Pepe Escobar

The ''responsibility to protect'' (R2P) doctrine invoked to legitimize the 2011 war on Libya has just transmogrified into ''responsibility to attack'' (R2A) Syria. Just because the Obama administration says so.

On Sunday, the White House said it had ''very little doubt'' that the Bashar al-Assad government used chemical weapons against its own citizens. On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry ramped it up to ''undeniable'' - and accused Assad of ''moral obscenity''.

So when the US bombed Fallujah with white phosphorus in late 2004 it was just taking the moral high ground. And when the US helped Saddam Hussein to gas Iranians in 1988 it was also taking the moral high ground.

The Obama administration has ruled that Assad allowed UN chemical weapons inspectors into Syria, and to celebrate their arrival unleashed a chemical weapons attack mostly against women and children only 15 kilometers away from the inspectors' hotel. If you don't believe it, you subscribe to a conspiracy theory.

Evidence? Who cares about evidence? Assad's offer of access for the inspectors came ''too late''. Anyway, the UN team is only mandated to determine whether chemical weapons were deployed - but not by who, according to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon's spokesman.

As far as the Obama administration and UK Prime Minister David ''of Arabia'' Cameron are concerned - supported by a barrage of corporate media missiles - that's irrelevant; Obama's ''red line'' has been crossed by Assad, period. Washington and London are in no-holds-barred mode to dismiss any facts contradicting the decision. Newspeak - of the R2A kind - rules. If this all looks like Iraq 2.0 that's because it is. Time to fix the facts around the policy - all over again. Time for weapons of mass deception - all over again.

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Stephen Lendman

In awarding its 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Committee members turned truth on its head, saying:

Obama made extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. He created a new climate in international politics. Multinational diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions play. He envisions "a world without nuclear weapons. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely the international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

Fact check: Throughout his tenure, Obama supported multiple direct and proxy wars. He backs perpetual wars. He spurns peace. He deplores it. He pursues confrontational policies. He chooses them over diplomatic conflict resolution. He does it every time. He supports some the world's most ruthless despots. They get White House photo-op invitations. He reinvented a new Cold War with Russia. His Asia pivot targets China and North Korea. He supports Honduran coup d'état rule. He conspired with fascist plotters to oust democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. After its disastrous January 2010 earthquake, he militarized Haiti. He plundered it freely. He opposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return. He orchestrated rigged elections. He prohibited democratic rule.

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Pepe Escobar

A picture downloaded from the US air force website
shows F-16 Fighting Falcons from the 35th and 80th
Fighter Squadrons (AFP Photo/US Air Force)

Only a few days before the 12th anniversary of 9/11, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama might be fighting side by side with… al-Qaeda, as he was foolish enough to be trapped by his own rhetoric on Syria.

The dogs of war bark and the caravan… is Tomahawked. Amid out-of-control hysteria, the proverbial “unnamed US officials” spin like demented centrifuges.

Obama’s “kinetic operation” on Syria will fall out of the sky “in the next few days.” It will be “limited,” lasting only “three days,” or “no more than two days.” It will “send a message,” a “short, sharp attack” against less than 50 sites on a list of targets.

But then long-range bombers may “possibly” join the Tomahawk barrage, and all bets are off.

A proverbial, anonymous “senior administration official” even stressed the “desire to get it done before the president leaves for Russia next week.”

That’s it; we bomb a country like dialing a pizza delivery, and then we go to a G20 summit with the world’s emerging powers hosted by no less than Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Just because we need to prove that the president of the United States meant what he said: chemical weapons are a red line. And to hell who’s responsible for deploying them.

I’m not making this up. This is the core of White House spokesman Jay Carney’s message, when he said, in faultless Newspeak: “The options that are being considered do not contain within them a regime change focus.”

So the administration of “constitutional lawyer” Barack Obama is mulling how to attack Syria, bypassing the UN Security Council – which will veto, via Russia and China, the new resolution proposed by the UK; bypassing always-docile NATO; and with 91 percent of Americans against it, just to send an (explosive) political message. And all because a US president was foolish enough to get trapped in his own rhetoric.

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Chris Floyd

They are insane. They are stupid. They are enslaved to murderous power — so they will kill.

