F. William Engdahl
Global Research

[Click on map to enlarge. NationMaster]

On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was "suspected" of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.

For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most important oil transport routes. In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world’s largest.

The 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with the failed bomb attempt, Abdulmutallab, reportedly has been talking, claiming he was sent on his mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. This has conveniently turned the world’s attention on Yemen as a new center of the alleged Al Qaeda terror organization.

Notably, Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran who advised President Obama on the policy leading to the Afghan troop surge, wrote in his blog of the alleged ties of the Detroit bomber to Yemen, "The attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day underscores the growing ambition of Al Qaeda's Yemen franchise, which has grown from a largely Yemeni agenda to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year... The weak Yemeni government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, which has never fully controlled the country and now faces a host of growing problems, will need significant American support to defeat AQAP."[1].

More »

Gordon Duff
Veterans Today

Bin laden never mentioned in Mcchrystal report or Obama speech
"Hunt for bin laden” a national shame

Conservative commentator, former Marine Colonel Bob Pappas has been saying for years that bin Laden died at Tora Bora and that Senator Kerry’s claim that bin Laden escaped with Bush help was a lie. Now we know that Pappas was correct. The embarrassment of having Secretary of State Clinton talk about bin Laden in Pakistan was horrific. He has been dead since December 13, 2001 and now, finally, everyone, Obama, McChrystal, Cheney, everyone who isn’t nuts is finally saying what they have known for years.

However, since we lost a couple of hundred of our top special operations forces hunting for bin Laden after we knew he was dead, is someone going to answer for this with some jail time? Since we spent 200 million dollars on “special ops” looking for someone we knew was dead, who is going to jail for that? Since Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney continually talked about a man they knew was dead, now known to be for reasons of POLITICAL nature, who is going to jail for that? Why were tapes brought out, now known to be forged, as legitimate intelligence to sway the disputed 2004 election in the US? This is a criminal act if there ever was one.

In 66 pages, General Stanley McChrystal never mentions Osama bin Laden. Everything is “Mullah Omar”now. In his talk at West Point, President Obama never mentioned Osama bin Laden. Col. Pappas makes it clear, Vice President Cheney let it “out of the bag” long ago. Bin Laden was killed by American troops many many years ago.

America knew Osama bin Laden died December 13, 2001. After that, his use was hardly one to unite America but rather one to divide, scam and play games. With bin Laden gone, we could have started legitimate nation building in Afghanistan instead of the eternal insurgency that we invented ourselves.

More »

Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

The last, wan hope for real change in the American system was not lost through the imperial dithering of Barack Obama's "Bush-Clinton Terror War Continuity" administration during the past two years. No; those last wan hopes went down the drain in 2006 -- the year that the Democratic Party regained control of Congress ... and promptly made a screeching U-turn on virtually every anti-war, anti-imperialist, pro-liberty, pro-people position it had taken against George W. Bush.

The sell-out -- or rather, the pay-off to the corporatist-militarist power factions who actually control the Democrats -- was immediate, brazen and deeply destructive. It helped entrench the vast abuses of power of the Bush Regime (and its bipartisan predecessors), it guaranteed the deaths of thousands of innocent people in the continuation and expansion of the Terror Wars, and it laid the groundwork for Obama's "Third Bush Administration" of presidential death squads, pointless "surges" in bloody quagmires, remote control slaughter by drone, bristling defenses and relentless expansions of authoritarian power, and cringing, servile capitulation to Big Money on every possible front.

As Bruce Dixon points out in a timely and important piece at Black Agenda Report, the instant the Democrats regained Congressional power in 2006, they immediately jettisoned all talk of impeachment, all investigations of war crimes and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, all impetus for real health care reform, all their previously vociferous opposition to Bush's tax cuts for the rich, and a host of other "dissenting" positions that they had cynically trumpeted in order to manipulate the public's genuine anger and thirst for change. (Ironically, the Democrats are now being hoisted on their own petard, as the corporate-run "Tea Party" Republicans are about to oust them from Congress with their own cynical manipulations of genuine anger and thirst for change.)

More »

Chris Marsden
WSWS

[A photograph taken in hospital in Baghdad shows that Ali was burned across his trunk and that his hands and forearms were incinerated. His head, neck, abdomen and legs were unblemished. Examination of this photograph shows this boy was subjected to the most intense radiated heat – not contact heat. Global Research]

Britain’s armed forces stand accused of torture and murder, perpetrated in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The scale of the abuses involved cannot be attributed to a few “rogue” individuals, or covered up by the routine excuse that Britain simply got “too close” to the United States and is guilty only by association. They present prima facie evidence for war crimes charges.

