By Chris Hedges

Video By teleSur

Chris Hedges and professor Leo Panitch examine the genesis of global imperialism and capitalism. The two discuss how both are upheld by economic and cultural forces, and debate the roles of ignorance, myth, and mal­intent in the perpetuation of systems of inequality.

Posted September 10, 2015

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42817.htm

By Jacob G. Hornberger

September 10, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “FFF” –  Consider the impact on the civil liberties of the American people of four of the non-stop wars that the U.S. government has been waging for a very long time: the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on immigrants, and the war on wealth. These four wars have converted what was once a free country into a police state, making the United States the most over-incarcerated nation in the world.

The war on drugs has subjected people to an untold number of searches of persons, homes, businesses, and especially automobiles. This war has served as a convenient excuse to made vast inroads on the protections against unreasonable searches provided by the Fourth Amendment. It would be impossible to calculate the number of people who have been stopped, patted down, and searched, especially without a judicially issued search warrant, in the name of the war on drugs during the past several decades.

The drug war has also brought us asset-forfeiture, a money-making operation for law enforcement that has encouraged the police and the DEA to make warrantless stops of people traveling on the highways, in the hopes of finding a large amount of cash to seize. Additionally, it has encouraged law-enforcement personnel to initiate searches of homes, businesses, and cars in the hopes that some drugs will be found, thereby enabling them to seize the property of the owner.

Think about all the invasions of financial privacy that now form a permanent part of American life. That's what both the war on drugs and the war on terrorism have wrought. People no longer have the freedom to keep their financial affairs secret from the government. People now have to take great care in how they deposit money into banks or withdraw it, owing to laws against "structuring." Bankers have been converted into snitches, reporting to the government any large deposits of money by their customers or any other "suspicious" behavior. The idea is that the customer might be a drug dealer or a terrorist.

People traveling outside the country are required to report whether they're carrying large sums of cash. If they're caught failing to do so, they have their money confiscated. That's because of the war on drugs and the war on terrorism.

Consider what the war on immigration has done to civil liberties. Immigration checkpoints on public highways, where federal officials not only have the authority to demand identification papers of people who are travelling domestically but also to conduct a full-scale, warrantless search of their vehicles. If they find anything illegal in the vehicle during these immigration checkpoints, such as illicit drugs, they turn the person over to the DEA or police for arrest and prosecution.

There are also roving automobile searches, where the Border Patrol arbitrarily stops cars on the highways and, after stating some excuse for the stop, such as "automobile riding low," conduct a warrantless search of the vehicle. Once again, if drugs are found, the person is turned over to drug war agents for criminal prosecution.

Additionally, there are the daily warrantless searches of farms and ranches that are located both on the border and several miles away from the border. These warrantless searches are justified under the rubric of controlling the border or the "functional equivalent of the border."

The war on terrorism has placed the American people under the ultimate control of the military and the CIA. The military now wields the legal authority to take any person into custody as an "enemy combatant," incarcerate him in a concentration camp or military dungeon, torture him, or execute him. Moreover, both the CIA and the military now wield the power to assassinate any suspected terrorist, including American citizens, and to do so anywhere in the world, including here in the United States. No right to jury trial, no protection from cruel and unusual punishments. Thanks to the war on terrorism, the military and the CIA, now have the authority to deprive any person, including American citizens, of life and liberty, without due process of law, notwithstanding the clear prohibition on such conduct in the Fifth Amendment.

The war on terrorism has also subjected the American people, as well as everyone else around the world, to the omnipotent surveillance powers of the NSA. Emails, telephone calls, and other electronic communications are now subject to being read and recorded by NSA agents. Judicial processes to judge such actions are held in secret, just like in totalitarian regimes. The very existence of the NSA has eradicated any reasonable expectation of privacy. Everyone must now operate on the assumption that his private communications are being monitored and recorded and live his life accordingly.

The war on terrorism has also subjected Americans to severe penalties, both civil and criminal, for engaging in trade with people in countries that are being sanctioned by the U.S. government.

The war on wealth has long subjected the American people to the omnipotent power of the Internal Revenue Service. To collect money from the American people to fund the welfare-warfare state, the IRS has been given omnipotent powers that strike fear in the hearts of any reasonable person. Under the income tax laws, everyone is mandated by law to report his most private of personal financial affairs to the government. If the IRS suspects the person of lying, it will hit him with an assessment and begin seizing his assets with attachments, garnishments, and liens. No lawsuit. No due process. No presumption of innocence. Just raw power to collect the monies that are necessary to fund the welfare-warfare state while, in the process, destroying both civil liberties and economic liberty.

The problem is that all too many Americans, believe that these four wars are part and parcel of a free society, a belief they demonstrate every time they praise the military and the CIA for "defending our freedom." They exemplify the words of Johann Goethe: "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." Even many of those who have knowingly traded our liberty for security, are convinced that it was necessary to do so. But nothing could be further from the truth, as our American ancestors, who lived without these four wars for more than a century, demonstrated.

