Stephen Lendman

In London, at a June 1999 anti-Yugoslavia war rally, Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter scathed US and UK leaders, saying:

"Let us face the truth....(N)either Clinton nor Blair gives a damn about the Kosovar Albanians. This action has been another blatant and brutal assertion of US power using NATO as its missile....to consolidate....American domination of Europe."

Today, Obama doesn't give a damn about Libyans, any more than about Iraqis, Afghans or working Americans. At issue only is Washington wanting unchallenged dominance everywhere, including over the Mediterranean Basin, using two missiles - NATO and so-called rebels, enlisted, funded, trained and armed well before bombing began on March 19.

Besides civilians and former regime soldiers, Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) paramilitaries comprise their hardcore - Al Qaeda-linked insurgents, cutthroat killers, showing no mercy for suspected pro-Gaddafi sympathizers.

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Stephen Lendman

Israeli border police in the occupied Jerusalem neighborhood
of Silwan. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

On April 7, 2011, HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) filed a petition, demanding that Israel's Interior Ministry stop revoking residency permits given East Jerusalem Palestinians.

After its June 1967 annexation, life for Palestinian residents became an ongoing cycle of neglect, discrimination, poverty, shortages, and persecution, compounded by the encircling Separation Wall and worsening daily hardships.

Moreover, though no longer, as permanent Israeli residents, they were afforded the right to live and work in Israel without special permits. However, permanent residency, unlike citizenship, passes on conditionally to children. For example, marrying someone without one and/or the other requires applying for family unification to live together. In fact, Israel treats East Jerusalem Arabs as foreigners, whose rights can be summarily revoked, denied, or severely restricted any time for any reason by civil or military order.

As a result, residents endure repeated investigations and inquiries to keep proving their legitimacy, letting authorities arbitrarily deny it. In addition, time and expense are involved, including for services and applications that can take months or years to be considered.

Moreover, many Palestinians live outside Jerusalem's municipal boundaries with no Israeli residency status. Severed from the West Bank by the Separation Wall, they're trapped in East Jerusalem in limbo. In October 2007, Israel denied them permanent residency, issuing only temporary permits under military authority.

Even getting them involves cost and bureaucratic red tape, and those with them may live in their homes, but not work or drive in Jerusalem. Nor can they get education, health, or other services. As a result, they've been ghettoized under severe, unrelenting duress as foreigners in their own homes on their own land in their own country.

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Stephen Lendman

This day remains embedded in Palestinian consciousness. A historic fact, it represents an appalling injustice, inspiring resolve to keep struggling for liberation, independence, peace, and just redress, nothing less.

What Ilan Pappe described as "the ethnic cleaning of Palestine," Edward Said called its "holocaust," saying:

"Every human calamity is different, but there is value in seeing analogies and perhaps hidden similarities." He called Nazi extermination "the lowest point of (Jewish) collective existence." Occupied Palestinians today "are as powerless as Jews were" under Hitler, devastated by "power used for evil purposes," not self-defense.

As a result, they hang onto life by a thread, while Israel's military juggernaut systematically reigns terror against them, no one intervening to help. "Is this the Zionist goal for which hundreds of thousands have died," Said asked? Isn't it time for justice advocates to demand for Palestinians what Jews spent decades to achieve.

In his book titled, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," Pappe documented Israel's master plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), a war without mercy:

● depopulating villages and cities;
● massacring innocent victims;
● committing rapes and other atrocities;
● burning, bulldozing, blowing up or stealing homes, property and goods; and
● preventing expelled Palestinians from returning.

In all, systematic terror expelled about 800,000 Palestinians, killed many others, and destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. It was genocidal ethnic cleansing, what international law today calls a crime of war and against humanity for which convicted Nazis at Nuremberg were hanged.

Under 44 years of occupation this June, Palestinians still experience daily institutionalized persecution with no power over their daily lives in a constant state of fear with good reason.

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Ellen Brown
Web of Debt

Debate continues to rage between the inflationists who say the money supply is increasing, dangerously devaluing the currency, and the deflationists who say we need more money in the economy to stimulate productivity. The debate is not just an academic one, since the Fed’s monetary policy turns on it and so does Congressional budget policy.

