Not that it was really a conspiracy 'theory' but with General Wesley Clark (ret.) now openly admitting "ISIS got started through funding from our friends and allies... to fight to the death against Hezbollah" it appears the 'angel investors' cat is out of the bag. Adding that "they recruited the zealots and religious fundamentalists" Clark says 'we' create "Frankenstein." He is careful not to name names, but we ask (rhetorically of course), which of our (oil-bearing) allies has the biggest bone to pick with Hezbollah (apart from Israel of course)?

Clark on creating Frankenstein...

I never fail to be amazed -- and that's undoubtedly my failing. I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the west? Maybe not.

The occasion for such reflections: machine guns in my hometown. To be specific, several weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton announced the formation of a new 350-officer Special Response Group (SRG). Keep in mind that New York City already has a police force of more than 34,000 -- bigger, that is, than the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya, Laos, Switzerland, or Zimbabwe -- as well as its own "navy," including six submersible drones. Just another drop in an ocean of blue, the SRG will nonetheless be a squad for our times, trained in what Bratton referred to as "advanced disorder control and counterterror." It will also, he announced, be equipped with "extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns -- unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances." And here's where he created a little controversy in my hometown. The squad would, Bratton added, be "designed for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris."

Now, that was an embarrassment in liberal New York. By mixing the recent demonstrations over the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others into the same sentence with the assault on Mumbai and the Charlie Hebdo affair in France, he seemed to be equating civil protest in the Big Apple with acts of terrorism. Perhaps you won't be surprised then that the very next day the police department started walking back the idea that the unit would be toting its machine guns not just to possible terror incidents but to local protests. A day later, Bratton himself walked his comments back even further. ("I may have in my remarks or in your interpretation of my remarks confused you or confused the issue.") Now, it seems there will be two separate units, the SRG for counterterror patrols and a different, assumedly machine-gun-less crew for protests.

Here was what, like the sun going down in the west, shouldn't have shocked me but did: no one thought there was any need to walk back the arming of the New York Police Department with machine guns for whatever reasons. The retention of such weaponry should, of course, have been the last thing to shock any American in 2015. After all, the up-armoring and militarization of the police has been an ongoing phenomenon since 9/11, even if it only received real media attention after the police, looking like an army of occupation, rolled onto the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in response to protests over the killing of Michael Brown.

I am writing this piece on the margins of a crucial negotiation with my country's creditors — a negotiation the result of which may mark a generation, and even prove a turning point for Europe's unfolding experiment with monetary union.

Game theorists analyze negotiations as if they were split-a-pie games involving selfish players. Because I spent many years during my previous life as an academic researching game theory, some commentators rushed to presume that as Greece's new finance minister I was busily devising bluffs, stratagems and outside options, struggling to improve upon a weak hand.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If anything, my game-theory background convinced me that it would be pure folly to think of the current deliberations between Greece and our partners as a bargaining game to be won or lost via bluffs and tactical subterfuge.

The trouble with game theory, as I used to tell my students, is that it takes for granted the players' motives. In poker or blackjack this assumption is unproblematic. But in the current deliberations between our European partners and Greece's new government, the whole point is to forge new motives. To fashion a fresh mind-set that transcends national divides, dissolves the creditor-debtor distinction in favor of a pan-European perspective, and places the common European good above petty politics, dogma that proves toxic if universalized, and an us-versus-them mind-set.

Most of the world's food is grown by small scale farmers. While it is called "traditional" agriculture, it is never static and farmers constantly adapt. This traditional agriculture relies on a varied and changing mix of crops, a polyculture, which provides a balanced diet, is affordable for local farmers and can accommodate changing local conditions.

Today marks one week since 23-year-old Yousef Abu-Salha's younger sisters — Yusor, 21, and Razan, 19 — were murdered by their neighbor. Yousef told The Electronic Intifada over the the phone from North Carolina that he has no doubt their murder was an anti-Muslim hate crime.

The women were executed along with Yusor's husband, 23-year-old Deah Barakat, in the newlywed couple's condominium.

All three were remarkable individuals devoted to helping the disenfranchised at home and refugees abroad. As their social media posts demonstrate, the plight of Syrian and Palestinian refugees were particularly near and dear to their hearts. In fact, Razan and Yusor were of Palestinian descent, which has been largely glossed over in the media coverage of their deaths.

Originally from the port city of Jaffa, the Abu-Salha family was driven out of historic Palestine by Zionist militias in 1948. Yousef's father was subsequently born in Jordan and raised in Kuwait. His mother, whose maiden name is al-Azzeh, was born in al-Bireh, a city in the occupied West Bank.

Yousef and Yusor, both born in Jordan, are dual Jordanian-American citizens. Their parents immigrated to the United States when they were little. The family moved to Virginia beach in 1993, where Razan was born. Soon afterwards, the Abu-Salhas moved to North Carolina, eventually settling down in Raleigh, where the children spent most of their lives.

After learning there had been a shooting, Yousef said his parents immediately suspected that Yusor and Deah, who weren't answering their phones, had been shot by the neighbor they had on so many occasions expressed fear of. The families rushed to the apartment complex for confirmation of their worst fears. But for five grueling hours, police refused to tell them whether their loved ones were shot and if so, whether they were alive or dead.

Chicago, Illinois - Last month, we reported that large numbers of military police officers who were formerly stationed at the infamous torture prisons at Guantánamo Bay were getting jobs as local cops.

