security patrols – a cache of 500 man-eating submachine guns.
The firearms were shipped to the island from Miami by the Jamaican Freedom League, a right-wing paramilitary faction with roots in Langley, financed largely by drugs. Peter Whittington, the group’s second-in-command, was convicted of drug trafficking in Dade County, Florida. The funds were laundered by the League at Miami’s Bank of Perrine, the key American subsidiary of Castle Bank, then the CIA’s financial base in Latin America. The bank was owned and operated by Paul Helliwell, bagman for the Bay of Pigs invasion, accused even by the conservative Wall Street Journal of involvement in the global narcotics trade.
A paramilitary force was mustered to quell the Rastafarian backlash, and the inevitable CIA-trained Cuban exiles beached in Jamaica. Among them was Luis Posada Carriles, once a secret-police official under deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, currently a full-fledged agent of the CIA.
The “duppies” [ghosts] policed dissent by incarnating the chemical-warfare tactics of the 1960s. In a year’s time, Marley saw the Rastafarian resistance disintegrate with the rise of a ruthless, highly organized narcotics syndicate, apparently from the Jamaican sand. The sudden abundance of hard narcotics in Jamaica wounded the Rastafarian movement with the burning spear of addiction. Marley and former Wailer Peter Tosh promoted ganja as an alternative to cocaine and heroin, a statement of independence and cohesion against the brutal stratagems of colonial rule.
For the first time in Jamaican politics, public figures roundly criticized the governing elite. Peter Tosh, in particular, split form his peers in the local music scene by serving up impassioned political “livalogues” at his public performances. Tosh pushed on, a cursing, joint-smoking, speechifying black militant, until his murder six years after the passing of Marley.
The suppression of Rastafarian protest escalated in the late 1970s, and grotesque human-rights abuses were commonplace. And the political climate in the Caribbean sweltered with the escalation of American covert operations well into the next decade.
The Nazi Doctor
In September 1980, Bob Marley suffered a stroke while jogging in New York’s Central Park. He was released by a physician the following day and recuperated in his room at the Essex Hotel. Rita Marley choked when she saw him. Her fears rose into uncontrollable sobs, “Wha’ has happened to you?” “Doctor say brain tumor black me out,” Marley told her. Isaac Fergusson had caught the dying rebel’s performance at Madison Square Garden a few days before, and had realized then that something was terribly wrong, even as Marley gripped his guitar “like a machine gun” and “threw his ropelike hair about,” a “whirlwind around his small black face. The crack of a drum exploded into bass, into organ.” Midway into the set, the Wailers stood back and Marley did a solo: “These songs of freedom is all I ever had…” Why, Fergusson wondered, was he singing this alone? Why the past tense?
“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery…”
Fergusson noticed that Marley “was always rubbing his forehead and grimacing while performing.” The following weekend, Fergusson stopped to visit Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. He asked about Bob’s condition. “We don’t know for sure,” Rita told him. “The doctors say he has a tumor in his brain.” In a silent moment, Fergusson realized that Marley was dying.
He was convinced at last to seek medical treatment. Marley was admitted to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Tests revealed that the cancer had spread to his brain, lungs and liver. The reggae legend received a few radiation treatments, but checked out when the New York papers let on that he was seriously ill. Marley consulted physicians in Miami, briefly returned to Sloan-Kettering, then to Jamaica, where he met with Dr. Carl “Pee Wee” Fraser, recommended to him by fellow Rastafarians. Dr. Fraser advised that Marley talk to Dr. Josef Issels, a German “holistic comprehensive immunotherapist” then practicing at the Ringberg Clinic in Rottach-Egern, a small Bavarian village located at the southern end of Tegernsee Lake.
Marley traveled to Bavaria and checked into the clinic. Dr. Issels met him, looked him over and allowed, without naming sources: “I hear that you’re one of the most dangerous black men in the world.”
The portrait offered by publicity releases from the Issels Foundation is imposing enough: Dr. Issels, born in 1907, founded the first hospital [financed by the estate of Karl Gischler, a Dutch shipping magnate] in Europe for comprehensive immunotherapy of cancer in 1951. He was the medical director and director of research.
All well and good… until it is considered that by this time, Dr. Issels was 44 years old. Certainly, his medical career did not begin in 1951. Why the unexplained gap in his bona fides? During World War II, it seems, Dr. Issels could be found plying his “research” skills for Hitler’s SS. Lew-Lee claims that Dr. Issels was assigned to the Auschwitz concentration camp, working alongside Dr. Josef Mengele. But author Gordon Thomas, in a long-out-of-print biography of Issels, contends that the doctor served in the SS only briefly. At any rate, he was indeed a member of the Nazi Party and served under Heinrich Himmler. Bob Marley, the “dangerous” black upstart, had placed his life in the hands of a Nazi doctor.
Lew-Lee recalls that Marley rejected conventional cancer treatments, “wanted to do anything but turn to Western medicine. This may have been a mistake.” Evidently so. “Dr. Issels said that he could cur Bob. And they cut Bob’s dreadlocks off. And he was getting all of this crazy, crazy medical treatment in Bavaria. I know this because Devon Evans [a musician then playing with the Wailers] told me that Bob was receiving these medical treatments.” Evans came by “every two or three months – 1979-80 – and told me: ‘Yeah, man, they’re killing Bob. They are KILLING Bob.’ I said, ‘What do you mean ‘they are killing Bob?’ ‘No, no, man,’ he said. ‘Dis Dr. Issels, he’s a Nazi!’”
Dr. Issels was one of the scores of Nazi practitioners to escape the attention of the Nuremberg tribunal. Michael Kater, a professor of history at York University in Canada, informs us that physicians of the Hitler period were steeped in Nazi racial doctrines at medical school, that many of them continued to practice undisturbed by war-crimes tribunals: “It was in a conventional medical culture, infiltrated from one side by a science alienated from humanity and from another by charlatanry, that young physicians in the Third Reich were raised to learn and prepare for practice, with many predestined to practice after 1945.”
Dr. Josef Issels first offered his alternative cancer therapies in a Nazi-fied atmosphere of ruthlessness and quackery. In the 1930s, chronic cancer patients consulted Dr. Issels and received his experimental “combination therapy,” a regimen of diet, homeopathic remedies, vitamins, exercise and detoxification, among other holistic approaches. Today, his clinic offers training in cancer immunization vaccines, UV blood irradiation, oxygen and ozone therapy, “biological dentistry” [tooth extraction], immunity elicitation by mixed bacterial vaccine, blood heating, and so on.
The medical establishment, particularly in the UK, has long rallied against some of Issels’ therapies. A former BBC producer reported in a televised documentary that Dr. Issels was arrested in September 1960. The police warrant alleged, “The accused claims to treat… cancer…. In fact [he] has neither reliable diagnostic methods nor a method to treat cancer successfully. It is contended [that] he is aware of the complete ineffectiveness of this so-called… tumor treatment.” It also called Issels a flight risk, noting that “he had prepared for all contingencies by depositing huge amounts in foreign banks.”
Marley, unaware of his physician’s past, was placed on a regimen of exercise, vaccines [some illegal], ozone injections, vitamins and trace minerals.
In time, Dr. Issels also introduced torture. Long needles were plunged through Marley’s stomach through to the spine. The patient-victim was told that this was part of his “treatment.” The torture continued until Marley foundered on the threshold of death.
Cedella Booker-Marley, his mother, visited him three times in the course of the “treatments.” She found Dr. Issels to be an “arrogant wretch” with the “gruff manners of a bully,” who subjected her dying son to a bloodless brand of “hocus-pocus” medicine. Booker-Marley: “I myself witnessed Issels’ rough treatment of Nesta [Marley]. One time I went with Nesta to the clinic, and we settled down in a treatment room. Issels came in and announced to Nesta, ‘I’m going to give you a needle.’” Dr. Issels “plunged the needle straight into Nesta’s navel right down to the syringe. [Marley] grunted and winced. He could only lie there helplessly, writhing on the table, trying his best to hide his pain. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I heard myself mumbling.” Issels yanked out the needle and strolled casually out of the room. Marley was left groaning with pain. “I went and stood at his side and held is hand.
.
“With every visit,” she recalls, “I found him smaller, frailer, thinner. As the months of dying dragged on, the suffering was etched all over his face. He would fall into fits of shaking, when he would lose all control and shiver from head to toe like a coconut leaf in the breeze. His eyes would turn in his head, rolling in their sockets until even the white jelly was quivering.”
Marley’s torment was aggravated by starvation. “For a whole week sometimes,” Booker laments, her son “would be allowed no nourishment other than what he got intravenously. Constantly hungry, even starving, he wasted away to a skeleton” – starved to death like an Auschwitz inmate. “To watch my first-born shrivel up to skin and bone ripped at my mother’s heart.” Marley weighed 82 pounds on the day of his death. The starvation diet must have devastated his immune system and rushed his demise, not prolonged his life as Dr. Issels and some biographers have contended. It also caused him intense pain. “It would drag on so, for one long painful month after the other, and every day would be a knife that death stabbed and twisted anew in an already open, bleeding wound.” The agony “wrapped him up like a crushing snake.”
Death finally claimed Marley on May 11, 1981. In Jamaica, May 20 was declared a national day of mourning. Marley’s wake at the National Arena was attended by some 30,000 mourners.
He was survived by his old partner Peter Tosh, who was shot to death in 1987. Marley and Tosh were not the only musicians murdered for political reasons in Jamaica. By the end of the decade, all Jamaican musicians were censored and subject to shell-casing politics.
The island’s Daily Gleaner reported in 1987 that Winston “Yellowman” Foster, stopped at a police roadblock and frisked for drugs, resisted detainment. One of the officers hissed, “You want to go like Tosh?” When Tosh went, there was nothing random about it. Witnesses and friends insist that he was a political hit. Two of the gunmen fled to New York to remain at large. The third was Dennis “Leppo” Lobban, an ex-con sentenced for the murder after an 11-minute trial.
Like Marley, Peter Tosh found the bloodshed and hypocrisy of death squad justice and CIA covert ops in the Third World unbearable. He was so obsessed with hidden evil and the upswell of violence in Jamaica that they visited him in his sleep. He had “visions” of “destruction [and] millions of people inside of [a] pit going down. And I… say, ‘bloodbath, where so much people come from?’ and looking in the pit, mon, it the biggest pit… but the way the people was crying, it was awful.”
Ferdinando Imposimato, Honorary President of the Supreme Court
Italian Supreme Court President Writes Book Linking Bilderberg to Operation Gladio and the CIA
“The Bilderberg Group is behind the so-called ‘strategy of tension,’ and therefore the massacres,” says Ferdinando Imposimato, Honorary President of the Supreme Court as he makes references to a document written more than 40 years ago – and which was almost lost- during the promotion of his new book, “La repubblica delle stragi impunite,” which translates to “The republic where massacres go unpunished.”
NAPLES – “The Bilderberg Group is one of the leading organizations behind the strategy of tension, and therefore the (Operation Gladio) massacres.” This statement is not just mentioned by bloggers or conspiracy theorists, or even Beppe Grillo, but Ferdinando Imposimato, Honorary President of the Supreme Court. The former magistrate, who would be proclaimed by the ’5-Star Movement’ as one of the possible presidential candidates, speaks in Naples during the promotion of his new book.
His words are very clear. “We found the truth about the massacres,” he says in an interview with a journalist. “There has been complicity between the state -or factions of the state- and the Mafia, as well as (black ops) terrorism and freemasonry. These elements came together during Operation Gladio, and consist of multiple international organizations, controlled by the CIA. This is a proven fact, “ he says. The purpose of their actions was to destabilize public order and stabilize the political power.
The 40-year-old document
In his book, Ferdinando Imposimato also speaks of the Bilderberg Group, mentioned in a document written by Emilio Alessandrini in 1967 -more than 40 years ago. “In this document, which I have quoted literally, it is mentioned that the Bildenberg Group is one of the biggest promoters of the strategy of tension, and therefore also behind the massacres. Here’s what Bilderberg does: It rules the world and democracies in an invisible way, influencing the democratic development of these countries.”
It is important for Italians to know this, for some of their countrymen are among the members of this group and the Trilateral Commission, like of Mario Monti, the current Prime Minister, John Elkann, Chairman of Fiat Group, Pier Francesco Guarguaglini, former president of Finmeccanica or Marco Tronchetti Provera, chairman of Pirelli, also Enrico Letta, vice secretary of the Democratic Party.
It is 65 years since Israel was forced upon the Middle East through terrorism, murder, ethnic cleansing and theft but so little has changed.
Then as now, Britain, the occupying power that handed Palestine to the European Jewish colonists on a plate, knew the truth about the Zionists yet chose be the midwife of their offspring, the state of Israel, even as they murdered British soldiers.
And now Britain, which is possibly better informed about the reality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than anyone other than the primary victims of Israel, remains the loyal international spokesman and facilitator of this terrorist state, working on its behalf from the United Nations to the European Union.
This week, British intelligence documents released by UK’s National Archives bring into sharp relief the extent to which the British government understood the truth about the Zionist criminals to which it was about to hand over Palestine, to be ethnically cleansed of its citizens and turned into the state of Israel.
The documents reveal that, just two weeks before Israel’s unilateral declaration of “independence”, the British government’s high commissioner for Palestine, Alan Cunningham, viewed the behaviour of Jewish terrorists as comparable to that of the Nazis.
On 30 April 1948, he wrote to his superiors that as the Jews celebrated military successes their “broadcasts, both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany”.
In another report, he said that the Jews were prepared for statehood and an “all-out offensive” with “all the equipment of a totalitarian regime”.
The papers, which make frequent references to Jewish “terrorists”, show the British understood that the Jews were willing “to go to almost any lengths to achieve their aim”.
In one dispatch, an account is given of the massacre at the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. In it, Cunningham wrote that 250 people were killed, with the attack “accompanied by every circumstance of savagery. Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed and then slaughtered.”
Exposing the myth of the poor “Jewish David” heroically standing up to the “Arab Goliath”, the British documents also show that while the Jews were organized, the local Arabs were poorly served by their leaders and by neighbouring countries, despite “extravagant claims of victories”.
Cunningham wrote on 30 April that the Arabs’ “much vaunted liberation army” was “poorly equipped and badly led”.
He continued: “In almost every engagement the Jews have proved their superiority in organization, training and tactics.”
Yet, 65 years on the Zionists’ barefaced big, fat lie, which claims that Israel is the victim and the Arabs are the aggressors, is still being peddled shamelessly by Western politicians and media.
It is time for the British state, which is directly responsible for the crime that is Israel, to shake itself off the Zionist yoke – the “Friends of Israel” tumours in the political parties and the Zionist fifth columnists infesting the media and the trade unions – and make amends for its criminal act in Palestine.
And it is time for the British people, who are better informed now about Palestine than at any time in the past, to bring their politicians to account for their slavish support of Israel and Zionism.
The United States government has been at war for eleven years. The US military destroyed Iraq, leaving the country and millions of lives in ruins and releasing sectarian blood-letting that had been kept in check by the secular Saddam Hussein government. On any given day in “liberated” Iraq, the death toll is as high as during the height of the US attempted occupation.