Inflation fears have been fueled ever 2009, when the Fed began its policy of “quantitative easing” (effectively “money printing”). The inflationists point to commodity prices that have shot up. The deflationists, in turn, point to the housing market, which has collapsed and taken prices down with it. Prices of consumer products other than food and fuel are also down. Wages have remained stagnant, so higher food and gas prices mean people have less money to spend on consumer goods. The bubble in commodities, say the deflationists, has been triggered by the fear of inflation. Commodities are considered a safe haven, attracting a flood of “hot money” -- investment money racing from one hot investment to another.

To resolve this debate, we need the actual money supply figures. Unfortunately, the Fed quit reporting M3, the largest measure of the money supply, in 2006.

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Stephen Lendman

[A man lies dead on the ground after an anti-government demonstration in the southern city of Les Cayes, Haiti, Monday, April 7, 2008. Hungry protesters angered by high food prices flooded the streets of Port-au-Prince, forced businesses and schools to close as unrest spread from the countryside. Witnesses said the man was killed by elite protecting hotel 'security guards.' Photo: AP/Nick Whalen/The WE!]

Martelly's mandate is to facilitate profiteering from misery.

Except for Aristide's tenure, what passes for Haitian democracy would make a despot blush, thanks to America's imperial grip on the hemisphere's poorest, long-suffering people.

As a result, last November's presidential and legislative elections might best be called a cruel joke. The entire process was rigged to exclude 15 parties, including by far the most popular, Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas.

Moreover, the election was so tainted by brazen disenfranchisement and fraud, including ballot box stuffing and other irregularities, that legitimate independent observers would have demanded throwing out the results and starting over.

Most Haitians, however, weren't fooled. A scant 22%, in fact, voted, a hemispheric low since record keeping began over 60 years ago.

Since no presidential candidate won a majority, a March 20 runoff followed, pitting stealth Duvalierist Michel ("Sweet Micky") Martelly, an anti-populist former Kompa singer, against Mirlande Manigat, wife of former right-wing president, Leslie Manigat. Between them, they got about 11% support in round one, making them both illegitimate presidential choices.

Even more so for winner Martelly with fewer than 22% of Haitians voting, a new record low so embarrassing it was almost like holding a national election and no one showed up. Why bother with only US approved candidates participating, making both rounds fraudulent, illegitimate, and predictable, assuring sham democracy, continued repression, deep poverty, and exploitation for another five years.

Nonetheless, on May 14, Martelly will be inaugurated as president, by imperial selection, not popular mandate. In a nation of about 9.7 million people, he got about 700,000 votes, about 16.7% of registered voters (about 7% of all Haitians), making him perhaps Haiti's least popular president ever. The people's choice, he's not, with good reason.

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Barry Grey
WSWS

Migrants who successfully made the boat trip to the tiny island
of Lampedusa, Italy from the unrest in north Africa receive as-
sistance. Photograph: Francesco Malavolta/AP

The attempt to justify the imperialist war by casting it as a humanitarian intervention to protect Libyan civilians against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi exposed as fraud

The British Guardian newspaper published an investigative report Monday documenting the case of African refugees who were left to die in the early days of the war against Libya by NATO and European authorities who spotted their vessel drifting in the Mediterranean but made no effort to rescue them.

The newspaper, citing the account of survivors and an Eritrean priest in Rome who was one of the last people to communicate with the stranded boat, said the passengers were left to drift in open waters for 16 days, even though the Italian coastguard had been alerted and the vessel had been seen by a military helicopter and an aircraft carrier.

Only nine of the 72 people who boarded the boat in Tripoli on March 25 in a desperate attempt to reach the Italian island port of Lampedusa 180 miles northwest of the Libyan capital survived the ordeal. The others, including 20 women and two babies, died from thirst and starvation while on the boat or after beaching near Misrata on April 10.

The Guardian exposé coincided with an announcement Monday by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR that a refugee boat with as many as 600 people on board sank Friday off the coast of Tripoli. There are no reports of survivors.

UNHCR spokeswoman Laura Boldrini said that, besides the disaster on Friday, at least three other boats with a combined total of several hundred passengers left Tripoli in late March and disappeared.

