Less than one month after killing more than 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 500 children, Israel is hosting its annual drone conference.

Organized in partnership with the US embassy in Tel Aviv, "Israel Unmanned Systems 2014" offers Israeli military firms an opportunity to flaunt the performance of their products, many of which were tested on Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip this summer.
Palestine has long served as a laboratory for Israel's ballooning "homeland security" industry to test and perfect weapons of domination and control, with disenfranchised and stateless Palestinians serving as their lab rats.

Speaking to the German magazine Der Spiegel last month, Avner Benzaken, head of the Israeli army's "technology and logistics" division - a unit "comprised largely of academics who also happen to be officers" - explained the benefits of this occupation.

"If I develop a product and want to test it in the field, I only have to go five or ten kilometers from my base and I can look and see what is happening with the equipment," said Benzaken. "I get feedback, so it makes the development process faster and much more efficient."

Easy access to a captive population to experiment on allows Israeli weapons manufacturers to market their products as "combat-proven," a coveted label that gives Israel a competitive edge in the international arms trade. Israel's suppression technology is then exported to regimes that are similarly invested in subjugating the poor and marginalized.

This dystopian arrangement has paved the way for Israel, a country the size of New Jersey, to rank among the globe's top five largest arms exporters and to become the world's number one exporter of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones.

US imperialism was once a fearsome force - mainly for ill. Under the latter heading, Washington's savage destruction of Vietnam four decades ago comes readily to mind. But now the American Imperium has become just a gong show on the Potomac - even as its weapons have gotten more lethal and its purposes more spurious and convoluted.

There is no more conspicuous proof than Obama's quixotic "war" on ISIS. The quote marks are necessary, of course, because the White House insists that this is merely a counter-terrorism project that is not really a war; that the campaign to "degrade, disrupt and destroy" the Islamic State will not deploy a single American soldier - at least not one with his or her boots on; and that the heavy lifting on the ground against the barbaric ISIS hordes will be conducted by a "broad coalition" of so far nameless nations.

In truth, the whole thing is a giant, pathetic farce. There will be no coalition, no strategy, no boots, no ISIS degradation, no gain in genuine safety and security for the American homeland. This is an utterly misbegotten war against an enemy that has more urgent targets than America, but a war which will nonetheless fire-up the already boiling cauldron of Middle Eastern tribal, religious and political conflict like never before. There is no name for what Obama is attempting except utter folly.

Even before Secretary Kerry brought his medicine show to Paris, it was evident there is no coalition of the willing - or even the bought. The best that the 26 odd signatories to his communique could muster was a vague endorsement of Iraq's boundaries and a pledge to support its still only partially formed, three-week old government "by any means necessary".........except not by a single one of the "means" that are actually available.

Let's start with the neighboring nations which should fear ISIS far more urgently than the citizens in distant places like Lincoln NE and Spokane WA. The short answer is not a single one of them want to help, can help or will be invited to help. Obama's putative coalition consists of the invisible (Germany), the indisposed (Turkey), the indecisive (the UK), the ineligible (Iran), the unwelcome (Saudi Arabia), the insolvent (Egypt) and the incensed (Russia), among others.

Thus, the heartland of the newly emerged Islamic State is in the upper Euphrates valley of Syria centered at Raqqah. That is, the fearsome threat against which Washington wants to mobilize two dozen nations sits cheek-by-jowl along a 560 mile border with Turkey. And the latter possesses the largest and most potent air force and army in the region - a force of some 600,000 including reserves or 25X the size of the CIA's most recent, and undoubtedly exaggerated, count of ISIS fighters.

Moreover, against the several score of tanks and armored vehicles that the jihadists seized from the retreating Iraqi Army, the Turkish military possesses 3,500 tanks, 9,000 armored fighting vehicles, 700 multiple-launch rocket systems, 2,000 towed artillery pieces and 1,000 aircraft and helicopters - much of this right out of the latest US military specs. Finally, by virtue of its membership in NATO, it also happens to host one of the largest US air bases in the world.

