While the Western media portray the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant as a group of jihadists reciting the Qur'an, the ISIL has started the oil war in Iraq. With the help of Israel, it has cut off Syria's supply and guaranteed the theft of oil from Kirkuk by the local government of Kurdistan. The sale will be assured by Aramco who will camouflage this diversion as increased "Saudi" production.

For the Atlanticist press, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). which has just invaded the north and west of Iraq. is a group of jihadists led by their faith, the Koran in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. For those who have suffered their abuses, including in Syria, it is a private army of mercenaries, composed from the four corners of the Earth and managed by American, French and Saudi officers - dividing the region to allow easier control by the colonial powers.

Germany has decided its gold is safe in American hands.

Surging mistrust of the euro during Europe's debt crisis fed a campaign to bring Germany's entire $141 billion gold reserve home from New York and London. Now, after politics shifted in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition, the government has concluded that stashing half its bullion abroad is prudent after all.

"The Americans are taking good care of our gold," Norbert Barthle, the budget spokesman for Merkel's Christian Democratic bloc in parliament, said in an interview. "Objectively, there's absolutely no reason for mistrust."

Ending talk of repatriating the world's second-biggest gold reserves removes a potential irritant in U.S.-German relations. It's also a rebuff to critics including the anti-euro Alternative for Germany party, which says all the gold should return to Frankfurt so it can't be impounded to blackmail Germany into keeping the currency union together.

At some point in time, the DHS and members of its Joint Terrorism Task Force must have viewed Joe Dante's John Carpenter's cult classic They Live and saw in it a blueprint for future actions. If you're not familiar with the premise, an average guy construction worker is given a pair of sunglasses that reveal the world for what it actually is -- controlled by aliens who pacify the populace by subliminally pushing them to obey, conform and consume.
Remember a few weeks back when we discussed the DHS Fusion Centers' use of powerful investigative tools like Twitter searches and The Google to investigate such harmful Occupy Wall Street-related activities like not participating in Black Friday sales or cutting up people's credit cards (at their request). Anti-consumerist is anti-government, apparently. It makes for a great conspiracy theory -- one that implies the government is actually run by corporations.

It doesn't seem to be much of a "theory," though. Given the number of active revolving doors that accomodate lobbyists, representatives and board members every time someone shouts "Change places!" there's little evidence out there to dispel this perception. The business of government is apparently business. The FBI worked with banks and Wall Street itself to ferret out certain Occupy protesters, going so far as to keep an assassination plot against Occupy leaders under wraps.

The Fusion Centers' ability to treat nearly every submission with complete credulity has only added to the mismanaged mess, which resulted in the agency's underlings breathlessly exchanging Facebook links to planned disruptions like protests of irresponsible lending processes and the singing of Christmas carols at a "high-profile, undisclosed location."

United States President Barack Obama has landed himself a last-place spot according to a new poll that measured the favorable ratings of the five living former and current American commanders-in-chief.

Results from a Gallup poll released over the weekend suggest that Bill Clinton is the living US president viewed in the most positive light, earning himself a favorable rating of 64 percent.

According to the poll, 63 percent of Americans think favorably of former president George H.W. Bush, who beat out his son George W. Bush by 10 whole percentage points. Among the living former US presidents, Jimmy Carter came in last place with a 52 percent favorable rating over 32 percent unfavorable and 16 percent with no opinion.

The current commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, was considered favorable by only 47 percent of the Americans polled by Gallup. Obama is also the only president who's unfavorable rating - 52 percent - surpassed the proportion of those who think positively of him, earning himself a net-negative reading.

On the Gallup website, however, writers there say the implications of the latest survey aren't anything to be taken too seriously.

"Americans are largely forgiving of former presidents, as each of the four living ex-presidents had times in office when they had job approval ratings below 40 percent, if not 30 percent," pollsters write on the Gallup site.

"Obama's current favorable ratings are the worst of his presidency, and they are worse than former presidents' ratings. No matter how popular or unpopular he is when he leaves office in a little more than two years, Americans' views of Obama personally should improve once he becomes a former president."

The results also clash to a degree with a separate survey taken last November by Gallup in which pollsters asked for Americans to describe the last 11 presidents as leading administrations that were outstanding, average or poor. According to the results of that poll, 28 percent of Americans said Pres. Obama will go down in history as being an "outstanding/above average" president, coming in fifth place behind Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and Eisenhower. According to that survey, Americans believed they would go on to remember the Obama administration as being more successful than that of Carter and both Bush presidents.

The company behind the backscatter imaging technology rampant in American airports is back with a new invention: a handheld X-ray "gun" capable of seeing through various types of material.

According to national security website Defense One, the device has been dubbed the "Mini Z" portable scanner and it's capable of capturing transparent images and sending them to other devices, such as laptops or tablets. The scanner's manufacturer, American Science and Engineering (AS&E), is currently offering the device to the US military, law enforcement agencies and border patrol officials.