Revelations regarding Afghanistan focus on the documents released by WikiLeaks, listing 21 British attacks on civilians, including children. But a separate document seen by the Daily Telegraph suggests coalition forces are responsible for up to 1,000 civilian deaths since 2006. This number has doubled in the past four years.

WikiLeaks also cited three reports recording cases of direct abuse by British troops against Iraqi detainees that coincide with mounting evidence of “systemic” abuses of detainees and other civilians.

A preliminary high court ruling in July found, “There is an arguable case that the alleged ill-treatment was systemic, and not just at the whim of individual soldiers”. The court was presented with evidence on behalf of 102 Iraqis held as prisoners by the British military in an action by Public Interest Lawyers headed by solicitor Phil Shiner. The evidence lists the cases of 59 Iraqi civilians who say they were hooded by British troops, 11 subjected to electric shocks, 122 alleging that ear muffs were used for sound deprivation, 52 deprived of sleep, 39 who were subjected to enforced nakedness, and 18 forced to watch pornographic DVDs.

The Iraq war logs also reveal appalling details of the torture and ill-treatment by the Iraqi authorities, after detainees were handed over by US and British forces. This is in breach of international law. States are bound by a duty of “non-refoulement” and must never hand someone over to another state where it is known they face a “real risk” of torture or ill-treatment. Public Interest Lawyers stated, “In the light of the Iraq war logs, the UK cannot say that it did not have evidence that there was a real risk of torture and ill-treatment at the hands of the Iraqi authorities.”

More »

Khalid Amayreh

1- The overall situation in occupied Palestine has already reached (or is about to reach) the point of “no return.” This means that we have already passed the chances of peace by. This is mainly attributed to the unrelenting Israeli settlement-expansion policy all over the occupied territories, especially Occupied East Jerusalem. This manifestly illegal policy, which flies in the face of international law, has rendered the creation of a viable and territorially-contiguous Palestinian State on the territories occupied in 1967, a virtually impossible and unrealistic goal. In other words, Israel has effectively killed the chances for a viable Palestinian state. Therefore, one can safely claim that the current American-sponsored process has already been rendered more or less irrelevant.

The current Israeli government, which is indisputably the most hawkish and jingoistic in Israel ‘s history, is trying successfully to decapitate, once and for all, any remaining chances for peace, mainly by building more settlements and further narrowing Palestinian horizons. This is also done through irreversibly altering the panoramic face of East of Jerusalem and obliterating the occupied town’s Arab-Islamic identity.

2- The present political process is doomed to failure, for it is none but a mere reproduction and repetition of the same past failed efforts, especially since the Oslo Accords. Hence, pining any real hope on the success of the current process is tantamount to indulging in self-deception.

3- The United States government, regardless of which administration is in office, is unable or unwilling (or both) to force Israel to end its enduring occupation of Palestinian land. This is mainly imputed to the disproportionate influence Israel’s supporters including the so-called Jewish Lobby exert on the American policy in this part of the world. Needless to say, this particular dimension has become well-known to many academics, politicians as well as ordinary people.

4- Israel is not really interested in any genuine and durable peace with her Palestinian neighbors. Indeed, a country that keeps building settlements on occupied land and keeps transferring its own citizens to live on a land that belongs to another people, is obviously not interested in peace. And in order to divert the attention of the world from the hard reality in Occupied Palestine, Israel and her supporters constantly resort to campaigns of lie, otherwise called hasbara, all for the purpose of laying the blame on Palestinians for the political deadlock or dead-end which the situation in our region has reached.

More »

Stephen Lendman

On October 22, Reuters confirmed Haiti's cholera outbreak, saying efforts were being made to prevent an epidemic that so far "killed nearly 200 people and sickened more than 2,000," official reports understating the threat.

On the same day, New York Times writer Donald McNeil, Jr. headlined, "Cholera Outbreak Kills 150 in Haiti," saying:

"A cholera outbreak in a rural area of northwestern Haiti....overwhelmed local hospitals with thousands of sick," according to the World Health Organization. Rural Artibonite, Haiti's main rice-growing area, 62 miles north of Port-au-Prince was struck, though cases were surfacing elsewhere. They're now in the nation's capital where overcrowding threatens a possible epidemic.

