Stephen Lendman

Israeli ID card with emblems of Kach and Nazi party super-
imposed (Yedioth Ahronoth)

Disturbing signs are ominous. On November 8, Israel demolished and ransacked a Negev Bedouin Arab mosque in Rahat, removing it for Jewish development. Professor Yousef Salamah called it "a criminal act," done on the pretext that it was unlicensed.

"These are not new acts but were preceded by many incidents and attacks, when the Israeli authorities demolished dozens of mosques inside Israel, turning some into museums, barns, restaurants, synagogues and parking lots."

Five Bedouins, Israeli citizens, were arrested for protesting. Others were attacked. On November 8, Haaretz writers Jack Khoury and Yanir Yagnar headlined, "Defiant Bedouin(s) rebuild Rahat mosque razed by state," saying:

Along with a one-day general strike, residents laid a foundation to rebuild. Yusuf Abu Jama, local leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement said:

"If they continue to destroy it, we will rebuild the mosque over and over again."

Southern District commander Yohanan Danino said:

"The mosque was born in crime and as a symbol of the radicalization and escalation of the members of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement within Rahat...."

Look for another demolition and more confrontation, denying Israeli Arabs equal rights with Jews, but even theirs are eroding. Israel is now unsafe for anyone challenging state authority, no matter how repressive its policies.

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Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator

President Barak Obama's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski visiting 'his boy', Osama Bin Laden, in training with
the Pakistan Army, 1981. Photo originally scanned from the New
York Village Voice. Credited to the Sygma/Corbis Agency, Paris.

Al-Qaeda is a CIA creation. That sounds like a crazy assertion because for nine years we've heard from the establishment media and corrupt political leaders that Al-Qaeda is a transnational menace, and the Western world's biggest security threat in the 21st century. But, there is nothing crazy about restating the truth. What's crazy is to keep denying this simple fact as impossible, and continuing to blindly trust the voices of authority just because they are in authority.

In general, Islamic terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and Hamas were created, funded, and trained by the CIA and Mossad to serve their own interests in the Middle East. By framing Palestinian resistance as terrorism to the world, Israel's leaders are able to carry out their objectives of creating a unified Israeli state, and destroying the Palestinian resistance. Likewise, under the umbrella of the war on terrorism, the Anglo-American establishment is in the position to secure large areas in the Middle East and Central Asia, providing them the military footing in a region of great geopolitical importance.

Reporter Richard Sale exposed Israel-Hamas connections in an article called "Hamas History Tied To Israel" that appeared in the United Press International back in June of 2002. Sale wrote:

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies. Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative," said a former senior CIA official.

It is dumbfounding to first learn that Israel gave financial support to Hamas, especially since Israeli leaders frequently accuse Iran of funding terrorism, and meddling in the Palestinian peace process. One expects the Iranian regime to be a supporter of terrorism because it is undoubtedly brutal, and anti-democratic, but to find out that Israel, a Western-style democracy, funds and trains terrorists, and not just any terrorists, but terrorists that recruit other unwitting terrorists who seek Israel harm, is a bewildering realization. What else are Israeli leaders capable of? What else are U.S. leaders capable of? If they arm and fund terrorists, then what is the depth of their evil crimes?

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Stephen Lendman

A man suffering from cholera symptoms lies on the floor of the hospital in
Marchand Dessalines, Haiti. (Photo: Associated Press)

On November 9, Haiti Libre said city authorities examined at least 120 suspected cases, mostly in Cite Soleil, the extremely impoverished, densely populated community home to around 400,000. More vulnerable from Hurricane Tomas flooding, Partners in Health (PIH) called crowded camps "a potential flashpoint for a cholera outbreak. There is growing concern" about reported cases, thousands that may spread to many more.

In recent days, cases "continued to expand geographically. More (appeared) in Haiti's Central Plateau," PIH reporting 111 people hospitalized. Reported deaths also keep rising, likely much higher than Haiti's Health Ministry 544 figure on November 8. On November 9, Al Jazeera reported 583 deaths, the numbers increasing daily. The report also said:

"At least 115 cases of cholera, including the death of (at least) one person, have been registered in Haiti's capital, the most significant warning sign yet that the epidemic has spread from outlying areas to threaten hundreds of thousands of people in the city's camps."

Reporter Sebastian Walker said hospitals were overwhelmed, adding:

"Given the sheer number of cases that hospitals are receiving, it is simply not possible to conduct laboratory tests in order to give 100 per cent overall confirmation that this is cholera."

