Stephen Lendman

Washington planned war on Syria years ago. Last year it was Libya. Earlier it was Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since conflict erupted last year, Washington, other NATO states, and regional allies recruited, armed, funded, trained and directed Syrian insurgents. Public admissions emerge slowly. Language conceals what's been ongoing all the time.

On November 29, CNN said Washington is "weighing whether or not to provide arms to the Syrian opposition." US Syrian ambassador, Robert Ford, said Obama "never (took) the provision of arms off the table." They've been supplied regularly under it covertly.

On December 9, Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus headlined "A call to arms for Syria's rebels."

Yesterday (December 11) Washington recognized the illegitimate opposition coalition as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Syrian people." In November, Britain and France announced support. The EU moved closer to official recognition. Member state foreign ministers extended their endorsement.

At the same time, Germany expelled four Syrian embassy staff members. Assad's ambassador was forced out in May. Britain, France, Italy and Spain took similar actions. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said:

"Shortly ahead of" the December 12 Friends of Syria meeting in Morocco, "the EU has given another clear signal of the upgrade and support of the coalition." [He added that doing so] "promote(s) the erosion of the Assad regime."

EU members previously accepted Syrian National Council (SNC) 2.0 members (National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces) as representatives of Syrian "aspirations."

They did so despite strong internal Assad support. Majority "aspirations" don't matter. Washington diktats overrule them. That's how imperialism works.

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William Blum

The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

From the Congress of Vienna of 1815 to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the "Allies" invasion of Russia in 1918 to the formation of what became the European Union in the 1950s, the great powers of Europe and the world have gotten together in grand meeting halls and on the field of battle to set the ground rules for imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, to Christianize and 'civilize', to remake the maps, and to suppress revolutions and other threats to great-power hegemony. They have been deadly serious. In 1918, for example, some 13 nations, including France, Great Britain, Rumania, Italy, Serbia, Greece, Japan, and the United States, combined in a military invasion of Russia to "strangle at its birth" the nascent Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill so charmingly put it.

And following World War 2, without any concern about who had fought and died to win that war, the Western powers, sans the Soviet Union, moved to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO, along with the European Union, then joined the United States in carrying out the Cold War and preventing the Communists and their allies from coming to power legally through elections in France and Italy. That partnership continued after the formal end of the Cold War. The United States, the European Union, and NATO are each superpowers, with extensive military, as well as foreign policy integration — almost all EU members are also members of NATO; almost all NATO members in Europe are in the EU; almost all NATO members have had a military contingent serving under NATO and/or the US in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere.

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Paul Craig Roberts

With its power declining, Washington was not able any longer to keep Russia out of the World Trade Organization. Congress showed its spite over its impotence by hooking the normalizing of trade with Russia to what is called the “Magnitsky rule.”

Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian attorney who represented a British investment firm accused of tax evasion and fraud in Russia. Apparently, the UK firm supplied information to media alleging government misconduct and participation in corruption inside state-owned Russian companies.

Magnitsky represented the accused UK firm. He claimed that the firm had not committed fraud but had been a victim of fraud. In turn, Magnitsky was arrested. He developed serious illnesses in prison for which he apparently received inadequate medical care.

Whether he died of untreated illnesses, we cannot know. But the US Congress, acting on the unsubstantiated allegation that Magnitsky was tortured and murdered, attached to the trade normalization bill a provision that requires the US government to release a list of Russian government officials believed or imagined to have been involved with the violation of Magnitsky’s human rights and to freeze the assets of these members of the Russian government and to deny them visas to travel to the US. Considering Washington’s belief that its law is the universal law of humankind, Washington probably intends for every country to enforce its edict or to be sanctioned in turn.

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Stephen Lendman

Residents fleeing their homes in Houla, near Homs, December 5,
2012. (Reuters/Misra Al-Misri/Shaam News Network/Handout)

News from Syria is grim. Libya 2.0 looms. Fabricating a chemical weapons threat looks like pretext for full-scale war.

On December 8, the Toronto Sun said Foreign Affairs officials urged Canadian citizens to leave Syria. Maybe they know something they're not explaining.

On December 9, Israel National News said the London Sunday Times said IDF special forces now operate inside Syria. Allegedly they're trying to locate "non-conventional weapons" and "sabotage" them. Israel considered ground and/or air attacks to destroy them. Perhaps they're still planned.

