Tag Archives: middle-east
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Global Food Prices Set to Soar: 2007-8 Food Crisis Revisited?

Joseph Dancy
www.financialsense.com
Global Oil Production Could Be Impacted by Instability

The ongoing “Arab Spring” in the energy-rich Middle East has been fueled by rising food prices and economic stagnation – two factors that continue to play a major part in political developments in that part of the world. High and rising food prices led to the 2007-8 food crisis sparking riots, export restrictions, and instability – not something which would benefit the global economy or the global energy markets.

Food prices have moderated over the last year but a major new threat has arisen. Weather patterns suggest a serious drought in the U.S. Midwest could occur this year – with a Purdue agronomist noting this could develop into one of “the so-called great droughts we’ve had in the last 30 years.” Because the U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of corn, soybeans, and wheat the impact could spread to global commodity prices very quickly. Read More

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A Prepping Manual: Preparing for the Worst

from Silver Doctors:

Prepping is partly buying a grocery list of items you need to stock, as well as a mind set that moves beyond the physical act of getting supplies in the cupboard. Stocking up is a great place to start. Stocking also buys you invaluable time to assess situations as they crop up while keeping you safe.

Preppers have a situational awareness of what might affect them in unexpected ways and unpredictable directions. Every plan comes unglued when it encounters the real world so having backups to your plan will smooth your way to safety. Some of those are in this short guide.

Read More @ SilverDoctors.com

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House Passes HR 4133 Binding the US to Israel and Their War Agenda

Susanne Posel
Pressforactivism.com
May 25, 2012

Without any mainstream media coverage at all, the House of Representatives passed the United States – Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012 (USIESC).

The USIESC, written by Eric Cantor , claims there is a need to provide Israel with unlimited military and financial aid as a result of the disturbances caused by the Arab Spring.

Israel will have an essentially unlimited amount of funds allocated to them through the Federal Reserve Bank. The country will also enjoy an “expanded role of NATO” that consists of an “enhanced presence at NATO headquarters and exercises”.

The USIESC pledges the US government’s “commitment” to assist Israel in remaining a Jewish State; as well as protection from the UN if the UN Security Council resolves to hold Israel accountable to international laws.

The US government’s counter-terrorism unit will also aid Israel by any means.

This USIESC asserts that “supported by the American people” the US government will “repeatedly affirm the special bond between the United States and Israel” and that the two countries have “shared values and shared interests.”

If there were ever language to suppose that there were a merging of these two nations, the USIESC fits that bill.

The Executive Summary of USIESC says that “the following actions to assist in the defense of Israel” are:

(1) Provide Israel such support as may be necessary to increase development and production of joint missile defense systems, particularly such systems that defend the urgent threat posed to Israel and United States forces in the region.

(2) Provide Israel assistance specifically for the production and procurement of the Iron Dome defense system for purposes of intercepting short-range missiles, rockets, and projectiles launched against Israel.

(3) Provide Israel defense articles and defense services through such mechanisms as appropriate, to include air refueling tankers, missile defense capabilities, and specialized munitions.

(4) Allocate additional weaponry and munitions for the forward-deployed United States stockpile in Israel.

(5) Provide Israel additional surplus defense articles and defense services, as appropriate, in the wake of the withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq.

(6) Strengthen efforts to prevent weapons smuggling into Gaza pursuant to the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and to protect against weapons smuggling and terrorist threats from the Sinai Peninsula.

(7) Offer the Israeli Air Force additional training and exercise opportunities in the United States to compensate for Israel’s limited air space.
(8) Expand Israel’s authority to make purchases under the Foreign Military Financing program on a commercial basis.

(9) Seek to enhance the capabilities of the United States and Israel to address emerging common threats, increase security cooperation, and expand joint military exercises.

(10) Encourage an expanded role for Israel within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including an enhanced presence at NATO headquarters and exercises.

(11) Support extension of the long-standing loan guarantee program for Israel, recognizing Israel’s unbroken record of repaying its loans on time and in full.

(12) Expand already-close intelligence cooperation, including satellite intelligence, with Israel.

USIESC goes on to claim that: “Iran, (3) which has long sought to foment instability and promote extremism in the Middle East, is now seeking to (4) exploit the dramatic political transition underway in the region to undermine governments traditionally aligned with the United States and support extremist political movements in these countries.”

On the contrary, Israel and the US have been the biggest proponents of violence toward unprovoked nations in recent times. The collaboration of the US, Israel and NATO, with help from CIA operatives al-Qaeda and other US funded terrorist groups, have synthesized fake revolutions (i.e. the Arab Spring) to destabilize foreign governments and force regime changes.

Right now, al-Qaeda is being used by the Obama administration to force the Syrian President out of office through repeated attacks and massive killing of innocent Syrians.