In Afghanistan eleven years of US attempted occupation has had no more success than a decade of Soviet occupation. The Afghans are still not worn down despite more than two decades of war with the two superpowers. Like the Soviets, the Americans have managed to kill many women, children, and village elders, but precious few warriors. In place of the Soviet puppet government there is Washington’s puppet government. That is the only change, and Washington’s puppet is no more secure than the Soviet one was.
In Libya, Washington used its corrupt NATO puppets and CIA-recruited bandits to overthrow another stable government, that of Muammar Gaddafi, leaving Libya mired in sectarian violence. A stable prosperous country has simply been destroyed by western governments that profess human rights values and condemn China and Russia for not having any.
Washington has also been killing civilians with drones and air strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, two countries with which Washington is not at war but has purchased the governments, paying the Pakistani and Yemeni governments for the right to murder their citizens and destabilizing both countries in the process.
And now in Syria Washington is at work destroying another stable secular government headed by a British trained eye doctor.
Washington’s eleven years of illegal aggression against Muslim countries–war crimes according to the Nuremberg trials of Nazis–have resulted in civilian deaths far in excess of military casualties and in a domestic American police state that has destroyed the rule of law and the constitutional protections of US citizens. Washington and its presstitutes have emphasized that these costs are necessary to save Americans from al-Qaeda terrorists, none of whom have ever been apprehended in the United States.
Having listened to the propaganda line pumped out by Washington and its Ministry of Propaganda for eleven years, imagine my astonishment when I saw two juxtaposed headlines: “Al-Nusra pledges allegiance to al-Qaeda” (BBC) and “Move to Widen Help for Syrian Rebels Gains Speed in West” (NY Times). Al-Nusra is the main military component of the “Syrian rebels,” and it has allied itself with our mortal enemy–Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
Wait a minute! Our government told us for eleven years that we blew trillions of dollars on wars to protect Americans from al-Qaeda, endangering Social Security, Medicare, the social safety net, the dollar’s exchange value, the credit rating of the US Treasury, and our civil liberties in order to save America from al-Qaeda terrorists. So why is Washington now supporting al-Qaeda’s overthrow of the secular, non-Islamist government in Syria which has never ever done anything whatsoever to Americans!?
The New York Times presstitutes, Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler, elevated the terrorist al-Qaeda organization to the status of “the Syrian opposition.” At a lunch meeting hosted by Washington’s puppet, British Foreign Secretary William Hague, and US Secretary of State John Kerry, “the Syrian opposition,” aka al-Qaeda, requested antiaircraft and antitank weapons. A senior Washington official said: “Our assistance has been on an upward trajectory, and the president (Obama) has directed his national security team to identify additional measures so that we can increase assistance.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry announced a $123 million “defense aid package” to “the Syrian opposition” that now includes al-Qaeda. Washington had already sent $117 million in “food and medical supplies” to “the Syrian opposition,” and ordered its Middle Eastern puppets to send arms. Note the Orwellian language: support for an outside terrorist force seeking to destroy a government and a people is called a “defense aid package.”
On April 11 the establishment French newspaper, Le Monde, reported that the al-Nosra organization affiliated with al-Qaeda is the dominant force in “the Syrian opposition,” not democratic revolutionaries. Despite this fact, Washington’s puppets, France and Britain, are pushing the European Union to send arms to the al-Qaeda affiliated “Syrian opposition.” And Senator John McCain wants US airstrikes on Syrian government forces with whom the US is not at war, in order to provide air cover for al-Qaeda’s takeover of Syria.
Meanwhile, the Islamist Shiites, whom the Americans left in control of Iraq, have announced that they have joined the battle against the American-supported al-Qaeda forces seeking to radicalize Syria.
So far at last count, the UN reports that the military attack on Syria organized by Washington’s proxies has killed 70,000 people. But americans are preoccupied with the Boson Marathon bombing, which killed 3.
Once again “the indispensable people” are bringing death and destruction to an entire country in order to bring to the dead “freedom and democracy.” No Syrian asked for this “liberation” from his life.
Be a Proud American. We are doing our duty to our rightful hegemony over the world and to Israel, which has purchased our government. It is our right to be the hegemonic power on the planet earth, and that includes the Mediterranean Sea. Therefore it is Washington’s right to overthrow Syria in order to get rid of the Russian naval base there. The Romans would never have put up with a foreign power having a naval base in the Mediterranean, and we can do no less, unless we are some kind of pansy state afraid of our own shadow. The Mediterranean was mare nostrum–our sea–for the Romans. Now it is our sea, and by god we are going to claim it by overthrowing Syria.
Israel, of course, was given the rights to “Greater Israel” by God himself–who am I to question the Christian Zionist preachers who are growing fat on Israeli money–and part of “Greater Israel” is the river in southern Lebanon that supplies precious water.
Hizbollah, provisioned by Syria and Iran has prevented Israel from confiscating southern Lebanon in order to acquire the water rights that God gave them. Therefore, to fulfill our obligations as Israel’s puppet, we are required to destroy both Syria and Iran so that Hizbollah is isolated and out of the way and “Greater Israel” can be created.
The Christian Zionist churches in the US repeat this message every Sunday. If you don’t believe it, you are some kind of anti-american anti-semite and should be exterminated. Or you could be a despicable Muslim terrorist to be waterboarded into confession. Homeland Security will make short work of you just like they did to those Russian Muslim terrorists in Boston who tried to blow up the Marathon race.
I mean, really, how can we indispensable people bring freedom and democracy to the world if the Russians have a naval base in our sea? How can we project strength if we project such weakness by permitting a foreign power’s presence in our exclusive sphere of influence many thousands of miles away from our borders. Don’t forget, America’s borders are the world’s borders. It says so in our song–”From sea to shining sea.” Don’t forget it.
Of course, we don’t want to go head-to-head with another well armed nuclear military power, but the way around that is to demonize the Syrian government and Russia for supporting an eye doctor who is “a brutal dictator” who is resisting an Islamist al-Qaeda takeover of Syria financed by Washington. Our masters in Washington can use the UN and all our well-paid puppet states to pressure the Russians to shut up and get out of our way. I mean, really, does Putin want all those Russian NGOs that we finance to bring their operatives out onto the streets in Moscow and bring down his government? I mean, really, who does Putin think he is standing up to our god-given hegemony over the world, much less Israel’s god-given hegemony over the Middle East? I mean, Putin is in for it, and so are those goddamn Chinese. I mean, really, who do they think they are? Americans? Don’t those Chinks know about our control of the Pacific? I mean, really, are they out to lunch?
And, I mean, really, how can all us get to heaven if we don’t do God’s will and deliver the Middle East to Israel as Israel says the scriptures require. I mean, really, do you want to oppose God and burn in hell? Instead of all those virgins Muslims promise you, you will be devoured by fire. You better get on the right side before you die.
I mean, really, who wants this fate. We had better get rid of Syria sooner than ordered.
If we don’t do what Israel tells us God requires, we are finished. That’s for sure.
This is the full 2 hour version of the original dvd “Blueprint for Truth-The Architecture of Destruction”. In 2 hours Richard Gage, AIA of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth takes you through most of the scientific forensic evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the destruction of WTC was accomplished with explosive controlled demolition.
This Friday, April 19, 2013 image made available by the Massachusetts State Police shows 19-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, hiding inside a boat during a search for him in Watertown, Mass. He was pulled, wounded and bloody, from the boat parked in the backyard of a home in the Greater Boston area. Two U.S. officials say the surviving suspect in the Boston bombings was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard. Authorities originally said they had exchanged gunfire with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for more than one hour Friday evening before they were able to subdue him. (AP Photo/Massachusetts State Police)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two U.S. officials say the surviving suspect in the Boston bombings was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard.
Authorities originally said they had exchanged gunfire with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-KHAHR’ tsahr-NEYE’-ehv) for more than one hour Friday evening before they were able to subdue him.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation, say investigators recovered a 9 mm handgun believed to have been used by Tsarnaev’s brother, Tamerlan, from the site of a gun battle Thursday night, which injured a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer. Dzhokhar was believed to have been shot before he escaped.
The officials tell The Associated Press that no gun was found in the boat. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said earlier that shots were fired from inside the boat.
This is pretty damning stuff. Im always open to the possibility but have been pretty skeptical of this whole crisis actor thing. I still am but this is pretty crazy. -Mort
Unlike Oaklahoma City the FBI cannot confiscate all of the surveillance, cell phone, and thousands of cameras that were at the finish line of Boston Marathon. 4Chan posted dozens of photos showing Navy Seal or Private Security personnel carrying the same black back packs which are the same style backpacks showed in FBI photos. It’s becoming crystal clear. Get these articles and this video out to everyone you know.
Navy SEALs Spotted at Boston Marathon Wearing Suspicious Backpacks? http://www.infowars.com/navy-seals-sp…
Boston Bombing Culprits Identified? http://www.infowars.com/boston-bombin…
NYT admits fraudulent Syrian human rights group is UK-based “one-man band” funded by EU and one other “European country.”
April 12, 2013 (LD) – In reality, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has long ago been exposed as an absurd propaganda front operated by Rami Abdul Rahman out of his house in England’s countryside. According to a December 2011 Reuters article titled, “Coventry – an unlikely home to prominent Syria activist,” Abdul Rahman admits he is a member of the so-called “Syrian opposition” and seeks the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad:
After three short spells in prison in Syria for pro-democracy activism, Abdulrahman came to Britain in 2000 fearing a longer, fourth jail term.
“I came to Britain the day Hafez al-Assad died, and I’ll return when Bashar al-Assad goes,” Abdulrahman said, referring to Bashar’s father and predecessor Hafez, also an autocrat.
One could not fathom a more unreliable, compromised, biased source of information, yet for the past two years, his “Observatory” has served as the sole source of information for the endless torrent of propaganda emanating from the Western media. Perhaps worst of all, is that the United Nations uses this compromised, absurdly overt source of propaganda as the basis for its various reports – at least, that is what the New York Times now claims in their recent article, “A Very Busy Man Behind the Syrian Civil War’s Casualty Count.”
The NYT piece admits:
Military analysts in Washington follow its body counts of Syrian and rebel soldiers to gauge the course of the war. The United Nations and human rights organizations scour its descriptions of civilian killings for evidence in possible war crimes trials. Major news organizations, including this one, cite its casualty figures.
Yet, despite its central role in the savage civil war, the grandly named Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is virtually a one-man band. Its founder, Rami Abdul Rahman, 42, who fled Syria 13 years ago, operates out of a semidetached red-brick house on an ordinary residential street in this drab industrial city [Coventry, England].
The New York Times also for the first time reveals that Abdul Rahman’s operation is indeed funded by the European Union and a “European country” he refuses to identify:
Money from two dress shops covers his minimal needs for reporting on the conflict, along with small subsidies from the European Union and one European country that he declines to identify.
Photo: From Reuters: “Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, leaves the Foreign and Commonwealth Office after meeting Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague, in central London November 21, 2011. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor” Abdelrahman is not the “head” of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, he isthe Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, run out of his UK-based house as a one-man operation.
….
And while Abdul Rahman refuses to identify that “European country,” it is beyond doubt that it is the United Kingdom itself – as Abdul Rahman has direct access to the Foreign Secretary William Hague, who he has been documented meeting in person on multiple occasions at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. The NYT in fact reveals that it was the British government that first relocated Abdul Rahman to Coventry, England after he fled Syria over a decade ago because of his anti-government activities:
When two associates were arrested in 2000, he fled the country, paying a human trafficker to smuggle him into England. The government resettled him in Coventry, where he decided he liked the slow pace.
Abdul Rahman is not a “human rights activist.” He is a paid propagandist. He is no different than the troupe of unsavory, willful liars and traitors provided refuge in Washington and London during the Iraq war and the West’s more recent debauchery in Libya, for the sole purpose of supplying Western governments with a constant din of propaganda and intentionally falsified intelligence reports designed specifically to justify the West’s hegemonic designs.
Abdul Rahman’s contemporaries include the notorious Iraqi defector Rafid al-Janabi, codename “Curveball,” who now gloats publicly that he invented accusations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the West’s casus belli for a 10 year war that ultimately cost over a million lives, including thousands of Western troops, and has left Iraq still to this day in shambles. There’s also the lesser known Dr. Sliman Bouchuiguir of Libya, who formed the foundation of the pro-West human rights racket in Benghazi and now openly brags in retrospect that tales of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s atrocities against the Libyan people were likewise invented to give NATO its sought-after impetus to intervene militarily.
Unlike in Iraq and Libya, the West has failed categorically to sell military intervention in Syria, and even its covert war has begun to unravel as the public becomes increasingly aware that the so-called “pro-democracy rebels” the West has been arming for years are in fact sectarian extremists fighting under the banner of Al Qaeda. The charade that is the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” is also unraveling. It is unlikely that the New York Times’ limited hangout will convince readers that Rami Abdul Rahman is anything other than another “Curveball” helping the corporate-financier elite of Wall Street and London sell another unnecessary war to the public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revo…
2002 documentary about the April 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt which briefly deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. A television crew from Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ happened to be recording a documentary about Chávez during the events of April 11, 2002. Shifting focus, they followed the events as they occurred. During their filming, the crew recorded images of the events that they say contradict explanations given by Chávez’s opposition, the private media, the US State Department, and then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. The documentary says that the coup was the result of a conspiracy between various old guard and anti-Chávez factions within Venezuela and the United States.
In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, President George W. Bush made a promise. “The Iraqi people can be certain of this,” he said. “The United States is committed to helping them build a better future.” A decade later, his successor, Barack Obama, seemed to suggest the U.S. had kept its end of the bargain. On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, he lauded U.S. troops who, he insisted, gave the Iraqi people “an opportunity to forge their own future after many years of hardship.”
But what happened to the “better future” for the untold number of Iraqis who died in the charnel house that resulted from the American invasion? Where can we find the “better future” of the nine-year-old girl killed by an air strike in Baghdad‘s Al-Nasser marketplace on March 28, 2003? Or the 12-year-old boy killed by a car bomb in Al-Ula market in Baghdad’s Sadr City on July 1, 2006? Or Dawoud Nouri’s eight-year-old daughter who was beheaded in Kirkuk on April 21, 2007? What happened to their opportunities “to forge their own future”?
According to a recent report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University, at least 123,000-134,000 Iraqi civilians have died “as a direct consequence of the war’s violence since the March 2003 invasion.” In fact, while the U.S. military left Iraq in 2011 and war supporters have advanced a counterfeit history of success there — owing to then-General (now disgraced former CIA director) David Petraeus’s military “surge” of 2007 — the war’s brutal legacy lives on. Last year, the casualty watchdog group Iraq Body Count tallied 4,570 Iraqi civilian deaths from violence, a small increase over the death toll from 2011.
And on the day of Obama’s 10thanniversary announcement, car bombs and other attacks killed and wounded hundreds in the Iraqi capital Baghdad alone. Add to these numbers the countless wounded of the last decade and the approximately 2.8 million Iraqis who, to this day, remain refugees outside the country or internally displaced within it and the words of both presidents ring hollow indeed.