At some point in the next few hours or days, it is likely that deeply damaged collection of moral cretins known as "Western leaders" will sit down behind the gargantuan phalanxes of heavily armed security that keeps their well-wadded rumps safe and cozy and give the nod to some close-cropped flunky laden with medals for mendacious time-serving and relentless butt-covering to launch the airstrikes that will kill a large number of human beings who had absolutely nothing to do with the alleged chemical weapon attacks allegedly carried out by Syrian government forces.

That is to say, the leaders of the West, particularly the notoriously bloodthirsty nations of the United States and Great Britain, will murder a number of their fellow human beings for no reason whatsoever. What's more, they know this and admit it beforehand, speaking under oath, as the U.S. military chief did this week, of the inevitable "collateral damage" the coming attacks will cause. These Western leaders, primarily Barack Obama and the pathetic, feckless ex-PR shill David Cameron, will knowingly murder an unknown number of people while braying all the while of their own righteousness and the strict "legality" of their acts of mass murder.

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Thomas Gaist and Alex Lantier

Washington’s campaign to justify war against Syria is disintegrating, as it becomes ever clearer that the war is illegal, and that Washington has no evidence to back up charges that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons in Ghouta. Despite press reports of an imminent US-NATO attack, US and British officials suggested yesterday that they might delay launching the war.

There is rising concern inside the political establishment about how to package a war in Syria modeled on the hated 2003 invasion of Iraq. Again, Washington and London are moving to launch a war based on lies about weapons of mass destruction and without legal sanction from the UN Security Council—that is, in violation of international law.

Even before war has begun, Obama administration officials are in disarray. In a PBS television interview last night, Obama attempted to back away from threats of an imminent attack: “We have not yet made a decision, but the international norm against the use of chemical weapons needs to be kept in place. If we are saying this in a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across the bow saying, stop doing this; that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term.”

Obama’s claim that his administration has not decided to move against Assad is an absurd lie. Washington has called for Assad’s overthrow for over a year, while the CIA massively armed Al Qaeda-linked Islamist opposition militias against his regime.

A senior US official contradicted Obama yesterday, telling NBC that US moves toward intervention in Syria are “past the point of no return,” and that strikes will be launched in days.

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Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The Middle East and North Africa have been turned into an arc of instability all the way from Iraq and the Persian Gulf to Libya and Tunisia. Chaos and violence seem to be in almost every corner of the Arab World and the Middle East. The bloodletting does not seem to stop.

One country in the region, however, is gleaming with satisfaction. Tel Aviv has been given a free hand by the instability that it has helped author with Washington in the region. The chaos around it has allowed Israel to move ahead with its annexation of more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank while it pretends to be talking peace with the Palestinian Authority of the irrelevant Mahmoud Abbas. All it needs now is for the US to lead a war against Iran and its allies.

The current upheavals actually have a resounding resemblance to the objectives of the Yinon Plan of 1982, named after its author Oded Yinon from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which calls for the fracturing of North Africa and the Middle East. The Israeli document may have been written in 1982, but it represents the strategic goals and ideas of Israel. «Breaking Egypt down territorially into distinct geographical regions is the political aim of Israel», according to it. It is a continuation of the colonial project of the British in the region and has been transmitted to American foreign policy, which explains the views of the neocons and Ralph Peters about the «New Middle East» that they seek. The «Clean Break» documented authored by Richard Perle for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also based on the Yinon Plan and informs the current position of the Obama Administration and Netanyahu’s government on Syria.

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Thomas Gaist

The Obama administration is in the final stages of its longstanding preparations for a massive military onslaught against Syria. President Obama is signing off on one of the various scenarios that have been developed over the past two years by the Pentagon. In all likelihood, the initial stages of the attack will involve the use of cruise missiles fired from US navy vessels and “standoff” attacks launched by US war planes from beyond Syria’s borders.

According to an NBC News report Tuesday evening, the US could hit Syria with an initial three days of missile strikes, beginning as early as Thursday. Subsequent waves of strikes could then be launched, unnamed senior officials told NBC, “to target what was missed in further rounds.”

“We are ready to go,” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told the BBC on Tuesday.

“This is as much a warning to Iran, as I see it, as it is action against Syria,” Representative Peter King of New York told CNN.

In order to provide political camouflage for the military operations and deceive the public, the administration and the media are claiming that the attack will be of a limited nature. This is a lie. Aside from the fact that the use of bombs and missiles against a heavily populated capital must lead to massive casualties, the political and military aims of the undeclared war are far-reaching.