For Americans who are interested in regaining their freedom, security, and economic well-being, a good place to start would be by terminating, not reforming, these four long-standing wars of the federal government: the wars on drugs, terrorism, immigration, and wealth.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. http://fff.org/ . He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42813.htm

By Moon Of Alabama

September 10, 2015 “Information Clearing House” –  The invasion force in Yemen is growing. The invasion troops now include:

• 3,000 United Arab Emirates
• 1,000 Qatar
• 1,000 Saudi Arabia
• 6,000 (somewhat unreliable) Yemeni expats hired and trained by Saudi Arabia
• 600-800 Egypt
• small contingents from Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan

All together the force has now nearly the size of an infantry division in a “western” army. That is not really much should these want to advance from Marib towards the capital Sanaa through the mountainous terrain inhabited by an unfriendly and well armed population. I would recommend at least three division or some 40-50,000 men for that partial task. (For comparison: In the 1960s Egypt sent some 70,000 troops to a proxy civil war in Yemen of which some 12,000 got killed and many more wounded.)

Coordinating such an array of forces with different military cultures will be extremely difficult. There have already been several cases in which the Saudi air force “successfully” bombed ground elements of its Yemeni allies.

Announced are also some 6,000 troops from Sudan though I doubt that so many will ever arrive. Smaller contingents are also to come from Senegal and Morocco.

The U.S. is not only supporting the Saudis with targeting advice, intelligence and logistics. It has now silently joined the fighting:

Haykal Bafana
#Yemen : US drones in Sirwah area of Marib tonight where Saudi allies trying for weeks to dislodge Houthi/Saleh forces. 2 missiles missed

There are no al-Qaeda forces around Marib so this was not a U.S. “anti-terror” strike.

The devastating blockade of Yemen continues. Yesterday an Indian fisherboat smuggling some small load of fuel near Hudaydah harbor was bombed by Saudi aligned forces. Twenty Indian fisherman died. Eleven food trucks with inspected load on their way from “liberated” Aden toward Mocha were bombed and destroyed. Over the last months Yemen received only 10% of the fuel it needs to keep emergency generators, ambulances and water pumps going. Child male nutrition in several areas is now above 30%. Half of the Yemeni population of 26 million are in danger of famine. Yemen’s religious and cultural heritage gets literately ruined.

The capital Sanaa is under constant bombing even though there are hardly any Houthi forces or valuable targets left but a Saudi general now announced that it is time to completely “cleanse” it.

All peace talks have broken down and the UN envoy, selected by the Saudis, is hapless and gets ignored.

“Western” media mostly ignore the war on Yemen and “western” governments excuse their very best customers, the Saudis, by repeating that the Houthis are aligned with Iran which is just one of the falsemyths around this war.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42822.htm

By Gareth Porter

September 10, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “MEE” – By the logic of geopolitics, the United States and Iran ought to be cooperating to contain and weaken the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh). Both countries have declared that the group is a very serious threat to their own security and to the security of the entire Middle East.

Indeed, it has become evident to all – besides those who are determined for their own reasons not to see it – that the Islamic State's intent on setting up an Islamic caliphate has the potential to dissolve the basic international order that has governed the Middle East for a century. So the logic of Iran-U.S. strategic cooperation against Daesh (as the group is referred to in Arabic) is no less compelling than was the logic of the Nixon administration in reaching an understanding with Maoist China to counter-balance their common Soviet adversary.

But that logical development isn't happening, contrary to the fears of some and hopes of others, and it isn't likely to happen any time soon, despite the nuclear agreement and the Obama administration's success in beating back the unprecedented campaign by the Israel lobby to defeat it. The reason is that it is not the logic of geopolitics, in the end, that is governing the problem.

It isn't the Iranian side of the equation that is failing to follow the geopolitical logic. Contrary to the constantly reiterated propaganda theme of the anti-Iran forces in the region and in the United States that Iran's ruling elite simply wants "death to America," Iran has publicly signalled to the Obama administration repeatedly that it was open to such cooperation. But the Obama administration has refused to reciprocate, for the simple reason that it is not capable of formulating a regional policy on the basis of an objective analysis of strategic interests.

To understand the why the international politics of the Middle East are now so profoundly dysfunctional, one must begin with the contrasting modes of Iranian and American foreign policymaking. The dramatic differences between the two approaches to defining interests and policy toward the region has produced a fundamental mismatch between the US and Iranian ways of responding to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Middle East.

For Iran, geopolitics does indeed shape policy toward the region and the US. Iran, as a middle power that is vulnerable to threats from enemies in the region, cannot afford to base its policies on anything but a realistic appraisal of the threats and opportunities. Specifically, Iran has been facing explicit threats of attack from both Israel and the United States since the mid to late-1990s. Now Daesh and al-Qaeda are on the offensive in Iraq and Syria, threatening the twin pillars of Iran's security strategy.

Under those circumstances, Iranian officials know that they must take advantage of any possible opening to improve relations with the United States. Iranian officials have made it clear that they are prepared to take advantage of any possibility – even if slight – of reaching an historic agreement with the United States that could lead to strategic understanding on the threat from Daesh.

One of the conceits of the US political and national security elite is that the real power in the Islamic Republic is held by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard leadership, and that their interests lie in continuing hostility toward the United States. But that convenient belief is belied by Khamenei's own public position. On 9 April, Khamenei clearly articulated the view that Iran is ready to cooperate with the United States on regional issues if the US would indicate some willingness to change its policy. In the context of the negotiations on the nuclear issue, Khamenei declared: "If the counterpart stops its bad behaviour, one could expand this experience to other issues, but if the counterpart continues its bad behaviour, it would only reinforce our experiences of the past and distrust in the United States."

