Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim W. Dean, the managing editor and columnist at the Veterans Today from Atlanta, to talk about the rise of al-Qaeda-linked militants in northern Syria which has left Turkey with a new security threat and raised serious speculations about Ankara's policy towards the crisis in the Arab country.

The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Jim Dean, we could look at how Turkey began going against Assad and there was one point of which the government there of Erdogan was supporting the group that is known as Jabhat al-Nusra and the belief that it was the most effective fighting force against Assad, but then you had the US that came and put that on the list of terrorist organizations.

So, it started from there, the beginning of this foreign policy of Turkey to kind of start falling apart. What happened there? What began with Turkey regarding the support that they were giving these groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra?

Dean: Well, it is just a classic mistake that you always find bigger powers often do. They always think that the war is going to be short, so they never worry about long-range consequences and you had, at the beginning, Turkey felt that because they were in NATO, they had protection from being very aggressive because if Syria retaliated, they were providing staging areas for the rebels which legally under international law makes you a combatant and Syria had the right actually to shell or even bomb and attack those staging areas.

But Turkey would have loved to have had that happened because they would have then invoked NATO that a NATO country has been attacked. So initially that was one of the redlines that they were trying to get Assad to cross over and then when that did not work and things started dragging out, they thought they could collapse the government through defections.

The Western media has hidden that they have had 300 to 350 assassinations of government officials which is really a huge number and then that did not collapse and that is when they started to get a little panicky and that is when they started searching all of the hovels of the Middle East for every dirt bag, every gangster, every kidnapping gang they could find and let them know that there was money to be made in Syria and they started organizing jailbreaks to bring in experienced Jihadi fighters and the idea there was very simple and that would divert Assad's forces and take heed of the Free Syrian fighters and they would have a two-flank war which they could collapse Syria that way and that has not worked.

So, now what they have done is they have released a bunch of Frankensteins that even after this Syrian situation is over, you are now going to have these very highly trained gangsters out of work and there is going to be people willing to offer them money, arms and ammunition to go somewhere else and create mayhem. So, what we have created here we are going to be dealing with for at least 25 years.

Report says CIA attacks led to civilian deaths and casualties and says US protocols are 'hurdle to transparency'

A United Nations investigation has so far identified 33 drone strikes around the world that have resulted in civilian casualties and may have violated international humanitarian law.

The report by the UN's special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson QC, calls on the US to declassify information about operations co-ordinated by the CIA and clarify its positon on the legality of unmanned aerial attacks.

Published ahead of a debate on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, at the UN general assembly in New York next Friday, the 22-page document examines incidents in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan and Gaza.

It has been published to coincide with a related report released earlier on Thursday by Professor Christof Heyns, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, which warned that the technology was being misused as a form of "global policing".

Emmerson, who travelled to Islamabad for his investigation, said the Pakistan ministry of foreign affairs has records of as many as 330 drone strikes in the country's north-western tribal areas since 2004. Up to 2,200 people have been killed - of whom at least 400 were civilians - according to the Pakistan government.

Pulitzer Prize winner explains how to fix journalism, saying press should 'fire 90% of editors and promote ones you can't control'

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism - close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" - or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011 [see footnote].

If Seymour Hersh says in a forthcoming book the tale of the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. SEALS is "one big lie" and "not one word of it is true," President Obama may be hard pressed to avoid impeachment.

Over a lifetime of journalism, investigative reporter Hersh has acquired a deserved reputation for honesty, accuracy, reliability, and integrity that is unmatched in his profession and if he says the bin Laden account is a fake, you can take it to the bank.

Hersh told The Guardian, Britain's investigative daily, "Nothing's been done about that story." A Pakistani report on the killing of bin Laden, Hersh says, was published with considerable U.S. input and is "a bullshit report." bin Laden allegedly was killed by a U.S. SEAL team in Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 1, 2011.

Actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is working to change the law so he can mount a 2016 presidential run, according to a New York Post report.

