KingWorldNews.com / Paul Craig Roberts

The Hindenburg Omen: a technical analysis pattern
that is said to portend a stock market crash. It is named
after the Hindenburg disaster of May 6, 1937, in which
the Zeppelin airship Hindenburg crashed and burned.

Today a former US Treasury Official warned King World News that the U.S. is now headed toward a terrifying collapse. He also cautioned that, despite mainstream media propaganda, the Fed and other Western central planners are now desperately trying to keep the current financial system from imploding. This is without question one of the most powerful interviews Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has ever done.

Eric King: “Obviously the big news this week, Dr. Roberts, was the Fed and how they shocked the financial markets with no tapering. Your thoughts?”

Dr. Roberts: “Here’s the situation for the Fed: All of the markets, and the solvency of the big banks, are totally dependent on the Fed buying the bonds. If they don’t buy the bonds, then the interest rates are going to rise, the prices of all debt-related instruments are going to go down, the insolvency of the banks again reappears, the bond market collapses, and the stock market collapses....

“So they can’t stop QE because the whole system is rigged-dependent on that (QE). The other part of the trap they are in is that the longer they carry on QE, the closer they get to the time when the rest of the world simply loses all confidence in the dollar because of the enormous rate at which new dollars are being created, and they bail out (of dollars). And when there is a run on the dollar the Fed loses control and the whole system blows up. So what the Fed is doing is preventing a short-term blowup with QE -- that is, with rigging bond prices, but the consequence is there is going to be a long-run blowup when there is a run on the dollar.

More »

Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood

Increasingly, the relationship between Americans and their government has come to resemble a one-way mirror dividing an interrogation room...

For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with “burner” phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents “are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide.

You’re probably assuming that we’re talking about another blanket National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program focused on the communications of innocent Americans, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. We could be, but we’re not. We’re talking about a program of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a domestic law enforcement agency.

More »

Peter Symonds

Barely a week after the US and Russia reached a deal to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, the Obama administration is engaged in a new round of bullying to force Russia and China to agree to a UN Security Council resolution that would give the green light for US military action against Syria.

In line with the tight deadlines contained in the agreement, the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad handed over details of its chemical weapon stockpiles to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague on Saturday. The Syrian document followed an initial statement on Friday.

The OPCW announced that the “expected disclosure from the Syrian government” had been received, but postponed an executive committee meeting on Sunday to discuss the implementation of US-Russia deal. The Washington Post reported that the postponement took place “amid an increasingly heated dispute between Russia and the United States over how to establish Syrian violations of the weapons agreement.”

More »

David Swanson

Remarks on September 21, 2013, at the Nashville Festival for Peace, Prosperity, and Planet.

Thank you to Elizabeth Barger and the Nashville Peace and Justice Center and to all of you, and happy International Day of Peace!

From a certain angle it doesn't look like a happy day of peace. The U.S. government is engaged in a major war in Afghanistan, dramatically escalated by the current U.S. president, who has been bizarrely given credit for ending it for so long now that a lot of people imagine it is ended. The same president goes through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays, picks which ones to have murdered, and has them murdered, often with missiles shot out of unmanned drones, drones that circle people's villages endlessly threatening immediate annihilation moment after moment for weeks on end, missiles that often miss their targets and often kill random people too close to their targets. The CIA with war powers. Secret military operations in dozens of nations. Expansion of U.S. troop presence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Some 90 percent of the world's nations with U.S. troops in them. Prisoners force-fed in Guantanamo. Black sites. Iraq ruined without reparations. Libya thrown into anarchy without apology. Activists treated as enemies. Journalists treated as spies. Whistleblowers locked up in cages. Our Constitutional rights treated as dispensable. The United Nations used, abused, and circumvented. U.S. weapons provided to dictatorships and democracies around the globe. Tennessee's U.S. Senator Bob Corker going on television repeatedly for weeks to tell us that the United States is covertly aiding one side of a war in Syria. Does he not know what "covertly" means, or does he not know how television works?

More »

Stephen Lendman

Under Obama, America more than ever is a global menace.

Oxford Dictionaries call rogue states "nation(s) or state(s) regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations." They're authoritarian or despotic and ruthless. They stop at nothing to achieve aims. They spurn human and civil rights. They possess weapons of mass destruction. They sponsor state terrorism.

