Fars News Agency — June 19, 2013

Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, is recruiting Algerian young men to send them to Syria to help the other foreign-backed terrorists in the fight against the Syrian people and government, an Algerian newspaper revealed on Wednesday.

Informed sources who asked to remain anonymous told the Algerian daily al-Fajr that the activities of Salafi groups in the country are under the supervision of Mossad and these groups coax the Algerian young men into getting involved in what they call as “Jihad in Syria” and includes killing civilians and increasing insecurity in the country.

The sources said that the Salafi groups in Algeria are in direct contact with their religious fellows in Tunisia and also receive different financial and military aid from Qatar.

In relevant remarks earlier this week, a senior Austrian officer disclosed the logistic, military and medical assistance of Israel to the terrorist groups fighting in Syria.

“Israel crosses the border with Syria very often and interferes in Syria’s border villages at an unimaginable rate and these interferences include assistance and aid (to the rebel and terrorist groups) in various logistic, military and medical grounds,” the Austrian officer, who asked to remain anonymous, said in an interview with the Palestinian weekly al-Manar on Monday.

He also said that Israel and the terrorist groups have joint operation rooms in the bordering areas between Syria and the occupied Palestinian territories to coordinate their activities and facilitate assistance to the rebel groups.

The officer who had been deployed in the Golan Heights within the framework of multi-national forces in recent months said that Israel also hosts and treats the wounded members of the rebel groups in field hospitals and clinical centers near the bordering areas, specially Zaif hospital in Safad city.

In relevant development, security sources in the Qatari government disclosed on Sunday that Israel has sent its Coordinator on Syrian Affairs Afif Shavit to a meeting with Qatari officials in London late in May to discuss supply of more arms to the rebel groups fighting the Syrian government.

“The 4-hour meeting was held in a house in Braum House in London belonging to Khalid a-Abeed, a Qatari citizen residing in Britain, on May 20,” the source, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of his information and for fear of his life, told FNA.

“During the meeting, It was decided that Israel prepare and supply the weapons needed by the terrorists in Syria and enter negotiations with European arms manufacturing companies on arms purchases and money transfer methods, and the Qatari side cover the funds and needed budget for purchases,” added the source.

The meeting was held at a time when the EU decided to lift the arms embargo on foreign-backed militants in Syria. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on May 28 that European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels have reached an agreement to lift the arms embargo on militants in Syria, while maintaining other sanctions on the country. The EU also decided to allow the European banks to open branches and accounts in Syria for use by the opposition.

It also coincided with US Republican Senator John McCain’s surprise visit to Syria in late May during which he urged the administration of President Barack Obama to send heavy arms and logistic aid to Syrian rebels.

On the other side, the Qatari government plays the role of a facilitator and the financial supporter of the rebel and terrorist groups in Syria. The British newspaper Financial Times published an investigation in May which revealed that Qatar spent billions of dollars in the past two years to fund the Syrian terrorist and rebel groups.

“Qatar has spent about three billion dollars in the past two years to support the opposition in Syria, which far exceeds what is provided by any other government. However, Saudi Arabia competes now in leading the bodies providing Syrian opposition with weapons,” the paper said.

“The cost of the Qatari intervention in Syria only represents a very small part of the international investment of Qatar,” it added.

FT claimed that Qatari support for the Syrian opposition overwhelms the western support.

The UK daily also noted that during scores of interviews it made with militant opposition leaders at home and abroad, along with senior western and regional officials, everyone stressed the growing role of Qatar in the Syrian crisis, and this has become a controversial issue.

The paper pointed out that “the small state with huge appetite” is the largest donor of aid to the Syrian opposition, offering generous grants for dissidents, amounting fifty thousand dollars per year for the dissident and his family, according to some estimates.

Sources close to the Qatari government said that the total spending on the Syrian crisis reached $3bln.

“According to the Institute for Peace Research in Stockholm which tracks the arms supply to the Syrian opposition,” the paper added, “Qatar is the largest arms exporter to Syria, where it funded more than 70 cargo flights of weapons to neighboring Turkey between April 2012 and March 2013.”

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against Syrian police forces and border guards being reported across the country.

Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed, when some protest rallies turned into armed clashes.

The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.

In October 2011, calm was almost restored in the Arab state after President Assad started a reform initiative in the country, but Israel, the US, its Arab allies and Turkey sought hard to bring the country into chaos through any possible means. Tel Aviv, Washington and some Arab capitals have been staging various plots to topple President Bashar al-Assad, who is well known in the world for his anti-Israeli stances.

Source

Oliver Wright — The Independent June 16, 2013

The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, rounded on Britain on Sunday, accusing David Cameron of betraying humanitarian values by supporting Syrian rebels with “blood on their hands”.

In harsh and undiplomatic language, Mr Putin accused the UK and other Western powers of attempting to arm rebels who “kill their enemies and eat their organs”. He insisted that Russia would continue to arm what he said was the recognised “legitimate government” in Syria and called on other countries to respect the same rules.

Mr Putin’s comments, ahead of Monday’s G8 summit in Northern Ireland, suggest that earlier British hopes of a softening of Russia’s position on Syria were misplaced. After around an hour of bilateral talks with David Cameron in Downing Street, Mr Putin’s spokesman told The Independent that the two sides remained as far apart as ever.

“There are very serious disagreements in terms of who is guilty and who is to blame,” he said. Asked what the impact of the American decision to arm Syrian rebels would be on potential peace talks, he added: “It makes it harder.”

In a press conference after the talks, Mr Cameron admitted that “President Putin and I have our disagreements on some of the issues”, but insisted the G8 could bring “new momentum and leadership” to start negotiations in Syria.

“What I take from our conversation today is that we can overcome differences if we recognise that we share some fundamental aims: to end the conflict, to stop Syria breaking apart, to let the Syrian people choose who governs them and to take the fight to the extremists,” he said.

“If we leave Syria to be fought over between a murderous dictator and violent extremists we will all pay the price,” he added.

But when Mr Putin was asked by British journalists about comments by Mr Cameron last year – that those supporting President Assad had the blood of Syrian children on their hands – he reacted angrily. He said: “One does not need to support people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras. Are these the people you want to support?

“Is it them you want to supply with weapons? Then this probably has little relation to humanitarian values that have been preached in Europe for hundreds of years.”

Mr Putin was referring to video footage on the internet of one rebel fighter eating what appeared to be the heart of a government soldier.

Downing Street sources said the talks had gone better than the press conference suggested.

Mr Cameron denied that Britain wanted to arm extremists within the Syrian opposition and defended the lifting of the EU arms embargo on supplying weapons to the rebels.

“We, rightly, changed the terms of the EU arms embargo because it was almost saying there was some sort of equivalence between Assad on the one hand and the official Syrian opposition on the other,” he said.

“The Syrian opposition have committed to a democratic, pluralistic Syria that will respect minorities, including Christians.”

In an interview with the BBC last night, Mr Cameron went further and said that Western powers needed to arm the rebels precisely to prevent the opposition being dominated by extremists.

“If we don’t work with the Syrian opposition then we shouldn’t be surprised when the only parts of the Syrian opposition that are proving effective are the most extreme and the most dangerous,” he said.

“I want to avoid that. One of the things I hope I will be able to agree with President Putin – although we come at this from a different angle – is that we’ll all be better off if we can expel al-Qa’ida extremists from Syria.”

But ahead of Monday’s G8 summit, Mr Cameron appears increasingly isolated domestically over his enthusiasm for greater British involvement in Syria.

At least five cabinet ministers have expressed their private opposition to the plan, while a significant number of Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs have indicated that they would be prepared to vote against the Government if it is put to a vote in the House of Commons.

Nick Clegg stressed on Sunday that no UK decision on arming the rebels appeared imminent. The Deputy Prime Minister told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “At this point we’re not providing arms. If we wanted to, we would do it. We clearly don’t think it is the right thing to do now or else we would have decided to do it.”

Describing the provision of non-lethal equipment, which is the current strategy, Mr Clegg insisted it was possible for the UK to take a different position from that of the Americans.

“We need to work in concert with our allies but we do not need to do the identical thing,” he said.

Other senior figures called on Mr Cameron to stay out of the conflict. The Conservative MP Julian Lewis warned against Britain getting involved in the “snakepit” of the Syrian conflict, and predicted the Prime Minister would struggle to get MPs to agree to arm the rebels.

“I have little doubt that the Prime Minister would struggle to get this approved by Parliament because so many of us think it’s not in the British national interest to get involved with this snakepit,” he said.

The former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, also cautioned that supplying arms to the Syrian opposition could turn into a “much larger intervention”.

He said: “I’m very much in the camp of those who would not wish to be involved and intervene in any shape or form.

“Goodness, if we’ve learned anything in the last few years, it is that we don’t get involved in another intervention without having a very clear idea of what we’re going to do, who we’re going to help, what the plan is, and what the exit strategy is. Surely we’ve not all forgotten those lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan so quickly?”

Source

Kevin Boyle — No One To Vote For June 16, 2013

Recent polls show that only 48% of the country living outside Instanbul support Turkey’s Prime Minister, Mr Erdogan while inside Istanbul that figure collapses to a mere and shocking 30%.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/163061/turks-grew-discontent-leaders-freedom-unrest.aspx

Similar polls in Syria as revealed by NATO sources, no less, reveal that Mr Assad enjoys 70% support from the Syrian people while only 10% oppose his rule.

http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/05/31/nato-data-assad-winning-the-war-for-syrians-hearts-and-minds/

Mr Obama! Mr. Cameron! Of course we must arm the Syrian rebels. This goes without saying……

….but let us be consistent in our principles and hold firmly to our high moral standards.

THE UNDEMOCRATIC HUMANITARIAN NIGHTMARE THAT IS MODERN TURKEY MUST BE ADDRESSED FORTHWITH.

THE TURKISH PEOPLE HAVE SUFFERED ENOUGH!

Act now.

Arm the Turkish rebels immediately in order that we may all sleep soundly at night and bestride our various narrow worlds in continuing good conscience.

Source

Peter Dominiczak and Christopher Hope — Telegraph.co.uk June 16, 2013

Arming the Syrian rebels would be disastrous because Britain would be “pressing weapons into the hands of maniacs”, says Boris Johnson.

