Stephen Lendman

Syrians inspect the rubble of a home reportedly hit by a U.S.-led
coalition airstrike in Kafar Daryan. As many as two dozen civilian
deaths in airstrikes were reported by Syrians. (Photo: Sami Ali)

Obama murders civilian men, women and children he calls militants. Terrorists. Eyewitnesses explain otherwise. He lied claiming he'll degrade and destroy IS's fighting capability. He supports it instead.

They're US proxies. Shock troops. Foot soldiers. Boots on the ground. US special forces and CIA operatives train them in Jordan and Turkey. They're taught effective ways to kill. Dirty ways. Using chemical weapons. Committing atrocities. Including beheadings and other barbarian acts.

Syrian targets struck aren't Islamic State ones. They include vital infrastructure, oil facilities, grain silos with food, empty buildings, residential homes and noncombatant men, women and children. Exact numbers killed and injured aren't clear. Various estimates differ. The toll rises daily.

On September 23, the Los Angeles Times headlined "Syrians say civilians killed in US airstrikes," explaining video evidence from Northwestern Syria...

"...shows Idlib province residents going through motions that have become all too familiar in three years of civil war between anti-government rebels and the forces of President Bashar Assad…" They're "surveying the remnants of flattened homes and picking through the debris."

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Robert Parry

The controversial map developed by Human Rights Watch
and embraced by the New York Times, supposedly showing
the flight paths of two missiles from the Aug. 21 Sarin attack
intersecting at a Syrian military base.

At the first anniversary of the Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, there is a concerted effort to reestablish the original conventional wisdom, blaming the Syrian government for the hundreds of deaths. The goal seems to be to bury the alternative narrative that later emerged.

One shouldn’t be surprised, I guess, that some wannabe-journalist bloggers are auditioning before possible mainstream employers by attacking investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh for writing a groundbreaking article implicating Syrian jihadist rebels and Turkish intelligence in the lethal use of Sarin on Aug. 21 outside Damascus.

From a sampling of these defenses of Official Washington’s old conventional wisdom – blaming the Syrian government – the chief attack line against Hersh is to repeat the initial U.S. government claim of a widespread strike involving multiple rockets.

The thinking then was that only the Syrian government had the capability to launch such a widespread assault. But this claim is outdated. The United Nations inspectors who fanned out across the Ghouta suburb of Damascus recovered only two suspicious rockets – and one was found to be clean of Sarin or any other chemical agent.

The one Sarin-laden rocket, which struck in the Zamalka/Ein Tarma neighborhood, was found to be crudely made and had a maximum range of about 2 to 3 kilometers, meaning that it would have been launched from rebel-controlled areas, not from a government zone.

But conventional wisdom is a difficult thing to shake once many “very important people” have embraced its certainties. Such VIPs don’t like to admit that they were suckered and there are always some aspiring operatives who hope to earn some brownie points by attacking anyone who deviates from the “group think.”

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Patrick Martin and Barry Grey

At least 100 Palestinians were killed Sunday as Israel escalated its savage land, sea and air attack on Gaza. In a single neighborhood on the east side of Gaza City, Shejaiya, Israeli bombs and artillery shells killed at least 62 people and wounded nearly 300 others. Among the dead were 17 women, 14 children and four elderly people. The corpses of women and children lined the streets of Shejaiya as people fled on foot and in overloaded vehicles.

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said more than 63,000 people had sought sanctuary in the 49 shelters it has set up in Gaza. “The number has tripled in the last three days,” UNRWA said, “reflecting the intensity of the conflict and the inordinate threats the fighting is posing to civilians.”

Hospitals in Gaza were overwhelmed by the wounded and other civilians seeking sanctuary from the relentless bombardment. Supplies of bandages and basic medicines were running out. In large parts of the besieged territory, water and electricity were cut off.

The Israeli military defended its use of flechette shells against the Palestinian population, saying it was permitted under the laws of war. [Using them agaist civilians is illegal. -Ed.] Flechette shells spray out thousands of tiny metal darts with sharpened tips, designed to shred human flesh.

Human Rights Watch, a US-based organization generally allied to the American political establishment, released a report indicting Israel for deliberately targeting civilian facilities. “Israeli air attacks in Gaza investigated by Human Rights Watch have been targeting apparent civilian structures and killing civilians in violation of the laws of war,” the report stated.