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Gilles Dorronsoro
The National Interest

[U.S. soldiers in Bravo Company stationed near Kandahar in a war game they were playing took it upon themselves to kill an unarmed Afghanistan boy. The Kill team did this January 15th 2010. Gul Mudin, a young teenager, lived in the village of La Mohammad Kalay, Afghanistan. Sworn statements have two soldiers Corporal Jeremy Morlock and Private First Class Andrew Holmes engaged in staging the killing so that it would appear that the US soldiers had been under attack. The statements read that they ordered the boy to stand still, then they tossed a grenade at him and opened fire with their weapons while they remained behind a mud wall. The dead body of the boy, Gul Mudin is seen here lying by the wall where he was killed. - The WE!]

Along the road between Jalalabad and Asadabad, two cities in eastern Afghanistan, an American truck is broken down as Afghan vehicles approach. A U.S. soldier steps out to stop oncoming traffic and begins to scream obscenities and, with his rifle butt, hit cars (including mine) that don’t move back fast enough. This will block the road for almost an hour and brew distrust and even hatred between American troops and the local population. Isolated incident? Unfortunately no.

Afghans say that this is just one minor incident in a series of more serious events. Nine children were recently shot down from an American helicopter in Kunar province after the pilot mistakenly thought they were insurgents. And shortly before I witnessed tensions mounting on the roadside, more than sixty civilians were killed in a coalition bombing.

Far from being contained to a specific area, the rejection of foreigners and international troops is pervasive across Afghanistan. This is a major problem for the coalition. A few outrageously manipulated polls notwithstanding, Afghans obviously see the coalition as an occupying force. With war crimes committed by some rogue U.S. troops and vile pictures of American servicemen smiling near the bodies of dead civilians still circulating widely via mobile phone—even to the most remote Afghan villages—the credibility of the coalition is destroyed.

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Michael C. Ruppert
Global Research

May 5, 2011, 1400 PST, SEBASTOPOL – I have personally interrogated underage criminal suspects who could lie better than White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. It has been four days since the P.T. Barnum proclamation of the death of Osama bin Laden (OBL). President Obama’s account of the firefight has had zero credibility from the outset and it continues to fray and wear thin as each day passes.

First, bin Laden was shooting. Then he wasn’t. Now, no pictures are going to be released. Ridiculous arguments on CNN, by House members stating that releasing photos would inflame and invite retaliation, flatly contradict what I suspect every grunt who ever earned a Combat Infantry Badge would say:

“Release the damn pictures. Give us some to hand out to the “indigs”. We got our man and that’s a message to anyone who would mess with us…Hoo Ah!”

However, as with 9-11, in order to fully appreciate the stupidity of the Obama Administration’s ploy it is only necessary to focus on one glaring inconsistency. With our focus on this inconsistency, demand an answer to it and bring down a house of cards that is already falling. This approach is essentially the same path I have taken with the War Game exercises that were being conducted on September 11th. The issue that follows is to focus on what to do with this inconsistency.

This also raises a fair question: Is 9-11 back on the table for me?

The answer is yes and no. Especially when “no” applies to any expectation that a competent, trustworthy court with jurisdiction would act with a budget and full approval of the U.S. Congress and the American people to actually reveal the truth and take action.

It is yes when, as you will hear below, responsible and credible academics and journalists see the direct connection between September 11,2001 and where we are today… and where we are headed as a planet.

This is because it is not possible to accurately understand or respond to Collapse without “seeing” all the criminality that led to it. Moreover, it is not possible to effectively deal with Collapse until the criminal behavior has been identified, addressed, and effectively terminated. Otherwise, the human race is left to confront Collapse as it is now; on an ad hoc basis, without any participation of sincere, honest and focused governmental bodies.

There is a massive awakening-taking place globally. However, the difference between this and what could be accomplished if governments were actively and helpfully involved is… maybe three billion human lives.

Now, back to Osama bin Laden.