Given the familiar symptoms, however, including severe diarrhea, vomiting and fever, there's little doubt about the cause. Over 9,000 cases so far have been identified, mostly in the Artibonite area, north of Port-au-Prince. Walker also said that "It is almost impossible to contain this disease in an environment like this. Port-au-Prince is a very overcrowded city with appalling sanitation infrastructure."

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

"There is no innocent explanation for the professed inability of myriad agencies—the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM), and the Naval Air Warfare Weapons Division—to account for the incident. It is far more credible to suppose that one or more of these agencies not only detected, but actually organized and carried out some sort of secret test, with or without approval from the highest civilian authorities in Washington."

US military officials announced Wednesday that the Pentagon was “satisfied” that the giant contrail seen Monday evening off the Southern California coast was the product of an airplane flight, not a secret missile launch. Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters, “There’s no evidence to suggest that it was other than an aircraft.”

While admitting that there was no hard evidence that a plane caused the contrail—the military denies its planes were involved, and no commercial flight has been identified as the source—Lapan added, “this case is closed.”

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

"Reactionary and unpopular measures already planned, but held back until after the election, are being put into motion, preparing an escalation of the carnage caused by American militarism. The Republicans winning control of the House of Representatives has only served to drive the administration’s policies, both foreign and domestic, even further to the right."

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates signaled Tuesday that the US is preparing to scrap a 2011 deadline for withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq, setting the stage for a permanent military occupation of the oil-rich country.

“We’ll stand by,” Gates told reporters. “We’re ready to have that discussion if and when they want to raise it with us.” The defense secretary, a holdover from the Bush administration, reiterated Washington’s formal position that while the “initiative clearly needs to come from the Iraqis; we are open to discussing it.”

The reality is that the Obama administration is presently exerting intense political pressure aimed at breaking an eight-month-old deadlock in the formation of a new Iraqi government so that it can have a US client regime capable of taking the “initiative” of asking American troops to stay.

US efforts have intensified in the aftermath of the midterm elections as part of a broad further turn to the right in both US foreign and domestic policies.

Last August, the Obama administration had celebrated the withdrawal of a single Stryker brigade from Iraq, proclaiming that its members were the last combat troops deployed in the country and that the US combat mission had ended.

The reality is that nearly 50,000 US troops remain in Iraq, the bulk of them with the same combat capabilities as the brigades that have been withdrawn. The US Air Force remains in control of Iraqi airspace and the US Navy controls its coastlines.

Obama sought to exploit the drawdown of US forces from their peak of 170,000—many of them redeployed to the “surge” in Afghanistan—for political purposes, claiming in the run-up to the elections that the Democratic president had fulfilled his campaign promise to end the war in Iraq.

This was a patent fraud. The timetable for the troop drawdown and the December 2011 final withdrawal was set not by Obama, but rather by a Status of Forces Agreement negotiated between the Bush administration and the US puppet government of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. The Obama administration is now moving to abrogate this Bush era treaty in order to secure an indefinite US military grip over Iraq.

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Stephen Lendman

An October B'Tselem/HaMoked, Center of the Defence of the Individual report, titled "Kept in the Dark: Treatment of Palestinian Detainees in the Petach-Tikva Interrogation Facility of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet)" is discussed below. Though, in some respects, treatment over the years has changed, it remains harsh, abusive, and in violation of international law, prohibiting all forms of torture and mistreatment at all times, under all conditions, with no allowed exceptions.

The report is based on testimonies from 121 Palestinian detainees during Q 1 and Q 4, 2009. Clear patterns of mistreatment were revealed - torture and abuse by any standard, what Israel practices as official policy.

An earlier article explained it in detail, accessed through THIS link.

Though denied, torture is official Israeli policy. The Jewish state and America are the only modern countries sanctioning it. Another link explains more:

Both countries, in fact, have laws prohibiting it, America under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause alone that automatically makes all international laws and ratified treaties the Supreme Law of the Land. In addition, War Crimes Act provisions make Geneva and Common Article 3 breaches illegal, including torture, abuse, and humiliating or degrading treatment.

Moreover, US Code, Chapter 113C: Torture states:

"Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life."