Today, Dahr Jamail, who, in the early years of the American occupation of Iraq, covered that country’s nightmare in a way that few other American reporters even tried to do, returns to its still war-torn streets to do what he does best: give voice to the men and women who were promised those bright futures by America’s commanders-in-chief. The Iraq they speak of, not surprisingly, bears little resemblance to the fantasyland touted by America’s recent presidents. And their thoughts, for the years ahead, seem to fall somewhere between fatalism and nihilism. “Hardship” is hardly in the past and a “better future” appears nowhere in sight on a dim road filled with sectarian tensions, despair, lack of basic services, and the urge for revenge. An “opportunity to forge their own future”? Tell it to the dead. Nick Turse
Living with No Future Iraq, 10 Years Later
By Dahr Jamail
Back then, everybody was writing about Iraq, but it’s surprising how few Americans, including reporters, paid much attention to the suffering of Iraqis. Today, Iraq is in the news again. The words, the memorials, the retrospectives are pouring out, and again the suffering of Iraqis isn’t what’s on anyone’s mind. This was why I returned to that country before the recent 10th anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion and why I feel compelled to write a few grim words about Iraqis today.
But let’s start with then. It’s April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I’m inside a makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah while that predominantly Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I’m alternating between scribbling brief observations in my notebook and taking photographs of the wounded and dying women and children being brought into the clinic.
A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing hysterically as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy. Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he’ll be dead. This sort of thing happens again and again.
Over and over, I watch speeding cars hop the curb in front of this dirty clinic with next to no medical resources and screech to a halt. Grief-stricken family members pour out, carrying bloodied relatives — women and children — gunned down by American snipers.
One of them, an 18-year-old girl has been shot through the neck by what her family swears was an American sniper. All she can manage are gurgling noises as doctors work frantically to save her from bleeding to death. Her younger brother, an undersized child of 10 with a gunshot wound in his head, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomits as doctors race to keep him alive. He later dies while being transported to a hospital in Baghdad.
According to the Bush administration at the time, the siege of Fallujah was carried out in the name of fighting something called “terrorism” and yet, from the point of view of the Iraqis I was observing at such close quarters, the terror was strictly American. In fact, it was the Americans who first began the spiraling cycle of violence in Fallujah when U.S. troops from the 82nd Airborne Division killed 17 unarmed demonstrators on April 28th of the previous year outside a school they had occupied and turned into a combat outpost. The protesters had simply wanted the school vacated by the Americans, so their children could use it. But then, as now, those who respond to government-sanctioned violence are regularly written off as “terrorists.” Governments are rarely referred to in the same terms.
10 Years Later
Jump to March 2013 and that looming 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion. For me, that’s meant two books and too many news articles to count since I first traveled to that country as the world’s least “embedded” reporter to blog about a U.S. occupation already spiraling out of control. Today, I work for the Human Rights Department of Al Jazeera English, based out of Doha, Qatar. And once again, so many years later, I’ve returned to the city where I saw all those bloodied and dying women and children. All these years later, I’m back in Fallujah.
Today, not to put too fine a point on it, Iraq is a failed state, teetering on the brink of another sectarian bloodbath, and beset by chronic political deadlock and economic disaster. Its social fabric has been all but shredded by nearly a decade of brutal occupation by the U.S. military and now by the rule of an Iraqi government rife with sectarian infighting.
Every Friday, for 13 weeks now, hundreds of thousands have demonstrated and prayed on the main highway linking Baghdad and Amman, Jordan, which runs just past the outskirts of this city.
Sunnis in Fallujah and the rest of Iraq’s vast Anbar Province are enraged at the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki because his security forces, still heavily staffed by members of various Shia militias, have been killing or detaining their compatriots from this region, as well as across much of Baghdad. Fallujah’s residents now refer to that city as a “big prison,” just as they did when it was surrounded and strictly controlled by the Americans.
Angry protesters have taken to the streets. “We demand an end to checkpoints surrounding Fallujah. We demand they allow in the press. We demand they end their unlawful home raids and detentions. We demand an end to federalism and gangsters and secret prisons!” So Sheikh Khaled Hamoud Al-Jumaili, a leader of the demonstrations, tells me just prior to one of the daily protests. “Losing our history and dividing Iraqis is wrong, but that, and kidnapping and conspiracies and displacing people, is what Maliki is doing.”
The sheikh went on to assure me that millions of people in Anbar province had stopped demanding changes in the Maliki government because, after years of waiting, no such demands were ever met. “Now, we demand a change in the regime instead and a change in the constitution,” he says. “We will not stop these demonstrations. This one we have labeled ‘last chance Friday’ because it is the government’s last chance to listen to us.”
“What comes next,” I ask him, “if they don’t listen to you?”
“Maybe armed struggle comes next,” he replies without pause.
Predictably, given how the cycle of violence, corruption, injustice, and desperation has become part of daily life in this country, that same day, a Sunni demonstrator was gunned down by Iraqi security forces. Lieutenant General Mardhi al-Mahlawi, commander of the Iraqi Army’s Anbar Operations Command, said the authorities would not hesitate to deploy troops around the protest site again “if the protesters do not cooperate.” The following day, the Maliki government warned that the area was becoming “a haven for terrorists,” echoing the favorite term the Americans used during their occupation of Fallujah.
Today’s Iraq
In 2009, I was in Fallujah, riding around in the armored BMW of Sheikh Aifan, the head of the then-U.S.-backed Sunni militias known as the Sahwa forces. The Sheikh was an opportunistic, extremely wealthy “construction contractor” and boasted that the car we rode in had been custom built for him at a cost of nearly half a million dollars.
Two months ago, Sheikh Aifan was killed by a suicide bomber, just one more victim of a relentless campaign by Sunni insurgents targeting those who once collaborated with the Americans. Memories in Iraq are long these days and revenge remains on many minds. The key figures in the Maliki regime know that if it falls, as is likely one day, they may meet fates similar to Sheikh Aifan’s. It’s a convincing argument for hanging onto power.
In this way, the Iraq of 2013 staggers onward in a climate of perpetual crisis toward a future where the only givens are more chaos, more violence, and yet more uncertainty. Much of this can be traced to Washington’s long, brutal, and destructive occupation, beginning with the installation of former CIA asset Ayad Allawi as interim prime minister. His hold on power quickly faltered, however, after he was used by the Americans to launch their second siege of Fallujah in November 2004, which resulted in the deaths of thousands more Iraqis, and set the stage for an ongoing health crisis in the city due to the types of weapons used by the U.S. military.
In 2006, after Allawi lost political clout, then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad tapped Maliki as Washington’s new prime minister. It was then widely believed that he was the only politician whom both the U.S. and Iran could find acceptable. As one Iraqi official sarcastically put it, Maliki was the product of an agreement between “the Great Satan and the Axis of Evil.”
In the years since, Maliki has become a de facto dictator. In Anbar Province and parts of Baghdad, he is now bitterly referred to as a “Shia Saddam.” Pictures of his less-than-photogenic face in front of an Iraqi flag hang above many of the countless checkpoints around the capital. When I see his visage looming over us yet again as we sit in traffic, I comment to my fixer, Ali, that his image is now everywhere, just as Saddam’s used to be. “Yes, they’ve simply changed the view for us,” Ali replies, and we laugh. Gallows humor has been a constant in Baghdad since the invasion a decade ago.
It’s been much the same all over Iraq. The U.S. forces that ousted Saddam Hussein’s regime immediately moved into his military bases and palaces. Now that the U.S. has left Iraq, those same bases and palaces are manned and controlled by the Maliki government.
Saddam Hussein’s country was notoriously corrupt. Yetlast year, Iraq ranked 169th out of 174 countries surveyed, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. It is effectively a failed state, with the Maliki regime incapable of controlling vast swaths of the country, including the Kurdish north, despite his willingness to use the same tactics once employed by Saddam Hussein and after him the Americans: widespread violence, secret prisons, threats, detentions, and torture.
Almost 10 years after U.S. troops entered a Baghdad in flames and being looted, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous places on Earth. There are daily bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations. The sectarianism instilled and endlessly stirred up by U.S. policy has become deeply, seemingly irrevocably embedded in the political culture, which regularly threatens to tip over into the sort of violence that typified 2006-2007, when upwards of 3,000 Iraqis were being slaughtered every month.
The death toll of March 11th was one of the worst of late and provides a snapshot of the increasing levels of violence countrywide. Overall, 27 people were killed and many more injured in attacks across the country. A suicide car bomb detonated in a town near Kirkuk, killing eight and wounding 166 (65 of whom were students at a Kurdish secondary school for girls). In Baghdad, gunmen stormed a home where they murdered a man and woman. A shop owner was shot dead and a policeman was killed in a drive-by shooting in Ghazaliya. A civilian was killed in the Saidiya district, while a Sahwa member was gunned down in Amil. Three government ministry employees in the city were also killed.
In addition, gunmen killed two policemen in the town of Baaj, a dead body turned up in Muqtadiyah, where a roadside bomb also wounded a policeman. In the city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, gunmen killed a blacksmith, and in the northern city of Mosul, a political candidate and a soldier were both killed in separate incidents. A local political leader in the town of Rutba in Anbar Province was shot and died of his injuries, and the body of a young man whose skull was crushed was found in Kirkuk a day after he was kidnapped. Gunmen also killed a civilian in Abu Saida.
And these are only the incidents reported in the media in a single day. Others regularly don’t make it into the news at all.
The next day, Awadh, the security chief for Al Jazeera in Baghdad, was in a dark mood when he arrived at work. “Yesterday, two people were assassinated in my neighborhood,” he said. “Six were assassinated around Baghdad. I live in a mixed neighborhood, and the threats of killing have returned. It feels like it did just before the sectarian war of 2006. The militias are again working to push people out of their homes if they are not Shia. Now, I worry everyday when my daughter goes to school. I ask the taxi driver who takes her to drop her close to the school, so that she is alright.” Then he paused a moment, held up his arms and added, “And I pray.”
“This Is Our Life Now”
Iraqis who had enough money and connections to leave the country have long since fled. Harb, another fixer and dear friend who worked with me throughout much of my earlier reportage from Iraq, fled to Syria’s capital, Damascus, with his family for security reasons. When the uprising in Syria turned violent and devolved into the bloodbath it is today, he fled Damascus for Beirut. He is literally running from war.
Recent Iraqi government estimates put the total of “internally displaced persons” in Iraq at 1.1 million. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis remain in exile, but of course no one is counting. Even those who stay often live as if they were refugees and act as if they are on the run. Most of those I met on my most recent trip won’t even allow me to use their real names when I interview them.
My first day in the field this time around, I met with Isam, another fixer I’d worked with nine years ago. His son narrowly escaped two kidnapping attempts, and he has had to change homes four times for security reasons. Once he was strongly opposed to leaving Iraq because, he always insisted, “this is my country, and these are my people.” Now, he is desperate to find a way out. “There is no future here,” he told me. “Sectarianism is everywhere and killing has come back to Baghdad.”
He takes me to interview refugees in his neighborhood of al-Adhamiyah. Most of them fled their homes inmixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods and towns during the sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007. Inside his cobbled-together brick house with a roof of tin sheeting held down with old tires, one refugee echoes Isam’s words: “There is no future for us Iraqis,” he told me. “Day by day our situation worsens, and now we expect a full sectarian war.”
Elsewhere, I interviewed 20-year-old Marwa Ali, a mother of two. In a country where electric blackouts are a regular event, water is often polluted, and waste of every sort litters neighborhoods, the stench of garbage and raw sewage wafted through the door of her home while flies buzzed about. “We have scorpions and snakes also,” she said while watching me futilely swat at the swarm of insects that instantly surrounded me. And she paused when she saw me looking at her children, a four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. “My children have no future,” she said. “Neither do I, and neither does Iraq.”
Shortly afterward, I met with another refugee, 55-year-old Haifa Abdul Majid. I held back tears when the first thing she said was how grateful she was to have food. “We are finding some food and can eat, and I thank God for this,” she told me in front of her makeshift shelter. “This is the main thing. In some countries, some people can’t even find food to eat.”
She, too, had fled sectarian violence, and had lost loved ones and friends. While she acknowledged the hardship she was experiencing and how difficult it was to live under such difficult circumstances, she continued to express her gratitude that her situation wasn’t worse. After all, she said, she wasn’t living in the desert. Finally, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “We know we are in this bad situation because of the American occupation,” she said wearily. “And now it is Iran having their revenge on us by using Maliki, and getting back at Iraq for the [1980-1988] war with Iran. As for our future, if things stay like they are now, it will only keep getting worse. The politicians only fight, and they take Iraq down into a hole. For 10 years what have these politicians done? Nothing! Saddam was better than all of them.”
I asked her about her grandson. “Always I wonder about him,” she replied. “I ask God to take me away before he grows up, because I don’t want to see it. I’m an old woman now and I don’t care if I die, but what about these young children?” She stopped speaking, looked off into the distance, then stared at the ground. There was, for her, nothing else to say.
I heard the same fatalism even from Awadh, Al Jazeera’s head of security. “Baghdad is stressed,” he told me. “These days you can’t trust anyone. The situation on the street is complicated, because militias are running everything. You don’t know who is who. All the militias are preparing for more fighting, and all are expecting the worst.”
As he said this, we passed under yet another poster of an angry looking Maliki, speaking with a raised, clenched fist. “Last year’s budget was $100 billion and we have no working sewage system and garbage is everywhere,” he added. “Maliki is trying to be a dictator, and is controlling all the money now.”
In the days that followed, my fixer Ali pointed out new sidewalks, and newly planted trees and flowers, as well as the new street lights the government has installed in Baghdad. “We called it first the sidewalks government, because that was the only thing we could see that they accomplished.” He laughed sardonically. “Then it was the flowers government, and now it is the government of the street lamps, and the lamps sometimes don’t even work!”
Despite his brave face, kind heart, and upbeat disposition, even Ali eventually shared his concerns with me. One morning, when we met for work, I asked him about the latest news. “Same old, same old,” he replied, “Kidnappings, killings, rapes. Same old, same old. This is our life now, everyday.”
“The lack of hope for the future is our biggest problem today,” he explained. He went on to say something that also qualified eerily as another version of the “same old, same old.” I had heard similar words from countless Iraqis back in the fall of 2003, as violence and chaos first began to engulf the country. “All we want is to live in peace, and have security, and have a normal life,” he said, “to be able to enjoy the sweetness of life.” This time, however, there wasn’t even a trace of his usual cheer, and not even a hint of gallows humor.
“All Iraq has had these last 10 years is violence, chaos, and suffering. For 13 years before that we were starved and deprived by [U.N. and U.S.] sanctions. Before that, the Kuwait War, and before that, the Iran War. At least I experienced some of my childhood without knowing war. I’ve achieved a job and have my family, but for my daughters, what will they have here in this country? Will they ever get to live without war? I don’t think so.”
For so many Iraqis like Ali, a decade after Washington invaded their country, this is the anniversary of nothing at all.
Dahr Jamail is a feature story staff writer and producer for the Human Rights Department of Al Jazeera English. Currently based in Doha, Qatar, Dahr has spent more than a year in Iraq, spread over a number of trips between 2003 and 2013. His reportage from Iraq, including for TomDispatch, has won him several awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism. He is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq.
