₦airaland Forum

igbonla: It is a good policy if people will cool down and let it work! Nigeria is a jungle where everybody including majority in govt are working to game the system.
The bank will handle all legitimate Forex transactions if people follow the rules; problem is those doing business wants to buy as much forex as needed for their imports or businesses abroad and carry the cash into foreign countries or wire them in a manner that allow them stay under the radar. CBN has a policy on all foreign transactions from mortgage payments, medical, personal purchases down to school fees and a whole lot of other purposes. The bank can attempt to put road blocks to protect themselves from CBN hammer or to send you away to the abokis but they will do what they are expected to do if you stay on their neck and provide necessary documentations.

The CBN in the same policy increased what each Naira debit and credit account holder can spend from ATM and POS transactions per year from $40,000 to $150,000.
In addition to the above, there is a provision for small scale importers requiring up to $250,000 per annum using telegraphic transfer; using only the online version of Form M (e-Form "M".

http://www.cenbank.org/Out/2013/CCD/Developments%20In%20The%20Foreign%20Exchang%20Market.pdf

I don't see where the issue is, aside people getting stuck to the old way of doing things. CBN statement that Nigeria is the largest importer of United States Dollar is dangerous and disturbing for a country relying on crude oil as the only major Forex earner.

http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/national-news/134398-cbn-bans-importation-of-foreign-currencies-

Politics is around the corner with politicians waiting to use US Dollars as currency of settlement during conventions and elections. It can only get worse if nothing is done.
For those using walking into a bank in the US and buying Forex, I would like to know how it is possible to buy $15,000 just like that. I cannot even get $5000 from the bank in local currency without giving them prior notice!

And by the way, every ATM withdrawal in North America only attracts a fee of about $2 to $3 for GTBank. For those with brothers/sisters/kids in schools abroad, please open a Naira account, send them the ATM card and put Naira in their account every month or as you wish.
For the vehicle dealers, you can go same route or do your importation using form M (that may be tough for people that want to stay under the radar).

I believe this policy is in the best interest of the country.

Example, the UBA Africard is limited to 1.5 Million per quarter; And deposit is limited to 50,000Naira/deposit, so if you want to deposit 200,000Naira you'd have to fill four deposit slips for 50,000Naira each. With all these, the AfriCard has daily deposit limit.
Using the card overseas allows you to transact at official exchange rate on POS transactions. The catch is when you withdraw from an ATM, charges are quite high. It's limited to 115,000( Naira Equivalent) or less per withdrawal, and charges 1700 per ATM withdrawal. Note, multiple withdrawal is allowed. I think there's no daily limit.

The issue is it's good to use the cards for petty payments or transaction, but if one is paying for bulk goods it's not really helpful. Say $10,000, this amount requires 14 ATM withdrawals and the total charge is 23,800Naira. I don't know if an ATM will allow 14 transactions without flagging 'em as fraudulent. Exchange houses charge 3.5% for cash paid against POS payment. Basically means you swipe $10,000 on their POS machine and they pay $9700 cash....Very horrible deal if you ask me.

Using Form M valid for foreign exchange is another. Importers do not declare 100% of goods to avoid hefty import tax. Cotecna and Globascan normally will raise estimated value of import by 500%. Importers know this. They undervalue the true cost of goods knowing that inspection agents (cotecna and the rest) will issue an assessed FOB value that's high. Simply put, sourcing directly from CBN is not easy. you declare $5000 on final invoice, but the actual value is $50,000. CBN grant you $5,000 as on invoice. Inspection company revises your invoice value (RAR) to $25,000, of which you pay tax (5~20%). Now the problem is, if you declare the true value $50,000., inspection agents may issue you a revised value of 100% ~500%. Imagine paying government (5%~20%) of a revised invoice ($250,000) at 500% of true value..... Na die!!

HAH: Please how is business life there, am actually thinking of leaving abuja to live somewhere for 2 to 5 years before returning back, I want to have foreign experience.