Iran has made it clear that it is prepared to think creatively and flexibly about a modus vivendi with the United States. Last December, the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, recognised that the United States was unlikely to cooperate explicitly with Iran, because of its continued support for Israel. But he suggested that a change in US policy toward Israel was "not impossible" and then raised the possibility of something less than explicit cooperation. "The two can behave in a way that they do not use their energy against each other," he said, and he called the nuclear agreement "crucial in this regard".

In the final round of negotiations on the nuclear agreement from late June to mid-July, Iranian officials in Vienna confirmed to me that Iran and the United States had not discussed regional issues during the nearly 18 months of negotiations. But senior Iranian officials were still holding out some hope, however slight, that the Obama administration might soften its hostility toward Iran sufficiently to make at least tacit cooperation possible once the agreement was reached and approved by Congress.

The Iranians were basing their hope on an analysis of the objective situation in the region. One official told me on 2 July: "The United States doesn't have any reason to trust its allies in regard to Daesh." He was alluding to the well-established fact that major funding for the terrorist organisation had come from Gulf Sunni regimes and that they were clearly more interested in taking down the Assad regime than in stopping Daesh. But the same official also said: "Some in the United States may see Daesh as a source of pressure on the Syrian regime."

But while Iran acknowledges the need for a change in US-Iran relations to ease regional security threats, the United States has not made a move toward any such acknowledgment. US policy toward the Middle East has long been defined primarily not by threats originating in the region but by much more potent domestic political interests, both electoral and bureaucratic. The power of the Israel lobby in Washington, primarily but not exclusively over Congress, is well known, and that has imposed a rigid political and legal framework of hostility toward Iran on the US government for two decades, beginning with a complete trade embargo that remains in place and creates major obstacles to any shift in policy.

What is seldom acknowledged, however, is that the interests of the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA have become tightly intertwined with those of the anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East. A set of mutually reinforcing bureaucratic interests now binds US policy to an alliance structure and military and intelligence programmes in the Middle East that have come to replace objective analysis of regional realities in determining US policy.

The first is the imperative for the US military of holding on to US air, naval and land bases in the region, all but one of which are located in states that are part of the anti-Iran coalition. Continuing long-term control of those bases is the coin of the realm for US military institutions that trumps possible competing policy concerns. Similarly, arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf sheikhdoms and Israel are a primary interest of the Pentagon, its arms contractor partners and its congressional allies. And the determination of that same set of domestic interests to continue the bonanza or research-and-development spending on a missile defense system requires a continued identification of Iran as primary regional adversary and threat.

Finally, the US national security state has never given up its ambition to regain primary influence in Iraq, despite the political legacy of the Iraq war and a Shia-dominated regime in the country. That quite unrealistic interest reduces still further the space for any cooperation with Iran in the region.

The interaction of all those dynamics leave the Obama administration in a position where it cannot adopt a real Middle East strategy that reflects the gravity of the current situation. The paradoxical result is that, instead of responding to the regional crisis by applying creative diplomacy involving an opening to Iran, the Obama administration is reduced to manoeuvring within the tight constraints imposed by the dominant political interests in cleaving to the status quo.

© Middle East Eye 2014 – all rights reserved.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42818.htm

Will the U.S. accept responsibility for the humanitarian consequences of Washington-manufactured wars?

By Philip Giraldi

September 10, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “American Conservative” – On April 29th, 2008 I had a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment. I had flipped open the Washington Post and there, on the front page, was a color photo of a two year old Iraqi boy named Ali Hussein being pulled from the rubble of a house that had been destroyed by American missiles. The little boy was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and had on his feet flip-flops. His head was hanging back at an angle that told the viewer immediately that he was dead.

Four days later on May 3rd a letter by a Dunn Loring Virginia woman named Valerie Murphy was printed by the Post. Murphy complained that the Iraqi child victim photo should not have been run in the paper because it would "stir up opposition to the war and feed anti-US sentiment." I suppose the newspaper thought it was being impartial in printing the woman's letter, though I couldn't help but remember that the neocon-dominated Post had generally been unwilling to cover anything antiwar, even ignoring a gathering of 300,000 protesters in Washington in 2005. Rereading the woman's complaint and also a comment on a website suggesting that the photo of the dead little boy had been staged, I thought to myself, "What kind of monsters have we become." And in truth we had become monsters. Bipartisan monsters wrapped in the American flag. Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions was "worth it." She is now a respected elder statesman close to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I had another epiphany last week when I saw the photo of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach like a bit of flotsam. He was wearing a red t-shirt and black sneakers. I thought to myself that many Americans will shake their heads when looking at the photo before moving on, more concerned about Stephen Colbert's debut on the Late Show and the start of the NFL season.

The little boy is one of hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to get to Europe. The world media is following the crisis by focusing primarily on the inability of unprepared local governments to deal with the numbers of migrants, asking why someone somewhere can't just "do something." This means that somehow, as a result, the vast human tragedy has been reduced to a statistic and, inevitably, a political football.

