Barry Grey

The long-suppressed Justice Department memo released Monday establishes that the president of the United States, Barack Obama, in the most calculated and criminal manner, authorized the murder of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.

Reading this document, with its crude arguments supporting the targeting and drone killing of a man far from any battlefield, who was never charged with a crime, is itself a chilling experience. The tortured pseudo-legalisms of its author only underscore the premeditated character of the act.

The drone attack that killed Awlaki and three others in Yemen on September 30, 2011, including a second US citizen, Samir Khan, was not carried out in the heat of battle. Neither was the drone attack one month later that obliterated Awlaki’s teenage son.

Obama’s secret decision to place Awlaki on his “kill list” was leaked to the press in April of 2010. The memo by the then-head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, David Barron, claiming that the Constitution and US laws gave the president the power to kill a US citizen, without charge or trial, was sent to Attorney General Eric Holder in July of 2010. Awlaki’s father filed a suit in federal court to remove his son from the kill list, but the case was thrown out in December of 2010. Thus the murder of Awlaki was organized over a protracted period of time. It was a cold-blooded extra-judicial killing by the state.

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Paul Craig Roberts

June 24, 2014. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is trying to save the world from war. We should all help him.

Today Putin’s presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov reported that President Putin has asked the Russian legislature to repeal the authorization to use force that was granted in order to protect residents of former Russian territories that are currently part of Ukraine from the rabid Russophobic violence that characterizes Washington’s stooge government in Kiev.

Washington’s neoconservatives are jubilant. They regard Putin’s diplomacy as a sign of weakness and fear, and urge stronger steps that will force Russia to give back Crimea and the Black Sea naval base.

Inside Russia, Washington is encouraging its NGO fifth columns to undercut Putin’s support with propaganda that Putin is afraid to stand up for Russians and has sold out Ukraine’s Russian population. If this propaganda gains traction, Putin will be distracted by street protests. The appearance of Putin’s domestic weakness would embolden Washington. Many members of Russia’s young professional class are swayed by Washington’s propaganda. Essentially, these Russians, brainwashed by US propaganda, are aligned with Washington, not with the Kremlin.

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Marc H. Ellis (on Gilad Atzmon)

Introduction by Gilad Atzmon: I learned this week that Professor Marc H. Ellis - regarded by many as the contemporary leading Jewish theologian, came to the conclusion that yours truly, is the new Jewish prophet.

Here are some quotes I found in the final chapter of “Future of the Prophetic”, Ellis’ new epic treatise:

“Like the ancient prophets Atzmon exposes Jews. At the same time, Atzmon believes that the Bible, from which the prophets spring, is bogus….Atzmon provides no hiding place for Jews anywhere.” (Future of the Prophetic, Marc H. Ellis, p. 332)

“Atzmon is extreme but, in his extremity, he is much like the biblical prophets.” (p. 332)

“Atzmon performs the prophetic for our time. Like the biblical prophets he does not acknowledge, Atzmon believes we are at the end of Jewish history, a history, like the prophets, he no longer believe exists or, if it does, is not worthy of being carried forward. Irony of ironies, he witnesses to the continuity of both.” (p. 334)

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