Am 37 with wife and two lovely kids a middle class Nigerian , I don't intent working but if I see a very good one that will pay like where I left I can take, am thinking of setting op business with let say $40k . Now what are the most partronised business and what are the chances of a Nigerian.

Am thinking of Ajman or sharjah because of the cost of living. I intent to rent out my villa here in abuja and use the money for accomodation over there. Another cost am thinking of is my children school fees

Well, there are opportunities to start up a business and make a good profit; but there are too many potholes for the not-so-savvy. The most important rules to survive here:
1) Trade only on what you know very well! I have been through that here. An example, I brought a container of 1hp split AC from Korea to here based on what some Arab n paki friends told me. I mean because of the weather you'd assume AC would sell like hot cake. wrong!!!! When the shipment arrived, these guys all let me down. They promised to buy each at $180 per unit, but were offering me $100 when the shipment arrived. Their reason -they prefer 2hp AC. Judging from the Nigerian market, many Nigerians prefer 1hp AC due to our issues with NEPA. I applied that idea to UAE, it failed.
The same freaking thing happened with double door "zipel" fridge freezers. You won't believe I ended up selling those fridges at 200aed per unit. I couldn't ship them to Nigeria.

2) Dont try to start it big! It will cost so much renting a warehouse, employing a few Bengalis; Before you know it your monthly bill is way up there. You can start with store of only 700aed per month. Hire your labor on need basis. Really solely on wholesale until you are confident enough to expand the business.

3) one important advice, these pakis and Arabs ain't different from your average "crooked" Nigerian. DO NOT TRUST! The Lebanese and Iraqis are quite a greedy bunch, even the Syrians. Egyptians are quite an aggressive bunch in haggling.
A few months back, one Iraqi offered me Molinex blenders at 65aed per set. The price was perfect but then I thought there must be something fishy in this deal. I opened a few boxes to check the content. They had Molinex blenders... It was difficult to smell out the fish. I decided to put my greed in check. I bought only a few(100 cartons) from him. I shipped them to Mozambique. It was there that I found the "fish": these were defective products returned by customers in UAE. The blenders are not working at all!

HAH: Please how is business life there, am actually thinking of leaving abuja to live somewhere for 2 to 5 years before returning back, I want to have foreign experience.

Am 37 with wife and two lovely kids a middle class Nigerian , I don't intent working but if I see a very good one that will pay like where I left I can take, am thinking of setting op business with let say $40k . Now what are the most partronised business and what are the chances of a Nigerian.

Am thinking of Ajman or sharjah because of the cost of living. I intent to rent out my villa here in abuja and use the money for accomodation over there. Another cost am thinking of is my children school fees

Well, there are opportunities to start up a business and make a good profit; but there are too many potholes for the not so savvy. The most important rule to survive here:
1) Trade only on what you know very very well! I have been through that here. An example, I brought a container of 1hp split AC from Korea to here based on what some Arab n paki friends told me. I mean the weather you'd assume AC would sell like hot cake., wrong!!!! When the shipment arrived, these mofo all let me down. They promised to buy each at $180 per unit, but were offering me 350aed when the shipment arrived. The same freaking thing happened with double door "zipel" fridge freezers. You won't believe I ended up selling those fridges at 200aed per unit. I couldn't ship them to Nigeria.

2) Dont try to start it big! It will cost so much renting a warehouse, employing a few Bengalis; Before you know it your monthly bill is way up there. You can start with store of only 700aed per month. Hire your labor on need basis. Really solely on wholesale until you are confident enough to expand the business.

3) one important, these pakis and Arabs ain't different from your average Nigeria. DO NOT TRUST! A few months back, one Iraqi offered me Molinex blenders at 65aed per pieces. The price was perfect but then I thought there must be something fishy in this deal. I opened a few boxes to check the content. They had Molinex blenders... It was difficult to smell out the fish. I decided to put my greed in check. I bought only 100 cartons from him. I shipped them to Mozambique. It was there that I found the "fish": these were defective products returned by customers in UAE. The blenders are not working at all!