The Sunday Times said if evidence suggests Assad used chemical weapons, Washington and Israel "might coordinate to carry out a ground invasion." An unnamed military source told The Times that US forces could be ready "rapidly within days" if chemical weapons are used. "The muscle is already there to be flexed."

On December 9, The Times of Israel headlined "Syrian rebels claim new video shows victims of chemical attack." A You Tube clip depicts alleged victims. It shows dead and injured Syrians with disfigured faces. Assad is blamed.

Days earlier, a You Tube video showed Syrian insurgents testing chemical weapons on lab rabbits. Threats to use them against Assad loyalists followed. Lab equipment and chemical containers were shown. Some containers bore the Turkish chemical company Tekkim name. An Arabic text wall poster read, "The Almighty Wind Brigade (Kateebat A Reeh Al Sarsar)." A man shown begins mixing chemicals in a beaker. It emits gas. Rabbits in a glass box have convulsions, collapse and die. The audio states:

"You saw what happened. This will be your fate, you infidel Alawites. I swear by Allah to make you die like these rabbits, one minute after you inhale the gas."

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Paul Craig Roberts

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) calls the government’s latest jobs and unemployment reports “nonsense numbers.”

There are a number of ongoing problems with the released numbers. For example, the concurrent-seasonal factor adjustments are unstable. The birth-death model adds non-existent jobs each month that are then taken out in the annual downward benchmark revisions. Williams calculates that the job overstatement through November averages 45,000 monthly. In other words, employment gains during 2012 have been overstated by about 500,000 jobs. Another problem is that each month’s jobs number is boosted by downside revision of the previous month’s jobs number. Williams reports that the 146,000 new jobs reported for November “was after a significant downside revision to October’s reporting. Net of prior-period revisions, November’s seasonally-adjusted monthly gain was 97,000.”

Even if we believe the government that 146,000 new jobs materialized during November, that is the amount necessary to stay even with population growth and therefore could not be responsible for reducing the unemployment rate from 7.9% to 7.7%. The reduction is due to how the unemployed are counted. The 7.7% rate is known as the “headline rate.” It is the rate you hear in the news. Its official designation is U.3.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has another official unemployment rate known as U.6. The difference is that U.3 does not include discouraged workers who are not currently actively seeking a job. (A discouraged worker is a person who has given up looking for a job because there are no jobs to be found.) The U.6 measure includes workers who have been discouraged for less than one year. The U.6 rate of unemployment is 14.4%, about double the headline rate.

The U.6 rate does not include long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year. John Williams estimates this rate and reports the actual rate of unemployment (known as SGS) in November to be 22.9%. In other words, the headline rate of unemployment is one-third the actual rate.

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Ellen Brown

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the Bank of Scotland have been pillars of Scotland’s economy and culture for over three centuries. So when the RBS was nationalized by the London-based UK government following the 2008 banking crisis, and the Bank of Scotland was acquired by the London-based Lloyds Bank, it came as a shock to the Scots. They no longer owned their oldest and most venerable banks.

Another surprise turn of events was the triumph of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election. Scotland is still part of the United Kingdom, but it has had its own parliament since 1999, similar to U.S. states. The SNP has rallied around the call for independence from the UK since its founding in 1934, but it was a minority party until the 2011 victory, which gave it an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament.

Scottish independence is now on the table. A bill has been introduced to the Scottish Parliament with the intention of holding a referendum on the issue in 2014.

Arguments in favor of independence include that it will allow the Scottish people to make decisions for Scotland themselves, on such contentious issues as having nuclear weapons in their seas and being part of NATO. They can also directly access the profits from the North Sea oil off Scotland’s coast.

Arguments against independence include that Scotland’s levels of public spending (which are higher than in the rest of the UK) would be difficult to sustain without raising taxes. North Sea oil revenues will eventually decline.

One way budgetary problems might be relieved would be for Scotland to have its own publicly-owned bank, one that served the interests of the Scottish people. True economic sovereignty means having control over the national currency, credit and debt.

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Gilad Atzmon

There is only one possible conclusion – Jewish anti-Zionism is a myth. Jewish opposition to Zionism is just another form of Zionism-lite that, just like it’s right-wing counterpart, locates Jewish self-interest firmly at its core.

God bless Philip Weiss, the progressive Jewish blogger brave enough to admit in public those things other Jewish ethnic activists prefer to shove under the carpet. A year ago, Weiss was brave enough to confess to me that it is ‘Jewish self interests’ that stands at the core of his pro Palestinian activism.

