Stephen Lendman

"Nuclear explosion over Tel Aviv" - A manufactured
threat brought to you by the Talmudic hellhole that is
The Voice of Mashiach. President Obama marches "in
lockstep" with Israeli lunatics like these, describing
Israel’s security as his “top priority." Yes, you read
that correctly, Israel's not America's. The Manchurian
US president is loyal to Israel, and the Jewish Zionists.
This means ever more wars for Israel: Iran....Syria....

Iran attacked no other country in over 200 years. It threatens none now. It's neighbors know it. So do Washington and Israel. Nonetheless, saber rattling warnings continue. At issue is making an independent state a client one. It's why Washington orchestrated Syria's insurgency and continues anti-Iranian propaganda.

Tehran won't tolerate losing its sovereignty, nor should it. It suffered a generation of repression under Washington's installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi after the CIA's first ever coup ousted democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh.

It also knows how America and Israel reign terror throughout the region. As a result, it's prepared to defend itself if attacked.

America's business is war, permanent war for unchallenged global dominance. Post-9/11, multiple ones raged and continue. Ordinary people want them stopped.

On February 4, dozens of anti-war organizations held a "Day of Mass Action to Stop a US War on Iran." Among others, The World Can't Wait announced it headlining, "NO war! NO sanctions! No intervention! No Assassinations."

A press release listed dozens of participating US cities, large and small. Other known countries involved included Canada, Britain, India, Ireland, Turkey, Norway, and Bangladesh.

Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark participated. In 1992, he founded the International Action Center (IAC). Calling itself "anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist," it's committed against wars, racism, economic exploitation, and other forms of injustice.

Its web site urged worldwide participation in an "emergency" protest day of action.

Thousands across America alone participated. Follow-up actions are planned. People are fed up and want America's war machine stopped. Vital resources are squandered while growing needs go unaddressed.

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Patrick Martin

The atrocities being committed in the drone missile strikes are not an aberration, but rather demonstrate the essence of the US intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, now in its eleventh year.

A report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) has found that the US Central Intelligence Agency deliberately attacked rescue workers and funeral processions in follow-up strikes after drone missile attacks on insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The findings were made public on the group’s web site and published by the Sunday Times of London.

According to the organization, which includes British and Pakistani journalists, at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes while they were attempting to help victims of an initial CIA drone attack. Dozens more were killed by missile strikes against the funerals of victims of drone attacks.

Overall, the group found that “since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed, including more than 60 children.” Pakistani officials and humanitarian aid workers have reported much higher figures for the death toll in Pakistan’s tribal areas, as many as several thousand.

Among the cases of mass murder detailed in the report:

● May 16, 2009: A US drone missile hit a group of Taliban militants in the village of Khaisor, killing as many as a dozen. As villagers were digging bodies out of the rubble, two more missiles hit, bringing the death toll to at least 29.
● June 23, 2009: A CIA missile strike killed Khwaz Wali Mehsud, a Pakistan Taliban commander, and five companions. Some 5,000 people attended his funeral later that day. US drones stuck again, killing as many as 83 people, ten of them children.
● March 17, 2011: The day after Pakistan released CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who had been jailed for two months for murdering two Pakistani men in Lahore, a CIA drone missile attack killed 42 people in North Waziristan, striking what a Pakistani military officer said was a tribal meeting to discuss a land ownership dispute, not a Taliban gathering.

Experts on international law have characterized these follow-up drone missile strikes as war crimes. Clive Stafford Smith, who has fought for the release of many innocent men held in Guantanamo Bay, told BIJ the drone strikes “are like attacking the Red Cross on the battlefield. It’s not legitimate to attack anyone who is not a combatant.”

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Paul Craig Roberts

Last Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this new year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate (U.3) fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/death model. In a prolonged downturn, seasonal adjustments and the birth/death model produce nonexistent employment.

The unadjusted data show a rise in the unemployment rate. The birth/death model, which estimates the net effect of jobs lost from business failures and jobs created by new start-ups was designed for a normal growing economy, not for a prolonged downturn four years old. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the BLS adds 48,000 new jobs per month to the payroll employment report based on the birth/death model even though the economy has not come out of the deep recession. In other words, over the course of a year, the birth/death model adds about 580,000 jobs to the reported jobs numbers. End of year benchmark revisions quietly take the nonexistent jobs out of the totals, but these revisions do not receive headlines and pass largely unnoticed.

The reported January jobs gains are contradicted by other official reports. For example, the January payroll jobs report shows 50,000 new jobs in manufacturing, but according to the recently released 4th quarter GDP, 81% of the reported growth consisted of undesired inventory accumulation. Normally, companies produce for sales not for inventories. Why would manufacturers be hiring people to produce goods for undesired inventories?

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