Stephen Lendman

Secretary of State John F. Kerry straps himself into a helicopter
as he prepares to fly out of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Kerry
will travel to Israel and the West Bank on Sunday.

On April 6, John Kerry began a multi-nation tour. He'll travel to Europe and East Asia. His first stop is Turkey. He'll meet with Netanyahu and Abbas. He wants peace talks restarted. More on that below.

Peace process deception is policy. It's always been a charade. It is now. Israel wants it that way. So does Washington.

It's been stillborn from inception. It's a scam. It doesn't exist. Palestinians never had a legitimate partner. For sure they don't now. Netanyahu deplores peace. So does Obama. Both are warrior leaders.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon once called peace talks a useful fiction. They're used "to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people," he said.

Golda Meir said Palestinians don't exist. They "never existed," she claimed. She deplored peace. She wanted all Arabs out of historic Palestine. "(M)y conscience would be absolutely clear" dispossessing them, she said.

Former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir wanted talks dragged out for years. He hoped doing so would facilitate settlement expansions. Other Israeli leaders felt the same way.

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Thomas Gaist

A NATO airstrike killed 20 people in eastern Afghanistan during the weekend, including at least one woman and 10 children ages 1 to 12. The attacks came at the end of one of the bloodiest weeks of the entire US occupation, which began in 2001.

The airstrikes were apparently part of an operation targeting Taliban leaders in the Shigel district of Kunar province. When US ground forces encountered resistance, they called for International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) air support. At least two Taliban militants were allegedly killed in the fighting.

In response to an attack in February of 2013 which killed 10 civilians, Karzai prohibited Afghan forces from calling in airstrikes in residential areas and publicly criticized the slaughter of civilians by the US and NATO. Nevertheless, US forces continue to murder innocent Afghan civilians.

“Government officials might tell you that Afghan and foreign forces only have the right to use airstrikes in unpopulated areas, but in practice it is different,” said Afghan General Amrullah Aman. “Americans will use their air support whenever they need it, no matter where it is and no matter how many presidential decrees are issued.”

Last Wednesday, another NATO airstrike in Ghazni, near DehYak district claimed the lives of four Afghan police officers. A helicopter attack in Ghazni, also last week, killed two children. At least seven civilians were killed in another attack last week in Logar province.

Last Wednesday, in the highest death toll attack since 2011, Taliban fighters stormed a courthouse in Farah, killing 46 as they sought to free insurgents standing trial. Last year, the Taliban initiated their spring offensive in May, with a series of bloody actions. With the Afghan winter coming to an end, fighting season is set to begin.

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Paul Craig Roberts

At the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 36 foreign govern-
ments and the United States have $255 billion worth of gold
bullion on deposit, the largest such accumulation on the planet.

Assault On Gold - Update
Update to the Update: The Attack on Gold

The US will be a third world country. We are halfway there.

For Americans, financial and economic Armageddon might be close at hand. The evidence for this conclusion is the concerted effort by the Federal Reserve and its dependent financial institutions to scare people away from gold and silver by driving down their prices.

When gold prices hit $1,917.50 an ounce on August 23, 2011, a gain of more than $500 an ounce in less than 8 months, capping a rise over a decade from $272 at the end of December 2000, the Federal Reserve panicked. With the US dollar losing value so rapidly compared to the world standard for money, the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing $1 trillion annually in order to support the impaired balance sheets of banks and to finance the federal deficit was placed in danger. Who could believe the dollar’s exchange rate in relation to other currencies when the dollar was collapsing in value in relation to gold and silver.

The Federal Reserve realized that its massive purchase of bonds in order to keep their
prices high (and thus interest rates low) was threatened by the dollar’s rapid loss of value in terms of gold and silver. The Federal Reserve was concerned that large holders of US dollars, such as the central banks of China and Japan and the OPEC sovereign investment funds, might join the flight of individual investors away from the US dollar, thus ending in the fall of the dollar’s foreign exchange value and thus decline in US bond and stock prices.

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