Russia has said the conduct of the Scottish referendum "did not meet international standards", with its observers complaining the count took place in rooms that were too big and that the procedure was badly flawed.

In an apparent attempt to mirror persistent western criticism of Russia's own elections, Igor Borisov - an accredited observer - said the poll failed to meet basic international norms.

Borisov and three other Russians arrived in Edinburgh on Wednesday evening, the state news agency Ria Novosti reported. The team from Moscow's Public Institute of Suffrage watched voting take place in the Scottish capital and the surrounding area. It also met with Scottish politicians, voters and representatives from non-governmental organisations, Ria said.

Borisov said he was unimpressed by what he saw. He said the room where he watched the count on Thursday night was a cavernous "aircraft hangar" next to an airfield. It was difficult to see what was going on, he said, adding: "The hangar is approximately 100m by 300m. There are tables, with voting papers stacked upon them, but the observers are stuck around the perimeter. Even if you want to, it's impossible to tell what's happening. It's also unclear where the boxes with ballot papers come from."

As Scotland's independence vote draws near, concerns are growing over possible vote rigging in the absence of international observers, which may cause the vote to play into the hands of the British government.

Informed sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told Press TV that absence of international observers to monitor the independence referendum and close competition between pro- and anti-independence camps are the main reasons that have strengthened suspicion of vote-rigging attempts.

Meanwhile, various British political leaders have been launching what has been described by Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond as a "scaremongering" campaign, in an effort to make Scots wary of the possible fallout of a 'Yes' to independence.

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is deeply skeptical about the Obama administration's new strategy to confront the ISIL terrorist organization in Syria, according to a report.

CIA officials have expressed "outright opposition" to the White House's proposal to task the Pentagon to further train and arm the so-called moderate militant groups in Syria to push back ISIL terrorists, The Huffington Post reports.

The CIA has already been covertly training Syrian insurgents out of secret bases in Jordan to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad.


The spy agency, however, has come to find the militants increasingly "disorganized" and "radicalized," the report said.

"The CIA thinks that it is impossible to train and equip a force of pro-Western Syrian nationals that can fight and defeat Assad, al-Nusra and ISIL, regardless of whatever air support that force may receive," a Democratic member of Congress told the online newspaper.

The congressman added that the CIA believes the new strategy is "doomed to failure."

He said that the CIA already believes its previous assignment to train and arm the Syrian militants was a "fool's errand." "And they are well aware of the fact that many of the arms that they provided ended up in the wrong hands."

The US claims Syrian President Bashar Assad has broken the chemical weapons treaty he agreed to earlier this year, by launching chlorine gas attacks in Syrian villages. It comes as the Senate officially approved a plan to arm and train Syrian rebels.

US Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday accused Assad of breaching the terms of the global pact on chemical weapons, by unleashing chlorine gas via barrel bomb attacks earlier this year.


"We believe there is evidence of [President Bashar] Assad's use of chlorine, which when you use it - despite it not being on the list - it is prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention," Kerry told the US House of Representatives. "He's in violation of the convention."

Kerry went on to add that Washington is studying ways to hold Assad to account.


The US official was not alone in what appeared to be a new wave of Western pressure on Assad's government, which was previously accused of perpetrating deadly chemical attacks in March 2013 near Aleppo and in August 2013 in Ghouta.

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.