In Africa, specifically the south Sudan region, Obama has teamed up with Israel to create the new nation of South Sudan by using terrorism to force their current government out.

USIESC continues its assault on Iran: “At the same time, (5) Iran may soon attain a nuclear weapons capability, a development that would fundamentally threaten vital American interests, destabilize the region, encourage regional nuclear proliferation, further empower and embolden Iran, (6) the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, and (7) provide it the tools to threaten its neighbors, including Israel”.

Although publicly, both the Obama administration and the Israeli government have admitted that Iran has absolutely no intention of building nuclear weapons. Both governments assume that by using words like “they may” or “they might” denotes a definite intention to do so.

The Mullahs that have ultimate authority in Iran have stated numerous times that the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons goes against the law of Islam. Independent studies, outside of the US and Israeli reach, have also confirmed that not only does Iran not have nuclear weapons at present, but are not perusing their allocation.

To justify the fabricated “need” to assist Israel in remaining “safe” the USIESC states : “As a result, (8) the strategic environment that has kept Israel secure and safeguarded United States national interests for the past 35 years has eroded.”

At the present time, Israel is in possession of an estimated 200 – 300 nuclear weapons. They are the covert superpower of the world. Israel also enjoys one of the most intensive and explicit armies in the world. While Israel continues to invade the sovereign nations that surround them, they are not being invaded themselves.

The USIESC is a propaganda piece of legislation designed to set the stage for full military support of Israel when they launch an unprovoked strike against Iran. While now, there are campaigns to coerce a fake grassroots effort to force a regime change in Iran, the inevitability of war declarations are looming in the distance.

China and Russia have made it clear that they have absolutely no intention of ending their relations with Iran.

The distractions in the mainstream media concerning Obama are just that. The sudden inflation of gay rights in the political arena and other nonsensical and unimportant social memes are being touted as if they will define our nation.

The USIESC has clearly set a precedent and definition of who America is.

The Obama administration, under careful control of the global Elite, is consolidating powers with Israel in a joint effort to take over the world . . . by toppling one government at a time.

Susanne Posel’s website is Occupy Corporatism.

Al-Qaida Now Deploying ‘Facebook Terrorism’ in Syria

Patrick Henningsen
Infowars.com
May 25, 2012

As many Americans already know, it’s not uncommon for Facebook to ban certain groups and erase postings on its social network. Reports of Ron Paul supporters and sovereign citizen groups suffering this treatment have unfortunately become a normal occurrence on Facebook, as their big brother behind-the-scenes moderators work overtime in the US to steer political reality into an ever-narrower band of awareness.

A very real and disturbing new trend has taken off in conflict-ridden Syria, where rogue opposition groups, many of whom are already associated with the al-Qaida terrorist brand, are using Facebook to post the names, phone numbers and residential addresses of pro-Assad government supporters. At the end of these posts, the terrorists then leave a note of encouragement for other opposition members to “go and kill them”.

The ramifications of this trend are far-reaching and very dangerous. Domestically in the US, such incidents are normally dealt with via local and federal law enforcement agencies, but in countries like Syria, stopping abuses on the network can be a slower process, and can cost lives. In the fog of chaos, opportunists and criminal are also coming out of the woodwork to settle personal scores, seize property and engage in extortion and kidnapping.

Of course, censors and moderators at Facebook are nowhere to be found, as al-Qaida operatives in Syria are allowed to run rampant on their social network, issuing death threats and calls for cold-blooded murder.

The fact that many of the so-called ‘opposition’ in Syria are being backed with arms and logistics from the US State Department, in a manner that is openly undermining the UN-brokered ceasefire agreement by working to ship arms to anti-Syrian government rebels via regional proxies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and over the Iraqi border – means that Facebook is now involved in Washington’s Syrian regime change plans. Facebook is on record as being set-up as a massive spying grid by the NSA and the CIA, which means that it will routinely turn a blind eye to any of Washington’s mercenary Mujaheddin criminal acts taking place of their digital platform.

 

No longer confined to the shadows of covert ops, Washington announced this week that it will in fact supply arms to terrorist groups in Syria, claiming it will be ‘vetting’ its arms supply lines to the Free Syria Army, a move that will almost certainly increase the violence in that country. According the Daily Star in Lebanon today, “While some intelligence analysts worry that there may be no suitable recipients of lethal aid in the Syria conflict, the vetting plan has arisen as the least objectionable idea in a complicated situation”.

In addition, the social network is also being used to post staged killings as false flag events, designed to demonize the Syrian government security services, as well as similar fake videos of human rights violations – many of which are immediately taken up by major corporate media networks in the US and Europe.