US President Barack Obama is no honest broker on the Middle East as his foreign policy is vacillating between pathological lying and autism, a commentator tells Press TV.

"His foreign policy is a cross between pathological lying and autism. I don't think that the United States is an honest broker," Randy Short, who is also a human rights activist, told Press TV in an interview.

He added that the US officials "don't really want to do what they say they want to do, and that Obama has a schizophrenic or a quixotic policy, where he supports different regional players...all at the same time."

Short also accused the US of creating chaos in the Middle East by pursuing a "deliberate plan" which weakens regional states so that their resources could be seized by Western powers, adding, "They've played a double-game. They've sent those weapons into the region."

The US has aligned with the very governments that it attacked later, the analyst said, warning that Washington's policy of funding terrorist groups leads to a "global conflagration."

"Of course they (the US officials) want chaos because this country has been since the Second World War driven by war and military expansion. It is obscene and absurd for people to pretend otherwise," he pointed out.

On Friday, Obama said the United States is assembling an international coalition to "snuff out" the ISIL terrorist group, adding that such extremist groups have "no place in the 21st century."

© Mark Runnacles/Getty Images
Deacon Blue frontman, Ricky Ross (centre), at a yes rally in Glasgow on the last day of campaigning.

The British state is an imperial behemoth that can only look on in panic as Scots scramble for the lifeboats

In Scottish city centres right now, you're rarely out of sight of a yes badge. The vibe was summed up by an Edinburgh cabbie: "We're being invited to run our country. It's very exciting. Maybe we can show how things can be done differently". It's not just him. Polls have shown the yes vote surging.

It's worth noting how remarkable this is. The only UK party supporting independence is the Greens. Of all of the local Scottish and British papers, only the Sunday Herald backs yes. The official story has long been that it's only a few angry men in kilts who care about this.

But in the internet age, officials don't get to write the stories any more. There were always people who had little time for flags, tartanry and shortbread, but who wanted to escape a political system that has made Britain one of Europe's most unequal counties. And it is these people - a better organised and vastly more powerful version of the Occupy movement - that the Westminster parties and their media partners failed to consider.

Noam Chomsky, one of the world's most respected intellectuals and political thinkers, told RIA Novosti that his "intuitions favor" a "yes" vote in the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence to be held September 18.

Chomsky told RIA Novosti that he is continuing to study the details and consequences of potential Scottish independence, but confirmed he has "been following the debate with interest."

"My intuition favors independence," Chomsky added.

The intervention is a major boost for the "yes" campaign, given Chomsky's international reputation.

Professor Hugh Pennington of the University of Aberdeen is a prominent academic campaigning against independence.

Pennington, a professor in bacteriology, told RIA Novosti that he was "surprised and disappointed" by Chomsky's support for independence.

"Professor Chomsky is obviously very well-regarded," Pennington said, adding that other academics would take note of his backing for Scottish independence and study his arguments.

Scottish voters will go to the polls on September 18^th to decide whether Scotland should become an independent country. As video blogger Ian R. Crane colorfully puts the issues and possibilities:

[T]he People of Scotland have an opportunity to extricate themselves from the socio-psychopathic global corporatists and the temple of outrageous and excessive abject materialism. However, it is not going to be an easy ride . . . .

If Alex Salmond and the SNP [Scottish National Party] are serious about keeping the Pound Stirling as the Currency of Scotland, there will be no independence. Likewise if Scotland embraces the Euro, Scotland will rapidly become a vassel state of the Euro-Federalists, who will asset strip the nation in the same way that, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain have been stripped of their entire national wealth and much of their national identity.

To achieve true independence, Crane suggests the following, among other mandates:

• Establish an independent Central Bank of Scotland.
• Issue a new Scottish (Debt Free) Currency.
• Settle any outstanding debt with new Scottish Currency.
• Take Scotland out of the EU.
• Take Scotland out of NATO.
• Establish strict currency controls for the first 3 years of independence.
• Nationalize the Scottish oil & gas industry.
• Re-take control of the National Health Service.
• Establish a State Employment Agency to provide work/training for all able-bodied residents.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner John Koskinen testified Wednesday that the IRS did not save any of the information on Lois Lerner's destroyed Blackberry and that there is no outside system to store agency emails.