Israeli law also prohibits it under Section 277 of its Penal Law, stating:

"A public servant who does one of the following is liable to imprisonment for three years: (1) uses or directs the use of force or violence against a person for the purpose of extorting from him or from anyone in whom he is interested a confession of an offense or information relating to an offense; (2) threatens any person, or directs any person to be threatened, with injury to his person or property or to the person or property of anyone in whom he is interested for the purpose of extorting from him a confession of an offense or any information relating to an offense."

Israel is also a signatory to international laws banning torture in all forms, including the 1984 UN Convention against Torture. Yet throughout its history, Israel's military and security forces have willfully, systematically and illegally practiced torture against Palestinian detainees.

In three 1996 cases, Israel's High Court legitimized use of violent shaking, hooding, playing deafeningly loud music, sleep deprivations, and lengthy detainments to continue these abuses. A 1999 ruling addressed so-called "ticking bomb" cases, approving physical force and other abuses, short of breaking a detainee's spirit. Moreover, by allowing loopholes, torture's current legal basis was established in Public Committee against Torture in Israel et al v. the Government of Israel et al (the HCJ Torture Petition).

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Frances Stonor Saunders
The Independent

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- com- munists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

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Charles Hugh Smith

"Integrity has become as light as the truth itself, and both have floated away, unnoticed and unmourned."

The financialized American economy and Central State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a foul, rotten heap.

Google's famous "don't be evil" is reversed in the American Central State and financial "industry": be evil, because everyone else is evil, too. In other words, lying, fraud, embezzlement, mispresentation of risk, material misrepresentation of facts, the cloaking of truth with half-truths, the replacement of statements of fact with propaganda and spin: these are not the work of a scattered handful of sociopaths: they represent the very essence and heart of the entire status quo.

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the banality of evil to capture the essence of the Nazi regime in Germany: doing evil wasn't abnormal, it was normal. Doing evil wasn't an outlier of sociopaths, it was the everyday "job" of millions of people, Nazi Party members or not.

Not naming evil is the key to normalizing evil. Evil must first and foremost be derealized (a key concept in the Survival+ critique), detached from our realization and awareness by naming it something innocuous.

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Arthur Silber
Once Upon a Time

Depending on my mood, I am astonished, horrified, sickened and/or immensely amused when writers, on both the right and the left, who repeatedly proclaim their skepticism and distrust of government (at least of certain significant aspects of governmental activities) offer figures about employment and the economy as if those figures accurately reflected the truth. The figures such writers put forth and then amplify with learned commentary are, of course, provided by the government. One might think that fact would be regarded as of some significance by those who are often skeptical and distrustful of government. One might be mistaken! For almost everyone, trust in and obedience to authority is the automatic default position; we are trained well and thoroughly, from our earliest years. (The second part of my series on Wikileaks discusses how this training takes place, and offers links to many articles that analyze the mechanisms in detail.) There are but few exceptions; they tend to be dyspeptic, dysfunctional irritants such as your humble correspondent.

Thus, the following exercise in cooling clarity from Paul Craig Roberts could be regarded as stating the obvious -- except that for most people, none of this is obvious at all:

If we cannot trust what the government tells us about weapons of mass destruction, terrorist events, and the reasons for its wars and bailouts, can we trust the government’s statement last Friday that the US economy gained 151,000 payroll jobs during October?

Apparently not. After examining the government’s report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that the jobs were "phantom jobs" created by "concurrent seasonal factor adjustments." In other words, the 151,000 jobs cannot be found in the unadjusted underlying data. The jobs were the product of seasonal adjustments concocted by the BLS.

As usual, the financial press did no investigation and simply reported the number handed to the media by the government. [Ditto every blogger I've read on the subject.]

Discounting the war production shutdown at the end of World War II, which was not a recession in the usual sense, Williams reports that "the current annual decline [in employment] remains the worst since the Great Depression, and should deepen further."

In short, there is no employment data, and none in the works, unless gimmicked, that supports the recovery myth. The US rate of unemployment, if measured according to the methodology used in 1980, is 22.5%. Even the government’s broader measure of unemployment stands at 17%. The 9.6% reported rate is a concocted measure that does not include discouraged workers who have been unable to find a job after 6 months and workers who want full time jobs but can only find part-time work.

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Craig Murray
Craig Murray's Blog

British democracy has lost its meaning. The political and economic system has come to serve the interests of a tiny elite, vastly wealthier than the run of the population, operating through corporate control. The state itself exists to serve the interests of these corporations, guided by a political class largely devoid of ideological belief and preoccupied with building their own careers and securing their own finances.

