Where is the USS New York? At 684 feet long and displacing over 24,900 tons, the Mayport, Fla.-based San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock is no smart car of the seas. Yet the vessel has gone “dark” for more than a week now. ● The low profile might have something to do with the fact that the New York is currently home to the recently captured Ahmed Abu Khattala, one of the accused ringleaders of the Sept. 11-12, 2012, Benghazi terrorist attacks that left four Americans dead. While any ship’s location is supposed to be a well-guarded secret when deployed, the New York is in a unique position, because instead of threading its way through the Suez Canal or dodging a Chinese destroyer, it’s believed to be steaming toward the East Coast: Abu Khattala is expected to be arraigned soon in Washington.

xymphora ■ Whitney and Engdahl on the oddities of ISIS; Madsen on the situation in Ukraine. ● There are parallels. Both operations have deep roots. American destabilizing operations in Eastern Europe have been going on since the Soviet days, and more recently have been quietly chugging along, more of a gnat-like nuisance to people like Putin than anything serious. Part of the ISIS team was trained by Americans in Jordan, and the ISIS leadership is very suspicious. ● The oddities need an explanation, but the explanation is obviously not an American government conspiracy at the Obama-Kerry level. The American response in each case is simply too off-the-cuff and weak. Kerry is in the middle of one of the most embarrassing foreign tours of an American Secretary of State ever (the sentencing of the journalists in Egypt was Sisi spitting in Kerry's huge face), and Obama has nothing constructive to offer (an empire that has no answers is no longer an empire). Meanwhile, Putin is using the opening caused by American clumsiness, looking east, south and west, to build a New World Empire. ● In both Ukraine and Iraq, a quiet operation that wasn't going anywhere was turned around in a hurry by operatives working below the highest levels, in both cases against real American interests, in both cases leaving the high-level American response flat-footed and embarrassingly ineffectual, and in both cases working for the interests of the Zionist Empire. There is only one explanation for the lack of information at the top. Treason.

Animated short on the impact of depleted uranium weapons and the international campaign against them, produced by the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons and IKV Pax Christi.

Barry Mason ■ Recent report confirms: US depleted uranium weapons targeted civilian areas in Iraq war || “Laid to Waste”, a report by the Dutch Catholic NGO Pax Christi International, confirms that US forces in Iraq used depleted uranium (DU) weapons in civilian areas during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. More than a decade later, DU is still harming people’s health. The impact of the use of DU in 2003 added to that resulting from the Gulf War of 1991. Pax made field trips to Iraq in November 2013 and January 2014 to collect data for the report, visiting sites containing scrap metal remnants resulting from DU attacks. They interviewed people living or working nearby. DU weapons are formed into dart-like projectiles from the remains of natural uranium, left when it is enriched to make nuclear weapons or for use in a nuclear reactor. It is mildly radioactive, but is extremely dense—1.7 times that of lead. As well as being radioactive, it is chemically toxic. It was developed as a weapon to use against armour-plated objects like tanks and can be fired from planes, tanks or armoured vehicles. When fired the DU core of the projectile (the penetrator) penetrates the armour plating and burns fiercely, producing a radioactive and toxic dust.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: Really? Anticipated Study Finds No Evidence of Iraqi Birth Defects

Dennis J. Kucinich ■ As Iraq descends into chaos again, more than a decade after “Mission Accomplished,” media commentators and politicians have mostly agreed upon calling the war a “mistake.” But the “mistake” rhetoric is the language of denial, not contrition: it minimizes the Iraq War’s disastrous consequences, removes blame, and deprives Americans of any chance to learn from our generation’s foreign policy disaster. The Iraq War was not a “mistake” — it resulted from calculated deception. The painful, unvarnished fact is that we were lied to. Now is the time to have the willingness to say that. ■ In fact, the truth about Iraq was widely available, but it was ignored. There were no WMD. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The war wasn’t about liberating the Iraqi people. I said this in Congress in 2002. Millions of people who marched in America in protest of the war knew the truth, but were maligned by members of both parties for opposing the president in a time of war — and even leveled with the spurious charge of “not supporting the troops.”

Washington's Blog ■ The Chaos In Iraq Is By DESIGN

The case against the Saudi apes and their Obama criminal allies is shaping up to be a no-brainer, a slam dunk, as the foolhardy Colin Powell once said about Saddam’s WMDs. Well, yesterday, viewers were treated to another romp in the fantasy world of the Chicago terrorist, Obama, and his relentless pursuit of abysmal failure. We introduce to you the Nusra terrorist extraordinaire, terrorist par excellence, and garrulous terrorist fink weasel, Baaher ‘Abdul-Kareem Al-Ways.

Mariam Yahya Ibrahim, the Christian woman sentenced to death and later freed after an international outcry, was briefly re-arrested while trying to leave the country for the US before being released again. ■ Eman Abdul-Rahim, her lawyer, said Ms Ibrahim was held with her two children and husband at Khartoum airport. The BBC said Ms Ibrahim, whose death sentence in May for renouncing Islam sparked outrage, was detained by about 40 security agents. Last night, it was reported that she had been freed. Marie Harf, a spokeswoman for the US State Department, said the Sudanese government had informed American officials that Ms Ibrahim and her family were “temporarily detained” over issues relating to their travel documents. The family was held 24 hours after Ms Ibrahim’s husband, Daniel Wani, who has US citizenship, said they would go to America following his wife’s release.

The Independent: Nigerian man detained in mental institute in Kano 'because he renounced Islam'

Thomas "Beau" Walker, the great-great-great grandfather to [former] U.S. President George W. Bush, was a notorious slave trader who either personally led or heavily invested in expeditions to kidnap Africans from their homeland and bring them to America as slaves, a journalist and historian announced this week. Word of the presidential ancestor came by way of retired journalist and genealogist Roger Hughes and historian Joseph Opala, who illustrated their findings to Slate. They made the discovery by comparing the signatures of known Bush ancestor Thomas Walker with a notorious slave trader of the day who bore the same name. Stacked side-by-side, the signatures looked almost exactly the same. They also recovered several letters Walker wrote, in which he complains about the cost of the people he's kidnapped. "Times on the coast is by no means as favourable as I expected," Walker reportedly wrote. "Slaves is at the price of 150 [illegible] and the coast seemes [sic] to be lin'd with vessels of all kind." "I have purchased seventeen fine negroes and am this day proceeding down the coast to try what I do can there," another of Walker's letters reads. "Slaves is at a very greate [sic] price." There were at least two other known slave-owners in the Bush family, according to Hughes.

Leaked NSA documents reveal Denmark is among the 33 countries collaborating with the NSA. ■ Famous whistle-blower Edward Snowden has leaked four new NSA documents that show how widespread the NSA’s influence has become, with over 30 countries contributing to the international surveillance effort. Among these “Third-Parties”, as they’re referred to, are Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They are all part of the RAMPART-A program, which is essentially a deal between between the NSA and foreign countries who “provide access to cable and host US equipment,” according to the leaked document. Allowing the NSA to install surveillance devices on their fiber optic cables gives them access to phone calls, e-mails, internet chat and much more, according to The Intercept, an online news source started by Glenn Greenwald – the man who worked with Snowden on his original leak last year. In exchange, these countries get cutting-edge surveillance technology for their own purposes.

William Engdahl ■ The very details of the ISIS military success in the key Iraqi oil center, Mosul, are suspect. According to well-informed Iraqi journalists, ISIS overran the strategic Mosul region, site of some of the world’s most prolific oilfields, with barely a shot fired in resistance. According to one report, residents of Tikrit reported remarkable displays of “soldiers handing over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.” We are told that ISIS masked psychopaths captured “arms and ammunition from the fleeing security forces” - arms and ammunition supplied by the American government. The offensive coincides with a successful campaign by ISIS in eastern Syria. According to Iraqi journalists, Sunni tribal chiefs in the region had been convinced to side with ISIS against the Shiite Al-Maliki government in Baghdad. They were promised a better deal under ISIS Sunni Sharia than with Baghdad anti-Sunni rule.