Philip Giraldi

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, poses for a picture with
the national synchronized swimming team during an awards cere-
mony for Russia's Olympians in Moscow's Kremlin. (08/15/12)

That 120,000 Russians can gather in the streets to protest an election speaks well of them and they should be left alone to find their own way. Would that half that many Americans could come together to actively protest the political process in the United States. That would be something worth seeing.

I confess that I cannot quite understand the campaign by the neoconservatives and also a number of leading Democrats to vilify Russia and confront it at every opportunity. The Cold War has been over for more than 20 years, but some appear to want to revive it. Russia has evolved into a developing democracy, has a relatively free press, has a judiciary that functions at least some of the time, is natural-resource rich, and has an economy that is now linked to the rest of the world and is doing reasonably well. On the negative side, it is plagued by corruption and cronyism as well as increasing authoritarianism, but the average Russian enjoys freedoms never experienced in Soviet days and can also see steady improvement in the standard of living. The country’s president, Vladimir Putin, continues to be supported by most Russians, though dissent is admittedly growing over his clear reluctance to give up power.

Russia has a lot to offer the West. It has good ties with its traditional friends in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, and it still is seen by many foreign governments as an anti-colonial power. This means it is well placed to help mediate crisis situations with countries like Syria and Iran, which no longer trust Washington or the Western Europeans. Instead, however, the U.S. and some of its allies have seen Russia as an obstruction precisely because it refuses to endorse “humanitarian intervention” and regime change. Regime change has not exactly worked out very well in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and we shall soon see what will happen in Syria. Moscow’s cautious approach is almost certainly the better option.

And Russia is still a major military power. It is the only country in the world that has the ability to destroy the United States, which one might think would be sufficient reason to establish a friendly relationship. Russia has also indicated its willingness to reduce its own nuclear and chemical arsenals and to work with Washington to safeguard existing nuclear stockpiles through the bilateral Cooperative Threat Reduction Program.

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Stephen Lendman

Never bet against Washington's imperial plans. New tactics follow failed ones. Efforts to oust Assad continue. Proxy killers can't do it alone. They're no match against Syria's superior military strength. It's committed to rout them. Expect NATO intervention anytime or perhaps post-US November elections. Libya 2.0 looks increasingly likely. What better way to finesse it than by staging a false flag attack blamed on Assad. America's false flag history suggests it.

■ In 1898, Spain was falsely accused of blowing up the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba harbor. The Spanish-American war followed.
■ Roosevelt manipulated Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. South Korea was used to instigate war on the North. Lyndon Johnson wanted war on Vietnam and got it.
■ Fake threats sent US marines to Grenada. Manufactured incidents precipitated America's Panama invasion.
■ Saddam was head-faked into invading Kuwait. The Gulf War, two decades of sanctions, another war, and occupation followed.
■ September 11, 2001 was the mother of all false flags. It's the big lie of our time. Eleven years of imperial wars followed. One segues to another without end. Syria is Washington's latest. Iran is next. Proxy wars always rage. Media silence makes pretexts unnecessary.

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Johannes Stern

Israeli-US script: Divide Syria, divide the rest. (Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya)

The cynicism with which Obama is seeking to justify the next US aggression in the Middle East is staggering.

Yesterday US and NATO officials discussed plans for a US military invasion of Syria to bring down Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, after US President Barack Obama announced that the US was contemplating a direct attack on Syria at a press conference Monday night.

A delegation led by Assistant Secretary for State for near East Affairs Beth Jones discussed US military plans with Turkey. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that Defense Department and US intelligence officials met their Turkish counterparts “to share operational pictures, to talk about the effectiveness of what we’re doing now, and about what more we can do.”

Senior US officials said that contingency plans for US intervention in Syria include scenarios requiring tens of thousands of American troops.

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Julie Hyland

The British media has played a venal role throughout the ongoing efforts to witch-hunt and silence WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. But it has plumbed new depths following the decision by Ecuador to grant his request for political asylum.

The WikiLeaks founder sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London on June 12, when it became apparent that UK authorities intended to extradite him to Sweden.

In his statement delivered from a window at the embassy on Sunday, Assange gave fresh evidence of Britain’s efforts to flout international law with its threat to derecognise the embassy and send police to arrest him. He described how he had heard police “storming” through internal fire escapes earlier in the week. He [also] denounced the incarceration and torture of alleged whistleblower, US Army private Bradley Manning, called for an end to the US-led persecution of WikiLeaks, the defence of free speech and resistance to state repression.