Social networks have featured prominently in recent years, particularly Facebook and Twitter for helping to promote the Arab Spring in Tunsia, Egypt, Libya, and in Syria, and the western commentators and pundits have credited these websites as playing a pivotal role in spreading ‘freedom and democracy’ in these countries. In most cases, and as recent history has proven in Egypt, this importance has been grossly overstated and in many cases, overseas manipulation of social media English language traffic has provided the lion’s share for the ‘pro-democracy’ illusion once championed by the news services in the west. With the ousting of Egypt’s career dictator Mubarak, came a new full-blown, military dictatorship, currently clinging to power with the popular Islamist Muslim Brotherhood leadership waiting in the wings.

But people worldwide are now getting wise to the virtual political sphere and are becoming increasingly aware that western intelligence operatives are not only using the social networks to achieve various propaganda ends, but are also, perhaps knowingly, allowing certain terrorists and ‘informants’ to use  the social networks to terrorize western political enemies.

As Mark Zuckerberg and his financial insiders scramble to avoid prosecution in the wake of the social network’s recent pump-and-dump IPO debacle, the US mainstream media has conveniently ignored Facebook’s enabling of actual terrorism in the Middle East.

Even in the face of such openly violent and criminal use of its platform, micro-managers for the online platform will routinely action relatively harmless cyber-bullying complaints against elementary school children, and in some cases, see actual US law enforcement involved in making arrests over virtual slurs. In most cases, the offending account holders will have their accounts suspended, or deleted for trivial events.

This latest disturbing news from Syria should not only highlight the hypocrisy of Facebook’s big brother censors, but it should also suggest the obvious link the company has to the highest echelons of the US Federal Government and its alphabet soup intelligence agencies.

We know Facebook’s policy on domestic censorship and trivial cyber-bullying, but what is Facebook’s public policy on al-Qaida using its international platform for terror?

Zuckerberg, we are waiting.

 

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WORLD WAR III: Armageddon Begins – Republican-Led House Votes to Allow United States Military Action Against Iran!

[ED NOTE: Non Fear mongering - Information Purposes only. Please Follow Up With Your Own Research]

 

The Republican-led House of Representatives approved Friday the use of US force against Iran if the Tehran regime threatens the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons.

According to a section of the National Defense Authorization Act, “it shall be the policy of the United States to take all necessary measures, including military action if required, to prevent Iran from threatening the United States, its allies or Iran’s neighbors with a nuclear weapon.”  Lawmakers by a vote of 299-120 passed the sweeping legislation, which sets out a total of $642.5 billion in military expenditures for the coming fiscal year. The bill including the tough Iran language came just a day after a non-binding but sharply worded House resolution put pressure on President Barack Obama to prevent Tehran from pursuing its nuclear program and reject policy merely aimed at containing a nuclear weapons-capable Iran.  Friday’s measure would make the possible use of force a key plank in US policy to prevent Iran from acquiring an atomic bomb.

The bill would still need to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, where Obama’s allies are highly unlikely to pass the House version without substantial changes.  Obama has already threatened to veto the measure if it prevents his administration from carrying out its defense strategy.  The House legislation would require the US military to prepare a plan to boost the presence of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Middle East, and conduct military exercises “or other visible, concrete military readiness activities.”  Iran and the P5+1 powers — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany — are preparing to meet next week in Baghdad for crunch talks on Tehran’s contested nuclear program. Western powers and Israel say Iran is masking an ambition to obtain nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian energy program, a charge Tehran vehemently denies.Rawstory.

Source

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U.S. Ambassador to Israel: Plan to Attack Iran “Ready”

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 16, 2012

The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shaprio, told a closed conference in Tel Aviv that the United States has completed preparations for a military strike on Iran. His comments were recorded by a reporter and aired on Israel’s Channel 2 TV on Wednesday night.

Daniel Shaprio (center) sat on the NSC as senior director for the Middle East before Obama appointed him ambassador to Israel.

“It would be preferable to resolve this diplomatically, and through the use of pressure, than to use military force,” Shapiro said. “But that does not mean that option isn’t available. Not just available, it’s ready. The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready.”

Shaprio’s comments were not intended for public consumption, the Times of Israel reports.

The finalized attack plan arrives as Israel and the United States prepare for joint military exercises in the United States. “The exercises, to be held in the coming months, will strengthen the relationship between the IAF and the US Air Force as they practice carrying out joint operations,” the Jerusalem-based online newspaper reported. “Israeli and US air defense forces are also to take part in a major joint drill later this summer in Israel to simulate a massive attack. Thousands of US soldiers are expected to arrive in Israel for the drills.”

In January, the Stars and Stripes reported that the exercise in Israel – billed as the largest ever conducted by the two countries – is not related to tensions with Iran, according to the U.S. European Command. The long-planned exercise is “part of a routine training cycle designed to improve the interoperability of our air defense systems, and not in response to any real-world event,” said EUCOM spokesman Air Force Capt. John Ross.

