Foreign jihadists - including Britons - are flooding into Syria to join al-Qaeda from safe houses in Turkey. ● Hundreds of al-Qaeda recruits are being kept in safe houses in southern Turkey, before being smuggled over the border to wage “jihad” in Syria, The Daily Telegraph has learned. The network of hideouts is enabling a steady flow of foreign fighters - including Britons - to join the country’s civil war, according to some of the volunteers involved. These foreign jihadists have now largely eclipsed the “moderate” wing of the rebel Free Syrian Army, which is supported by the West. Al-Qaeda’s ability to use Turkish territory will raise questions about the role the Nato member is playing in Syria’s "civil war".

Tony Cartalucci: Al Qaeda Terrorists Pass US Special Forces, CIA Agents on Way to Syria ■ A recent Daily Telegraph article reveals that armies of Al Qaeda terrorists are using NATO-member Turkey as a springboard for their invasion of neighboring Syria. NATO is the chief executor of the so-called "War on Terror," started in 2001 after Al Qaeda terrorists allegedly flew four passenger planes into various targets on America's east coast, including the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Nearly 3,000 people died in a single day. The invasion of Afghanistan promptly followed based on the pretense that it was "harboring" members of Al Qaeda. The invasion and nearly decade-long occupation of Iraq followed shortly thereafter. Yet despite all of this, Turkey, a NATO member since the early 1950's, appears to be guilty of the very crime Afghanistan was allegedly invaded and to this day still occupied for, harboring Al Qaeda terrorists. An army of Al Qaeda is (and has been for nearly 3 years) using southern Turkey as a safe-haven and staging ground for the invasion of Syria - disingenuously portrayed by the Western media as a "civil war."

Britain is using its embassy in Berlin to spy on the nearby Bundestag, as well as the office of Chancellor Angela Merkel. The concern was raised following the latest Edward Snowden revelations. ● The news comes just one week after the alleged closure of an American listening ‘nest’ just 150 meters away from the British embassy, which is believed to be damage control following the embarrassing details of how the US itself is listening in on Merkel. NSA documents leaked by Snowden, and supported by satellite photographs and related information about past spying activities, talk of high-tech listening equipment perched right on top of the British embassy, the Independent revealed in an exclusive.

It was clear to everyone that Miranda wasn't connected to terrorism -- rather, the UK establishment was attempting to intimidate people connected to the Snowden leaks through arbitrary detention and harassment. Now that Miranda's lawyers are chasing down the people responsible, we're getting a more detailed picture of the process that led up to Miranda's detention. Before a Section 7 detention takes place, British cops have to file a form called a Port Circular Notice, and several drafts of the Notice used to detain Miranda have come to light. The final draft argues that Miranda should be detained under terrorism law because "...the disclosure or threat of disclosure is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism."

Common Dreams: UK Claim That 'Journalism Equals Terrorism' Sparks Outrage
Raimondo/Lendman: The Language of Tyrants: In Britain, journalism is "terrorism"

In Washington, 13 year old Zubair Rehmen along with his 9 year old Nabeela, spoke with members of Congress in a briefing organized by Alan Grayson, to send a message to our elected representatives who authorize our blowback inducing bull in a geo-political china shop of military budget what the rest of the world can see as plain as day: Drone attacks in countries that have not declared war on us and pose no threat to us are illegal, immoral, and create more enemies then they kill.

From Huffpo: He thought little of the U.S. drone buzzing over his family's house one day last year, its incessant sound just one more addition to the rhythm of daily life in northwest Pakistan. As he walked home from school, his grandmother told him to eat a snack before coming to the field to help her pick okra. It was the eve of one of the holiest holidays in Islam, when they would gather for a favorite family dish. He went outside. Dum, dum -- the sounds of missiles pierced the air.

"All of a sudden things became very dark," Zubair Rehman, 13, remembered. The next thing he knew, his grandmother, Mamana Bibi, was gone. "It was like she was exploded to pieces."