The U.S. military has spent about $1 billion on Libya’s revolution, and secretly helped NATO with everything from munitions to surveillance aircraft. John Barry provides an exclusive look at Obama’s emerging ‘covert intervention’ strategy.
The U.S. military has spent about $1 billion so far and played a far larger role in Libya than it has acknowledged, quietly implementing an emerging “covert intervention” strategy that the Obama administration hopes will let America fight small wars with a barely detectable footprint.
Officially, President Obama handed the lead role of ousting Muammar Gaddafi to the European members of NATO. For this he was criticized by Washington war hawks who suggested that Europeans working with a ragtag team of Libyan rebels was a recipe for stalemate, not victory.
But behind the scenes, the U.S. military played an indispensable role in the Libya campaign, deploying far more forces than the administration chose to advertise. And at NATO headquarters outside Brussels, the U.S. was intimately involved in all decisions about how the Libyan rebels should be supported as they rolled up control of cities and oil refineries and marched toward the capital, Tripoli.
The Libya campaign was a unique international effort: 15 European nations working with the U.S. and three Arab nations. The air offensive was launched from 29 airbases in six European countries. But only six European nations joined with the U.S. and Canada to fly strikes against Gaddafi’s forces. The scale of the unpublicized U.S. role affirms hawks’ arguments: a divided NATO simply couldn’t have waged the war it did without extensive American help. What the hawks underestimated was the U.S. ability to operate without publicity—in military lingo, beneath the radar.
According to two senior NATO officials, one American and the other European, these were the critical U.S. contributions during the six-month military campaign:
• An international naval force gathered off Libya. To lower the U.S. profile, the administration elected not to send a supercarrier. Even so, the dozen U.S. warships on station were the biggest contingent in this armada. In the opening hours of the campaign, an American submarine, the USS Florida, launched 100 cruise missiles against Libyan air defenses, crucially opening an entry corridor for the airstrikes that followed.
Left: Rebel fighters celebrate overrunning Gaddafi’s compound Bab al-Aziziya in Tripoli, on Aug. 24; President Obama (AP Photo)
• U.S. tanker aircraft refueled European aircraft on the great majority of missions against Gaddafi’s forces. The Europeans have tanker aircraft, but not enough to support a 24/7 air offensive averaging, by NATO count, around 100 missions a day, some 50 of them strike sorties. The U.S. flew 30 of the 40 tankers.
• When the Europeans ran low on precision-attack munitions, the U.S. quietly resupplied them. (That explains why European air forces flying F-16s—those of Norway, Denmark, Belgium—carried out a disproportionate share of the strikes in the early phase of the campaign. The U.S. had stocks of the munitions to resupply them. When Britain and France, which fly European-built strike aircraft, also ran short, they couldn’t use U.S.-made bombs until they had made hurried modifications to their aircraft.)
• To target Gaddafi’s military, NATO largely relied on U.S. JSTARS surveillance aircraft, which, flying offshore, could track the movements of rival forces. When more detailed targeting information was needed—as in the battles for Misrata and other towns defended by Gaddafi’s troops—the U.S. flew Predator drones to relay a block-by-block picture.
• U.S. Air Force targeting specialists were in NATO’s Naples operational headquarters throughout the campaign. They oversaw the preparing of “target folders” for the strikes in Tripoli against Gaddafi’s compound and the headquarters of his military and intelligence services. (Organizing precision strikes by high-speed jets is not a task for novices. The attack routes over Tripoli and the release times of bombs had to be precisely calibrated so munitions released even a second late by a strike aircraft would have the best chance of avoiding civilian homes.)
What seems to be evolving is a new American way of war.
• U.S. AWACS aircraft, high over the Mediterranean, handled much of the battle-management task, acting as air-traffic controllers on most of the strike missions. Again, the Europeans have AWACS, but not enough crews to handle an all-hours campaign lasting months.
• Eavesdropping by U.S. intelligence—some by aircraft, some by a listening post quietly established just outside Libya—gave NATO unparalleled knowledge of what Gaddafi’s military planned.
• All this was crucial in supporting the European effort. But U.S. involvement went way beyond that. In all, the U.S. had flown by late August more than 5,300 missions, by Pentagon count. More than 1,200 of these were strike sorties against Libyan targets.
• The administration largely stuck to Obama’s decision that the U.S. would not put boots on the ground in Libya (although the CIA did have agents inside Tripoli). British and French special forces were on the ground, training and organizing the insurgents—as were units from two Arab nations, Qatar and Jordan. But their communications relied on a satellite channel run by the U.S. And the U.S. also supplied other high-tech gear—NATO sources declined to describe it, but apparently it had never been given before, even to allied special forces.
• When a desperate Gaddafi began to launch Scud missiles into towns held by the opposition, a U.S. guided-missile destroyer offshore negated his offensive by shooting down the Scuds.
“President Obama may have taken the U.S. out of the direct combat role, but he certainly did not take American forces out of the front line,” Michael Clarke, director of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, wrote in a recent analysis. “The European allies were hardly ‘going it alone’ in this operation.”
With the Pentagon facing deep budget cuts, the Libyan campaign will likely provoke a debate in Washington. There is zero appetite to repeat the massive interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. is still embroiled a decade later. The Libya campaign appears to offer an alternative. It hasn’t been cheap. The Pentagon estimates U.S. operations there cost $896 million through the end of July.
The good news is that the U.S. will be repaid for its assistance to the Europeans—everything from fuel for the aircraft to munitions and spare parts—which cost a further $222 million, the Pentagon estimates. And compared with Afghanistan, which is still costing the U.S. taxpayer roughly $10 billion a month, Gaddafi’s overthrow has been a bargain.
One senior NATO official pointed to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001 as a precursor of the Libya campaign. In Afghanistan, U.S. special forces riding with Northern Alliance troops downloaded on their laptops satellite pictures of Taliban deployments over the next hill, and used their satphones and hand-held GPS targeting devices to call in airstrikes. The Taliban was overthrown in 63 days.
“That was a classic example of the U.S. using its technological supremacy to support local forces,” the official said. “Now we have Libya as another example.”
The campaign in Yemen provides a third example. For more than two years, U.S. special forces have been training and working with Yemeni troops to combat, among other insurgent groups, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The U.S. campaign in Yemen has used conventional weaponry on occasion: sorties by Harriers and even some cruise-missile strikes. But the burden of much of the campaign has fallen to special-forces units, supported by Predators.
The ongoing struggle in Pakistan is arguably yet another case study in what seems to be evolving as a new American way of war.
Predator strikes against alleged Taliban and allied Afghan insurgent groups massing in Pakistan have preoccupied international attention. But senior NATO officers in Kabul whisper that again “beneath the radar,” CIA paramilitary operatives are inside Pakistan, leading groups of locally recruited frontier tribesmen. They apparently supply much of the targeting information for the Predators—especially against senior Taliban and al Qaeda operatives, who reportedly are the main targets of these CIA-led bands. Their mission may go beyond reconnaissance. According to one senior NATO officer in Kabul, some strikes credited to Predators actually result from raids by this covert force.
The killing 10 days ago of al Qaeda’s operations chief, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, in the Pakistani frontier province of Waziristan, was the greatest single success in the campaign. U.S. officials attributed al-Rahman’s death to a Predator strike. But on the question of how he was identified and tracked, the officials were tight-lipped.
John Barry joined Newsweek‘s Washington bureau as national-security correspondent in 1985. He has reported extensively on American intervention in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, and Somalia and on efforts for peace in the Middle East. In 2002 he co-wrote The War Crimes of Afghanistan, which won a National Headliner Award. He won the 1993 Investigative Reporters & Editors Gold Medal for his investigation of the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes, as well as a 1983 British Press Award—the British equivalent of a Pulitzer—for his reconstruction of the U.S.-Soviet negotiations to ban intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.
RT @bayonnebernie: BIGGEST QUESTION IS WHY GMO? BIG BUCKS! BIG MONEY! Biotech crops risky to consume, says former pro-GMO scientist http:/…....end..... 6 hours ago
RT @kr3at: Rebels film execution of 11 Syrian soldiers, as Obama continues anti-Assad rhetoric bit.ly/14LOE3H
via @kr3at....end..... 6 hours ago
RT @Alexandra_2090: We already live in a police state, Americans are just too stupid to know it because the MSM hasn't told them yet.....end..... 6 hours ago
RT @MKERone: This is like Irak/Iran war fomented by the USrael. Make them fight each other so they'll both be weakened. And Zionism can pre…....end..... 6 hours ago
“Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten”. Cree Indian Prophecy
This site is mostly GOOGLE free !
US : Who Owns the Media?
Revolution ( in the US a constitutional right )
The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.
and ….. JFK in his own words !
In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:
“No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment.”
Abraham Lincoln said, just before his assassination:
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country...Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Hmmmm.
Herds of wooly mammoths once shook Earth beneath their feet, sending humans scurrying across the landscape of prehistoric Ohio. But then something much larger shook Earth itself, and at that point these mega mammals' days were numbered. Something -- global-scale combustion caused by a comet scraping our planet's atmosphere or a meteorite slamming i […]
They call themselves Catholic Whistleblowers, a newly formed cadre of priests and nuns who say the Roman Catholic Church is still protecting sexual predators. Although they know they could face repercussions, they have banded together to push the new pope to clean house and the American bishops to enforce the zero-tolerance policies they adopted more than a […]
London - Scientists believe they have found the first evidence that other universes exist after analysing the data gathered by the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft. Theories that our universe could be just one of billions -- perhaps an infinite number - have been discussed for decades but until now they have lacked any evidence. However, a few […]
A giant tornado, a mile wide or more, killed at least 51 people as it tore across parts of Oklahoma City and its suburbs Monday afternoon, flattening homes, flinging cars through the air and crushing at least two schools packed with children. As the injured began flooding into hospitals, the authorities said many people remained trapped, even as rescue worke […]
A Lake Tahoe area scientist has found an unidentified life form in a high-altitude lake. Now agencies in the area are trying to figure out what it is. University of Nevada Reno Professor Emeritus, John Kleppe pilots a remotely operated vehicle, or "ROV," into the frigid depths of Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe. Particles whiz by the ROV's li […]
Astronomers have found a group of comets that have risen from the dead. The asteroidal belt comets - or ABCs for short - lie in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, report astronomers on the on the pre press website ArXiv.org. Dr Ignacio Ferrin, Dr Jorge Zuluaga and Pablo Cuartas from Columbia's University of Antioquia, say the group of elev […]
Event Time 2013-05-21 01:55:08 UTC 2013-05-21 12:55:08 UTC+11:00 at epicenter Location 52.505°N 160.470°E depth=33.9km (21.1mi) Nearby Cities 136km (85mi) ESE of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia 147km (91mi) ESE of Vilyuchinsk, Russia 159km (99mi) ESE of Yelizovo, Russia 988km (614mi) SE of Magadan, Russia 2483km (1543mi) NE of Tokyo, Japan Technical Detail […]
When the brain's primary "learning center" is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function, say life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in creating those alternate pathways -- often far from the damaged site. The research, conducted by UCLA's Michael F […]
Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt." We went into our nation's impoverished "sacrifice zones" - the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace - to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and c […]
Gregory Cox, 32, the founder and chief executive of the UK-based Quintessential Finance Group and a graduate of the exclusive Millfield boarding school near Somerset, has admitted to a sexual encounter with the woman - a 21-year-old from Bermuda - but claims she consented. The trial started with a new jury this week after the first jury was discharged last w […]
A shutdown call given by separatist group Tuesday has disrupted normal life in Muslim majority areas of Indian-controlled Kashmir, including summer capital city Srinagar.
At least nine people were killed and 53 others wounded in bombing attacks against two Shiite mosques in Iraq's southern city of Hilla on Monday, a police source said.
Russian special services eliminated two gunmen suspected of masterminding a terror attack in Moscow and arrested another, the National Anti-terrorism Committee (NAC) said Monday.
A total of 95 people, including 23 Hezbollah members, have been killed in an intense fighting in Syria's central city of al-Qussair over the past 48 hours, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday.
Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif Monday said Taliban's offer for peace talks should be taken seriously as every issue cannot be solved through use of power and bullet, local media reported.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday started a two-day visit to Mozambique, during which he will exchange views with Mozambican officials on issues such as the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Mokhtar Lamani, the Damascus representative of the UN-Arab League peace envoy to Syria, said Monday that his efforts will be focused on the planned international conference on Syria slated for June.
A Pakistani court on Monday granted bail to former President Pervez Musharraf in the 2007 assassination case of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, court officials said.
The spokesman of Iran's Guardian Council of Constitution Abbasali Kadkhodaei said Monday that next Iranian president should be physically competent to be able to work for hours, the State IRIB TV reported.
Tokyo characterized the revelation as a diplomatic fiasco maliciously inflicted by North Korea. Seoul slammed it, and the US was kept in the dark. Whatever the truth, the "secret" dispatch of Japanese envoy Isao Iijima to Pyongyang has broken a united stand and revealed Japan's determination to move beyond being an obedient US ally to being an […]
As Manila views Chinese naval occupation of disputed territory in the South China Sea as a "when" not an "if", it is under no illusion that US support can be counted upon, hence a change in tack to diplomacy through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The group may be more amenable now Cambodia no longer holds the chair, but it so […]
Contradictory discourse in the US over the Syrian civil conflict underlines how American strategy in the Middle East has become watered-down to the point of impotence. It's a far cry from the days of invading Iraq and carving up the region through "peace deals" - yet this was the likeliest end result of a foreign policy almost entirely reliant […]
By the time of his death on May 12, international relations visionary Kenneth Waltz's core theories of how great powers interacted in an "international anarchy" had been eroded by the onset of a multipolar world and the increasing influence of violent non-state actors and ruthless multinational corporations. However, Waltz's gems are left […]
Maimed victims of landmines in Kashmir are struggling to pay for medical treatment and prosthetic limbs with the menial government compensation on offer. With many farming families forced to sell land and beg as a result, the impact of such accidents lasts long after the detonation. - Athar Parvaiz (May 21, '13)
Jonas Lalehzadeh, as an American-born basketball player who plays in Iran and for the Islamic Republic's national team, has more insight than most into how passionate Iranians are about the sport. Insisting that sport transcends politics, Lalehzadeh says his fans forget about tensions whenever the National Basketball Association and its players such as […]
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is going shopping for mobile-Internet related companies to match a transition of customers away from computers to smart-phones and tablets and in advance of a possible share sale that may raise more than US$70 billion. - Sherman So
A Western backlash against nuclear power following the Fukushima plant disaster has seen atomic energy's contribution rolled back in numerous countries. Energy needs in developing nations demand acknowledgement that, thanks to Russian specialists, the impact of human error in the nuclear sector has considerably decreased. - Igor Alexeev
BEIRUT, (SANA)- Lebanese Defense Minister, Fayez Ghosn, warned of the gravity of the ongoing loose security situation in northern Lebanon particularly in the city of Tripoli, saying this situation can put Lebanon at stake
AMMAN, (SANA)- Scores of al-Qaeda-linked takfiri extremists attacked the members of the Jordanian Popular Committee for Supporting Syria and the Resistance Approach in Irbid city in Jordan to prevent them from holding an activity in solidarity with Syria and its people
TEHRAN, (SANA) – Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Araqchi reiterated his country's call to solve the crisis in Syria peacefully and reject any solution that is imposed on the Syrian people from abroad
MOSCOW, (SANA) – Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, stressed on Monday the necessity of guaranteeing the agreement of the Syrian opposition to participate in the international conference
TEHRAN, (SANA)- Secretary of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, Saeed Jalili, stressed that the Syrian people will not be the only ones who will pay the price of a war on Syria; rather the European people will also pay a price
OCUPPIED JERUSALEM,(SANA) - Scores of the Palestinians organized a solidarity stand for Syria in front of the French Consulate in Haifa city in the occupied Palestine of 1948 to express their support to Syria and its people
VIENNA, (SANA) – The "Hands Off Syria" initiative in the city of Vienna called on Austrian media to report facts about events in Syria with more credibility, objectivity, professionalism and freedom
MOSCOW, (SANA) – Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov said that there should not be time restrictions on the international conference on Syria
MOSCOW, (SANA)_UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that deliberations are underway for holding the international conference on Syria under the auspices of the United Nations
The United Nations has expressed concern over recent clashes between armed men and government troops in eastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Two separate attacks have claimed the lives of at least 11 policemen in the troubled southern and western regions of Afghanistan, security sources say.