“It’s a classified exercise, and we can’t release even small details about it,” Ross explained in an email to the Department of Defense newspaper.

“Austere Challenge ’12″ was originally scheduled for April, but postponed by Obama.

“U.S. participation in such an exercise, obviously geared to a scenario involving an Iranian retaliation against an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities, would have made the United States out to be a partner of Israel in any war that would follow an Israeli attack on Iran,” Gareth Porter and Jim Lobe reported in January.

“Obama and U.S. military leaders apparently decided that the United States could not participate in such an exercise so long as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to give the administration any assurance that he will not attack Iran without prior approval from Washington.”

On March 8, the Israel Insider reported that Netanyahu had struck a deal with the United States.

“The US will supply Israel with bunker-busting bombs and refueling planes in return for delaying a strike against Iran until at least the end of the year,” the website reported, citing Maariv, a Hebrew language daily newspaper published in Israel. In short, the long planned strike on Iran will occur after the November election in the United States.

COVERT OPS PROMOTE SECTARIAN STRIKE IN PAKISTAN? Hands Behind Shia Massacre in Pakistan

Death is whimsical these days, manifesting itself in shapes most repellent to man: men posing with the mangled parts of dead bodies; men urinating on dead bodies; men cutting out the eyes of their brothers and killing them in the name of religion.

A human tragedy of inconceivable magnitude is taking place in some parts of Pakistan which are being inexcusably and consciously ignored by Western media.

Only in April 2012, more than 250 Shia Muslims were maimed and killed in broad daylight. Around 150 pairs of Shias’ eyes were cut out of their sockets; many of them died while their faces had been smashed with stones or sprayed with acid. According to witnesses, who had managed to flee the scene of the crime, the Wahhabi attackers were void of any mercy; the criminals are now free and keep on partaking in their feast of blood.

All these massacres are being legitimated and orchestrated by a Wahhabi group known as Sepah Sahabeh who emerged in 1985 in the Pubjab province of Pakistan as a reaction to the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the burgeoning Shia Muslims who had gradually entered the political and economical positions in the Pakistani government. The extremist group was considerably beefed up and enlarged under support of the then Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq with the ultimate goal of establishing an independent Wahhabi state in Pakistan and eliminating the Shia minority in the country. In fact, it is widely believed that the then Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq generously contributed to the emergence and development of such extremist groups and implicitly gave them carte blanche to engage in liquidating the Shia minority.
The government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif which to a large extent relied on the Wahhabi extremists for political support went silently by this spate of violence. However, in January 2001, Sepah Sahabeh was branded as a terrorist group under the then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. A violent crackdown soon ensued as a result of which many members went into hiding but the group later re-emerged and branched out under different names such as Lashkar Jangawi and Jaish Muhammad. After all, Tahrik-e Taliban euphemistically called “Student Movement of Pakistan” is an offshoot of the terrorist group.

Apart from the mass killing of the Shia groups, many individuals also became the target of these terrorists backed by the Pakistani intelligence agencies, inter alia, ISI.

A large number of Shia elite including doctors, engineers, university professors and top students were brutally assassinated by this insidious group in areas such as Gilgit, Baltistan, Parachinar, Quetta, and even in major cities including Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Southern Punjab, and Islamabad.

Interestingly enough, not a single soul has been arrested to account for these gruesome murders over the past years. It is extremely unfortunate to note that no practical steps have been taken on the part of the government in order to stall the activities of these extremists. The only group which used to support the minorities including the Shia Muslims in this bias-benighted country is the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) which has been recently plagued by indifference. The current PPP rulers seem to have shut their eyes to the woes of the minorities especially Shia Muslims who have contributed tremendously to the economic and social progress of the country. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was himself a Shia Muslim who healed the image of the country in the eyes of the international community.

Conversely, the Shia community has, during all these years, been on the path of patience and has never responded wrath with wrath and hatred with hatred.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain promote Wahhabism and conduce to extremism by importing only non-Shia workers from Pakistan. Media reports suggest that Bahrain has hired retired Pakistani army officers to suppress the popular uprising in the country. Also, recent reports indicate that the Shia minority are being discriminated against in different government organizations in Pakistan. This is indeed an indirect act of promoting extremism within the Pakistani society.

Be it as it may, the target killings have not only destabilized Pakistan but also deprecated the country as a hotbed of extremism and terrorism on an international level.

These killings have provoked the ire of Sunni Muslims all across the country who believe atrocities of this nature gravely shake the very pillars of Pakistan, disrupt national unity, strengthen the enemies and drag the country into abysmal extremism beyond salvation.