The US and its imperialist co-conspirators in Britain, France and Germany intend to destroy the Assad regime’s military capabilities, eliminate its ability to resist the proxy “rebel” forces that are serving US interests, and bring about regime-change.

This outcome will set the stage for a war against Iran within the next year or two, if not earlier.

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Stephen Lendman

CIA's & Mossad's ragtag army. It's well established by now
that they've been using chemical weapons. Would the Syrian
government have been using that filthy stuff now that it was
winning the war and right before the UN was going to Syria?

When America goes to war or plans one, media scoundrels march in lockstep. Might justifies right. Imperial priorities are suppressed. Wars of aggression are called liberating ones. Bombs away is called humanitarian intervention. Nations are destroyed to free them. Plunder is called economic development. So is exploitation. Unchallenged imperial control is called democracy. Code language conceals real motives. Monied interests alone benefit. They choose US leaders. They decide policy. They have final say. When they want war they get it. Media scoundrels support what demands condemnation. It happens every time.

On August 27, the Wall Street Journal headlined " 'Little Doubt' Syria Gassed Opposition," saying: John Kerry "mad(e) (the) case for US action."

He cited "undeniable evidence."He failed to produce it. None exists. The Journal didn't explain. Inflammatory headlines substitute. It's standard scoundrel media practice. They regurgitate Big Lies. They do so unconscionably. They do it unapologetically. They bear direct responsibility for lawless aggression that follows.

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Alex Lantier

Yesterday US Secretary of State John Kerry appeared on national television to deliver a lying statement aimed at preparing public opinion for an impending US-NATO attack on Syria. It was his very own “Colin Powell moment.”

On February 5, 2003, Powell, then the Secretary of State in the Bush administration, made an infamous presentation before the United Nations. For two hours, armed with photos, graphs, and audio tapes, the chief diplomatic officer of the United States made the case for war against Iraq. He claimed that the evidence he presented showed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which it was about to unleash on the world.

The media and politicians of both parties hailed Powell’s performance, declaring that the former general had made an overwhelming case that Iraq had enormous WMD programs. Six weeks later, bombs fell on Iraq as the US invasion began.

Powell’s speech was a pack of lies. Not one of his claims about yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes, or mobile weapons labs was true. At the time, the WSWS wrote that the brief for war was “a diplomatic charade laced with cynicism and deceit… predicated on a colossal lie: that the coming invasion is about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad’s supposed threat to US security and world peace.” And so it proved to be.

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John McMurtry

The following essay was delivered at a forum entitled "The Assault on Iraq and the War Against Democracy: How Should Canadians Respond?" held on Sunday March 23, 2003 in Toronto, Ontario, under the auspices of Science for Peace.

"It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." ~ Hermann Göring

Genocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as progress and spreading civilisation.

I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam Chomsky say that genocide was America's defining political tradition. Then I realised that the United States (like Canada to a much lesser extent) was based on destroying the lives and cultures of the 25 million or so first peoples who had lived in America for millennia. In the case of the U.S., the story continued with the forcible seizure of Texas in 1845 from Mexican farmers and indigenous peoples, and Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, California and other state territories shortly afterward in 1849. U.S. troops under the slave-owning General Zachary Taylor unilaterally invaded its southern neighbour under the false pretext of avenging American blood, and General Taylor soon vaulted into the White House as a presidential war hero. Even though a young Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, exposed the pretext, and connected it to a Anglo-British business strategy to impose free trade on the regions by financing the prior president, James Polk, into the White House as General Taylor's commander.

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Kenny's Sideshow

Something needs to be done. Is it too late?

The crisis in Syria could possibly become totally out of control if the US takes direct interventionist measures. We can only imagine the chaos that could arise. What will Russia do?

The Sunday talking head warmongers have been doing their best to please their masters by interviewing every crazed psychopath they can get to come on their lie machine. My own senator, the inhuman Bob Corker, is calling for action now.

Assad is allowing UN inspectors to go to the site of the false flag chemical attack but an unnamed US official says 'it's too late baby now it's too late,' Syria's credibility is shot and there was little doubt the government was to blame. Obama and Cameron have been plotting. They want Iran too and are a danger to the world.

So is there anything we the people can do? We have not stopped the push to war at all for the last hundred years. At the best it has only been slowed down a bit. The 'seven countries in five years,' the Oded Yinon plan and 'A Clean Break' are behind schedule. The PNAC manifesto is still a work in progress.

