We are publishing below an editorial from the Turkish daily Today's Zaman. The columnist points to the defeat of the Syrian Contras which, in her view, spells out a defeat for Turkey who has given them all out support. While adopting the Atlanticist misrepresentation of the facts, she warns her country against a foreseeable exodus of extremist fighters who will not fail to seep into neighboring countries.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime has been making significant advances on the ground against opposition fighters in a civil war of over two-and-a-half years, raising the possibility of the potential risk of a massive exodus of opposition fighters to neighboring countries including Turkey. Reports coming from both NATO as well as Turkish military sources provide important evidence of the Syrian regime's advances against the opposition, in particular in the past several months.

Republican member of the House of Representatives Rep. Michele Bachmann says Iran's nuclear facilities "must be bombed" despite a nuclear agreement between Iran and six major powers.

"It may be incumbent upon the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] to make a decision he has no desire to make, and that would be to bomb facilities, that must be bombed, in Iran," Bachmann said during a speech at a Zionist Organization of America gala.

On November 24, a six-month accord was sealed in Geneva between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- the US, Britain, Russia, France and China -- plus Germany.

The House Intelligence Committee member said the nuclear deal was a deliberate effort to harm Israel's security interests.

"That decision that was made by the P5+1 in Geneva had more to do with Israel than it had to do with Iran," she said.

"Because, you see, the decision that was made could be the biggest cudgel that our president, and that the nations of the world, could use to prevent Israel from defending not only herself, but her right to exist," the congresswoman claimed.

Washington's move to fly nuclear-capable bombers over China's eastern air defense zone as a forceful endorsement of Japan's claims over disputed islands is both needlessly confrontational and totally counterproductive.

The territorial dispute over an uninhabited chain of islands in the East China Sea - referred to as the Senkaku Islands by Japan and the Diaoyu Islands by China - has been a highly contentious issue in Sino-Japanese relations for decades, and the issue has resurfaced in recent times as both sides assert their sovereignty over the area.

Mass protests were seen in China targeting Japan's embassy and Japanese products, shops and restaurants when Tokyo's far-right former Governor Shintaro Ishihara called on Japan to use public money to buy the islands from private Japanese owners in 2012.

The issue stirs passions in Chinese society because Tokyo's claims are seen as an extension of the brutal legacy of the Japanese occupation and a direct challenge to strong historical evidence that has legitimized Chinese sovereignty over the area since ancient times.

Moreover, the official stance of the government in Beijing is that Japan's invalid claims over the islands were facilitated and legitimized by a backdoor-deal between Tokyo and Washington that directly challenges international law and post-World War II international treaties.

Indonesians are usually an easy-going, amiable people.

But this week, they are boiling with anger and a sense of betrayal after revelations that Australia's Signals Directorate had been tapping the phones of senior Indonesian government officials, including President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and, worst of all, his wife, First Lady Ani Yudhoyono.

Aussie intelligence was also spying in the very same senior Indonesian cabinet officials who, like the president, are regarded as staunch allies of the US and Australia. This electronic spying was part of the by now notorious, top secret Five Eyes joint intelligence operation between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - aka "the white man's spy agency."
Five Eyes is run by the US National Security Agency; its other Anglo-Saxon members act as loyal junior partners, spying on their neighborhoods and, often, their own people. How much of their local data is passed to Washington is unknown, but it is likely substantial. Disturbingly, it was recently revealed that the US NSA passes information on US citizens to another ally, Israel.

Indonesians are asking why Australia spied on them - supposedly a friendly neighbor - and, worse, on their admired president and first lady. Interestingly, Indonesians I've talked to, including the very bright editor- in -chief of the Jakarta Post, Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, feel deeply insulted and personally offended. Indonesia and Australia have been trying to better relations for the past twenty years. They have been cooperating closely on a host of government, military, environmental and health programs.

Indonesia, with 248 million people is the closest major neighbor to Australia's 23 million people, a fact that has often made the highly xenophobic Aussies nervous even though their defense is guaranteed by Washington. US Marines are soon to be stationed in northern Australia, near Indonesia. This militarily useless act has angered Indonesia and China

Australia's new, conservative prime minister, Tony Abbot, arrogantly belittled the scandal as a minor flap and issued the same lame excuse as other red-hand spying western governments: "everyone does it." That excuse may work in schoolyards, but not with Indonesia- or with many Americans, for that matter.

An elite U.S. Army study center has devised a plan for enforcing a major Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that would require about 20,000 well-armed troops stationed throughout Israel and a newly created Palestinian state.

There are no plans by the Bush administration to put American soldiers into the Middle East to police an agreement forged by the longtime warring parties. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is searching for ways to reduce U.S. peacekeeping efforts abroad, rather than increasing such missions.

