Syria will not use any chemical or biological weapons against its own people. The Obama Administration and company are just recycling the same lines that were used months earlier against Damascus.

These statements are disingenuous and hollow. They can easily be deconstructed as rhetoric. All we need to do it look at recent history.

In 2011, were not similar charges put forward against another Arab country? Were they not claiming that the late Muammar Qaddafi would use chemical weapons against his own population? Was it not claimed even earlier that Qaddafi and the Libyan military had brought in black-skinned African mercenaries to kill Libyan citizens? Or that Libyan jets were killing Libyan protesters? What happened to the genocide in Benghazi? Now there is nothing but silence and lost memories. Claims were made, morality and responsibility were invoked, and then a rising Arab country was bombarded. An engine of economic progress in Africa was halted in its tracks overnight and an entire society robbed.

There was also the textbook case of Iraq even before the lies about the Libyan Jamahiriya. Did not the Bush Jr. Administration, Tony Blair, and their circle of war criminals-in-office not lie to the entire international community and say that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program and weapons of mass destruction in 2003? What happened to those WMDs? This is not something that can easily be scoffed at. More than one million Iraqis died over the lies conjured by the Anglo-American duo. Not to mention the ecological damage and the intellectual genocide perpetrated against Iraq's intelligentsia and professional class.

Let us be clear, Syria threatened to use chemical weapons against any invading force on July 23, 2012. Firstly, the statement was made in a defensive context. Secondly, it was directed against military threats. This is very different from planning on using chemical weapons against your own citizens, specifically civilians.

Due to its close proximity to Washington DC, in recent years Maryland has become one of the worst police states in the country.

Last month, we reported on a botched FBI raid in Maryland, where unarmed teenagers were shot at simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then, just the other day in Baltimore, an activist and blogger had his house surrounded by police over a trumped-up charge that was over 3 years old.

Now, in a more rural area of Maryland, a man named Terry Porter became the target of a massive manhunt involving FBI and state police after being reported to be a "survivalist" with a "collection of guns" who outlined his anger over the presidential reelection to an undercover officer.

This situation apparently stemmed from an anonymous tip from someone who reported Terry to the police because he owned guns and invested in a bomb shelter.

Communist East Germany allowed Western drug companies to use its medical patients as unwitting guinea pigs for tests with untried pharmaceuticals in return for hundreds of thousands in hard currency, a television documentary by Germany's ARD television channel has revealed.

The disturbing disclosures about the former communist state's patients-for-cash scheme comes only weeks after an admission by the Swedish furniture giant Ikea that East German political prisoners were used to make its products before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

The ARD documentary Tests and the Dead, which was aired for the first time this week, sheds light on other dubious practices East Germany resorted to in an attempt to sustain its failing economy.

The film reveals how Western pharmaceutical companies deliberately turned to financially strapped Eastern Bloc countries in their search for human guinea pigs after the 1960s Thalidomide scandal, which had suddenly obliged them to carry out rigorous tests on their products before they could be sold.

The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. In an interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this information against anyone.

Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the history of the National Security Agency, resigned in 2001. He claimed he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the Constitution, such as how the FBI engages in widespread and pervasive surveillance through powerful devices called 'Naris.'

This year, Binney received the Callaway award, an annual prize that recognizes those who champion constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.

A series of events just from this week makes clear who is actually violating the consensus of the international community

The phrase "rogue nation" is one of the terms that get tossed around often in political discourse without much effort devoted to its actual meaning. Let's try to apply this term to a series of events just from the last week, beginning with this one:

"The 193-nation UN General Assembly on Thursday overwhelmingly approved the de facto recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state . . . . There were 138 votes in favor, nine against and 41 abstentions. . . . .The assembly approved the upgrade despite threats by the United States and Israel to punish the Palestinians by withholding funds for the West Bank government.. . . .The Czech Republic was unique in Europe, joining the United States, Israel, Canada, Panama and tiny Pacific Island states likes Nauru, Palau and Micronesia in voting against the move."

In response, Israel announced it would "punish" the Palestinians for the UN vote by approving more settlements (which virtually the entire world deems illegal) and withholding tax revenue that was to pay employees of the Palestinian Authority; that behavior by Israel resulted in this:

"Australia and Brazil summoned their Israeli ambassadors on Tuesday to protest against Israel's decision to expand Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and withhold tax revenue from the Palestinian Authority.

