Killing Lt. Goldin...and 150 innocents

The sickness of present-day Israel, on display over the past horrible month of the one-sided slaughter of nearly 2000 Palestinians (including over 400 children) in the fenced-in ghetto of Gaza, has finally reached its nadir with the ugly case of the deliberate Israeli Defense Force murder of captured IDF 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin.

According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, once it was determined that Goldin had been captured by Hamas fighters in the Gaza town of Rafah, the IDF initiated what it calls the "Hannibal Protocol" -- the deliberate liquidation of the captive -- to prevent his being used as a hostage to win concessions from Israel in future truce negotiations with the Palestinians. One reason for the almost instantaneous and ruthless Israeli decision to kill Goldin rather than attempt to rescue him, is that this captured soldier had the misfortune of being related to Israel's defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, making him a valuable prize indeed for Hamas.

And so began a massive bombardment of the entire residential area where Goldin was captured.As Haaretz reports in an editorial about this case of deliberate sacrifice of an IDF officer, headlined "What Happened in Rafah?", the ensuing high-explosive blitz on the area didn't just kill Goldin, but also indiscriminately killed over 150 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including many women and children. Indeed, the paper states that the IDF "...shelled and bombed houses and their inhabitants indiscriminately, and as they tried to flee homes, hit them with shells and bombs in the streets." The fatal bombing of a targeted UN-operated school in Rafah, which was condemned by the US government and by UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, who called it a "criminal act and a moral outrage," was part of that Hannibal Protocol action.

Today David Stockman warned King World News that investors need to brace themselves for historic and worldwide financial destruction. KWN takes Stockman's warnings very seriously because he is the man former President Reagan called on in 1981, during that crisis, to become Director of the Office of Management and Budget and help save the United States from collapse. Below is what Stockman, author of the website contracorner, had to say in his powerful interview.

~
Eric King: "David, the man who is counsel to big money around the world, Michael Belkin, just spoke with KWN and issued a dire warning for the financial markets. I just wondered how you see things at this point with the Dow recently tumbling and everything that is happening across the globe? What should we expect?"

Stockman: "Well, the watchword at this point is stay out of harm's way. We are headed into a perfect storm of policy failures. This is not simply a failure by the Fed, which has inflated this massive bubble and painted itself into a corner with no clue how to get out, but we are also seeing an absolute failure of American world dominance....

In a new book, our veteran correspondent documents the forces that wreaked havoc on an entire region. Here is an exclusive extract

Iraq has disintegrated. Little is exchanged between its three great communities - Shia, Sunni and Kurd - except gunfire. The outside world hopes that a more inclusive government will change this but it is probably too late. The main victor in the new war in Iraq is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) which wants to kill Shia rather than negotiate with them. Iraq is facing a civil war that could be as bloody as anything that we have seen in Syria and could go on for years.

The crucial date in this renewed conflict is 10 June, 2014 when Isis captured Iraq's northern capital, Mosul, after three days' fighting. The Iraqi government had an army with 350,000 soldiers on which $41.6bn (£25bn) had been spent in the three years from 2011, but this force melted away without significant resistance. Discarded uniforms and equipment were found strewn along the roads leading to Kurdistan and safety. The flight was led by commanding officers, some of whom rapidly changed into civilian clothes as they abandoned their men. Given that Isis may have had as few as 1,300 fighters in its assault on Mosul this was one of the great military debacles in history. Within two weeks those parts of northern and western Iraq outside Kurdish control were in the hands of Isis. By the end of the month the group had announced a caliphate straddling the Iraq-Syria border.

People in Baghdad are used to shocks after years of war, massacres, occupation and dictatorship, but when Mosul fell they could feel the ground shifting under their feet. Soon Isis fighters were only an hour's drive north of a capital in which the streets, normally choked with traffic, grew quiet as people stayed at home because they thought it too dangerous to go out. This was particularly true of Sunni districts such as al-Adhamiyah on the east bank of the Tigris River, where young men rightly believed that if they passed through a checkpoint they were likely to be arrested or worse. People watched television obsessively, nervously channel-hopping as they tried to tease out the truth from competing propaganda claims. The sense of crisis was made worse by the main government channel broadcasting upbeat accounts of the latest victories, though the claims were seldom backed up by pictures. "Watch enough government television and pretty soon you would decide there is not a single member of Isis in the country," said one observer.

Saturday from the White House South Lawn, President Barack Obama blamed "intelligence estimates" for not anticipating the speed in which ISIS would capture large sections of Iraq.

The president,who has been under harsh media criticism for likening ISIS to an Al-Qaeda JV basketball team in January said, "There is no doubt that their advance their movement over the last several of months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the the expectation of policy makers both in and outside of Iraq."


The president also made clear no troops would go into Iraq during this operation of humanitarian aid and military airstrikes on ISIS.

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

Maybe Amazon really is rattled by the whole Authors United phenomenon organized by Douglas Preston. The writers are encouraging their readers to email Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief executive, and tell him to stop holding books hostage as the company negotiates with Hachette Book Group.

