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Iran-US partnership? Pure fantasy

Seyed Mohammad Marandi
Al Jazeera
Tue, 06 Jan 2015 02:12 UTC
ISIL
© ReutersIranians do not buy the argument that a repentant US is waging a real war against ISIL, writes Marandi
Western pundits who blithely assert that the Islamic Republic of Iran can or will cooperate with the United States in Iraq against ISIL ignore a basic problem; how can the US be a serious partner in fighting a terrorist movement that Washington may have played a critical role in creating?

When US Vice-President Joe Biden told an American university audience in October that Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are responsible for arming al-Nusra, ISIL, and other al-Qaeda-rooted extremists in Syria and that there is no "moderate middle" in the country, there was (as most non-Americans expected) little coverage of this stunning admission in the US mainstream media.

Indeed, what little coverage there was focused on Biden's subsequent apologies to Turkish, Emirati, and Saudi leaders for having made such comments in the first place.

Predictably, there was no follow-up reporting in the New York Times reminding Americans that the US is itself complicit in funding and arming extremists in Syria.

Comment: U.S. involvement ISIL is even more 'hands on' than Marandi lets on above. See: Iran is right to be skeptical. The whole world should be.

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Bad Guys

The emergence of Western-controlled ISIS in Syria is about one thing - regime change

Carla Stea
Global Research
Wed, 07 Jan 2015 01:29 UTC
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On December 18, 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution A/c.3/69/L.3 overwhelmingly condemning the Syrian government for human rights abuses. The resolution had been referred to the General Assembly by the Third Committee. On November 18, 2015, the United Nations Third Committee adopted three distorted and biased resolutions containing unfounded allegations of human rights abuses against Syria, the DPRK and Iran. Numerous delegations from developing countries and the non-aligned movement opposed these resolutions.

The resolution demonizing Syria, A/C.3/69/L.31 is particularly distorted.

The Russian Federation stated: "The text of these resolutions are attempts to turn the Third Committee into a politicized body with the aim of exerting pressure on one of the Member States. That approach is unacceptable.

China stated that "human rights issues should be addressed in an equal and fair manner, without politicization. "Opposing the use of pressure on countries under the guise of protecting human rights," his country voted against the resolution.

Chile stated that: "Armed non-State actors were committing crimes in Syria, and the report should have reflected that in a more detailed manner.

Indonesia expressed "concern about the use of country-specific resolutions"

Singapore stated it: "did not agree with country-specific resolutions, as they are counterproductive."

Belarus "endorsed the statement made by the Non-Aligned Movement and underscored the unacceptability of country-specific resolutions. The sponsors of the draft resolution were undermining the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter."
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Attention

Vicky Ward tried to warn about pedophile billionaire Epstein in 2003

Vicky Ward
The Daily Beast
Tue, 06 Jan 2015 01:31 UTC
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© The Daily Beast
When Vicky Ward profiled Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair, allegations of his attempted seduction of two young sisters were excised from the final piece.

"Jeffrey wanted me to tell you that you looked so pretty," the female voice said into my disbelieving ear.

It was the fall of 2002. I was pregnant, uncomfortably so, for the first time and with twins, due the following March. I was besieged by a relentless morning sickness. I was sick in street gutters, onto my desk, at dinners with friends. I suffered severe bloating and water retention.

But here was this faux-compliment coming, bizarrely and a bit grotesquely, from a woman I hadn't met - a female assistant who worked for one Jeffrey Epstein, a mysterious Gatsby-esque financier whom I'd been assigned to write about by my then-boss Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. (Epstein had caught the attention of the press when he had flown Bill Clinton on his jet to Africa. No one knew who he was or understood how he'd made his money.)

Comment: It's almost a given these days that psychopaths rise to the top: in finance, politics, corporations, etc. What isn't as well known is that there seems to be an almost certain connection between these people's psychopathy and sexual violence, rape, and pedophilia. No, contrary to some village-idiot 'pop science' writers, psychopathy isn't a 'good leadership trait'. These monsters rape children and young teens, and worse. Thankfully, some of them are finally being exposed. See also: The rabbit hole goes deeper than most can imagine. If the full extent became public knowledge, there would be riots in the streets.

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Life Preserver

UN confirms Palestine will become ICC member starting April 1


RT
Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:25 UTC
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© Reuters/Enrique Castro-MendivilUnited Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Palestine will join the International Criminal Court on April 1, announced UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday. The Palestinians will be able to sue Israel for war crimes, a move the Israeli administration has consistently opposed for decades.

The UN treaty website says that due to the court's procedures "the statute will enter into force for the State of Palestine on April 1, 2015."

