Patrick Martin

The US Department of Justice announced Thursday that it would not investigate charges that the CIA had spied on members of the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whitewashing the brazenly illegal actions of the US intelligence apparatus. “The department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation,” read the Justice Department statement.

The department will also not investigate countercharges by the CIA that Senate staffers had gained unauthorized access to CIA documents, effectively equating the two and prompting the corporate-controlled media (which has largely buried the story) to portray the action as a neutral, “hands-off” position in a murky dispute between the Senate and the CIA.

The CIA surveillance of the activities of the Senate committee—which is charged by law with oversight of the CIA—was such a flagrant violation of the constitutional separation of powers that the panel’s chairman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, took the extraordinary step of denouncing the agency in a lengthy speech on the Senate floor on March 11.

A longtime hardline defender of the intelligence apparatus, Feinstein was visibly disturbed by what she had learned of the CIA’s actions, which she said “may well have violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution,” and also “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

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Patrick Martin

A ball of fire is seen following an Israel airstrike in Rafah, southern
Gaza, on Tursday. Israeli warplanes launched dozens of airstrikes on
different targets in the Gaza Strip. (Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images)

Isaeli warplanes struck the Gaza Strip again on Thursday, hitting at least 15 targets in the blockaded Palestinian territory, causing extensive damage and wounding at least 10 people, including a pregnant woman and a 65-year-old man.

The Israel Defense Forces moved tanks and artillery units towards Gaza, positioning them in advance of any order from the cabinet to invade the densely populated enclave, with nearly two million people crammed into an area of less than 200 square miles. The IDF also called up an undisclosed number of reservists for duty.

The military mobilization was the largest on the border of Gaza since Israel’s last major attack on the Palestinian territory, eight days of bloody bomb and missile strikes in November 2012.

An Israeli military spokesman claimed the sites targeted by bombs and missiles were linked to Hamas, the Islamic party that has ruled Gaza since it won elections in 2006. The Israeli government has declared Hamas responsible for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, although that territory is controlled by the secular Palestinian party Fatah, with Israeli support.

The killing of the three teenagers, whose bodies were found on June 30 outside Hebron, is being used as a pretext by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to escalate tensions with Hamas and threaten an invasion or re-occupation of the Gaza Strip. Israeli military forces and settlers were withdrawn from Gaza in 2005.

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Patrick Martin

The abduction and murder of a Palestinian teenager early Wednesday morning, apparently a revenge killing carried out by right-wing Israeli settlers, has sparked rioting and direct clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli security forces.

Muhammad Hussein Abu Khudair, age 16, was grabbed by several men who approached him on the street as he walked from his home to the local mosque for early morning prayers, the usual start of the day for an observant Muslim during Ramadan. Eyewitnesses said the men were Jewish. They shoved him into a dark-colored car and drove away.

The family reported the abduction to the Israeli police. About an hour later, the boy’s body was found in another part of the city, Jerusalem Forest, badly burned and bearing other signs of the violence that claimed his life. The father identified his son’s body, and this was confirmed by DNA analysis based on samples given by the parents.

The body was taken to Israel’s Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for autopsy. It will be released Thursday to the family for an independent autopsy by Palestinian doctors and for burial.

The Khudairs showed reporters a copy of the video footage from a CCTV camera in front of the family’s electronics shop showing two of the kidnappers. The original video was seized by Israeli police. Israeli courts have imposed a gag rule on media reports about the details of the crime.

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Patrick Martin

In the face of the unfolding debacle for the United States in Iraq, the Obama administration is preparing yet another escalation of violence. Like all of the other actions taken by American imperialism in Iraq and the broader Middle East, this too will lead to nothing but more death and destruction.

The humiliating collapse of the US-backed military forces in Iraq in the face of an offensive by the Sunni-based Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has put that tortured country once again in Washington’s gunsights.

