Putting Syria into some perspective

The Holy Triumvirate - The United States, NATO, and the European Union - or an approved segment thereof, can usually get what they want. They wanted Saddam Hussein out, and soon he was swinging from a rope. They wanted the Taliban ousted from power, and, using overwhelming force, that was achieved rather quickly. They wanted Moammar Gaddafi's rule to come to an end, and before very long he suffered a horrible death. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected, but this black man who didn't know his place was sent into distant exile by the United States and France in 2004. Iraq and Libya were the two most modern, educated and secular states in the Middle East; now all four of these countries could qualify as failed states.

These are some of the examples from the past decade of how the Holy Triumvirate recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that they can do whatever they want in the world, to whomever they want, for as long as they want, and call it whatever they want, like "humanitarian intervention". The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.

Next on their agenda: the removal of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As with Gaddafi, the ground is being laid with continual news reports - from CNN to al Jazeera - of Assad's alleged barbarity, presented as both uncompromising and unprovoked. After months of this media onslaught who can doubt that what's happening in Syria is yet another of those cherished Arab Spring "popular uprisings" against a "brutal dictator" who must be overthrown? And that the Assad government is overwhelmingly the cause of the violence.

What are the odds? On December 15th 2011, the US Navy simulated the crash of one of its jet into the back bay area of Virginia Beach. Less than 4 months later, on April 6th 2012, a US Navy jet crashed into an apartment complex in the Virginia Beach area.

Coincidence? Are there any coincidences left these days? Or were they all used up on 9/11?

The civilian attorney representing the U.S. soldier accused of murdering 17 Afghan villagers wants to replace the military lawyer assigned to the case after disagreements over how to handle his defense.

"You are fired, sorry, but we have much more experience than you," Seattle-based John Henry Browne, the outspoken lawyer who has been the public face of the defense of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, said in an email to military lawyer Major Thomas Hurley.

The Army assigns defense counsel such as Hurley to soldiers facing court martial but defendants also have the right to hire additional civilian counsel, in this case Browne. Any change in military counsel would have to be approved by the Army.

Browne's associate Emma Scanlan confirmed the decision, saying she and her boss looked forward to working with another lawyer. "We wish Major Hurley the best in his future endeavors," she said by email. Hurley declined to comment.

Browne's team wants to work with a military attorney with death penalty case experience, the email to Hurley from Browne, part of a chain obtained by Reuters, showed. Hurley has more than 60 military cases under his belt, with three involving homicide charges, but none were capital cases.

The office of Homeland Security is warning that apparently innocuous behaviour in passengers could be a sign that they are a terrorist.

A presentation released by the New Jersey office of the agency warns that passengers yawning, developing goose bumps and appearing fidgety could all be potential terrorists.

The presentation titled Terrorism Awareness and Prevention says it aims to educate the public on recognizing potential threats in any environment including at work and in the community as well as how to report them.

It says the 'signs will become particularly evident in a person's eyes, face, neck and body movements,' the department lists some of the following descriptions as warning signs to watch out for.

If an individual has a cold stare, 'trance-like gaze' or wide 'flashbulb eyes,' they may be a terrorist, according to the report.

If they seem to exaggerate yawning in conversation, repeatedly touch their face or ears, or excessively watch a clock or fidget, these may be indicators of a terrorist.

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest - that is, who are not yet convicted - haven't been introduced into a prison population.

Humiliation is the law of the land. When you fall into the clutches of the police, for any reason, or no good reason at all, you can be compelled to bare your private parts before being placed in the general jail population. Five of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled that Constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable searches end at the jailhouse door, even if there is no reason to suspect that the person under arrest is in possession of anything that could be called contraband.