A bloated state sector is abused and milked by a new class of massively overpaid public secotr managers in every area of public provision - university, school and hospital administration, all executive branches of local government, housing associations and other arms length bodies. All provide high six figure salaries to those at the top of a bloated bureaucratic establishment. The "left", insofar as it exists, represents only these state sector vested interests.

These people decide where the cuts fall, and they will not fall where they should - on them. They will fall largely on the services ordinary people need.

Meanwhile we are not all in this together. The Vodafone saga only lifts the lid for the merest peek at the way the corporate sector avoids paying its share, hiding behind Luxembourg or Cayman tax loopholes and conflicts between international jurisdictions - with which our well provided politicians are very happy. The often excellent Sunny Hundal provides a calm analysis of the Vodafone case here.

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Stephen Lendman

While slaughtering Muslims abroad, supporting Israeli's illegal occupation and genocidal Gaza siege, as well as waging domestic war on Islam, Reuters, on November 9, headlined, "Obama says US earnest, reaching out to Muslim world," saying:

From Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, "President Barack Obama said Tuesday that Washington's effort to reach out to the Muslim world was earnest and would help improve security, although he acknowledged that there was still more work to do."

At a news conference with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhovono, he said,

"With respect to outreach to the Muslim world, I think that our efforts have been earnest and sustained. We don't expect that we are going to completely eliminate some of the misunderstandings and mistrust that have developed over a long period of time, but we do think that we're on the right path."

On August 31, he wreaked of duplicitity declaring an "end to the combat mission in Iraq," saying:

"Throughout this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility."

No matter that after two decades of war, sanctions, occupation, millions of deaths and displacements, disease, and insecurity, Iraq no longer exists. Divided in three parts (the Basra south, Kurdish north, and Baghdad center), it's unsafe, corrupt, terrorized, tyrannized, contaminated, and permanently occupied like Afghanistan and wherever else America shows up, the scourge of the Muslim world.

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Fred Reed
Fred on Everything

Sen. Lindsey Graham is the one in a horizontal position...

Oh good. I see that Senator Lindsey Graham wants to attack Iran. The US, he says, should "sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard."

Senator Graham has the brains of a tapeworm, making him eminently qualified for the senate. Tapeworms, I note, do not have brains. It is characteristic of warlike innocents, to include the Pentagon, to believe that if you destroy navies and air forces, you win wars. This worked well in Vietnam, you will recall, and as soon as we destroy the Taliban’s navy, Afghanistan will be a cakewalk.

Now, I understand that practicality and realism are alien concepts in American politics, to be approached with trepidation, but maybe, just once, we should think before sticking our private parts into a wood-chipper. Just once. I do not propose consistent rationality, forethought, or intelligent behavior. I profoundly respect my country’s traditions.

However, folk wisdom from West Virginia: Before you say, “I can whip any man in the bar!” it is well to scout the bar.

Note that the United States cannot defeat Iran militarily, short of using nuclear weapons. It is easy to start a war. Finishing one is harder. I could punch out Mike Tyson. Things thereafter might not go as well as hoped.

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Stephen Lendman

"Justifiably, Israel ranked 144, besting only Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq in descending order, Iraq ranking last, but Afghanistan is just as bad or worse."

"GPI rankings conspicuously omit two factors:

lor="#43395D">● outside influence causing internal conflicts, instability, and/or disruptions; and
● responsible provocateur countries.

As a result, although America ranks low at 85 (above the 94 average) behind Rwanda, Indonesia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Egypt, it deserves a bottom position for imperial wars. In addition, numerous countries score low because of American and/or Israeli direct or indirect meddling. They might be relatively peaceful without it."

Launched in May 2007, the Global Peace Index (GPI) ranks nations according to peacefulness. Its 2010 report includes 149 countries, graded on the basis of "ongoing domestic and international conflict, safety and security in society and militarisation...."

An earlier article discussed GPI's 2008 survey, accessed through THIS link.

This year's index includes 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators, "which combine internal and external factors ranging from a nation's level of military expenditure to its relations with neighboring countries and the level of respect for human rights."

According to GPI's founder, Australian entrepreneur Steve Killelea, indicators were chosen by an international panel of academics, business people, philanthropists, and peace organization members.

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Gerald Celente
The Trends Journal

The “American Century” – an age of opportunity characterized by the entrepreneur – [has] passed into history. America [has] been corporatized, homogenized, dumbed down and chained.

What had happened to that rebellious Yankee spirit and the American mind? Could it have been the food that overstuffed and immobilized them?

