The U.S. strategy, devised by Zbigniew Brzezinski, using support for Islamist obscurantism to fight both progressive Muslim policies and against Russia, sparked an alliance to resist it. Now, China, Russia, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah are forced to stick together to survive. Ultimately observed André Charny, the trap has sprung on those who set it.

Islam against Islam ...

Iran, Syria and Lebanon thanks to Hezbollah and its allies, considered by Westerners for years to be a source of evil because of their support for what they call "terrorism" have not finished being talked about. After individual treatment for each of them according to political divisions in the region, an axis has set itself up that starts at the gates of Russia and China to end at those of Tel Aviv.

This axis is rooted in Western politicies reserved for this region. The United States, followed by major Western countries, have declared how its economic interests must be preserved at all costs. This biased policy has generated tensions over the years, the source of armed conflicts and street fights that incessantly feed the televised news.

This policy, enshrined for some time, was implemented with the support of local stakeholders. However, an acceleration took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall, lived as an historical event, which it obviously was, but that marked the advent of an aggressive and contemptuous strategy toward the Middle East.

This undated file image posted on a militant website on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2014 shows fighters from the al-Qaida linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) marching in Raqqa, Syria. Once a vibrant, mixed city considered a bastion of support for President Bashar Assad, the eastern city of Raqqa is now a shell of its former life, transformed by al-Qaida militants into the nucleus of the terror group's version of an Islamic caliphate they hope one day to establish in Syria and Iraq. In rare interviews with The Associated Press, residents and activists in Raqqa describe a city where fear prevails, music has been banned, Christians have to pay religious tax in return for protection and face-veiled women and pistol-wielding men in jihadi uniforms patrol the streets.

Once a vibrant, religiously mixed community, Syria's eastern city of Raqqa is now a shell of its former self, terrorized by hard-line militants who have turned it into the nucleus of their vision for the Islamic caliphate they hope one day to establish in Syria and Iraq.

Today it is not so much that people believe our CEOs and politicians act without empathy or compassion regarding the well-being of average citizens, especially towards those in dire poverty, but rather whether or not our entire system is psychologically deranged. Psychopathology has become fully institutionalized as a legitimate way of doing business and making policy decisions. The Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, which ruled that corporations and banks are "persons," was a further step infecting our entire politics and society with a serious mental disorder that has steadily contributed to the US's widening inequality gap, class struggle, and Americans' loss of democracy and freedom of speech.

Joel Bakan is an internationally recognized legal scholar at the University of British Columbia specializing in Constitutional and economic law. The award-winning documentary film The Corporation was based upon his bestseller The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. When I last spoke with Professor Bakan, I asked him about the kind of corporate personality the Supreme Court ruled in favor of. "The corporation," he said, "is legally programmed to always serve its own interests. Its directors and managers have a legal obligation always to put the financial interests of shareholders above all other interests. It breaks the law with impunity if it can get away with it."

The problem lies less in the fact that Wall Street and multinational presidents and CEOs are psychopaths. Rather according to Bakan, "we've created an institution that attracts psychopaths and that incentivizes psychopathic behavior." If we can imagine putting JP Morgan or Monsanto on the shrink's couch, analyze the way these firms think and function, how they are programmed, they would be diagnosed as psychopathic. Bakan believes this is the current state of private industry. A bank's collective control and power is unfathomable to the average person. Executives believe they are untouchable and their astronomical wealth enables them to act with complete freedom and without regard for the consequences of their actions.

Dr. Bayer takes these firms' socio-political dominance further. "Corporations existentially are like feudal fiefdoms," he said. "They are countries with regulations and laws unto their selves. International corporations can commit crimes and do certain things, and then relocate their headquarters and be off the hook in terms of legality, extradition, and penalty."

Sarah Palin has offered unsolicited advice to US President Barack Obama on containing Russian aggression, saying "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke".

The Republican former vice presidential candidate used a predominantly crass tone throughout her appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

But she hit home by attacking what she called a feckless Obama foreign policy that she said has helped embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Failing to show peace through strength has allowed some "very, very, very bad dudes (to) gain ground", said Palin, who remains a darling of the far-right.

Obama "would gut our arsenal while he allows others - enemies - to enrich theirs", she said.

"Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke." The comments follow Russia's invasion of neighbouring Ukraine last month, action which sent tensions soaring and US-Russia relations to perhaps their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

In an ironic turn, the congressional authorities who have staunchly defended the National Security Agency's widespread spying operations are now crying foul after having been spied on by another branch of U.S. intelligence.

News reporting on Tuesday revealed that the Inspector General's office, the agency tasked with CIA oversight, has asked the Department of Justice to investigate claims that the spy agency monitored computers used by Senate aides preparing what is believed to be a "searing indictment" on the CIA's secret detention and interrogation program.