The Pentagon announced Saturday that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had ordered the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush into the Persian Gulf, accompanied by two other warships. President Obama has declared that some form of military action is imminent, saying Friday, “there will be some short-term, immediate things that need to be done militarily.”

The possible operations reportedly range from shipping emergency supplies of weapons and ammunition to Iraqi forces, to drone missile attacks, to air and missile strikes from US naval forces in the Persian Gulf.

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Patrick Martin

A major American goal at the G-7 meeting is to revive an atmosphere of confrontation.

President Barack Obama left Washington Monday night for a four-day trip to Europe, where he will seek to intensify the campaign against Russia that began with the US-backed and fascist-led coup in Ukraine in February. The trip will include Obama’s first face-to-face meeting with Petro O. Poroshenko, the billionaire oligarch who is to be inaugurated as the new president of Ukraine on June 7.

Obama meets Tuesday in Warsaw with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, then with a group of Eastern European officials, including representatives from Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia. The following day he has a one-on-one session with Poroshenko.

The US president will also meet with American airmen deployed at a Polish air base and he will give a public speech marking the 25th anniversary of the first elections held after the collapse of the Stalinist regime in Poland.

Press reports suggest that Obama and Poroshenko will discuss direct US military aid to help the Kiev regime in its campaign to suppress opposition groups in eastern Ukraine, populated mainly by Russian speakers hostile to the ultra-right Ukrainian nationalists who now control the country’s government.

Washington has so far limited its aid to “nonlethal” supplies, including military rations, but may well use the May 25 presidential election—largely boycotted in the eastern third of the country—as the pretext for escalating its intervention in the Ukraine crisis by supplying weapons and ammunition as well as providing military training.

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John W. Whitehead

Cliven Bundy, right, and Clance Cox, left, stand at the Bundy
ranch near Bunkerville Nev. Saturday, April 5, 2014. The U.S.
Bureau of Land Management started stealing Bundy's cattle on
Saturday. BLM says it had been trespassing on U.S. land...

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” — John F. Kennedy

Those tempted to write off the standoff at the Bundy Ranch as little more than a show of force by militia-minded citizens would do well to reconsider their easy dismissal of this brewing rebellion. This goes far beyond concerns about grazing rights or the tension between the state and the federal government.

Few conflicts are ever black and white, and the Bundy situation, with its abundance of gray areas, is no exception. Yet the question is not whether Cliven Bundy and his supporters are domestic terrorists, as Harry Reid claims, or patriots, or something in between. Nor is it a question of whether the Nevada rancher is illegally grazing his cattle on federal land or whether that land should rightfully belong to the government. Nor is it even a question of who’s winning the showdown— the government with its arsenal of SWAT teams, firepower and assault vehicles, or Bundy’s militia supporters with their assortment of weapons—because if such altercations end in bloodshed, everyone loses.

What we’re really faced with, and what we’ll see more of before long, is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.” And it won’t matter what the issue is—whether it’s a rancher standing his ground over grazing rights, a minister jailed for holding a Bible study in his own home, or a community outraged over police shootings of unarmed citizens—these are the building blocks of a political powder keg. Now all that remains is a spark, and it need not be a very big one, to set the whole powder keg aflame.

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Patrick Martin

There is considerable support for Russia in eastern Ukraine. A
man loyal to Moscow stands with two banners made from
shields near the Ukraine security agency building. (AFP/Getty)

In separate statements in the US and Europe, President Obama and NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen ratcheted up the threats by US and European imperialism against Russia. Their statements came on the eve of four-party talks set for Thursday in Geneva, with the US, the European Union and their Ukrainian puppet regime facing off against Moscow.

Obama gave an interview to Major Garrett of CBS News, who asked a series of provocative questions suggesting that the White House should step up its campaign of economic warfare against Russia. Before the interview, the White House announced that a new round of economic sanctions had been “prepared” for use against Russia if there was no progress in resolving the crisis in Ukraine.