The Mayor of London warns David Cameron that the UK must not use Syria as an “arena for muscle-flexing” and says that any weapons sent to the country’s opposition could end up in the hands of al-Qaeda.

His comments come after several leading figures opposed any move by Mr Cameron to join President Barack Obama in providing greater assistance to the forces fighting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia, whose nation provides arms to the Assad regime, criticised the Prime Minister for considering arming rebels who “eat the organs” of their enemies.

The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also cautioned Mr Cameron against arming the Free Syrian Army, saying that if it were a good idea, Britain would have done it already. The former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, said he feared any such assistance would lead Britain into further intervention, while the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, urged Mr Cameron to “tread very warily”

But it is Mr Johnson’s comments that will do most to undermine Mr Cameron’s position on the issue.

Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Mr Johnson says the only solution in Syria is a “total ceasefire” and claims that it will be “impossible” to arm the rebels without weapons ending up in the hands of “al-Qaeda-affiliated thugs”.

“This is the moment for a total ceasefire, an end to the madness,” Mr Johnson writes. “It is time for the US, Russia, the EU, Turkey, Iran, Saudi and all the players to convene an intergovernmental conference to try to halt the carnage. We can’t use Syria as an arena for geopolitical point-scoring or muscle-flexing, and we won’t get a ceasefire by pressing weapons into the hands of maniacs.”

The crisis in Syria is threatening to overshadow the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland which begins on Monday.

Mr Cameron clashed with the Russian president at a Downing Street press conference on Sunday.

Asked by reporters whether he had “blood on his hands” for arming the Assad regime, Mr Putin said that his nation had acted in accordance with international law by delivering arms to the Syrian government.

He added: “I believe you will not deny the fact that one should hardly back those who kill their enemies and eat their organs – all that is filmed. Do you want to support these people? Do you want to supply arms to these people?”

Mr Cameron faces growing political opposition at home amid suggestions that he is in favour of joining the Americans in helping to assist rebels. He has been warned that he could be defeated in the Commons if he tries to win a parliamentary agreement for Britain to arm the rebels.

Mr Clegg insisted that the Government will not arm the rebels because it is not the right thing to do at the moment. “We’ve taken no decision to provide lethal assistance so we clearly don’t think it is the right thing to do now, otherwise we would have decided to do it,” Mr Clegg told the BBC.

Lord Dannatt, former head of the Army, warned that supplying arms to the Syrian opposition could turn into a “much larger intervention”.

“It’s a very complex situation,” he said. “And I think there is a real danger of an arm going in a mangle.”

He said the risk of supplying small arms is that it “becomes the thin end of the wedge”.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, warned that arming the rebels could be a “naive position to take” because it is impossible to know who the “good guys” are.

Julian Lewis, a Tory MP, said it would be “suicidal” for Britain to hand arms to an opposition known to include extremist elements.

Source

Press TV — June 16, 2013

A former French foreign minister says Britain had been planning a war against Syria some two years before to the unrest broke out in the Arab country.

The statement by Roland Dumas came during a recent interview with French Parliamentary TV network, LCP.

“I’m going to tell you something. I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria,” said Dumas.

He continued by saying, “This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate.”

Responding to a question on the motive behind inciting violence in Syria, Dumas said, “Very simple! With the very simple aim! To overthrow the Syrian government, because in the region, it’s important to understand, that the Syrian regime makes anti-Israeli talk,” said Dumas

The former foreign minister added that he had been told by an Israeli prime minister a long time ago that Tel Aviv would seek to “destroy” any country that did not “get along” with it in the region.

Turmoil has gripped Syria since March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian security forces, have been killed in the unrest.

Damascus says the United States and its allies are seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad by supporting armed terrorist groups operating in Syria.

In May, under pressure from Britain and France, the European Union lifted an arms embargo on the militants in Syria, while maintaining other sanctions on the Syrian government.

CAH/HMV

Source

Mike Adams — Natural News June 15, 2013

Obama’s “chemical weapons” claims against Syria are woven from the same fabric as Bush’s “weapons of mass destruction” claims against Iraq. That fabric is, of course, fiction. Neither claim has any basis in reality, but they make a great story that can be spoon-fed to the American people by CNN, the Comedy News Network.

The story CNN won’t tell you, however, is that Obama has chosen to arm — who else? — al-Qaeda, the very group that Bush said flew the airplanes into the twin towers on 9/11, resulting in the creation of DHS and the TSA (yippee!) as well as the Patriot Act that gave rise to many of the surveillance abuses we’re seeing today from the NSA.

“US says it will arm Syrian rebels,” blares The Guardian. This is after the U.S. government claims it detected chemical weapons being used in Syria — a claim with absolutely no basis in fact. This is nothing more than a modern-day “Bushism” being resurrected under Obama.

And who are these Syrian rebels, exactly? They’re working with al-Qaeda!

“Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda,” blares a Detroit Free Press headline. The New American chimes in with, “President Obama OKs Shipment of Arms to Al-Qaeda in Syria.”

So now it’s in your face, you see: Obama is arming terrorists. Not just any terrorists, but THE terrorists that Bush claimed justified the rise of the entire U.S. police state reach-down-your-pants spy grid security theater apparatus. Isn’t it now obvious that the U.S. government runs al-Queda, 1984-style, to make sure America always has a boogeyman to invoke when justifying the destruction of civil rights and individual privacy?

To fight terrorism, we will arm the terrorists

Meanwhile, the American people, as befuddled as ever, can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that Obama, much like Bush, is quite literally arming the very terrorist group that he claims the U.S. police state security apparatus was constructed to fight.

Why do we need Gitmo and other secret military prisons? To “fight terrorists!” Why do we need the NSA spying on us all, reading our emails and listening to our phone calls? To “fight terrorists!” Why do we need the TSA reaching down our pants at the airport? To “fight terrorists!” And who is Obama now sending heavy weapons to in Syria? The terrorists!

It’s all blatantly ridiculous at this point, and Obama’s transformation into Bush is now complete. Obama, after all, agrees with all of Bush’s key policies: expanding the police state, destroying the Bill of Rights, waging American imperialism across the world, running secret prisons, accelerating the national debt, bailing out the corrupt banksters and gutting America’s working middle class.

While all this is going on, the American people are told to swallow one insane lie after another: Al-Qaeda is your enemy! No, wait, they’re our friends! Terrorists shouldn’t have weapons… but wait! Now let’s arm the terrorists! The enemy is now patriots, veterans and anyone who cites the Constitution! Let’s declare war on veterans while arming al-Qaeda!

This is the kind of insanity you’re being subjected to on a daily basis by CNN, NPR, MSNBC and other purveyors of bewildering blather. Only a complete fluoride-headed zombie could buy into the false narratives and the never-ending “mental whiplash” head games being played by the White House. Because in addition to all this nonsense that makes Obama look nearly identical to Bush, we’ve also got the added bonuses of an IRS that intimidates and oppresses conservative groups, a DOJ that runs guns into Mexico while secretly wiretapping journalists, an NSA that spies on all your electronic activities including phone calls and emails, plus the dark skin pigmentation of the President which somehow allows the leftist media to stupidly label anyone who doesn’t agree with Obama’s actions a “racist.”

Obama, in other words, has actually become worse than Bush. No wonder even left-leaning Ralph Nader, a champion of unions and socialist-leaning policies recently asked, “Has there [ever] been a bigger con man in the White House than Barack Obama?”

Certainly not when it comes to plunging the nation into an inescapable cycle of debt that will sooner or later implode in all our faces. On that front, Obama has beat Bush at his own game, taking America from a “mere” $9 trillion in debt to an ear-popping $16 trillion in national debt in less than five years:

Click here to see the U.S. debt clock in real time.

And where did all this money go? Most of it went just three places: 1) Into the pockets of banking empire criminals on Wall Street, 2) Into the pockets of entitlement recipients who have come to depend on big government for everything, and 3) Into the pockets of the American war machine: weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the entire war industry.

By the time Obama leaves office in 2016 — and we should all pray this actually takes place — the U.S. debt will likely have exceeded $20 trillion.

You are witnessing the destruction of a nation

With each passing day that Obama remains president, Americans are thrust deeper into debt, stripped of more civil rights and constitutional protections, more deeply enslaved into the global banking monopolies, and subjected to all the abuses of a rapidly-expanding police state set to grow into such a devastating monstrosity that it’s going to make the rise and fall of Nazi Germany seem like a joke.

And yet 45% or so of Americans still endorse Obama because he’s black, thereby proving that Obama’s supporters are, themselves, mindlessly racist because their decisions on whom to support are determined solely by the color of a man’s skin rather than the content of his character. Yet they call critics of Obama “racist” for wanting to debate the President’s ideas and policies… and the fact that Obama is rapidly destroying everything America once stood for: justice, civil rights, individual liberties, hard work, entrepreneurship, innovation and the idea that all men are subject to the same laws.

If these ideals of a free and just nation are abandoned, then the nation will in time devolve into a unjust, un-free society run by tyrants and exploited by domineering corporate entities. Perhaps Obama’s transformation into Bush is only phase one of this plan. Step two will see Obama transform into Kim Jong Un while America becomes the ultimate expression of leftist control freak government: North Korea.

Source

Robert Fisk — The Independent June 16, 2013

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years.  Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for  2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle.  Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war.  So much for America’s ‘friends’.

Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power.  Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure – that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East.  Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad.  The Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of  Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power.  Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained.  Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.

In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army.  The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy.  They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.

From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus – every war crime committed by the rebels – will be regarded in the region as Washington’s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2011 – who are America’s greatest enemies as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism.  His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.

For the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all, but to the south of Moscow;  and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier.  Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim.  Six of the Soviet Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni.  And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims.  For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.

Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon – with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither.  They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan.  The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance.  One of the sources claimed – not without some mirth — that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran’s help.

It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria.  Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.

Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule.  One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as “Israel’s man in Damascus”.  Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator.  In vain.

If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians.  The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’.  ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s attempts to create such a state have been laughable.  A future ‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation.  But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.

Another of the region’s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush Assad.  Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.

In Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive.  Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.