Now, a new investigation by the Guardian has revealed that Former Guantánamo Bay interrogator Richard Zuley was already torturing people as a Chicago detective before he was ever stationed at the military prison.

In fact, it was reported that he was one of the most brutal officers in the city during his 25 years with the police department.

During his time on the police force, between 1977 and 2007, Zuley behaved as if he was in a military prison in a war zone. Zuley often used torture to force confessions out of suspects. He has also been accused of shackling inmates to the walls during interrogations and leaving them for hours on end with no food or water. He's been accused of threatening to hurt family members of suspects if they did not confess, threatening suspects with the death penalty, and in some cases he was even caught planting evidence.

He then left and became an interrogator in the military prisons at Guantánamo Bay, where he reportedly carried out "one of the most shocking acts of torture ever conducted."

"I've never seen anyone stoop to those levels. It's unconscionable, from a perspective of a criminal prosecution - or an interrogation, for that matter," prosecutor Stuart Couch told reporters.

Source
Translated by DzhMM, Mikhael, Gideon (thanks guys!!!!)

In the course of life today, we've grown accustomed to using terms whose meaning we might not fully understand. We throw them around casually, not realizing that they lose their meaning and sometimes even come around to stand for their exact opposite. This is precisely why the sense has arisen today in society that there is a need to determine in a clear and understandable manner exactly what is happening on the global chessboard in front of all of our eyes - the Big Story, written online.

Even those people the very furthest from politics are feeling the need for understanding and explaining to themselves the reasons for the things they encounter even just moving through their own lives. Why have prices in stores started to go up? What's the reason for the fact that, quietly and nearly unnoticed, belief in a brighter tomorrow is slipping? When and why did talk about a possible war stop being speculative and distant? These and dozens of other questions have driven millions of yesterday-apolitical citizens to seek answers. They feel the need to find those answers and to construct a new worldview in which what-comes-tomorrow is not simply a lottery ticket, but a predictable and logical continuation of today. Predictable and, hopefully, not frightening.

This atmosphere, unfortunately, is a breeding grounds for attempts to brainwash our citizens and to stuff their heads with ideas which will be devastating to them personally. But this devastation will come hidden within banal attempts stubbornly do good. So let's try to dissect the methods and means of manipulating the people's conscience which we have already started to encounter. And, which will grow in direct proportion to the problems being encountered by our geopolitical opponents.

In an exclusive interview, Alexander Popov and Sergei Khayrulskiy, former Berkut operatives, say the public disturbances at Kiev's 'Maidan' escalated into street fighting - ultimately leading to a coup d'état in Ukraine.

Exactly one year has passed since the public disturbances at Kiev's 'Maidan' escalated into street fighting — ultimately leading to a coup d'état in Ukraine. Members of the Ukrainian 'Berkut' special police force were involved in these events from the beginning. The new Ukrainian authorities now label them as traitors, and blame them for the numerous deaths and injuries that occurred during the riots.

Alexander Popov and Sergei Khayrulskiy are two former Berkut operatives who moved to Russia and enlisted at the Moscow Special Purposes Center of Russia's Ministry of the Interior. They firmly believe that they were doing the right thing back then on the streets of Kiev. "We have nothing to be ashamed of, we did not betray Ukraine. We were doing our duty until the end; we were the ones betrayed by Ukraine," they say.

Why did you decide to move to Russia?

Alexander: Because we're considered criminals now in Ukraine, even though we were simply doing our duty. Not once did we exceed our authority while we were trying to keep the public order, and yet the Ukrainian authorities have initiated five criminal cases against us.

Sergei: Some Berkut operatives in Ukraine have already been sentenced to 23 or 24 years in prison. Men who were just protecting law and order in Kiev got longer sentences than some convicted murderers.

There are increasingly signs that Merkel and Hollande operated behind the backs of the Americans, when they traveled to Minsk last week, in an attempt to reach an agreement between the warring factions. During a closed-door meeting at the Munich Security Summit, Nuland fumed that the Europeans needed to be fought:

Der Spiegel described a closed-door meeting, apparently reported on anonymously both to it and to the Bild newspaper, held by Assistant Secretary of State Nuland at the Munich Security Conference one week ago, with "perhaps two dozen U.S. diplomats and Senators." There Nuland gave instructions to "fight against the Europeans" on the issue of arming Ukraine to fight Russia. She was described as "bitterly" referring to the German Chancellor's and French President Hollande's meeting with Russian President Putin as "Merkel's Moscow junk," and "Moscow bullshit," and she welcomed a Senator's calling German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen the "Defeatism Minister."

The leader of ISIS jihadist group and self-proclaimed "caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, spent nearly a year in US custody in Iraq in 2004 as a "civilian detainee," declassified military documents have revealed.

The files were obtained by Business Insider through a Freedom of Information Act request, revealing new details about the mysterious jihadist leader. The Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL ) chief was identified by his birth name, Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Al Badry, in the detainee information records, viewed by the website.

The documents helped determine the time, spent by Baghdadi in US custody, more precisely as there had previously been conflicting reports on the issue.

According to the records, his "capture date" was February 4, 2004, with the detention taking place in Fallujah in central Iraq. Baghdadi was then held in several prison facilities in the country, including Camp Bucca and Camp Adder, with the date of his "release in place" being December 8, the same year.

The papers list him as a "civilian detainee," meaning that he was not considered a member of any militant group at that time, but was still held for security reasons.