Overwhelmed by thousands of would-be travelers, Hungary suspended train service heading towards Western Europe while countries like Serbia and Macedonia deployed their military and police along their borders in a failed attempt to completely block refugees. Italy and Greece have been overwhelmed by migrants arriving by sea. Germany, to its credit, is intending to process up to 800,000 refugee and asylum applications, mostly from Syria, while Austria and Sweden have also indicated their willingness to accept many more. Immediate neighbors of the zone of conflict, notably Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are hosting more than three million of those who are displaced, but the wealthy Arab Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia have done little or nothing to help.

Demands for a European unified strategy to deal with the problem are growing, to include sealing borders and declaring the seas off of preferred departure points in North Africa and Asia to be military zones where undocumented ships and travelers will be intercepted and turned back. One also has to suspect that the refugee crisis might be exploited by some European politicians to justify NATO "humanitarian" intervention of some sort in Syria, a move that would have to be supported by Washington. But while the bickering and maneuvering goes on, the death toll mounts. The recent discovery of 71 dead would-be migrants who suffocated in the back of a locked truck found in Austria, to include five children and a toddler, horrified the world. And that was before the dead three year old on the Turkish beach.

Many of the would-be migrants are young men looking for work in Europe, a traditional enterprise, but most of the new arrivals are families escaping the horrors of war in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Their plight has been described in the media in graphic terms, families arriving with nothing and expecting nothing, fleeing even worse conditions back at home.

The United States has taken in only a small number of the refugees and a usually voluble White House has been uncharacteristically quiet about the problem, possibly realizing that allowing in a lot of displaced foreigners at a time when there is an increasingly heated debate over immigration policy in general just might not be a good move, politically speaking. But it should perhaps be paying some attention to what caused the problem in the first place, a bit of introspection that is largely lacking both from the mainstream media and from politicians.

Indeed, I would assign to Washington most of the blame for what is happening right now. Since folks inside the beltway are particularly given to making judgements based on numerical data they might be interested in the toll exacted through America's global war on terror. By one not unreasonable estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.

There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia.

The number of internally displaced within each country is roughly double the number of those who have actually fled and are seeking to resettle outside their homelands. Many of the latter have wound up in temporary camps run by the United Nations while others are paying criminals to transport them into Europe.

Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war. The invasion of Iraq created a power vacuum that has empowered terrorism in the Arab heartland. Supporting rebels in Syria has piled Pelion on Ossa. Afghanistan continues to bleed 14 years after the United States arrived and decided to create a democracy. Libya, which was relatively stable when the U.S. and its allies intervened, is now in chaos, with its disorder spilling over into sub-Saharan Africa.

Everywhere people are fleeing the violence, which, among other benefits, has virtually obliterated the ancient Christian presence in the Middle East. Though I recognize that the refugee problem cannot be completely blamed on only one party, many of those millions would be alive and the refugees would for the most part be in their homes if it had not been for the catastrophic interventionist policies pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States.

It is perhaps past time for Washington to begin to become accountable for what it does. The millions of people living rough or in tents, if they are lucky, need help and it is not satisfactory for the White House to continue with its silence, a posture that suggests that the refugees are somehow somebody else's problem. They are, in fact, our problem. A modicum of honesty from President Barack Obama would be appreciated, perhaps an admission that things have not exactly worked out as planned by his administration and that of his predecessor. And money is needed. Washington throws billions of dollars to fight wars it doesn't have to fight and to prop up feckless allies worldwide. For a change it might be refreshing to see tax money doing some good, working with the most affected states in the Middle East and Europe to resettle the homeless and making an honest effort to come to negotiated settlements to end the fighting in Syria and Yemen, both of which can only have unspeakably bad outcomes if they continue on their current trajectories.

Ironically, American hawks are exploiting the photo of the dead Syrian boy to blame the Europeans for the humanitarian crisis while also demanding an all-out effort to depose Bashar al-Assad. Last Friday'sWashington Post had a lead editorial headlined "Europe's Abdication," and also featured a Michael Gersonop-ed urging immediate regime change in Syria, blaming the crisis solely on Damascus. The editorial railed against European "racists" regarding the refugee plight. And it is not clear how Gerson, an evangelical neoconservative former speech writer for George W. Bush, can possibly believe that permitting Syria to fall to ISIS would benefit anyone.

We Americans are in something approaching complete denial about how truly horrible our nation's recent impact on the rest of the world has been. We are universally hated, even by those who have their hands out to receive their Danegeld, and the world is undoubtedly shaking its head as it listens to the bile coming out of the mouths of our presidential candidates. Shakespeare observed that the "evil that men do lives after them," but he had no experience of the United States. We choose to dissimulate regarding the bad choices we make followed up with lies to justify and mitigate our crimes. And still later the evil we do disappears down the memory hole. Literally.

In writing this piece I looked up Ali Hussein, the little Iraqi boy who was killed by the American bomb. He has been "disappeared" from Google, as well has the photo, presumably because his death did not meet community standards. He has likewise been eliminated from the Washington Post archive. The experience of Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984 immediately came to mind.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42814.htm

If we peer behind the veil of mainstream media oversimplification, lies and propaganda we find that the humanitarian crises we are faced with today are the straight line consequences of a decades-old policy on the part of the West (defined as the US, the UK, Israel and others ) to subvert and destabilize the very nations that are submerged in civil war and strife.