A number of Iranian lawmakers and religious scholars have called on the Guardian Council to not approve Expediency Council chairman and presidential hopeful, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi, for the June 14 election.
US President Barack Obama’s administration has been hit with a number of scandals, as Washington struggles to put the pieces back together again, an analyst tells Press TV.
South African police say at least 10 mineworkers have been wounded after security guards fired rubber bullets at a crowd of striking workers at a chrome mine in northern part of the country.
Hundreds of demonstrators marched outside the US Justice Department in Washington to protest the judiciary’s failure to prosecute major American financial institutions that have contributed to the nation’s growing housing crisis, Press TV reports.
Are there too many coincidences in the Boston Bombings official narrative to call them coincidences? Behind each one lurks the shadow of Graham Fuller—a top CIA strategist who famously advocated co-opting Islamic extremists to further advance the US agenda in Central Asia—and his cozy ties with the accused brothers' uncle. William Engdahl delves into th […]
In light of Evo Morales' May Day expulsion of USAID from Bolivia for seeking to undermine his government, here is a look back to the Harry Truman administration's work to undermine Bolivia's transformative National Revolution in 1952. "This history's legacy lives on; Washington's power is woven into the fabric of Bolivian politi […]
In a statement from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady Zyuganov reviews the Israeli attack against Damascus in light of the 1980 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the USSR and Syria. He calls for the delivery of defensive weapons and not just the fulfillment of current defensive arms contracts. A few da […]
The new Italian national coalition government eagerly began its reinforced collaboration with Washington. Emma Bonino, the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, met with her US counterpart, John Kerry, to polish the details. As Manlio Dinucci explains, it will be based on the military activity of the Special Forces, mainly in the Middel East. In her meeting with […]
Syria destroys the Israeli domination illusions By Ghaleb Kandil Israeli think tanks thought that the events in Syria have imposed changes in favor of Israel. Zionist leaders have imagined having eliminated the results of Resistance victories in Lebanon and Palestine, which imposed new strategic deterrent equations, especially since the defeat of Israel in J […]
« “Against small-mindedness As locusts over the biblical Egypt political correctness came over Switzerland” », by Dr Peter Forster / « “Will there soon be a referendum on freedom of expression in Switzerland?” », by Matthias Erne / «“Switzerland has the potential to resist political blackmail” » / «“Should the Federal Government consider releasing GM plants. […]
At a time when the US and Gulf proxies are losing ground to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) nationwide, this pundit ranges in on the likely motive for Israel's recent air raids against Syria, carried out with Washington's approbation. On May 3-4 the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) launched two successive aerial bombing strikes deep inside Syrian territory, […]
On May 10, 2013, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia relieved General Mohamed al-Ayech of his duties as Chief of Staff of the Saudi Armed Forces. No explanation has been given for this action, any more than for the dismissal of Deputy Defense Minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, on April 20. In his place, the king appointed General Fayadh Ben Hamed al […]
A plea issued to his readers by one of the most authoritative voices in the United States, as he sees his country hurtling towards a Gestapo police state. If there is hope, dear readers, you are it. You are motivated to find truth. You can think outside the box. You can see through propaganda. You are the remnant with the common sense that once was a common […]
Hard right Republican Senator John McCain and Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota state Democratic Party affiliate, both support no-fly zones over Syria. That's because, as BAR executive editor observes, when it comes to U.S. imperial policy, there is not one iota of difference between the pro-war Left and the Right, who march in […]
A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation. Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: How Would a Nuclear-Armed Tehran Behave?“, the report asserts that the acquisition by Tehran [...]
Coordinated bombing attacks resumed today. At least ten blasts were seen in the capital alone, and a pair of rare explosions occurred far south in Basra. Both Sunni and Shi'ites targeted in them. Overall, at least 116 people were killed and 240 more were wounded, but the figures are likely to rise. Some of the dead and wounded were Iranian pilgrims.
A policy has to be judged by its results, and by that standard interventionism is a complete and total failure, as a look at the day’s headlines reveals. We’ve heard several public officials say Al Qaeda has been effectively dismantled, with its top leadership – including Osama bin Laden – out of commission. But that [...]
Hamid Karzai has let the Pentagon’s cat out of the bag — to the displeasure of the Obama Administration. The Afghan president revealed inside information about President Obama’s war plans after all U.S. “combat troops” completely withdraw in 17 months at the end of 2014. As was known in recent years, the Obama Administration actually [...]
Although Iraq is enjoying a respite from major bombings, small arms attacks appear to be on the rise. Anbar province, in particular, saw gun violence targeting police. Also, two more kidnappings were reported. Overall, at least 44 people were killed and 25 more were wounded.
At least 40 people were killed and 45 more were wounded in mostly small attacks across Iraq. Also, as many as 13 people were kidnapped across Anbar province.
Quick, somebody tell CIA Director John Brennan about the handwriting on the inside wall of the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding before Boston-area police riddled it and him with bullets. Tell Brennan that Tsarnaev’s note is in plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in solving the mystery: “why do [...]
As violence surged in Iraq this week, the United Nations called on the government and politicians to protect civilians. Today alone, bombers targeted a Sunni mosque and funeral in apparent retaliation for earlier attacks against Shi'ites. Overall, at least 83 Iraqis were killed and 173 more were wounded in the assaults.
The worsening violence and repression in Syria has left policymakers scrambling to think of ways the United States could help end the bloodshed and support those seeking to dislodge the Assad regime. The desperate desire to “do something” has led to increasing calls for the United States to provide military aid to armed insurgents or [...]
Amidst all the justified outrage over the apparent targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups by the IRS, not to mention the Associated Press phone tapping brouhaha, an important point is being lost: this is nothing new. The Tea Partiers may be shocked – shocked! – that the Big Government they have spent the last [...]
Permission = Freedom? Eric Blair Activist Post "The secret in propaganda is that when you demonize, you dehumanize," says James Forsher, a film historian. "When you dehumanize, it allows you to kill your enemy and no longer feel guilty about it." Apparently illegal immigrants have been sufficiently dehumanized to force them into biometric […]
Cindy Cohn & Trevor Timm EFF The journalism world has been rightly outraged by the Justice Department dragging the Associated Press (and now a Fox News reporter) into one of its sprawling leak investigations. As we wrote last week, by obtaining the call records of twenty AP phone lines, “the Justice Department has struck a terrible blow against the freed […]
Dees Illustration Madison Ruppert Activist Post Hidden amongst the reams of reports about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal is one little gem: the outgoing IRS Commissioner Steve Miller said that America’s tax system is “voluntary” in his testimony. Now, whatever you do, don’t take that to mean that it is actually voluntary in the way that the word […]
image source Brandon Turbeville Activist Post In the past, I have written numerous articles dealing with Codex Alimentarius and its guidelines regarding vitamin and mineral food supplements, food irradiation, and genetically modified (GM) food. I have also written about the unfolding agenda to implement Codex standards on a global scale to the detriment of a […]
Alex Pietrowski Activist Post The imperative nature of marching this Saturday, May 25th, in the March Against Monsanto couldn’t ever be more stressed than now, with recent news that Monsanto keeps forging ahead with its repugnant plans to poison us all by planting more altered seeds – yet again. Monsanto and other mega-pharmaceutical companies, with the USDA […]
Michael Snyder Activist Post Have you ever wondered who controls the mainstream media? In America today, we are more "connected" than ever. The average American watches 153 hours of television a month, and we also spend countless hours watching movies, playing video games, listening to music, reading books and surfing the Internet. If someone co […]
Freda Art Clarence Walker Stop The Drug War Dispensaries providing marijuana to doctor-approved patients operate in a number of states, but they are under assault by the federal government. SWAT-style raids by the DEA and finger-wagging press conferences by grim-faced federal prosecutors may garner greater attention, but the assault on medical marijuana prov […]
Youtube Enter Your Email To Receive Our Newsletter Close var fnames = new Array();var ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='FNAME';ftypes[1]='text';fnames[2]='LNAME';ftypes[2]='text';var err_style = ''; try{ err_style = mc_custom_error_style; } catch(e){ err_s […]
Brad Jordan Activist Post [Editor's note: This article is an excellent rundown of what Monsanto is in regards to food rights, safety, monopoly, patents, cronyism, and why millions are marching in peaceful protest. Please read and especially share with friends and family who are hearing about it and may not be aware of Monsanto and genetically modified f […]
Youtube Subscribe to Larken Rose Channel LarkenRose.com Enter Your Email To Receive Our Newsletter Close var fnames = new Array();var ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='FNAME';ftypes[1]='text';fnames[2]='LNAME';ftypes[2]='text';var err_style = ''; try{ err_ […]
My kids and their friends and everyone roughly their age will, in fact, be the last human beings to remember a stable, predictable procession of seasons. This article first appeared at Orion Magazine under the title "The Discontent of Our Winter." You can enjoy future Orion articles by signing up to the magazine's free trial subscription progr […]
As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its powerful lobbies, we are at their mercy. From BillMoyers.com:At the end of a week that reminds us to be ever vigilant about the dangers of government overreaching its authority, whether by the long arm of the IRS or the Justice Department, we should pause to think about another thr […]
A planned demonstration at Gap Inc's shareholder meeting in San Francisco aims to get Gap to sign on to fire and building safety regulations in Bangladesh. The Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in April, the world’s worst garment industry catastrophe which killed over 1,000 people, has sparked intensive debate over who is to blame for the devast […]
The Oklahoma medical examiner's office gave the latest death toll, which was carried by all the major US television networks, which said the number of fatalities was expected to rise. WASHINGTON — At least 37 people were killed when a powerful tornado with winds of up to 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour pulverized an Oklahoma City suburb, hitting at […]
Three Chicago teens are charged with a horrible sexual assault. They allegedly posted the video on social media. It’s yet another story of how social media can apparently become a tool for abuse — and evidence of it. But the lesson seems all wrong. In Chicago this weekend, prosecutors announced three teenaged boys will tried as adults for aggravated crimina […]
The deceased, who was fighting a traffic ticket, suffered from asthma -- but deputies accused her of faking, suit filed in court argues. MONTGOMERY, Ala. (CN) - A woman died on a courthouse floor because Alabama sheriff's deputies refused to give her her medicine - after arresting her for an old traffic ticket, the woman's daughter claims in court. […]
A lifelong educator joins the Moral Mondays protests in Raleigh to fight GOP education agenda. Update: Barbara Parramore was taken into police custody Monday evening. She was part of a crowd of hundreds of peaceable citizens (the highest count yet) gathered at the North Carolina Legislature buidling to protest right-wing policies pushed by GOP lawmakers. The […]
Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always been there. Racism has been a consistent thread weaving through the American Right from the early days when Anti-Federalists battled against the U.S. Constitution to the present when hysterical Tea Partiers denounce the first African-American president. Other factors have come and gone fo […]
High school's tough enough without having to face prison time for refusing to serve an occupation you know is wrong. When the 19-year-old Israeli war resister Noam Gur attends weekly demonstrations against the occupation of Palestine, the soldiers who suppress the protestors—with tear gas, stun grenades, and occasionally live fire—aren’t just strangers […]
The US government extensively monitors its citizens' internet activities, with dangerous effects on personal liberties. The most egregious rights violations tend to happen against the voiceless; those who have neither the platform nor resources to articulate their grievances to the broader world.Last week, however, the US Department of Justice was caugh […]
(AJC) – New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ’s attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington [...] Related posts: […]
(AJC) – Alex continues with author Joel Scousan discussing the ongoing globalist agenda to topple the American way of life and the Public’s necessity to prepare themselves for tyranny. http://www.joelskousen.com/ See Also: (AJC) – Video: Joel Skousen – The Runaway Darkside of Govt Joel Skousen, author, consultant and editor of World Affairs Brief, will be [. […]
(AJC) – After watching Terrorstorm in 2006, I began a journey to promote the truth and question the status quo. I am a nonconformist and believe that one should take a stand in educating themselves. I spent nine years on active duty and saw, first hand, the over-regulation and contradictory actions within our government. After [...] No related posts.
(AJC) – Incarcerated political activist Adam Kokesh, arrested by police for exercising his First Amendment rights during a pro-marijuana legalization protest on Saturday, has been charged with “assaulting a federal police officer,” despite the fact that the video of the incident shows him not resisting arrest. http://www.infowars.com/report-adam-k… See Also: […]
(AJC) – May 20th, 2013 – See Also: (AJC) – Video: The Globalist Plan is Total Slavery Alex discusses the continued situation with the IRS controversy as well as the arrest of activist adam kokesh and the associated press calling the confiscation of phone record unconstitutional. Related posts: Adam Kokesh Captured! – A critical viewpoint Adam Kokesh Charged […]
(AJC) – Daniele Perazzi was arrested on Saturday after a cab driver turned him into police as a terrorist. The Perazzi Shotguns executive was taken into custody by Adams County Deputies outside of the Denver Merchandise Mart where the annual Colorado Gun Collectors Show was held over the weekend. The show is a noted venue [...] Related posts: Denver Cops Arr […]
(Rys2Sense) – The whole thing is on film, he did NOT assault an officer. He didn’t even resist arrest. Related posts: Adam Kokesh Framed – Ryan Dawson Dr Finkelstein on Geopolitics with Ryan Dawson: Netanyahu is insane – Ryan Dawson Adam Kokesh Charged With “Assaulting a Federal Officer”
(WRH) – May 20th, 2013 See Also: (WRH) – Video: I Hate to Tell You I Told Ya So – Also: (WRH) – Video: Risking Annihilation of Life on Earth Over Ink & Paper Related posts: And China Laughs – Michael Rivero Israeli Attacks on Syria – Michael Rivero Another Richard Nixon in the White House – Michael Rivero
(Freedomain) – In the second call on the 5/19 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, Stefan Molyneux talks to a listener about the general denial of economic reality and the unsustainability of statism. See Also: (Freedomain) – Video: Help! I’m a Recovering Political Activist! – Also: (Freedomain) – Video: What Replaced Slavery? Also: (Freedomain) – Video: An [...] R […]
(WAN) – May 20th, 2013 – If you want to help Leonard and family contact info@wideawakenews.com ~ subject “O.K.” and Wide Awake News will help coordinate. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic… http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/20/us/seve… http://kfor.com/ http://www.news9.com/category/112032/… Related posts: Kentucky Sheriff Tells Feds They Will Never Take Guns Out […]
It is high time to clear up the confusion regarding the situation in Mali. Thanks to David S. J. Borelli, Mathaba readers can now have a clear insight into one of the lesser-known but most crucial conspiracies being hatched to plunder African resources in the heart of Africa. Final Part 4 in the series. ...read more: MEMBERS | FREE version.