Also, a few weeks ago, the same Weiss was honest enough to announce that his Jewish ‘progressive’ internet journal, Mondoweiss, changed its comment policy and “will no longer serve as a forum to pillory Jewish culture and religion as the driving factors in Israeli and US policy.”

But this week, the very same Weiss published a new polemic on his website. He now thinks that “it’s time for the media to talk about Zionism.” So, now Weiss is happy to join with the rest of us in talking about Zionism – so long as we avoid discussing ‘Jewishness’. Well, I’m afraid that Philip Weiss may have missed the train since, by now, many of us have already grasped that the time is ripe to talk about Jewishness and the role of ‘Jewish culture as the driving factor in Israeli and US policy.’

Weiss’ logic is no doubt fascinating. This Jewish ethnic activist does provide us with an insight into the level of deceit that is, unfortunately, inherent to Jewish left politics.

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Stephen Lendman

Netanyahu never met a non-Jew he considered equal, a peace plan he didn't spurn, a law he didn't violate, or truth he didn't turn on its head. He's contemptuous of Palestinians, other Arabs, and Iranians. He considers them subhuman enemies. He reveals Israel's true face.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is notoriously pro-Israeli. At the same time, he calls the "far-right group running Israel today so arrogant." He omitted lawless, racist, hawkish, and menacing.

Palestinians wanted liberation and peace for decades. They agreed to relinquish plenty for it. Israel enforces occupation violently. On Saturday, half a million Gazans massed in Gaza City's Kateba Square.

They commemorated Hamas' 25th anniversary. More than 3,000 foreign guests joined them. They came from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Malaysia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Algeria, Britain, and several other European countries.

A main stage was erected for speakers. Two empty chairs were positioned on it symbolically. They represented Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Qassam Brigades head Ahmad Jabari.

Israel murdered them in cold blood. They're two of many Palestinian martyrs. They're lionized as heroes. Rogue killers remain unaccountable. Justice has miles to go.

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Eric Peters

Lenin asked, “What is to be done?”

The question facing liberty-minded people almost 100 years later is the same. But our answer should not be Lenin’s answer – violent lashing out.

I get e-mails from readers who are frustrated – rightly – about the state of things. About how Ron Paul was treated by the GOP apparat. About the seemingly relentless increase in (and brazenness of) state thuggery. They ask, “when do we do something?” “How much more do we take”? And most of all: “What is the point of just bitching about things?”

Some urge action – taking the proverbial stand. But just as the time for action (physical action) had not yet come for our forefathers circa 1770, so also the time has not yet come for us. The issue, then as now, is whether intellectual action is to be preferred over (and as the necessary prelude to) physical action. Whether we – as isolated individuals – go out in the proverbial – and pointless – blaze of glory… . Or, whether we bide our time while we work to increase the number of people who get it – and thereby, increase the number of people who are on our side. Such that if it becomes necessary to act, we will not be acting alone – and not acting suicidally.

As in the 1770s, opponent of the current status quo have to have that critical mass of like-minded people on our side before we can hope for change we can believe in. Otherwise, we are just tilting at windmills.

We risk losing everything – to gain nothing.

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Stephen Lendman

Obama's warmaking appetite exceeds all his predecessors and then some. He's already waging multiple direct and proxy wars. His rhetoric about winding them down rings hollow. He wants to make the most of the next four years. No targeted country left behind reflects his agenda. He's ravaging the world multiple countries at a time. He's out-of-control. He governs like a serial killer. He plans more war on Iran, perhaps Lebanon, and full-scale intervention against Syria. He has other targets in mind. He's insatiable. Africa dreaming explains what's on his mind.

On December 15, 2006, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) was authorized. On February 6, 2007, it was announced. On October 1, 2007, it was established, and on October 1, 2008, it became operational. It's based in Stuttgart, Germany, not Africa. It's responsible for warmaking and military relations throughout the continent. It's comprised of 53 countries. Many potential targets are represented.

Washington wants the entire continent colonized and controlled. It is resource rich. It has large amounts of oil, gas, water, gold, silver, diamonds, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, manganese, other valued minerals, and rich agricultural land.

In early July 2009, Obama visited sub-Saharan Africa. He signaled his intentions. In Accra, Ghana, he said:

"We have a responsibility to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don't, and that is exactly what America will do." He said Ghana and other African governments must achieve "good governance."

His message was clear. Open the continent to Western investment and development. Privatize, privatize, privatize. Forget about providing healthcare, education, and other vital services. Give US and other Western corporate predators free reign. Play the game the way Washington demands or suffer the consequences. Ghana got the message. Why else would Obama show up?