Source

David Alexander and Lesley Wroughton — Reuters June 15, 2013

The United States said on Saturday it will keep Patriot missiles and F-16 jet fighters in Jordan after joint military exercises end next week while Secretary of State John Kerry said a political solution to the civil war in neighboring Syria may be getting “out of reach.”

The decision to put Patriot batteries – an air and missile defense system – in Jordan has been particularly controversial for Russia, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s main global ally.

Russia is worried the missiles could be used by the United States and its allies to impose a “no-fly” zone over Syria in the first direct Western military intervention in the conflict.

The Pentagon announced the action two days before President Barack Obama meets Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday at a G8 conference in Northern Ireland to discuss Syria.

The Patriot missiles could be used to protect U.S. ally Jordan against any possible missile attack as the Syrian war threatens to widen into a more regional, sectarian conflict.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel “has approved a request from the Kingdom of Jordan for a detachment of F-16s and Patriot Missiles to remain in Jordan following the conclusion of the Eager Lion Exercise next week,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said in a statement.

“All other U.S. personnel assigned to Jordan for Eager Lion will depart at the conclusion of the exercise. The United States enjoys a longstanding partnership with Jordan and is committed to its defense,” Little added.

Assad’s forces are fighting insurgents in a two-year-old conflict.

Secretary of State John Kerry asked Iraq to do what it could to help halt new military supplies from reaching Assad’s forces, the State Department said in a statement on Saturday that gave details of Kerry’s telephone call on Friday with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

‘OUT OF REACH’

“The secretary reaffirmed that the United States continues to work aggressively for a political solution with the goal of a second Geneva meeting, but that the use of chemical weapons and increasing involvement of Hezbollah demonstrates the regime’s lack of commitment to negotiations and threatens to put a political settlement out of reach,” the department said.

Jordan and Syria’s other neighbors are increasingly nervous the Syrian civil war will spill over its borders.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday any attempt to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria using F-16s and Patriot missiles from Jordan would violate international law.

A U.S. official said earlier this month that the Eager Lion exercises – held annually with a theme of irregular warfare – include more than 8,000 service members from about 19 countries, running from June 9 to 20.

Jordan on June 6 threatened to expel Syria’s ambassador after he warned the Jordanians that Syrian missiles could be used against the Patriot missile batteries.

Hagel said in April that the United States was dispatching U.S. Army planners to Jordan, bolstering efforts started last year to plan for contingencies related to Syria’s chemical weapons and to prevent a spillover of violence across Jordan’s border. A U.S. official said at the time that about 200 U.S. personnel would be involved.

Accusing Assad’s forces of using chemical weapons, the White House said on Thursday the United States would supply direct military assistance to the rebels. A U.S. official said that meant sending them weapons supplies for the first time. The weapons likely will include rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, sources said on Friday.

Syria’s government denies using chemical weapons.

The State Department also said Kerry, in his talks with the Iraqi foreign minister, expressed U.S. concern “about the increasingly sectarian nature of the Syrian conflict on both sides.” It said Kerry thanked Zebari for “discouraging Iraqis from joining the fight in Syria.”

“The secretary further urged that Iraq take every possible measure to help end the military resupply of the Assad regime and thereby increase the pressure that will be necessary to advance a political solution,” the State Department said.

(Additional reporting by Jason Lange; Editing by Will Dunham and Eric Walsh)

Source

Robert Fisk — The Independent June 14, 2013

Tosh! That’s the only sane reaction to the White House’s announcement that America the Brave is to arm the Syrian rebels.

The US doesn’t plan to send weapons to the horrid rebels, mark you – not to the al-Qa’ida-inspired al-Nusra Front whose chaps film themselves eating Alawites for YouTube videos, barbecue the heads of captured Syrian troops and murder 14-year-old schoolboys for blasphemy. Only to the nice rebels, the Free Syrian Army deserters who are battling the forces of Assad darkness in the interests of freedom, liberty, women’s rights and democracy.

Anyone who believes this knows nothing about war, killing, barbarity and, especially, greed. Because weapons are not just guns. They are currency. They are money. They are saleable commodities the moment you send them across any border. Their value in US dollars, pounds sterling, Syrian pounds or Qatari dinars is infinitely more important than their use in battle.

The Western powers are dangerously close to flooding Syria with weapons and ammunition which will officially go to the nice rebels – but will quickly pass to the horrid rebels, who will sell some of them to al-Qa’ida, Iraqi insurgents, Syrian government troops, Malian militiamen, Taliban fighters and Pakistani hitmen. Guns are about money.

It works like this. The nice rebels could be given anti-aircaft missiles (shoulder-fired variety preferred) to use against Assad’s helicopters and Migs. Thank you – “shukran” – the nice rebels will say. But once over the border, the horrid rebel Nusra chaps will make an offer the nice rebels can’t refuse: either many thousands of dollars or a threat to seize the munitions (head-chopping optional), or a mixture of both. For a hefty sum, the horrid rebels will then split the proceeds with their chaps in Iraq. Ask the Syrian government soldiers – as I have – and they’ll tell you that they too would prefer the weapons to go to the nice rebels, who always run away – because the horrid rebels of the Nusra always fight to the last man.

In the Lebanese civil war, not a single gun I ever saw was actually donated to the men who carried them. The Phalangists used weapons they received from the Israelis, who got them from the Americans (or with American money, the same thing). The Palestinians used guns from Syria, which had in turn imported them from the Soviet Union. Hezbollah even have a few self-loading rifles which appear to have come long ago from the Lebanese Army, which received them as surplus from the British Ministry of Defence after our chaps left Northern Ireland following the Good Friday Agreement.

Back in the Eighties, the US handed out missiles and other goodies to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the super-freedom fighters trying to kill lots of Russians in Afghanistan. But Mr Hekmatyar then became a super-terrorist and decided to kill lots of post-2001 American occupiers of his country – using the same weapons donated to him by those grand arms dealers Messrs Carter and Reagan Inc.

In 1991, the Israelis took delivery of AGM-114C missiles from the Americans – manufactured for the US Marine Corps, who were supposed to fire them at Iraqi soldiers – and used one of them to blow up an ambulance full of Lebanese women and children in 1996.

History lesson. The weapons used by both sides in the 1922-3 Irish civil war – and you can see them in museums – included Lee-Enfield .303  rifles, each bearing the imprint of a British crown on the butt. They had been made for the Brits to use against Germans in the First World War. Whoops…

Source

ANI — Jan 30, 2013

The Obama administration gave green signal to a chemical weapons attack plan in Syria that could be blamed on President Bashar al Assad‘s regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country, leaked documents have shown.

A new report, that contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence, showed a scheme ‘approved by Washington’.

As per the scheme ‘Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons,’ the Daily Mail reports.

Continues …

Introduction — June 14, 2013

If there wasn’t enough to confirm that the corporate media was in lockstep with the authorities, the above report is based on a story that appeared the day before in the UK’s Daily Mail.

A more detailed and extensive report, it quoted emails between two senior officials at Britam Defence where a scheme ‘approved by Washington’ is outlined explaining how Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons.

In fact the Daily Mail’s report was based on a story by Paul Joseph Watson that first appeared on Infowars.com.

Strangely though the Daily Mail report has since been scrubbed from the Mail’s server. Not a hint of it now remains on the Mail’s website.

Fortunately however, the appropriately named Black Vault website copied the report before it disappeared down the memory hole. Proving once again, how easily government and media lies can be exposed by the Internet.

The leaked email was allegedly sent from a top official at a British defense contractor regarding a 'Washington approved' chemical attack in Syria which could be blamed on Assad's regime

U.S. ‘backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria and blame it on Assad’s regime’

By Louise Boyle — Daily Mail Jan 29, 2013

Leaked emails have allegedly proved that the White House gave the green light to a chemical weapons attack in Syria that could be blamed on Assad’s regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country.

A report released on Monday contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence where a scheme ‘approved by Washington’ is outlined explaining that Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons.

Barack Obama made it clear to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last month that the U.S. would not tolerate Syria using chemical weapons against its own people.

According to Infowars.com, the December 25 email was sent from Britam’s Business Development Director David Goulding to company founder Philip Doughty.

It reads: ‘Phil… We’ve got a new offer. It’s about Syria again. Qataris propose an attractive deal and swear that the idea is approved by Washington.

‘We’ll have to deliver a CW to Homs, a Soviet origin g-shell from Libya similar to those that Assad should have.

‘They want us to deploy our Ukrainian personnel that should speak Russian and make a video record.

‘Frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea but the sums proposed are enormous. Your opinion?

‘Kind regards, David.’

Britam Defence had not yet returned a request for comment to MailOnline.

The emails were released by a Malaysian hacker who also obtained senior executives resumés and copies of passports via an unprotected company server, according to Cyber War News.

Dave Goulding’s Linkedin profile lists him as Business Development Director at Britam Defence Ltd in Security and Investigations. A business networking profile for Phil Doughty lists him as Chief Operationg Officer for Britam, United Arab Emirates, Security and Investigations.

The U.S. State Department had not returned a request for comment on the alleged emails to MailOnline today at time of publication.

However the use of chemical warfare was raised at a press briefing in D.C. on January 28.

A spokesman said that the U.S. joined the international community in ‘setting common redlines about the consequences of using chemical weapons’.

A leaked U.S. government cable revealed that the Syrian army more than likely had used chemical weapons during an attack in the city of Homs in December.

The document, revealed in The Cable, revealed the findings of an investigation by Scott Frederic Kilner, the U.S. consul general in Istanbul, into accusations that the Syrian army used chemical weapons in the December 23 attack.

An Obama administration official who had access to the document was reported as saying: ‘We can’t definitely say 100 per cent, but Syrian contacts made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs on Dec. 23.’

Mr Kilner’s investigation included interviews with civilians, doctors, and rebels present during the attack, as well as the former general and head of the Syrian WMD program, Mustafa al-Sheikh.

Dr. Nashwan Abu Abdo, a neurologist in Homs, is certain chemical weapons were used. He told The Cable: ‘It was a chemical weapon, we are sure of that, because tear gas can’t cause the death of people.’

Eye witness accounts from the investigation revealed that a tank launched chemical weapons and caused people exposed to them to suffer nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, delirium, seizures, and respiratory distress.

The symptoms suggest that the weaponized compound Agent-15 was responsible. Syria denied using chemical weapons and said it would never use them against citizens.