Libyan photographer makes a propaganda photo series aiming to reflect ``the treatment that Gaddafi inflicted on his people`` ...read more: MEMBERS | FREE version.
Since early 2011, Obama has been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme is familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism`s dark side. ...read more: MEMBERS | FREE version.
Seen any walnuts in your medicine cabinet lately? According to the Food and Drug Administration, that is precisely where you should find them. ...read more: MEMBERS | FREE version.
On the 17th of June, anti-imperialists will gather in Dublin, from across Ireland and from Africa, Iraq, Palestine, the Basque Country, the Philippines, Syria, the USA, Canada... ...read more: MEMBERS | FREE version.
HOLDER PASSES THE BUCK Attorney General Eric Holder testifies before Congress earlier today. --- AP STORY Govt obtains unprecedented AP phone records in probe The Justice...
NOT ON OUR WATCH Alberto Gonzales: Bush Administration Refused to Pursue Media in Leak Probes Details here... --- AP STORY Govt obtains unprecedented AP phone records in probe The...
NOTHING WRONG WITH SUBPOENA Short clip from yesterday's press conference. --- AP STORY Govt obtains unprecedented AP phone records in probe The Justice Department secretly obtained...
TAX DOLLARS AT WORK Star Trek video produced by the IRS for a 2010 training and leadership conference. --- WAIT THERE'S MORE IRS GILLIGAN'S ISLAND --- HOW THE IRS WASTES...
MODERN EDUCATION EXPOSED Youtube viral video with more than 1.2 million views in just the last 6 days. Jeff Bliss gives an unforgettable lesson to his teacher at Duncanville High School in...
Updated: 6:15 p.m. EST with a clarified quote*. In the seemingly endless war over abortion rights in America, battles are waged in legislatures, in courts and, most recently, on the Internet. The strategy of using abortion-related keywords to send a woman searching the web for abortion information More...
On Monday, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski announced changes that would modernize the agency’s Lifeline program to give greater broadband Internet access to low-income Americans. Lifeline has traditionally provided “discounts on one basic monthly telephone service (wireline or wireless) for qualified subscribers.” While announci […]
Sangeeta Ghosh, assistant corporate counsel for Kent County, Mich., says should the 51-year-old man charged in two cases of failing to disclose his HIV-positive status to sexual partners make bail, the county is prepared to ask a court to force him to take antiretroviral medications. “The county is More...
Former Michigan state Rep. Jack Hoogendyk is likely to announce next week that he will challenge Congressman Fred Upton (R-St. Joseph) in the GOP primary in August. Hoogendyk unsuccessfully challenged Upton for the seat two years ago, when he was able to garner only 43 percent of the vote, More...
The Foundation for Government Accountability debuted a new website Monday — an online database of the salaries of Florida’s public employees: FloridaOpenGov.org. The website is almost a replica of a project by Foundation President Tarren Bragdon at his last place of employment, the Maine Heritage Policy Center. More...
Going to court may be “the best way” to resolve a dispute over water rights between the U.S. Forest Service and the National Ski Areas Association, according to a former Forest Service ski area permit coordinator. “Frankly, litigation may be the best way forward on this issue,” Ed Ryerson More...
Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has blocked the state’s Personhood affiliate from introducing a bill that would define life from the moment of conception, on the grounds that it is “too vague” as written. Though “fetal personhood” measures across the country have been criticized for that very reason, Personhood Arkansas More...
With the beginning of session only days away, Florida legislators have been busy filing a slew of anti-abortion bills. Add yet another to the list: a measure outlawing race- and gender-based abortions. The bill was filed by state Rep. Scott Plakon, R-Longwood. House Bill 1327, or the “Susan B. More...
Kalley King Yanta, a former anchor for a Minneapolis-based television station and an anti-abortion-rights activist, has joined the Minnesota for Marriage group to anchor videos intended to convince Minnesotans to vote for the anti-gay-marriage amendment on the ballot in 2012. The videos — and Yanta — have come under More...
An alleged admission by a 51-year-old Comstock Park, Mich., man that he attempted to infect hundreds of people with HIV through unprotected sexual activity and needle-sharing has sparked a media feeding frenzy, which HIV activists and legal experts have roundly censured as “sensationalist.” In spite of the national condemnation, More...
Former leader of Guatemala, General Efrain Rios Montt, who was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity earlier this month has won a legal appeal in the nation's high court and a new trial has been ordered. The ruling comes less than two weeks after Montt's conviction by a criminal tribunal which declared that Montt was responsible for […]
BREAKING - A mile-wide tornado blasted through Oklahoma City suburbs this afternoon causing massive damage to schools and neighborhoods. One TV helicopter reports the wide-area of destruction is "atomic bomb-like." * * * * * * read more
Protesters erected a 'foreclosed home' barricade in front of the Department of Justice Monday afternoon. (Photo: @OccupyDenver)Underwater homeowners and hundreds of allies barricaded the front door of the Department of Justice building Monday afternoon to protest the "too big to jail banks" who have shirked punishment despite having destr […]
Results from a year-long investigation into the activities of the United States' expansive counter-terrorism apparatus found that, throughout the country, the government has turned the tax-payer-funded intelligence-gathering against its own citizens in an effort to suppress dissent. read more
(Photo: Image by John Moore / Getty Images)Organizing for Action, the so-called 'grassroots arm' of the Obama administration, was designed to harness the youthful and hopeful energy of its members, and bring the political energy generated during the previous presidential campaigns to help support the current White House agenda. read more […]
Screenshot from Spanish TV's Salados, May 19, 2013. Speaking during an interview with Spanish television program Salvados, which aired on Sunday, WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said that he has received a series of unclassified instant message exchanges from UK intelligence officials suggesting that he is being framed. read more […]
New revelations about the manner in which President Obama's Department of Justice has pursued journalists thought to have garnered government secrets is being called not just a "war on whistleblowers," but an assault on "investigative journalism itself." Last week, uproar followed the Associated Press announcement that the DOJ had so […]
Following the recent passage of a law dubbed derisively by its critics as the 'Monsanto Protection Act', environmentalists and legislators are standing up against the biotech giant and their "dictatorship over seeds, over life, over food and over our freedom." read more
(image: WoodleyWonderWorks/Creative Commons)New research from Europe predicts a 4ºC global temperature rise is well within the range of possibility this century, and that even if the worst predictions of climate change disasters do not materialize the cost of this global change will mean "human disaster" for the planet. read more […]
Fran Sweet, a 68-year old retiree, says she is still out $69,400 after the failure of Penny Pritzker’s subprime-speculating Superior Bank in 2001. Sweet told Breitbart News, “It was not a failure. It was a bank robbery... My feeling is she has no business being nominated to Secretary of Commerce. She has unfinished business here in Illinois, she needs to pay […]
On Monday, Tiger Woods said the PGA Tour should ban anchored putters as soon as possible. "I hope they go with the ban," Woods said on Monday at Congressional Country Club outside of Washington, D.C. "Anchoring should not be a part of the game. It should be mandatory to have to swing all 14 clubs. "And as far as the PGA Tour, I hope they […]
“I bought gold at $1,400, I buy every month some gold, and I have an order to buy more at $1,300 because I want to keep an allocation towards gold--physical gold--and not stored in the United States at all times.” -- Marc Faber, CNBC The past several months have seen the price of gold slump even as the Fed and other central banks have accelerated their massi […]
Frank VanderSloot was one of 16 million-dollar Romney donors identified by Rolling Stone, and now Nate Silver writes that the fact that there is no statistical evidence that the IRS audit of VanderSloot indicates he was targeted. At first glance there is only a 1.11 percent chance of an individual being audited by the IRS, which would indicate that there is […]
The Conservative Hispanic Society has joined the growing list of conservative groups that feel that they, too, were targeted by the Internal Revenue Service in its recent campaign of harassment. In a statement, CHS is "expressing outrage" over what it feels is Obama's "infiltration of every aspect of our government." In a statement t […]
Amid rising energy prices, increased taxation, and the politically driven buying panic that's pushed ammunition and firearm prices higher under Obama, it might surprise you to know it's possible to get your AR-15 ready for home defense on the cheap. In fact, for $100 you can get quite a few accessories that help turn a basic AR with a single 10 or […]
The Maryland Board of Physicians has permanently revoked the license of abortionist Nicola I. Riley. In a blistering order issued May 6th, Riley was prohibited from ever again applying for licensure or reinstatement of her license. According to pro-life organization Operation Rescue, Riley’s license was first suspended in September of 2010, after having perf […]
If there is one lesson I have learned over my decade and a half at Judicial Watch, it is this: you must never overestimate the hypocrisy of the Left--especially in covering for their own. Lest you have even the slightest doubt, cast an eye to the outrageous behavior of District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan when he allowed NBC-TV’s David Greg […]
In my experience, the term “BOLO” is a law enforcement term short for “be on the lookout” for criminals and suspects on the run. But for the Obama IRS, BOLO meant, literally, “be on the lookout” for citizen groups who might be opposed to the Obama agenda. First, we know that the “independent” IRS purposely stonewalled the approval of non-profit applications […]
In an article published on Bloomberg.com, David Crane, president of Govern for California, argues that California Governor Jerry Brown should instigate the repeal of proposition 13, the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation, which was enacted during his first tenure as governor in 1978. In 2011 Brown said of Proposition 13 that it “started the […]
[Leadership]United States president Barack Obama will not be visiting Nigeria as recently speculated in the media. Obama and his wife Michelle will only visit Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania between June 26 and July 3.
[Daily Trust]Scores of air passengers were yesterday stranded at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA) as unions at the Nigeria Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) embarked on an indefinite strike.
[Premium Times]The Chairman of the United Nations High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, Thabo Mbeki, has said that the continent loses, at least, $50 billion annually through illicit fund flows.
[Magharebia]Tripoli -Libyan security services defused several car bombs and other explosives in the past two days, Prime Minister Ali Zidan said on Sunday (May 19th).
[Aswat Masriya]The Egyptian presidency will hold a press conference on Monday to comment on the kidnapped security officers in the Sinai Peninsula, reported a satellite channel.
[SA Info]With South Africa confirmed as a key partner, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has announced October 2015 as the launch date for construction of the first phase of what could eventually be the largest hydroelectric plant in the world.
[UN News]United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon shares the concerns expressed earlier by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union over the latest developments in the electoral process in Madagascar, according to the spokesperson for the world body's chief.
[IRIN]Kampala -Gaps in the healthcare system in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are hampering the fight against malaria, a leading killer of children, say experts.
[IRIN]Monrovia -The Liberia Land Commission, which was set up in 2009 to help settle land disputes between returning refugees and their neighbours, is making significant headway, say land experts, but non-conflict related land disputes are increasing, most of them as a result of weak land laws.
[White House]Washington, DC -President Obama and the First Lady look forward to traveling to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania from June 26 - July 3. The President will reinforce the importance that the United States places on our deep and growing ties with countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including through expanding economic growth, investment, and trade; […]
Warm welcome. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (right) welcomes Developing 8 (D-8) Secretary General, Seyed Ali-Mohammad Mousavi (left), to the Presidential Office in Jakarta, on Tuesday. The ...
At least 150 nurses with the West-Nusa Tenggara (NTB) chapter of the Indonesian Nurses Association (PPNI) staged a rally in front of the province’s Legislative Council (DPRD) and NTB governor’s ...
Thai police have seized 4.49 million methamphetamine pills found in an apartment in the largest meth bust ever in Bangkok.Deputy Prime Minister Chalerm Yubumrung said Tuesday the tablets and 60 ...
A 66-year-old Tunisian man has died from the new coronavirus following a visit to Saudi Arabia and two of his adult children were infected with it, the Tunisian Health Ministry reported.His sons were ...
Former vice president Jusuf Kalla was re-elected as chairman of the Centrist Asia Pacific Democrats International (CAPDI) for a third time at the second CAPDI International Conference in Makassar, ...
Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are sounding out the possibility of joint investments on energy and mineral resources in the border of the two countries.“The joint investments could bring benefits ...
Japanese airline All Nippon Airways (ANA) will start serving ramen noodles to its passengers starting June 1, 2013.Ramen noodles will be available as a light meal choice for first- and ...
Britain's biggest theater group has reached across the Atlantic Ocean and bought the lease to Broadway's largest theater from Live Nation Entertainment for about $60 million.Ambassador Theatre Group ...
A Myanmar court sentenced seven Muslims to prison — one of them to a life term — in the killing of a Buddhist monk amid deadly sectarian violence that was overwhelmingly directed against minority ...
A new anti-crime program has resulted in a 55% reduction in homicides in a sector of Greater Caracas, a Venezuelan government official reported yesterday. read more
Venezuela and the People’s Republic of China took a further step forward in strengthening their bilateral relations last Monday when Vice President Li Yuancho visited the Caribbean country as part of his recent tour of South America. read more
As a response to increased shortages of basic goods in recent weeks, the Venezuelan government has announced it is in dialogue with members of the private sector and is taking measures to increase domestic production. read more
The Venezuelan government announced that it is implementing a short term plan, called ‘Safe Homeland’, to fight crime. Members of the Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) will patrol areas of Venezuela with the highest crime rates. read more
During a speech on Saturday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro blamed food shortages on an “economic war” from the Venezuelan private sector, and assured the government is taking measures to resolve the issue. read more
Landless peasants from the western state of Lara announced they were relaunching the “war on latifundio” last week when hundreds of them invaded and occupied a large estate belonging to the local elite. read more
Venezuela's new Labour Law for Workers (Lottt) came into effect this week, guaranteeing shorter working hours, longer maternity leave and pensions for all Venezuelans. read more
Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro has wrapped up his tour of the Southern Cone after receiving support from South America's largest economy, Brazil. read more
Pre-dawn emergency workers searched feverishly for survivors in the rubble of homes, primary schools and an hospital in an Oklahoma City suburb ravaged by a massive tornado feared to have killed up to 91 people and injured well over 200 residents.
The head of the Financial Information Office(UIF in Spanish) José Sbatella today warned that non-declared dollars are a “black market investment factor” that creates “illegal activities” and “eases tax offense.”
Iran has approved the memorandum of understanding with Argentina to create a joint “truth commission” to probe the 1994 terrorist attack on the AMIA Jewish community centre, Iranian Embassy chargé d’affaires Ali Pakdaman informed a local radio yesterday.
Buenos Aires City Mayor Mauricio Macri’s emergency decree for the “defence of freedom of expression” was approved by the city’s Constitutional Affairs Committee yesterday and will be debated by the full legislature.
