While there is a ray of hope that international negotiations may finally find a way to resolve the Syrian war, there is also growing pressure on President Obama to escalate U.S. military involvement even if that risks a wider war with Russia, a danger that ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern assesses.
The perpetual chaos that has unfolded after America’s successful dismemberment of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are but warnings of the fate that could befall Syria should order not be restored, and Syria’s sovereignty not protected.
In 2010, WikiLeaks became a household name by releasing 251,287 classified State Department cables. Now, a new book collects in-depth analyses of what these cables tell us about the foreign policy of the United States, from authors including Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail and our regular contributors Gareth Porter, Robert Naiman, Phyllis Bennis and Stephen Zunes. “The essays that make up The WikiLeaks Files shed critical light on a once secret history,” says Edward Snowden.
When the majority of the Syrian population in Syria votes for Assad and openly sings his praise and holds banners and posters supporting him, it means he genuinely has popular support. Watch the spin doctors make all sorts of lies to reinvent what has happened. Go ahead New York Times and Washington Post, take your best shots.
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) today found former Israeli army general Amos Yaron and the state of Israel guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide stemming from the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.
Bandar Bush’s strategy, coordinated with jihadis, was to virtually beg for Hezbollah to fight inside Syria. When Hezbollah obliged, with only a few hundred fighters, the jihadis scurried away from the battlefield to implement plan B: blowing up innocent women and children in the streets of Lebanon.
Weaponizing “our” Wahhabi bastards is the sweetest deal for the industrial-military-Orwellian Panopticon complex. Sequestration? Tight budgets? Who cares? There’s a never-ending contractor bonanza in the Gulf – inbuilt in the narrative of the benign superpower “benefactor” of those helpless oil and gas monarchic monopolies defending them against assorted evildoers; one day the evildoer is Iraq, the next day Iran, the next day could be their own people, so one’s gotta be prepared.
Al-Qaeda is now the West’s darling in Syria. So anybody who resists al-Qaeda – as Hezbollah recently decided to do – is a “terrorist.”
The irony doesn’t get any thicker than that.
US Secretary of State John Kerry hailed the EU’s move. Kerry argued that Hezbollah is indeed a terrorist organization because it “has deepened its support” for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. What Kerry didn’t say is that Assad is fighting an insurgency led by al-Qaeda.
The Bomb in My Neighborhood by Franklin Lamb (Counter Punch) Dahiyeh, Beirut. This observer’s neighbors seemed to believe, especially over the past year, as most of us did, that the war in Syria would, in one form or another, spill into our neighborhood, Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut near the Shatila and Burj el Barajeh Palestinian refugee camps. […]