Zubair traveled from his home in mountainous North Waziristan with his father, Rafiq ur-Rehman, and sister Nabeela, 9, to Washington for a grim first on Tuesday. The drone victims will appear before Congress to explain for the first time the human fallout of the U.S. program. The briefing was organized by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The Rehmans' story, documented extensively in a report released last week by Amnesty International and in a new documentary from filmmaker Robert Greenwald, serves as a wrenching, first-hand rebuke to the Obama administration's frequent claims that drone strikes have caused few if any civilian casualties. Bibi was the only person killed in the strike. Nine people, including the two children, were hurt.

Medea Benjamin: Drones Have Come Out of the Shadows

The National Security Agency is fed internal information from Google and Yahoo’s private networks by British counterpart GCHQ, which intercepts communications traveling between company data centers based in Britain. ● Documents supplied by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reported by The Washington Post last Wednesday showed how the NSA and GCHQ work together to intercept private links that connect Google and Yahoo global data centers. On Monday, The Post added new background and details of a program known as “MUSCULAR” to its previous report to paint a more succinct picture of how the spy agencies access these supposedly protected data links.

Washington Post: How we know the NSA had access to internal Google and Yahoo cloud data
Washington Post: What Yahoo and Google did not think the NSA could see

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal has accused the Islamic Republic of Iran of military intervention in Syria. ● Faisal said at a joint news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday that Iran has deployed troops to Syria and that the Arab country is under occupation. The Saudi foreign minister’s comments come as Saudi Arabia has been the main supplier of weapons and funds to foreign-backed militants fighting against the Syrian government. According to a recent report by French daily Le Figaro, the weapons used by the militants in Syria are initially purchased by Saudi Arabia from black markets in Ukraine and Bulgaria. The weapons, which include Israeli missiles, are then transferred to a number of cells on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus. These cells are directly linked to a command center in Jordan, which is headed by Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief. However, in his absence, this command center is led by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, according to the newspaper.

Matt Taibbi: The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia ■ Stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What's more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street's secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves' cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about "getting a button man to clip the capo," on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like "pull a nickel out" or "get to the right level" or "you're hanging out there" – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.

A large reserve may lie under Israel and the occupied territories, but Palestinians are unlikely to reap the benefits. ● Israeli investors had reason to celebrate last month with the news that Israel may soon be joining the club of oil-producing states, in addition to its recent finds of large natural gas deposits off the coast. Shares in Givot Olam, an Israeli oil exploration company, rallied on reports that it had located much larger oil reserves at its Meged 5 site than previously estimated. The company, which says it has already sold $40m worth of oil since the Meged field went operational in 2011, now believes that the well is sitting on exploitable reserves of as much as 3.53 billion barrels - about a seventh of Qatar's proven oil reserves. Only one cloud looms on the horizon. It is unclear how much of this new-found oil wealth actually belongs to Israel. The well sits on the so-called Green Line, the armistice line of 1948 that formally separates "Israel" from occupied Palestine.

Israel demolishing MORE homes of the lesser race, It is sickening that this goes on in our day and age.

Kate Randall: Obama administration knew insurance companies would drop millions of customers ■ The insurance companies’ cancellation of these individual policies is not the result of a technical anomaly of the ACA, but goes to the very heart of Obamacare. From the beginning, the legislation has been crafted with the main aim of cutting health care spending while boosting the profits of the private insurers and corporations. Aside from Obama’s cynical political considerations in defending his main domestic initiative, at its most fundamental level, the health care overhaul is driven by a bipartisan agenda to slash health care spending and impose a greater share of the burden onto the backs of ordinary Americans, while boosting the bottom line of the health care industry and corporations.

● In another powerful and significant "move for Peace", the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin has cancelled a presidential order which in 2011, had set up an interdepartmental working group under the authority of the Russian Presidential Administration designed to develop ways to establish cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the sphere of 'missile defense'.
● Many experts and NATO watchers familiar with the decree and the attempts by the Russian Federation to develop an equal partnership relationship with NATO on the basis of mutual respect and transparency may now breathe a collective sigh of relief that President Putin has finally run out of patience with the alliance.