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Four more years of war

Stephen Lendman
Activist Post
Mon, 24 Dec 2012 18:37 UTC
war statue of liberty graphic lrg
Expect Obama to prioritize advancing America's imperium. He did aggressively in term one. New wars are planned. Current ones won't end. Proxy ones continue. So does increasing America's global military footprint.

Fiscal cliff hype is about greater force-fed austerity to free up more funds for America's war machine. Waging them isn't cheap. Profiteers depend on wasteful spending to boost bottom line performance.

It pays to have friends in high places. They assure all the billions wanted. Social America is being sacrificed to provide them.

Over the next decade, trillions of dollars will shift from peoples needs to war making, generous corporate handouts, tax breaks for the rich, and hardened homeland repression against nonbelievers.

At the same time, deficits will keep rising exponentially. Hype about urgently cutting them is fake. Post-9/11 has been the worst of times. Expect more of the same on steroids ahead.

Conditions today are the most perilous in world history. Global war is possible. The threat is real and ominous. Open discussion is suppressed. Media scoundrels won't touch it.

Nor do they explain Project Censored's top Censored 2013 story: "Signs of an Emerging Police State." It began pre-9/11, accelerated under Bush, then Obama exceeded his extremism.
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Chess

EU likely to step up pressure on Israel in 2013, Foreign Ministry report says

Barak Ravid
Haaretz
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:11 UTC
Image
© Associated Press
Luxembourg's FM Jean Asselborn, French FM Laurent Fabius and German FM Guido Westerwelle in Luxembourg on Monday Oct. 15, 2012.
Report states that the EU has become disenchanted with the diplomatic process in its traditional format - direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians - because they doubt its ability to lead to a solution.

The European Union will step up efforts to pressure Israel and the Palestinians into an agreement in 2013, an internal Foreign Ministry document predicts.

The report, which was compiled following last month's UN vote to recognize Palestine as a nonmember observer state and subsequent European protests over Israel's approval of new construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, states that the Europeans may try to promote the establishment of an actual Palestinian state independent of negotiations with Israel.

Foreign Ministry officials this week began discussing an evaluation to be presented to the new government after the January 22 election. The feeling in the ministry is that Israel's status has deteriorated badly over the past four years, particularly in the European Union. Ministry officials attribute the decline to the lack of progress in the peace process and Israel's response to the Palestinians' UN bid, particularly the wave of settlement construction.
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Target

The Final Battle

Chris Hedges
Truthdig.com
Tue, 25 Dec 2012 17:23 UTC
Image

Destination FEMA camps?
Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights - ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution - will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, pushed through the Senate an amendment to the 2013 version of the NDAA. The amendment, although deeply flawed, at least made a symbolic attempt to restore the right to due process and trial by jury. A House-Senate conference committee led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., however, removed the amendment from the bill last week.

"I was saddened and disappointed that we could not take a step forward to ensure at the very least American citizens and legal residents could not be held in detention without charge or trial," Feinstein said in a statement issued by her office. "To me that was a no-brainer."
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Bullseye

A word of advice about the Middle East - we've reached the 'tipping point' with cliches

Robert Fisk
The Independent, UK
Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:58 UTC
Image

Good terrorists at work
You've got to be careful when Syria's rebels are perpetually "closing in"

Remember the days when we thought Egypt's path to democracy was a done deal? Western-trained Mohamed Morsi had invited the people to come and meet him in Hosni Mubarak's former presidential palace, the old military toffs in the "Supreme Council of the Armed Forces" had been pensioned off and the International Monetary Fund was waiting to bestow some of those cruel deprivations upon Egypt that would ready it for our financial benevolence. How happy the Middle East optimists were by mid-2012.

Next door, Libya produced a victory for nice, pro-Western secularist Mahmoud Jibril, promising freedom, stability, a new home for the West in one of the Arab world's most fecund oil producers. It was a place where even US diplomats could wander around virtually unprotected.

Tunisia may have an Islamist party running its government, but it was a "moderate" administration - in other words, we thought it would do what we wanted - while the Saudis and the Bahraini autocracy, with the purse-lipped support of Messrs Obama and Cameron, quietly suppressed what was left of the Shia uprising which threatened to remind us all that democracy was not really welcome among the wealthiest Arab states. Democracy was for the poor.
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Radar

China on Alert After Japan Scrambles Jets over E. China Sea


VOA News
Tue, 25 Dec 2012 15:21 UTC
China says it is on alert after Japan dispatched fighter jets over the East China Sea.