If the Pakistani establishment is really intent on stopping the spread of extremism in the country, they should cut off the invisible hands which buttress these extremist groups within the civilian government, military, intelligence services and the judiciary system.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30699

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We are all terror suspects now

WRC559.com
Pressforactivism.com
Forum
29/04/2012
 

You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it?

You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished.

Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Centre may monitor whether you are typing not merely ‘Al Qaeda’, but ‘exercise’, ‘drill’, ‘wave’, ‘initiative’ and ‘organisation’: all proscribed words.

The British government’s announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming Western democracy.

What are you going to do about it?

In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with “terror suspects”. Habeas Corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none except one has been charged with a crime.

All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty, which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to “cruel and unusual punishment”.

One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk.

To the Land of the Free, they go – along with young Richard O’Dwyer, who faces 10 years in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the internet.

As the law is politicised and Americanised, these travesties are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating “terrorism” on the internet, Appeal Court judges in London ruled that “acts … against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes” were now crimes.

Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.

What are you going to do about it?

The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer called “pre-fascist” has metastasized. The US attorney-general, Eric Holder, defends the “right” of his government to assassinate American citizens. Israel, the protege, is allowed to aim its nukes at nukeless Iran.

In this looking-glass world, the lying is panoramic. The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians on March 1, including at least nine children and four women, is attributed to a “rogue” American soldier. The “authenticity” of this is vouched by President Obama himself, who had “seen a video” and regards it as “conclusive proof”.

An independent Afghan parliamentary investigation produces eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence of as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging their villages, killing and raping: a standard, if marginally more murderous, US special forces “night raid”.

Take away the videogame technology of killing – America’s contribution to modernity – and the behaviour is traditional. Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally trained, frequently racist, obese and led by a corrupt officer class, American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway places whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend.

A nation founded on the genocide of the native population never quite kicks the habit. Vietnam was “Indian country” and its “slits” and “gooks” were to be “blown away”.

The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a “rogue” incident and, profanely, an “American tragedy” (the cover headline of Newsweek).

Only one of 26 men prosecuted was convicted and he was let go by president Richard Nixon. My Lai is in Quang Ngai province where, as I learned as a reporter, an estimated 50,000 people were killed by American troops, mostly in what they called “free fire zones”. This was the model of modern warfare: industrial murder.

Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the beneficiaries of America’s new permanent war: NATO, the armaments and hi-tech companies, the media, and a “security” industry whose lucrative contamination is a contagion on everyday life.

The conquest or “pacification” of territory is unimportant. What matters is the pacification of you, the cultivation of your indifference.

What are you going to do about it?

The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now, the Supreme Court in London will decide whether the WikiLeaks editor, Julian Assange, is to be extradited to Sweden. Should this final appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an epic scale, who is charged with no crime, faces solitary confinement and interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations.

Thanks to a secret deal between the US and Sweden, he can be “rendered” to the American gulag at any time. In his own country, Australia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has liaised with those in Washington she calls her “true mates” to ensure her innocent fellow citizen is fitted for his orange jump suit just in case he should make it home.

In February, her Government wrote a “WikiLeaks Amendment” to the extradition treaty between Australia and the US that makes it easier for her “mates” to get their hands on him. She has even given them the power of approval over Freedom of Information searches – so that the world outside can be lied to, as is customary.

What are you going to do about it?

John Pilger is a journalist, author and film maker. View his profile here. Source

Julian Assange’s Television Debut: Exclusive Interview with Hezbollah Leader Nasrallah

Patrick Henningsen
Infowars.com
April 17, 2012

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has made a career out of feeding the media with millions of documents, as well as being interviewed on his political situation, both of which have landed him in hot water with the US State Department and the British Foreign Office. Following 500 days awaiting extradition under house arrest in rural Great Britain, Assange has managed to turn the media tables, with Russia Today initiating him the host of their new talk show, The World Tomorrow.

In media terms, Assange has managed to catch a very big fish. His debut guest is not just any political heavyweight, but one whom every western journalist would love to get in front of the camera, but have failed to, mainly because  from the West’s perspective, Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah has been a “no-go area” – categorically classed as an international terrorist by the US, UK, NATO allies and of course, Israel.

In a fairly candid and insightful interview with Nasrallah, the two men cover a number of subjects including the Syrian proxy war, the Palestinian occupation, religion and the wider nature of geopolitics in the Middle East.

For alternative media audiences, it will certainly be encouraging to see a network like RT take on such an ambitious program, and no doubt, RT will be the target of incredible criticism from the US, Israel and its allies in the weeks and months to come for airing such an interview. Watch:

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Israel ‘would not be able to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme with pre-emptive air strike’

Thomas Harding
London Telegraph
Monday, April 9, 2012

Experts believe Israeli military planners options are restricted to high risk choices, such as a long range missile bombardment from Israel or a special forces raid involving troops attack facilities on the ground.