Speaking to Pentagon reporters at the time, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said his biggest concern was how the U.S. and allies would secure the chemical and biological weapons sites scattered across Syria and ensure the components don’t end up in the wrong hands if the regime falls, particularly under violent conditions.

Government forces and rebels in Syria have both been accused by human rights groups of carrying out brutal warfare in the 22-month-old conflict, which has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

Source

Miriam Elder in Moscow and Richard Norton-Taylor — Guardian.co.uk June 14, 2013

Russia has dismissed US assertions that Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people, and said any US move to arm Syrian rebels would jeopardise efforts to convene a peace conference.

Responding to White House moves to broaden its military support for the forces lined up against Assad’s regime, the Kremlin said it was not convinced by the pretext for doing so.

Yuri Ushakov, foreign policy adviser to Vladimir Putin, said US officials had briefed Russia on the allegations against Assad. “But I will say frankly that what was presented to us by the Americans does not look convincing,” he said. “It would be hard even to call them facts.”

The White House said late on Thursday that it would supply direct military aid to Syria‘s rebels after concluding that government forces had used chemical weapons, something Barack Obama has called a “red line”.

David Cameron told the Guardian on Friday that Britain shared the Americans’ “candid assessment”.

In Damascus, Syrian officials denounced the US verdict as a “caravan of lies” and said Washington’s decision to arm the rebels was a “flagrant double standard” in its dealings with terrorism.

“The White House … relied on fabricated information in order to hold the Syrian government responsible for using these weapons, despite a series of statements that confirmed that terrorist groups in Syria have chemical weapons,” the foreign ministry said.

Russia has consistently obstructed US-led attempts to bring sanctions against Assad’s regime for the bloody conflict that has resulted in almost 100,000 deaths in Syria, and millions of people displaced. Officials say they do not support Assad and are merely against foreign intervention on principle, but Moscow has continued to supply arms and other aid to Assad as his last major ally alongside Iran.

The issue of arming the rebels has taken on extra urgency in recent days as pro-Assad forces are believed to be moving towards Aleppo, Syria’s second city, for a possible showdown with rebel forces that could change the course of the two-year conflict. Heavy fighting was reported in Aleppo on Friday morning.

It remains unclear exactly what weaponry the Americans might supply. Senator John McCain, one of the strongest proponents of US military action in Syria, said he was told on Thursday that Obama had decided to “provide arms to the rebels”. Officials told the Associated Press that details were being finalised but that the weapons might include small arms, ammunition, assault rifles and a variety of anti-tank weaponry such as shoulder-fired remote-propelled grenades and other missiles.

The CIA was expected to be tasked with teaching the rebels how to use the weapons, AP reported. The New York Times gave a similar outline of the arms involved and said anti-aircraft munitions, hotly sought after by the rebels, were not under consideration. Syrian rebel groups have repeatedly called for both anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles.

Analysts suggested that the US might step up the intelligence effort in Syria and possibly use groups of special forces to advise and train rebel groups rather than intervene overtly with military force.

There is deep concern in British military and intelligence circles about the prospect of direct US military intervention in Syria. Even establishing no-fly zones or “safe areas” would be extremely risky and lead to confrontation with Syrian forces, observers warned.

“There is no political appetite for it, in Washington or in London, and even Paris has gone quiet,” said Brigadier Ben Barry, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Russia has insisted on a diplomatic solution, but an international peace conference announced by John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has been plagued by disagreements from the start, including over Russian demands that Iran attends the talks.

Ushakov said US pledges of military aid to the opposition would further complicate attempts to convene a conference. “If the Americans … carry out more wide-scale aid to the rebels and opposition, it will not make organising the international conference easier,” he said.

The Russian foreign ministry reiterated that position in a statement released on Friday, but said it remained committed to holding an international peace conference. It said US arms deliveries to the rebels would “drive up the level of violent confrontation and violence against innocent civilians”

Source

Smoking Mirrors — June 14, 2013

Dog Poet Transmitting…….

May your noses always be cold and wet.

Well, here they are again, the same twisted, demented, cold-blooded motherfuckers; the same low down, dirty, rotten, filthy liars. Yes, there they are again folks, one more cabal of mass murdering, Zionist, Central Banker owned, mass murdering thugs; Obama, McCain, Dame Lindsey Graham and assorted shitheads and psychopaths. They claim Assad has been using chemical weapons on the rebels. Typically, the only ones caught with chemical weapons have been the rebels. The rebels were caught red handed with chemical weapons and that is of no importance to these lowdown , dirty, rotten, filthy liars, who are now accusing Assad of doing what the rebels already did and who are now going to arm the rebels, who were caught with chemical weapons. You’ll note in one of these links that some sleazy weasel of a government shill, is claiming that the rebel forces are made up of disaffected deserters from the Assad army. This is in direct contradiction to what the 24/7, ‘all lies, all the time’ Zionist owned, mass media, has been claiming all the way up until now. However, since the new, most outrageous lie of the day, has been minted and put into circulation, suddenly, the rebel army that heretofore had been made up of a local franchise of the mythical (CIA creation) Al Qaeda; Saudi Arabians, Libyans, camouflaged Israelis and assorted mercenaries from anywhere, the rebel army is now made up of deserting Syrian soldiers.

I have a friend, Bud the Birdman, who just gave me a vituperative backhand, insisting that it is Assad who has killed 90,000 of his own people. Bud gets his news from the lame stream media. For 12 years I have been researching all manner of things for hours every day. Bud has made nowhere near this effort but he is an expert on what’s going on, like so many other people. When someone tells me something I didn’t know before, no matter how silly or over the top it may seem, the first thing I do is to go and look into it and that usually means at least three different sources. There are far too many people who allow their minds to be made up for them, never bother to make an independent investigation and then, should you challenge their position, their face gets red, the cords stand out on their neck …and they give you the party line. The last thing I didn’t thoroughly vet, turned out to be a hoax. So I am more determined than ever to stay alert and be watchful.

It mystifies me. I cannot get my head around that mass of the population, who possess no curiosity and do not thirst for the truth, as if it were the wellspring of existence, which it is. Not infrequently, people presume that I hold the opinions I hold because they are things I want to believe. I assure you, on my life and on my soul, this is not true. I hold the views and opinions I have …because the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence give me no choice. There is no profit in it for me, to have to publicly state that Israel did 9/11. I make no powerful and influential friends by stating that dual national, Israeli neo-cons, strong-armed the United States and ZATO into decimating Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and nations yet to be named. The Zionist, Satanic network, owns most of the publishing, music, entertainment and media companies and what they don’t own, they distribute for, or can close down, or drive out of business, you may be sure. Ergo, I have effectively cut myself off from any hope of commercial success, unless some kind of inexplicable miracle occurs but like those few others who share my pariah status, I find ways to get around the blackout.

No one pays me to say what I do. I have to strategize every day on how I will sustain myself. Although I do have a donations button, you never catch me asking the reader to help me out, like the other 99% of the rest of us do. Except for my request, concerning Kickstarter and investment capital for a business venture (which was ignored), I can’t remember ever hitting on the reader for much of anything. I take what integrity I have, seriously. I trust the cosmos, 100%, to look out for me and distribute free advertising to the worthy. That is how committed I am.

I’m not saying any of these things, which I do occasionally bring up, as a way of tooting my own horn, nor am I indirectly, sideways like a crab, looking to garner sympathy or anything else. I don’t require that. For whatever my flaws as a human being may be and I do have them, thankfully not so many as before, the creative side of my life is pretty much cosmos owned and operated. I don’t do any of this under my own power. The truth is that none of us do; all power is borrowed power. I just happen to be aware of that and so are a good number of the readers. Being aware of it permits you to decide who you’re channeling, instead of being hijacked by whatever most closely matches your appetites and desires. I like the same things everyone else does as far as the basics go. I love good food and drink AND I appreciate sex. My intention is to seduce the cosmos into ‘doing me’. If you don’t stop, you have a solid guarantee.

I am ashamed to share the planet with these sold out whores, speaking of sold out whores and the sold out Johns who patronize them, here’s an example of a celebrated low-life who will, hopefully sooner rather than later, be irrefutable proof of that Visiblelism; ‘the bigger the funeral, the bigger the asshole’. The same thing applies to limousines. This is one of the hallmarks of The Kali Yuga, the veneration of gutter slime in expensive suits, along with the marginalization of the good and useful people. Another feature, is the deep pockets funding for the opposition of effective medical treatments, innovative shelter technologies and a host of good ideas that are competition to all the bad ideas brought into manifestation by uncaring money junkies, who are cynical enough to produce things that cause health problems, so that they will make more money for the medical/ pharmaceutical supply side of their conglomerate. This is the same mentality that pressures congress and local governments to create more and more laws, in order to route more people into the private prison industry. Don’t think they don’t do this. Consider the judges who were being paid to sentence people to prison.

How corrupt and brutal is the Israeli-owned American government? They won’t even bring these people to trial because they don’t have enough evidence to make a case. A veritable police state is emerging in easily observable steps. It is right in front of the noses of the blind being led by the blind. Even though they can’t see it, you would think they would smell it. I can come to only one conclusion about the whole affair and that is that whatever is meant to be, is meant to be. It is as if the movie has already been shot and is playing now in theaters of operation everywhere, as the players provide both the actors and the audience. It’s got to have something to do with Karma. Indeed, one of the principal elements of Karma are Samsaras. They are likened to scarves of varying opacity. Awareness can burn these scarves away, as can good works and other things. One has to be keenly motivated, in order to persevere until success arrives. The incredible, suffocating force of materialism, militates against awareness and perseverance. It takes a special kind of person to have the commitment and conviction to do what is necessary; some of us have help. Anyone with any sanity remaining, will seek out such help relentlessly and persistently until it arrives, or you are a fool, a tragic fool, who will learn soon enough what the cost of their indifference amounted to.