The Pop-Tarts® and Egg McMuffins® washed down with Coke® for breakfast? The Baconator® Triple, The Whoppers®, The Big Macs®, the $5 Foot-Long Subs, the bucket-of-chicken and 32oz. Big Gulp®? Too many trips to the All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet or The Never Ending Pasta Bowl®? Or was it the Slurpees, tubs of ice cream, or boxes of donuts grabbed at the convenience store?

Could it have been the factory-farmed, battery-raised, hormone implanted, antibiotic-laced, pesticide sprayed, genetically modified beef, fish, chicken, eggs, dairy, vegetables, grains that were used in the highly processed, synthetic, ultra pasteurized, artificially sweetened, colored and flavored “product” passed off as food?

What drove a nation with a relatively well-off and well-educated population to inflict such suicidal behavior upon itself? It was easy to point to the poor for buying cheap and eating stupid. But what excused the smartest of the smart and the richest of the rich from buying cheap and eating stupid?

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

"He went on national television to conciliate big business and embrace the concerns of the Tea Party right wing, declaring them politically legitimate. He was low-key, conciliatory and, above all, prostrate before corporate America, whose servant he is."

US President Barack Obama was interviewed for nearly half an hour on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” broadcast Sunday night. The discussion with correspondent Steve Kroft was conducted on Thursday, November 4, and was the only extended public interview with Obama since the rout of the Democrats in last Tuesday’s congressional election.

These circumstances make the content of the discussion that much more remarkable. Obama has given no accounting of the debacle for the Democrats. He has not explained how his administration managed to restore the political standing of an ultra-right Republican Party that was totally discredited only two years ago. Nor has he warned his former supporters of the dangers to jobs, living standards and democratic rights from a newly empowered right-wing majority in the House of Representatives.

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Matthew Nasuti
Kabul Press

The West simply cannot afford to continue to fight the Taliban.

The military-industrial complex is a voracious beast that demands its daily fix at the trough of the American taxpayers.

It costs $50 thousand to kill each NATO soldier while it costs $50 million to kill each Taliban soldier. It is therefore 1,000 times cheaper to kill a NATO soldier; a fact that does not seem to bother the Pentagon, NATO’s leadership or European defense ministers.

Kabul Press, on September 30, 2010, published an article by this author detailing the best estimate of Taliban killed per year (2,000) divided by a portion of the direct costs that the Pentagon is spending each year in Afghanistan ($100 billion). The resulting statistic suggests that it costs $50 million to kill each Taliban soldier. This number is very conservative. If all NATO and American costs (direct and indirect) were included, the analysis would reveal that it actually costs about $150 million.

The present article examines spending from the Taliban side in order to comparatively determine what it costs to kill each NATO soldier. The Brookings Institution is the consulting firm with the best political access to the Obama Administration and the U.S. State Department. In September 2009, it published a report on Taliban annual revenue, based in part on data gathered by the Congressional Research Service. Brookings estimated Taliban annual income at between $140 and $200 million. The Taliban have already inflicted over 600 deaths on NATO soldiers and more than twice that number of fatalities on Afghan army and police personnel. By the end of the year, total Coalition deaths are expected to reach 3,000. The math is unfortunately easy. Assuming Taliban revenue of $150 million divided by 3,000 = $50,000 to kill a NATO, American or Afghan soldier.

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Khalid Amayreh

The Israeli government is exerting tremendous pressure on the UK to amend British laws allowing for the arrest and prosecution of suspected war criminal.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague reportedly was being 'ambushed' by Israeli officials during his recent visit to the de facto Apartheid state. Hague's Israeli hosts cancelled a high-level security briefing with him in response to a British threat to arrest an Israeli official for suspected war crimes.

Pro-Palestinian and civic-minded Britons have presented virtually irrefutable evidence showing that numerous Israeli political and military leaders committed acts that can be defined as war crimes and/or crimes against humanity.

Israeli human rights organizations, such as B'tselem, have also collected testimonies detailing deliberate acts of murder by members of the Israeli Defence Forces who argued that they were acting on orders and instructions from their superiors.

The principle of universal jurisdiction is one of the few remaining outlets for establishing justice for weak victims who have very few or no practical means to bring their victimizers to justice.

According to Amnesty International, the principle of universal jurisdiction should be a requirement for all states that are signatories to the UN Convention against Torture and the Inter-American Convention.