The authoritative military journal Jane’s Defence Weekly has also cast doubt on Israel’s ability to mount a successful operation saying it would face “substantial difficulties”

“The significant distances involved and hardened features of Iran’s nuclear facilities make any ‘massive surprise’ aerial attack a very high-risk operation for Israel to undertake on its own,” Jane’s concluded in a recent study.

While Israel has the most powerful air force in the Middle East, it would struggle to mount the complex strikes necessary to deal a real blow to Iran’s well protected nuclear plants. Senior Israeli officials have warned the country is prepared to take unilateral action to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Russia, Iran set to counter US/Israeli strike against Iran. US-led naval drill

DEBKAfile
April 3, 2012

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov issued a strong warning against a military attack on Iran Monday, April 2,, saying that a pre-emptive strike would violate international law. His comments, made during a visit to Armenia, stopped short of threatening (the US and/or Israel) of consequences. But they backed up and were in tune with the explicit threat from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last Thursday of strong Iranian resistance to foreign intervention in Syria and vow to defend Damascus as the “center of resistance against Israel.”

Western military observers link the two statements as representing an evolving Russian-Iranian front. After their shared success in delivering Bashar Assad from the revolt against his regime, the two partners are preparing to fend off a potential strike against Tehran’s nuclear program as well as shore up Iran’s regional interests from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. They are getting set to counter two US-led steps, disclosed here byDEBKAfile:

1. Although the US-backed Friends of Syria 2, which took place Sunday, April 1, in Istanbul, offered the Syrian Free Army no direct assistance or support, Saudi Arabia and Qatar established an international fund to pay rebel fighters a regular wage. They hope to lure more officers and men into defecting from the army units loyal to Assad.
Moscow and Tehran view this step as Arab intervention in the Syrian conflict.

2. The US, Israel and Greece launched a shadowy air-naval exercise in the Mediterranean Thursday, March 29. Codenamed “Noble Dina,” it appears to range across a broad sweep of sea up to Crete and including the waters off Turkey, Cyprus, and Israel Navy bases in Haifa and Ashdod ports.

Full article here

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Pentagon: Brain Eating Vaccines to Lobotomize Vets

Uploaded by

 

 

Monday, April 2, 2012

A video on You Tube appears to show a Pentagon briefing in which the idea of lobotomizing terrorists to remove their religious fanaticism using a manufactured virus containing a vaccine is seriously proposed, although debate has raged about whether the clip is authentic or not.

The footage shows a speaker giving a lecture to a handful of attendees and is also accompanied by authentic-looking Department of Defense project ID numbers. According to the text on the clip, the lecture took place inside a Pentagon briefing room.

The speaker discusses how certain people are predisposed to be religious fundamentalists because they have an aggressive VMAT 2 (God) gene which causes them to act on their beliefs in fanatical ways.

After a member of the audience asks the speaker if the idea is to “by spreading this virus….eliminate individuals who are going on to a bomb fest, who are going into a market and blowing it apart,” the speaker confirms, “by vaccinating them against this, we’ll eliminate this behavior.”

The question of how to implement the vaccine is answered by the speaker when he responds to the man in the audience, who raises doubts over the feasibility of performing CT scans on suspected terrorists rather than just “putting a bullet in their head”.

“The virus would immunize against this VMAT 2 gene and that would….essentially turn a fanatic into a normal person, and we think that would have major effects in the Middle East,” states the speaker.

The audience member then asks, “How do you suggest this can be dispersed, via an aerosol?” — to which the speaker responds, “The present plan and the tests we’ve done so far have used respiratory viruses such as flu and we believe that’s a satisfactory way to get the exposure of the largest part of the population.”

The speaker confirms that the name of the proposal is “Funvax — the vaccine for religious fundamentalism.”

Debate over the video’s authenticity has raged over the course of the past year since the video was uploaded to You Tube. /watch?v=nADFJlAggnY

http://wrc559.com/2012/04/03/real-or-fake-pentagon-proposal-to-lobotomize-terrorists-using-virus/

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Australia joins list of countries warning against Israeli strike on Iran

Barak Ravid
Haaretz
March 31, 2012

More and more Western countries are joining a growing list of countries who are applying heavy international pressure on Israel to prevent it from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. The latest voice is that of the new Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr.


Several days ago, Carr phoned his Israeli college Avigdor Lieberman. This was the first telephone call between the two. Aside from the niceties of the first formal phone call, Carr took advantage of the conversation in order to warn Lieberman that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will have serious consequences.

Carr revealed the contents of the conversation during an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Our position is very clear – we counsel Israel against taking military action apart from any other consideration.

It is not in the interest of Israel – I said that to the Israeli Foreign Minister when I spoke to him last week,” Carr said. Despite insisting he was concerned over an Israeli strike, Carr said a military operation was still only a “hypothetical solution.”

