An image speaks a thousand words - and that is presumably what Israel's supporters hoped for with their latest ad in the New York Times. Two photographs are presented side by side. One, titled ISIL, is the now-iconic image of a kneeling James Foley, guarded by a black-hooded executioner, awaiting his terrible fate. The other, titled Hamas, is a scene from Gaza, where a similarly masked killer stands over two victims, who cower in fear.

A headline stating "This is the face of radical Islam" tries, like the images, to equate the two organisations.

We have heard this line before from Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who tweeted "Hamas is ISIL" after the video of Foley's beheading aired. In a recent speech he called Hamas and ISIL, "tentacles of a violent Islamist terrorism".

Mr Netanyahu's depiction of Hamas and ISIL as "branches of the same poisonous tree" is a travesty of the truth. The two have entirely different - in fact, opposed - political projects.

Members of Hamas may disagree on that state's territorial limits but even the most ambitious expect no more than the historic borders of a Palestine that existed decades ago. ISIL, by contrast, aims to sweep away Palestine and every other Arab state. That is the key to interpreting the very different, if equally brutal, events depicted in the two images.

ISIL killed Foley, dressed in Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit, purely as spectacle - a graphic message to the world of its menacing intent. Hamas's cruelty was directed at those in Gaza who collaborate with Israel, undermining hope of liberation from Israel's occupation.

Preface

Congressman Louis T. McFadden served as Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency from 1920 thru 1931. He was thus a supreme expert witness to events which culminated in the first Great Depression. As this material further attests, seven years prior to the fact he was also an unknowing witness to "financial" events which contributed mightily in terms of American monetary gold to the arming of Japan and Germany in preparation for World War II.

The following excerpts are from a speech which is now difficult to obtain from the Congressional Record, in which he addressed the House of Representatives in the midst of the first Great Depression, June 10, 1932. The speech largely documents the extensive crimes of the private banks which were unlawfully consolidated under the deceptively named Federal Reserve Act, which gave these unassented private banks the audacious power to draw unlimited unearned profit from a currency costing practically nothing to private banking institutions which are neither federal, nor a reserve of anything. As McFadden testifies, the excesses of that unassented profit not only manifested in mightily arming foes of the world's wars, and even instigating wars; they further comprise not only all the "interest" and multiplication of cost we have endured since 1914, but the sum of our crippling private and public debt.

From the portions of Mr. McFadden's address preserved here, considerable material has been dropped because it is less germane to the arguments of these pages, and because the whole of the speech is a practically overwhelming body of material.

As this abbreviated version retains most important points, it nonetheless is especially obligatory reading, because McFadden testifies to so many issues which the usual citizen not only is wholly unaware of, but which we must find wholly adverse to American principles and our republican form of government.

His ultimate conclusion is certainly worthwhile. It is certainly an address capable itself of re-uniting America. Few principled people will finish before their ire peaks.

US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has voiced concerns that, without sufficient protections, the age of unmanned drones and ubiquitous surveillance will usher in an "Orwellian world."

Sotomayor told faculty and students at Oklahoma City University last week that technological capabilities allow devices to monitor "your conversations from miles away and through your walls."

"We are in that brave new world, and we are capable of being in that Orwellian world, too," she added, in a nod to George Orwell's seminal authoritarian-dystopia novel '1984.'

Sotomayor also discussed the rise of drone use in wider society. "There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that's happening on what we consider our private property," Sotomayor said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom. Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion, but I don't like the fact that someone I don't know...can pick up, if they're a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property."

The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has filed a case with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg challenging current UK legislation on mass surveillance and its threat to journalism.

The case, which seeks to determine if current UK legislation properly protects journalists' sources and communications from government scrutiny and mass surveillance, was filed on Friday.

If the court rules in favor of the application, it will force the British government to review regulations around the mass collection of communications data.


"We understand why the government feels the need to have the power of interception," the Bureau's Christopher Hird said.

"But our concern is that the existing regulatory regime to control the interception of communications data, such as phone calls and emails, by organizations such as GCHQ, does not provide sufficient safeguards to ensure the protection of journalists' sources, and as a result is a restriction on the operation of a free press."


The collection of data by authorities is handled by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, known as RIPA. Communications can include emails, phone calls as well as the use of Dropbox, Google docs and communications platforms such as Skype.

Bombing ISIS amounts to attacking a symptom rather than finding a cure. But the cure would require addressing politically sensitive issues, such as Israel oppressing Palestinians and Saudi Arabia financing Islamic extremism. So the U.S. does what it knows best - blowing stuff up - as Nat Parry observes.
The great American tradition of bombing Iraq - now in its third decade - has recently been revived by the "hope and change" presidency of Barack Obama, the fourth consecutive U.S. Commander-in-Chief to launch strikes against the beleaguered Middle East nation. Iraq may be alone in the world in being able to claim such a dubious distinction.

I remember the first time the U.S. bombed Iraq, in January 1991. I was a sophomore in high school and Wilson Phillip's "Hold On" was at the top of the charts. I didn't really know what to think about it, but a lot of people were tying yellow ribbons to trees and wearing "Operation Desert Storm" t-shirts with bald eagles and American flags on them, so it seemed like a good idea. Plus, there was the whole babies-being-pulled-from-incubators story, which turned out to be a complete fabrication, but we didn't know that at the time, so the war's justification seemed pretty solid.

It wasn't until later when I started learning more about U.S. foreign policy in general and the lies that accompanied the build-up to Operation Desert Storm in particular that I started to question these policies, and by the late 1990s, I became actively opposed to the sanctions regime and the periodic bombings of Baghdad.The first time I protested a U.S. bombing campaign of Iraq was in 1998. It was in the midst of Congress's efforts to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about his illicit affair with Monica Lewinsky, and the day after his announcement of the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign, I joined a picket in front of the White House holding a hand-made sign reading "IMPEACH HIM FOR WAR CRIMES."

With the full support of the country's ruling business elite, Canada has joined the new "coalition of the willing" that US imperialism has organized to wage war in Iraq, Syria and beyond.

Launched in the name of degrading and defeating ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), this war is the continuation and expansion of the wars the US has waged over the past quarter-century in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Its predatory aim is to secure unfettered US strategic hegemony over the Middle East, far and away the world's most important oil-exporting region.

Specifically, it is aimed at propping up the US client regime that was installed in Baghdad as a result of the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and at intensifying the US campaign for "regime change" in Syria.

US President Barack Obama announced Wednesday evening that the US will now intervene directly in the war in Syria - initially with air strikes - and step up its efforts to arm, train, and logistically support the insurgency the US and its allies, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, have fomented in Syria.

At a parliamentary hearing Tuesday, Canada's Conservative government admitted that Canadian Armed Forces' special forces are already on the ground in northern Iraq.

These are the first of what the government has said will be a deployment of up to one hundred members of the Canadian Special Operations Regiment tasked with providing training to the Peshmerga - Kurdish militia forces that are currently allied with the government in Baghdad.

US journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said New Zealand officials are spying on their citizens, a charge that has provoked a harsh response from NZ Prime Minister John Key.

Greenwald, who is in New Zealand to attend Kim Dotcom's much anticipated "Moment of Truth" event Monday, said the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) had been snooping on New Zealanders as part of the so-called Five Eyes pact between the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

In June 2013, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras were given thousands of classified NSA documents from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. Greenwald said he has spent several months pouring over the files in an effort to determine whether GCSB broke the law and spied on citizens.

Greenwald told the Nation television program: "The government does engage in extraordinary amounts of analysis of metadata - meaning who's talking to who, for how long, where they are when they speak - on a massive indiscriminate scale, not just internationally but of New Zealanders as well."

According to Greenwald, New Zealand spends a disproportional part of its budget on electronic surveillance.

"Every single thing that the NSA does... involves NZ directly," he said.

Three veterans from one of Israel's most secretive intelligence units speak out about questionable surveillance tactics used against Palestinians. The men, along with 40 other reservists, past and present, have signed a public letter refusing to serve in operations involving the occupied Palestinian territories. They allege the widespread use of monitoring and oppressive tactics against innocent Palestinians

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

As the Ukrainian crisis has unfolded over the past few weeks, it's hard for Americans not to see Vladimir Putin as the big villain. But the history of the region is a history of competing villains vying against one another; and one school of villains - the Nazis - have a long history of engagement with the United States, mostly below the radar, but occasionally exposed, as they were by Russ Bellant in his book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (South End Press, 1991).

Bellant's exposure of émigré Nazi leaders from Germany's World War II allies in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign was the driving force in the announced resignation of nine individuals, two of them from Ukraine, which is why he was the logical choice to illuminate the scattered mentions of Nazi and fascist elements among the Ukrainian nationalists, which somehow never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. Of course most Ukrainians aren't Nazis or fascists - all the more reason to illuminate those who would hide their true natures in the shadows...or even behind the momentary glare of the spotlight.

Q: Your book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, exposed the deep involvement in the Republican Party of Nazi elements from Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukrainians, dating back to World War II and even before. As the Ukrainian crisis unfolded in the last few weeks, there have been scattered mentions of a fascist or neo-fascist element, but somehow that never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. I can't think of anyone better to shed light on what's not being said about that element. The danger of Russian belligerence is increasingly obvious, but this unexamined fascist element poses dangers of its own. What can you tell us about this element and those dangers?

The element has a long history, of a long record that speaks for itself, when that record is actually known and elaborated on. The key organization in the coup that took place here recently was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN], or a specific branch of it known as the Banderas [OUN-B]. They're the group behind the Svoboda party, which got a number of key positions in the new interim regime. The OUN goes back to the 1920s, when they split off from other groups, and, especially in the 1930s, began a campaign of assassinating and otherwise terrorizing people who didn't agree with them.

Translated by es.Sott.net


A letter in which the Russian President settles scores with the "pathological western criminals"

Russian president Vladimir Putin believes the west should apologize to him so he's created a web page with a letter which any western citizen can sign.


Translated into various languages, it's a letter addressed to Putin as well as the Russian people, and the opening lines get straight to the point: "Please accept our apologies for the behavior of our Governments and Media." So far, according to the website, 23,649 people have signed it.