Stephen Lendman

Previous articles discussed Washington-supported death squads in Syria. It's common practice in all US direct and proxy wars. Massacres and unspeakable atrocities are committed. Women are raped. Civilians are treated like combatants. Official coverup and denial follow.

Vietnam's Operation Phoenix became a prototype for today's wars. Terrorizing people into submission is official US policy. Guns for hire are enlisted, armed, funded, trained, and directed. Nothing too heinous is out of bounds. Killing continues daily like sport. So do gruesome atrocities.

In March 2012, Der Spiegel discussed the "Homs burial brigade." An insurgent "executioner" said he and comrades "kill in the name of the Syrian revolution. They leave torture (to) the so-called interrogation brigade...." "They do the ugly work." He believes in violence, he said. He "cut the throats of four men." He machine-gunned many more. Executions happen regularly. Atrocities are routinely committed.

On May 14, Russia Today discussed a graphic video. It showed an insurgent commander mutilating a Syrian soldier's corpse. Images showed him cutting out a soldier's heart and liver. He held the organs in his hands. He appeared to bite into them. He addressed the camera, saying:

"I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog." Others off-camera chanted "Allahu akbar (God is great)." The person filming said "God bless you, Abu Sakkar. You look like you are drawing (carving) a heart of love on him."

Even Human Rights Watch (HRW) was outraged. Nearly always it's reliably pro-Western. It backs NATO's imperial wars. It supports Washington's regime change plans. It's one-sidedly anti-Assad.

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Philip Giraldi

Top L-R: Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Robert
Kagan Bottom L-R: Zbigniew Brzezinski, William
Kristol and Elliott Abrams. More members here.
(American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus)

It has been noted ironically by Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com and also by Scott McConnell over at The American Conservative how the neoconservative dominated American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, which sees Chechens and other Central Asian Muslim militants as “freedom fighters” against Russian rule, exists side by side with other organizations like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the American Enterprise Institute that feature many of the same neoconservatives dedicated to restraining Political Islam while extirpating what they frequently describe as “Islamic fascism.” As is frequently the case with ideologically driven positions, the American neocon supporters of Chechen independence have failed to note that the Chechen nationalist uprising of the 1980s has now morphed into an Islamic based insurgency. The contradictory behavior is particularly glaring as Chechens have frequently been identified among al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and elsewhere and have carried out major terrorist operations in the Russian Confederation, highlighted by the killing of 186 schoolchildren at Beslan in September 2004. The friends of Chechnya response to the massacre has been to successfully pressure the State Department to provide political asylum and a government job for Ilyas Akhmadov, a rebel leader who might have been party to the terrorist attack, a bit of hypocrisy that the Russians have noted vis-à-vis Washington’s professed global war on terror.

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Barry Grey

In a brazen and illegal attack on press freedom, the Obama Justice Department secretly subpoenaed the telephone records of Associated Press editors and journalists and tracked ingoing and outgoing calls on at least 20 telephone lines, including the national headquarters of the press agency and its news bureaus in New York, Hartford and Washington DC. Among the lines tracked was the telephone used by AP reporters working out of the House of Representatives press gallery in the Capitol.

The Associated Press was given no advance notice of the government dragnet, which reportedly began in April of 2012 and continued through May of that year. Such a massive operation over a two-month period would generate records of many thousands of telephone calls, providing the government with legally privileged information about AP journalists’ sources and methods. More than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were seized.

The lines that were tracked included the home and cell phones of at least one editor and an unknown number of reporters. While the Justice Department has not provided any reason for the spying operation, it is widely assumed, and so asserted by AP, that it was carried out in connection with a federal investigation into an alleged leak of “classified” information by the press agency in a May 7, 2012 article concerning a CIA covert operation in Yemen.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Over the last several years I have watched the rise of an important new intellect on the American scene. Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, has demonstrated time and again the extraordinary ability to reexamine settled issues and show that the accepted conclusion was incorrect.

One of his early achievements was to dispose of the myth of immigrant crime by demonstrating that “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age and gender.” You can imagine the uproar, but Unz won the debate.

Unz provoked and prevailed in another controversy when he concluded that Mexican-Americans have approximately the same innate intelligence as whites, with their lower IQs being due to transitory socio-economic deprivation.