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Bill Van Auken

Amid an escalating drumbeat about a supposed threat that Syria’s government is preparing to use chemical weapons against its own people, Washington has deployed a naval armada off the country’s coast.

The USS Eisenhower carrier strike group was sent through the Suez Canal from its deployment in the Persian Gulf earlier this week and has reportedly arrived in the Mediterranean near Syrian shores. The deployment joins that of an amphibious battle group already present in the eastern Mediterranean, consisting of the USS Iwo Jima, the USS New York and the USS Gunston Hall, which together carry a contingent of 2,500 US Marines.

Between the two naval forces, Washington now has 17 warships, 70 fighter-bombers and 10,000 military personnel within close striking distance of Syria. This is in addition to the Air Force’s 39th Air Base Wing stationed at the Incirlik base in Turkey together with tens of thousands of US ground troops deployed in Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Citing US military sources, the Times of London reported Wednesday that Washington is ready to launch a military attack on Syria “within days.”

“It won’t require major movement to make action happen,” an unnamed US official told the British newspaper. “The muscle is already there to be flexed.”

Pentagon sources have suggested that an intervention carried out on the pretext of securing Syria’s chemical weapons would require some 75,000 troops.

In a further threat of direct US-NATO intervention, NATO governments are moving ahead to implement Tuesday’s decision of the NATO foreign ministers conference to deploy Patriot missile batteries on Turkey’s border with Syria. Germany’s defense and foreign ministers announced a decision to deploy some 400 German troops on the border. Similar detachments will also be sent by the US and the Netherlands.

While Turkey claimed it needed the missiles to defend itself from a supposed threat that Syria would fire missiles carrying chemical weapons towards its border, the Patriot batteries could also be used to impose a de facto “no-fly zone” over northern Syria, allowing the US-backed “rebels” to consolidate control over territory and creating the conditions for the installation of a Western-backed government on Syrian soil.

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Justin Raimondo

That FDR’s deception holds some lessons for our own day seems too obvious to even comment on, and I’ll let my readers draw their own conclusions as to its meaning and applicability in the present context.

Today is the seventy-first anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an act that brought us into World War II, pushed a reluctant America onto the world stage, and ushered in the age of empire. The official history of that event is that it was a "sneak attack" precipitated by war-crazed Japanese militarists, and that the totally unprepared Americans – kept from arming themselves by evil "isolationists" in Congress and the Republican party – were caught completely by surprise.

There is, however, one big problem with this official history: it’s a lie.

The truth is that, by the winter of 1941, the Americans had decrypted the various Japanese military and diplomatic codes: President Roosevelt, key members of his cabinet, and top military leaders, including Gen. George C. Marshall, US Army chief of staff, had access to this intelligence, which was intercepted, decoded, and transmitted directly to them. We know this because Robert Stinnett, in researching his seminal book, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, obtained heretofore unknown documents under the Freedom of Information Act, which trace the intelligence stream from interception stations throughout the Pacific to the 36 Americans cleared to look through what was, in effect, a window into Japanese plans and preparations for the Pearl Harbor attack. The President and 35 other Americans in top political and military circles knew where the attack was to take place, they knew when it was to take place, and they watched it unfold, step by step, with full knowledge of its import.

It is widely remarked that even on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the vast majority of the American people stubbornly resisted efforts to drag us into the European war. The Court Historians responsible for constructing the FDR cult would have had great difficulty denying the pattern of presidential prevarication that had us effectively fighting the Axis powers long before war was officially declared.

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Stephen Lendman

Photo: Syria, February 2012: A boy attends a funeral for a man who was killed, in a town affected by the growing conflict between rebel and government forces. By mid-March, 1.7 million people were affected by the year-long conflict. More than 150,000 have been displaced and 30,000 refugees, half of them children, have fled to neighbouring countries.

Stephen Lendman, War Without Mercy on Syria
Stephen Lendman, War Without Mercy in Syria

Call it the curse of oil and gas. Countries with large and smaller reserves are affected. So are some with few or perhaps none. Living in a targeted neighborhood is challenging. Independent governments are most vulnerable. Reports suggest the worst ahead. Iran remains a longtime US/ Israeli target. Syria's very much on the boil. Washington's proxy war rages. It's been ongoing since early last year. It was planned many years ago. Previous articles explained that America wants all independent governments replaced by pro-Western puppet ones.