As much as a part of me despises these men and women without conscience, who engage in engineering and perpetuating the horrors of the day, I pity them as well. They have no idea of the consequences of their actions. It might be that once they took the right number of wrong turns, they are locked into their groove and there’s no wakey-wakey till the end of the line. It makes sense. It explains why so very, very few of these miscreants ever do an about face. Their usual course is to do their worst, right up until they can do no more; like Henry Kissinger, like David Rockefeller, like Shimon Peres. There is no way that these men do not know the quality and impact of their deeds. They know and they do these things for the sheer joy of it. They delight in evil. It gets them high and it makes them hard. While the ordinary jerk-off artiste, uses stroke books for orgasm assistance, they use autopsy photos, crime scene photos and scenes from the battlefields. The layman does not understand what these men are. No ordinary person can comprehend the face of the abyss, which hopefully they are not looking overlong upon.

I can find no more to say about these lowdown, dirty, rotten, filthy liars. They are what they are. They are contemptible and damned. Equally contemptible, is the public who supports these monsters in their efforts, who chant “USA! USA! USA!”, who somehow possess the capacity to believe ridiculous lies, who believe that 3 buildings came down at the speed of freefall into their own footprint. The only difference between them and the cattle in the fields, is that they are ‘presently’ walking on two legs and that the cows, generally, have a better diet. It’s not something to get upset about because that does nothing to correct the situation. It’s not something to get frustrated about because the situation is not impressed by frustration. It’s similar to losing your temper with someone at the motor vehicle department. It is something to be aware of and that awareness should help you plot your own course toward a destination, different than that to which the monsters and their mind slaves are bound.

End Transmission…….

Source

David Alexander, Phil Stewart — Reuters June 14, 2013

The Obama administration is promising to step up assistance to Syrian rebels after concluding Damascus used chemical weapons against opponents of President Bashar al-Assad, but the military options facing the United States are no easier than before.

President Barack Obama has been slow to move toward military assistance for Syria’s opposition in the past and is likely to continue to move judiciously, looking to work with allies in any intervention in the country’s civil war.

“Thankfully the president is being cautious about his military options. This is not a place where America can go it alone,” said David Solimini, a vice president at the Truman National Security Project think tank.

The Obama administration’s possible military choices range from limited one-off missile strikes from ships – one of the less-complicated scenarios – to bolder operations like carving out no-fly safe zones.

White House officials on Thursday played down the prospects of a no-fly zone, citing the open-ended costs and uncertainty of such an operation in a place like Syria, with its well-defended air space. But they did not rule it out either.

The White House did, however, rule out the more politically unpalatable possibility of sending U.S. forces into the country.

A more likely move would be to begin providing lethal assistance to Syrian rebels. The White House said on Thursday it would increase support to the opposition Supreme Military Council, including military support, but it did not specify lethal aid.

A source close to the matter said on Thursday that Obama has authorized sending some U.S. weapons to Syrian rebels as part of a new package of military support. There was no word on the type of weaponry the United States would provide or when it would be delivered.

Obama had opposed limited steps like arming anti-government rebels, but pressure to deepen U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war after American intelligence agencies concluded Damascus used chemical weapons appears to have changed the calculation.

Obama last August pledged he would consider more significant aid to the rebels if Assad’s regime crossed a “red line” by moving around or using sizeable amounts of chemical weapons.

Representative Ed Royce, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Thursday: “It is now clear that the Assad regime has crossed a red line. … I encourage the administration to begin in earnest arming the Free Syrian Army.”

STRIKES, NO-FLY ZONE

One form of military intervention that could limit to some extent U.S. and allied involvement in Syria’s war would be one-off strikes on pro-Assad forces or infrastructure tied to chemical weapons use. Given Syria’s air defences, planners may choose to fire missiles from ships at sea.

“The most proportional response (to limited chemical weapons use) would be a strike on the units responsible, whether artillery or airfields,” Jeffrey White, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute For Near East Policy, said recently.

“It would demonstrate to Assad that there is a cost to using these weapons. The problem so far is that there’s been no cost to the regime from their actions.”

It is not clear how the Syrian government would respond and if it would try to retaliate militarily against the U.S. forces in the region. U.S. military involvement would also upset Russia, which has a naval facility on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

Another option the Pentagon has examined involves the creation of humanitarian safe areas in support of Turkey and Jordan that would also be no-fly zones off limits to the Syrian air force – an option favoured by lawmakers including Republican U.S. Senator John McCain.

That would involve taking down Syrian air defences and destroying Syrian artillery from a certain distance beyond those zones, to protect them from incoming fire.

But officials, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, have warned that establishing safe zones would tie the United States more closely to Syria’s messy conflict. Assad would almost certainly react.

The U.S. military has also completed planning for going into Syria and securing its chemical weapons under different scenarios, including one in which Assad falls from power and his forces disintegrate, leaving weapons sites vulnerable to pillaging.

But any eventual move to put U.S. boots on the ground in Syria remains a remote possibility.

(Reporting by David Alexander, Phil Stewart, and Peter Apps, with additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Karey Van Hall and Doina Chiacu)

Source

Max Fisher — Washington Post June 12, 2013

Iran, though it is isolated, is still outmaneuvering the United States in the Syrian conflict that matters for them both. The Washington Post’s Liz Sly reports that Hezbollah’s entrance into the war on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad signals the degree to which Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor and Assad’s ally, “is emerging as the biggest victor in the wider regional struggle for influence that the Syrian conflict has become.”

Hezbollah and Iran have been helping Assad’s forces to regain the momentum in the war, making it look more likely that he could ultimately prevail over the rebels. If and when the war ends, it’s increasingly plausible that Iran will emerge as the big winner, able to project even more influence in a weakened Syria and into Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based. “If Iran wins this conflict and the Syrian regime survives, Iran’s interventionist policy will become wider and its credibility will be enhanced,” an analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Council told Sly

How did it happen? The answer may be both simple and complex. For all the twists and turns in regional politics, sectarian divisions and even great-power politics, it might come down to something really simple: Iran just has a bigger stake in Syria than the U.S. does.

It’s true that Iran has responded more forcefully in Syria, sending in weapons, cash, even Revolutionary Guards officers while the United State has hesitated over even arming select rebel groups. But it would be overly simplistic to boil that down to the decisions of a few U.S. and Iranian officials, to reduce the war’s sweep to the Obama administration’s reluctance to send arms.

Long-held international relations theory maintains that states, though their leaders might nudge them a few degrees one way or another, tend to conduct foreign policy in accordance with their national interests. And the simple fact is that, for all the U.S. interests in Syria, Iran’s interests run deeper. The country just has much more to gain in “winning” the conflict than does the United States and much more to lose if it doesn’t.

A rebel-held Syria, whether those rebels were the Islamists favored by Saudi Arabia and Qatar or the moderates hoped for in Washington, would shut out Iran from its only major Arab ally and and make it much tougher for Iran to reach its proxies in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. It would leave Iran less able to reach the outside world or to threaten Israel, which Tehran sees, rightly or wrongly, as an imminent threat to Iranian security that must be deterred.

Amr al-Azm, a history professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio who is Syrian and active in the opposition, put it succinctly to the Post’s Sly. “Politically we’re screwed, and militarily we’re taking a pounding,” Azm said of the opposition’s recent setbacks. “America talked the talk while Iran walked the walk.”

Source

Liz Sly — Washington Post June 12, 2013

As fighters with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement wage the battles that are helping Syria’s regime survive, their chief sponsor, Iran, is emerging as the biggest victor in the wider regional struggle for influence that the Syrian conflict has become.

With President Obama set to host a White House meeting of top national security aides on Wednesday to reassess options in light of recent setbacks for the rebels seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the long-term outcome of the war remains far from assured, analysts and military experts say.

But after the Assad regime’s capture of the small but strategic town of Qusair last week — a battle in which the Iranian-backed Shiite militia played a pivotal role — Iran’s supporters and foes alike are mulling a new reality: that the regional balance of power appears to be tilting in favor of Tehran, with potentially profound implications for a Middle East still grappling with the upheaval wrought by the Arab Spring revolts.

“This is an Iranian fight. It is no longer a Syrian one,” said Mustafa Alani, director of security and defense at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Council. “The issue is hegemony in the region.”

The ramifications extend far beyond the borders of Syria, whose location at the heart of the Middle East puts it astride most of the region’s fault lines, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the disputes left over from the U.S. occupation of Iraq, from the perennial sectarian tensions in Lebanon to Turkey’s aspirations to restore its Ottoman-era reach into the Arab world.

An Iran emboldened by the unchecked exertion of its influence in Syria would also be emboldened in other arenas, Alani said, including the negotiations over its nuclear program, as well as its ambitions in Iraq, Lebanon and beyond.

“If Iran wins this conflict and the Syrian regime survives, Iran’s interventionist policy will become wider and its credibility will be enhanced,” he added.

From Iran’s point of view, sustaining Assad’s regime also affirms Iran’s control over a corridor of influence stretching from Tehran through Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut to Maroun al-Ras, a hilltop town on Lebanon’s southern border that offers a commanding view of northern Israel, according to Mohammad Obaid, a Lebanese political analyst with close ties to Hezbollah.

Iran has sought to minimize its visible involvement in Syria so as not to exacerbate sectarian tensions that have been inflamed by a conflict pitting an overwhelmingly Sunni opposition against a regime dominated by Assad’s minority Shiite-affiliated sect, Obaid said.

Iran has provided advice, money and arms to Assad’s regime, but the manpower needed to bolster his forces, flagging after two years of trying to contain the revolt, has come from Hezbollah, which was founded in the 1980s with help from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and has become Lebanon’s leading military and political force.

“Hezbollah is part of the Iranian strategy,” Obaid said. “This counts as a victory for the group of Iran, Syria, Iraq and Hezbollah against the group backed by the United States.”

‘Iran walked the walk’

Supporters of the Syrian opposition contrast the hesitancy of the U.S. administration in offering arms to the outgunned, poorly trained and deeply divided rebels with the commitment that Iran has shown to its Damascus ally.

The U.S. goal was to pressure Assad into making concessions at the negotiating table, without delivering a resounding military victory to the rebels that might have brought Islamists to power in Damascus, said Amr al-Azm, a history professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio who is Syrian and is active in the opposition. Instead, a proposed peace conference in Geneva seems likely to be held on Assad’s terms, should it go ahead.

“Politically we’re screwed, and militarily we’re taking a pounding,” Azm said. “America talked the talk while Iran walked the walk.”