He next surprised by showing the connection between the declining real value of the minimum wage (about one-third less than in the 1960s) and immigration. Americans cannot survive on one-third less minimum income than four decades ago, and the unfilled jobs are taken by Hispanics who live many to the room. A higher minimum wage, Unz pointed out, would cure the illegal immigration problem as American citizens would fill the jobs.

I wrote about some of Unz’s remarkable findings. One of my favorites is his comparison of the responsiveness of the Chinese and US governments to their publics. I found his conclusion convincing that the authoritarian one-party Chinese government was more responsive to the Chinese people than democratic two-party Washington is to the American people.

The person is rare who can take on such controversial issues in such a professional way that he wins the admiration even of his critics. In my opinion, Ron Unz is a national resource. He has established online libraries of important periodicals and magazines from the pre-Internet era, information that otherwise essentially would be lost. I have not met him, but he donates to this site [paulcraigroberts.org] and is an independent thinker free of The Matrix.

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Stephen Lendman

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Imperial tool, killing for Israel & the US

In 1999, Nobel laureate/outspoken anti-war critic Harold Pinter minced no words denouncing NATO's Yugoslavia war. "Let us face the truth," he said. "The truth is that neither Clinton nor Blair gives a damn about the Kosovar Albanians. This action has been another blatant and brutal assertion of US power using NATO as its missile." "It set out to consolidate one thing - American domination Europe. This must be fully recognized and it must be resisted."

Obama's using Turkey as its missile against Syria. Both countries share a common border. CIA elements infest the region. They're very much involved in Turkey. They're recruiting, arming, training and directing insurgent fighters. They're likely doing it on both sides of the border.

In June 2012, The New York Times headlined "CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition," saying: Operating covertly from southern Turkey, CIA operatives are "decid(ing) which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers." Weapons supplied include "automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition, (and) antitank weapons..." They're smuggled across Turkey's border through "a shadowy network of intermediaries..."

Turkey's a NATO country. It's a reliable imperial partner. It has its own regional ambitions. It's Washington's lead attack dog against Syria. The aftermath of Saturday's Reyhanli's bombings bears watching. Turkey blamed Syria. It did so straightaway. No evidence whatever proves it. Accusations don't wash.

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Thomas Gaist

The twin bombings that struck the town of Reyhanli, Turkey, near the border with Syria, this weekend are being used to push for direct, US-led military intervention against Syria. The Turkish government is blaming Syrian intelligence agencies and pushing for “international” action against regime of Bashir al-Assad, despite reports implicating US-backed “rebels” in the bombings.

Mehmet Ali Ediboğlu, a member in the Turkish parliament for Kemalist opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), told Die Presse that the Turkey had allowed Syrian opposition groups to operate in the border region. He said that the cars that were used had been smuggled into the country from areas controlled by the Al Nusra Front, the Islamist organization affiliated to Al Qaeda that has played a leading role in the campaign against Assad.

The attack, Ediboğlu said, was “very professional” and had the hallmarks of an Al Nusra operation. “It looks like an Al Qaeda-style attack,” Ediboğlu said. “They want to get Turkey into the war.”

He added, “Syrians knew something and left the town in the morning before the attack.”

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Paul Craig Roberts

Just who does the US government represent?

There are many signs of gangster state America. One is the collusion between federal authorities and banksters in a criminal conspiracy to rig the markets for gold and silver.

My explanation that the sudden appearance of an unprecedented 400 ton short sale of gold on the COMEX in April was a manipulation designed to protect the dollar from the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy has found acceptance among gold investors and hedge fund managers.

The sale was a naked short. The seller had no gold to sell. COMEX reported having gold only equal to about half of the short sale in its vaults, and not all of that was available for delivery. No one but the Federal Reserve could have placed such an order, and the order came from one of the Fed’s bullion banks, one of the entities “too big to fail.”

Bill Kaye of the Greater Asian Hedge Fund in Hong Kong and Dave Kranzler of Golden Returns Capital have filled in the details of how the manipulation worked. Being sophisticated investors of many years of experience, both Kaye and Kranzler understand that the financial press runs with the authorized story planted to serve the agenda that has been put into play.

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Stephen Lendman

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side.

In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way.

Naked aggression is called humanitarian intervention. New wars follow earlier ones. Ravaging humanity is called liberation. Nations are destroyed for their own good. Propaganda convinces people that America is threatened. Truth is turned on its head.

