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Washington's terrorists kill 80 Syrians as US pulls out of ceasefire


The Guardian
Tue, 05 Jun 2012 09:25 UTC
Image
© Hons/AP
Syrians look at an army tank damaged in clashes between rebels and government forces in the northern town of Ariha, in Idlib province.
Syrian rebels killed at least 80 government soldiers at the weekend, an opposition watchdog has said.

The attacks came after rebels warned they would act if Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, failed to observe a UN-backed ceasefire.

The latest violence, and Assad's defiant speech to parliament on Sunday, raised questions about how long the UN and Arab League envoy, Kofi Annan, can realistically pursue his peace plan.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said local doctors had confirmed the names of 80 dead soldiers.

Insurgents told the British-based group they had killed more than 100 soldiers and destroyed some tanks in clashes across Syria, including in Damascus and Idlib province, in the north-west.
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Light Sabers

Surprise! Washington's terrorists not committed to Annan peace plan anymore


Press TV
Tue, 05 Jun 2012 09:05 UTC
Image

Terrorists, made in the USA
The terrorist Free Syrian Army (FSA) has abandoned the peace plan brokered by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, resuming its deadly attacks.

The terrorist group said on Monday that it has abandoned the ceasefire after the Syrian government gave no response to the rebels' deadline. The rebels had earlier threatened to abandon the ceasefire unless the army stops its operations against armed groups by Friday.

Major Sami al-Kurdi, a Free Syrian Army spokesman, said the rebels were no longer bound by the truce after their Friday deadline passed.

FSA had earlier urged Annan to issue a statement declaring his peace plan to have failed.

The announcement of rebels' abandoning the ceasefire and resuming their attacks comes as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that Free Syrian Army has killed over 100 soldiers across the country over the weekend.

Comment: They never were 'committed' to peace. They are terrorists after all. The next stage is to try one last time to get a UN resolution, then its bombs away...

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Bad Guys

America's Total War

Adrian Salbuchi
RT.com
Mon, 04 Jun 2012 23:45 UTC
drone
© Reuters / Gil Cohen Magen
President Obama promised change, but there's little of it in his war policies, which are harsher than those of George W. Bush.US drone bombings often target not just "terrorists" but all "military-age males in a strike zone as combatants."

"Unless there is explicit posthumous intelligence proving otherwise", that is.

As an extensive recent report in the New York Times explains, for all practical purposes Obama is applying what can best be described as a Total War Doctrine, bringing government, military and media propaganda PsyWar under one strategy.

The concept of "Total War" - war involving not just the military but all civilians irrespective of age or sex, together with the entire infrastructure of a country - became a horrible reality during the 20th century, driven for the most part by steering scientific discoveries and technological progress towards unlimited use in warfare. Total War is very much alive today and is being spearheaded by the United States and its Allies.

This is being abetted on all fronts by US, European and global mainstream media that willingly oblige. In the case of Obama's Total War Doctrine, the media go along with US official policy, and describe the murder of innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when American democracy-building drone bombs fall, as "militant combatants".

Comment: It won't stop because, as Lobaczewski wrote in Political Ponerology, "Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing." Nothing less than a broad-spectrum shift in awareness would cause people to see the psychopaths for what they really are. For that to happen before the whole world is consumed by Total War, from where we're standing, is gonna take a miracle of some sort.

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Bell

Secret Service Agents Can't Be Sued, Justices Rule

Adam Liptak
The New York Times
Mon, 04 Jun 2012 14:41 UTC
The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled against a protester who said his free speech rights had been violated when Secret Service agents arrested him after he made critical remarks about the Bush administration's war policies.

The case arose from a 2006 visit by Vice President Dick Cheney to a mall in Beaver Creek, Colo. A Secret Service agent assigned to protect the vice president said he heard a man standing nearby say into a cellphone that he planned to ask Mr. Cheney "how many kids he's killed today." The man, Steven Howards, later approached Mr. Cheney and said the administration's "policies in Iraq are disgusting."