The Israeli state is carrying out mass murder in Gaza. It troops, tanks, war planes and gunboats are perpetrating a massacre of defenseless Palestinians trapped inside a tiny, impoverished and densely populated territory. No one really knows how many have been killed in the two weeks of Israeli bombing and shelling. But Palestinian hospital officials as of mid-day Sunday put the figure at 436, with more than 3,000 wounded. The dead include more than 100 children. — If this is not a war crime, then what is?

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Edward S. Herman

The fool is John Kerry, who has looked bad in his rushing around between Washington and Tel Aviv trying to get in place a “framework” agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that would show progress in the efforts of the honest broker, assailing Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela for his “terror campaign against his own people,” and, of course, denouncing the Russians for their “aggression” against the coup-regime of Ukraine. His statement that “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext,” has to be regarded as an Orwellian classic and may be his signifier in future history books, in the unlikely event that he makes it at all. His punchline has been the subject of many jokes and laughs in the dissident media, but the mainstream media have hardly mentioned it and certainly haven’t made it the butt of jokes and a basis for discrediting the man (just as there has been no discrediting of Madeleine Albright based on her statement on national TV that killing 500,000 Iraqi children via the sanctions of mass destruction in the 1990s—which she helped engineer—“was worth it”).

Of course, it is possible that Kerry really believed he was speaking truths, having internalized the assumptions that flow from U.S. “exceptionalism,” which make words like “invasion,” “aggression” and “international law” inapplicable to us as the world’s police; and what might be a “completely trumped up pretext” if offered by the Russians is only a slight and excusable error or misjudgment when we do it. After all, the New York Times quickly used the word “aggression” in editorializing on the Crimea events (“Russia’s Aggression,” March 2, 2014), whereas it never used the word to describe the invasion-occupation of Iraq, nor did it mention the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003 (Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper).

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Robert Parry

Exclusive: Journalist Seymour Hersh has unearthed information implicating Turkish intelligence in last summer’s Sarin attack near Damascus that almost pushed President Obama into a war to topple Syria’s government and open a path for an al-Qaeda victory.

Last August, the Obama administration lurched to the brink of invading Syria after blaming a Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on President Bashar al-Assad’s government, but new evidence – reported by investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh – implicates Turkish intelligence and extremist Syrian rebels instead.

The significance of Hersh’s latest report is twofold: first, it shows how Official Washington’s hawks and neocons almost stampeded the United States into another Mideast war under false pretenses, and second, the story’s publication in the London Review of Books reveals how hostile the mainstream U.S. media remains toward information that doesn’t comport with its neocon-dominated conventional wisdom.

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Tony Cartalucci

King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt
aboard USS Quincy, Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, 14 Feb 1945

US President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia confirms what many even causal political observers have begun to suspect regarding recent US political history, that Washington’s values aren’t just nonpartisan, driven entirely by special interests permeating both sides of the political aisle, but are altogether non-existent. To understand why requires an understanding of both US-Saudi relations, not just during the Obama administration, but over the past several decades, as well as a basic understanding of Saudi Arabia itself.

Despite the integral role Saudi Arabia plays in US foreign policy, particularly but not limited to the Middle East, many know very little regarding this nation. American, British, and European media intentionally serve up disjointed reports regarding the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Should ever a complete picture be given to global audiences and the same amount of attention given to the shortcomings of Saudi Arabia as is given toward the perceived enemies of the Western world, clear limitations would be demanded by the public in regards to their respective governments’ relationship with the Saudis until badly needed reform was undertaken.

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Stephen Lendman

Israel gets away with murder and much more. Crimes against humanity repeat multiple times daily. Palestinians are defenseless. Who can contest Israel's military might? It's other security forces are ruthless. So are extremist settlers.

Yesh Din Volunteers for Human Rights addresses them. "Acts of violence are being committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the West Bank on a daily basis," it says. They repeat in many forms. They include violence and vandalism.

They're not isolated incidences. They reflect more than hate or anger. They're "part of a sophisticated wider strategy," says Yesh Din. They're "designed to assert territorial domination of Palestinians in the West Bank. They include settler-imposed "no go zones." Palestinians face armed militants. They come from nearby settlements and outposts. They "create effective 'no go zones.' " They're on privately owned Palestinian land. Doing so gets them to abandon it. The do it in fear for their lives.

Israeli soldiers, police and other security forces provide no protection. They support lawless settlers. They commit so-called "price tag" attacks. Settlers use the term to describe retaliations relating to Israeli government actions limiting their political goals.

Palestinians bear their brunt. From September 2004 through 2011 alone, around 3,700 incidents occurred. They're documented by time, type, location, number of injuries and/or deaths, and settlements of origin. Every West Bank governorate is affected. Key is that Israeli and collaborating Palestinian security forces do little to stop them. Ordinary Palestinians are left vulnerable on their own. They live in a virtual war zone.

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Stephen Lendman

Israel is a racist police state. Zionist ideology espouses Jewish superiority, specialness, and uniqueness. It claims Jews are God's "chosen people." It's uncomfortably close to Nazi Aryan dogma. Master race notions are troubling. They reflect racist extremism. Israel is a prime example.

It calls itself a democratic Jewish state. Democracy is nowhere in sight. Jews alone have rights. Increasing numbers have limited ones. Neoliberal harshness denies them. Arab citizens have few rights. Bedouin Arab citizens and Occupied Palestinians have none. Israel has various Judaization plans. They feature ethnic cleansing.

David Ben-Gurion's Plan Dalet preceded Israel's War of Independence. It called for:

"Mounting operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

■ Destruction of villages - setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris - especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously.
■ Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it.
■ In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

Ben-Gurion mandated ethnic cleansing. "I don't see anything immoral in it," he claimed. Bloodbath slaughter followed.

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Medea Benjamin

Faisal bin Ali Gaber is a soft-spoken engineer from Yemen. After he lost his cousin and brother-in-law in a drone strike in August 2012, he published an open letter to President Obama and Yemeni President Hadi. He said his brother-in-law was an imam who had strongly and publicly opposed al-Qaeda, and that his young cousin was a policeman. “Our town was no battlefield. We had no warning. Our local police were never asked to make any arrest,” he wrote to the presidents. “Your silence in the face of these injustices only makes matters worse. If the strike was a mistake, the family — like all wrongly bereaved families of this secret air war — deserve a formal apology.”

Now Faisal Gaber will get a chance to appeal directly to the American people. This weekend for the first time ever, a Yemeni delegation of drone strike victims’ family members, human rights experts and grassroots leaders will be visiting Washington as part of the Global Drone Summit–– You can watch the Summit live all weekend on the CODEPINK livestream channel.

While the CIA and US military have been using lethal drones for over a decade, this will be only the second time that drone victims have gotten visas to come to the United States to tell their stories. The first visit was just a few weeks ago when, on October 29, the Rehman family — a father with his two children — came all the way from the Pakistani tribal territory of North Waziristan to the US Capitol to tell the heart-wrenching story of the death of the children’s beloved 67-year-old grandmother. The hearing, convened by Congressman Alan Grayson, had the congressman, the translator and the public in tears. The Rehman family’s story is documented in the new film Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation, which was released at the time of their visit.

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Stephen Lendman

War without end rages. Human needs go begging. Wherever America shows up, death and destruction follow. So does unrelieved dystopian harshness. No end in sight looms.

US drones murder Afghan civilian men, women and children. American grounds forces do it up close and personal. US inflicted death, torture and other atrocities reflect daily life. Ordinary Afghans suffer most. They struggle to survive. American aggression is one of history's greatest crimes.

War criminals remain unpunished. Accountability is denied. Conflict persists. It's Washington's longest war. It's longer than WW I and II combined. It shows no signs of ending.

Trillions of dollars go mass slaughter and destruction. They're spent for unchallenged global dominance. Vital homeland needs go begging. Targeted countries are ravaged and destroyed. Imperial lawlessness operates this way.

Its appetite is insatiable. It ignores rule of law principles. It does whatever it wants. It does it where, when, by what means, and under whatever pretexts it contrives. It does so unapologetically. It targets one country at a time or in multiples. It wages direct and proxy wars. It does so without justification. It lies claiming otherwise.

All US wars are dirty. Atrocities are virtually de rigueur. In March 2012, 20 US forces murdered 16 Afghan men, women, and nine children aged two to 12. Children were massacred while they slept. Two women were raped before soldiers killed them. Pentagon officials and media scoundrels whitewashed what happened.

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