There is no obvious reason why the Western powers should care whether it was the friends or the family of Mohammed which took over the leadership of his movement upon his death. However there is plainly an agenda led by the USA to support the Sunnis in their spiralling regional conflict with the Shia.

This is not hard to rationalise. The ultra wealthy members of the Gulf regimes continue to act as the West's proxies in the region and provide harbour to its neo-imperialist armed forces, while at the same time maintaining themselves an obscurantist version of Islam which would have horrified Mohammed and breaks virtually every precept of the Koran, particularly as regards treatment of women and of minority religions within their territory.

In Bahrain the large Shia majority is brutally repressed with active western collusion; in Saudi Arabia the Shia minority in the East is degraded. Iran is the great Shia bogey, and the West is so determined to maintain it as "the enemy" that they refuse the most basic diplomatic openings. The UK turned down an invitation to be represented at the inauguration of a new more moderate President and hold initial conversations. Meanwhile, Shia groups have mustered the only effective military resistance to Israeli aggression, and in Syria a Shia friendly regime is under intense pressure from the West and its Gulf allies. Peculiarly, in Iraq Western invasion resulted in the installation of a Shia regime, but that was only one of the entirely unforeseen consequences of that most stupid of invasions, and the Western response is to try to split up the country and fuel multiple insurgencies.

"We have challenged the United States and France to come up with a single piece of proof, but they have been incapable of doing so."

"Anybody who contributes to the financial and military reinforcement of terrorists is the enemy of the Syrian people. If the policies of the French state are hostile to the Syrian people, the state will be their enemy."

"The Middle East is a powder keg and the fire is approaching."

"We shouldn't just talk about a Syrian response, but what will happen after the first strike. Everybody will lose control of the situation when the powder keg blows."

President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to the French daily Le Figaro. Below is the full text:

The elected members of the U.S. Congress will soon vote on whether the country should send missiles into Syria, intervening in a war that has already claimed the lives of over 100,000.

One would think that the matter before the Congress would at least command their attention. But, as the Senate conducted a hearing today to discuss the details of the strike, and the arguments for and against it, Sen. John McCain took out his iPhone and played poker to pass the time.

An image of McCain's phone was captured by Washington Post photographer Melina Mara, and posted to the Post's live blog of the hearing. The photo is blurry, but clearly depicts a game in progress.

When he learned of the picture, McCain posted a flippant response to Twitter.

"Scandal!" he wrote. "Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing - worst of all I lost!"

- John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) September 3, 2013

While he may have made up his mind on the strike (he said yesterday he is confident in the direction the White House is moving), McCain's game playing projected a certain lack of seriousness about a major strategic military decision. And, when some on Twitter saw his tweet, they lashed out in response:

"Haha, you're right!" wrote Digg's David Weiner. "It's absurd to expect someone who pushed us into two, now maybe three wars to give his full attention!"

"OUR LEADERS ARE SHAPING THE COURSE OF HISTORY," wrote Carlo Johnson of Brooklyn, New York.

"Yes, we shouldn't expect our Senators to pay attention for 3 whole hours. It's just bombing another country, after all!," added astronomer and author Phil Plait.

A new video has been posted on YouTube showing the extent of brutality exercised by the foreign-backed Takfiri militants operating inside Syria.

Warning: Graphic Content

The leader of Tokyo's bid for the 2020 Olympics has reassured the IOC that the Japanese capital is totally "safe" and "unaffected" by the leak of radioactive water from the tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

On September 7, International Olympic Committee (IOC) members will gather in Buenos Aires, Argentina to choose between Tokyo, Istanbul and Madrid to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.

Ahead of the vote, Tsunekazu Takeda, the president of the Japanese Olympic Committee addressed the IOC with a letter, saying that "Life [in Tokyo], for all 35 million residents, is completely normal and safe and we do not foresee any change to that."

"The city's air and water are monitored daily and there remains no evidence at all of any issue, as confirmed by the Japanese government," the text reads, as cited by Associated Press.

This comes as Japan is striving to overcome the aftermath of the accident in the Fukushima nuclear plant caused by a deadly earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The disaster damaged cooling systems to the plant's reactors, as a result of which three of them melted down, leading to a contamination of air and sea.

On Tuesday, the Japanese government announced it is going to spend almost US$ 500 million to contain leaks of radioactive water from the nuclear station. Some $US 320,000 million will be spent on the construction of a massive underground frozen wall around damaged reactors to prevent the groundwater from mixing with water being used to cool the melted fuel rods.