Like the British government, which has refused to comment on Assange’s statement, the media had nothing to say on the substance of his remarks. The well-paid hacks of Fleet Street are just as contemptuous towards democratic rights as their political masters. This applies with equal measure to those employed by newspapers that are overtly right-wing, such as the Daily Mail, or nominally liberal outlets like the Guardian.

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Julian Assange

I am here today because I cannot be there with you today. But thank you for coming. Thank you for your resolve and your generosity of spirit.

On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and the police descended on this building, you came out in the middle of the night to watch over it, and you brought the world’s eyes with you.

Inside this embassy, after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape. But I knew there would be witnesses. And that is because of you.

If the U.K. did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching.

So, the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the embassy of Ecuador.

Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world and a courageous Latin America nation took a stand for justice.

And so, to those brave people: I thank President Correa for the courage he has shown in considering and in granting me political asylum.

And I also thank the government, and in particular Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño, who upheld the Ecuadorian constitution and its notion of universal rights in their consideration of my asylum. And to the Ecuadorian people for supporting and defending this constitution.

And I also have a debt of gratitude to the staff of this embassy, whose families live in London and who have shown me hospitality and kindness despite the threats we all received.

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Brandon Smith

Tyranny is nothing but an opportunity for the best in all of us to rise.

It is inevitable. There comes a point in the development of every crisis, every catastrophe, every impending disaster, every act of methodical dictatorship, in which the generations selected by fate or destiny to endure the trial must attempt to look beyond the intellectual and the psychological, to deeply consider the greater philosophical or spiritual questions of their epoch.

Certain moments in history demand that truly free individuals relinquish their cynicism, and embrace that inherent world of form and conscience that exists in each of us but remains largely unexplained. Without this act of “faith”, or intuitive knowing, good cannot exist, inspire, or prevail.

To understand what we face in our age of encroaching technocracy draped like glistening silicon across the face of a third world American cesspool, we must accept certain realities; the first and foremost being the existence of “evil”. Not the evil of ignorance, that is easy to recognize. Not the evil of apathy and moral relativism, though the stench of both sharply permeates the sour underside of our culture.

No, I am talking about pure, unbiased, unflinching, perfectly conscious and fully absorbed evil. The kind that they tell stories about. The kind that history books speak of almost in awe, as if it is miraculous in nature. A dark tide. A prehistoric leviathan. An unbelievable and seemingly inhuman myth made manifest by astonishingly vile despots.

This evil is so overwhelming that many people today scarcely imagine it possible. It is our society’s greatest weakness; the denial of ultimate malice.

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Adnan Al-Daini

Having trashed teaching qualification (QTS)[*] by telling academies that they could appoint teachers without QTS qualifications, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, is at it again, this time telling teachers how to teach mathematics.  Whatever next? Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, telling doctors how to treat patients?

The arrogance of politicians, from all parties, when it comes to education is breathtaking. Micromanaging lessons to the extent of compulsory rote learning of the times tables, counting, Roman numerals etc., is a vote of no confidence in the professionalism of teachers that will lower their morale and impact negatively on standards.

Teaching in a school is not for the fainthearted.  I should know, for I taught mathematics in a school, taught engineering in a university and worked in industry.  School teaching was the most demanding, the poorest paid, and the least appreciated, and that was before government interference in the minutiae of education became fashionable.

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Stephen Lendman

International law protects refugees and asylum seekers. Article 1 of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees calls them:

"A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country."

Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to help them. To gain legal protection, they must:

• be outside their country of origin;
• fear persecution;
• be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
• fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
• pose no danger to others.

Immihelp.com calls asylum and refugee status "closely related." They differ "only in the place where a person asks for asylum status." Refugee status is asked for outside countries of origin. "However, all people who are granted asylum status must meet the definition of a refugee."

Assange is entitled to political refugee rights. Britain won't grant them.