"The moves followed similar actions in Europe including Spain, France, Britain, Sweden and Denmark in the wake of the Palestinians winning de facto UN recognition of statehood."

US President Barack Obama's renewed warning against Syria this week, that any use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces is a red line triggering direct military assault on the country, can be seen as the Western powers moving towards their endgame of "regime change."

Washington first raised the specter of Syrian chemical weapons several months ago and warned then that it would be forced to act militarily in order to "secure" such alleged stockpiles.

Now the American president and his officials are rekindling fears of this contingency, with the added alleged development that the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad has become so desperate to survive that it is preparing to mobilize chemical warheads.

Speaking in Washington, Obama upbraided the Syria government that "the world is watching" and that there would be "consequences" for any such deployment.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton echoed the warning and described the use of these weapons as "a red line." Tellingly, she added that if there is "any evidence" that the Syrian military had begun to use chemical warheads then "we are certainly planning to take action."

Members of the United Nation's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) have agreed to work towards implementing a standard for the Internet that would allow for eavesdropping on a worldwide scale.

At a conference in Dubai this week, the ITU members decided to adopt the Y.2770 standard for deep packet inspection, a top-secret proposal by way of China that will allow telecom companies across the world to more easily dig through data passed across the Web.

According to the UN, implementing deep-packet inspection, or DPI, on such a global scale will allow authorities to more easily detect the transferring and sharing of copyrighted materials and other protected files by finding a way for administrators to analyze the payload of online transmissions, not just the header data that is normally identified and interpreted.

"It is standard procedure to route packets based on their headers, after all it is the part of the packet that contains information on the packet's intended destination," writes The Inquirer's Lawrence Lati, "but by inspecting the contents of each packet ISPs, governments and anyone else can look at sensitive data. While users can mitigate risks by encrypting data, given enough resources encryption can be foiled."

Iran has obtained data from a U.S. intelligence drone that shows it was spying on the country's military sites and oil terminals, Iranian media reported its armed forces as saying Wednesday.

The Islamic Republic announced Tuesday that it had captured a ScanEagle drone belonging to the United States, but Washington said there was no evidence to support the assertion.

"Its capture is not an issue the Americans can easily refute," Iran's Revolutionary Guards spokesman Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif was quoted as saying Wednesday.

"I advise the American commanders to recount their drones accurately," he said.

The incident has underscored tensions in the Gulf as Iran and the U.S. draw attention to their military capabilities in the vital oil exporting region in a standoff over Iran's nuclear program.

"We have fully extracted the drone's information," the Revolutionary Guard said in a statement Wednesday, according to Iran's English-language Press TV.

Ottawa - Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says Israel's plan to build new settlements on territory claimed by the Palestinians is not helping the cause of peace in the Middle East.

Baird was making his first public statement in the House of Commons on the controversial move by the Israelis, which was meant as retaliation after the Palestinians won greater recognition at the United Nations last week.

The Israeli settlement announcement sparked international condemnation from all of Canada's allies, including the United States, which voted against the Palestinian motion at the UN.

The Harper government has been criticized for staying virtually silent on the Israeli move, beyond a generic statement that unilateral moves by either side were not good for the prospects of peace.

Baird reiterated the government's heavy criticism of the Palestinian statehood bid during question period when he was asked about the settlements by the Bloc Quebecois.

But he emphasized that neither the UN vote nor the settlement announcement is helpful.

On Tuesday, the Harper government pledged to preserve hundreds of millions of dollars in Canadian humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.

In October, the US launched an airstrike in Afghanistan that killed three children - ages 8, 10, and 12 -while they were gathering firewood (or by some accounts, dung to burn as fuel). NATO issued its usual dismissive statement, admitting it may have "accidentally killed three innocent Afghan civilians."

But now, according to the Military Times, the US military includes children on their list of who they're allowed to murder with impunity.

...a Marine official here raised questions about whether the children were "innocent." Before calling for the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System mission in mid-October, Marines observed the children digging a hole in a dirt road in Nawa district, the official said, and the Taliban may have recruited the children to carry out the mission.

So digging holes in Afghanistan is now grounds for getting bombed? The children's relatives and local tribal elders had confirmed at the time that they were not Taliban recruits and were not planting any roadside bombs.