Full article here

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Report: Iran planned to bomb Israeli ship in Suez Canal

Avi Issacharoff
Haaretz
March 24, 2012

Iran had planned to bomb an Israeli ship while it crossed the Suez Canal, the prosecution in Egypt’s state security court said, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reported on Saturday.

According to the report, two Egyptians were recently arrested and investigated for allegedly planning an attack on an Israeli ship in the Suez Canal.

The investigation of the two found that they had received their instructions from Iranian agents, and that the two asked a third person, by the name of Mohamed Zakri, to carry out the act in exchange for 50 million Egyptian pounds.

The two denied the accusations against them.

Full article here

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Obama Installs New Guidelines To Aid Spying On Innocent Americans

National Counterterrorism Center given new privacy busting power

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
March 23, 2012

New guidelines put forth by the Obama administration will allow US spy agencies to keep records on innocent Americans without oversight for up to five years.

As the AP reports, previously the National Counterterrorism Center, was legally obliged to immediately destroy information that it gathered about American citizens if it found no clear links to terrorism.

Following the 2009 Christmas day underpants bomber debacle, US representatives immediately called for the NCTC’s authority to be expanded, saying that there was not enough communication between intelligence agencies.

“Following the failed terrorist attack in December 2009, representatives of the counter-terrorism community concluded it is vital for NCTC to be provided with a variety of data sets from various agencies that contain terrorism information,” National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper Jr. said in a statement late Thursday.

“The ability to search against these data sets for up to five years on a continuing basis as these updated guidelines permit will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

The NCTC, made up of a combination of intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, was created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and has drawn criticism ever since for infringement on the Fourth Amendment and basic privacy rights.

“It is a vast expansion of the government’s surveillance authority,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said of the new guidelines.

Noting that the new rules contravene the Federal Privacy Act, Rotenberg added “The fact that this data can be retained for five years on U.S. citizens for whom there’s no evidence of criminal conduct is very disturbing.”

An Obama administration official said that privacy will be safeguarded because there are strict measures in place to ensure that any intelligence gathered on American citizens “is likely to contain significant terrorism information.”

However, given that the Department of Homeland Security now considers banal bodily activities such as yawning, staring and goose pumps as “suspicious activity” indicative of terrorism, those assurances are unlikely to appease concerned Americans.

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RAND Collected Iranian Tweets For U.S. “National Security Agenda”

Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars.com
March 22, 2012

Whenever you post something, anything, on Twitter or Facebook- or any other form of “social media” for that matter- know that they will be picked up, stored and analyzed by a RAND-corporation social scientist.

In a document titled Using Social Media to Gauge Iranian Public Opinion and Mood After the 2009 Electionthe authors have set out to reveal their findings after having collected thousands of tweets from the Iranian people in the months following the Iranian elections of 2009. The globalist think tank complained about the shortcomings of just scanning through Iranian blogs and such. In order to assess the Iranian zeitgeist, RAND turned to an extraordinary computer-program called LIWC:

“Given the shortcomings of the manual approach, using a computerized method to study the content of social media can serve as a useful complement, compensating for some of these limitations. Such a tool exists: an automated content analysis program called “Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2007” (LIWC, pronounced “Luke”).”

“Focusing on Twitter, we used LIWC as a means of tapping into Iranian public opinion and mood during the tumultuous months following the highly controversial 2009 presidential election”, the report states.

Admitting that the probing and analyzing of Iranian tweets serves the national security interests of the United States, the RAND researchers in the same breath admit:

“Given that LIWC is largely untried in non-Western political contexts, we used Iran during this period as a test case. On the one hand, we sought to shed light on how public opinion and mood evolved after the 2009 election. But at the same time, we intended to examine the validity of a new methodology—one incorporating the LIWC tool—for analyzing foreign public sentiment on political topics, as expressed through the social media platform, Twitter.”

The results, according to the authors, are so full of promise that they seek to expand the program even further. Under the header “Expanding the Scope of the Current Work” they state:

“To extend this current work, applying the methodology to other forms of social media is an obvious next step. For instance, we have conducted initial analyses of Iranian, Persian-language blogs, and of political leaders’ Facebook postings, which are not reported here.”

The authors are aware of the implications of their research when it comes to national security “interests”:

“We could also extend the current research by looking across more than one country at a time to gauge the sentiments that social media users in each country express on topics of interest to them all.”, the report continues.

“For example, using the current methodology, it is possible to compare sentiments expressed across Iran, Pakistan, and other countries on topics including the United States, nuclear weapons, and domestic political issues. Other extensions of the current research could focus on Asian countries that are high on the national security agenda, such as China and Taiwan, or on Middle Eastern countries where political protests in early 2011 were reportedly influenced by social media use, such as Egypt and Tunisia.

