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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Paul Craig Roberts

Whether you vote Republican or Democrat, the oligarchs will win.

The election of the next puppet president of the “world’s only superpower” is about two and one-half months off, and what are the campaign issues? There aren’t any worthy of the name.

Romney won’t release his tax returns, despite the fact that release is a customary and expected act. Either the non-release is a strategy to suck in Democrats to make the election issue allegations that Romney is another mega-rich guy who doesn’t pay taxes, only to have the issue collapse with a late release that shows enormous taxes paid, or Romney’s tax returns, as a candidate who advocates lower taxes for the rich, don’t bear scrutiny.

What are Romney’s issues? The candidate says that his first act will be to repeal Obamacare, a program that Romney himself first enacted as governor of Massachusetts. This will cost Romney political contributions from the insurance industry, which is thankful for the 50 million new private insurance policies that Obamacare, written not by Obama but by the private insurance companies, provides at public expense. It is not to the insurance industry’s benefit to have a single payer system like other western countries.

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