The anti-war left is dead. There will be little protesting in the streets but for what it may be worth there needs to be although a few 'domestic terrorist' events may be necessary to to put an end to any peacenik endeavors.

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Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)

President al-Assad: Syria will never become a western puppet state, we will fight terrorism and freely build relationships that best serve the interests of the Syrians.

President Bashar al-Assad stressed that Syria is a sovereign country that will fight terrorism and will freely build relationships with countries in a way that best serves the interests of the Syrian people. In an interview with the Russian newspaper of Izvestia, President al-Assad stressed that "the majority of those we are fighting are Takfiris, who adopt the al-Qaeda doctrine, in addition to a small number of outlaws." On the alleged use of chemical weapons, President al-Assad said that the statements by the US administration, the West and other countries were made with disdain and blatant disrespect of their own public opinion, adding that "there isn’t a body in the world, let alone a superpower, that makes an accusation and then goes about collecting evidence to prove its point." His Excellency stressed that these accusations are completely politicised and come on the back of the advances made by the Syrian Army against the terrorists.

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Thomas Gaist

The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that documents supplied by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden prove the NSA spied on internal communications at the United Nations headquarters in New York City during the summer of 2012. The NSA has also targeted the European Union and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), according to Der Spiegel.

Documents published by Der Spiegel show that the NSA tapped into the UN’s internal video conferencing system and deployed decryption technology to gain access to the video stream. Within weeks of penetrating the video stream, the NSA ramped up the number of communications being decrypted and monitored from 12 to 458.

“The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!),” read one of the documents quoted in the report.

Der Spiegel further reported on a US intelligence program called the “Special Collection Service,” which operates in diplomatic facilities across the globe. “The surveillance is intensive and well organized and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists,” the magazine wrote.

Previous revelations have shown systematic spying by the US on EU governments. American intelligence operatives apparently gained access to the virtual private network (VPN) relied on by EU embassies in the US. Files copied from NSA servers by Snowden include detailed plans of the EU’s information technology infrastructure and other internal EU documents.

The latest revelations of the massive and international scope of the US government’s illegal spying operations come only two weeks after a White House press conference in which President Obama repeated the official lies about the supposedly limited and legally sanctioned character of the secret NSA programs.

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Julian Assange

It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system.

So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements.

Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.

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Stephen Lendman

Democracy exists in name only. Modern day McCarthyism harms everyone. State terror threatens everyone. Humanity's endangered.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) targeted alleged communist sympathizers. Uncorroborated hearsay alone mattered.

Prominent Hollywood figures were named. Hundreds of actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, musicians, songwriters, and other artists were accused of communist sympathies. They were blacklisted.

Notable ones were called the Hollywood Ten. They included screenwriter Alvah Bessie, screenwriter/director Herbert Biberman, screenwriter Lester Cole, director Edward Dmytryk, screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., screenwriter John Lawson, screenwriter Albert Maltz, screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, producer/screenwriter Adrian Scott, and author/screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

McCarthyism signifies baseless slander, unscrupulous fearmongering, and political lynchings. Communist hearings got headlines. They were televised. They were witch-hunt prosecutions.

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Stephen Lendman

Whenever America goes to war or plans one, media scoundrels march in lockstep. Truth is the first casualty. Managed news misinformation substitutes. It happens every time. It's standard practice.

It's no different this time. Facts on the ground don't matter. They're systematically ignored. Nations Washington opposes are vilified. Harsh media scoundrel rhetoric targets them. It repeats with disturbing frequency. It's escalating now.

Wednesday's Ghouta incident ignited a firestorm. Emotion and misinformation substitute for responsible reporting. Credible analysis is systematically lacking. Fingers point the wrong way. It's de rigueur. It's shameless. It's reprehensible. It's unconscionable. It doesn't matter.

On August 22, New York Times editors headlined "The Corpses in Syria." Assad's government was called a "cutthroat regime." If he's proved responsible for Wednesday's Ghouta incident, "as many suspect, the United States and other major powers will almost certainly have to respond much more aggressively than they have so far," said Times editors.

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Barry Grey

The mounting provocations and war preparations against the Assad regime threaten to unleash a far wider and more bloody war across the Middle East—one that could bring the US into direct conflict with Russia and China.

US officials have outlined a series of options that are being considered for a direct assault by American and allied military forces against Syria, using Wednesday’s alleged chemical weapons attack as the pretext. The stepped-up military preparations make clear that the events on Wednesday are part of a provocation to justify yet another neo-colonial war in the Middle East.