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Stephen Lendman

In a video released by the Pentagon on Saturday, Osama bin
Laden watched television at his compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan. (Department of Defense, via Agence France-Presse
— Getty Images)

On May 2, AP writer Matt Apuzzo headlined, "US Official: New bin Laden tape, recorded shortly before death, expected to surface soon," saying:

"US intelligence officials believe (he) made a propaganda recording shortly before his death and expect that tape to surface soon....A new recording (would) provide a final word from beyond the grave...."

On May 7, New York Times writer Elisabeth Bumiller headlined, "Videos From Bin Laden's Hide-Out Released," saying:

On May 7, the administration "released five videos recovered from" his alleged hideout, showing him "threatening the United States, condemning capitalism and at some points flubbing his lines and missing a cue."

Videos were released "without sound (allegedly) to avoid disseminating terrorist messages....The intelligence official who briefed reporters....took pains to point out that bin Laden....had dyed his white beard black," suggesting vanity or a desire to look younger.

Unmentioned were earlier tapes, including a posthumous December 27, 2001 video showing his beard clearly gray and another in 2004 the same, unlike a 2007 one showing it black. Forensic evidence proved the latter two crude audio and video fakes. More on them below.

Moreover, it's unclear whether Islamic law or teachings prohibit dying hair black. An Islam Question & Answer site says:

"Dyeing hair with pure black dye is haram (punishable) because the Prophet....said: "Avoid black," as well as "the threat of punishment reported with regard to this matter. This ruling applies to both men and women."

However, if black dye "is mixed with another color, so that it is no longer black, there is nothing wrong with it." A more detailed statement can be accessed through this link. True or false, other observers believe bin Laden never dyed his hair or beard, a notion in their minds as absurd.

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June Terpstra
LEARN

On May, 6, 2011, embattled Jazz musician and philosopher Gilad Atzmon gave a talk at Columbia College Chicago about his intellectual and musical journey of liberation from identity supremacy and the shame of living in an oppressor state. In tones intense and dissonant he provided definitions for Zionism, Judaism, Jewish supremacy, Israel and Palestine while contextualizing with both the saxophone and reflections on being raised in a culture where one group’s hunger for superiority, power and properties concludes with the oppression of the indigenous “other”. Gilad gave witness to the horrific methods the Israeli states goes to attain their supremacy.

While his story takes place in the land of Palestine with a state called Israel similar stories are simultaneously being played out in Iraq, Afghanistan, with Libya and Pakistan next on the list, by what is called the United States and the United Kingdom and other European competitors. The groups doing the aggressive killings and plundering believe that by eradicating some and controlling all of the indigenous groups they will gain both power and domination of the lands and resources. The Israelis, Americans and British stop at nothing and do everything to gain and maintain their supremacy. The committing of such heinous crimes against other human beings requires the blocking of the heart of the human connection between the two groups. By disconnecting one’s self from the reality of the crime, the imposing group is able to carry out their atrocities while naming any indigenous resistance that does not benefit them, terrorism.

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Stephen Lendman

'The recent growth-burst is built on monetary and fiscal policies
which are wildly expansionary, wholly unsustainable and will surely
soon come to an end.'

On May 6, headlines cheered the new jobs report, New York Times writer Motoko Rich headlining, "Payrolls Show Strong Growth but Jobless Rate Rises," saying:

"For three straight months, the nation's employers have delivered solid job growth, easing some concerns that the economy could be slowing."

Bloomberg.com's Timothy Homan said, at 244,000, "American employers in April added more jobs than forecast....indicating the world's largest economy is weathering the impact of higher fuel prices."

Wall Street Journal writer Sara Murray wrote:

"Job engine shifts to higher gear (as) companies cranked up hiring in April to the fastest pace in five years...."

In fact, labor force participation held steady at 64.2% for the fourth consecutive month, down from 66% in 2006. Moreover, economist Jack Rasmus estimates 25 million unemployed, a number showing downturn, not growth. He also explained that considerably more workers left the labor force than entered it, saying:

A recovering jobs market "does not experience that kind of massive number of discouraged workers leaving the labor force. Quite the opposite. A truly recovering labor market is characterized by large numbers of discouraged workers re-entering the labor force. Something else is going on here."

