Stephen Lendman

Tyranny and permanent wars define Obama's agenda. Since taking office, he exceeded the worst of George Bush. Much more ahead is coming. Ravaging humanity is policy. Foreign nations and America's homeland are targeted. Rule of law principles are ignored. Unchallenged dominance alone matters. Plans are to crush dissent and replace independent regimes with puppet ones. Subservience to Washington is demanded. Obama enforces these policies ruthlessly. Outliers aren't tolerated. Removing internal opposition and destroying one country after another are planned. Occupy Wall Street is targeted for elimination. Syria tops the queue abroad. Blame game strategy wrongfully accuses Assad for Western crimes. Potential global war looms. Policymakers are mindless. So are supportive media scoundrels. More on them below.

On May 20 and 21, NATO states and partners invaded Chicago violently. Discussions went way beyond Afghanistan. Focus included Syria. Escalated violence was planned. At issue is regime change. Dangers of potential global war weren't considered.

Officially NATO rules out intervention. Unofficially it's raged for months. Expect much more ahead. Washington, Britain and France are lead belligerents. Assad is more victim than villain.

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Bill Van Auken

There are countless millions of people in the United States who are sickened by the news that the man who occupies the White House is personally involved in the selection of victims for an unconstitutional and utterly criminal program of extra-judicial killings. It will not be long before this opposition–deeply rooted in democratic traditions that are still venerated by the American working class–emerges into the open.

“We are not ruled by murderers, but only—by their friends,” Rudyard Kipling wrote a century ago. That the poet’s stinging aphorism has become hopelessly outdated is made clear by a New York Times article detailing the assassination program being run out of the Obama White House.

The lengthy May 29 article in the Times establishes that personally plotting killings and selecting victims occupies a great deal of President Barack Obama’s time. The process has been organized as a weekly routine, with Obama heading so-called “Terror Tuesday” meetings of military and intelligence officials. Each week they assemble in the White House situation room to study mug shots and biographies of those on the “kill list”, some of them minors and, in one case, “a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.”

In the end, Obama selects most of the victims. He “signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan—about a third of the total,” according to the Times.

Thus, when one sees or hears news accounts of “suspected militants” being slain in a drone missile strike—or the less frequent follow-up stories revealing that the “militants” were in fact unarmed men, women and children—it can be assumed that Obama personally ordered the killings.

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