The growing threat of direct US intervention in the war for regime-change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was also underscored Friday by President Obama, who used an interview on CNN to indicate he was seeking to marshal international support and some form of legal cover for a US-led attack.

The New York Times reported in a front-page article Friday that senior officials from the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence agencies met with White House officials for three-and-a-half hours Thursday to outline possible military measures. The article cited unnamed officials, who said no decision was reached amid internal differences over whether to launch direct US military action in the coming days.

According to the Times, the military options discussed ranged from cruise missile strikes launched from US ships currently deployed in the Mediterranean Sea to a full-scale air war targeting civilian as well as military sites. The newspaper wrote: “The targets could include missile or artillery batteries that launch chemical munitions or nerve gas, as well as communications and support facilities. Symbols of the Assad government’s power—headquarters and government offices—also could be among the proposed targets, officials said.”

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Anna Filimonova

Recently Greece took the «honor» of first place in Europe for reducing budget expenditures on health services. In particular, expenditures on medications were reduced from 5.6 billion euros (2010) to 3.8 billion euros in 2011 and to 2.88 billion euros in 2012. As a direct result of this, over 50 world pharmaceutical companies have discontinued shipments of medications to Greece. It has become common for relatives of hospital patients to have to run exhausting marathons from pharmacy to pharmacy in search of needed medications. There is an acute shortage of medical equipment. State hospitals are short around 6,500 doctors and 20,000 nurses and orderlies; massive numbers of medical professionals are leaving the country.

Even those who are employed have difficulty paying for medical services, whose prices have abruptly shot up. More and more often people don't have the money to obtain quality medical assistance, especially in rural regions and on the islands. In a UN expert report published in May 2013, it was noted that over 10% of the total population of the country live in conditions of extreme poverty. Greece remains the only country in the Eurozone with no complex social assistance scheme, healthcare services are almost inaccessible to poor and low-income citizens, and almost a third of the population does not have state medical insurance.

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Stephen Lendman

Laws are made to be obeyed. Washington acts like they don't exist. Big Brother is official policy.

It's longstanding. It's no secret. It's well known. Now we know more. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) deserves credit. On August 21, it headlined "Intelligence Agency Attorney on How 'Multi-Communication Transactions' Allowed for Domestic Surveillance." EFF filed a FOIA lawsuit. For over a year, it fought for public disclosure. It demanded release of an 86-page FISA court opinion.

In October 2011, it was gotten. It called NSA's so-called "upstream collection" (UC) system illegal and unconstitutional. It violates the FISA Amendments Act. It breaches constitutional provisions. NSA violates the letter and spirit of federal law. Its UC occurs when it "gets a copy of Internet traffic as it flows through major telecommunications hubs, and searches through for 'selectors,' like an email address or a keyword."

Declassified documents show NSA collected 58,000 or more domestic emails. It obtained other US communications. It's done it annually for at least three years. It's likely done it much longer. It constitutes a gross invasion of privacy. It's unconstitutional. It violates Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment provisions. It's unrelated to terrorism.

In February 2006, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appointed US District Court for the District of Columbia Judge John D. Bates to serve on the FISA court. From May 2009 - February 2013, he was presiding judge. He said (at least) three times over a three-year period, Washington...

..."disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program. (T)he volume and nature of the information (NSA's) been collecting is fundamentally different than what the court had been led to believe."

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David Walsh

US Army Private Bradley Manning, who helped bring to light innumerable crimes of the American government and armed forces, was sentenced to 35 years in military prison Wednesday, a sentence without precedent for the “crime” of whistle-blowing.

At a press conference the same day, Manning’s attorney, David Coombes, read aloud an open letter from the 25-year-old army private to President Barack Obama. The statement will be included in a request to the Secretary of the Army asking Obama to pardon Manning or commute his sentence to time already served.

The letter is an honest, powerful document, which outlines Manning’s motives for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents. It is unlike the stage-managed “confession” that Manning was obliged to give before his military tribunal in Ft. Meade, Maryland on August 14, during which he apologized for his actions.

In his letter to Obama, Manning first explains that the decision to release the incriminating material was “made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in.” He adds that he agreed at first with the methods adopted by US authorities following 9/11. Not until Manning was deployed to Iraq and began “reading secret military reports on a daily basis” did he start “to question the morality of what we were doing.”

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