The newspaper quotes unnamed sources who say the actor, who's in New York City to promote his latest movie, "has been talking openly about working on getting the constitutional rules changed."

The source said the 66-year-old Schwarzenegger, a Republican, intends to file the necessary paperwork to challenge the rules.

The U.S. Constitution forbids foreign-born citizens from holding the chief executive position, but some legal experts have said it's not completely clear that courts would enforce the law instead of letting voters decide.

Constitutional amendments require two-thirds majority approval in both the House and the Senate and then must be ratified by at least 38 of the 50 states.

Life is good if you're a member of the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, officially known as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). You can crush the Arab Spring at will. You can hire goons all across dar-al-Islam to advance a sectarian Sunni-Shi'ite divide. You can be deeply implicated in the destruction of Syria. You can treat a significant part of your own population as third-class citizens.

Not only you get away with it; you get rewarded with expensive toys. And in one particular case - Saudi Arabia - even with a two-year seat at the UN Security Council.

Not to mention that the House of Saud expertly gets away with manipulating Islam as the pillar of its "legitimacy". The House of Saud controls the Hajj - which took place this week; an enormous logistical operation that "legitimizes" its role as leader of Sunni Islam, and automatically, the whole Islamic world. Well-informed Muslims though are very much aware of the fallacy - as much as they're aware of how the House of Saud is fast transforming Mecca into a Vegas-style pay-per-prayer luxury resort. Who's profiting? Certainly not the pilgrims.

This week, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced it had notified congress about selling more state-of-the-art heavy metal for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That breaks down into "various munitions and associated equipment, parts, training and logistical support" to Riyadh for US$6.8 billion and to Abu Dhabi for $4 billion.

• The ship, owned by U.S security firm AdvanFort, was stopped on Saturday

• 33 crew men including six Britons, have been detained by Indian police

• They claim that a weapons haul onboard was not properly declared

• But AdvanFort say that the ship was part of an anti-piracy operation

The crew of a U.S-owned ship have been arrested by Indian police accused of entering Indian waters illegally with a stockpile of weapons on board.

The Indian coast guard stopped the ship, which belongs to security firm AdvanFort, on Saturday and detained 33 crew members.

AdvanFort claims that the ship has been supporting an anti-piracy initiative in Asia but Indian authorities say that they found weapons that had not been properly declared.

Three British organizations said Thursday that they had filed a legal challenge in the European Court of Human Rights to the online surveillance programs of the British spy agency the Government Communications Headquarters. The groups are seeking to have the court declare the collection of metadata, including e-mails and social media messages, in secret programs revealed by the American intelligence analyst Edward J. Snowden to be an illegal breach of the right to privacy.

Five-year Low: 13% Say U.S. Heading in Right Direction

The number of U.S. voters who feel the country is heading in the right direction has fallen to the lowest level of the Obama presidency.

Just 13% of Likely U.S. Voters now say the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey for the week ending October 13. That's down from 17% the week before and the lowest finding since the week of October 20-26, 2008, when George W. Bush was still president.

Confidence in the country's direction has fallen 15 points since the government shutdown began two weeks ago and is down from a high of 43% the week before Election Day last fall.

After President Obama assumed office in January 2009, the number of voters who felt the country was heading in the right direction rose to 40% in early May of that year. In 2010 and 2011, confidence fell to the narrow range of 14% to 19%, levels similar to those measured in the final months of the Bush administration. Optimism began easing up again in mid-December 2011.

France's top appeals court on Wednesday upheld a fraud conviction and hundreds of thousands of euros in fines against the Church of Scientology for taking advantage of vulnerable followers.

The Cour de Cassation rejected the organization's request that a 2009 conviction for "organized fraud" be overturned on the grounds it violated religious freedoms.

The group has previously indicated that it will appeal the conviction to the European Court of Human Rights.

The conviction saw Scientology's Celebrity Centre and its bookshop in Paris, the two branches of its French operations, ordered to pay 600,000 euros ($838,452) in fines for preying financially on several followers in the 1990s.