Faced with a burgeoning refugee crisis in Europe sparked by global extremism, U.S. and European officials said this week that there is a growing consensus that the multinational military campaign against Islamic State must focus more on targeting the group's nerve centers in Syria.

Using thousands of people flowing into Europe every day as a pretence, France and Britain are both poised to join Washington in carrying out more airstrikes with greater and greater levels of aggression against Islamic State in Syria.

U.S. allies also are responding to rising concerns about extremists in Syria planning attacks on western targets, such as a thwarted attempt last month by a lone gunman to kill passengers on a Paris-bound train and the Tunisia attacks on British citizens in June. The stage is set. Cameron will convince Parliament, Britain will engage in a new war.

But is all this activity about beating Islamic State in Syria or is about a much wider conflict?

This week, there has been a serious escalation that should be of concern to everyone.

Reuters –

"The U.S. officials said the intent of Russia's military moves in Syria was unclear. One suggested the focus may be on preparing an airfield near the port city of Latakia, a stronghold of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. U.S. officials have not ruled out the possibility that Russia may want to use the airfield for air combat missions. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to his Russian counterpart for the second time in four days to express concern over reports of Russian military activities in Syria".

The US State Department lists 62 countries as members of the "global coalition to degrade and defeat ISIL." Many countries have pledged military or humanitarian support. They are;

Albania, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Somalia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and last but most the United States.

Intervention forces in Syria include the US, the Gulf States, Morocco and Canada and as we have now found out Britain. Armament support comes from France and Kurdistan. Armed groups come from around 30 tribes and various fighting forces.

ISIL and it's allies are also in there.

Meanwhile, on the other side, non lethal support to Syria's Assad includes; Venezuela, Angola and China. Lethal support includes; Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Balarus and even Egypt. Then there are Syrian government forces and over thirty allied armed forces groups. Hezbollah, Iran and Russia all have forces in Syria backing Asad's regime.

In all of this, it is Russia's recent step up that is most concerning. Western backed sanctions currently crippling Russia's economy over Ukraine will increase over its involvement in Syria. When that happens, it forces Russia further into the arms of China.

China and Russia have moved in tandem on Syria. They have repeatedly vetoed resolutions aimed at the Assad regime in the UN Security Council. China has no major concerns over Syria but it does with Russian relations. The issue of Syria is more of aconundrum of loyalties and politics to China. China is powered largely by both Russian and Saudi oil and gas.

In the meantime, China has been dumping US treasuries in record volumes, burning through $100billion in just two weeks in supporting its own currency that has rattled America enough that there are even suspicions that the US is not taking that lying down.

Five Chinese navy ships are currently operating in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, Pentagon officials said just last week, marking the first time the U.S. military has seen such activity.

Just last week, China also formally releases information of a new class of weapons described by the FT- "Some analysts say such missiles threaten to consign aircraft carriers — which form the basis of current US naval strategy — to the dustbin, just as aircraft carriers themselves did to battleships with Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor". The FT continues  – "There is more potent symbolism in this missile than any other weapon in the Chinese arsenal," said Ashley Townshend, a research fellow at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. "This is the missile that really does potentially encroach on US capability to deploy military power close to Chinese shores. It significantly raises the risks and costs."

Russia, a key ally of Syria during its four-year civil war, says it has sent military experts but that is all. Correspondents say that without Moscow's backing, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may have fallen by now. Unnamed US officials quoted by Reuters say Moscow has sent additional aircraft and two tank landing ships to Russia's naval base in the Syrian coastal city of Tartus, within the past day or so. They also say a small number of naval infantry forces have been deployed.

Britain now has troops on the ground, despite Parliament not yet approving the deployment of troops there. Those troops are fighting alongside American Special Forces.

According to various sources (HERE, HERE and HERE) – The Iranian government has sent 15,000 fighters to Syria to help the Syrian government. The force, made up of Iranians, Iraqis and Afghanis, arrived in the Damascus region and in the province of Latakia last month.

Bulgaria and Greece have both been told by US officials to not allow Russian planes over their airspace in recent days. Bulgaria has been trying to forge new relations with Russia recently as has Greece in its desperation to stop avert total economic collapse.

Russia says it has permission to fly over Iranian airspace to reach Syria – Iran has not commented yet.

The purpose of this article is not to rationalise events in Syria, not to lay blame or point a finger but merely to highlight the fact that there is no dispute that there has been a very serious escalation of events in the war that is being conducted in Syria.

The war in Syria is not about Islamic State.

It is to highlight the fact that the countries involved in this war are now from all four hemispheres of the planet who are now represented and engaged in a conflict that will definitely be a fight to the very end. The question is – where will that very end, end up being?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/all-four-hemispheres-of-the-world-now-engaged-in-a-single-war/5475200

The conditionality of the Soviet Union's agreement to allow East Germany to be taken by West Germany and for the Cold War to end, was that NATO would not expand «one inch to the east». This was the agreement that was approved by the Russian President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, a great man and a subsequent hero to democrats around the world.