Japanese media report Japan sent F15 fighter aircraft after detecting a Chinese marine surveillance plane in disputed airspace near contested islands in the East China Sea.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters Tuesday Beijing will pay close attention to Japan's decision to dispatch fighter jets. She said China's surveillance plane was conducting routine patrols at the time.
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Vader

Israel continues West Bank expansion steps

Batsheva Sobelman
LA Times
Tue, 25 Dec 2012 15:07 UTC
The Jerusalem district planning committee has granted approval to build another 1,200 housing units in Gilo, expanding the Jewish neighborhood built on Jerusalem-area land seized by Israel in 1967.

It was the latest in a series of similar development decisions that have followed the United Nations vote in November granting the Palestinian Authority its request for non-member observer state status. Planning committee member Moshe Montag told Israel Radio on Tuesday that the plan had been submitted more than a year ago but that procedures had been blocked for diplomatic reasons -- until now.

"Unfortunately, it takes a drama, terror attack or U.N. vote to release construction in Jerusalem, our capital, and this is absurd," Montag said.
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Pharoah

Egypt's New Pharaoh

Chris Hedges
Truthdig
Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:05 UTC
Image
© Mr. Fish
When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran after 14 years in exile on Feb. 1, 1979, he set out to destroy the secular opposition forces, including the Communist Party of Iran, which had been instrumental in bringing down the shah. Khomeini's declaration of an Islamic government, supported by referendum, saw him rewrite the constitution, close opposition newspapers and ban opposition groups including the National Democratic Front and the Muslim People's Republican Party. Dissidents who had spent years inside Iran's notoriously brutal prison system under the shah were incarcerated once again by the new regime. Some returned to their cells to be greeted by their old jailers, who had offered their services to the new regime.

This is what is under way in Egypt. It is the story of most revolutions. The moderates, who are crucial to winning the support of the masses and many outside the country, become an impediment to the consolidation of autocratic power. Liberal democrats, intellectuals, the middle class, secularists and religious minorities including Coptic Christians were always seen by President Mohamed Morsi and his Freedom and Justice Party - Egypt's de facto political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood - as "useful idiots." These forces were essential to building a broad movement to topple the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. They permitted Western journalists to paint the opposition in their own image. But now they are a hindrance to single-party rule and are being crushed.
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Che Guevara

Eight killed in Yemen clashes; attacks in capital target officers

Mohammed Ghobari
Reuters
Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:59 UTC
At least six militants and two soldiers w ere killed in Yemen on Tuesday in fighting near a damaged oil pipeline east of the capital Sanaa, a defence ministry official and residents said.

Separately, gunmen and bombers targeted three senior military officers and the transport minister in a series of attacks in the capital Sanaa.

In one incident, two gunmen riding a motorbike shot dead Brigadier Fadel Mohammed Ali, an adviser to the minister of defence, outside the ministry's offices in Sanaa, a police source said. Further details were not immediately available.
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Che Guevara

Life in Occupied Palestine, a video presentation

Anna Baltzer
Vimeo
Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:23 UTC
Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American with the IWPS, documents the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israelis.
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MIB

FBI questions Tunisian man over Benghazi consulate attack


RT
Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Agence France-Presse
This file photo taken on September 11, 2012 shows a vehicle and the surrounding area engulfed in flames after it was set on fire inside the US mission compound in Benghazi.
A Tunisian man has been questioned by the FBI in connection with the September 11 bombing of the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four diplomats. After months of failed attempts, he was examined as a "witness" - without legal counsel.

­Ali Harzi was extradited to Tunisia after being arrested in Turkey in October, under strong suspicion of involvement in the terrorist attack in which US Ambassador Christopher Stephens was killed.

He had since refused to be questioned by the FBI without the presence of his lawyer.

"They wanted to interrogate him as a witness, but he has refused," his lawyer Abdelbasset Ben Mbarek explained to AFP, adding that authorities attempted to question him "in secret" without his lawyers.

Fadhel Saihi, an advisor to the Tunisian Justice Ministry, told AFP that Tunisian authorities are cooperating with the US investigation.

However delays with the questioning of Hazri have led to calls for sanctions in the U.S.

In early December Republican representative Frank Wolf urged Congress and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to cut off financial aid to Tunisia until it allowed the FBI to interview Hazri. Tunisia has received over $320 million in US aid since January 2011.

After months of wrangling, the Tunisian court allowed three FBI agents to question Hazri before a judge and through a Moroccan interpreter. Hazri's legal counsel was not allowed to be present, on the basis that he was being questioned as a "witness" and not a defendant.

Comment: Petraeus, Allen, Gaouette, Ham: The Benghazi Story The Media Isn't Telling You

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