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Eye 2

Best of the Web: U.S. support of terrorists like al-Nusra is no conspiracy theory

Robert Fisk
The Independent
Wed, 17 Jun 2015 14:43 UTC
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© RexAl-Nusra and its supporters wishes to rebrand itself as a completely different and more moderate entity than Islamic State
No apologies for returning today to the strange case of the "moderate" Jabhat al-Nusra rebels, the throat-cutters and executioners who are playing the anti-Isis card to woo the US.

Their leader, you may recall, told Qatar's Al Jazeera channel that his al-Qaeda affiliated warriors will oppose both Isis and Bashar al-Assad - and even protect Syria's Christian and Alawite minorities. The usual American nomenklatura are telling the world this is tosh. It's the "conspiracy theorists" who are to blame, they say, for suggesting that the US might send barrel-loads of new weapons to such men. No. The US would never deal with those who are on its infamous, though pointless, "terrorist list". Besides, Qatar would never promote these killers as moderates - would they?

Well, first, let's take another look at all these conspiracy theorists. By chance, that inestimable French journal Le Monde Diplomatique this month carries a wodge of articles under the title "Did you say conspiracy?", painfully dissecting how many false-flag stories turned out to be true. There's the Mukden incident, for example, a 1931 Chinese attack on imperial Japan which turned out to be a Japanese attack on China and led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Rape of Nanking, et al.

Comment: No cash? No prospects? Join IS and help yourself and the US government!



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Brick Wall

Best of the Web: Prisons without walls: We're all inmates in the U.S. police state

John W. Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
Mon, 15 Jun 2015 19:07 UTC
"It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free—to be under no physical constraint and yet be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation wants him to think, feel and act. . . . To him the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free."—Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World Revisited
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© highdefdiscnews.com
"Free worlders" is prison slang for those who are not incarcerated behind prison walls. Supposedly, those fortunate souls live in the "free world." However, appearances can be deceiving.

"As I got closer to retiring from the Federal Bureau of Prisons," writes former prison employee Marlon Brock, "it began to dawn on me that the security practices we used in the prison system were being implemented outside those walls." In fact, if Brock is right, then we "free worlders" do live in a prison—albeit, one without visible walls.

In federal prisons, cameras are everywhere in order to maintain "security" and keep track of the prisoners. Likewise, the "free world" is populated with video surveillance and tracking devices. From surveillance cameras in stores and street corners to license plate readers (with the ability to log some 1,800 license plates per hour) on police cars, our movements are being tracked virtually everywhere. With this increasing use of iris scanners and facial recognition software—which drones are equipped with—there would seem to be nowhere to hide.

Detection and confiscation of weapons (or whatever the warden deems "dangerous") in prison is routine. The inmates must be disarmed. Pat downs, checkpoints, and random searches are second nature in ferreting out contraband.

Sound familiar?

Metal detectors are now in virtually all government buildings. There are the TSA scanning devices and metal detectors we all have to go through in airports. Police road blocks and checkpoints are used to perform warrantless searches for contraband. Those searched at road blocks can be searched for contraband regardless of their objections—just like in prison. And there are federal road blocks on American roads in the southwestern United States. Many of them are permanent and located up to 100 miles from the border.

Comment: The best way to overcome cognitive dissonance is to be aware of the mental trap. In order to see the true agenda and the power behind it, we have to stop believing our own lies.
"One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic ways. When the habits of subconscious selection and substitution of thought-data spread to the macrosocial level, a society tends to develop contempt for factual criticism and to humiliate anyone sounding an alarm."

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology



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Eagle

Best of the Web: American Conservative magazine: Why the U.S. needs endless war, not victory

Jon Basil Utiley
The American Conservative
Fri, 12 Jun 2015 17:30 UTC
us troops
© Sputnik/ Vladimir PirogovFreedom and democracy is a warm gun.
America doesn't "win" its wars, because winning a war is secondary to other goals in our war making. Winning or losing has little immediate consequence for the United States, because the wars we start, Wars of Choice, are not of vital national interest; losing doesn't mean getting invaded or our cities being destroyed. The following are some of the interests Washington has in not winning, reasons for our unending wars.

1) War sustains the (very) profitable log-rolling contracts for supplies in key congressional districts, grants for university faculties to study strategy, new funding for new weapons. During wartime who dares question almost any Pentagon cost "to defend America?"

2) Continued conflict postpones hard decisions about cutting defense spending such as closing surplus bases, cutting duplicate systems, and focusing on waste. See 16 Ways to Cut Defense. Shakespeare put it well, advising a king to have lots of foreign wars in order to have tranquility at home.

