Iran's ambassador to Azerbaijan has questioned Washington's sincerity about launching a military coalition against the Takfiri ISIL terrorist group, saying such a coalition is only meant to deceive world's public opinion.

In an interview with Trend news agency on Tuesday, Mohsen Pak-Ayeen said this so-called coalition is supposed to be fighting a phenomenon, which has been created as well as financially and militarily supported by the United States.

He added that the world public opinion will not forget the number of occasions when the US Congress endorsed financial support for ISIL militants and other Takfiri groups.

President Barack Obama, under pressure from some lawmakers to provide more help to foreign-backed militants operating inside Syria, asked the US Congress in late June to approve $500 million to train and equip the militants.

The European Union does not recognize elections in the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Monday.

"In view of reports about local elections having taken place in Crimea and Sevastopol, we recall that the European Union recognizes neither the legal framework nor the legitimacy of these elections," Ashton said in a statement.

"The European Union continues to condemn the illegal annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol by the Russian Federation and will not recognize it," she added.

The elections to the State Council, the peninsula's new legislature, were held on September 14. These were the first elections in Crimea since it became part of Russia in March .

More than 96% of the Crimean residents voted for the reunification with Russia during a referendum held on March 16.

Russia is now threatening NATO allies in the Baltics. If Moscow tries another invasion of commandos and spies, the alliance is prepared to act, NATO's top general said.

On Monday, NATO Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove had a not-so-subtle message for Russia: it will consider stealth and unofficial invasions to be a trigger for war.

Europe knows these stealth invasions all too well. Russia first sent teams of special operations forces wearing uniforms without insignia in February into Crimea and then later into eastern Ukraine to work with Russian minorities inside the country to begin an insurrection. Ukraine's military has been fighting these "little green men" ever since. But until recently, Russia has not even acknowledged sending anyone into the country.


Breedlove, speaking at the Atlantic Council on Monday, said if the Kremlin tried that in one of the NATO allies that border Russia - like the former Soviet republics in the Batlics, for example - it would risk triggering Article Five of NATO's charter which is the section that calls on the alliance to come to the defense of a member state being attacked.

Russian officials fear regional war may turn into a world war.
A joke making the rounds among Russian officials and hacks who take a keen interest in what is going on in the Middle East these days goes something like this: How will the Yanks deal with the Islamic State group? They will create "Islamic State 2", a bigger and better armed group, and let it deal with the original Islamic State group. And what happens when "Islamic State 2" turns against them as it happened with the original Islamic State? They will create "Islamic State 3", and so on.

But seriously, the rise and spread of the Islamic State group is no laughing matter. Now that the US and its allies have finally woken up to the dangers of the spread of the extremist group, the worry in Moscow is that the hotheads in the Pentagon and at Nato headquarters in Brussels will decide to start hitting Islamic State positions in Syria along with "other targets" there as well - for instance, Syrian army positions.

US President Barack Obama has already announced his plan to deal with the group, promising to lead a "broad coalition" that will "roll back this terrorist threat". In Moscow, the fear is that the US will seize this opportunity to intervene in Syria.

Activists from Japanese island hope growing anger over a controversial US military base will boost support

Campaigners from Okinawa will arrive in Scotland on Monday to seek inspiration from the Yes campaign as they look to boost support for making the southern Japanese island an independent nation.

While Okinawa's movement is tiny compared with its counterpart in Scotland, activists say they stand to benefit from mounting public anger over Tokyo's plans to push through the construction of a controversial US military base in defiance of local opposition.

"We're really interested in seeing how the rest of the UK and the international community react if Scotland does vote for independence," said Masaki Tomochi, a professor of economics at Okinawa International University and a leading figure in the independence movement.

"Scotland has every right to be independent and to take decisions about its own future. That's what people all over the world want, including the people of Okinawa."

Tomochi and his colleagues, along with a reporter from the Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper, will tour Scotland meeting voters, academics and Scottish National party officials. Their group has posted a condensed Japanese version of the SNP's Scotland's Future manifesto on its website.

The history of Okinawa, Tomochi argues, is one of bloody sacrifice at mainland Japan's behest, and collusion between Tokyo and Washington, beginning with a secret postwar agreement to allow the US to bring nuclear weapons to the island and maintain military bases there indefinitely.

The 2012 deployment of MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft on the island, and the relocation of a military base have added to popular resentment towards Tokyo.

"The only way we can fix this is to declare our independence from Japan and go back to the way we were before Japan used force to take the islands," he said.

An image speaks a thousand words - and that is presumably what Israel's supporters hoped for with their latest ad in the New York Times. Two photographs are presented side by side. One, titled ISIL, is the now-iconic image of a kneeling James Foley, guarded by a black-hooded executioner, awaiting his terrible fate. The other, titled Hamas, is a scene from Gaza, where a similarly masked killer stands over two victims, who cower in fear.

A headline stating "This is the face of radical Islam" tries, like the images, to equate the two organisations.

We have heard this line before from Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who tweeted "Hamas is ISIL" after the video of Foley's beheading aired. In a recent speech he called Hamas and ISIL, "tentacles of a violent Islamist terrorism".