Along with the ICC application, the UN chief approved other sets of documents, enabling Palestine to join 16 international agreements, conventions and treaties.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed the ICC application documents on the last day of 2014, following the UN Security Council's resolution on December 30, which rejected Palestine's official bid for statehood, a document vetoed by the US in support of Israel.

The Palestinian delegation submitted its ICC application on January 2.

Israel's immediate reaction was negative.

"We will not let Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers and officers be dragged to the International Criminal Court in The Hague," Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting, AFP reported.

The Israeli administration immediately applied financial pressure on the Palestinian Authority, freezing the transfer of half a billion shekels (over $127 million) in monthly tax revenues it collected on behalf of the Palestinians.

The US joined the financial pressure on the Palestinian Authority on Monday, when the Obama administration announced a review of America's annual $440 million aid package to the Palestinians. As AP pointed out, once the Palestinian Authority apply any case against Israel to the International Criminal Court, US financial help to Palestine will cease immediately under American law.

Comment: We're not holding our breath, but for the sake of Palestinians, let's hope the ICC will actually hold Israel accountable for their war crimes and the genocide will end.
"This (ICC) is the same organization who very recently had flatly rejected a bid by the Palestinian government to try the Israelis for their conduct during Operation Cast Lead which led to the murder of 1400 civilians including 300 children. Targeting civilians with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Israelis had gone on a shooting spree. The three-week long campaign that the Israelis began towards the end of 2008 aimed primarily at civilian enclaves in Gaza was to 'break the back of resistance' as was boasted by generals if the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Following the conflict, a UN sponsored tribunal charged the IDF with complicity in war crimes. The Palestinians wanted justice and went to the ICC for that very purpose. But guess what? The ICC rejected the request under the ridiculous excuse that while 130 countries and some U.N. bodies recognize Palestine as a state, it still holds an observer status in the U.N., and so the ICC 'cannot at this time investigate allegations of war crimes committed on Palestinian territory,' according to Moreno-Ocampo the ICC prosecutor.

By claiming that 'the court's reach was not based on a principle of universal jurisdiction and it could open investigations only if asked to do so by either the UN Security Council or by a recognized state,' the ICC brought the Palestinian Authority's bid for war crimes tribunal to investigate an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip among other incidents of war crimes to a full stop.

There have been immediate reactions that accused the ICC of political bias. Amnesty International's International Justice campaign group charged that 'For the past three years, the prosecutor has been considering the question of whether the Palestinian Authority is a state that comes under the jurisdiction of the ICC and whether the ICC can investigate crimes committed during the 2008-9 conflict in Gaza and southern Israel. Now, despite Amnesty International's calls and a very clear requirement in the ICC's statute that the judges should decide on such matters, the Prosecutor has erroneously dodged the question, passing it to other political bodies. This dangerous decision opens the ICC to accusations of political bias and is inconsistent with the independence of the ICC.'

And yet Moreno-Ocampo and his prosecution office at the ICC chooses to ignore the human toll and suffering of the Gaza conflict of over three and a half years ago, and instead focuses on the single-handed objective of bringing another Arab dictator to justice.

By their hypocrisy and evasion in not confronting the Israelis with their mammoth list of war crimes and prosecuting them to the full extent of the law, the ICC has lost its relevance on the international stage to mete true justice."

Hypocrisy of the International Criminal Court


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Pistol

Paris shooting video: Are the Paris gunmen trained professionals?

Mitchell Prothero
McClatchyDC
Wed, 07 Jan 2015 23:04 UTC
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© FRANCK DUBRAY — TNSThousands gather in Nantes, France, on Jan. 7, 2015, in a rally at the Place Royale in Nantes, France, to pay tribute to those injured and killed in an attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The gunmen who attacked the Paris editorial offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday appeared to be focused professionals who'd carefully prepared the assault.

Video showing two of the assailants suggests they were well trained, striking their target during its weekly editorial meeting, when most of the publication's journalists would be gathered in one place.

Other evidence suggests they could be linked to a top French al Qaida operative, David Drugeon, who's been the target at least twice of U.S. airstrikes in Syria over the last four months.

Witnesses inside the magazine's offices told the French newspaper L'Humanité that both attackers spoke perfect French and claimed to be members of al Qaida.

Drugeon, who many experts believe was a French intelligence asset before defecting to al Qaida, is alleged to have masterminded a 2012 "lone wolf" attack on French soldiers and Jewish targets in the southern French city of Toulouse. That attack killed seven people before the perpetrator, a French citizen named Mohammed Merah, who French intelligence believes had been trained by Drugeon, was killed by a police sniper after a long, violent standoff with security forces.

