US admits Al Qaeda "amongst" Syrian rebels, recognizes them as the "legitimate representative of the Syrian people"

As expected, after a long pause of feigned "consideration," the US has recognized the militants it has been arming, funding, aiding logistically and supporting diplomatically since as early as 2007, as the "legitimate representatives of the Syrian people," with the added caveat, "in opposition to the Assad regime." The Wall Street Journal would report that US President Barack Obama's announcement actually read:

"The Syrian National Coalition for Revolutionary and Opposition Forces is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime."

The bizarre, uncertain wording sends a message of both uncertainty and resounding illegitimacy, indicating that the US itself recognizes the true nature of the so-called "Syrian" opposition is apparent to an increasing number of people both in public office and across the public, and that a certain degree of rhetorical distance must be kept.

Israel is conducting a covert cross-border operation directed against Syria in liaison with NATO and the Pentagon.

After looking for a "smoking gun" in Iran earlier this year, Israeli special forces are now "tracking" Syria's "stocks of chemical and biological weapons", according to The Sunday Times.

"The cross-border operation is part of a secret war to trail Syria's non-conventional armaments and sabotage their development. 'For years we've known the exact location of Syria's chemical and biological munitions,' an Israeli source said, referring to the country's spy satellites and drones. 'But in the past week we've got signs that munitions have been moved to new locations.'" (Uzi Mahnaimi and Lucy Fisher Israel tracks Syria's chemical arsenal, The Sunday Times 9 December 2012.)

Everyone recalls the WMD hype prior to launching the war on Iraq. It turned out that the Iraqi WMD threat was an outright fabrication.

Those involved in the Iraq WMD propaganda ploy are now applying their skills with a view to fabricating a WMD pretext to intervene in Syria. According to a report from the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, "Israelis 'misread' the Iraqi threat". In 2003, the BBC wrote on the report's findings:

© Anthony Fredawww.AnthonyFreda.com

American Military Starts Assassinating Children

Obama and the American military label all young men - between the ages of say 15 and 35 - who happen to be in battle zones as suspected insurgents who they can target and kill.

Under the Bush administration, children were tortured.

Now, the U.S. military is starting to target children for assassination in battle zones. As the Nation reports:

In a despicable article in Military Times, the US military says that children are legitimate targets in the war in Afghanistan because sometimes the Taliban and other insurgents use kids.

In the original incident, which I cited in October, The New York Times reported it this way:

The...case of three children allegedly killed in a coalition strike was reported by local officials in Helmand Province's Nawa district. The officials said that the children were killed in a NATO strike on Sunday afternoon as they were gathering dung to burn as fuel, a common practice in the desert reaches of southern Afghanistan where there are few trees.

***
The Marja governor said that NATO forces watched as improvised explosive devices were being planted, and targeted the insurgents planting them. "As a result two I.E.D. planters were killed and the shrapnel killed the three children who were wandering nearby," he said. Other reports said that three insurgents had been killed.

A spokesman for the international forces, Maj. Adam Wojack, said that the coalition forces were aware of the allegations and that the episode was being investigated. "I.S.A.F. did conduct a precision airstrike on three insurgents in Nawa district, and the strike killed all three insurgents," he said.

"None of our reporting shows any civilian casualties or any children."

The Obama administration has decided to launch a covert operation to send heavy weapons to Syrian rebels, Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times of London reports.

Diplomatic sources told the Sunday Times that the U.S. "bought weapons from the stockpiles of Libya's former dictator Muammar Gaddafi."

The heavy arms include mortars, rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and the controversial anti-aircraft heat-seeking SA-7 missiles, which are integral to countering Bashar Al-Assad's bombing campaign.

The German cabinet on Thursday agreed to participate in a NATO mission sending Patriot missiles and some 400 soldiers to Turkey to help the country cope with potential security threats from Syria.

"Turkey is currently the most-affected partner in the Syria conflict. It is exposed to a potential threat from Syria," the foreign and defense ministries said in a joint statement.

Turkey, a vocal opponent of the Syrian government, had asked NATO to reinforce its air defense facilities as the conflict between Syrian government and rebels pose a mounting threat to Turkish citizens living close to borders.

In October, several artillery shells from Syria struck a Turkish border town and killed five civilians.

Political crisis deepens as judges refuse to oversee referendum on new constitution proposed by president

An International Monetary Fund loan to Egypt has been delayed until next month, intensifying the political crisis gripping the country.