Obama told CBS that it was “absolutely clear” that Russia had violated Ukrainian sovereignty in annexing Crimea and that it was continuing to do so by supporting “non-state militias” in southern and eastern Ukraine, where there is overwhelming popular hostility to the US-backed right-wing regime in Kiev. Offering no proof for his accusations against Russia, Obama declared: “What I’ve said consistently is that each time Russia takes these kinds of steps, that are designed to destabilize Ukraine and violate their sovereignty, that there are going to be consequences, and what you have already seen is the Russian economy weaker, capital fleeing out of Russia.” In language that suggested possible US support for future Ukrainian membership in NATO—a radical break from previous policy—Obama said, “We don’t need a war. What we do need is a recognition that countries like Ukraine can have relationships with a whole range of their neighbors and it is not up to anybody whether it is Russia or anybody else to make decisions for them.”

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Patrick Martin

Nearly two days after the London Review of Books published a lengthy exposé by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh detailing efforts by the Turkish government to stage a provocation to bring the US military directly into the civil war in Syria, the US media has blacked out the report.

Hersh, who has authored groundbreaking investigative reports uncovering US atrocities, including the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war, titled his article on last August’s sarin gas attack outside of Damascus “The Red Line and the Rat Line.”

The “red line” refers to President Obama’s threat to attack Syria if the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons. The “rat line” was a CIA-organized supply chain running from Benghazi, Libya through southern Turkey and into Syria, which was used to smuggle weapons to the Syrian “rebels.”

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Patrick Martin

From the August 2013 "rebel" gas attack in Damascus (Ghouta)

It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.

In a lengthy article published Sunday by the London Review of Books, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports that the sarin gas attack on a Damascus suburb on August 21, 2013 was actually carried out by Syrian “rebel” forces acting at the behest of Turkey, for the purpose of providing a pretext for a US attack on Syria.

The gas attack killed many hundreds of people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, and the Obama administration and the corporate-controlled US media immediately blamed the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad for the atrocity. The New York Times, in particular, published a lengthy analysis by its military “expert,” C. J. Chivers, which purported to show, based on rocket trajectories, prevailing winds and other technical factors, that the gas shells could only have been fired from Syrian army artillery positions.

For several weeks, the Ghouta attack became the pretext for a warmongering campaign by the White House and the US and European media. Obama threatened immediate air strikes, claiming that the Syrian government had crossed a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons, which he had laid down in 2012.

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Patrick Martin

The speech delivered by President Barack Obama in Brussels Wednesday was a call to arms for a US-NATO confrontation against Russia. With a series of lies and evasions, Obama presented a world turned upside down in which the US and European imperialists, who backed the coup in Ukraine spearheaded by fascistic forces, are the defenders of democracy and peace.

US President Obama at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam

There was little in the speech that could convince working people, either in Europe or the United States, that a policy of open-ended conflict with Russia was in their interests. That was not the purpose of the speech, which consisted of one propaganda lie after another, uttered with the assurance that there would be no serious criticism, let alone opposition, within the ruling elites of the US and Europe or from their media mouthpieces.

Obama sought to elaborate the basis for a major turn in US foreign policy—what one of his foreign policy advisers called a “strategic pivot” towards confronting Russia, deliberately employing the same term that the White House has used to describe its systematic anti-China policy in the Far East.

One aim of this strategy of confrontation is to provide a new political axis for the US-dominated NATO military structure, which has visibly frayed in the absence of the old Cold War framework.

Much of the speech was devoted to rehashing long-discredited claims that American imperialism and its European allies represent democracy, freedom and the popular will. Obama invoked the conflict between democratic ideals and the authoritarian view that “order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.”

But the words rang rather hollow coming from a president who has claimed absolute and unreviewable power to order the drone-missile assassination of anyone he chooses, anywhere in the world, and whose government asserts the right to collect and store the e-mails, text messages and telephone calls of the entire human race.

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