Syria is Washington's latest target. Plans haven't gone as expected. Ousting another government was supposed to be easy. US-enlisted terrorists are no match against Syria's military superiority. Implementing Plan B looms. It could come any time. Obama's heading toward full-scale intervention. Pretexts are easy to create. Assad's been falsely blamed for numerous insurgent massacres. Evidence showed he had nothing to do with them.

More recently, he was unjustifiably accused of using chemical weapons. Insurgents used them several times. A previous article said Pentagon contractors trained them in their use. This is how imperial America operates.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The new president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, is cast in Chávez’s mold. On May 4, he called US president Obama the “grand chief of devils.”

Obama, who has betrayed democracy in America, unleashing execution on American citizens without due process of law and war without the consent of Congress, provoked Maduro’s response by suggesting that Maduro’s newly elected government might be fraudulent.

Obviously, Obama is piqued that the millions of dollars his administration spent trying to elect an American puppet instead of Maduro failed to do the job. If anyone has accurately summed up Washington, it is the Venezuelans.

Who can forget Chávez standing at the podium of the UN General Assembly in New York City speaking of George W. Bush? Quoting from memory: “Right here, yesterday, at this very podium stood Satan himself, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulphur.”

Hegemonic Washington threw countless amounts of money into the last Venezuelan election, doing its best to deliver the governance of that country to a Washington puppet called Henrique Capriles, in my opinion a traitor to Venezuela. Why isn’t this American puppet arrested for treason? Why are not the Washington operatives against an independent country–the US ambassador, the counsels, the USAID/CIA personnel, the Washington funded NGOs–ordered to leave Venezuela immediately or arrested and tried for spying and high treason? Why allow any presence of Washington in Venezuela when it is clear that Washington’s intention is to make Venezuela a puppet state like the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Japan, and on and on.

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Stephen Lendman

US democracy is illusory. America never was beautiful. It's not the land of the free and home of the brave. It wasn't created that way. More than ever, it's not now. Freedom is a four-letter word. It's fast disappearing. It's an endangered species. Wealth, power and privilege alone matter. America's war on terror priorities advance them. International, constitutional and US statute laws are spurned. Rogue state ruthlessness replaced them.

Boston's unprecedented lockdown suggests what's coming. It covered a two hundred square mile area. An important threshold was crossed. Martial law terrorized city residents. Constitutional rights were suspended. Perhaps it was prelude to what's coming. It can happen anywhere across America. It can show up nationwide. Thousands of heavily armed militarized police, National Guard troops, FBI Swat teams, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operatives, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and perhaps other federal, state and local enforcers showed what full-blown tyranny looks like. Defying public diktats risked arrest or getting shot. Helicopters hovered low over neighborhoods. House-to-house searches ordered pajama-clad families outside. Without probable cause, some were handcuffed and/or placed face down on sidewalks. Others were publicly strip-searched. Imagine what's coming next time. Freedom in America's on the chopping block for elimination.

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Bill Van Auken

Forward Operating Base Logar, Afghanistan (Wikimedia Commons)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai Thursday revealed that Washington wants to maintain nine US military bases scattered across the country after the formal deadline for the withdrawal of US and NATO coalition forces at the end of 2014.

In a speech delivered at Kabul University, Karzai stressed that he was amenable to the US demand, indicating that he was willing to trade the bases for promises of a continued flow of economic aid from the West and security for his puppet government. Another likely condition is US support for the election of his handpicked successor in an election set for next year.

“If these conditions are met, we are ready to sign the contract with the United States,” he said. As to the continued presence of foreign troops on Afghan soil after more than a dozen years of war and occupation, Karzai stated, “We see their staying in Afghanistan beyond 2014 in the interests of Afghanistan as well as NATO.”

The statements represented an abrupt rhetorical shift by the US-backed president. In recent months, Karzai has accused Washington of colluding with the Taliban to increase violence and create a pretext for a continued US military presence. He has repeatedly demanded an end to US aerial bombardments and to night raids by US Special Forces, which have claimed civilian lives and increased hatred for both the foreign occupation and Karzai’s corrupt puppet government in Kabul.

In February, Karzai barred US special operations troops from operating in the entire province of Maidan Wardak, southwest of Kabul. These and other statements and gestures have been aimed at deflecting popular hostility and posturing as a nationalist leader, rather than Washington’s stooge.