Argentines expect inflation to clock in at 34.9 percent over the next 12 months, a 0.7 percentage point increase from the previous monthly report issued by Torcuato Di Tella University.
A hot-air balloon collided with another balloon mid-air during a sightseeing tour of volcanic rock formations in Turkey and crashed to the ground, killing two Brazilian tourists and injuring 23 other people on board. Three Argentines were among those injured.
By Patricio Navia The last two weeks have been plagued with problems for the Barack Obama administration. Three controversies have kept the White House on the defensive and have delayed legislative progress on key issues central to Obama’s second term.
Britain has said economic agreements in the South Atlantic could be relaunched on one condition: that Argentina drops its sovereignty claim over the resource-rich Malvinas Islands.
IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation has released an extensive report concerning the cases filed across the world into Israel’s 2010 raid on Mavi Marmara, which claimed the lives of nine peaceful activists. 30.01.2013 - Judicial report of Mavi Marmara trials released The report tells the judicial battle fought by participants of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in Tu […]
OJ was on the first trip into Gaza on board the Free Gaza when we landed on August 23, 2008. She has since been back to this tiny strip on the Mediterranean several times and is there now bearing witness and reporting. Below is her story. Beit Lahiya, Gaza Strip, Monday 21st January, 2013: A ceasefire was announced on 21st November, ending eight days of horr […]
Khuza'a, Gaza Strip: For the last hour I've been able to see from my appartment window small fishing boats close in to shore being harrassed by an Israeli gunboat. Every so often, one of them is picked out by a strong searchlight and circled. They are to the north of Gaza City but clearly this side of the border some distance south of the Israeli […]
Since November 22, 2012, 4 Palestinians have been killed and 75 Palestinians, including 14 children have been wounded by IOF fire in Gaza Strip. One of the wounded is a fisherman shot in the sea, while the others are protesters, workers and farmers shot in the areas close to the fence of the Green Line. The data is from PCHR weekly reports, unless otherwise […]
The two reports below are from Free Gaza passengers, Orange Jenny (OJ) and Theresa McDermott. They are staying in Gaza to work with farmers and fishermen and to bear witness to what the IOF is continuing to do to the people there after a 'ceasefire' was agreed to by Israel and Hamas. Theresa has been interviewing family members of the Palestinian f […]
آخر الأخبار والتحديثات May 21, 2013 | 24183 Days Since Al-Nakba – Gaza is under siege for 2169 days For news of previous news days | Daily News Overviews Follow on Twitter for more live updates Continuous updates.. Israel Army Spokesman: Gunfire from Syria No injuries were reported, but a patrol jeep was damaged http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4382 […]
Live Blog: The Genocide on Palestinian Refugees in Syria Live Blog: Israel Bombs Syria Maan News Agency | May 21, 2013 BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Four Palestinian refugees were killed in Syria on Monday, the Damascus-based task-force for Palestinians in Syria said. Farid Qasim was “executed” by gunmen affiliated with rebels from the Free Syrian Army […]
Maan News Agency | May 21, 2013 GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — The Israeli government has decided to re-extend Gaza’s fishing zone to 6 miles, after reducing it in March following a rocket attack from the coastal territory, a statement from Israel’s army said Tuesday. The decision was announced after a meeting between Israeli premier Benjamin […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) greets US President Barack Obama at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport on March 20. PressTV | Tue May 21, 2013 6:11AM GMT The Israeli military also has carried out three airstrikes against Syria so far this year. An Israeli website has said in an article that the US, Turkey, and […]
Tuesday May 21, 2013 08:14 by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies Tuesday May 21, 2013; the Himaya Center for Journalists Defending Human Rights has reported that more than 2400 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are currently stuck at the Rafah Border Terminal between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, awaiting to be allowed through. In […]
#NAKBA65 | 65 YEARS NAKBA = ENOUGH! Kawther Salam | May 20, 2013 ملاحظة: نص الرسالة في اللغة العربية منشور أدنى الرسالة في اللغة الأنجليزية Mr. The General Secretary of the United Nations Organization – United Nations Organization – New York In the name of our Palestinian People , living in the poor miserable refugees […] […]
Tuesday May 21, 2013 01:59 by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies Monday, May 20 2013; Israeli soldiers kidnapped two Palestinian schoolchildren returning home from school, in the Al-Wad Road area, in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem. The twin brother, were release on bail. File – Soldiers kidnapping A Palestinian Child The Israeli […]
Tuesday May 21, 2013 01:24 by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies Monday at dawn, May 20 2013, Israeli soldiers, supported by armored jeeps, invaded the northern West Bank city of Jenin, and the Al-Yamoun nearby town, installed a number of roadblocks and interrogated several Palestinians. Israeli Soldiers – File, PalInfo The army also handed […]
Tuesday May 21, 2013 02:25 by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies Monday evening, May 20 2013, Palestinian medical sources reported that several Palestinians have been treated for the effects of teargas inhalation, after Israeli soldiers invaded Bodrus village, west of the central West Bank city of Ramallah. Property damage and fires have also been […]
Tuesday May 21, 2013 03:22 by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies Palestinian sources reported that Palestinian security officers kidnapped, on Monday evening, one of the political leaders of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), from his home, in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. File – Image Maan News […]
Arab Idol finalist Mohammed Assaf managed to get out of Khan Younis refugee camp to Cairo and has has drawn comparisons to the late Egyptian nightingale Abdel Halim Hafez; Mahmoud Abbas has called him to say he has made Palestine and the Arab world proud; his poster is hanging in homes, restaurants and stores all across Palestine...
Palestinian youths make their way into Jerusalem through Israel's apartheid wall OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (PIC) 18 May -- A group of Palestinian young men was able on Friday evening to knock down part of Israel's segregation wall near Abu Dis town … Continue reading →
Haaretz: Under increasing pressure from Kennedy to accept 100s of 1000s of Palestinian refugees, Ben-Gurion convened a special meeting. He was convinced that the refugee problem was primarily one of public image (hasbara), convincing the world that the refugees fled "of their own free will"
Palestinian-American Raed Zidan became the first Palestinian to reach the summit of the earth's highest mountain last Saturday, dedicating his climb to Palestinians - especially political prisoners.
Al Jazeera pulled Joseph Massad’s article – “The Last of the Anti-Semites” - from their website yesterday. Massad’s article is disappearing. Like disappearing Palestine, it will reappear. Neither are going away.
Yair Lapid Israel's finance minister has not talked to John Kerry, savior of the two-state solution, since March, reports the New York Times, and he hasn't talked to any Palestinian since taking office
On a Birthright tour of Israel, two Dartmouth students find that their guide has nothing to say about the occupation and tries to turn their view away from settlements and refugee camps
What power on earth can prevent two people from the same country meeting in their own land? Walaa Al Ghussein (on the right) had a permit to be in Israel for one day. She had to get back to Gaza by 7 PM. She had never been to Jerusalem before in her life. Her friend Maha from Umm al-Fahem was desperate to see her...
Melanie Springer MockI’d like to believe my sons’ best life is in my home, and not with their first families. But Christians committed to justice need to remember we are not entitled to other people’s children.
Rose-Ellen LessyIn the wake of Angelina Jolie’s well-intentioned exhortation for “every woman” to explore their risk of breast cancer, one company stands to make a staggering profit.
EU leaders Wednesday will likely agree that each country should continue to have one EU commissioner beyond 2014, the deadline written into the Lisbon Treaty. A senior German official Tuesday explained that the deadline extension was a promise made to Ireland before it held a second referendum on the treaty.
Dutch Liberal MEP Sophie in't Veld threatened Tuesday to take the European Commission to court if it does not allow her access to documents on the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). In't Veld said she had asked for the documents last year but received no response.
EU leaders will make another bid to crack down on tax evasion after UK Prime Minister Cameron called on British tax havens to "get their house in order."Related StoriesEU finance ministers draw blank on new tax law[Agenda] EU leaders discuss energy and tax next WEEK
Russia's request for Interpol to track Bill Browder, a UK-based human rights campaigner, could end his trips to Brussels and other EU capitals.Related Stories[Analysis] Cold War politics hang over EU shale gas revolution
Large depositors in the EU should suffer losses if a bank gets into trouble, but deposits under €100,000 should be protected, MEPs say.Related StoriesEU finance ministers draw blank on new tax lawLeaked report damns Cyprus on money laundering
German politicians from across the political spectrum have expressed their outrage after Hungary's Viktor Orban compared Angela Merkel's policies to the Nazi invasion ordered by Adolf Hitler.Related StoriesResponse to Hungary is test for EUProtests as Germany opens giant Barbie house
Serbian and Kosovar prime ministers are to meet in Brussels on Tuesday to improve relations between the two nations, reports AFP. An EU-brokered deal in April saw Serbia lift its objections to Kosovo joining international institutions. EU leaders now want the deal implemented.
UK prime minister David Cameron on Monday said Google should pay taxes in exchange for benefiting from low tax rates, reports Reuters. The US internet giant enjoys a low corporate tax but has been in the media spotlight, along with Amazon and Apple, for not contributing to the public coffers.
The International Religious Freedom Report for 2012 released on Monday by the US Department of State notes the global rise of anti-semitism and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Anti-Muslim rhetoric was most often found in the EU and Asia. Anti-semitism was most noted Venezuela, Egypt, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, Greece, Argentina and Hungary.
The biggest thing to come out of Texas may turn out to be a blow to Internet freedoms: legislators there are considering a bill that would compromise privacy on the Web for all residents of the Lone Star State. Lawmakers in the State Senate are expected to vote Monday on a bill that, if passed, [...]
The terrified political system has now launched an extremely aggressive attack on Golden Dawn. Now in addition to the “anti racist” thought crime law they try to pass, the US Department of State announced in its annual “international religious freedom report” that Golden Dawn is a threat to the well being of Muslims in Greece. [...]
The University of Cambridge has published a report about experiences of almost 50 British women of all backgrounds, ethnicities, ages and faiths (or no faith), who have all converted to Islam. The report was commissioned and produced by the University’s Centre of Islamic Studies (CIS), in association with the New Muslims Project, Markfield. The 129-page [... […]
Officials within the United States government say hackers from China have renewed their assault on US targets only three months after a highly-touted investigation linked the People’s Liberation Army to a series of cyberattacks waged at American entities. According to the New York Times, computer security experts and US officials alike say the PLA’s sophisti […]
Several casualties including children have been reported after a historic tornado swept through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, devastating hundreds of buildings including two schools. Meteorologists reported winds up to 200 miles per hour. A severe storm has generated baseball-sized hail, high winds and at least 28 tornadoes in the Midwest, including Okl […]
Middle East Out of Control. Celente thinks Israel bombing Syria means World War 3 is on its way. The cycle leading to war started with the crash of 2008. 8 May 2013
La estadounidense no fue la primera mujer astronauta en el mundo, la precedió la cosmonauta soviética Valentina Tereshkova, que viajó al espacio en 1963.
Star Wars Rebels, basada en la franquicia cinematográfica multimillonaria de George Lucas, estará ambientada en las dos décadas entre los sucesos de la tercera y cuarta entregas, donde el Imperio se convierte en una fuerza dominante en la galaxia, dijo Disney.
Dos centros educativos quedaron destruidos, en uno de ellos fallecieron siete niños. Un alumno de sexto grado relató como él y sus compañeros huyeron a los baños para guarecerse, pero fueron desalojados por una fuga de gas.