3) Starting wars is the historic way for kings (and presidents) to gain popularity and avoid doing tough domestic reforms for problems that cry out for solutions. War lets them be postponed. Think of George W. Bush winning election on promises to balance the budget, have health care reform, reform our bankrupt social security commitments, tackle the EPA, take on the teachers' unions, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and such. Instead, with war, all those issues were swept aside. He won his re-election by having even bigger deficit warfare/welfare spending and increasing the national debt by trillions.

Comment: TAC bills itself as an anti-war, 'paleoconservative' alternative to the neoconservatives. It's good to see not all American conservatives have drunk the Neocon Koolaid.

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Mr. Potato

Best of the Web: 'Obama zombies': Americans sign prankster's petition to nuke Russia


RT
Tue, 09 Jun 2015 17:11 UTC
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© Still from YouTube video/Mark Dice
US journalist Mark Rice has asked the people of San Diego to sign President Barack Obama's "plan" to nuke Russia to "maintain America's superiority." The majority of beachgoers didn't appear to get the joke, and signed the fake petition.

The "experiment" was recorded on video, which Mark Ricethen shared on his Twitter, YouTube and Facebook accounts.

"We just need a couple more signatures to support President [Barack] Obama's new plan to deal with Russia," Dice tell a random man whom he stops. "We are going to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike."

The man, who does not seem to be much familiar with the issue, cuts off Dice in mid-sentence, and says: "I'll sign it for you."

Comment: This demonstrates how difficult it is to make any improvements to our slavery. In contrast, RT tried a similar experiment in Russia. The results were reassuringly lackluster:



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Fire

Best of the Web: Paranoid patriotism: We're trapped in vicious cycle of militarism, says US Army colonel


Sputnik News
Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00 UTC
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© © Flickr/ The US Army
Americans have come to the point where they fear they can't live without war, US Army Colonel Gregory A. Daddis said, adding that the US' addiction to war is fed by "paranoid patriotism."

Since the end of the Second World War Americans have found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of warmongering, fed by constant fear of an external threat, noted Gregory A. Daddis, a US Army colonel and a professor of history at the United States Military Academy.

Throughout the Cold War American policy makers spoke "in apocalyptic terms" about a major threat presented the Soviets and Communism. Remarkably, nothing has changed since the collapse of the USSR, and "the gravest threat looms continuously on the horizon," the colonel pointed out.

"The 2015 National Security Strategy, published in February, offers a case in point. While acknowledging America's growing economic strength and the benefits of moving beyond the large ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the document stresses the 'risks of an insecure world.' Despite its global power and reach, the United States, we are told, faces a 'persistent risk of attacks,'" Gregory A. Daddis emphasized.
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Sherlock

Best of the Web: Skirmish in the Spratlys - China will have to beat U.S. at its own game to preserve independence and survive Cold War

Mike Whitney
Counter Punch
Mon, 08 Jun 2015 18:34 UTC
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"Washington is not looking for peace or war. They're looking for domination. If they can achieve domination peacefully - that's fine. If they can't, they'll use war. It's that simple."

— William Blum, Interview with Russia Today
"The U.S. is frantically surrounding China with military weapons, advanced aircraft, naval fleets and a multitude of military bases from Japan, South Korea and the Philippines through several nearby smaller Pacific islands to its new and enlarged base in Australia.... The U.S. naval fleet, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines patrol China's nearby waters. Warplanes, surveillance planes, drones and spying satellites cover the skies, creating a symbolic darkness at noon."

— Jack A. Smith, "Hegemony Games: USA vs. PRC", CounterPunch
The vast build up of military assets in the Asia-Pacific signals a fundamental change in U.S. policy towards China. Washington no longer believes that China can be integrated into the existing US-led system. Recent actions taken by China - particularly the announcement that it planned to launch an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) that would compete head-to-head with the World Bank and IMF— have set off alarms in the Capital where behind-the-scenes powerbrokers and think tank pundits agree that a more "robust" policy is needed to slow China's ascendency. The current confrontation in the South China Sea - where the US has demanded that China immediately cease all land reclamation activities - indicates that the new policy has already been activated increasing the prospects of a conflagration between the two nuclear-armed adversaries.