Comment: Charlie Hebdo Paris shooting: Man linked to attacks turns himself in
The witness, who refused to allow his name to be used because he feared for his safety, said the attackers were so methodical he first mistook them for France's elite anti-terrorism forces. Then they fired on the officer.
See also: Operation Gladio: France armed terrorists that struck Paris
Operation Gladio Redux: At least 11 killed in shooting at Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo

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Pistol

Operation Gladio: France armed terrorists that struck Paris

Tony Cartalucci
Land Destroyer Report
Wed, 07 Jan 2015 22:47 UTC
Image
© Getty
France, as part of a NATO-led coalition, has been arming, funding, aiding, and otherwise perpetuating Al Qaeda terrorists for years, beginning, on record in Libya with the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and continuing until today with NATO's arming, harboring, and backing of Al Qaeda terrorists including the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS) within and along Syria's borders.

With the recent attack in Paris likely the work of the very terrorists France has been arming and backing across North Africa and the Middle East, the French government itself stands responsible, guilty of the continued material support of a terrorist organization that has now killed French citizens, including two police officers, not only on French soil, but within the French capital itself.

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© UnknownBritish-French leaders tour decimated Libya in wake of 2011 NATO
intervention on behalf of "rebels" composed primarily of Al Qaeda terrorists.
In the New York Times article, "Terror Attack on Charlie Hebdo Newspaper in Paris Kills 12," it was reported that:
Masked gunmen with automatic weapons opened fire in the offices of a French satirical newspaper on Wednesday in Paris, the police said, killing 12 people and then escaping in a car.
President François Hollande said the attack on the weekly, Charlie Hebdo, was "without a doubt" an act of terrorism and raised the nationwide terror alert to its highest status. He said that several terrorist attacks had been thwarted in recent weeks.

However, despite Hollande's feigned concern and outrage over the attack, it was the French government who had advocated and presided over the arming of terrorist groups across the Arab World in the West's bid to overthrow nation after nation and reorder the entire region according to their own geopolitical and economic interests starting with the "Arab Spring" in 2011.

The Washington Post would report in 2011 in an article titled, "France sent arms to Libyan rebels," that:
French officials announced Wednesday that they had armed rebels in Libya, marking the first time a NATO country has said it was providing direct military aid to opponents of the government in a conflict that has lasted longer than many policymakers expected.
While Hollande's predecessor, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy would be the one to set foot in decimated Libya in the wake of NATO's intervention there - which included in addition to French arms sent to terrorists, French planes providing these terrorists air cover as they carried out atrocities and genocide - Hollande would continue policies enacted under Sarkozy, both in Libya, and currently in Syria.

Comment: See also: Operation Gladio Redux: At least 11 killed in shooting at Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo

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Snakes in Suits

SOTT Exclusive - Sick joke: U.S. to investigate the 'possibility' that civilians died in coalition airstrikes in Syria and Iraq

Ante Sarlija
Sott.net
Wed, 07 Jan 2015 14:17 UTC
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© AFP Photo / Handout / US Navy / MC2 Jacob G. Sisco
In light of growing civilian casualties in the U.S.-led invasion of Syria, U.S. Central Command has started an investigation into reports of civilian deaths. According to the spokesman for the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations (UOSSM), between 30 to 60 people are dying each day since the U.S-led coalition started bombing Syria.

Boasting about the precision of airstrikes, the top commander of the coalition 'fighting' the Islamic State, Lieutenant General James Terry, claims that: "We have some great capability in terms of precision," and "To date, we've got a very good record." Further claiming that "we took the utmost care about who we are targeting."
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Pistol

Flashback Sophisticated gunpoint robbery by 'Kalashnikov-wielding, commando-looking men': Unnamed Saudi prince's convoy robbed of 200,000 Euros and 'sensitive documents' in Paris

Andy Vitalicio
China Topix
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 20:32 UTC
Saudi ambassador
© Saudi Ministry of Foreign AffairsSaudi Arabia's ambassador to France, H.E. Dr. Mohammed Ismail Al-Sheikh, celebrates with embassy staff and visiting Saudi dignitaries in this 2012 photo at the Saudi Embassy in Paris
French police are investigating a possible inside job after heavily armed men attacked a convoy of cars belonging to a Saudi Arabian prince, and stole cash amounting to 250,000 euros (US$330,000).

The prince, who was not immediately identified, was in a convoy of several vehicles headed to the Le Bourget airport from the Saudi embassy in Paris late Sunday, when it was attacked by men who were described as moving like "commandos."