William Blum's done some of the best research. His books include "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower." He documented how from 1945 through 2005, America tried or succeeded in toppling over 40 governments. It crushed dozens of popular movements. It slaughtered millions of people doing so. It condemned countless others to immiseration, agony and despair. According to Blum, US policies are "worse than you imagine." "If you flip over the rock of American foreign policy (throughout) the past century, this is what crawls out:"

"invasions, bombings, (subversion), overthrowing governments, suppressing (popular) movements for social change, assassinating political leaders, perverting elections, manipulating labor unions, manufacturing 'news,' death squads, torture, (chemical), biological (and nuclear) warfare, (radiological contamination), drug trafficking, mercenaries," police state repression, and war on humanity writ large. "It’s not a pretty picture," said Blum. "It is enough to give imperialism a bad name."

Bullies make more enemies than friends. America's the unchallenged world champion. It intimidates, threatens, and otherwise pressures other nations to comply with its will. Obey or else... is policy. It's waging longstanding war on humanity. It risks mass annihilation. It doesn't matter. Unchallenged global dominance alone counts. Rogue states operate that way. America's by far the worst. It targets independent governments. It wants pro-Western puppet regimes replacing them. It wants control of the world's resources. It wants ordinary people exploited as serfs. It mocks democratic values. It spurns rule of law principles. It enforces its will through the barrel of a gun.

More »

John W. Whitehead

Here’s a recipe for disaster: Take a young man (or woman), raise him on a diet of violence, hype him up on the power of the gun in his holster and the superiority of his uniform, render him woefully ignorant of how to handle a situation without resorting to violence, train him well in military tactics but allow him to be illiterate about the Constitution, and never stress to him that he is to be a peacemaker and a peacekeeper, respectful of and subservient to the taxpayers, who are in fact his masters and employers.

Once you have fully indoctrinated this young man (or woman) on the idea that the police belong to a brotherhood of sorts, with its own honor code and rule of law, then place this person in situations where he will encounter individuals who knowingly or unknowingly challenge his authority, where he may, justifiably or not, feel threatened, and where he will have to decide between firing a weapon or, the more difficult option, adequately investigating a situation in order to better assess the danger and risk posed to himself and others, and then act on it by defusing the tension or de-escalating the violence.

I’m not talking about a situation so obviously fraught with risk that there is no other option but to shoot, although I am hard pressed to consider what that might be outside of the sensationalized Hollywood hostage crisis scenario. I’m talking about the run-of-the mill encounters between police and citizens that occur daily. In an age when police are increasingly militarized, weaponized and protected by the courts, these once-routine encounters are now inherently dangerous for any civilian unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

More »

Finian Cunningham

The US has accused Russia of “swimming against the tide” in persisting with its claims that foreign-backed militants in Syria committed the chemical weapons attacks, not the Syrian armed forces, as the Western governments have asserted.

In a sense, the US is correct. Russia is indeed swimming against a tide - a powerful tide of fabrication and propaganda promulgated by Washington, its Western allies and their dutiful news media.

But that tide is now subsiding, by the day, as more facts emerge about what really happened in Syria with regard to the use of chemical weapons. If Russia was swimming against a tide, the position of the US and its allies is now sinking from lies and criminality. As each day passes, it becomes clear that Western states tried to railroad a guilty verdict on the Syrian government and thereby trigger a desired military aggression.

The Western propaganda operation went into full speed on Monday following the release of the report by the United Nations chemical weapons team, led by Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom. No sooner had that report been published than the US, British and French governments were crowing that it provided “conclusive proof” of their allegations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces had committed the mass killings on 21 August near the capital, Damascus.

The UN team did not actually state who perpetrated the chemical gas attack, but its inferences allowed others to point the finger of accusation at the Syrian army. So too did the tone of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon who called for sanctions against those who commit such crimes “against your own people”.

So, they all lined up in familiar choreography to denounce the Syrian government. The US, British and French said they were justified in calling for military strikes and that they intended incorporating such action in the recent chemical decommissioning deal worked out by Washington and Moscow. For a day or two, it seemed that the Western governments had gained the psychological upper hand.

But it is increasingly clear that the Western “certainty” over Syrian chemical weapons is an edifice built on sand. The initial Western claims were never supported by verifiable evidence, only “secret intelligence”. Now it turns out that the UN inspectors’ report upon which the Western governments have rested their case is fatally flawed.

More »

Montea Cristo

Following the Second World War and the decline of British colonial power, London’s foreign policy has always been influenced by US expansionist plans, raising objections even among politicians in the UK to such an indisputable adherence.

Britain’s policy on the Iraqi imposed war on Iran could be defined as being primarily affected by Washington's protectionist policies towards Iraq's executed dictator Saddam Hussein and European Union’s approach to regional issues in the Middle East.

