PSYOPs is the military short-hand for “psychological operations,” used extensively in U.S. wars abroad, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of this work is carried out by Army reserve personnel, who travel from village to village dropping leaflets and offering financial incentives in an attempt to convince residents not to support the insurgency. ■ What if the same techniques that the Army used to weaken the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan are being used by the gas industry to intimidate U.S. citizens in Pennsylvania? Of course they wouldn’t need the Black Hawk helicopters, the U.S. Postal Service can drop letters just fine. But the tactics of using financial incentives and disseminating propaganda designed to pit neighbor against neighbor?

About a million landmines have been planted by the Israeli occupation in occupied Palestinian West Bank, official Palestinian data has shown. - The Commissioner General of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Washington, Maan Erekat, said: "The number of Israeli landmines planted is between 800,000 to a million." During his meeting with UN and NGO officials in New York on Wednesday, Erekat said: "This significant number of landmines poses great direct danger to the safety and security of Palestinian citizens." He discussed efforts with the officials he met to remove these landmines. The Israeli occupation has planted landmines in the Palestinian territories since it occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 under "security" pretexts.

Once, twice, three times a lady! - President Obama’s speech Thursday on national security wasn’t just a one-sided affair. The president paused multiple times when Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin shouted out, literally stopping Obama in his place and forcing him to respond. Benjamin was demanding answers for the drone strikes that killed four American citizens as well as the end to holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Benjamin is a well-known anti-war protester recognized around the world, and she joined us to talk about why she couldn’t remain silent during the president’s speech.

Russia will dispatch a permanent group of five to six combat ships to the Mediterranean Sea, Russian Navy chief Admiral Viktor Chirkov said. Frigates and cruisers will make up the core of the fleet. - Putin upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his country’s air attacks on Damascus. Moscow is sending sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries, anti-submarine missiles and other munitions to beleaguered Assad, and has just announced that 12 Russian warships will patrol the Mediterranean. President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation has drawn a line in the sand over Syria, the government of which he is determined to protect from overthrow. Not since the end of the Cold War in 1991 has the Russian Bear asserted itself so forcefully beyond its borders in support of claims on great power status. In essence, Russia is attempting to play the role in Syria that France did in Algeria in the 1990s, of supporting the military government against rebels, many of them linked to political Islam. France and its allies prevailed, at the cost of some 150,000 dead. Can Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad pull off the same sort of victory?

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency says the Syrian army is capable of conducting successful operations against the foreign-backed militants ‘at will.’ - Gerhard Schindler, the head of Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), told security officials that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is now more stable than it has been in a long time, German news website Spiegel Online reported on Wednesday. The new assessment is a fundamental reversal from last summer, when the BND predicted that the Syrian government would collapse by early 2013.

PressTV: Syria resolute to fight terrorists, find political solution: Assad

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: Israel is fighting a regional war in Syria - The changing internal situation in Syria is putting a new set of plans into motion, which involve Israeli aggression against Syria. Not only have the US and its allies been trying to militarily buttress the retreating anti-government militias, but now they aim to create a new phase in the conflict where states start asserting leverage against Syria in place of the weakening anti-government forces. In other words, external pressure is being applied to replace the declining internal pressure.

Pepe Escobar: Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent. US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow 'Drone Wars' from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it. Until virtually yesterday the Obama administration did not even recognize in public the existence of the shadow 'Drone Wars'. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at the Pentagon – which would then be in charge of the 'Drone Wars' - is bound to remain secret. And the Pentagon is not exactly yearning to retouch its definition of a “militant”, a prime candidate to be 'target-assassinated'; “any military-aged male in a strike zone”. “Muslim” male, it goes without saying. Obama’s rhetoric is one thing. His administration’s 'Drone Wars' are another thing entirely. The President now insists GWOT is no longer a “boundless global war”. That’s rhetoric. For the Pentagon, the “entire globe is a battlefield”. That is the operative concept since the beginning of GWOT, and inbuilt in the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. And if the entire globe is a battlefield, all its causes and consequences are interconnected.

Daniel McAdams: Senate Votes Unanimously Toward War Against Iran - Today the US Senate voted unanimously in favor of a Lindsey Graham resolution, S.Res.65, which "[s]trongly support(s) the full implementation of United States and international sanctions on Iran and urg[es] the President to continue to strengthen enforcement of sanctions legislation." The legislation, as expected from a Lindsey Graham product, is full of misstatements, historical revisionism, and war-drum-beating hyperbole. Particularly revolting is the distortion and lies about Iran's not being in compliance with IAEA nuclear safeguards requirements and the irony of Graham's using Iran's refusal to implement UN resolutions as evidence of its rogue status. Also deceptive is the sleight of hand claiming that Iran pursuing a "nuclear weapons capability" is the real violation, rather than an Iranian failure to uphold its agreed upon obligation to not actually divert fissile material to build a nuclear weapon. It is a unilateral lowering of the bar, which is in fact itself a US violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Through support for Israeli occupations and participation in American invasions of Muslim countries, Britain has ended up spawning tens or even hundreds of millions of “radicalized Muslims” across the world, British MP George Galloway told RT.

RT: You compared the Woolwich attackers to UK-sponsored Syrian rebels - what do you mean?
George Galloway: This was a grotesque and sickening act of murder involving either an attempt of successful beheading of someone by fanatic extremists. This is the sort of thing that happens in Syria every day, except sometimes they even cut out the heart and the liver of the deceased and eat it on video for the entertainment of their brothers in the barracks afterwards. And Britain is helping to pay for that sickening barbarism in Syria. But when it comes close to home, happens on our own streets by the same kind of people, these people influenced by the al-Qaeda mindset are exactly the same kind of people that we are paying for, arming, giving all kinds of war material and agitating to give them more in Syria. So I simply ask David Cameron as I asked him before in Parliament if he would adumbrate the key differences between the hand-chopping throat-cutting fanatics that we saw in Woolwich yesterday and the hand-chopping throat-cutting fanatics we are giving money and weapons to in Syria.

In a show of force, the United States Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a resolution urging an uncompromising US stance against Iranian efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, calling for Washington’s support should Israel strike the program. - “If the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence,” the resolution reads. It also calls for the US to take “such action as may be necessary” to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability. While senators are careful in their calls for US military intervention, the resolution, which passed 99-0 [sic], is seen as the most direct expression yet heard from Washington reflecting support for a potential Israeli strike.