Obama is now - after the fact - scrambling to justify bombing the sovereign nation of Syria without the permission of either the Syrian government or even the United States Congress by saying that we were going after the super-evil Khorasans, who were about to attack us.

My God! That sounds terrifying ... like a cross between Genghis Khan, Klingons and the Kardashians!

The U.S. is saying that they're even more dangerous than ISIS.

There's just one wee little problem ... the Khorasan threat is as as fake as the Kardashians' physiques. (Admittedly, it's confusing, given that the Kardashians have also inserted themselves right in the middle of the Syrian conflict.)

Agence France-Presse reports:

The US says it has hit a little-known group called "Khorasan" in Syria, but experts and activists argue it actually struck Al-Qaeda's affiliate Al-Nusra Front, which fights alongside Syrian rebels. In announcing its raids in the northern province of Aleppo on Tuesday, Washington described the group it targeted as Khorasan, a cell of Al-Qaeda veterans planning attacks against the West.

But experts and activists cast doubt on the distinction between Khorasan and Al-Nusra Front, which is Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch. "In Syria, no one had ever heard talk of Khorasan until the US media brought it up," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"Rebels, activists and the whole world knows that these positions (hit Tuesday) were Al-Nusra positions, and the fighters killed were Al-Nusra fighters," added Abdel Rahman, who has tracked the Syrian conflict since it erupted in 2011.

Experts were similarly dubious about the distinction. "The name refers to Al-Qaeda fighters previously based in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran who have travelled to Syria to fight with... Al-Nusra," said Matthew Henman, head of IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre.

"They... should not be considered a new or distinct group as such." Aron Lund, editor of the Syria in Crisis website run by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, raised similar doubts. "The fact that news about this Al-Qaeda-run, anti-Western cell linked to Al-Nusra emerged just over a week ago, through US intelligence leaks - well, it's certainly an interesting coincidence," he told AFP.

What is military common sense may not make political sense. The US plan to weaken and ultimately destroy Isis has several political and military weaknesses undermining its long-term success. Air campaigns not supported by ground forces can damage the other side but they do not win wars on their own. Isis has already faced bombardment by US planes in Iraq since 8 August, but it is still fighting the Iraqi army around Baghdad. Some of the weaknesses of the air war are already apparent since Isis had evacuated its leaders, fighters and heavy equipment from buildings that were targeted. Its fighters avoid large gatherings and mix with the civilian population. The shock effect of being bombed will be the less because the Syrian air force has long been bombing rebel-held cities and towns.


Isis expertise is in guerrilla warfare and it is only recently that it has used columns of vehicles packed with gunmen and heavy infantry weapons. Air superiority over the fruit groves of Diyala province or the palm trees of northern Hilla is difficult to use effectively. Of course, in Syria and Iraq there are ground troops capable of taking advantage of the air strikes, but they mostly belong to armies and militias with whom the US is not meant to be co-operating.

In Syria, the most powerful armed group opposing Isis is the Syrian army, followed by Hezbollah and the Syrian Kurds. In Iraq, three months after the fall of Mosul, the Iraqi army still does not seem able to hold its own against Isis as recent fighting around Fallujah demonstrated. Advances that have taken place have generally been by Shia militiamen under the direction of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers and Kurdish Peshmerga, though these did not distinguish themselves when Isis attacked Sinjar in August.

Three so-far-unnamed Brazilian dairy companies have received the proper paperwork to start deliveries to Russia, a representative of the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture said. The new imports will help fill a gaping hole left by EU suppliers.

One of the companies has already started deliveries, Marcelo Junqueira, secretary for international affairs of the Brazilian Agriculture Ministry Marcelo said, ITAR-TASS reported.

The new deliveries will help fill the 57 percent gap of imported dairy products after Russia introduced a one-year food embargo in August on certain agricultural products from the EU, US, Australia, Canada, Australia and Norway.

The move is symbolic of the strengthening political and economic ties between Brazil and Russia as relations with the West continue to sour over the Ukraine crisis.