Relations between the Islamic Republic and the UK were also influenced by a number of factors such as the anti-colonial nature of the Islamic Revolution, the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, the 1980 siege of Iran’s embassy in London, the frequent expulsion of diplomats from the both countries and finally the British support of Saddam during the imposed war.

Former British Prime Minister and Labour party leader James Callaghan recognized the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, but he immediately proceeded to remove two thousand of his country’s citizens from Iran.

More »

Wayne Madsen

The UN in Geneva has released its long-awaited report on the use of chemical weapons in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on August 21.The UN concluded:

1. Sarin gas was used in the attack.
2. The attack used at least two surface-to-surface rockets
3. One of the warheads containing sarin held 56 liters of the deadly chemical.

The UN report did not assign blame for the attack nor was assigning blame in the charter of the team of forensic investigators. However, France and the United States immediately used the report to blame Syria for the attack.

Cited as evidence were the two rockets used: an M14 artillery rocket with Cyrillic markings and a 330-millimeter rocket of unknown origin.

The UN report stated that the evidence found in rebel-controlled territory outside of Damascus could have been manipulated by the rebels or forces allied with the rebels. The CIA and Mossad have a particularly long and jaded history of manipulating evidence in false flag attacks.

Some Syrian rebels, including those affiliated with Al Qaeda, have been known to have access to sarin gas in Iraq. The rebels also have access to mountains of weapons in Iraq once possessed by Saddam Hussein’s armed forces, most of which were of Soviet or Eastern European origin and from countries that use the Cyrillic alphabet, including Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Serbia.

The United States is claiming that the Syrian rebels do not have the means to transport such weapons to Syria and, therefore, it is the Syrian government that is responsible merely by using the process of elimination. However, the Saudi intelligence service, the General Intelligence Directorate or Ri'asat Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Amah and its chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, nicknamed “Chemical Bandar,” does have the capability to pre-position the sarin rockets used in the attack on Ghouta. Saudi Arabia has been providing cash, weapons, training, diplomatic support, and jihadist mercenaries to the Syrian rebels to topple President Bashar al Assad and his government from power.

More »

J B Campbell

Treason everywhere. Our crackhead queen president is arming what we’ve been told for over a decade is the enemy in the war on terror, al-Qaeda, which means “the base.” That refers to the CIA’s computerized data base of mujahedeen fighters they put together in Afghanistan back in the ‘80s to fight the Soviet Army, which was finally defeated by surface-to-air Stinger missiles the CIA provided to al-Qaeda.

How al-Qaeda could ever be considered “the enemy” is a joke, since the CIA created the group, armed it, trained it and financed it with the help of Osama bin Laden, who was the CIA’s paymaster. Osama said in several interviews leading up to his death of Marfan Syndrome and kidney failure in late 2001 that he had nothing to do with 9/11. He said it was committed by the US government and Israel.

However, al-Qaeda is the boogyman in the Bush/Obama power grab they call the war on terror, except when we supply them with powerful ordnance including chemical weapons.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Syria threatens no one. It hasn't used chemical weapons against insurgents or its own civilians. Claims otherwise are fabricated.

In contrast, Israel is nuclear armed and dangerous. It maintains large chemical and biological weapons arsenals. More on that below.

In 1986, Dimona nuclear technician/heroic whistleblower Mordechai Vananu revealed important documents, photos, and other scientific evidence. They proved Israel began producing atomic weapons since at least the 1960s. Years later, thermonuclear warheads were manufactured. It's believed Israel's arsenal includes hundreds it won't admit to publicly. It's missile capability can deliver them long range. So can its nuclear submarines. Vananu revealed Israel's nuclear program. He provided credible evidence. Doing so cost him dearly.

In 1986, Mossad agents lured him to Rome. They beat, drugged and kidnapped him. He was secretly tried. He was convicted on espionage and treason charges. He got 18 years in prison. He spent much of it in brutalizing solitary confinement. He suffered cruel and barbaric treatment.

After release, he was imprisoned again. It was for speaking to foreign journalists. Daniel Ellsberg calls him "the preeminent hero of the nuclear era." Vananu said "I am neither a traitor nor a spy. I only wanted the world to know what was happening." People everywhere have a right to know.

More »

John Robles

US war criminals continue to escape justice and the only hope is for the people to finally stand up and do something about all of the government illegality and war crimes that have been exposed by WikiLeaks. The organization continues its fight to expose the truth and has opened a door through which whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden may pass. In the final installment of a recent interview with Kristinn Hrafnsson from the WikiLeaks Organization, Mr. Hrafnsson gives his views on those matters and more.