He agreed then to end the Soviet Union and abandon communism and thus to end the entire Cold War; he agreed to this because he had been promised that NATO would expand not «one inch to the east,» or «one inch eastward,» depending upon how the promise was translated and understood — but it has the same meaning, no matter how it was translated. He trusted American President George Herbert Walker Bush, whose friend and Secretary of State James Baker made this promise to Gorbachev. With this promise, Gorbachev agreed to end the Soviet Union; end the communist mutual-defense pact which was their own equivalent of NATO, the Warsaw Pact; and he believed that the remaining nation that he would then be leading, which was Russia, would be accepted as a Western democracy.

He was even promised by the United States that «we were going to make them a member [of NATO], we were –observer first and then a member». In other words: the U.S. promised that NATO would not extend up to the borders of Russia and so become a mortal threat to the national security of the Russian people – now isolated and separated from its former military allies. Instead, Gorbachev was told, Russia would itself become welcomed into the Western Alliance, and ultimately become a NATO member. That was the deal, ending the 46-year Cold War.

Russia kept its part of the bargain. The United States did not; the U.S. instead lied through its teeth and so has since expanded NATO to absorb former member-nations of the Warsaw Pact into NATO as being, now, an anti-Russian military alliance — exactly what the U.S. had promised would never happen. U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush in private told West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl (who had wanted to go along with what James Baker had arranged): «To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn't». He didn't want peace with Russia; he wanted to conquer it; he wanted to rub Russians' noses in their inferiority to Americans.

Russia's continued (and continuing) desire to join NATO has simply been spurned. This is war by NATO in intent; it is the exact opposite of what the U.S. had promised to Russia, on the basis of which the Warsaw Pact ended. How can the Russian people then trust such a country as the United States? They would need to be fools to do so.

But this deceit, this double-cross, isn't merely America's shame; it has also become the shame by the entirety of the nations that joined in that Western promise at the time. Because all of them accepted America's leadership in this double-crossing war against Russia, America's war to conquer Russia. They accept this merely by remaining as members of the now-nefarious military gang, which NATO has thus become. Worse yet, some of the other member-nations of NATO at the time were (like West Germany's Kohl, the model for his protégé Angela Merkel, who now continues the crime) themselves key participants in the making, and now breaking, of that promise to Russia.

Here is the evidence regarding this massive and ongoing historical international crime — the crime that's now the source of so much misery and even death in not only Russia but the rest of Europe, and of millions of refugees fleeing from Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and other former Russian-allied nations — the chaos that's being led by America:

THE TESTIMONY

«I was there when we told the Russians that we were going to make them a member, we were–observer first and then a member»: Lawrence Wilkerson, 3 October 2014, on The Real News Network, at 18:54 in the interview.

«When I spoke with Baker, he agreed that he told Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union allowed German reunification and membership in NATO, the West would not expand NATO «one inch to the east»: Bill Bradley, 22 August 2009, in Foreign Policy.

«Mr. Kohl chose to echo Mr. Baker, not Mr. Bush. The chancellor assured Mr. Gorbachev, as Mr. Baker had done, that 'naturally NATO could not expand its territory' into East Germany»… Crucially, the Gorbachev-Kohl meeting ended with a deal, as opposed to the Gorbachev-Baker session the previous day… Mr. Kohl and his aides publicized this major concession immediately at a press conference. Then they returned home to begin merging the two Germanys under one currency and economic system: Mary Louise Sarotte, New York Times, 29 November 2009.

«According to records from Kohl's office, the chancellor chose to echo Baker, not Bush, since Baker's softer line was more likely to produce the results that Kohl wanted: permission from Moscow to start reunifying Germany. Kohl thus assured Gorbachev that 'naturally NATO could not expand its territory to the current territory of [East Germany].' In parallel talks, Genscher delivered the same message to his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, saying, 'for us, it stands firm: NATO will not expand itself to the East.'… But Kohl's phrasing would quickly become heresy among the key Western decision-makers.

Once Baker got back to Washington, in mid-February 1990, he fell in line with the National Security Council's view and adopted its position. From then on, members of Bush's foreign policy team exercised strict message discipline, making no further remarks about NATO holding at the 1989 line. Kohl, too, brought his rhetoric in line with Bush's, as both U.S. and West German transcripts from the two leaders' February 24–25 summit at Camp David show. Bush made his feelings about compromising with Moscow clear to Kohl: 'To hell with that!' he said. 'We prevailed, they didn't.'… In April, Bush spelled out this thinking in a confidential telegram to French President François Mitterrand… Bush was making it clear to Mitterrand that the dominant security organization in a post–Cold War Europe had to remain NATO — not any kind of pan-European alliance.

As it happened, the next month, Gorbachev proposed just such a pan-European arrangement, one in which a united Germany would join both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, thus creating one massive security institution. Gorbachev even raised the idea of having the Soviet Union join NATO. 'You say that NATO is not directed against us, that it is simply a security structure that is adapting to new realities,' Gorbachev told Baker in May, according to Soviet records.

'Therefore, we propose to join NATO.' Baker refused to consider such a notion, replying dismissively, Pan-European security is a dream.'… By the time of the Camp David summit, … all members of Bush's team, along with Kohl, had united behind an offer in which Gorbachev would receive financial assistance from West Germany — and little else — in exchange for allowing Germany to reunify and for allowing a united Germany to be part of NATO»: Mary Louise Sarotte, Foreign Affairs, October 2014.