A staggering crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border has left federal officials scrambling to provide basic human necessities to thousands of undocumented immigrants - most of them unaccompanied children - who have flowed over the divide.

The office of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who represents the district including the southern border town of Laredo, provided Business Insider with photos showing just how bad the conditions are at one federal facility where some of these immigrants are being held.

Cuellar's office said the photos were taken recently in a Customs and Border Protection facility in south Texas. The congressman's office declined to identify the exact source or location of the photos to protect the source's identity.

Overall, the pictures show some of the stark challenges facing immigrants as well as federal officials attempting to address the flood of people streaming over the border. In many cases, the undocumented immigrants are crammed into rooms with nowhere to sleep or even sit. And in at least one case (the first photo below), one of the immigrants has rashes that Cuellar's office said were reported to be either scabies or chickenpox.

Although the U.S. State Department recently singled out Russia by name to criticize its law prohibiting homosexual propaganda aimed at youth, the same State Department refused to comment on Saudi Arabia where homosexual conduct is punishable by death.

On Oct. 24, Uzra Zeya, the acting assistant secretary of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, spoke at the ILGA-Europe annual conference in Zagrab, Croatia. ILGA is the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. In her remarks, Secretary Zeya said that promotion of human rights, including those for LGBT people, is a "foreign policy priority" of the United States.

Zeya praised new hate crimes legislation in Europe and then said, "But the United States remains extremely concerned about negative trends in a number of countries. The anti-gay propaganda law in Russia and the proposed law to strip gay parents of their parental rights are alarming."

"Laws, even when it is unclear how they will be enforced, are incredibly important," she said. "They are a statement of a country's values and they have a teaching effect. Laws that validate discrimination, as we have seen in Russia, can lead to an increase in violence and harassment. This is particularly true when authorities don't act to protect all of their citizens and when they fail to investigate and prosecute crimes committed by or against particular groups."

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

No, it's an International Space Station. But if Russia gets its way, it's going to be off-limits to the United States soon.

For weeks now, there have been rumblings about Russia wanting to ban the United States from using the ISS while the two countries wrangled over Ukraine. While that would probably violate international law, it may be feasible from a practical perspective. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin argued that "the Russian segment [of the ISS] can exist independently from the American one. The U.S. one cannot."

Since the United States terminated its space shuttle program, we've depended on Russian rockets to carry U.S. astronauts to the ISS. NASA has a contract to continue these flights through 2016 -- at $70 million a pop. After that, Russia would be within its rights to deny U.S. astronauts seats on Soyuz rockets. If America wants to send astronauts up after the contract expires, joked Rogozin: "I propose that the United States delivers its astronauts to the ISS with the help of a trampoline."

It never just rains, it pours (even in space)

An even more immediate problem facing America is Russia's threat to cut off access to the RD-180 rocket engines that the United Launch Alliance (the joint venture between Boeing (NYSE: BA ) and Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT ) ) uses in its Atlas V rockets. These are the big beasts that carry U.S. military satellites into space. They're critical to national security. But we've only got enough RD-180s stockpiled to keep ULA supplied for about another 22 months.

Russian President Vladimir Putin voiced support for a cease-fire in Ukraine declared by his counterpart, calling for all sides to halt military activities even as he put more than 65,000 troops on combat alert.

Putin said that while he supports the week-long truce that President Petro Poroshenko announced on June 20, the move shouldn't be an ultimatum to militia groups and won't be "viable or realistic" without "constructive steps" to start negotiations with rebel leaders in southeast regions.

The statement, issued late yesterday by the Kremlin, came after the Defense Ministry in Moscow announced snap military drills across central Russia, the biggest since the country annexed Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March. Poroshenko, in office two weeks, is seeking to quell violence in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions that's left hundreds dead.

The U.S., which accuses Russia of aiding the pro-Russian separatists, last week imposed sanctions on people linked to the insurgency, adding to penalties announced more than a month ago. U.S. and European officials have warned that more painful penalties affecting Russia's access to financial markets, technology and military hardware may come as early as this week if Putin fails to take measures to curb tensions.

Today, after more than a million dead and several millions exiled, as the "too extreme for al-Qaeda" ISIL is grabbing more and more of Iraq, the question once again arises:

Why did George Bush and Tony Blair drag us into the Iraq quagmire?

They told us it was about Saddam's WMD. But that was a preposterous lie. Bush even camped it up about looking for WMD under his desk. He thought it was fabulously hilarious that anyone had ever believed in Iraqi WMD.

So what was the real reason for the Iraq war?

Some say oil. But that seems dubious, since big oil lobbied hard against the Iraq invasion, fearing it would destabilize their business.

Others say Israel. That makes more sense; the Zionist lobby was the main force pushing for war in Iraq. But how can a sh*tty little country like Israel force a superpower to do its bidding?

One way is by blackmailing politicians. And in Bush and Blair, they had plenty of opportunity.