"Brazil is known for its high level of sanitary control, we supply meat to more than 100 countries and poultry to 155 countries, so it is natural that a major importer [Russia] came to us," Junqueira said, as quoted by ITAR-TASS.

Last week the Brazilian delegation, comprised of 37 private companies, attended the Moscow International Exhibition of World Food. Over $106 million in contracts were inked, Junqueira said, without disclosing which companies.

In 2012, the turnover of trade between Russia and Brazil reached $5.9 billion. Brazil plans to import fish and grains from Russia.

Obama is now - after the fact - scrambling to justify bombing the sovereign nation of Syria without the permission of either the Syrian government or even the United States Congress by saying that we were going after the super-evil Khorasans, who were about to attack us.

My God! That sounds terrifying ... like a cross between Genghis Khan, Klingons and the Kardashians!

The U.S. is saying that they're even more dangerous than ISIS.

There's just one wee little problem ... the Khorasan threat is as as fake as the Kardashians' physiques. (Admittedly, it's confusing, given that the Kardashians have also inserted themselves right in the middle of the Syrian conflict.)

Want to decipher what the US military is really doing in Iraq and Syria, or figure out whether its regional war against the Islamic State (Isis) is legal? Good luck. The Obama administration's secret efforts to redefine the ordinary meaning of key legal terms and phrases has made that near impossible.

For instance, in his Tuesday statement that US airstrikes that have expanded into Syria, Obama studiously avoided any discussion about his domestic legal authority to conduct these strikes. That dirty work was apparently left up to anonymous White House officials, who told the New York Times's Charlie Savage that both the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) from 2001 (meant for al-Qaida) and the 2002 war resolution (meant for Saddam Hussein's Iraq) gave the government the authority to strike Isis in Syria.

In other words: the legal authority provided to the White House to strike al-Qaida and invade Iraq more than a dozen years ago now means that the US can wage war against a terrorist organization that's decidedly not al-Qaida, in a country that is definitely not Iraq.

It's been weeks since initial air strikes began, and the administration has still refused to release a detailed written legal rationale explaining how, exactly, that works.

As bombs start dropping in Syria and Iraq, the world is once again being asked to cower in fear of a shadowy terror group that most people hadn't heard of just a few months ago. But even the most cursory examination of ISIS's past, its connections, and the actors populating it reveal a very different story than the one we are being asked to believe in. Fake terrorists. Foreign backers. False flags. Meet the new boogeyman, same as the old boogeyman.

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After having heard your words at the UN a few hours ago, I felt compelled to write this letter, compelled, to expose your lies & deceit. You, Mr. President, are a war-monger & an abettor of terror. You essentially lend a liberal face to the Trans-National Military Industrial Complex.

During your ahistorical & ignorant speech today, you misled the world on every count, whilst trying to preach & lecture the world on the virtues of global cooperation to fight the scourge of religious extremism, terror & wars. Mr. President, the world is aware of the fact that it has been US policy to promote & foster Islamic extremism by both covert & overt means ever since 1979. You would have been aware of the policy that was essentially envisioned by your senior adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

On being asked, "about any regrets having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"

Brzezinski replied - "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" (Le Nouvel Observateur, 1998)

You would have surely known of the fact that it was the US-CIA that created Al Qaeda, as attested to by Hillary Clinton.

"The people we are fighting today, we funded twenty years ago".

She also vividly describes US cooperation with the Saudi Wahhabis in this entire nefarious design, where the Mujahedeen were mobilized from across the world, funded, trained & armed with the latest weapons that the US armoury had to offer.

You surely would have watched the Hollywood blockbuster "Charlie Wilson's War" starring Tom Hanks & Julia Roberts, also nominated for the Oscars. This is a true story of a Texas congressman Charlie Wilson's covert dealings in Afghanistan, and his efforts to assist the Mujahedeen in their war against the Soviets

These are known facts that the entire world is aware of, but yet you chose to deceive, even as you have yet again created another Frankenstein called the ISIS, which is basically an updated version of the Al Qaeda.

