Stephen Lendman

A previous article discussed Israel's Wednesday attack on Lebanon. Reports suggested Syrian weapons and munitions heading cross border were struck. It asked why would Assad send vitally needed weapons and munitions to Lebanon? He needs all he can get. Assad's got all he can handle. He's contesting Washington's proxy war.

What's Israel up to? Is something else going on? Is it trying to provoke Syria to retaliate? Does it want to entrap it in all-out war? Doing so would involve Washington and NATO. It would mean Syria's undoing. It would ignite regional conflict. Potentially it could morph into global war.

Assad's got hostile neighbors. Turkey and Jordan are threatening. Israel attacked before. Naked aggression is longstanding Israeli policy. In June 1967, it attacked Syria preemptively. It was long-planned. Israel wasn't threatened. Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin later admitted it. "We must be honest with ourselves, he said. "We decided to attack." Israeli Air Force Commander General Mordechai Hod said "(s)ixteen years of planning had gone into those initial 80 minutes. We lived with the plan. We slept on the plan. We ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it." IDF Commander General Haim Barlev said "(w)e were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six Day War, and we had never thought of such a possibility."

Other Israeli military and government officials voiced similar sentiments. Israel wages wars of choice. So are separate premeditated attacks. Some precede larger conflicts. Others serve specific purposes. Netanyahu wages war without declaring it. Gaza is bombed, shelled, and invaded regularly. Targeted assassinations are commonplace. So are cyber attacks, deadly explosions, other sabotage, as well as various covert and overt acts.

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Paul Craig Roberts

In the 21st century Americans have experienced an extraordinary collapse in the rule of law and in their constitutional protections. Today American citizens, once a free people protected by law, can be assassinated and detained in prison indefinitely without any evidence being presented to a court of their guilt, and they can be sentenced to prison on the basis of secret testimony by anonymous witnesses not subject to cross examination. The US “justice system” has been transformed by the Bush/Obama regime into the ”justice system” of Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia. There is no difference.

In an article available here, Stephen Downs, formerly Chief Attorney with the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct and Kathy Manley, a criminal defense attorney and member of the New York Civil Liberties Union, report on how the US government destroyed a charity, the Holy Land Foundation, which provided money for feeding the poor and for building schools and hospitals in Palestine.

The charity, aware of the perils of being based in the US and doing anything for Palestinians, relied on the US State Department and the US Department of Justice (sic) for guidance on where to send humanitarian aid. The charity sent its aid to the same aid committees in Palestine that the US Agency for International Development and the UN used to distribute aid to the Palestinians.

In the first trial of the Holy Land Foundation, the US government admitted that none of the charity’s donations had gone to terrorist organizations, and the federal prosecutors failed to achieve a conviction. So the prosecutors tried the charity again.

In the second trial, the judge permitted the prosecutors to call an “anonymous expert” to tell the jury that some of the committees used by USAID and the UN and approved by the US Department of State were controlled by Hamas, the elected government of Palestine that Israel requires the US government to brand as “terrorist.”

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Eric Peters

A reader – several readers – express their sense of hopelessness. That 1930s Germany is replaying itself out right before our eyes – and that most Americans either don’t see it or don’t care. One reader put it as follows:

I wish I had some faith in all of this but history isn’t kind to it. My prediction is that a few of you will be made examples which will be splashed all over the media, 99.9 percent will do as they are told, and the rest will merely hide/bury their guns for another day . . . which never comes. California already made the SKS (rifle) illegal retroactively and all the owners meekly handed them over. This won’t be any different. It is to easy to go to work, make another deal with the devil, and hope that nothing worse happens … but it will. The cattle cars will next and you won’t resist those either. Your neighbor will be called a terrorist but you won’t care because he always was a little funny, kept putting leaves in your yard, and most importantly it isn’t you….

It could certainly go that way (as history so depressingly shows us). But it could also go a different way. I suspect it will. In fact, I submit that we already have evidence that it is going differently.

For one thing, a lot of people are already wake – and more are waking up every day. In percentage terms, the numbers are small – perhaps 5 percent of the population is comprised of people who reject the state – organized violence – in principle and who adhere consciously to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). However, that 5 percent is also millions of people.

Now consider that there are tens of millions more gun owners who are frightened by – and angry about – what’s going on. Who are beginning to comprehend that a right that matters to them is under siege – and thus, inevitably, they are beginning to appreciate that all of their rights (and by necessary implication, the rights of others) are also under siege. They are beginning to get it. And their numbers are increasing at a geometric rate. Witness the eruption of rage in New York. The widespread and public utterances of defiance. (See here and here.) Even the cops – some of them, at any rate – are coming out openly on the right side. Our side. (See here.)

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