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Hedy Epstein
Move Over AIPAC

At the end of one of my first journeys to the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2004, I endured a shocking experience at Ben-Gurion Airport. I never imagined that Israeli security forces would abuse a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, but they held me for five hours, and strip-searched and cavity-searched every part of my naked body. The only shame these security officials expressed was to turn their badges around so that their names were invisible.

The only conceivable purpose for this gross violation of my bodily integrity was to humiliate and terrify me. But it had just the opposite effect. It made me more determined to speak out against abuses by the Israeli government and military.

Yet my own experience, unpleasant as it was, is nothing compared to the indignities and abuses heaped on Palestinians year after year. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is based not on equal rights and fair play, but on what Human Rights Watch has termed a “two-tier” legal system – in other words, apartheid, with one set of laws for Jews and a harsh, oppressive set of laws for Palestinians.

This, however, is the legal system and security state AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) will defend from May 22-24 at its annual conference. And, despite this grim reality, members of Congress will converge to hail AIPAC and Israel. The Palestinians’ lack of freedom is bound to be obscured at the AIPAC conference with its obsessive focus on security and shunting aside of anything to do with upholding fundamental Palestinian rights.

Several years ago near Der Beilut in the West Bank, I saw the Israeli police turn a water cannon on our nonviolent protest. As it happened, I recalled Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 and wondered why an ostensibly democratic society responded to peaceable assembly by trying, literally, to drown out the voice of our protest.

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Stephen Lendman

Wikipedia defines false or black flags as

"covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities."

They're "big lies," defined by Merriam-Webster as

"deliberate gross distortion(s) of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic."

America's decade from September 11, 2001 to May 1, 2011 was punctuated by the (big) lie of our time and (big) lie of the moment.

Put another way, the official stories are falsified, myths, widely believed fantasies contrary to reality.

In his exhaustive research and writings, David Ray Griffin provided convincing evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and that bin Laden died of natural causes in mid-December 2001.

The former spawned a decade of overt and covert "war on terror" lawlessness at home and abroad. Policies and events following the second have yet to unfold, but expect little at best to be positive.

Past US false flags provided pretexts for militarism, wars, occupations, domestic repression, and national security state extremism, antithetical to democratically free and open societies. Allegedly removing America's "Enemy Number One," in fact, may intensify, not diminish, Washington's scheme for unchallengeable global dominance. More on him below.

With or without bin Laden, bogymen threats are plentiful. Since WW II alone, America's had numerous ones, including communists, Al Qaeda, WMDs, the Taliban, Gaddafi, and a host others yet unnamed, as well as numerous "foiled" domestic ones.

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Larry Chin
Global Research

The Obama administration and the corporate media are concocting an ever-more elaborate and spectacular theater around the “heroic” murder of the CIA intelligence myth/CIA asset Osama bin Laden. Not content to simply to exploit the 9/11 atrocity for political gain, the administration is heaping new layers of lie and cover-up to the original crime.

The growing cover-up

The desperation is palpable. Just days since the “big announcement”, Obama administration officials have already been forced to backpedal, issuing multiple corrections, adding to the confusion over the location of the killing, whether bin Laden was armed or unarmed, whether there was a “fire fight”, if an alleged wife was involved, the burial at sea, whether to release “graphic photos”, etc. The mainstream corporate media---following approved CIA/White House narratives---is spewing and regurgitating a tidal wave of red herrings that add to the inconsistencies.

Seasoned observers will not be fooled, no matter how many Obama lies, doctored photos, fake footage, lurid new testimonials and CIA pronouncements are pushed forth. As put simply by Paul Craig Roberts:

“As the alleged body has been dumped into the ocean, nothing remains but the word of the US government, which lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections, about yellowcake, about Iranian nukes, and, according to thousands of experts, about 9/11. Suddenly the government is telling us the truth about bin Laden’s death? If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have for a good price.”

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Janet McMahon (WRMEA)
Pink Tank

One could be forgiven for thinking that the last three letters of AIPAC stand for “political action committee.” But since the American Israel Public Affairs Committee does not itself make campaign contributions to political candidates, technically it is not a PAC. Curiously, however, the 30-odd “unaffiliated” pro-Israel PACs, most with deceptively innocuous names, all seem to give to the same candidates—almost as if there were a guiding intelligence behind their contributions. In the eyes of the Federal Election Commission, AIPAC is a “membership organization” rather than a political committee. This means that, unlike actual PACs, AIPAC is not required to file public reports on its income and expenditures.