This would not be the first time that Iran has outmaneuvered the United States since the Iranian revolution brought Shiite clerics to power in Tehran in 1979. But the assertion of Shiite power in Syria rankles Sunnis across the region, compounding the dangers that the Syrian conflict could provoke a wider and even bloodier war than the one currently underway, which is estimated to have killed at least 80,000 people.

Escalating violence in Iraq and growing tensions in Lebanon, whose conflicts are inextricably intertwined with the increasingly sectarian nature of the war in Syria, underscore the risk that centuries-old religious rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites will be aggravated by Iran’s role. The leading religious authority in Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri have in the past week called on Sunnis to volunteer to fight in Syria, marking a potentially dangerous convergence that could herald an intensified influx of Sunni jihadis.

Saudi Arabia’s role

Saudi Arabia, the leading Sunni power in the region and Washington’s closest Arab ally, is unlikely to tolerate an ascendant Iran even if the United States chooses to remain aloof, said Jamal Khashoggi, director of the al-Arab television channel.

“It is a serious blow in the face of Saudi Arabia, and I don’t think the Saudis will accept it. They will do something, whether on their own or with America,” he said. “Syria is the heart of the Arab world, and for it to be officially conquered by the Iranians is unacceptable.”

One way in which Saudi Arabia could influence the outcome is by facilitating unchecked supplies of arms to the rebels, analysts say. Although the umbrella Free Syrian Army has received small quantities of weaponry from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar over the past year, the United States has sought to control the flow, vetting the recipients and restricting the caliber of the weapons provided.

After videos surfaced in March of Islamist groups wielding antitank weapons funneled across the Jordanian border by Saudi Arabia, the United States imposed a freeze on all further deliveries, putting the rebels at a disadvantage just as Iran, through Hezbollah, was gearing up to rejuvenate the Assad regime’s army with reinforcements, according to rebel leaders.

A symbolic battle

Military analysts caution against overestimating the impact of the rebel defeat in Qusair on what is likely to be a long and unpredictable war. The obscure western town abutting Hezbollah-controlled territory in Lebanon almost certainly offered an easier conquest than other rebel strongholds, such as the city of Aleppo, where the regime is touting an imminent offensive.

The rebels are continuing to press attacks in the northern, eastern and southern peripheries of the country even as the government appears to be tightening its grip on the central provinces of Damascus and Homs, raising the specter that the country will be partitioned into enclaves backed by rival Sunni and Shiite regional powers. A suicide bombing in Damascus on Tuesday highlighted the likelihood that the rebels will sustain an insurgency similar to the one that persists in Iraq even if they are defeated militarily.

The chief significance of the battle for Qusair lay in the powerful symbolism of the role played by Hezbollah, which eliminated any doubt that the Syrian conflict has turned into a proxy war for regional influence, said Charles Lister, an analyst with IHS Jane’s defense consultancy in London.

“External actors are becoming increasingly decisive and pivotal in terms of where the conflict is going,” he said. And if the United States increased its support for the rebels, Assad’s allies would be likely to boost theirs, he added.

“The conflict has regionalized, and, unfortunately, that gives it the potential to drag on longer,” he said. “As long as one side increases its assistance, the other will see the need to do so, too.”

Source

By Mairead Maguire, Nobel peace laureate. Spokesperson for Mussalaha International Peace delegation to Lebanon/Syria, May, 2013

Report and Appeal to the International community to support a process of dialogue and reconciliation in Syria between its people and Syrian government and reject outside intervention and war.

After a 10 days  visit to Lebanon and Syria, leading a 16 person delegation from 8 countries, invited by Mussalaha Reconciliation Movement,  I have returned hopeful that peace is possible in Syria, if all outside interference is stopped and the Syrians are allowed to solve their own problems upholding  their right to  self-determination.

An appeal to end all violence and for Syrians to be left alone from outside interference was made by all those we met during our visit to Syria.  We have tried to forward it to the International community in our Concluding Declaration(l).

During our visit we went to refugee camps, affected communities, met religious leaders, combatants, government representatives, opposition delegations and many others, perpetrators and victims, in Lebanon and Syria.

1. Visits to refugee camps:   In Lebanon we visited several refugee camps, hosted by Lebanese or Palestinian communities.  One Woman said: “before this conflict started we were happy and had a good life (there is free education, free healthcare, subsidies for fuel,  in Syria ,) and now we live in poverty”. Her daughter and son-in-law (a pharmacist and engineer) standing on a cement floor in a Palestinian refugee camp, with not even a mattress,  told us that this violence had erupted to everyone surprise’s and spread so quickly they were all still in shock, but when well armed, foreign fighters came to Homs, they took over their homes, raped their women, and killed young males who refused to join their ranks, so the people fled in terror.They said that these foreign fighters were from many countries like Libyans, Saudis, Tunisians, Chechens, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Emiratis, Lebanese, Jordanians, Turkish, Europeans, Australian, and these gangs are financed and trained by foreign governments.  They attach suicide vests around peoples’ bodies and threaten to explode them if they don’t do what they are told.  One refugee woman asked me ‘when can we go home’? (To my great delighted a few days later in Damascus I met a woman working on a government programme which is helping refugees to return to Syria and over 200 have returned to date).

Religious and government leaders have called upon people not to flee Syria and it is to be hoped many will heed this call, as after seeing so many Syrian refugees living in tents and being exploited in so many ways, including sexually, I believe the best solution is the stability of Syria so its people feel safe enough to stay in Syria.If refugees continue to flee Syria then surrounding countries could be destabilized, causing the domino effect and destabilizing the entire Middle East.

Many people have fled into camps in surrounding countries like Turkey, Jordan or Lebanon, all of whom are trying to manage the huge influx of Syrian refugees. Although the host countries are doing their best to cope they are overwhelmed by refugee numbers. (UNHCR’s official figure of refugees is 1,5 millions).Through our meetings we have been informed that Turkey invites Syrian refugees into the country and forbid them to go back home. It is documented that Syrian refugees in Turkey and Jordan are mistreated. Some young Syrian refugee girls are sold for forced marriage in Jordan.   From Ohchr reports we know that more than 4 million Syrians are displaced inside their own country, living in great need.

A representative from Red Cross, told us that there is freedom to do their work throughout Syria for all Ngo and the Syrian Red crescent in co-ordination with the Ministry of Social affairs  and under such dire circumstances, they are doing their best, providing services to as many people as possible.  However there is a great shortage of funds for them to cope with this humanitarian tragedy of refugees and   internally displaced population.   The economic sanctions, as in Iraq,are causing great hardship to many people and all those whom we met called for them to be lifted.  Our delegation called for the lifting of these illegal US-led sanctions that target the Syrian Population for purely political reasons in order to achieve regime change.

2- Hospitals: We visited the hospitals and saw many people injured by shootings, bombings, and armed attacks.  A moderate Sunni Imam told me how he was abducted by jihadists, who tortured him, cut off his ear, tried to cut his throat, slicing his legs, and left him for dead.  He said when he goes back to his mosque they will slaughter him.  He told us”these men are foreign fighters, jihadists from foreign countries, well armed, well trained, with money, they are in our country to destroy it.  They are not true Muslims but are religious extremist/fundamentalists terrorizing, abducting, killing our people”.  The government spokesman also confirmed that they have in detention captured foreign fighters from 29 countries, including Chechens, Iraqis, and many others.The Ministry of Health showed us a documentary on the terrible killings by Jihadists and the terror caused by theseforeigners with thekilling of medics and destruction of medical infrastructure of the Syrian State whichhas made it difficult to answer the needs of the population.

3- Meeting with Opposition: Our delegation participated in an open forum with many representatives  of internal opposition’s parties. One political opponent who was in prison 24 years under the Assad (father) regime, and has been out for 11 years, wants political change with more than 20 other internal opposition components, but without outside interference and the use of violence.  We met with ‘armed’ opposition people in a local community who said they had accepted the governments offer of amnesty and were working for a peaceful way forward.  One man told me he had accepted money from Jihadists to fight but had been shocked by their cruelty and the way they treated fellow Syrian muslims considering them as not real Muslims. He said foreign Jihadists wanted to take over Syria, not save it.

The 10thMay a part of our delegation headed to Homs, invited by the opposition community of Al Waar city where displaced families from Baba Amro, Khalidiyeh and other rebel’s strongholds seek refuge. The Delegation saw all the conditions of this city and is studying a Pilot Project for Reconciliation and peaceful reintegration between this community and the surrounded non rebel communities (Shia and Alaouites) with whom 15 days ago an agreement of non belligerence has been signed through the auspices of Mussalaha.

4 -  Meeting with Officials: Our Delegation met, and spoke, at the Parliament, and also with the Governor, Prime Minister and 7 other Ministries.  We were given details of the new Constitution and political reforms being put in place, and plans for elections in 2014.  Government Ministers admitted that they had made mistakes in being slow to respond to legitimate demands for change from civil community but these were now being implemented.  They told us when the conflict started it was peaceful for change but quickly turned into bloodshed when armed men killed many soldiers.

In the first days soldiers were unarmed but when people started asking for protection the government and military responded to defend the people and in self defence.

When we enquired from the Prime Minister regarding the allegation that the Syrian Government had used Sarin gas, he told us that as soon as  news came from Aleppo that allegedly gas had been used, his government  invited immediately the UN to come into investigate, but heard nothing from them.  Most recently however, a UN investigator, High Commissioner Carla Del Ponte, has confirmed that it was rebels, not Syrian government, who used Sarin gas.   During meeting with Justice Minister, we requested that a list of 72 non-violent political dissidents currently detained be released.  The justice Ministersaid after checking those listed were indeed non-violent political dissidents,  he would,  in principal, agree to the release of these nonviolent detainees.  He also informed us thatthey do not implement the death penalty and it is hoped that when things settle in Syria they will move to have the death penalty abolished.  We also asked the Justice Minister (an international lawyer) about Syrian Government’s Human rights abuses, namely the artillery shelling into no-go areas being held by jihadists and armed opposition.  The Minister accepted those facts but alleged that the Government had a duty to clear these areas.  We suggested there was a better way to deal with the problem than artillery shelling but he insisted that the government had responsibility to clear the areas of rebel forces and this was the way in which they were doing it

The Ministers and Governor said that President Assad was their President and has their support.  There were many people we spoke to who expressed such sentiments.   However, some young people said they support the opposition but in order to protect the Unity of Syria from outside destruction, they will support the government and President Assad, until the election next year and then they will vote for the opposition. They said the Doha Coalition in Qatar does not represent them and that no one outside Syria has a right to remove President Assad but the Syrian people through the elections next year.  The journalists in Syria are in great danger from the religious extremist/fundamentals,and during my visit to a television station a young journalist told me how his mother was killed by jihadists and he showed me his arm where he had been shot and almost killed.