In what McClatchy news characterized as an "unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers," members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are saying the alleged CIA spying violates provisions of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

McClatchy continues:

The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers - in possible violation of an agreement against doing so - that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge.

In response to the news, Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, and independent journalist Glenn Greenwald noted the irony of the investigation:

Lawmakers who sanctioned unlawful #NSA spying were target of unlawful #CIA spying. http://t.co/a8lfqNf75h #torture #SSCI

- Jameel Jaffer (@JameelJaffer) March 5, 2014

Ironic: Senate Intel Comm - which endorses vast NSA spying on ordinary citizens - gets angry when they're spied on http://t.co/zHnWQcD9Rr

- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 5, 2014

Henry A. Kissinger was Secretary of State and a mass murderer from 1973 to 1977.

Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.

Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side's outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them.

Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia's borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.

The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709 , were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet - Russia's means of projecting power in the Mediterranean - is based by long-term lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.

A judge has denied the federal government's request to allow the National Security Agency to keep telephone metadata past the current five-year maximum in order to preserve the information for use in pending lawsuits.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Reggie Walton said the government hadn't shown a strong enough need to keep the data, especially given the privacy concerns raised by such a move.

"The amended procedures would further infringe on the privacy interests of United States persons whose telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government to aid in national security investigations," Walton wrote in a 12-page order posted here. "The government seeks to retain these records, not for national security reasons, but because some of them may be relevant in civil litigation in which the destruction of those very same records is being requested. However, the civil plaintiffs potentially interested in preserving the...metadata have expressed no desire to acquire the records."

"This Court is reluctant to take any action that could impede the proper adjudication of the identified civil suits, and understands why the government would proceed with caution in connection with records potentially relevant to those matters," Walton continued. "However, the Court cannot make the finding required to grant the motion based on the record before it."

Last month, the Justice Department made the request to keep the data indefinitely. A spokesman for the department had no immediate comment Friday.

Their names are Jawhar Nasser Jawhar, 19, and Adam Abd al-Raouf Halabiya, 17. They were once soccer players in the West Bank. Now they are never going to play sports again. Jawhar and Adam were on their way home from a training session in the Faisal al-Husseini Stadium on January 31 when Israeli forces fired upon them as they approached a checkpoint. After being shot repeatedly, they were mauled by checkpoint dogs and then beaten. Ten bullets were put into Jawhar's feet. Adam took one bullet in each foot. After being transferred from a hospital in Ramallah to King Hussein Medical Center in Amman, they received the news that soccer would no longer be a part of their futures. (Israel's border patrol maintains that the two young men were about to throw a bomb.)

This is only the latest instance of the targeting of Palestinian soccer players by the Israeli army and security forces. Death, injury or imprisonment has been a reality for several members of the Palestinian national team over the last five years. Just imagine if members of Spain's top-flight World Cup team had been jailed, shot or killed by another country and imagine the international media outrage that would ensue. Imagine if prospective youth players for Brazil were shot in the feet by the military of another nation. But, tragically, these events along the checkpoints have received little attention on the sports page or beyond.

Much has been written about the psychological effect this kind of targeting has on the occupied territories. Sports represent escape, joy and community, and the Palestinian national soccer team, for a people without a recognized nation, is a source of tremendous pride. To attack the players is to attack the hope that the national team will ever truly have a home.

The Palestinian national football team, which formed in 1998, is currently ranked 144th in the world by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). They have never been higher than 115th. As Chairman of the Palestinian Football Association Jibril al-Rajoub commented bluntly, the problems are rooted in "the occupation's insistence on destroying Palestinian sport."

With the Obama administration grappling with a crisis in Ukraine, former United Nations ambassador John Bolton took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday and declared that the country's "biggest national-security problem is Barack Obama."

Bolton honed in on the terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, which he described as paradigm of President Obama's foreign-policy failures because the president "has done nothing to avenge Chris Stevens's death."

"That is a terrible lesson for our adversaries," Bolton said. "Under Barack Obama you can murder his personal representative and get away scot-free."

He also warned that the matter will come back to haunt Hillary Clinton if, as most suspect, she launches a presidential bid in 2016. "We will be happy to tell Hillary Clinton in unmistakable terms, 'We know what difference it makes, even if you don't,'" he said.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday cited treaty violations by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a reason that the U.S. should consider "military options" in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

"I worry when we begin to address a crisis, the first thing we do is we take options off the table," Cheney told CBS host Charlie Rose. "I don't think the administration should do that."

"In a sense, [the Obama administration said] no military," he continued. "He seemed to operate that way most of the time. There are military options that don't involve putting troops on the ground in Crimea. We could go back and reinstate the ballistic missile defense program."

Cheney pointed out that Putin had violated commitments "like the Budapest Memorandum, when Russia, the U.S. and Britain guaranteed the borders of Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons. Very important. And Putin is just blowing that off."