Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Did Senator McCain Violate NDAA by Hanging Out with Syrian Rebels?

In case you missed it, Senator John McCain took the opportunity this Memorial Day to cross the Turkey-Syria border and hang out with Syrian rebels. These are the same rebels with ties to Al Qaeda. These are the same rebels cutting out and eating the hearts of dead soldiers. According to reports, Senator McCain wanted to go further into combat but was not allowed.

The consequences of Senator McCain’s calls to intervene in Syria and meddle further in a civil war could be quite grave, as Russia is sending anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian regime. The use of chemical weapons has been reported – although it’s unsure which side is using them – with more attacks reported over the weekend.

There are further reports that most of our aid to the region is going to “hard-line Islamic jihadists.” In fact, the same day President Obama announced our recognition of the opposition, rebel groups across Syria signed a petition pledging allegiance to the Jihad and asking America by name not to intervene. It’s hard to imagine that twelve years after 9/11, Senator McCain would be calling for US foreign and military aid be given to “the Jihad.”

Interestingly enough, this is the same Senator McCain who championed NDAA 2012, which gives our government the right to indefinitely detain Americans for doing exactly what he did: supporting elements aligned with al-Qaeda.

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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

As the market panic demonstrates, central banks are stuck on a treadmill of money printing

Oh what a tangled web central bankers weave when they practice to deceive… Last night’s panic in Tokyo, where the Nikkei dropped a stomach churning 7 per cent, demonstrates just how difficult it’s going to be for the world’s central banks to exit their loose money policies.

It’s not even as if Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, said he was planning to exit; in fact, initially he said the reverse in testimony to Congress. It was only in the Q & A, and in minutes to the last meeting of the Fed’s Open Markets Committee, that a clear bias emerged to slow the pace of asset purchases “in the next few meetings”, so long as the economic data was strong enough.

What the subsequent violent gyrations in markets indicate is that any hint of applying the brakes risks generating a fresh financial crisis, which in turn would render the economic recovery still born. Both financial markets and the real economy have become addicted to “quantitative easing”, such that they can’t do without it.

The upshot is that we are going to see financial repression of the type being practiced in virtually all the major advanced economies – including, if only to a more limited extent, the eurozone – continue out into the indefinite future.

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The Real Meaning of President Obama’s National Security Speeches

This past Thursday and Friday, President Obama delivered two speeches designed to outline his new thinking on national security and counter-terrorism. While much was made in the media of the president’s statements at the National Defense University and the US Naval Academy suggesting that the most active phase of US military action overseas was coming to an end, this “new” approach is but the same old policy wrapped in new packaging. In these addresses, the president panders to the progressives, while continually expanding and solidifying the “enabling act” principle.

The president will continue and even expand drone attacks overseas because they are “less deadly” than ground invasions. He promises to be more careful in the future.

He is entertaining the introduction of “kill courts” which will meet in secret to decide who is to be executed without trial or charge. He promises these will have sufficient oversight.

He will seek a new and updated Authorization for the Use of Military Force to expand his legal authority to wage war wherever and whenever he wants. He promises it will one day be repealed.

He will continue to indefinitely detain at Guantanamo individuals who have been neither charged nor convicted of any crime, and who cannot even be tried because they were tortured and thus the evidence is tainted. He promises to “commit to a process of closing GTMO.”

The speech speaks of more war and more killing and more interventionism all masked in the language of withdrawal.

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McCain Spends Memorial Day with Al-Qaeda Allies

Senator John McCain snuck into Syria this Memorial Day to spend the day with the terrorist-affiliated Free Syrian Army, in violation of both Syrian Law and likely of international law. While meeting with the Syrian insurgents and FSA Commander, Gen. Salem Idris, McCain likely assured his allies that it was only a matter of time before the US began overtly transferring the weapons it is currently facilitating covertly.

Gen. Idriss is the conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, and untold millions in covert CIA and US Special Forces assistance. He swears he does not cooperate with the terrorist-designated Al-Nusra Front, but he only coordinates with the Al-Nusra-allied Arhar al Sham.

About McCain’s meeting partner:

“Idriss said his group didn’t work with al Qaida-affiliated rebels who belonged to the Nusra Front. But he said the military councils worked closely with another Islamist rebel faction, Arhar al Sham, that’s known to coordinate its actions with Nusra and shares many of Nusra’s beliefs about how Syria should be governed if Assad is vanquished.”

But Idriss makes no secret of his admiration for Al-Nusra. He said recently:

“Jabhat al-Nusra has proved to be the most effective in fighting the Syrian army.”

During McCain’s secret and illegal visit, Idriss called for even more US intervention on the side of the insurgents:

“The visit of Senator McCain to Syria is very important and very useful especially at this time. We need American help to have change on the ground; we are now in a very critical situation. What we want from the U.S. government is to take the decision to support the Syrian revolution with weapons and ammunition, anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft weapons. Of course we want a no-fly zone and we ask for strategic strikes against Hezbollah both inside Lebanon and inside Syria.”

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The Unraveling of Sykes-Picot

The thrice-promised land it has been called.

It is that land north of Mecca and Medina and south of Anatolia, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.

In 1915 – that year of Gallipoli, which forced the resignation of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill – Britain, to win Arab support for its war against the Ottoman Turks, committed, in the McMahon Agreement, to the independence of these lands under Arab rule.

It was for this that Lawrence of Arabia and the Arabs fought.

In November 1917, however, one month before Gen. Allenby led his army into Jerusalem, Lord Balfour, in a letter to Baron Rothschild, declared that His Majesty’s government now looked with favor upon the creation on these same lands of a national homeland for the Jewish people.

Between these clashing commitments there had been struck in 1916 a secret deal between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s Francois Georges-Picot. With the silent approval of czarist Russia, which had been promised Istanbul, these lands were subdivided and placed under British and French rule.

France got Syria and Lebanon. Britain took Transjordan, Palestine and Iraq, and carved out Kuwait.

Vladimir Lenin discovered the Sykes-Picot treaty in the czar’s archives and published it, so the world might see what the Great War was truly all about. Sykes-Picot proved impossible to reconcile with Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that he and the allies – the British, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese empires – were all fighting “to make the world safe for democracy.”

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