But a 68-page paper by the Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) does provide a look at the daunting task any international peacekeeping force would face if the United Nations authorized it, and Israel and the Palestinians ever reached a peace agreement. Located at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the School for Advanced Military Studies is both a training ground and a think tank for some of the Army's brightest officers. Officials say the Army chief of staff, and sometimes the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ask SAMS to develop contingency plans for future military operations. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, SAMS personnel helped plan the coalition ground attack that avoided a strike up the middle of Iraqi positions and instead executed a "left hook" that routed the enemy in 100 hours.

The cover page for the recent SAMS project said it was done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Maj. Chris Garver, a Fort Leavenworth spokesman, said the study was not requested by Washington.

Five days after Iran struck a landmark accord with world powers on its nuclear program, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced on Thursday that Tehran had invited international inspectors to visit a heavy water production plant covered by the deal - the first tangible step since the agreement was concluded.

In a speech to the 35-nation governing board of the I.A.E.A., Yukiya Amano, the head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, said the invitation was for inspectors to travel to the Arak plant on Dec. 8.

While Mr. Amano did not specifically say the invitation had been accepted, he added that "all other outstanding issues" relating to the I.A.E.A.'s differences with Iran would be addressed "in subsequent steps."

Mr. Amano visited Tehran on Nov. 11 and said he had agreed with high-ranking officials there that Iran would permit "managed access" to at least two contentious sites - the Gachin mine in Bandar Abbas and the heavy-water production plant being built in Arak, which could be used in the production of plutonium potentially for use in weapons.

Do you remember president Bill Clinton ordered two US aircraft carrier battle groups into the Strait of Taiwan in 1996 to "send a message" to China? Well, it appears that Barack Obama, the lame-duck, spineless multi-humiliated and multi-defeated president of the US of A, just had a surge of testosterone and decided to provoke China yet again by mocking its decision to extend its air defense zone over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

The way Uncle Sam sent his usual message of imperial contempt was to send two B-52 bombers to flout the Chinese air defense zone. Not content to do something so mind-bogglingly stupid and irresponsible, the Americans also decided to make sure to add an inflammatory statement.

According to the BBC, (emphasis added):

US Colonel Steve Warren at the Pentagon said Washington had "conducted operations in the area of the Senkakus". "We have continued to follow our normal procedures, which include not filing flight plans, not radioing ahead and not registering our frequencies," he said. There had been no response from China, he added.

Brilliant, no?

Controversial secret programme reportedly turned al-Qaida suspects into spies with lure of freedom, safety for families and millions in cash

In the early years after 9/11, the CIA turned some Guantánamo Bay prisoners into double agents then sent them home to help the US kill terrorists, current and former US officials said.

The CIA promised the prisoners freedom, safety for their families, and millions of dollars from secret accounts.

It was a risky gamble. Officials knew there was a chance that some prisoners might quickly spurn their deal and kill Americans. For the CIA, that was an acceptable risk in a dangerous business. For the American public, which was never told, the programme was one of the many secret trade-offs the government made on its behalf. At the same time the government used the fear of terrorism to justify jailing people indefinitely, it was releasing dangerous people to work for the CIA.

Microsoft is moving toward a major new effort to encrypt its Internet traffic amid fears that the National Security Agency may have broken into its global communications links, said people familiar with the emerging plans.

Suspicions at Microsoft, while building for several months, sharpened in October when it was reported that the NSA was intercepting traffic inside the private networks of Google and Yahoo, two industry rivals with similar global infrastructures, said people with direct knowledge of the company's deliberations. They said top Microsoft executives are meeting this week to decide what encryption initiatives to deploy and how quickly.

Documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest - but do not prove - that the company is right to be concerned. Two previously unreleased slides that describe operations against Google and Yahoo include references to Microsoft's Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger services. A separate NSA e-mail mentions Microsoft Passport, a Web-based service formerly offered by Microsoft, as a possible target of that same surveillance project, called MUSCULAR, which was first disclosed by The Washington Post last month.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's food police have struck again!

Outlawed are food donations to homeless shelters because the city can't assess their salt, fat and fiber content, reports CBS 2's Marcia Kramer.

Glenn Richter arrived at a West Side synagogue on Monday to collect surplus bagels - fresh nutritious bagels - to donate to the poor. However, under a new edict from Bloomberg's food police he can no longer donate the food to city homeless shelters.

It's the "no bagels for you" edict.

"I can't give you something that's a supplement to the food you already have? Sorry that's wrong," Richter said.

Richter has been collecting food from places like the Ohav Zedek synagogue and bringing it to homeless shelters for more than 20 years, but recently his donation, including a "cholent" or carrot stew, was turned away because the Bloomberg administration wants to monitor the salt, fat and fiber eaten by the homeless.