Though normally less congested, Artibonite hosts thousands of earthquake victims, most drinking St. Marc River water, contaminated with raw sewage. As a result, a potential disaster there looms as in Port-au-Prince and other parts of Haiti. Dirty water and poor sanitation are the problems, as well as poverty, always the main cause wherever cholera strikes.

St. Marc Hospital was "a horror scene," said David Darg, director of Operation Blessing International. McNeil reported him

"describing people lying in courtyards on sheets soaked with rain and feces, children writhing in agony and adults lying motionless, their eyes rolled back as nurses searched for veins."

More »

Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service

The revelation by Wikileaks of a U.S. military order directing U.S. forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the U.S. military about detainee abuse.

But the deeper significance of the order, which has been missed by the news media, is that it was part of a larger U.S. strategy of exploiting Shi'a sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the U.S. war.

And Gen. David Petraeus was a key figure in developing the strategy of using Shi'a and Kurdish forces to suppress Sunnis in 2004-2005.

The strategy involved the deliberate deployment of Shi'a and Kurdish police commandoes in areas of Sunni insurgency in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by Wikileaks show.

That strategy inflamed Sunni fears of Shi'a rule and was a major contributing factor to the rise of al Qaeda's influence in the Sunni areas. The escalating Sunni-Shi'a violence it produced led to the massive sectarian warfare of 2006 in Baghdad in which tens of thousands of civilians - mainly Sunnis - were killed.

More »

Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

In her desperate attempt to smear Lauren Booth, Independent writer Julie Burchill, a devout Zionist, proves how deceiving British multiculturalism is.

Indeed the Zionification of this Kingdom has left this country in a disastrous ethical limbo.

“Last year I took the first steps towards converting to Judaism; also last year, I abandoned my attempt”, says Burchill.

But I guess that Burchill didn’t really have to convert -- She is obviously far more Jewish than anyone I can think of. Burchill can teach Rabbi Ovadia Yosef what self-love is all about. She can teach Paul Wolfowitz, David Aaronovitch and David Miliband what moral-interventionism stands for. She can give Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman a crash course in Hasbara. Burchill can lecture Zionist slander operators on how to spread venom.

But most significantly, she displays an astonishing command of Jewish humour. Burchill is indeed very funny.

More »

Erich Follath & Christian Neef
Der Spiegel

[Craig Murray's comment to this Spiegel article HERE]

Uzbekistan is both a nation of terror led by brutal dictator Islam Karimov and a partner of the West that is an important staging ground for NATO's war in Afghanistan. Its story is best told through the eyes of two men -- the flamboyant former British ambassador and the current top German diplomat in the country.

Some cities are tedium set in stone, joyless places where people don't live but merely survive.

And then there are the cities whose names alone are the stuff of legend. They are places of stunning geography, impressive history and breathtaking architecture. Three of these cities are Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, located on the legendary Silk Road in Uzbekistan in Central Asia, lined up like a string of pearls, each rising up from the shimmering heat of the surrounding deserts like mirages. These are magical places.

Their turquoise domes, madrassas decorated with mosaics and ornate caravanserai roadside inns are not only evidence of the skill of those who built them, but also of the ambitions of the ethnic groups that proudly left their mark on the region in past centuries: Persians, Greeks, Mongols and Turks. In the 19th century, the British and the Russians competed over strategic bases and mineral resources in the region, in what was known as the "Great Game." After 1920, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin drew the arbitrary borders that would later outline the Central Asian nations. Today, the region's conflicts are crystallizing once again.

Uzbekistan is the most populous and probably most important of the new Central Asian countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union. Islam Karimov, the Communist Party's first secretary in Uzbekistan prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, easily transitioned into his new role as president, brutally eliminating all opposition and placing members of his family into positions of power. Today Karimov has his eye on billions in future business. Uzbekistan is the world's sixth-largest cotton producer and has massive reserves of natural gas as well as gold and uranium deposits. It is potentially a wealthy country.

More »

Lawrence Davidson
Redress

Lawrence Davidson considers why so many US officials, some ostensibly intelligent, end up blatantly lying or blindly following murderous orders without question, and why the general public seems to accept this.

Dr Susan Elizabeth Rice (DPhil, Oxford, 1990) is United States ambassador at the United Nations. She is a professional diplomat and foreign policy consultant as well as a protégée of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Rice, who is unrelated to Condolezza Rice, had a reputation of being a free thinker and a stubborn defender of what she thought to be proper and right.

This tendency to be independent of mind meant she had trouble with other, older career diplomats when, in the second Clinton administration, she served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs. No doubt she soon learned that, in the world of diplomacy as in most well established bureaucracies, too much independent thinking makes you a square peg surrounded by round holes. In the long term one either conforms or leaves for a more accommodating career (usually in academia). It appears that Dr Rice has done the former.