Mr. Howards also touched Mr. Cheney on the shoulder. Mr. Howards said the gesture was an openhanded pat. Secret Service agents described it as a forceful push. Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said the dispute over the manner of the touch "does not affect our analysis."
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Crusader

No respite for pope as more documents leaked

Philip Pullella
Reuters
Sun, 03 Jun 2012 09:11 UTC
pope
© Reuters
Milan, Italy - Pope Benedict got no rest on Sunday from a leaks scandal when an Italian newspaper published documents showing that his butler was not the only person in possession of confidential correspondence indicating a Vatican in disarray.

Benedict, 85, ended a weekend trip to Italy's industrial and financial capital Milan with a closing mass for an international gathering in which he praised traditional Catholic family values and re-stated his opposition to gay marriage.

But in its Sunday edition, the Rome newspaper La Repubblica published documents it said it had received anonymously after the arrest of the pope's butler on May 23.

A note received by the newspaper said there were "hundreds more" documents and that the butler, Paolo Gabriele, was just a scapegoat.
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Attention

10 Things That We Can Learn About The Economic Collapse In Greece


The Economic Collapse
Sun, 03 Jun 2012 21:50 UTC
Burnt Cars
© The Economic Collapse
When the economy of a nation collapses, almost everything changes. Unfortunately, most people have never been through anything like that, so it can be difficult to know how to prepare. For those that are busy preparing for the coming global financial collapse, there is a lot to be learned from the economic depression that is happening right now in Greece.

Essentially, what Greece is experiencing is a low level economic collapse. Unemployment is absolutely rampant and poverty is rapidly spreading, but the good news for Greece is that the global financial system is still operating somewhat normally and they are getting some financial assistance from the outside.

Things in Greece could be a whole lot worse, and they will probably get a whole lot worse before it is all said and done. But already things have gotten bad enough in Greece that it gives us an idea of what a full-blown economic collapse in the 21st century may look like. There are reports of food and medicine shortages in Greece, crime and suicides are on the rise and people have been rapidly pulling their money out of the banks.

Hopefully this article will give you some ideas that you can use as you prepare for the economic chaos that will soon be unfolding all over the globe.

The following are 10 things that we can learn about shortages and preparation from the economic collapse in Greece....
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Attention

Innocent civilians are being killed by US Predator drones in Waziristan despite claims by the CIA that this is not the case

Clive Stafford Smith
The Guardian
Sat, 02 Jun 2012 16:44 UTC
Drone
© US Air Force/Getty Images
Innocent civilians are being killed by US Predator drones in Waziristan despite claims by the CIA that this is not the case.
Last October I was at a jirga in Islamabad where 80 people from Waziristan had assembled to talk about the US Predator drones that buzz around overhead, periodically delivering death by Hellfire missile. A jirga is the traditional forum for discussing and resolving disputes, part parliament, part court of law. The turbaned tribal elders were joined by their young sons on a rare foray out of their region to meet outsiders and discuss the killing. The isolation of the Waziris is almost total - no western journalist has been to Miranshah for several years.

At our meeting I spoke as the representative westerner. I reported the CIA claim that not one single innocent civilian had been killed in over a year. I did not need to understand Pashtu to translate the snorts of derision when this claim was translated.

During the day I shook the hand of a 16-year-old kid from Waziristan named Tariq Aziz. One of his cousins had died in a missile strike, and he wanted to know what he could do to bring the truth to the west. At the Reprieve charity, we have a transparency project: importing cameras to the region to try to export the truth back out. Tariq wanted to take part, but I thought him too young.