War is the bottom line option of choice when other methods fail. Direct US/NATO intervention looms. Deploying attack Patriot missiles in Turkey near Syria's border comes perilously close to declaring war. Doing so may follow. Germany agreed to participate. It approved sending 400 troops to the Turkish/Syrian border. Washington, Berlin, and the Netherlands will provide Patriot missiles. On Tuesday, NATO formerly approved deploying them. Operationally, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) will control them.

Washington considers the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean Sea its private lakes. Powerful naval forces dominate their waters ominously. The USS Eisenhower sits off Syria's coast. On board are eight fighter bomber squadrons and 8,000 troops. It joined the USS Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group. About 2,500 marines are on board. Mossad-connected DEBKAfile (DF) said "10,000 US fighting men, 70 fighter-bombers and at least 17 warships, including three Iwo Jima amphibious craft, a guided missile cruiser, and 10 destroyers and frigates" are positioned off Syria or nearby. Four ships have Aegis missile interceptors. Some are nuclear armed. US firepower off Syria's coast can destroy the entire country. It remains to be seen what's next. The combination of powerful warships, heavy armaments, thousands of combat troops, dozens of attack aircraft, offensive Patriot missiles, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System readiness, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) capability suggests direct US-led intervention could happen any time.

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Philip Giraldi

The American public has become so desensitized to what its own government is doing abroad that there is only a ripple of interest when the media reports some new outrage. The assassination of expatriate American citizens by drones preceded detailed media accounts of how kill lists are drawn up by the president himself in the White House. And now there have been press reports of how the Obama administration, in the lead up to the presidential election, sought to establish “explicit rules” for death by drone, thereby institutionalizing the practice as a component of the United States’ “defensive” strategy.

The Obama administration has killed an estimated 2,500 people using CIA and military drones, most of whom were Pakistanis. There is considerable debate over how many of the victims were actually terrorists or insurgents, as the CIA regards any male adult killed as a terrorist unless it can be proved otherwise after the fact, but sources inside Pakistan report a significant civilian kill rate. The rush by the Obamas to codify what has until now been a largely ad hoc practice was reportedly triggered by concern that there might be a new administration in Washington that would benefit from “clear standards and procedures” for killing terrorists with Hellfire missiles fired by Predator drones. The New York Times reports that the White House was seeking to “resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.” Why? Because advisers are “still debating whether remote control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool.” Top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, who reportedly favors limiting the attacks, argues that the Obama administration is seeking to set “the ethical standard for” targeting by drones.

An ethical standard might prove to be elusive in an environment where body counts, just as in Vietnam, have become the measure of success. The first targeted killing of alleged terrorists by drone took place in 2002. Prior to 9/11, the U.S. considered targeted killings to be illegal. At the heart of the current controversy is the government’s contention both under George W. Bush and Barack Obama that the United States is legally at war with al-Qaeda and that the terrorist group, being stateless, can be attacked anywhere in the world where the local authorities are either unwilling or incapable of taking action themselves. This has sometimes been referred to as a constabulary function, not unlike U.S. marshals going to a foreign country and working with the local authorities to arrest an American fugitive. The difference with the marshals is, of course, that a legal process leading to arrest has both process and transparency, while a kill list drawn up in secret and without any rights for the suspect does not.

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Finian Cunningham

US President Barack Obama’s renewed warning against Syria this week, that any use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces is a red line triggering direct military assault on the country, can be seen as the Western powers moving towards their endgame of “regime change.”

Washington first raised the specter of Syrian chemical weapons several months ago and warned then that it would be forced to act militarily in order to “secure” such alleged stockpiles.

Now the American president and his officials are rekindling fears of this contingency, with the added alleged development that the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad has become so desperate to survive that it is preparing to mobilize chemical warheads.

Speaking in Washington, Obama upbraided the Syria government that “the world is watching” and that there would be “consequences” for any such deployment.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton echoed the warning and described the use of these weapons as “a red line.” Tellingly, she added that if there is “any evidence” that the Syrian military had begun to use chemical warheads then “we are certainly planning to take action.”

Various Western media reported that American officials have over the past week stepped up contact with counterparts in other Western states to formulate a military response. This is said to include limited air strikes and the dispatch of thousands of ground forces.

Previously, the US and other Western governments had declined to commit military forces to Syria, as they had done in Libya last year, preferring the covert option of proxy forces, including Persian Gulf Arab weapon suppliers and mercenary fighters. That calculus seems to be now changing.

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