Evidence of this choice came on 28 October 2010 when Ambassador Rice stepped out of the UN Security Council chamber in New York and began scolding the Syrian government for a "flagrant disregard" of Lebanese sovereignty. Syria is supposedly doing this by "continuing to provide increasingly sophisticated weapons to Lebanese militias, including Hezbollah…"

Murderous hypocrisy

Dr Rice’s charge is only superficially true and that is where she left it. For instance, she omitted the context of the situation and the whole recent history of Lebanon. She made no mention of Lebanon’s right-wing factions and the role of the United States and France in supporting their continuing divisive independence. She did not deem to mention that Lebanon’s horrible history of civil wars was finally brought to an end only with Syrian intervention. And, she did not tell of Hizbollah’s role as protector of the country’s majority Shi’i population as well as defender of the entire nation from the rapacity of the United States’ main ally, Israel. No, she did not put things in perspective, but rather got her orders from Washington to play the sovereignty card and thereby distort things for the sake of a highly partisan American position. And so, like a good soldier, she carried out those orders. She is now an official team player.

More »

Bill Van Auken
WSWS

The Obama administration is preparing to escalate its intervention in Yemen, placing US military units under CIA control to facilitate intensified drone attacks and death squad killings.

Citing unnamed government officials, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the administration has responded to the alleged airplane mail bomb plot by stepping up its consideration of “military options” inside Yemen.

According to the report, these plans would include placing “elite US hunter-killer teams that operate secretly in the country under Central Intelligence Agency authority.” The Journal added,

“The White House is already considering adding armed CIA drones to the arsenal against militants in Yemen, mirroring the agency’s Pakistan campaign.”

The purpose of placing the US intervention in Yemen (now largely conducted by US military special operations forces) under CIA command, the report states, would be to “streamline US decision-making, giving the White House more direct control over day-to-day operations.”

What this means in practice is that making the growing intervention in Yemen a CIA operation would allow the Obama administration to cloak in even greater secrecy its escalation in yet another front in the “global war on terrorism.” It would be able to operate with less congressional oversight, while concealing its actions from the American people.

Equally important, placing the operation under the command of the US spy agency would circumvent the need for explicit approval by Yemen’s government. While such approval is required for the deployment of the US military, outside of an outright war, the covert character of CIA’s activities would provide both Washington and the corrupt and autocratic regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh with “deniability.”

Popular hostility in Yemen to US operations is overwhelming, forcing Saleh to publicly declare his opposition to foreign military intervention and to refuse permission for some US missile strikes.

Washington’s aim is to create a similar arrangement as the one it forged with the government in Pakistan, which has tacitly accepted drone missile attacks—allowing US forces to operate from Pakistani territory—while publicly condemning them.

More »

JuJuBe (Joanna)
IMR

Last week, a victory for the government in a federal court case sent a signal out to the rest of the world as to how loosely we hold the ideals of "liberty and justice for all" In a decision that is not surprising AT ALL, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones determined that the Pentagon DOES NOT need to make public vital information pertaining to the prisoners held at the Parwan Prison on the Bagram Air Force Base outside of Kabul.

The ACLU filed suit demanding that such pertinent information as circumstances and location of "capture", the national origin and citizenship, and the length of imprisonment of detainees at Bagram be released. They were denied, under the guise of "national security". And, the judge also decided that there is no need to reveal whether or not the CIA is keeping captives there. It seems like after the debacles at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the government is reluctant to share any details of the hundreds of people detained at Bagram. The ACLU believes that it is for fear that the public will find out that many people being held are, in fact, innocent of any wrongdoing, simply victims of circumstance. Prisoners at Bragram DO NOT have the right to challenge their captivity in US Courts.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Currently writing a twice-weekly Washington Post column, Broder is called America's "dean" of political journalists, having covered every presidential campaign since Kennedy-Nixon. At age 81 (ironically born September 11, 1929), his bio lists an array of awards as well as accolades like:

● "Washington's most highly regarded columnist;
● Best Reporter;
● Hardest Working;
● the high priest of political journalism;
● the most respected and influential political journalist in the country; and
● Least Ideological," among others.

Phew, for a man distinguished more for supporting power and privilege than delivering real journalism, the kind found nowhere in the dominant media, especially in establishment broadsheets like The New York Times and Washington Post. Both papers and their star reporters are plagued by conflicts of interest, Broder more than most. Atop the media food chain, maybe all, and it shows.