Because the methods used by RAND were retrospective in nature, the authors envision using this and other software for monitoring of international conflicts “as they unfold”:

“A final way to extend the current methodology is to build a real-time tracking tool for social media texts. Such a tool could automatically download texts as they are posted, run them through a parsing algorithm, and place them into a database for processing through LIWC (or other software). Using such a tool, it would be possible to view and analyze patterns in written texts almost as quickly as they unfold. Given the policy relevance of our findings, these recommendations for validation and extensions of the methodology illustrate the potential of analyzing social media to understand public mood and opinion in various populations of interest.”

This expanded RAND-program is no doubt already fully operational, as the new world order further tightens its grip on all of humanity.

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Jeffrey Goldberg: Iran Will Not Target U.S. Warships If Attacked

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 21, 2012

In an article posted on the Bloomberg website, the neocon propagandist, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells us an attack on Iran is “historically inevitable” and will not result in World War Three.

photoIran wouldn’t dare take out U.S. warships… or would they?

“Some Israeli security officials also believe that Iran won’t target American ships or installations in the Middle East in retaliation for a strike, as many American officials fear, because the leadership in Tehran understands that American retaliation for an Iranian attack could be so severe as to threaten the regime itself,” Goldberg writes.

Goldberg faithfully follows the Israeli propaganda narrative: the attack on Iran will be limited to striking nuclear targets that supposedly represent an “existential threat” to not only the Jewish state, but the entire world.

In an earlier article, Goldberg created hypothetical diplomatic conversations between Israel and the United States and wrote that “the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.”

In fact, the objective of the coming attack will not be to only take out Iran’s nuclear facilities and the current regime, but convert the country from a modern industrialized state into a post-Stone Age ruin similar to Iraq following a decade of sanctions and two brutal invasions.

Goldberg knows this. He is, after all, “the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel,” according to Michael Massing of the New York Review of Books. He also understands the settler mindset of the Israeli establishment and its hatred of all things Arab and Muslim (and Persian). Goldberg left college to move to Israel, where he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a prison guard at the Ketziot military prison camp during the First Intifada.

Ibrahim Kazerooni , writing for Foreign Policy in Focus, cites a comment made by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the Charlie Rose Show in November to make the point that Israel’s obsession with Iran’s supposed nukes is little more than an excuse.

“With one honest comment, Barak demonstrated that the hysteria surrounding an Iranian bomb is, in fact, not about an ‘existential threat’ to Israel, but about the fact that: Israelis don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon because, if it does, Israel will not be free to continue its role as regional hegemon and to do whatever it wants in the Middle East. It will change the balance of power in the region,” Kazerooni writes.

This objective would undoubtedly stand even if Iran wasn’t pursuing a nuclear weapon as Israel and the United States claim ad nauseam.

Israel and the United States understand that a united Arab world is at best a distant dream and for all practical purposes Arab nationalism is dead. The Arabs do not pose a threat to Israel – as we are often told – and when they do, as in the case of Saddam Hussein, the United States takes care of them.

Iran is the only regional power that can effectively challenge Israeli hegemony. Jeffrey Goldberg, the Likudite Israelis, the neocons (who have a penchant for hating Arabs and Muslims more than their Likud comrades) and the political establishment in the United States know this. That’s why they are pushing the irrational narrative of apocalyptic Shiites working feverishly into the night to develop a nuke so they can wipe Israel off the map.

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Iran: Insane Israeli Hypocrisy and Iraq-Style WND Lies

by Mike Cotugno, EndTheLie.com:

This fear mongering about Iran maybe having the potential to possibly build a nuclear bomb (which they are not currently doing) is a desperate propaganda campaign by war profiteers on the hill to preemptively invade a sovereign state (most likely without a declaration of war), so I think it would be a good idea to pump the breaks and go over some basic facts that the dinosaur media conveniently forgets to divulge.

If we first look at who is intensifying the rhetoric and pushing for “crippling” sanctions on a country that has, as of yet, failed to actually do anything wrong, the finger would have to be pointed squarely at the state of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Read More @ EndTheLie.com

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Australian ‘special forces gathering intelligence in Africa’

The Telegraph
March 14, 2012

The Sydney Morning Herald said 4 Squadron of the elite Special Air Service (SAS) had mounted dozens of clandestine operations in places such as Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Kenya in a role normally carried out by spies.

Citing a government source, it said the missions by the previously unknown squadron were believed to involve terrorism intelligence gathering amid concerns about the threat posed by the Islamist al-Shebab militia.

They are also aimed at developing rescue strategies for evacuating trapped Australian civilians while assessing African border controls and exploring landing sites for possible military interventions.

Read more

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The Coming War With Iran

Part 1 Video

 

Part 2 Video

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