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Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator

"Obviously, the current order of things cannot last. A reckoning is awaiting the world."

In September of this year, a retired Turkish general named Sabri Yirmibeshoglu admitted on Turkish television that the Turkish government carried out false-flag attacks on the island of Cyprus in the 1960s in order to instill feelings of hatred and revenge in Turkish Cypriots against the Cyprus government. The false-flag operations successfully destabilized the island, and helped Turkey's military objectives.

Yirmibeshoglu's admission was significant, as he was the former Secretary-General of the National Security Council (MGK), and the chief of Turkey's Special Warfare Department. For more details read Elias Hazou's report, which was filed on September 24, 2010 for the Cyprus Mail:

Created in 1953 as part of the Turkish secret service, the Special Warfare Department is believed by commentators in Turkey to be the executive branch of the so-called ‘deep state.’

“In order to increase the resistance of the people, you carry out sabotage against certain values, in order to create the impression that it is the enemy who did it. In Cyprus, we had torched a mosque,” Yirmibeshoglu said in an interview while describing methods used in unconventional warfare. (Turkey carried out false-flag attacks in Cyprus in 1960s, says Turkish General, Elias Hazou, Cyrpus Mail; Sept. 24, 2010).

Yirmibeshoglu was named by Ahmet Özal as one of the suspects involved in the assassination attempt of his father, Turgut Özal, in 1988. Özal later died in in 1993 due to a heart attack, but his family asserts that he was killed as a result of a poison injection by the same individuals within the Turkish deep-state who failed to kill him in 1988. Özal served as Turkey's Prime Minister from 1983 to 1989, and as President from 1989 to 1993.

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Khalid Amayreh

"Fat Rat" © Nidal El-Khairy

Trying to justify its manifest moral and political bankruptcy, the Fatah movement, under PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, is trying to use the so-called Iran bogey to justify its effective surrender to the Zionist regime.

Fatah, which is kept alive by American money and Israeli tolerance, thinks that by joining the international Zionist-led campaign against Iran, it will obtain a certificate of good conduct from Israel, the US as well as from the many American puppet regimes in the Arab world.

In recent weeks, the Fatah leadership even began currying favor with some anti-Iranian regional groups, suggesting that resisting the so-called Iranian expansionism was more important than resisting Israeli Nazism.

In fact, the bulk of some of Fatah’s propaganda activities has centered on “highlighting” the Iranian danger and only secondarily on saving Jerusalem and occupied Palestinian land from the claws of Zionist ghoul.

I have no doubts that Zionist money and intelligence are behind those who are trying to tell the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that their real enemy is Iran, not the Zionist regime whose nuclear warheads are being trained toward Muslim countries.

Listening to some of the Fatah propaganda of late, one would get the impression that it is the Iranians, not the Zionist regime, that is trying to demolish the Aqsa Mosque, destroy homes in Jerusalem, build more colonies in the West Bank and carry out more wars and massacres in the Gaza Strip. This misplaced fixation on Iran surfaces and resurfaces every time Israel is facing a difficult situation at the international arena. Hence, it is probably no co-incidence that Israel’s Arab or “Muslim” agents hasten to help their ultimate master, the Venomous Zionist viper, every time it finds itself in a stressful situation.

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Scott Horton
Harper's Magazine

[Reporter Joshua Phillips discusses how American veterans have been psychologically scarred by their abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners. AUDIO (Information Clearing House)]

Earlier this year, Joshua Phillips received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for his 2008 American Radio Works documentary What Killed Sergeant Gray. Now he’s developed that story in a book that offers a compelling account of how the use of torture and abusive techniques on prisoners affected the lives of American soldiers caught up in it. I put six questions to Joshua Phillips.

1. Most of the discussion of torture has focused on the prisoners as victims; you turn this around by describing the tragic consequences of torture for soldiers. How did you come to this approach?

By accident. I learned about the central story while investigating various veterans’ issues, and the problems that some troops faced trying to report prisoner abuse to their superiors. One of the soldiers I interviewed was Jonathan Millantz, an Army combat medic. Millantz told me he was upset by the pushback that he faced from officers when he tried to report abuse. Over time, he revealed how he and his fellow unit members became involved in prisoner abuse and, in some cases, torture. It was important to Millantz that I understand the complex circumstances that led to such misconduct. He and his fellow troops also wanted me to recognize how damaging the experience had been for them—especially for soldiers who felt remorseful about their involvement with abuse, such as Sergeant Adam Gray.

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