Not for nothing, however, did Fortune magazine once name it the second most powerful lobby in Washington. So it’s easy to understand why, like a night flower that blooms in the dark and dies with the light of day, this particular organization which advances the interests of a foreign government has fought long and hard to ensure that its funding sources and expenditures are not exposed to public scrutiny.

Despite its best efforts, however, unwanted light does occasionally shine on AIPAC’s activities. Most dramatically, perhaps, two of its top operatives, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were indicted on espionage charges in 2005. Four years later federal prosecutors dropped the charges when it became clear that Judge T.S. Ellis’ numerous rulings in favor of the defendants would require the release of sensitive government documents. Rosen then sued his former employer for defamation, claiming that AIPAC routinely dealt in classified information and that he was in no way a rogue employee, as AIPAC had claimed.

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Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed
Al-Nahyan, left, speaks to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary R.
Clinton at the Second Contact Group Meeting on Libya, in
Rome, on Thursday, May 5, 2011. (AP/J. Martin, Pool)

Yesterday’s meeting of the “Contact Group on Libya” concluded with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announcing that Washington will soon “tap some portion” of the $30 billion in Libyan assets it has confiscated to assist the military intervention.

The brazen illegality of the Obama administration’s moves to use Libya’s national wealth to keep the so-called rebel leadership afloat again demonstrates the colonial character of the US-NATO war to oust Muammar Gaddafi.

Held in Rome, Italy, the second meeting of the Contact Group was a squalid spectacle, resembling a gathering of mafia bosses coordinating a lucrative heist. Twenty-two foreign ministers, mostly from European and Arab states, were joined by officials with the UN, Arab League, NATO, the European Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the World Bank.

In a lengthy joint statement, the group declared that the so-called Interim National Council (INC) in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi is a “legitimate interlocutor for Libyans”—a status that “should entail the possibility for it to request the unfreezing of Libyan assets, which remain frozen in accounts in several states”. A “Temporary Financial Mechanism” has been established to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to the anti-Gaddafi leadership, which comprises various ex-regime figures, Islamic fundamentalists, and US intelligence assets. Kuwait has already pledged $180 million, and Qatar $400 million.

The Obama administration will move to pass legislation allowing it to spend $150 million in Libyan assets in seized in February. The Washington Post reported that “the administration will work with Congress to decide who will get the money”—underscoring the arbitrary and illegal nature of the operation. The Post further explained that the initial sum is only a small fraction of the total $30 billion in “frozen” Libyan assets because “some of that money is in American banks overseas, making it more complicated to use”.

Apparently, stealing Libyan resources is one thing, but removing them from the coffers of American banks quite another.

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Stephen Lendman

As reported, it sounded more like bad fiction than eliminating "Enemy Number One," especially with no visuals, corpse, independent proof, and shifting official accounts.

In Hollywood, it's called rewrite. In politics, it's lying, a Washington bipartisan specialty, notably on issues mattering most.

Also at issue is conducting lawless operations for any purpose. More on that below.

Two previous articles discussed the staged May Day hokum, accessed through the following links here and here.

They addressed the alleged killing of a dead man, an administration and media spread lie. David Ray Griffin's important book titled, "Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?" provided convincing objective and testimonial evidence of his mid-December 2001 death, of natural causes, not a commando hit squad getting their man.

Issues and Answers

After years of using bin Laden simultaneously as a CIA asset and "Enemy Number One," why the shift now? Aside from eliminating the alleged top terror threat, major events like this are always strategically timed for political reasons.

At least several stand out now, including:

(1) Boosting Obama's sagging image. It worked according to a New York Times poll showing an approval bump from 46% in April to an early May 57%, even though the euphoria will soon fade in hard times.
(2) Diverting attention from eroding domestic needs, notably growing angst over a deepening Main Street depression.
(3) Hyping fear for intensified, not less, imperial war, and perhaps preparing the ground for a major false flag attack to advance America's grand scheme for unchallengeable global dominance.