«A failure to appreciate how the Cold War ended has had a profound impact on Russian and Western attitudes — and helps explain what we are seeing now. The common assumption that the West forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus won the Cold War is wrong. The fact is that the Cold War ended by negotiation to the advantage of both sides. At the December 1989 Malta summit, Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush confirmed that the ideological basis for the war was gone, stating that the two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies. Over the next two years, we worked more closely with the Soviets than with even some of our allies. … 'By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,' Bush said during his 1992 State of the Union address. That rhetoric would not have been particularly damaging on its own. But it was reinforced by actions taken under the next three presidents. President Bill Clinton supported NATO's bombing of Serbia without U.N. Security Council approval and the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe. The effect on Russians' trust in the United States was devastating» (Jack Matlock, Washington Post, 14 March 2014).

«Sir Rodric Braithwaite GCMG, former British Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Russia, informed us that assurances were given in 1990 by the US (James Baker, US Secretary of State) and Germany (Helmut Kohl, German Chancellor), and in 1991 on behalf of the UK (by the then Prime Minister, John Major, and the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd) and France (by French President Francois Mitterrand). Sir Rodric Braithwaite said that this 'factual record has not been successfully challenged in the West'»( The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine, 20 February 2015, British House of Lords, paragraph 107.)

CONCLUDING NOTE:

Gorbachev's failure to demand these assurances in writing has been widely criticized, but handshake agreements in international affairs are common, and no treaty was to be signed at the end of the Cold War because it hadn't been a hot war: there were no claims, no restitution or reparations to be paid by either side to the other. Gorbachev thought that the U.S. was honest and could be trusted — that understandings reached in private and witnessed by numerous participants would be honored by the West, as they would be by Russia.

Sadly, he was trusting mega-crooks who were led by a super-gangster, G.H.W. Bush, and the entire world is suffering from those crooks today, and every day. Instead of the West apologizing, and stopping, it insults Russia constantly. It's digging in deeper, into G.H.W. Bush's original sin, the West's mega-crime, which produces increasing global chaos and bloodshed, in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere, and now a resulting refugee crisis throughout Europe.

For example, Defense News, the trade journal for U.S. military contractors, headlined on 4 September 2015, «Ukraine's New Military Doctrine Identifies Russia As Aggressor, Eyes Naval Acquisitions,» and reported that:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk [whom Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department had appointed on 4 February 2014, 18 days before the coup] said that the country's new draft military doctrine is the first in Ukraine's history to clearly identify Russia as an enemy and an aggressor. The announcement was made Sept. 1 during the prime minister's visit to Odessa. … Yatsenyuk said that … the Ukrainian President «will sign the corresponding decree»… Vice Admiral James Foggo, commander of the US 6th Fleet, and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R. Pyatt [who took instructions from Nuland and ran the coup for her] took part in the ceremony… «We feel as one force with our partners, NATO [member] states, with our American partners. Therefore, the American ships have entered and will [defeat the Russians in Crimea and expell from the naval base there the Russian navy which has been headquartered there since 1783, and so] enter the Ukrainian territorial waters in the future. We will continue our joint exercise,» Yatsenyuk said.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-america-double-crossed-russia-and-shamed-the-west/5475209

I recently interviewed Jeff Halper about his excellent new book, War Against the People, which examines the way Israel has crafted an indispensable role for itself doing what Halper calls "niche-filling" in the "war on terror".

Put in the simplest terms, Halper's argument is that Israel develops, refines and tests things – weapons, missile interception systems, surveillance, crowd control, biometric data collection, new interpretations of international law – using the Palestinians as guinea pigs. The occupied territories are test beds, demonstrating how well such "innovations" work in the field. That knowledge and experience can then be sold on to other international players, including, of course, the biggest: the United States.

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador (one who went rogue, from the British government's point of view) has a very interesting post about the latest efforts of David Cameron's government to justify the extra-judicial murder of two Britons in Syria over the summer by claiming that such actions accord with international law. The US began doing similar things in the Middle East to its citizens, also using drones, a few years earlier.

Israel, of course, led the way decades ago on this kind of murder from the skies, before most people had heard of drones. Israel refers to these murders as "targeted assassinations", and has spent the intervening period trying to persuade the world that they are legal in international law.

I have been covering the Israel-Palestine conflict long enough to remember a time when no one took that argument seriously. In fact, Israel was regularly castigated by the US and others for carrying out such attacks, perhaps most famously in 2002 when it dropped a one-tonne bomb on a residential neighbourhood of Gaza, killing at least 10 children as they slept, as it "targeted" Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh.

Then 9/11 happened and the US, backed by the UK, launched its endless "war on terror". Usefully, Israel had been there long before and had a blueprint for how to conduct such a sustained offensive. After all, it had been waging its own war on terror – aka an illegal, belligerent occupation – against the Palestinians for decades.

It is worth bearing all this in mind as you read Murray's piece (and I recommend you do) on the execution of the two Britons in Syria. I don't know what drones were used by the UK but there has to be a good chance they were made by Israel. Britain is the biggest importer of drones in the world, and most of them come from Israel – in fact, 55 were bought by the UK between 2010 and 2014. But Israel's role in this is about much more than the hardware, as Murray's post illustrates.