5- Meeting with religious leaders: We attended in the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus a prayer gathering led by the Grand Mufti of the Syrian Arab Republic, Dr. Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun and the Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III Laham with the delegate of Greek Orthodox Patriarch John X Yazigi, and clerics of all traditions. The Assembly prayed for the peace and unity of Syria and the non-interference of outsiders in their country.  They stressed the conflict in Syria is not a religious conflict, as Muslims and Christians have always lived together in Syria, and they are,(in spite of living with  suffering and violence much of which is not of their own making), unified in their wish to be a light of peace and reconciliation to the world.  The Patriarch said that from the Mosque and Christian churches goes out a great movement of peace and reconciliation and asked both those inside and outside Syria, to reject all violence and support the people of Syria in this work of dialogue, reconciliation and peacemaking.

The Muslim and Christian Spiritual Leaders are very conscious if the religious extremist/fundamentalists gain momentum and control Syria, the future of those who are not supportive of fundamentalists like moderate Muslims, Christians, minorities, and other Syrians is in great danger. Indeed the Middle East  could loose its precious pluralistic social fabric with the  Christians, like in Iraq, being the first to flee the country. This would be a tragedy for all concerned in this multi-religious, multi-cultural secular Syria, once a light of peaceful conviviality in the Arab world.

AN OVERVIEW:

Following many authorized reports in the mainstream Medias and our own evidences I can stress that the Syrian State and its population are under a proxy war led by foreign countries and directly financed and backed mainly by Qatar who has imposed its views on the Arab League. Turkey, a part of the Lebanese opposition and some of the Jordan authorities offer a safe haven to a diversity of jihadist groups, each with its own agenda, recruited from many countries. Bands of jihadists armed and financed from foreign countries invade Syria through Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon porous frontiers in an effort to destabilize Syria. There are an estimated 50,000 foreign jihadist fighters terrorizing Syria.Those death squads are destroying systematically the Syrian State infrastructures (Electricity, Oil, Gas and water plants, High Tension Pylons, hospitals, schools, public buildings, cultural heritage sites and even religious sanctuaries).  Moreover the country is submerged by snipers, bombers, agitators, bandits.  They use aggression and Sharia rules and hijack the freedom and dignity of the Syrian population.  They torture and kill those who refuse to join them. They have strange religious beliefs which make them feel comfortable even perpetrating the cruelest acts like killing and torture of their opponents. It is well documented that  many of those terrorists are permanently under stimulant like Captagon. The general lack of security unlashes the terrible phenomenon of abduction for ransoms or for political pressure.  Thousands of innocents are missing, among them the two Bishops, Youhanna Ibrahim and Paul Yazigi, many priests and Imams.

UN and EU economic sanctions as well as a severe embargo are pushing Syria to the edge of social collapse. Unfortunately the international media network is ignoring those realities and is bent on demonizing, lying, destabilizing the country and fuelling more violence and contradiction.

In summary: the war in Syria is not as depicted a civil war but a proxy war with serious breaches of International laws and the Humanitarian International laws.. The protection of the foreign fighters  by some foreign countries among the most powerful gives them a kind of an unaccountability that pushes them with impunity to all kind of cruel deeds against innocent civilians. Even war conventions are not respected incurring in many war crimes and, even, crimes against Humanity.

CONCLUSION:

During our visit to Syria, our delegation was met with great kindness by everyone and I offer to each one who facilitated or hosted our Delegation my most sincere feelings of gratitude.  We witnessed that the Syrian people have suffered very deeply and continue to do so.  The entire population of 23 million people are under tremendous threat of continued infiltration by foreign terrorists.  Many are still stunned by the horrors and suddenness of all this violence and worried their country will be attacked and divided by outside forces, and are all too aware that geopolitical forces are at work to destabilize Syria for political control, oil and resources. One Druze leader said ‘if westerns want our Oil – both Lebanon and Syria have oil reserves – let us negotiate for it, but do not destroy our country to take it’.     In Syria memories of next door Iraq’s destruction by US/UK/NATO forces are fresh in people’s minds, including in the minds of the one and a half million Iraqis who fled Iraqi’s conflict, including many Christians, and were given refuge in Syria by the Syrian Government.

The greatest hope we took was from Mussalaha, a non political movement from all sections of Syrian society, who have working teams throughout Syria and is proceeding through dialogue to building peace and reconciliation.  Mussalaha mediates between armed gunmen and security forces, help get release of many people who have been abducted, and bring together all parties to the conflict for dialogue and practical solutions.  It was this movement who hosted us, under the leadership of Mother Agnes-Mariam, Superior of Saint James’ Monastery, supported by the Patriarch Gregory III Laham, head of the Catholic Hierarchy of Syria.

This great civil community movement building a peace process and National Reconciliation from the ground up, will, if given space, time, and non-interference from outside, help bring Peace to Syria.  They recognize that there must be an unconditional, all inclusive political solution, with compromises and they are confident this is happening at many levels of society and is the only way forward for Syrian peace.

I support this National Reconciliation process which, many Syrians believe, is the only way to bring Peace to SYRIA and the entire Middle East. I am myself committed to this peaceful process and hope that the International Community, the Religious and Political Leaders as well as any person of good will help Syria to bypass violence and prejudice and anchor in a new era of Social peace and prosperity.  This cradle of civilizations where Syria occupies the heart is an enormous spiritual heritage for humanity, let us strive to establish a non war zone and proclaim it an OASIS of Peace for the Human Family.

MAIREAD MAGUIRE

Nobel peace laureate.    www.peacepeople.com

Source

Kevin Boyle — No One To Vote For June 9, 2013

A wretched mornings viewing this Sunday on BBC1.

On ‘The Daily Politics’ there was, for the first time, an item on the Bilderberger Conference, held this year at ‘The Grove’ in Watford, UK. There were large crowds of protesters outside, if somewhat distant from, the hotel itself. BBC coverage managed to make it look like a handful of fruitcakes carrying ventriloquist’s dummies, wearing clown suits and carrying  deranged-looking ( to the disinterested observer) placards about paedophilia and the like. Cut to the studio where Andrew Neil interviewed David Aaronovitch and (Blimey What’s This!) Alex Jones about the Bilderbergers. Look at the clip below (to the very end please) and judge for yourselves but for once, and it is once, I have to almost agree with David Aarovitch when he said, re global criminal conspirators manipulating world events, to Jones:

“The fact you are here indicates that either that one, they don’t exist or two, you are part of the conspiracy. I say the first.”

Anyone who watches the entire sorry performance below will surely go with number two.

Could Jones possibly have used this precious time more wastefully. Could he possibly have given a more discreditable performance. God help us!. He was embarrassing to watch and said nothing, in my view, that would tempt the casual government-trusting observer to change their views. Andrew Neil’s gesture at the end was surely, to the average viewer, quite fitting.

Jones is the very worst kind of spokesman for those of us who try to educate people about deep manipulation of political processes, the hegemony of finance, and the breathtaking and murderous lies of all our leaders.

I admit to having learnt quite a bit from Jones myself but this ‘limited hangout’ artist acts like a fool, looks like a fool and, what’s worse, brings down ridicule on the heads of the rest of us.

Most of us quickly grow out of admiring this Zion-funded egomaniac.

What was it Lenin said?

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

Looks like Alex, smells like Alex.

Must be Alex.

For more BBC1 manipulation watch ‘The Big Questions’ on BBC iPlayer (series 6, episode 20), aired this morning also, but not yet online.

The debate about Syria was so skewed it was sickening to watch. There were two opponents of ‘our’ intervention in Syria, the main guy being a decent enough military fellow but a bit dim. He pointed out the obvious dangers based on the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan but failed to also make the point out that it was US/UK/EU politicians (with the support of Qataris and Saudis) that kicked off the’Syrian Rebellion’ that these same politicians now find so ‘heartbreaking’. He also did not challenge the picture of a satanic government at war with its own people when NATO’s own research shows that 70% of the Syrian public support Assad, 20% are neutral and only 10% support the rebels. This is a level of support that David Cameron and Barack Obama can only dream about.

The (don’t laugh) ‘democrats’ pushing for war far outnumbered these two and were allowed to bang on about our ‘humanitarian duty’ ad nauseam. One also notes that whenever issues of war are debated on the BBC, the Jewish representative from the ‘Henry Jackson Society’ always seems to make an appearance, loathsome dissembling git that he is.

Yup, the BBC know how to create the impression they desire. Gotta be the world’s most skilled and practiced liars. Increasing numbers, encouragingly, are seeing through the system. Even Tory MP’s are up in arms about the prospect of our arming ‘the rebels’ (as their party leaders recommend) so these people are getting educated somewhere even if it is not by the BBC.

P.S. Here is a powerful report about and appeal for Syria written by Nobel Laureate, Mairead Maguire.

It’s conclusion (below) contains the kind of truth you will never read in the western mainstream media,

http://www.sibialiria.org/wordpress/?p=1517%2024%20maggio%202013

AN OVERVIEW:

Following many authorized reports in the mainstream Medias and our own evidences I can stress that the Syrian State and its population are under a proxy war led by foreign countries and directly financed and backed mainly by Qatar who has imposed its views on the Arab League. Turkey, a part of the Lebanese opposition and some of the Jordan authorities offer a safe haven to a diversity of jihadist groups, each with its own agenda, recruited from many countries. Bands of jihadists armed and financed from foreign countries invade Syria through Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon porous frontiers in an effort to destabilize Syria. There are an estimated 50,000 foreign jihadist fighters terrorizing Syria.Those death squads are destroying systematically the Syrian State infrastructures (Electricity, Oil, Gas and water plants, High Tension Pylons, hospitals, schools, public buildings, cultural heritage sites and even religious sanctuaries).  Moreover the country is submerged by snipers, bombers, agitators, bandits.  They use aggression and Sharia rules and hijack the freedom and dignity of the Syrian population.  They torture and kill those who refuse to join them. They have strange religious beliefs which make them feel comfortable even perpetrating the cruelest acts like killing and torture of their opponents. It is well documented that  many of those terrorists are permanently under stimulant like Captagon. The general lack of security unlashes the terrible phenomenon of abduction for ransoms or for political pressure.  Thousands of innocents are missing, among them the two Bishops, Youhanna Ibrahim and Paul Yazigi, many priests and Imams.