Armed with Kalashnikov rifles and using two vehicles, about eight men targeted a Mercedes mini-van in the convoy at around 9:15 p.m. (1915 GMT), pointing their guns at the driver and forcing him to stop.

The whole convoy stopped by the wayside when the armed men stopped the mini-van.

The men then drove the mini-van with the driver and two passengers inside, leaving the other vehicles behind. French media reported that no shots were fired, and the Saudis were later released a short distance away from the northern ring at Porte de la Chapelle on the edge of the city.

Comment: It's possible the theft of the money was meant to be a distraction from the theft of 'sensitive papers'. It's certainly downplayed in this article. Given the Saudis' penchant for being in the background of much of the trouble in the Middle East and elsewhere, those papers might be very interesting.

Update 7 January 2015

Not a single update or follow-up to the above incident event has been reported by any media.

Incidentally, today, January 7th 2015, an attack was carried out in Paris by a gang of Kalashnikov-firing, commando-looking men. Are the same "insiders" involved?

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Camera

Welcome to the Matrix: Enslaved by technology and the internet of things

John W. Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
Wed, 07 Jan 2015 18:53 UTC
"There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me.'" ― Philip K. Dick
Matrix
© Flickr/Aneta Virtova
If ever Americans sell their birthright, it will be for the promise of expediency and comfort delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Likewise, if ever we find ourselves in bondage, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, while most of us are consumed with our selfies and trying to keep up with what our so-called friends are posting on Facebook, the megacorporation Google has been busily partnering with the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, and other governmental agencies to develop a new "human" species, so to speak.

In other words, Google - a neural network that approximates a global brain - is fusing with the human mind in a phenomenon that is called "singularity," and they've hired transhumanist scientist Ray Kurzweil to do just that. Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, Kurzweil said. "It will have read every email you will ever have written, every document, every idle thought you've ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself."

But here's the catch: the NSA and all other government agencies will also know you better than yourself. As William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA said, "The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control."

Science fiction, thus, has become fact.
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Radar

The forces that drive Obama against Russia

Ray McGovern
Consortium News
Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:00 UTC
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Exclusive: Heading into the last quarter of his presidency, Barack Obama must decide whether he will let the neocons keep pulling his strings or finally break loose and pursue a realistic foreign policy seeking practical solutions to world problems, including the crisis with Russia over Ukraine, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

The year 2015 will surely mark a watershed in relations between the United States and Russia, one way or the other. However, whether tensions increase - to war-by-proxy in Ukraine or an even wider war - or whether they subside depends mostly on President Barack Obama.

Key to answering this question is a second one: Is Obama smart enough and strong enough to rein in Secretary of State John Kerry, the neocons and "liberal interventionists" running the State Department and to stand up to the chicken hawks in Congress, most of whom feel free to flirt with war because they know nothing of it.


Comment: If past is prelude, then we have to say no. Obama is not smart enough, nor strong enough (and this seems like a silly question coming from a former CIA analyst who should know better about how things really work in Washington). Since Obama himself is mostly a puppet doing the bidding of the military industrial complex, the banking elite, and other 'interested' parties, a better question then may be: Are the people who tell Obama what to do, say, and think - sane enough to avert world-wide catastrophe by putting a stop to their objectives and modes of operation? And I think we know the answer to that one, though McGovern does break some of it down for us here.


Russian President Vladimir Putin, by contrast, experienced the effects of war at an early age. He was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) eight years after the vicious siege by the German army ended. Michael Walzer, in his War Against Civilians, notes, "More people died in the 900-day siege of Leningrad than in the infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together."

Putin's elder brother Viktor died during the siege. The experience of Putin's youth is, of course, embedded in his consciousness. This may help to account for why he tends to be short on the kind of daredevil bluster regularly heard from senior Western officials these days - many of whom are ignorant both of suffering from war and the complicated history of Ukraine.

Comment: If the office of the U.S. Presidency wasn't so controlled and manipulated a seat of power, if the individuals elected to it weren't so ponerized by the career of psychopaths who wield so much influence on it, and if there weren't so many powerful groups and individuals who one had to yield to and comprise with to reach this station, then McGovern may have a point or two that might help diffuse the impending disaster. And this assumes that the President elect even has the insight and will to rule in good faith.

That's a lot of ifs.

Individuals like Kerry, Nuland and their neocon family are just symptoms of a much bigger problem, and are only a few of the names of the people who really call the shots, or try to. But whoever those are who are driving the U.S. down this genocidal road of "conquest," it will be damned interesting, and terrifying, to witness the future moves and countermoves of the forces being discussed here. We are simply witnessing History in the making. And the stakes are huge.

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