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James Petras
The James Petras Website

Boy killed by Honduran military with bullets and M-16′s
paid for by the U.S. government

Imperial interventions in civil wars have a devastating effect on countries that last for decades and affect the entire economy and society. One indicator of the long-term consequences of imperial military intervention is the tremendous increase of violent crime, the multiplication of gangs, homicides and general insecurity in Central America.

Violence increased far beyond what existed prior to imperial wars in such countries as Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. In the period prior to imperial intervention in Central America, during times of revolutionary ferment, high levels of social organization via inclusive social movements, channeled discontent into political and social channels. Revolutionary movements organized armed resistance against specifics targets; repressive police, military and death squad militias. Imperial intervention included military advisers and counter-insurgency strategies which uprooted peasants via scorched earth policies and destroyed communities. Assaults on urban barrios led to the break-up of family and neighborhood networks. The social bonds which integrate people into a moral and social community were ruptured: the goal of imperial planners is to decimate any independent popular civil-society organization as a political threat to its illegitimate collaborator regime.

In El Salvador, the US provided over $300 million a year in arms and training for almost a decade. The Pentagon through its advisory missions, in collaboration with local landlords and generals, financed and forcibly recruited thousands of peasants into death squad ‘civilian militias’ to assassinate local movement activists and terrorize farm workers’movements and trade union organizations. Under imperial military pressure the leaders of the major Central American guerrilla organizations signed on to a peace agreement. The “peace accords” retained the US collaborator regimes in power and the promised social reforms were never implemented. As a result, the homicide rate skyrocketed. The discharged guerrilla militants and unemployed right wing militia members, armed and trained, and with no future, became the bases for gangs, drug and people traffickers, kidnappers and extortionists. The number of people who were annually killed in violent crime (1991-2011) exceeded the number who died each year during the revolutionary struggle (1979-1990).

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Sergei Shashkov
Strategic Culture Foundation

The task of the media is to portray situations in line with the powerful decision-makers' needs rather than to reflect reality.

The media have long evolved into a kind of auxiliary warfare, and, in terms of their impact, now almost rank with weapons of mass destruction.

The West maintains a number of media-related institutions which, in the majority of cases, are integrated into defense or security agencies, serving to feed carefully tailored information to the audiences and to influence the public opinion. Part of their mission is to instill robotically unwaivering support for military campaigns including bombings and occupations of sovereign countries while justifying tolerance, oftentimes temporary, in dealing with others…

The corresponding techniques are being permanently refined. The contrast between the former information campaigns — those which paralleled the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999 and preceded the «democratization» of Iraq in 2003 - and the current one around Libya highlights the impressive progress made by media technologies along with the striking buildup of cynicism over the relatively short period of time…

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Stephen Lendman

A previous article explained the announced deal, accessed through this link.

In late April, Fatah and Hamas announced a reconciliation draft agreement, including a transitional government and planned presidential and legislative elections within a year.

It signaled hope for rapprochement between the two sides, as well as better prospects for Palestinian independence within 1967 borders, UN membership, achieving peace, and ending Israel's 44 year occupation. However, fulfillment faces long odds without strong Western backing, unlikely to surface given determined Israeli and Washington pressure to subvert it.

Despite unresolved issues between the two sides, AFP writer Nasser Abu Bakr headlined on May 3, "Palestinian factions sign unity deal in Cairo," saying:

"Representatives of 13 factions (including Fatah and Hamas), as well as independent political (groups), inked the deal following talks with Egyptian officials."

According to PLO member Bilal Qassem, "All the Palestinian factions signed the document at a meeting with Egyptian intelligence officials."

Palestine People's Party member Walid al-Awad said:

"We signed the deal despite several reservations. But we insisted on working for the higher national interest. We have discussed all the reservations. Everyone has agreed to take these points into consideration."

At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu denounced it, calling it "a hard blow to the peace process" he fundamentally rejects as a waste of time based on earlier comments.

Of course, signing ceremonies are one thing, commitment and follow through another, as well as fine print deal details. More on them below.

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