Mr Netanyahu's depiction of Hamas and ISIL as "branches of the same poisonous tree" is a travesty of the truth. The two have entirely different - in fact, opposed - political projects.

Members of Hamas may disagree on that state's territorial limits but even the most ambitious expect no more than the historic borders of a Palestine that existed decades ago. ISIL, by contrast, aims to sweep away Palestine and every other Arab state. That is the key to interpreting the very different, if equally brutal, events depicted in the two images.

ISIL killed Foley, dressed in Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit, purely as spectacle - a graphic message to the world of its menacing intent. Hamas's cruelty was directed at those in Gaza who collaborate with Israel, undermining hope of liberation from Israel's occupation.

Preface

Congressman Louis T. McFadden served as Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency from 1920 thru 1931. He was thus a supreme expert witness to events which culminated in the first Great Depression. As this material further attests, seven years prior to the fact he was also an unknowing witness to "financial" events which contributed mightily in terms of American monetary gold to the arming of Japan and Germany in preparation for World War II.

The following excerpts are from a speech which is now difficult to obtain from the Congressional Record, in which he addressed the House of Representatives in the midst of the first Great Depression, June 10, 1932. The speech largely documents the extensive crimes of the private banks which were unlawfully consolidated under the deceptively named Federal Reserve Act, which gave these unassented private banks the audacious power to draw unlimited unearned profit from a currency costing practically nothing to private banking institutions which are neither federal, nor a reserve of anything. As McFadden testifies, the excesses of that unassented profit not only manifested in mightily arming foes of the world's wars, and even instigating wars; they further comprise not only all the "interest" and multiplication of cost we have endured since 1914, but the sum of our crippling private and public debt.

From the portions of Mr. McFadden's address preserved here, considerable material has been dropped because it is less germane to the arguments of these pages, and because the whole of the speech is a practically overwhelming body of material.

As this abbreviated version retains most important points, it nonetheless is especially obligatory reading, because McFadden testifies to so many issues which the usual citizen not only is wholly unaware of, but which we must find wholly adverse to American principles and our republican form of government.

His ultimate conclusion is certainly worthwhile. It is certainly an address capable itself of re-uniting America. Few principled people will finish before their ire peaks.

US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has voiced concerns that, without sufficient protections, the age of unmanned drones and ubiquitous surveillance will usher in an "Orwellian world."

Sotomayor told faculty and students at Oklahoma City University last week that technological capabilities allow devices to monitor "your conversations from miles away and through your walls."

"We are in that brave new world, and we are capable of being in that Orwellian world, too," she added, in a nod to George Orwell's seminal authoritarian-dystopia novel '1984.'

Sotomayor also discussed the rise of drone use in wider society. "There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that's happening on what we consider our private property," Sotomayor said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom. Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion, but I don't like the fact that someone I don't know...can pick up, if they're a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property."

The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has filed a case with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg challenging current UK legislation on mass surveillance and its threat to journalism.

The case, which seeks to determine if current UK legislation properly protects journalists' sources and communications from government scrutiny and mass surveillance, was filed on Friday.

If the court rules in favor of the application, it will force the British government to review regulations around the mass collection of communications data.


"We understand why the government feels the need to have the power of interception," the Bureau's Christopher Hird said.

"But our concern is that the existing regulatory regime to control the interception of communications data, such as phone calls and emails, by organizations such as GCHQ, does not provide sufficient safeguards to ensure the protection of journalists' sources, and as a result is a restriction on the operation of a free press."


The collection of data by authorities is handled by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, known as RIPA. Communications can include emails, phone calls as well as the use of Dropbox, Google docs and communications platforms such as Skype.

Bombing ISIS amounts to attacking a symptom rather than finding a cure. But the cure would require addressing politically sensitive issues, such as Israel oppressing Palestinians and Saudi Arabia financing Islamic extremism. So the U.S. does what it knows best - blowing stuff up - as Nat Parry observes.
The great American tradition of bombing Iraq - now in its third decade - has recently been revived by the "hope and change" presidency of Barack Obama, the fourth consecutive U.S. Commander-in-Chief to launch strikes against the beleaguered Middle East nation. Iraq may be alone in the world in being able to claim such a dubious distinction.

I remember the first time the U.S. bombed Iraq, in January 1991. I was a sophomore in high school and Wilson Phillip's "Hold On" was at the top of the charts. I didn't really know what to think about it, but a lot of people were tying yellow ribbons to trees and wearing "Operation Desert Storm" t-shirts with bald eagles and American flags on them, so it seemed like a good idea. Plus, there was the whole babies-being-pulled-from-incubators story, which turned out to be a complete fabrication, but we didn't know that at the time, so the war's justification seemed pretty solid.

It wasn't until later when I started learning more about U.S. foreign policy in general and the lies that accompanied the build-up to Operation Desert Storm in particular that I started to question these policies, and by the late 1990s, I became actively opposed to the sanctions regime and the periodic bombings of Baghdad.The first time I protested a U.S. bombing campaign of Iraq was in 1998. It was in the midst of Congress's efforts to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about his illicit affair with Monica Lewinsky, and the day after his announcement of the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign, I joined a picket in front of the White House holding a hand-made sign reading "IMPEACH HIM FOR WAR CRIMES."