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Patricia Gossman

Conflict has raged in Afghanistan since April 1978. It has been marked by brutality on a massive scale. Although the major fighting ended with the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, conflict continues especially in the south and east of the country, and many of those responsible for war crimes in earlier phases of the war continue to wield power. During every phase of the fighting, Afghan and foreign armed factions committed crimes against humanity and serious war crimes. These included large-scale massacres, disappearances and summary executions of tens of thousands of Afghans, indiscriminate bombing and rocketing that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, torture, mass rape and other atrocities. There has never been any serious effort, international or domestic, to account for these crimes.

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Bill Van Auken

South African police opened fire with automatic weapons on striking platinum miners in the country’s North West province on Thursday, killing at least 30. Other reports cite a death toll as high as 40.

Corpses were strewn on the ground after a three-minute hail of gunfire. Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa told the media, “A lot of people were injured and the number keeps on going up.”

The mass killing came on the sixth day of a strike by miners at Marikana operations of the British-owned Lonmin Plc, the world’s third-largest platinum mining company. Thousands of rock drillers walked out of the mines last Friday to press their demand for a doubling of salaries. The platinum mines are among the lowest paying in South Africa, and miners charge that little has changed in their conditions since the end of apartheid nearly two decades ago.

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Stephen Lendman

For around two months, Julian Assange has been holed up in Ecuador's London embassy after requesting political asylum. Sweden wants him extradited on spurious charges. They include unlawful coercion, sexual molestation and rape. Allegedly it's for having nonconsensual condomless sex. A honey trap snared him. Sex charges are bogus. Sweden represents Washington's interests. Obama officials wants him extradited to stand trial for whistleblowing. They want him put away and silenced. Sweden's playing willing co-conspirator. So is Britain.

On August 16, word came. Asylum was granted short of freedom to leave Britain unarrested. Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said "Ecuador decided to grant political asylum to Julian Assange following the request sent to the President."

He faces likely extradition to a third country without proper guarantees. If tried in America, it won't be fair. Patino called Ecuador's decision "protected by international law."

Shortly before Patino's announcement, President Raphael Correa signaled his likely decision by twittering "No one is going to terrorize us."

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Bill Van Auken

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud
Barak at the IDF air base in Hatzerim. (IDF handout, Haaretz)

A leaked memo that surfaced Wednesday provides a detailed blueprint for an unprovoked Israeli war against Iran. The publication of the memo coincides with multiple Israeli media reports indicating that such an attack may be imminent.

The memo was first published by US blogger and journalist Richard Silverstein and was subsequently picked up by the BBC and other media. Silverstein said that the document had been passed by a member of the Israel Defense Forces to a politician, and then on to him. He said it had been prepared for the eight-member Israeli Security Council as part of a bid by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak to convince other members of the government to support an early and unilateral Israeli strike.

The memo posted on Silverstein’s blog, Tikun Olam, states: “The Israeli attack will open with a coordinated strike, including an unprecedented cyber-attack which will totally paralyze the Iranian regime.” The aim is to shut down all communications between the Iranian government and military, leaving the country’s leadership in the dark about what is happening at key installations and bases. Carbon fiber munitions would be employed to shut down the country’s electrical grid.

Meanwhile, “A barrage of tens of ballistic missiles would be launched from Israel toward Iran,” the memo states. These would be fired by Israeli submarines from the Persian Gulf region against Iranian nuclear facilities at Arak, Ishfahan, Fordo and elsewhere. They would be supplemented by “a barrage of hundreds of cruise missiles” aimed at destroying the regime’s command and control capacity and decapitating Iran’s nuclear and missile development program, targeting the “residences of senior personnel.”

These attacks would be followed up by Israeli Air Force warplanes carrying out air strikes against “targets which require further assault.”

Clearly, such an assault would inflict massive civilian casualties while plunging the entire region into chaos.

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Stephen Lendman

Past and present leaders reveal the soul of their nations. Arguably America never had one. Current domestic and foreign policies provide convincing evidence. Police state harshness targets defenders of right over wrong everywhere. National resources go for militarism, belligerence, and making super-rich elites richer. Corporations are licensed to steal, exploit, and plunder. Wars ravage one country after another. Humanity is ruthlessly destroyed. Battlefields shift from one theater to another. Gangsterism writ large reflects official policy.

Syria is ground zero. Months of Western generated violence left thousands dead, many more injured, and countless numbers displaced. Nothing deters America's war machine madness. Bloodlust defines it. Dominance matters most. Body counts mount. Rule of law principles and democratic values are considered quaint and out of date.