Then, three days later, the CIA announced that it had eliminated "four militants". In truth there were only two victims: Tariq had been driving his 12-year-old cousin to their aunt's house when the Hellfire missile killed them both. This came just 24 hours after the CIA boasted of eliminating six other "militants" - actually, four chromite workers driving home from work. In both cases a local informant apparently tagged the car with a GPS monitor and lied to earn his fee.
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Bad Guys

US raises prospect of intervention in Syria

Ruth Sherlock and Richard Spencer
Telegraph
Thu, 31 May 2012 07:42 UTC
clinton
© AFP/Getty
America has raised the possibility of intervening in Syria without United Nations approval and accused Russia of pushing the country into civil war. Hillary Clinton said the absence of UN support for action in Syria, due mainly to Russia's opposition, 'makes it harder' to respond to the crisis Photo: AFP/GETTY
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, bluntly criticised Russia's continued backing for President Bashar al-Assad's regime yesterday. This support was illustrated last night by the disclosure that a Russian cargo ship carrying weapons had docked in Syria last Saturday, one day after the massacre in Houla which claimed at least 108 civilian lives.

Addressing students in Denmark, Mrs Clinton urged Russia to use its influence on Mr Assad to curb the fighting.

"The Syrians are not going to listen to us. They will listen - maybe - to the Russians, so we have to keep pushing them," she said.

Russian officials, added Mrs Clinton, "are telling me they don't want to see a civil war. I have been telling them their policy is going help to contribute to a civil war." Western governments believe that diplomatic cover afforded by the Kremlin has emboldened Mr Assad and encouraged him to resist pressure to negotiate a settlement of the conflict.
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Newspaper

The Leveson Inquiry into the British press - oh, what a lovely game

John Pilger
johnpilger.com
Sun, 03 Jun 2012 07:16 UTC
Image

Rupert Murdoch: Perception manager
Rupert Murdoch is a bad man. His son James is also bad. Rebekah Brooks is allegedly bad. The News of the World was very bad; it hacked phones and pilloried people. British prime ministers grovelled before this iniquity. David Cameron even sent text messages to Brooks signed "LOL", and they all had parties in the Cotswolds with Jeremy Clarkson. Nods and winks were duly exchanged on the BSkyB deal.

Shock, horror.

Offering glimpses of the power and petty gangsterism of the British tabloid press, the inquiry conducted by Lord Leveson has, I suspect, shocked few people. As the soap has rolled on, bemusement has given way to boredom. Tony Blair was allowed to whine about the Daily Mail's treatment of his wife until he and the inquiry's amoral smugness protecting him were exposed by a member of the public, David Lawley-Wakelin, who shouted, "Excuse me, this man should be arrested for war crimes." His Lordship duly apologised to the war criminal and the truth-teller was seen off.

Why Murdoch should complain about the British establishment has always mystified me. His interrogation, if that is the word, by Robert Jay QC, was a series of verbal marshmallows that Murdoch promptly spat out. When he described one of his own rambling, self-satisfied questions as "subtle", Jay received this deft dismissal from Murdoch: "I'm afraid I don't have much subtlety in me."
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USA

A Tipping Point for Israel

Philip Giraldi
AntiWar.com
Thu, 10 May 2012 07:11 UTC
Image
A tipping point is where physical momentum, inclined in one direction, reverses its course, stabilizes, and then begins to move the opposite way. Those of us who have been arguing for a sane United States foreign policy in the Middle East have well understood that the odds on shifting the prevailing narrative have been heavily against us thanks to the overwhelming resources possessed by a powerful domestic lobby. Ten years ago in America, it was impossible to place even a letter in a mainstream newspaper or magazine that was in any way critical of Israel. Apart from Pat Buchanan, no one on television provided a critique of Israel and its policies. In the U.S. media, Israel was ever the beleaguered little democracy surrounded by savage Arabs.

But then, all of a sudden, the conspiracy of silence began to break down. It began with the revisionist history of the antecedents of the Iraq War as that conflict continued to drag on. Many began attributing Washington's initiation of the fighting, at least in part, to Israeli interests. Philip Zelikow, chief counsel for the 9/11 Commission Report, famously noted in March 2004 that the war was "to protect Israel," surely an exaggeration but containing more than a kernel of truth. Many also began to observe that the agitation for a new war with Iran was following the same pattern, with supporters of Israel leading the charge.
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