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Stephen Lendman

US-led anti-Assad efforts continue. Obama's going all out to topple him. He's heading America for more war. His imperial strategy prioritizes it. Rule of law principles are discarded. Unchallenged global dominance alone matters. America's longstanding permanent war agenda advances it.

Syria is now being ravaged. Assad is wrongfully blamed for US proxy death squad crimes. Ad nauseam propaganda claims otherwise. Facebook and Twitter have Stop Assad campaigns. UK-based Media Lens reports reliably on media bias. On May 8, it headlined " ' This Madman Must Be Stopped' - Syrian Chemical Weapons."

Propaganda wars precede hot ones. Western efforts are relentless. Media scoundrels regurgitate official lies. Quasi-progressive print publications and web editors are involved. So are NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Corporate foundations fund them. Well-known ones include Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Soros, and MacArthur. Tainted money expects services rendered in return. Conflicts of interest are rife.

Sources [that] viewers, listeners and readers believe are reliable replicate their scoundrel media counterparts. Critics call America's NPR National Pentagon Radio. They do so for good reason. On major world and national issues, Britain's BBC is all propaganda all the time. America's dominant media are deplorable. Truth is systematically suppressed. Managed news misinformation substitutes. When America goes to war or plans one, they march in lockstep. In modern times, it's never been any other way.

Television makes it easy. Stop Assad images proliferate. Doing so overwhelms anti-war voices of truth. Anti-Assad propaganda aims to fool enough of the people enough of the time to matter.

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If Americans Knew

Israel has a population of approximately 7.7 million, or a million fewer than the state of New Jersey. It is among the world's most affluent nations, with a per capita income similar to that of the European Union.[1] Israel's unemployment rate of 6.3% is much better than America's 8.2%,[2] and Israel's net trade, earnings, and payments is ranked 146th in the world while the US sits at a dismal 193rd.[3]

Yet, Israel receives more of America’s foreign aid budget than any other nation.[4] The US has, in fact, given more aid to Israel than it has to all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean combined—which have a total population of over a billion people.[5]

And foreign aid is just one component of the staggering cost of our alliance with Israel. Given the tremendous costs, it is critical to examine why we lavish so much aid on Israel, and whether it is worth Americans' hard-earned tax dollars. But first, let's take a look at what our alliance with Israel truly costs.

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William Blum

Boston Bomb Suspect Manhunt, New Images of Police Battle

What is it that makes young men, reasonably well educated, in good health and nice looking, with long lives ahead of them, use powerful explosives to murder complete strangers because of political beliefs?

I’m speaking about American military personnel of course, on the ground, in the air, or directing drones from an office in Nevada.

Do not the survivors of US attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere, and their loved ones, ask such a question?

The survivors and loved ones in Boston have their answer – America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That’s what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber has said in custody, and there’s no reason to doubt that he means it, nor the dozens of others in the past two decades who have carried out terrorist attacks against American targets and expressed anger toward US foreign policy.[1] Both Tsarnaev brothers had expressed such opinions before the attack as well.[2] The Marathon bombing took place just days after a deadly US attack in Afghanistan killed 17 civilians, including 12 children, as but one example of countless similar horrors from recent years. “Oh”, an American says, “but those are accidents. What terrorists do is on purpose. It’s cold-blooded murder.”

But if the American military sends out a bombing mission on Monday which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Tuesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Wednesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and the military then announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” … Thursday … Friday … How long before the American military loses the right to say it was an accident?

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Thomas Gaist

Calls for a war with Syria mounted yesterday, despite mass popular opposition to war in the United States, amid reports that US-backed Islamist opposition forces fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have suffered serious reverses.

Speaking on NBC News yesterday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressed for Washington to take military action against Syria.

He repeated unsubstantiated allegations that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, which have been refuted by UN investigator Carla del Ponte, claiming, “It is clear the regime has used chemical weapons and missiles.” Claiming that a “red line” had been crossed, he said: “We want the United States to assume more responsibilities and take further steps. And what sort of steps they will take, we are going to talk about this.”

Erdogan dismissed out of hand reports that chemical weapons used in Syria were in fact used by the US-backed opposition.

He stressed that his government would support US imposition of a “no-fly zone” in Syria, which would involve destroying Syrian air defenses and shooting down any Syrian aircraft that took to the skies.

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