The decision throws out laws against unreasonable strip searches in at least ten states, and overrides federal law enforcement regulations against intrusive searches. The High Court decision also flies in the face of international human rights treaties to which the United States is a signatory. In effect, the Supreme Court majority ruled that the whim of the local jailer trumps any standard of reasonableness. The American Correctional Association, which represents jail guards, is pleased that its members now have the "flexibility" to look into virtually every human orifice that enters their domain, even though the association's own standards currently discourage blanket policies of strip-searching everyone.

"The administration's lawyer chose to use hypothetical political protesters as the bad guys of his argument."

When the U.S. wants to fund, train, arm or otherwise align itself with a Terrorist group or state sponsor of Terror - as it often does - it at least usually has the tact to first remove them from its formal terrorist list (as the U.S. did when it wanted to support Saddam in 1982 and work with Libya in 2006), or it just keeps them off the list altogether despite what former Council on Foreign Relations writer Lionel Beehner described as "mounds of evidence that [they] at one time or another abetted terrorists" (as it has done with close U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, along with the El Salvadoran death squads and Nicaraguan contras armed and funded in the 1980s by the Reagan administration). But according to a new, multi-sourced report from The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the U.S. did not even bother going through those motions when, during the Bush years, it trained the Iranian dissident group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) at a secretive Department of Energy site in Nevada:

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. . . . The M.E.K.'s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration's fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

The US Department of Homeland Security and the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Office have placed an order for 450 million rounds of .40 caliber bullets. The amount of ammo exceeds the amount of people that live in the US and many wonder the motives behind the vast purchase. The contractor Alliant Techsystems is the company supplying the ammunition to DHS and ICE and although the agencies claim these bullets are to be used for target practice many believe they have something else in mind. Jason Bermas, radio host and Filmmaker, joins us for more on the questionable purchase.

Imagine a country in which the very richest people get all the economic gains. They eventually accumulate so much of the nation's total income and wealth that the middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going full speed. Most of the middle class's wages keep falling and their major asset - their home - keeps shrinking in value.

Imagine that the richest people in this country use some of their vast wealth to routinely bribe politicians. They get the politicians to cut their taxes so low there's no money to finance important public investments that the middle class depends on - such as schools and roads, or safety nets such as health care for the elderly and poor.

Imagine further that among the richest of these rich are financiers. These financiers have so much power over the rest of the economy they get average taxpayers to bail them out when their bets in the casino called the stock market go bad. They have so much power they even shred regulations intended to limit their power.

These financiers have so much power they force businesses to lay off millions of workers and to reduce the wages and benefits of millions of others, in order to maximize profits and raise share prices - all of which make the financiers even richer, because they own so many of shares of stock and run the casino.

A renewed focus on security in recent weeks has boosted the reelection campaign of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, but his opponents are now accusing him of cracking down on potential terrorists for election purposes.

Several factors are working in Mr. Sarkozy's favor. First, there were the shootings in the Toulouse area. A self-proclaimed member of al Qaeda shot three soldiers dead in two separate attacks and raided a Jewish school in Toulouse, killing four people.

Mr. Sarkozy immediately put his campaign on hold, becoming the leader of a grieving nation at a time of frantic soul-searching. Meanwhile, his interior minister blanketed the airwaves, assuring radio and TV audiences that the government was in control. The suspected killer, Mohamed Merah, was himself shot dead by French police on March 22 after a dramatic siege at his Toulouse apartment.

About a week later, TV viewers watched over their morning coffee more scenes of police commandos breaking into the homes of suspected terrorists in a series of dawn raids that led to 17 arrests. And on Wednesday morning, it happened again with 10 more arrests.

To be sure, even prior to the terror attacks in and around Toulouse last month, Mr. Sarkozy was recovering in the polls. But the focus on security allowed him to close the gap with his principal rival, François Hollande, in surveys of the first round. Now, some polls show the incumbent has overtaken his challenger, upping the pressure on Mr. Hollande to increase the momentum of his campaign ahead of the first round of voting on April 22.

But Mr. Sarkozy's political opponents are now accusing the government of leaking the planned raids to television crews.