Stomping on people is policy. Concern for human and civil rights is off the table. Winning hearts and minds was never America's game. Crushing the will to resist is more important. Repression enforces the message harshly. Death squad diplomacy eliminates non-believers. Where it ends, who knows! Despite ongoing direct and proxy wars, hawkish US lawmakers want more. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are three of America's worst. Peace they believe is abhorrent.

Death squad massacres in Syria aren't enough. As a 2008 presidential candidate, McCain's advocated bombing Iran. "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," he sang on his "Straight Talk" tour to the tune of a popular Beach Boys song. Lunatics like this run America. Now McCain wants more. So do Graham and Lieberman. They're not alone.

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Barry Grey

The role of the government in shielding the financial mafia shatters all claims that the financial system can be reformed.

On August 9, the US Justice Department announced it was ending a criminal investigation into allegations that Goldman Sachs committed securities fraud in its underwriting and marketing of mortgage-backed securities in the months leading up to the Wall Street crash of September 2008. The department said it would not file charges against the bank or any of its employees.

As a special favor to Goldman, the Obama administration’s Justice Department took the unusual step of making a public announcement that it had cleared the bank of wrongdoing.

The allegations stemmed from a detailed, 640-page report on the financial crisis issued in April of 2011 by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report, based on a two-year investigation and 56 million pages of evidence, documented rampant fraud and criminality by major banks and the complicity of credit rating firms and federal bank regulators. In releasing the report, the chairman of the committee, Senator Carl Levin, said the panel’s two-year probe had uncovered “a snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”

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Philip Giraldi

The recent killing of 16 Egyptian military police by militants in Sinai, part of an unsuccessful attempted penetration of the nearby Israeli border using a captured armored personnel carrier, appears to have been carried out by jihadi groups from the north of the peninsula along with Palestinians infiltrated from Gaza.

But is the accepted narrative true? For a number of years both Egypt and Israel have been having problems with Bedouin tribes in Sinai and across the border inside the Jewish state. The tribesmen, generally regarded as bandits, have carried out kidnappings, sabotage, and have killed Egyptian officials when the opportunity has arisen. Recently, the situation in Sinai has deteriorated due to a weakening of security in general as a consequence of the Arab Spring.

Al-Qaeda affiliated militants carried out a spectacular attack on hotels in the southern resort area of Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005, but there is some legitimate skepticism as to whether the group has much of a permanent presence in Sinai. It is particularly interesting to note that the attackers in the latest incident, eight of whom were reported killed by the Israelis, have not been identified, while no one has claimed responsibility.

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Stephen J. Sniegoski

Stephen Lendman, Israel's Longstanding Middle East Plan
Oded Yinon, "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties" /
Israel Shahak, "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East"[*]

If everything goes according to plan, the end result will be a Middle East composed of disunited states, or mini-states, involved in intractable, internecine conflict, which would make it impossible for them to confront Israeli power and to provide any challenge to Israel’s control of Palestine.

It is widely realized now that the fall of President Bashar Assad’s regime would leave Syria riven by bitter ethnic, religious, and ideological conflict that could splinter the country into smaller enclaves. Already there has been a demographic shift in this direction, as both Sunnis and Alawites flee the most dangerous parts of the county, seeking refuge within their own particular communities. Furthermore, it is widely believed in Syria that, as the entire country becomes too difficult to secure, the Assad regime will retreat to an Alawite redoubt in the northern coastal region as a fallback position.

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Stephen Lendman

Last December, Truth 11.com offered a model for destroying and colonizing nations. In Orwellian newspeak, it said:

(1) Global "Mafia" scoundrels target nations "ripe for 'Regime Change.' " Calling them rogue states enlists support.
(2) CIA/Mossad/MI6 and collaborators "arm, train, (and) finance local and foreign mercenaries/terrorists." Freedom fighters they're called for the same reason.
(3) With or without Security Council authorization, mass killing and destruction follow. At the same time, sanctions suffocate nations economically. Political isolation harms them further. Civilians always suffer most.
(4) Media propaganda glorifies war in the name of peace. Managed news enlists public support. Mind manipulation convinces people to back what they should condemn.
(5) Invasions and occupations are called liberation. Plunder is called economic development. Exploitation and imperial control are called democracy.