Source

Voltairnet.org — June 9, 2013

The Anglo-American press reports on an internal NATO study (dated June 2013), which takes stock of Syrian public opinion [1].

The study shows that 70% of Syrians support President Bashar al-Assad, 20% adopt a neutral position and 10% support the “rebels.”

These figures are presented as reflecting a change of heart. The population is tired of the abuses and divisions of the armed opposition. From NATO’s perspective, what we are witnessing is not a phenomenon that is occurring in view of the approaching “Geneva-2″ peace conference.

For two years, the events in Syria have been portrayed by the Atlanticist and GCC press as a peaceful revolution cruelly suppressed by a tyrant. The Syrian and anti-imperialist press, on the contrary, brands them as a foreign attack, armed and funded to the tune of billions of dollars.

Source

Gilad Atzmon — gilad.co. June 7, 2013

In the last week we have been following British and French’s desperate attempts to push for a military intervention in Syria. It is far from being a secret that both British and French government are dominated by the Jewish Lobby. In Britain it is the ultra Zionist CFI (Conservative Friends of Israel) – apparently 80% of  Britain’s conservative MPs are members of the pro Israeli Lobby. In France the situation is even more devastating, the entire political system is hijacked by the forceful CRIF.

But in case anyone fails to grasp why the Jewish Lobby is pushing for an immediate intervention, Debka, an Israeli news outlet provides the answer. Seemingly, the Syrian army is winning on all fronts. Israel’s military and geo-political calculations are proved to be wrong.

According to Debka, “the battle for Damascus is over”. The Syrian army had virtually “regained control of the city in an epic victory”.  The rebels, largely mercenaries,  have lost the battle they “can’t do much more than fire sporadically. They can no longer launch raids, or pose threats to the city centre, the airport or the big Syrian air base nearby. The Russian and Iranian transports constantly bringing replenishments for keeping the Syrian army fighting can again land at Damascus airport after months of rebel siege.”

But it isn’t just the capital. Debka reports that “Hezbollah and Syrian units have tightened their siege on the rebels holding out in the northern sector of al Qusayr; other (Syrian army) units have completed their takeover of the countryside around the town of Hama; and a third combined Syrian-Hizballah force has taken up positions around Aleppo.”

Debka maintains that senior IDF officers criticized the Israeli defense minister (Moshe Ya’alon) who “mislead” the Knesset a few days ago estimating that “Bashar Assad controlled only 40% of Syrian territory.”  Debka suggests that Israeli defense Minister drawn on a “flawed intelligence assessment and were concerned that the armed forces were acting on the basis of inaccurate intelligence.” Debka stresses, “erroneous assessments… must lead to faulty decision-making.”

Debka is clearly brave enough to admit that Israeli military miscalculations may have lead to disastrous consequences. It reports, “the massive Israeli bombardment of Iranian weapons stored near Damascus for Hezbollah, turned out a month later to have done more harm than good. It gave Bashar Assad a boost instead of weakening his resolve.”

Debka is obviously correct. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that an Israeli attack on an Arab land cannot be accepted by the Arab masses, not even by Assad’s bitterest Arab opponents.

Debka maintains that the “intelligence focus on military movements in Syria especially around Damascus to ascertain that advanced missiles and chemical weapons don’t reach Hezbollah laid to a failure of in detecting major movement by Hezbollah militia units towards the Syrian-Israeli border.”

Israel is now facing a new reality.  It is facing Hezbollah reinforcements  streaming in from Lebanon towards the Golan heights and its border with Syria.

Israel, Debka concludes,  will soon find itself  “face to face for the first time with Hezbollah units equipped with heavy arms and missiles on the move along the Syrian-Israeli border and manning positions opposite Israel’s Golan outposts and villages.”

Debka is correct to suggest that instead of “growing weaker, Iran’s Lebanese proxy is poised to open another warfront and force the IDF to adapt to a new military challenge from the Syrian Golan.”

Rather than The Gurdian or the Le Monde, it is actually the  Israeli Debka that helps us to grasp why Britain and France are so  desperate to intervene. Once again, it is a Zionist war which they are so eager to fight.

Sadly enough, it isn’t The Guardian or The New York Times that is there to reveal the latest development in Syria and expose Israeli lethal miscalculations. It is actually a ‘Zionist’ Israeli patriotic outlet that is providing the good. I actually believe that this form of harsh self-criticism that is embedded in Israeli culture, is the means that sustains Israeli regional hegemony, at least monetarily. This ability to critically examine and disapprove your own leadership is something I fail to encounter in Western media. Seemingly,  the  media in Israel is far more tolerant toward criticism  than the Zionist dominated  Media in the West.

Source

Christopher Bollyn — bollyn.com June 5, 2013

Israel, whether intentionally or not, has made itself a perceived ally of the Syrian rebels – capable of replacing international shoulder-shrugging and military inaction with a policy of intervention.

-  “Assad’s dilemma: Blame Israeli strike on rebels or retaliate and risk open war,” by Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz (Israel), May 5, 2013

Based on lies and fabrications the United States and its NATO allies went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. By using lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which did not even exist, the war in Iraq was sold to the American people. These unjustified wars have plundered the U.S. economy with massive amounts of defense spending in which defense contractors earn immense profits, year after year, at the expense of the American taxpayer.

The top contractors for the U.S. government are all defense related companies. The federal funds, borrowed and paid to the top 5 defense contractors alone (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon) currently amount to nearly $400 per year for every man, woman, and child in the United States. War is very dirty business through which huge amounts of money are stolen from the state. Apart from interest on the debt, the U.S. Defense Department is the undisputed king of the hill consuming the lion’s share of the U.S. budget (about $373 billion in 2011), a budgetary distortion that does not leave much to provide for the needs of the American people.

The same propaganda tactics that were used to start the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are now being used to prepare public opinion for more wars. The same lies about banned weapons are being recycled to set the stage for military intervention in Syria and Iran. It is, therefore, important to understand who is pushing for Western intervention in the war in Syria, and why.

As Syrian forces and their allies regain territory from the rebels, the supporters of the rebels (some of whom have engaged in acts of cannibalism) are increasing their demands for Western states or NATO to intervene militarily to overthrow the Syrian government. This call is being led by France and Britain, states in which the Zionist Rothschild family has the greatest influence. In France, Laurent Fabius, the Jewish foreign minister who has close ties to Israel, is pushing for military intervention claiming that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons. The opinion of non-biased experts, however, is that it is the rebels who have used these banned weapons – not the Syrian government.

In early May, Carla del Ponte said that the independent UN investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria indicated that they had been used by the rebels – not government forces.

“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated… This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”

The statements by del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, that chemical weapons had been used by the rebels were not welcomed by those who support the rebels in Syria, especially the governments of France and Britain.

Video Link - http://youtu.be/kmX5sJktyC8

The very same French government, which wages war in Mali against Islamist militias, is now pushing for intervention in Syria to support Islamist rebels. Evidently, Islamist rebels are being used to achieve strategic goals that have nothing to do with Islam.

One month after del Ponte’s revelation, on June 4, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius turned the allegations around saying there was no doubt the Syrian government had used nerve agent sarin against the rebels. “There is no doubt that it’s the regime and its accomplices” that are responsible for use of the gas, Fabius said on France2 television. “All options are on the table,” he said. “That means either we decide not to react or we decide to react including by armed actions targetting the place where the gas is stored.”

Laurent Fabius (right) with Israel's finance minister Yair Lapid on May 31, 2013. Lapid is the former TV host who discussed the 9-11 attacks on Israeli television with three of the five Israelis who were arrested on 9-11. One of the terror suspects told Lapid, "Our mission was to document the event." Lapid didn't ask who gave them the mission. It was understood.

Fabius (left) with Israel's foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman in Israel during the Jewish state's aggression against the Gaza Strip in November 2012.

Laurent Fabius and his wife Françoise Castro are both Jewish. When Fabius was prime minister, Jewish militants worked with the French government.

It is certainly not the national interest of France that Laurent Fabius is promoting in Mali and Syria. He is clearly working as an agent of the Rothchilds and the Zionist state of Israel when he lies about who is responsible for war crimes in Syria. Fabius has a history of working with Jewish extremists, as Robert Faurisson noted in 1995:

In 1986, when Laurent Fabius was Prime Minister of France, his wife, Mme. Françoise Castro, revealed that the Jewish militants and the Interior Minister were working hand in hand. She stated: “An extraordinary novelty in political behavior: the Left has allowed Jewish militants to establish themselves in some quarters of Paris and also in Toulouse, Marseille, and Strasbourg [and to have] regular contacts with the Interior Minister.” (Le Monde, March 7, 1986, p. 8). Castro and Fabius are both Jewish.

- “Jewish Militants: Fifteen Years, and More, of Terrorism in France,” by Robert Faurisson, June 1995

Sources:

“Assad’s dilemma: Blame Israeli strike on rebels or retaliate and risk open war,” by Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz, May 5, 2013
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/assad-s-dilemma-blame-israeli-strike-on-rebels-or-retaliate-and-risk-open-war.premium-1.519368

“France’s Fabius ‘confirms sarin use’ by Syria regime,” BBC News, June 5, 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22773268

“Jewish Militants: Fifteen Years, and More, of Terrorism in France,” by Robert Faurisson, June 1995
http://vho.org/aaargh/engl/FaurisArch/RF9603xx.html

“UN’s Del Ponte says evidence Syria rebels ‘used sarin’,” BBC News, May 6, 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22424188

“U.N. has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas: investigator,” Reuters, May 5, 2013
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/05/us-syria-crisis-un-idUSBRE94409Z20130505

Original posted at bollyn.com