More »

David Michael Green
The Regressive Antidote

You know, I hate like hell using the tired old Nazi analogy.

For one thing, everybody does it, and everybody does it all the time. It hasn't exactly earned an A for originality in about a half century now.

For another thing, not only does everybody do it, but now complete idiots who couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel are doing it too, and of course they're too dumb to even use the term properly. You can't foam at the mouth about what a freaking socialist Barack Obama is and then call him a Nazi at the same time. Unless, of course, you happen not to mind looking like a moron. Which, of course, all too many Americans don't anymore. But here's a hint to all y'all in the ganglion-cyst-where-there's-supposed-to-be-an-actual-brain crowd: Nazis hate socialists. Indeed, they murder them, along with Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals. Get it?

And then there's a third reason to avoid the Nazi analogy, namely that because everyone else is doing it, the term has now been diluted to the point of lacking all impact or meaning anymore. If everyone's a Nazi, no one is.

All good reasons not to use the term. But, that said, there are also three good reasons to do just that.

More »

Nahida Izzat
Exiled Palestinian

Alan Hart, a friend and supporter of Palestine, invited ALL Palestinians, at home and in Diaspora with all their political shades, factions and affiliations to unite and “call israel’s bluff”.

On July 27, 2010 he writes: (emphasis mine)

“They could do so with a joint Fatah-Hamas statement to something like this effect: “We cannot and will not recognise Israel’s “right” to exist because it has no such right, but we are a pragmatic people and we hereby declare that we are prepared to recognise and live in permanent peace with the reality of an Israel inside its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war, with Jerusalem an open, undivided city and the capital of two states… We further declare that our pragmatism extends to accepting that the right of the dispossessed Palestinians to return must and will be confined to the Palestinian state, which means that many of those who wish to return will have to settle for compensation for the loss of their homes and their land.”

Alan Hart recapitulates:

“The point of the article above is only that I believe the Palestinian leadership should now say, in the most explicit terms, that most Palestinians are still prepared to live in permanent peace with an Israel inside its pre-1967 borders."

Our friend wants the Palestinians to attest their good-intention publicly, once and for all and demonstrate to the world and to the occupiers of their lands that they are only interested in peace, they "should" reassure their rapist murderers, "in the most explicit terms" that they want to "live in permanent peace" with a Jewish state encroached over 80% of their land!!

In other words, Palestinians are strongly advised by our friend to pull their acts together, organize, unite and hurry up, sign the statement he prepared for them in which they sign off permanently their RIGHTS to their OWN historic land of Palestine. Furthermore, he wants the Palestinians to declare publicly and permanently that they are giving up their right of return!

More »

Stephen Lendman

Besides less prominent investment/economic advisors, no one does it better than Jeremy Grantham, based in Boston, not Wall Street. In 1977, he co-founded Grantham, Mayo and Van Otterloo, now known as GMO. Quarterly in letters to clients, he assesses current economic and market conditions, taking a longer view as well.

His commentaries are reflective, refreshing, scholarly, sober and clear, although in recent ones (compared to the previous 15 years) he's been uncharacteristically upbeat. Not in his latest, however, titled, "Night of the Living Fed: Something Unbelievably Terrifying," below which, in billboard film promotion form, he lists the following:

"Runaway Commodities!
(Zombi) Banks Come Back to Life!
Homes Destroyed!
Families Evicted!
Currency Wars!
Starring BEN BERNANKE
and introducing JANET YELLEN (current Fed vice chairman)
with Guest Appearance as Chief Zombie ALAN GREENSPAN,"

the Maestro of Misery, responsible for today's mess before Bernanke took over in February 2006, exacerbating it with policies disgusting enough to make legitimate analysts blush, cry foul, or rage against ruinous practices on his watch.

Credit Grantham for the latter, at his best in his Q3 report. Noting "The Ruinous Cost of Fed Manipulation of Asset Prices," he says the following:

"If I were a benevolent dictator, I would strip the Fed of its obligation to worry about the economy (failing dismally at it)....limit(ing) its meddling to attempting to manage inflation."

Put another way, he recommends maintaining price stability alone, what few, if any, Fed chairmen accomplished since 1913 - why nearly a century later, pre-Fed dollar value declined to less than 5 cents. Moreover, it's heading lower, given Bernanke bent on weakening it, perhaps destroying it to be replaced by a Wall Street controlled global currency. They may crave it, but not US households seeing their savings destroyed.

More »