"Hard drive crashes continue as we speak," Koskinen admitted at a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing when asked if any computers had recently crashed under his watch.

Koskinen admitted that destroying records would be an act "not consistent with the law," but maintained that there's no evidence that the IRS intentionally destroyed records.

"Ms. Lerner's Blackberry was replaced in February 2012 as part of an ongoing Blackberry update....it was disposed of under standard procedures at that time," Koskinen said.

Koskinen claimed that information from Lerner's Blackberry could not be transferred to her new model because "Our Blackberries only display email that is displayed by our employees' Microsoft Outlook emails, which is maintained on IRS servers."

Koskinen also said that there's no outside system to save IRS employees' emails.

"There is no system outside the IRS, government or otherwise, that the IRS uses to back up or store emails," Koskinen said.


Koskinen didn't mention that the IRS terminated its years-long contract with its email archiving company Sonasoft shortly after Lerner's computer crashed.

The West's latest round of sanctions against Russia and the fragile truce between Moscow and Kiev fails to alter the fact that the Kremlin has already succeeded in achieving most of its aims in Ukraine. Crimea is an all-but-accepted lost cause, and territories in Eastern and Southern Ukraine are under serious pressure to follow suit. But the US and the EU should realize that it was not solely militias in Eastern Ukraine or Russian weaponry that secured the upper hand for the Kremlin. In its campaign in Ukraine, Russia's propaganda and information warfare have been far more effective than military action in helping Moscow achieve its agenda while largely tying the West's hands in its attempts to respond.

The original version of this post was published on the Oceania Saker Blog who spearheaded the effort to translate this most important document proving, if needed, that one can be down under and yet at the very top at the same time!

The Saker
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Malaysian Flight MH17 crash analysis, by The Russian Union of Engineers

This is an excellent detailed analysis of the MH17 tragedy by the Russian Union of Engineers which quite frankly illustrates how heavily censored the Dutch "report" is.

We will let you digest this report and come to your own conclusion, which in all likelihood will explain the infamous high velocity projectiles whitewash pumped out by the western "press".

This review was undertaken by experts who not only know the subject matter but have objectively presented evidence that must be considered with the legitimacy that is inherent to it. Here is the overall description of the "Analytical Group" from the report:

A group of experts from the Russian Union of engineers was convened to analyze the situation, including reserve officers with experience in the use of anti-aircraft missile systems, as well as pilots having experience with aircraft weapons.This problem was also discussed at a meeting of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, where many variants were tested and discussed again. In the course of their analysis the experts used materials derived from public sources, found in the media. The situation was also analyzed using a computer simulation of the Su-25.

You can download the English version of the report here.
The original Russian version of the report is here.

[note: the links above point to documents in the proprietary M$ DOCX format. For those who, like myself might prefer the free ODT or PDF format, I have made them available here. The Saker]

Official statement by the Russian Union of Engineers:
(please press on the 'cc' button to see the English subtitles)

A top European court has struck down restrictions imposed by the European Union against the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) on an alleged charge of circumventing US-led sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

In a judgment on Thursday, the Luxembourg-based EU's Court of Justice said it "annuls...the EU March 23, 2012 [ruling] concerning restrictive measures against Iran in so far as it listed Central Bank of Iran."

"The reasons relied on are so vague and lacking in detail that the only possible response was in the form of a general denial," the court ruled on Thursday, adding that "those reasons therefore do not comply with the requirements of the case-law."

It said the charge leveled against the CBI is "insufficient in the sense that it does not enable either the applicant or the Court to understand the circumstances which led the [European] Council to consider...to adopt the contested act."

The court also ordered the 28-nation European bloc to "bear one half of its own costs and to pay one half of the costs of Central Bank of Iran."