What did Tony Blair and Jack Straw do back in 2003 when they needed to support the US in its illegal attack and invasion of Iraq? Unfortunately for them, international law is clear about such attacks, just as it is about extra-judicial murder on foreign soil. An unprovoked attack on another state – one that is not in self-defence from an imminent and credible threat –  is a war crime. In fact, it is worse than that: it is defined as "the supreme war crime".

That is the advice Blair and Straw received when they tried to get their in-house lawyers to sanction the attack.

So what did they do? They brought in an outside expert. They turned to Daniel Bethlehem, a lawyer beloved of Israeli prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as the Israeli army. He had spent many years advising the Israeli military as it tried to develop new legal principles that justify states using massive firepower that kills chiefly civilians. That nonchalance you see from Israeli officials every time Israel murders hundreds of children in Gaza relies on the legal sophistry provided by rent-an-excuse lawyers like Bethlehem.

Israel and its enablers have tried to create a loophole in international law, arguing that an "imminent" threat exists – whether from a country like Iraq or two blokes with guns in Syria – and justifies self-defence even if the country has no weapons that pose a credible threat or the people killed aren't involved in an attack on the aggressor state, imminent or not.

This is exactly the kind of tough, thankless work Israel has been doing that, in our age of permanent "war on terror", is highly marketable. States buy weapons systems and they pay people like Bethlehem big bucks to put their names to bits of paper spouting nonsense about international law.

But most of all, as Halper argues, this kind of usefulness is not paid for in hard currency. It buys good will. Lots of it. Which is why you won't see the British or US governments making life hard for Israel soon, however much their own publics may be outraged by Israel's behaviour.

www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/09/exclusive-i-can-reveal-the-legal-advice-on-drone-strikes-and-how-the-establishment-works

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ways-israeli-war-crimes-buy-good-will/5475184

This text was written fourteen years ago, on September 30, 2001, in the week preceding the onslaught of the US-NATO war on Afghanistan. Officially the war on Afghanistan was in retribution for the alleged sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks by the Afghan government. You do not plan a large scale theater war in a matter of 3-4 weeks, the war on Afghanistan was planned well in advance of  September 11, 2001.(Michel Chossudovsky,  September 10, 2015)

*      *      *

America is preparing for war [late September 2001]. British and US Special Forces "trained in the arts of kidnapping and assassination" are already operating inside Afghanistan. More than one million US troops are on standby. US military bases around the World are on high alert: "the Japan-based USS Kitty Hawk battle group and the 7th Fleet are ready to join" in the largest display of military might since the Vietnam war.

The Bush Administration is planning on launching this military operation without delay, prior to the development of a cohesive anti-war movement in the US and around the World.

Already, US military personnel of the 82nd Airborne and 101st Air Assault Divisions have arrived in Pakistan. They will be collaborating with the Pakistani military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the agency which over the years –under CIA guidance– has channeled support to the Islamic jihad including Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government in Kabul.

The pretext to wage war as a means of combating international terrorism is totally fabricated. In a cruel irony, the legitimacy of the Bush administration in embarking on this military adventure rests entirely on Osama bin Laden's presumed role in the terrorist attacks of September 11.

At this critical juncture in US history, does President Bush have a firm grasp of the broad implications of his decisions? According to Time Magazine (15 November 1999):

…on too many issues, especially those dealing with the wider world of global affairs, Bush often sounds as if he's reading from cue cards. When he ventures into international issues, his unfamiliarity is palpable and not even his unshakable self-confidence keeps him from avoiding mistakes.

A president with minimal understanding of key international and strategic issues can easily be manipulated by the military-intelligence apparatus.

Apart from reading carefully prepared speeches, is George W. Bush as President and Commander in Chief capable of formulating "responsible" foreign policy decisions? In this regard, does the President wield real political power or is he an instrument? In other words, who decides in Washington? On the eve of a major military adventure, this question is of utmost significance because ultimately the US military machine will respond when the president "pushes the button".

The knowledge of the President on Pakistan and Afghanistan –i.e. the two countries which constitute the theatre of America's war– is dismal to say the least. Prior to becoming President, George W. Bush thought the Taliban was a rock group.

In a 1999 TV interview with Andy Hiller on NBC (WHDH in Boston), when asked who was the president of Pakistan, George W. Bush had "the name of General Pervez Musharraf on the tip of his tongue, but then allowed his enthusiasm to make him appear to condone the military coup that ousted the elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif." (Daily Telegraph, 6 November 1999).

Below is an excerpt of this interview:

Bush: "The new Pakistani General, he's just been elected – not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country and I think that's good news for the sub- continent."

Hiller: "And you can name him?"

Bush: "General. I can name the general."

Hiller: "And it's . . ?

Bush: "General."

Hiller: "And the Prime Minister of India?"

Bush: "The new Prime Minister of India is – (pause) No."

To which George W. Bush retorted with a question to Andy Hiller:

Bush: "Can you name the Foreign Minister of Mexico?"

Hiller: "No sir, but I would say to that, I'm not running for President."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/in-the-wake-of-911-did-george-w-bush-have-a-grasp-of-key-foreign-policy-issues/5475176