The delay, announced on Tuesday, came as judges voted decisively against overseeing the referendum on the controversial new constitution.

Ahmed El Zend, the head of the judges club, an unofficial body with most of Egypt's judges among its members, said 90% had decided not to supervise the referendum. However, the high elections commission, the judicial body supervising the referendum, said there were enough judges on board to oversee the voting but only by staging the referendum in two phases, on 15 December and 22 December.

All Australians could be implanted with microchips for tracking and identification within the next two or three generations, a prominent academic says.

Michael G Michael from the University of Wollongong's School of Information Systems and Technology, has coined the term "uberveillance" to describe the emerging trend of all-encompassing surveillance.

"Uberveillance" is not on the outside looking down, but on the inside looking out through a microchip that is embedded in our bodies," Dr Michael told ninemsn.

Microchips are commonly implanted into animals to reveal identification details when scanned and similar devices have been used with Alzheimers patients.

China has sacked three officials for breaching Chinese laws and ethical regulations during a trial in which children were fed genetically modified rice.

The trial's legitimacy was questioned in August by the environmental group Greenpeace. A three-month investigation, led by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), culminated in the decision on 6 December to sack two members of the CDC's own staff - Yin Shi'an, the principal investigator of the Chinese arm of the project, in Beijing, and Hu Yuming at the CDC's regional office in Hunan province, where the study took place - as well as Wang Yin, head of science and technology at the Zhejiang Academy of Medical Sciences.

The genetically modified rice strain at the centre of the controversy is engineered to produce β-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, with the aim of fighting vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. It has been dubbed Golden Rice because of its bright yellow colour.

The trial was designed to test how efficiently the β-carotene is converted to the vitamin once ingested. The US study team was led by Guangwen Tang, a nutrition scientist at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and was part-funded by the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and the US Department of Agriculture.

According to a paper published online by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on 1 August, each group of two dozen or so children aged six to eight ate meals containing Golden Rice, spinach or β-carotene capsules for lunch every week day during the three-week trial¹.

But none of the children, their parents or school teachers was aware that Golden Rice was involved, according to a 45-minute investigative news programme broadcast on 8 December on CCTV, China's state television channel.

The informed-consent form said that the rice contained β-carotene, but not that it was genetically modified or that it was Golden Rice. Nor did it highlight uncertainty around any potential risks of ingesting such rice.

It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've been paying attention the past decade or so: it's what our leaders in both parties said about Saddam Hussein by way of justifying the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and it's what they're saying now about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who is the regime-changers' latest target.

No one denies Assad is a murderous tyrant, just as few denied the same appellation to the departed Iraqi despot, but Western outrage when it comes to these matters is extremely selective. After all, the US-supported government of Yemen is also killing its own people in air strikes that get very little attention in the Western media - but since Yemen is on the front lines of our eternal "war on terrorism," we look the other way. Indeed, air strikes by the US have often been attributed to the Yemenis, who are covering for us - and receiving goodies in return.

Regime-change in Yemen? Not on your life.

The latest hysterics from the Washington crowd involve alleged "weapons of mass destruction" in Assad's possession: chemical weapons which he is supposedly mixing up in his demonic labs and loading onto missiles for delivery against the Western-backed al-Qaeda fanatics "freedom fighters" battling the Syrian army. The inherently counterintuitive illogic of deploying such weaponry against a widely dispersed guerrilla army hasn't deterred the usual Anonymous Government Officials from making this startling claim, and our "mainstream" media - playing its accustomed role as passive purveyors of government propaganda - is spreading this "news" far and wide.

We won't be fooled again - except when we are.

Earlier this month we learned that the Obama administration is significantly expanding the number of covert Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) agents overseas. From just a few hundred DIA agents overseas today, the administration intends to eventually deploy some 1,600 covert agents. The nature of their work will also shift, away from intelligence collection and more toward covert actions. This move signals a major change in how the administration intends to conduct military and paramilitary operations overseas. Unfortunately, it is not a shift toward peace, but rather to an even more deadly and disturbing phase in the "war on terror."

Surely attacks on foreign countries will increase as a result of this move, but more and more the strikes will take place under cover of darkness and outside the knowledge of Congress or the American people. The move also represents a further blurring of the lines between the military and intelligence services, with the CIA becoming more like a secret military unto itself. This is a very troubling development.