Late Friday, Amazon unveiled Readers United, and encouraged e-book buyers to email the chief executive of Hachette, whose address was helpfully provided.

In introducing the group, Amazon made the same arguments it has been making in the last few weeks: e-books need to be cheaper and Hachette is robbing readers by preventing this from happening. It also provided a list of recommended journalism on the topic - a very selective list.

For readers who are not quite sure exactly what to write to Hachette, Amazon included a list of talking points. The first one is, "We have noted your illegal collusion," always an ice-breaker in these sorts of chats.

© Mohammed Saber/EPAAn Israeli army flare illuminating Gaza on 3 August.

The carnage unleashed on the Palestinians is part of a decades-old routine that depends on western support

Global revulsion at the mind-numbing carnage of Israel's onslaught on Gaza seems finally to have spurred some of the western political class to speak out. The resignation of Sayeeda Warsi, Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister, in protest against her government's "morally indefensible" stance, emboldened Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, to demand the suspension of arms export licences to Israel.

Last week it was Ed Miliband who condemned Israel's invasion and the prime minister's "silence on the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians". Even the United States administration denounced its strategic protege's "disgraceful" bombardment of a school, while Barack Obama described Palestinian suffering as " heartbreaking" - as if he had nothing to do with it.

Now that Israelis and Palestinians have arrived in Cairo to turn the ceasefire into something more long-lasting, perhaps it feels safer to take a stand. But a month of indiscriminate brutality in which 1,875 Palestinians and 67 Israelis have been killed is still presented, grotesquely, as a war of Israeli self-defence - rather than as a decades-long confrontation between occupier and occupied, in which western governments stand resolutely on the side of the occupier.

And while the overwhelming majority of Palestinian dead are civilians - 430 of them children - and 64 of the Israeli dead are soldiers, it is Hamas that is branded terrorist, rather than the Israeli armed forces armed with the most sophisticated targeting technology in the world.

It's only necessary to consider for a moment what the reaction would have been if the death toll had been the other way round to realise how loaded are the scales of western moral outrage and selective the appetite for action. And it's only by ignoring the entire history of the conflict that it can be portrayed as the result of some wearisome ancient ethnic hatred.

This week's centenary of the outbreak of the first world war should help. David Cameron claims it was fought for freedom. In reality, it was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of imperial powers to carve up territories, markets and resources.

Far from defending democracy or the rights of small nations, Britain and France ended the war divvying up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Iraq to Palestine. A century on, we're still living with the consequences.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won the presidential election with 52 percent of the vote, according to early results. Thus, Erdogan has become the country's first popularly-elected head of state.

The High Election Board (YSK) chair, Sadi Güven, has announced Erdogan's victory in the presidential election, according to interim results.

"The chairman of the AK Party and the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has become the first president elected by the people," Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag posted on his Twitter account.

With 98.75 percent of the ballots counted, Erdogan leads with 52 percent, the Hurriyet Daily reports. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, former Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has received 38 percent of the votes. Selahattin Demirtas, head of the leftist pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party, is in third place with just 10 percent.

The presidents of Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia may hold three-party talks in Sochi on Sunday to curb the recent outbreak of violence in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in the South Caucasus, Moscow said.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, arrived to the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Saturday for separate talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"We do not rule out such a meeting," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when asked about three-party negotiations.

The leaders of the three states could also attend a combat SAMBO competition together in the evening on Sunday, he added.

The Israeli military uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, a new report from the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights soon will reveal. An investigative team from the non-governmental organization, based in both Geneva and the Gaza Strip, has obtained first-person testimony from several families in various locations describing their capture and use as "shields" for Israeli soldiers for hours at a time.

"The Israeli government has tried to defend its indiscriminate killing of civilians - including more than 400 children - by claiming that resistance fighters hide among the people, when actually there is no place in Gaza that is safe from the bombs and shelling," says Ramy Abdu, chair of the Euro-Mid Observer. "Instead, what we have documented is that Israeli forces have literally used Palestinian civilians as shields as they killed their neighbors."

One of these victims, Ramadan Muhammad Qadeeh, who lives in the town of Khuza'a in the southern Gaza Strip, recounted his family's harrowing ordeal in a video interview recorded by Media Town and released by Euro-Mid Aug. 9. An Israeli assault leveled much of Khuza'a, leaving whole streets flattened and once-grand mosque domes reduced to ground level. One man recalled counting 360 shell attacks in a single hour. Most of the town's 14,000 inhabitants fled.

Last month, I wrote an article highlighting the fact that President Barack Obama apparently had become so tired of being President that he decided to just hang out and socialize instead. The piece was titled, The New York Times Describes Obama - "A Restless President Weary of the Obligations of the White House..."

Apparently, Mr. Obama has found a middle ground. A perfect mix of dinner-party diplomacy with some of the world's most violent and homophobic dictators. Introducing the first ever U.S.-Africa summit, which just ran from August 4-6th. As the Daily Mail points out, President Obama had no problem smiling and hobnobbing with a cornucopia of murders and human rights abusers. If there was a Hollywood celebrity hashtag campaign of outrage protesting the event, I must have missed it.