Aug 28 2013

US Syria policy insult to common sense

“Never send for who the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” …John Donne, in 1624

America’s incompetent foreign policy was cranked up a notch this week by the pitiful display of using a massacre of civilians, obviously killed by the FSA, in a last ditch attempt to trigger a US intervention.

Despite the disintegrating state of the FSA rebels the Obama administration seemed like it is doubling down on a bad bet. Why… only God could know. We at Veterans Today cannot find a soul in the military or civilian Intel community that we know who can even imagine what benefit the administration seeks by driving our Syria foreign policy over the cliff.

We are hearing a phrase never really used before when describing the current policy as one that is a “national security risk to the US in itself.” While there had been a breath of sanity when Obama held up on the transfer of heavy weapons to the rebels, after strong warnings from the military, the cheap manipulation of this gas attack is reminiscent of halfwit John McCain’s ‘Bomb, bomb Iran’ remark.

Where McCain was just an airhead, this current psyops is premeditated, as shown by the mixed signals. Obama says no attack without UN support, and absent that a ‘strong coalition’ would be problematic to put together.

I guess that would exclude Italy whose foreign minister urged those pushing for air strikes to “rethink their decision a 1000 times.” That is a nice way of saying ‘You people must be crazy!’

But maybe crazy like a fox a suspicious Jim Dean is beginning to wonder. Are they trying to torpedo the Geneva convention with a military intervention? Have they promised the FSA, who does not want to attend Geneva in a weak position, that the US will do a ‘little bombing’ to entice them?

Are the US and Israelis trying to bait the Iranians to come in so they can derail the very careful distance that the Iranians have maintained from the conflict? But that may be changing with today’s report of their framing a US attack on Syria as crossing ‘red line’ for them. What could that mean?

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Feb 15 2013

Israeli Gaza Airstrikes Violated Laws of War

drawing by Zeon

By Stephen LENDMAN

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said so. Rarely does HRW do the right thing. Exceptions prove the rule. Most often it’s a reliable imperial partner.

Connections in high places and corporate funding keep it that way. Services rendered in return are expected. Conflicts of interest are rife.

HRW and likeminded sources followers rely on operate like their scoundrel media counterparts. They do it deceptively. They produce one-sided or quasi-real reports on issues mattering most.

Exceptions occur. Even then they fall far short. On February 12, HRW headlined “Israel: Gaza Airstrikes Violated Laws of War.” More on its report below.

International laws of war are clear. They unambiguous. UN Charter provisions explain under what conditions attacking another nation is justified. No others apply.

Article 2(3) and Article 33(1) require peaceful settlement of international disputes. Article 2(4) prohibits force or its threatened use.

Article 51 allows the “right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member….until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security.”

Justifiable self-defense is permissible. Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 prohibit unilaterally threatening or using force not allowed under Article 51, authorized by the Security Council, or, in the case of America, constitutionally permitted.

Three General Assembly resolutions prohibit non-consensual belligerent intervention. They include:

(1) The 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty.

(2) The 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

(2) The 1974 Definition of Aggression.

Washington spurns international, constitutional, and US statute laws with impunity. So does Israel. Doing so constitutes “the supreme international crime against peace.” It exceeds all other high crimes and wrongdoing.

On November 14, Operation Pillar of Cloud began. Israel launched premeditated aggression on Gaza. It wasn’t the first time.

Aggressive wars reflect longstanding policy. Israel’s resume includes decades of crimes of war, against humanity and genocide.

HRW stopped short of explaining. Data cited grossly understated Israeli terror bombing. It raged for eight days. Dozens of attacks occurred daily. Hamas and other resistance groups responded defensively. International law permits doing so.

Palestinian deaths exceeded 160. Numbers injured topped 1,000. Some harmed later died. Most victims were noncombatant men, women, children, infants, the elderly and infirm.

Israel considers them legitimate targets. Rogue states operate that way. Israel is one of the worst. It violates fundamental international law. It does so unaccountably.

It claims a divine right to kill, main, displace, and destroy. It takes full advantage.

It steals Palestinian land for Jews. It punishes them collectively. It does so for praying to the wrong God. It’s been that way for decades.

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Feb 15 2013

Hypocrisy: US Arms Al Qaeda in Syria, Mass-Slaughters Civilians in Afghanistan

February 13, 2013 (LD) – AFP has reported that a recent NATO airstrike in Afghanistan has killed over 10 civilians in an all-too-familiar headline glossed over by the Western media in an exercise of both depravity and hypocrisy. RT’s article, “NATO airstrike kills 10 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children – officials,” notes in particular that up to 11,864 civilians were killed in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2011, and that civilian deaths before 2007 were not even tracked by the UN.