Unrentable Neubaugebiete und ländliche Räume sollen zukünftig nicht mehr an das Festnetz der Telekom angeschlossen werden. Das soll die Kosten für den Konzern reduzieren. Allerdings ist das Unternehmen eigentlich dazu verpflichtet, eine bundesweite Mindestversorgung zu bieten. Klassische Festnetz-Anschlüsse sind der Telekom ein Dorn im Auge. Mobilfunk soll z […]
Impfen Eine Lachnummer Oder? Der Todesstoß? Aber mir ist nicht zum Lachen? Auch vielen Kollegen und Journalisten ist nicht zum Lachen. Sie führen einen einsamen Kampf gegen den Unsinn des Lebens. Frage: Welche Inhaltsstoffe haben die Impfstoffe? Sind es: Tod bringende oder Leben bringende Stoffe? Sollten Sie sich impfen lassen, so lassen Sie […] […]
“90 Prozent der Täter sind Männer” Das Thema kam von verschiedenen Seiten auf sie zu – doch anfangs wollte Produzentin Gabriela Sperl nicht genau hinsehen. Doch dann landete sie bei ihren Recherchen zu Kinderhandel und Kinderprostitution in Deutschland. Das war der Anfang von “Operation Zucker”. Von: Astrid Hickisch Gabriela Sperl Die promovierte Historikern […]
Externsteine am 19.Mai 2013 – für Frieden und Völkerverständigung Pfingstsonntag – schönes Wetter, gute Laune, nette Menschen, was will man mehr. Viele sind meiner Einladung, z.T. von sehr weit her, gefolgt, um Energien oder auch Informationen zu tanken, oder auch um einfach mal auszuspannen. . ….leider ist der Anfang nicht mit gefilmt worden…. . Externstein […]
Wolfgang Eggert Aufklären, aufdecken, “nackte Tatsachen” zeigen, dabei saufen und koksen was das Zeug hält: Nutten (“Horizontales Gewerbe”) und Mainstreamjournalisten (“Schreibende Zunft”) sind Berufsstände, die sich in Vielem gleichen. Doch es gibt Unterschiede, im Detail. DER BERUF Sowohl die Hure als auch der Journalist können ihren Beruf ohne jegliche Ab […]
Gladio – Geheimarmeen in Europa In Italien und Deutschland sterben in den 60er bis 80er Jahren zahlreiche Menschen bei Bombenanschlägen. Indizien belegen bestimmte Zusammenhänge, die Spuren führen zu einer geheimen Struktur namens “Gladio“. So sterben 1969 in Mailand 16 Menschen bei einem Bombenanschlag. Im August 1980 detoniert eine Bombe im Bahnhof Central […]
….und wohin sie führen können Die Weltgeschichte ist wie ein Reisebüro: Es gibt Auskunft über Züge und Anschlüsse; die Fahrkarte mit dem Ziel lösen die Reisenden. von Antofagasta nach Oruro – - – - von Pretoria zur Delagoabaai – - – - von Moskau nach Port Arthur – - – - von Istanbul nach Bagdad […]
Ein abenteuerlustiger Anthropologe versucht den Code zu entschlüsseln, der in den Werken Leonardo Da Vincis steckt. Doch die Suche nach dem größten Schatz, den die Menschheit je gesehen hat, wird zu einer tödlichen Jagd rund um die Welt, die in einem Finale endet, das die Grundfeste der Geschichte erschüttert. Netzkino . Gruß an die Anthropologen […]
Ein Pfingstgedichtchen will heraus ins Freie, ins Kühne. So treibt es mich aus meinem Haus ins Neue, ins Grüne. . Wenn sich der Himmel grau bezieht, mich stört´s nicht im Geringsten. Wer meine weiße Hose sieht, der merkt doch, es ist Pfingsten. . Nun hab ich ein Gedicht gedrückt, wie Hühner Eier legen, und gehe […]
von H.-P. Schröder alle Parteien sind Parteien der Besatzer „Merkel wurde wegen ihrer besonderen Charakterlosigkeit ausgesucht.“ sagt Thierry Meyssan Time to say Good Bye, sagt ihr Chef Falls Sie es noch nicht bemerkten, es ist bereits Wahlkampf. The transition is opened! Gebote werden ganztägig entgegengenommen, die Buchmacher haben sich mit bunten Kreide […]
erschienen bei antikrieg.com – Danke an Yvonne von Franklin Lamb Homs, SYRIEN – Es ist nicht schwer, im Regierungsbezirk von Homs oder in Syriens anderen dreizehn Regierungsbezirken Kritiker der Regierung Assad zu finden, laut syrischen Analysten, die ich interviewen konnte, sowie laut Berichten von Menschenrechtsgruppen und Anwälten, die Dissidenten in Syri […]
von H.-P. Schröder Im Badezimmer stapelten sich die Kartons. Das war in Ordnung. Niemand hatte noch genügend Platz im Badezimmer. Manche wichen schon in die Besenkammer aus, was Probleme bereitete, denn wie wollte man schnell an die Fläschchen kommen, wenn man überraschend Gäste bekam, oder wenn man sich entschloss noch spät abends auszugehen. Dann konnte [. […]
erschienen bei b5 aktuell Einmal im Jahr soll hierzulande an die Vertriebenen erinnert werden – mit einem eigenen Gedenktag. Mit dieser Forderung hat Bayerns Sozialministerin Christine Haderthauer (CSU) den Sudetendeutschen Tag in Augsburg eröffnet. Christine Haderthauer sieht den Freistaat als Vorreiter: Ab kommendem Jahr wird es in Bayern bereits einen Tag […]
erschienen bei web.de – Danke an Armeeverkauf Skrupellose Geheimagenten als eiskalte Killer, geheime Sprengstofflager und blutige Anschläge im Auftrag der Nato, viele unschuldige Tote und Verletzte – die Anschuldigungen des Duisburger Historikers Andreas Kramer sind ungeheuerlich. Der 49-Jährige macht westliche Geheimdienste unter anderem für das Attentat au […]
erschienen bei heise online – Danke an Armeeverkauf von Marcus Klöckner Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck kennt Fall Mollath – will sich aber nicht äußern Sein Haus wurde geräumt, seine Zelle wird durchsucht, und das Letzte, was er noch an Habseligkeiten hat, wird auch noch weniger. Laut Erika Lorenz-Löblein, der Anwältin des in der Bayreuther [...] […]
erschienen bei Junge Welt – Danke an Yvonne von Rainer Rupp Der winzige gasreiche Golfstaat Katar habe in den vergangenen zwei Jahren »die Rebellion in Syrien mit bis zu drei Milliarden Dollar unterstützt«. Das sei »weit mehr als jede andere Regierung«, berichtete die britische Financial Times am Freitag. Über die Rolle Katars im Syrien-Konflikt hat [...] […]
von Wolfgang Eggert Aufklären, aufdecken, “nackte Tatsachen” zeigen, dabei saufen und koksen was das Zeug hält: Nutten (“Horizontales Gewerbe”) und Mainstreamjournalisten (“Schreibende Zunft”) sind Berufsstände, die sich in Vielem gleichen. Doch es gibt Unterschiede, im Detail. DER BERUF Sowohl die Hure als auch der Journalist können ihren Beruf ohne j […]
Abstimmung in der UNO-Generalversammlung widerspiegelt Umschwung der öffentlichen Meinung in Syrien. Ein Artikel von Franklin Lamb, erschienen am 18. Mai 2013 auf ”Foreign Policy Journal” übersetzt von antikrieg.com. Homs, SYRIEN – Es ist nicht schwer, im Regierungsbezirk von Homs oder in Syriens anderen dreizehn Regierungsbezirken Kritiker der Regierung As […]
Die größte Mordserie in der Geschichte der BRD offenbart sich immer mehr als Farce. Das, was uns das Gericht in München glauben machen will, nämlich, dass es keinerlei kriminelle Verbindungen zwischen Staat und NSU-Trio gegeben haben soll, ist nicht nur nachweislich falsch, es ist noch mehr: Eine dreiste Lüge. Ohne den Staat hätte es die […]
Die herrschende Wissenschaft hat Intelligenz in Forschung und Lehre mit einem strengen Verbot belegt. Zuwiderhandlungen werden verfolgt. In ihrer Überheblichkeit vergaß sie jedoch, dass es in jeder Generation Rebellen gibt, die sich von Verboten nicht besonders beeindrucken lassen. Ben Stein deckt auf, wie erstklassige Wissenschaftler und Hochschullehrer rei […]
Trotz Manipulationsvorwürfen haben die beiden großen Verlierer der Parlamentswahl in Pakistan den klaren Sieg der Muslim-Liga (PMLN) von Ex-Premierminister Nawaz Sharif (Foto rechts) anerkannt. Die bisher regierende Volkspartei PPP teilte am Montag mit: «Obwohl die Partei ernsthafte Bedenken hinsichtlich der Fairneß der Wahlen hat, hat sie die Ergebnisse akz […]
Im Interview mit Kontext TV am Rande einer Diskussion an der Harvard University in den USA spricht der amerikanische Enthüllungsjournalist Jeremy Scahill (Foto links) zum ersten Mal mit einem deutschen Medium über sein gerade in den USA erschienenes Buch „Dirty Wars. The World Is a Battlefield” („Schmutzige Kriege. Die Welt ist ein Schlachtfeld”), das im […] […]
Im Januar diesen Jahres wurde die Revision von vier Angeklagten vom BGH abgeschmettert. Damit hat es die Haftstrafen von drei bis sieben Jahren des Landgerichts Frankfurt a.M. bestätigt. Die Steuerhinterzieher haben einen Schaden von 260 Millionen Euro verursacht. Involviert war auch die Deutsche Bank, die im Dezember 2012 von 500 Polizisten und Steuerfahnde […]
Hier das Video vom ehemaligen Verteidigungsminister Kanadas, Paul Hellyer, mit seiner Aussage im Citizens Hearing in Washington D.C. (29. April – 3. Mai 2013). Einen besonderen Dank möchte ich dem Betreiber des YouTube-Kanals: „Wir wollen die Wahrheit wissen“ aussprechen, der mit seinem wunderbaren TUN uns dieses Video in deutscher Synchronisation zur Verfüg […]
“Wir bekämpfen den Charakter der Deutschen. Im angeborenen Bösen der deutschen Denkungsart – der Art des gesamten deutschen Volkstums – ist das Problem der Welt zu finden.” Zitat aus “Charakterwäsche” von Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg begannen die Westalliierten eine in der Weltgeschichte beispiellose Umerziehung des deutschen Volke […]
Weißrussischer Präsident Alexander Lukaschenko im Interview mit der britischen BBC und The Independent. Lukaschenko spricht über Hintergründe der NATO-Kriege in Irak und Lybien, 9 Okt. 2012. Die Wahrheit über Irak und Lybien Gadddafi Gaddafi durch einen Kopfschuss kaltblütig ermordet. Libyen – die verbotene Wahrheit Gadaffi, unabhängig und unzensiert Irak: U […]
Eine willkommene Pause im wahnsinnigen Gezerre um Syrien. Washington DC – Der bösartige Bürgerkrieg in Syrien hat die beiden größten Atommächte der Welt auf einen Kollisionskurs gebracht wegen eines kleinen Landes in der Levante, das für Washington keine strategische Bedeutung hat. Das darf nicht weitergehen. Berichte, dass die Vereinigten Staaten von Amer […]
Die New Yorker Finanzaufsicht überprüft mehrere große Investment-Firmen, die ins Versicherungs-Geschäft eingestiegen sind. Es wird befürchtet, dass Pensionsgelder zu riskant angelegt werden. Die Rentner könnten dann mit leeren Händen dastehen.
Die Rohstoff-Börse in Hong Kong hat nicht mehr genug Geld. Nach nur zwei Jahren muss sie schließen. Alle abgeschlossenen Verträge über Gold und Silber werden nun bar ausbezahlt. Gold oder Silber wird nicht ausgeliefert.
Mittels einer Reform des Wahlrechts wollen die etablierten Parteien Italiens den Oppositions-Politiker Beppe Grillo von der nächsten Wahl ausschließen. Die neue Reform stellt Anforderungen an Parteien, die Grillos Movimento 5 Stelle derzeit nicht erfüllt.
Apple hat keine Steuern hinterzogen. Doch der US-Senat kritisiert, dass das Unternehmen bestehende Schlupflöcher nutzt. Dies widerspreche dem „Geist“ der Gesetze.
Angela Merkel hat den Deutschen versprochen, sie werde in Zypern aufräumen, wenn deutsche Steuergelder dorthin fließen. Nun belegt ein Geheimbericht: Bei den zypriotischen Banken herrscht das pure Chaos, fast 60 Prozent aller Konten haben mit Schwarzgeld zu tun. Beobachter sagen: Solch einem Land würde ich privat niemals Geld geben. Und Merkel?
In den letzten fünf Jahren hat Katar weltweit 10 Milliarden Dollar in Banken investiert. Nun hat das Emirat auch Aktien der größten deutschen Bank in sein Portfolio aufgenommen.
In der Krise werden die Rufe nach den Vereinigten Staaten von Europa immer lauter. Die italienische Außenministerin Emma Bonino hält den Zeitpunkt für günstig, jetzt möglichst viele Kompetenzen in Brüssel zu zentralisieren. Unter anderem die Einwanderungspolitik - weil Europa in den kommenden Jahren 50 Millionen neue Einwanderer brauche.
Europäische Lebensmittel-Händler beklagen eine Knappheit an konventionell angebauter Soja. Schuld sei der rasante Siegeszug der Gentechnik. Den Konsumenten droht eine signifikante Einschränkung ihrer Wahlfreiheit.
46 Prozent der Briten wollen aus der EU, wenn nicht mehr Rechte von Brüssel nach London zurückwandern. Nur ein Viertel befürwortet den Verbleib Großbritanniens in der Union.
Israel beschießt erneut Syrien. Die Invasion Syriens bricht zusammen. Eine strategische Lageanalyse mit ein paar Hintergründen. Artikel zum Thema: Gescheiterte Syrien-Invasion: Das Regime der “Neuen Weltordnung” erreicht seine Endphase Die von den USA, mit ihr finanziell-ökonomisch-mental eng verschmolzenen diversen...
Es ist schwer vorstellbar, dass der erfahrene Warlord diesem Attentat zum Opfer fiel, schon gar nicht durch einen Mann der Taliban oder afghanischen Polizisten, die nicht in seine unmittelbare Nähe gelangt wären. Er und das Bezirksratsgebäude in Pul-i-Khumri sind durch seine tadschikische Leibwächtermiliz ständig gesichert. Möglich wäre demnach auch, dass de […]
Dazu gehört die European Union Training Mission (EUTM) in Uganda, einem menschenrechtsverachtenen korrupten Staat unter der Diktatur Museveni’s. Dort werden Rekruten aus “Somalia” in speziellen Ausbildungslagern für Sondereinsätze wie Häuserkampf trainiert. Nun offenbart am 23.April 2013 die Bundeswehr auf ihrer Website, dass ein Oberstleutlant “im Rahmen de […]
Nachdem der Botschafter von Qatar sich für die von seinem Land eingebrachte (und mehrfach wieder eingebrachte) Resolution ausgesprochen hatte, gab Ja’afari bekannt, dass es da ein e-mail von einem Repräsentanten der syrischen Opposition gibt, das der syrischen Botschaft in Qatar zugespielt worden ist, aus dem die Beteiligung Qatars bei der Entführung von UNO […]
Vertuscht wurde die Tragweite des Gesetzes mit der Vorläufigkeit von einigen Monaten bis 2014 wegen steuerlicher Aspekte. Doch versteckt sich im Abschnitt 735 des Entwurfs die Entmachtung der U.S.-Justiz - ein weiterer Schritt Washingtons zur Abschaffung der Demokratie. Die Passage des Gesetzes beinhaltet die Aushebelung der allgemeinen Gesetzgebung und verh […]
Dank dem Duisburger Historiker Andreas Kramer habe ich endlich eine Ausrede dem trockenen Aktenstudium meiner ASJ Recherche zu entfliehen und kann mich einem übel riechenden Sumpf zuwenden, der mit SOB / Gladio und / oder Oktoberfest-Attentat beschrieben ist. Artikel zum Thema: Nur eine Idee: Verschwörung für freie Abgeordnete Der heutige Tag hat mein Haupt […]
“Intelligente graue Zellen” (Intelligence sources) sagten, dass ein intaktes, aber geschwächtes Assad-Regime für das Land und die ganze Krisenregion vorzuziehen wäre, nachdem der israelische Ministerpräsident Netanjahu am Dienstag Präsident Wladimir Putin in Russland überfallen hat, der C.I.A.-Direktor John Brennan am Freitag nach Jerusalem zum israelischen […]
Da ich immer mal wieder darauf angesprochen wurde, warum wir keine "email subscription" haben und ich grade irgendwo gelesen habe dass man das unbedingt haben muss - eh bien, hier ist unsere Benachrichtigung per mail bei neuen Artikeln, rechts etwas weiter unten in der Sidebar zu finden. Artikel zum Thema: EU-Vertrag: Email für Sie, Herr Bundespräs […]
Am 21.11.2012 habe ich beim Internationalen Strafgerichtshof (IStGH) in Den Haag Anzeige erstattet gegen unbekannt wegen des Verdachts des Verbrechens gegen die Menschlichkeit durch vorsätzliche und gleichzeitig systematische und groß angelegte Schädigung der Gesundheit der griechischen Bevölkerung (Art.7 Abs. 1 lit. k Römisches Statut). Artikel zum Thema: G […]
Die französischen Kinderpsychiater verwenden auch nicht das gleiche DSM-System (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) zur Einstufung von emotionalen Probleme der Kindheit wie amerikanische Psychiater. Der französische Verband der Psychatrie entwickelte die alternative Klassifizierung CFTMEA (Classification Française des Troubles Mentaux de L […]
Military wing of Shiite group may soon find self on global blacklist, if EU has way. As militia's fighters get more involved in Syrian war, international pressure grows to reign them in
Bedouin Omar Walid lost his best friend at Beersheba massacre, yet took bullets for others. Police: All evacuees from shooting were handcuffed until identified beyond doubt
2-mile-wide tornado tears through Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, killing at least 91 people including 20 children, destroying homes, trapping two dozen school children beneath rubble. US President Obama declares major disaster
National Anti-Terrorist Committee says special forces killed two Russian citizens who received training along Afghanistan-Pakistan border and planned to attack in Moscow; third detained
US State Department report says 2012 saw sharp rise in anti-Semitism worldwide: Egyptian president said 'amen' during anti-Jewish prayer, and Iran's Ahmadinejad said 'horrendous Zionist clan' ruling major world affairs
Gunmen fire automatic weapons in raid on base in the Al-Ahrash as Egyptian army send tanks to Sinai where Islamists kidnapped seven soldiers, policemen
Ferdinando Imposimato, Honorary President of the Supreme Court