Might justifies right. Nations are destroyed to free them. Code language conceals real motives. Policy involves ravaging the world one country at a time or in multiples. Nations are destroyed for their own good. Monied interests alone benefit.

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Patrick Martin

American imperialism is planing atrocities in Syria that would put the events in Libya in the shade, and dwarf the killings that have already taken place.

US-backed forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are stepping up their offensive in Aleppo, the country’s largest city, amid with reports Wednesday that the rebels had engaged in summary execution of dozens of captured loyalist police and soldiers. A gruesome video of one such slaughter was widely distributed on the Internet.

The scale of the fighting was shown in the reported storming of a police station at al-Marju in the Salhein district of Aleppo by a force of more than 700 "rebel" fighters. The 45-man security detachment inside resisted the attack fiercely until a large bomb was thrown into the building, killing at least 15 of the defenders. Most of the rest then surrendered.

One video showed four men, accused of being members of the pro-Assad Shabbiha militia force, lined up against a wall and forced to kneel, then mowed down with automatic weapons as their killers chanted “Allahu Akbar.” The victims were said to be members of the Barri family, a clan linked to Assad through adherence to the Alawite religion, a branch of Shiite Islam. In another video, from the al-Marju police station, showed a rebel desecrating the corpse of the station commander, blowing his head off.

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Stephen Lendman

If wars had labels, Syria's conflict would be called Made in America

Paul Wolfowitz and other Project for the New American Century (PNAC) ideologues planned it years ago. They also targeted half a dozen or more other countries. PNAC's Statement of Principles called for "shap(ing) a new century favorable to American principles and interests." Doing so it said requires:

■ "increase(ing) defense spending significantly;"
■ "challeng(ing) regimes hostile to our interests and values;" and
■ "accept(ing) responsibility for American's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles."

PNAC effectively declared war. Independent nations were targeted. Implementing policy required a "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." False flags provide pretexts for militarism, wars, occupations, domestic repression, national security state extremism, and other policies antithetical to free and open societies. PNAC members got what they wanted. They comprise a rogues gallery of hardcore neocon extremists. Charter members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Jeb Bush, and others.

In 2009, PNAC reinvented itself as the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). Policies remain unchanged. Regime change in Syria is prioritized. Direct intervention is urged. Obama is criticized for inaction. "What is clear," it says, is that America "sent a horrible message to tyrants elsewhere about the (non-existent) costs of mass killings of innocents." FPI knows Washington bears full responsibility. It's not enough. FPI wants full-scale war initiated.

September 11, 2001 was the Big Lie of our time. It was a classic false flag. It launched a decade of wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Palestine. Proxy wars rage in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere.

Full-scale ones are planned against Syria and Iran. The road to Tehran runs through Damascus. Western and/or regional intervention looks certain. Proxies alone can't match Syria's superior military capability.

Expect Libya 2.0 in some form. Initiating it could happen any time or might follow US November elections. Electoral priorities dictate policy.

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Bill Van Auken

While the FBI records in meticulous detail every category of crime committed in the US, no government agency keeps track of how many people die at the hands of the police.

New York City cops chased down and executed Darrius Kennedy in Times Square last Saturday. The encounter began with an attempt to arrest the 51-year-old street performer on suspicion of smoking a marijuana cigarette, a misdemeanor. Kennedy fled arrest and waved a knife at the police, leading them on a slow-motion chase as he walked and skipped backward down Seventh Avenue.

It ended with Kennedy cornered at the entrance to an office building, seven blocks south of where the initial encounter began. By this time he was surrounded by scores of police, some armed with military-style assault weapons, and hemmed in by police vehicles. Two of the cops closest to him opened fire, shooting some 15 rounds and hitting him seven times. He was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital less than an hour later.

This was not Dodge City, but midtown Manhattan where Darrius Kennedy was gunned down like a dog. The incident was emblematic of the brutality that characterizes American society. The overwhelming force employed carried with it the stench of a police state.

Similar police killings take place every day and in every part of the country. Generally, they go unreported and unnoticed outside of the immediate area in which they take place. What distinguished the shooting last Saturday was that it unfolded in the middle of the afternoon in one of the most heavily traversed thoroughfares in the US, witnessed by hundreds of horrified tourists and passersby, some of whom fled in panic while others recorded the scene on their cell phones.

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