There's no need to go over the details of China's land reclamation activities in the Spratly Islands since reasonable people can agree that Washington has no real interest in a few piles of sand heaped up on reefs 10,000 miles from the United States. The man-made islands pose no threat to US national security or to freedom of navigation. The Obama administration is merely using the Spratlys as a pretext to provoke, intimidate and harass Beijing. The Spratly's provide a justification for escalation, for building an anti-China coalition among US allies in the region, for demonizing China in the media, for taking steps to disrupt China's ambitious Silk Roads economic strategy, and for encircling China to the West with US warships that threaten China's access to critical shipping lanes and vital energy supplies. This is the ultimate objective; to bring China to its knees and to force it to comply with Washington's diktats. This is what Washington really wants.
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War Whore

Best of the Web: U.S. creation of its proxy army ISIS in Iraq and Syria part of imperial divide-and-conquer strategy for Middle East

Seumas Milne
The Guardian
Wed, 03 Jun 2015 17:05 UTC
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© Eva Bee
The sectarian terror group won't be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place

The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an "affront to justice" when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing "extensive support" to the armed Syrian opposition.

That didn't only include the "non-lethal assistance" boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of "arms on a massive scale". Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a "rat line" of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much. But it's only the latest of a string of such cases. Less fortunate was a London cab driver Anis Sardar, who was given a life sentence a fortnight earlier for taking part in 2007 in resistance to the occupation of Iraq by US and British forces. Armed opposition to illegal invasion and occupation clearly doesn't constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva convention.
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Newspaper

Best of the Web: Putin's interview with Il Corriere della Sera

Vladimir Putin
President of Russia
Sat, 06 Jun 2015 15:32 UTC
Putin
© Presidential Press and Information OfficeInterview to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good evening.

Luciano Fontana: Good evening, Mr President. First of all, we would like to thank you for giving us this important opportunity to interview you today.

Vladimir Putin: It is my pleasure.

Luciano Fontana: My name is Luciano Fontana. I am the new head of Il Corriere della Sera, and here with me is my colleague, Paolo Valentino, who worked for a long time in Russia and even married a Russian woman.

Vladimir Putin: You are the new head of the newspaper?

Luciano Fontana: Yes, it has only been a month.

Vladimir Putin: Congratulations you on the appointment.
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Eye 1

Best of the Web: USA Freedom Act: Another nail in the coffin of civil liberties

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
Thu, 04 Jun 2015 00:41 UTC
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© Unknown
With the passage of the USA FREEDOM Act, mainstream media outlets and even some "privacy advocates" are hailing the passage of the bill as a welcome step forward and a sign of defeat for the USA PATRIOT Act, the bill that was itself passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and widely representative of the United States' rapid descent into outright police state tyranny.

Unfortunately, however, the passage of the FREEDOM Act is no victory for freedom. In fact, is an insultingly sound nail in freedom's coffin.

The bill, which has been promoted and supported by many of the same members of Congress that supported the PATRIOT Act (notably, James Sensenbrenner) now comes on the heels of a 2nd US Circuit Court decision that bulk telecommunications data collection was not authorized by the PATRIOT Act, unconstitutional, and therefore an illegal act.

To be sure, the FREEDOM Act has been in the works for passage since 2013 when lawmakers began pushing it. At the time, the bill attempted to actually extend the PATRIOT Act provisions through the end of 2017 as well as maintain a number of violations of civil liberties and privacy concerns.

Comment: For more on the psychopathic elites' freedom to eradicate American's right to privacy see:

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Snakes in Suits

Best of the Web: More insanity: US officials consider nuclear strikes against Russia

Niles Williamson
World Socialist Web Site
Fri, 05 Jun 2015 00:00 UTC
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© UnknownU.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter: Another spokesman for U.S. insanity.
US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is meeting today at the headquarters of the US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany with two dozen US military commanders and European diplomats to discuss how to escalate their economic and military campaign against Russia. They will assess the impact of current economic sanctions, as well as NATO's strategy of exploiting the crisis in eastern Ukraine to deploy ever-greater numbers of troops and military equipment to Eastern Europe, threatening Russia with war.

A US defense official told Reuters that the main purpose of the meeting was to "assess and strategize on how the United States and key allies should think about heightened tensions with Russia over the past year." The official also said Carter was open to providing the Ukrainian regime with lethal weapons, a proposal which had been put forward earlier in the year.

Most provocatively, a report published by the Associated Press yesterday reports that the Pentagon has been actively considering the use of nuclear missiles against military targets inside Russia, in response to what it alleges are violations of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Russia denies US claims that it has violated the INF by flight-testing ground-launched cruise missiles with a prohibited range.

Comment: The pattern of U.S. aggression towards Russia is crystal clear: provoke-react, Provoke-React, PROVOKE-React, PROVOKE-REACT, PROVOKE-REACT!, PROVOKE-REACT!! Despite the obvious irrationality of this strategy, not to mention the level of pure destruction this approach is leading to, the U.S. has been absolutely relentless in its pursuit of dominating Russia.

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