Robles: Kristinn, I don’t know if you are aware about that law that the United States passed in 2002 (I wrote an article about it today), some people call it the “Hague Invasion Act”. Are you aware of that? I mean, for me that explains the impunity and why no one has yet to be prosecuted for any of this stuff. Is there any will that you know about in the international community to deal with all of this illegality? I mean, we are talking about the worst crimes possible against all of humanity that some of these people are committing.

Hrafnsson: I’m pinning my hopes on the individuals. And I see they are slowly and gradually waking up to the reality that I mentioned earlier. It will take time to mobilize. It will take time to materialize. But I have a strong belief in the democratic process. And I hope that through that process, the criticism and the awakening of people will result in a change, a fundamental change in the way where we are dealing with the international matters.

And the Internet comes strongly into play here. The fact that we started something in 2010, which has been a watershed moment I believe, in information dissemination, will affect that fundamentally, and is affecting that.

A door was opened through which Edward Snowden entered and other whistleblowers will come forth. There are people with conscience and people with courage that will submit information into the public domain. So, I’m rather optimistic that we are getting into a better place, but there will be turbulent times.

More »

Bill Van Auken

In a front-page article Tuesday, the New York Times reported that a United Nations report released the day before on the August 21 chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus “strongly implicated the Syrian government.”

In fact, the report did no such thing. The story’s headline, “UN implicates Syria in using chemical weapons,” is a cynical distortion of reality tailored to meet the needs of the US government for war propaganda.

While the UN inspectors reported “clear and convincing evidence” that surface-to-surface rockets carrying sarin gas were used in the attack, the report provided no indication as to whether it was government forces that fired these rockets, or the Al Qaeda-led “rebels” that are backed by Washington and its allies. As the report states, “The conclusion is that chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syrian Arab Republic.”

These inspectors were invited into Syria by the government of President Bashar al-Assad and were set to investigate three separate sites of reported chemical weapons attack, which the Assad regime has blamed on the Islamist anti-government militias. In one of these, which took place on March 19 on the village of Khan al Assal outside Aleppo, the majority of the victims were government soldiers.

Neither the Times nor anyone else charging the Assad regime with ordering the August 21 attack have presented any explanation for why it would do so on the very day that the weapons inspectors that it had invited into Syria were beginning their work just a 15-minute walk away from the site of the attack. On the other hand, the motive for the “rebels” to stage such an attack and blame it on the government is obvious: to provoke Western military intervention in support of their flagging insurgency.

The Times article does not concern itself with such questions. Rather, it deduces from the report’s findings that only the government could have been responsible. This is based fundamentally on the assertion that the “rebel forces … are not known to possess such weapons.” It similarly quotes US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers as claiming that there is “no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.”

More »

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Question 1: Why was the news of the chemical attack posted before the attack took place?

Question 2: Were the weapons home-made or were they produced in a factory?

Question 3: If the Iranians told the USA in 2012 that terrorists operating in Syria had chemical weapons, why did US Secretary of State John Kerry say they did not and why would it be outside the realms of possibility for them to have deployed such weaponry in Ghouta?

Question 4: Why would the Syrian Armed Forces have deployed such weaponry in an area where their own forces were massing on the eve of a UN inspection?

Question 5: Why was the first video to be released (Amer Mosa), which claimed to be a recording of the attack, showing the terrorists operating in Syria firing rockets at Government positions?

Question 6: Why does the date of the said video antecede the attack and how can its title referring to chemical weapons be taken seriously if the video was released before the attack took place?

More »

Paul Craig Roberts

When is the last time the US government told the truth about anything?

By readers’ request, this is a reposting of a translation of a Pakistani National TV interview with an eyewitness to the alleged SEAL Team Six attack that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. I made the translation available two years ago in an article prior to the creation of my website.

Before you believe “your” government’s lies about Syria, remember “your” government’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction.” Remember Washington’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin that unleashed the Vietnam war. Remember the lies about Gaddafi and Libya. Remember the lies about 9/11, the lies about the murders of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Remember the Northwoods Project that the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted President John F. Kennedy to embrace.

The Northwoods project called for shooting down US airliners, shooting down people on the streets of Miami and Washington, D.C., and strafing Cuban refugee boats in order to blame Castro and build public support for regime change in Cuba.

Sound familiar? Sound like regime change in Iraq, Libya, Syria?

The top secret Operation Northwoods plot against Cuba and the American people was officially released and is available online, as are numerous histories of the proposal by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to kill Americans in order to create support for invading Cuba. Keep this established fact in mind before you again repeat the gullible and reassuring statement: “our government wouldn’t kill its own people.”

More »