Announced less than a week before the IOC's decision, the move is seen as the government's attempt to show that the nuclear crisis will not be a safety concern at the time of the Olympic Games.

Secretary of State John Kerry: "There is no doubt that Saddam al-Assad has crossed the red line. ... Sorry, did I just say 'Saddam'?"

A US drone has just taken a photo of Mullah Omar riding on a motorcycle through the streets of Damascus. 1

So what do we have as the United States refuses to rule out an attack on Syria and keeps five warships loaded with missiles in the eastern Mediterranean?

• Only 9 percent of Americans support a US military intervention in Syria. 2
• Only 11% of the British supported a UK military intervention; this increased to 25% after the announcement of the alleged chemical attack. 3
• British Prime Minister David Cameron lost a parliamentary vote August 29 endorsing military action against Syria 285-272
• 64% of the French people oppose an intervention by the French Army. 4 "Before acting we need proof," said a French government spokesperson. 5
• Former and current high-ranking US military officers question the use of military force as a punitive measure and suggest that the White House lacks a coherent strategy. "If the administration is ambivalent about the wisdom of defeating or crippling the Syrian leader, possibly setting the stage for Damascus to fall to Islamic fundamentalist rebels, they say, the military objective of strikes on Assad's military targets is at best ambiguous." 6
• President Obama has no United Nations approval for intervention. (In February a massive bombing attack in Damascus left 100 dead and 250 wounded; in all likelihood the work of Islamic terrorists. The United States blocked a Russian resolution condemning the attack from moving through the UN Security Council)

The first cell of Syrian rebels trained and armed by the CIA is making its way to the battlefield, President Barack Obama has reportedly told senators.

During a meeting at the White House, the president assured Senator John McCain that after months of delay the US was meeting its commitment to back moderate elements of the opposition.

Mr Obama said that a 50-man cell, believed to have been trained by US special forces in Jordan, was making its way across the border into Syria, according to the New York Times.

The deployment of the rebel unit seems to be the first tangible measure of support since Mr Obama announced in June that the US would begin providing the opposition with small arms.

Congressional opposition delayed the plan for several weeks and rebel commanders publicly complained the US was still doing nothing to match the Russian-made firepower of the Assad regime.

Mr McCain has been a chief critic of the White House's reluctance to become involved in Syria and has long demanded that Mr Obama provide the rebels with arms needed to overthrow the regime.

The US Defence Minister Chuck Hagel, the Secretary of State John Kerry, the National Security counsellor Susan Rice and the National Intelligence director James Clapper, held a closed meeting regarding Syria with leaders of Congres, on Thursday August 2013.

According to representative Elliot Engel, who is the Democratic minority leader on the Foreign Affairs Commission, the Obama administration confirmed the interception of a Syrian government communication attesting to it's responsibility in the chemical attack of August 21st, as revealed by Foreign Policy.

Yet, these ''interceptions'' are in fact of Israeli origin¹.

Elliot Engel is a militant Zionist. Member of the US Committee for a Free Lebanon, which organized the ''Cedar Revolution''², he drafted, in 2002, the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, authorizing the US president to go to war against Syria without having to pass before Congress. This text, adopted by the Congress itself and signed by George W. Bush, is still in force.

I've been watching the progressive erosion of civil liberties in Vietnam with a watchful eye for some time now. The country first appeared on my radar due to its particularly aggressive measures against the citizenry's gold buying.

As the progression usually goes, first a country will lash out against its own people for buying protection against the leadership's mismanagement of the economy by blaming gold. Once that fails, a country will usually then start cracking down on civil liberties.

Shortly after that we usually see the cracking of heads. It appears Vietnam has taken a frightening and dangerous step forward in the progression with Decree 72.

From the BBC:

A controversial law banning Vietnamese online users from discussing current affairs has come into effect. The decree, known as Decree 72, says blogs and social websites should not be used to share news articles, but only personal information.

Dozens of activists, including bloggers, have been convicted for anti-state activity in the country this year.

The new law specifies that social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook should only be used "to provide and exchange personal information".

It also prohibits the online publication of material that "opposes" the Vietnamese government or "harms national security."

Last month the US embassy in Hanoi said it was "deeply concerned by the decree's provisions", arguing that "fundamental freedoms apply online just as they do offline".

Oh please. The rogue leadership in the USA is one financial crisis away from trying to do the exact same thing.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike