In testimony before a Senate committee Wednesday, the Pentagon's civilian and uniformed chiefs confirmed that they are drawing up war plans against Syria at the request of the Obama White House.

The statements by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey came amid mounting evidence that Washington and its key European allies, working in conjunction with the right-wing monarchical regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are escalating a covert intervention aimed at bringing about Syrian regime change.

Much of the media coverage of Wednesday's hearing focused on the jingoistic intervention of Arizona's Senator John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate. He is demanding US air strikes against Syria, to carve out "safe havens" in which Western-backed armed groups can prepare military strikes against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"How many additional civilian lives would have to be lost in order to convince you that the military measures of the kind we are proposing necessary to end the killing and force Assad to leave power?" McCain demanded of Panetta.

It cannot be denied that the Holocaust theme has served Netanyahu well politically. As many commentators have pointed out, Netanyahu has succeeded in reframing political discourse on the Middle East: this visit to the U.S. was the first in a long time in which the Palestinian issue was completely off the table. Nobody even raised the question of settlement construction or the old question how to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiation table. Instead of being on the defensive on the Palestinian issue, Netanyahu is now on the offensive on Iran. By invoking the allied power's failure to disrupt the Nazis sending millions to concentration camps in 1944, he is reminding the Free World of a horrible mistake, and demanding that this mistake not be repeated. Carlo Strenger - Haaretz

Observing Netanyahu's continuous invocation of the Holocaust and the imminent threat of Iran annihilating the Jewish people, it is passing curious to note that much of the most qualified Israeli military and intelligence community is openly against attacking Iran and neither are most Israelis.

Most Israelis believe that if the United States does not attack Iran's nuclear facilities, Israel must not try to do so alone, according to a Haaretz poll.

AFRICOM: The expansion of US military interests on African soil

'Stop Kony': the Pentagon's effort to get YOU behind its global war machine!

I listened to President Obama's speech to AIPAC Sunday, March 4, 2012, while sitting outside the Washington Convention Center where AIPAC was holding its annual conference. We at OCCUPY AIPAC hooked up a PA system to a computer and listened to the live stream while watching tens of thousands of Israel's American supporters arrive for their yearly intimidation of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. President to fund and protect Israel.

Much of the focus for others writing about the President's pandering speech to AIPAC will be about the Iran nuclear program and, if weaponized, the threat to Israeli and U.S. security, in that order. I will leave the Iran nuclear program to them while I will write about a part of his speech that pertains to a part of the world that I know personally.

But one last comment about Iran-- Obama said the Iranian government denies the Holocaust.

I would say that Iranian government is not the only "denier."

President Obama and his advisors are the "deniers" of incredible Israeli violence and horrific violations of international law.

A Ugandan lady explains that Joseph Kony, the latest media boogeyman, left Uganda six years ago. People in Uganda know that something else is going on here...

This statement on the Middle East was dated 31st January, 1970, and was read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell's death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo.

The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment.

The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler's bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world.

The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to "reason" and has suggested "negotiations". This is the traditional role of the imperial power, because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression. The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate.

Unsconscious looking-glass resentment once made Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff Alexander Haig call British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington a "duplicitous bastard". The sick irony of Haig's petulant blart is that US foreign policy has always been one of deceitful cunning, evil mass-murder and global criminality, notoriously exemplified by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It continues unchanged with plutocrat-catamite Barack Obama.

Svelte houseboy-President Obama rents out his duplicitous-bastard talents to help corrupt Western corporate elites and their allies pauperize their own peoples and plunder vulnerable countries like Libya. Obama sells his crimes as promoting democracy and prosperity. His weird-familiar Hillary Clinton and her depleted-uranium blasted-heath sisters, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, provide back up.

These serial-child-killers try hard to outdo Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who notoriously argued that 500,000 needlessly dead Iraqi children represented "a price worth paying". They work overtime to hubble-bubble, toil-and-trouble virtual pretexts for diplomatic, economic and military aggression against countries the Western political and corporate elites want to control. Once the supreme war crime is consummated, their financial, military-industrial and other corporate carpet-bagger partners move in.

The New York Times' Scott Shane recently reported how Western multinational buzzard-corporations are now swooping on Libya while the country is still in conflict with its cities ruined and tens of thousands dead. Shane writes, "Entrepreneurs are abuzz about the business potential of a country with huge needs and the oil to pay for them, plus the competitive advantage of Libyan gratitude toward the United States and its NATO partners. A week before Colonel Qaddafi's death on Oct. 20, a delegation from 80 French companies arrived in Tripoli to meet officials of the Transitional National Council, the interim government. Last week, the new British defense minister, Philip Hammond, urged British companies to "pack their suitcases" and head to Tripoli. "

'80s sitcom heartthrob turned evangelical Kirk Cameron made his stance on gay rights, and gays in general, crystal clear in an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan last night. Survey says: definitely not pro! After Morgan broached the topic, Cameron deflected by making reference to Christine O'Donnell's gay-marriage-induced walkout of last summer, but the Growing Pains star eventually shared his views:

"I believe marriage was defined by God. Marriage is almost as old as dirt, and it was defined in the Garden between Adam and Eve. One man, one woman for life till death do you part. So I would never attempt to try to redefine marriage. And I don't think anyone else should either. So do I support the idea of gay marriage? No, I don't."

FBI Director Robert Mueller repeatedly defers to Justice Dept. when questioned over killing Americans on U.S. soil.

(Washington) - At a time when states are struggling to reduce bloated prison populations and tight budgets, a private prison management company is offering to buy prisons in exchange for various considerations, including a controversial guarantee that the governments maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years.

The $250 million proposal, circulated by the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America to prison officials in 48 states, has been blasted by some state officials who suggest such a program could pressure criminal justice officials to seek harsher sentences to maintain the contractually required occupancy rates.

"You don't want a prison system operating with the goal of maximizing profits," says Texas state Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and advocate for reducing prison populations through less costly diversion programs. "The only thing worse is that this seeks to take advantage of some states' troubled financial position."