The US fanfare surrounding Washington's bombing raid over Syria was immense. WIth all the hype, you'd have thought that it was a new Pearl Harbor.

With a risk of popping President Obama and the US State Department's bubble, we need to ask: did the US bomb a load of empty buildings in Syria on Tuesday?

According CNN Middle East correspondent Arwa Damon (photo, above), residents from the town of Raqqa, in northeastern Syria had "mixed reactions to US strikes". The reason given was a real shocker:

Damon revealed on air early Wednesday that ISIL terrorists who were held up in the town may have been tipped off weeks in advance to the US airstrikes on Tuesday. According to Damon:

"15-20 days before the airstrikes, (ISIL) buildings were evacuated, and fighters then mixed in with the local population".

Maybe Damon let the truth slip out by accident, or maybe she was trying to do what US journalists so often are not allowed to do by challenging Washington's prefabricated narrative. Regardless, CNN's chief war enthusiast Wolf Blitzer did not feel the need to pursue the point.

This surprising admission by CNN would mean that the US military may have only destroyed empty buildings in Raqqa, and that Washington's inflated claims of dead ISIL fighters are probably exaggerated. In other words, it was all a big show, and ISIL's capabilities were not degraded at all by Obama's celebrated US blitzkrieg in Syria.

Europe will not regain its share of the Russian market after the sanctions war is over, as it will already be occupied by other local and foreign businesses, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has warned.

Russia and the West will eventually "come to agreements sooner or later, as sanctions don't last forever," Medvedev said in an interview with Vesti 24 TV channel.

"These foolish sanctions will pass, but international relations will continue. And currency markets will open up," he added.


The prime minister stressed that "the niches in our [Russian] economy, which will by then be occupied by local produces or other foreign producers...our European counterparts wouldn't be able to come back."

According to Medvedev, "this is the price Europe will have to pay" for trying to put Russia under economic pressure.

He assured that Asian and Latin American companies - which will replace the Europeans on the Russian market - will maintain their positions after relations between Moscow and the EU return to normal.

"We're decent people. If we reach agreements then we fulfill the existing contracts, including those with our Latin American and Asian counterparts, of course. And those of our Western partners, who'll be eager to return, will only be able to take the remaining share, nothing more," he explained.

Bloomberg has a story today on the faltering of Draghi's latest scheme to levitate Europe's somnolent socialist economies by means of a new round of monetary juice called TLTRO - $1.3 trillion in essentially zero cost four-year funding to European banks on the condition that they expand their business loan books. Using anecdotes from Spain, the piece perhaps inadvertently highlights all that is wrong with the entire central bank money printing regime that is now extirpating honest finance nearly everywhere in the world.

On the one hand, the initial round of TLTRO takedowns came in at only $100 billion compared to the $200 billion widely expected. It seems that Spanish banks, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, are finding virtually no demand among small and medium businesses for new loans.

Many small and medium-sized businesses are wary of the offers from banks as European Central Bank President Draghi prepares to pump more cash into the financial system to boost prices and spur growth. The reticence in Spain suggests demand for credit may be as much of a problem as the supply.

The monthly flow of new loans of as much as 1 million euros for as much as a year - a type of credit typically used by small and medium-sized companies - is still down by two-thirds in Spain from a 2007 peak, according to Bank of Spain data.

On the other hand, Spain's sovereign debt has rallied to what are truly stupid heights - with the 10-year bond hitting a 2.11% yield yesterday (compared to 7% + just 24 months ago). The explanation for these parallel developments is that the hedge fund speculators in peripheral sovereign debt do not care about actual expansion of the Spanish or euro area economies that is implicit in Draghi's targeted promotion of business lending (whether healthy and sustainable, or not). They are simply braying that "T" for targeted LTRO is not enough; they demand outright sovereign debt purchases by the ECB - that is, Bernanke style QE and are quite sure they will get it. That's why they are front-running the ECB and buying the Spanish bond. It is a patented formula and hedge fund speculators have been riding it to fabulous riches for many years now.