By Tony Cartalucci, LAND DESTROYER

Such facts reveal alarming hypocrisy as the UN keeps almost daily, inflated tallies of civilian deaths elsewhere, in particular, in nations like Libya and Syria where Western interests have been heavily involved in regime change and in dire need of manipulating public perception worldwide. The United Nations had in fact pieced together a dubious report crafted from “witness accounts” compiled not in Syria, or even beyond its borders in a refugee camp, but instead, in Geneva by “witnesses” supplied by the so-called Syrian “opposition.”

Image: Just some of the corporate members of the US-Qatar Business Council, whose president just so happens to sit on the same board of directors of the Middle East Policy Center as Karen AbuZayd, co-author of one of many conveniently timed UN Human Rights Council reports on Syria.

Worse yet, that UN report was co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council. Its board of directors includes Exxon men, CIA agents, representatives of the Saudi Binladin Group (Osama Bin Laden’s family business), former ambassadors to Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, Al Jazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO’s operations against Libya), and Boeing.

In other words, the very underwriters of the armed militancy that is consuming Syria are sitting along side the head of the UN commission producing reports portraying the Syrian government as guilty of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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Nov 22 2012

Bloodlust in Israel: son of Sharon :’Flatten Gaza, send it back to Middle Ages, they need to die!’

Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai.(AFP Photo / Menahem Kahana)

A new wave of hatred towards Palestine is sweeping through Israel from public figures to the man on the street. This hostility is in sharp contrast to efforts in Cairo, where Arab leaders and Western diplomats are trying to hammer out a peace plan.

While Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) official Nabil Sheath expressed hope Sunday night that negotiations would continue, very different noises were coming out of Israel.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Operation Pillar of Defense would continue and likely be expanded, a reference to the possibility that a ground offensive has already been given the go-ahead.

The war in Gaza “must be so painful and difficult that the terror groups will not think twice but a hundred times before they fire missiles against Israel again,” it was reported in The Israel National News.

“Destroy and damage infrastructure, public buildings and government buildings. We must make sure that Hamas will be spending many years rebuilding Gaza, and not attacking Israel,” he continued.

A few days ago he said, “The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages, only then will Israel be calm for the next 40 years.”

His words were relatively mild compared to some of the comments that have been coming out of Israel in recent days.

Journalist, Gilad Sharon, the son of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in an editorial in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday called for Gaza to be flattened like the US flattened the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 with an atomic bomb.

“We need to flatten all of Gaza. The American’s didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough – so they hit Nagasaki too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire,”ranted Sharon.

Gilad Sharon, son of the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.(AFP Photo / Brian Hendler)

As the former Prime Minister’s son publicly urged the military to wipe Gaza off the map, a member of the Knesset and the National Unity Party, Michael Ben-Ari, called for Israeli soldiers to kill Gazans without thought or mercy.

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Nov 16 2012

Excuse me while I vomit

By Alan Hart, Information Clearing House

I imagine I am not the only one who feels the need to vomit (dictionary definition – “to throw up the contents of the stomach through the mouth”) when Israel’s Goebbels justifies the Zionist state’s ferocious and monstrously disproportionate attacks by air and sea on the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, the prison camp which is home to 1.5 million besieged and mainly impoverished Palestinians.

The Israeli to whom I am referring is, of course, Australian-born Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman, for which read spin doctor. The more I see and hear him in action, the more it seems to me that he makes Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief look like an amateur.

In a piece for The Observer on 6 June 2010, Ruth Sutherland wrote the following. “If the men from Mars ever wanted to manufacture a PR man, they would model their robot on Regev. No matter how formidable the interviewer, or how aggressive the questioning, he never buckles under pressure. His disarming Aussie accent and unfailing politeness – he calls interviewers ‘Sir’ and uses phrases like ‘I beg to disagree’ – almost lulls listeners into overlooking his aggression. He is always regretful about death and horror – he regrets that the non-Israeli victims brought their fate on themselves. Viewers are reduced to a trance of slack-jawed amazement at what he is prepared to say with a straight face. He is unlikely to win sceptics to Israel’s cause, but as a PR performer he is horribly compelling.”

Compelling he certainly is but, as Sutherland indicated (I will be more explicit), only to Westerners and Americans in particular who have been conditioned for decades by Zionist propaganda and, as a consequence, know nothing or little worth knowing about the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel.

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