HAH: @post.email I can see that life cheap in Ajman and Sharjah compared to Abuja.

Thank you for the response.

Life is cheap, but without own car it's horrible. There are cheap cars on sale in Abushagara; the problem is the bloody license. Sharjah and Ajman do not make getting one any easier.

Part time offer:
If you have a car:
Pick up light goods and deliver with Dubai
Payment: 30aed per delivery.

Also available for Nigerians on tourist visa with rental cars.

Apparently, if you are on tourist visa, you can use Nigerian drivers license. If you are resident here, then you need the local drivers license.

HAH: @ogapatapata @just4jesu and other gurus

Please I want you to shed light on the following in the emirates of sharjah and ajman which are very near dubai.

1, Accomodation
2, Transpotation
3, Feeding
4,Social life
5, Any other thing that is relevant

Cheers

Ajman:
1BHK within city ~ 20,000 -23,000
1BHK out of city ~ 16,000 - 18,000
Studio within city ~12,000-17,000
Studio out if city. ~ 10,000-12,000

Registering FEWA new account- 1500aed deposit.
Sewerage- 1080 per year.


Transportation
Ajman city center (lulu hypermarket) to Sharjah (Rolla square) ~4aed
Ajman musalaa station to Dubai ~5aed
Ajman lulu hypermarket to jurf ind/china mall/Ajman immigration/labor ~3aed
AlSharq terminal >Rolla>Sharjah J&P>Sharjah airport -5aed

Minimum taxi fare-3aed
Feeding
Afghani bread -1aed
Chicken/beef shawama -4/5aed
Rice -5aed per kg
Beans - 4aed per kilo
Beef -18aed per kilo
Chicken full -20aed
Visit Ajman public market for cheaper veggies and stuff.

Social life
Cheap chicks - hotels along the corniche
Cheap booze - Ajman industrial zone (a bottle of vodka -15aed)
( south African wine -4ltr -45aed)
(California red 9ltr -85aed)
Restaurant ... Too many
Fresh fish - Ajman fish market. roast it for less than 10aed. Enjoy the feast along the corniche.

Well... Ajman is tiny compared to Dubai, and less organized.


Sharjah is similar to Ajman except for the lack of cheap booze n chicks, n cigarette shops.

Transportation:
Bus 14 goes to Ajman AlSharq terminal from Sharjah airport passing Rolla, Jubail bus station.
Bus 114 goes from Jubail to AlBustan Ajman
Bus 14x stops at Rolla.
Note: Rolla square is the transfer center for most Sharjah buses.
Fare. 5aed

Housing: 20% higher than Ajman.

Social life... Only the shopping malls, Buhaira corniche for water shows, coffee shops, Jolaif Mandi restaurants etc.
Also Abushagara used car market to sell and buy cars.

Taxi from sharjah To Dubai-=20aed + meter fare
Minimum taxi fare: 10aed

When Billy Graham Urged Nixon to Kill a Million People
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER
COCKBURN

There’s a piquant contrast in the press coverage
across the decades of Billy Graham’s various
private dealings with Richard Nixon, as displayed
on the tapes gradually released from the
National Archive or disclosed from Nixon’s
papers. We’ll come shortly to the flap over Graham and Nixon’s closet palaverings about the
Jews, but first let’s visit another interaction
between the great evangelist and his commander-
in-chief. Back in April, 1989, a Graham memo to Nixon
was made public. It took the form of a secret
letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted
after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries
from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the
peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act,
Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight
destroy the economy of North Vietnam”. Graham lent his imprimatur to this
recommendation. Thus the preacher was
advocating a policy to the US Commander in
Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have
killed a million people. The German high
commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss- Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg
for breaching dikes in Holland in World War
Two. (His execution did not deter the USAF from
destroying the Toksan dam in North Korea, in
1953, thus deliberately wrecking the system that
irrigated 75 per cent of North Korea’s rice farms.) This disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war
criminal did not excite any commotion when it
became public in 1989, twenty years after it was
written. No one thought to chide Graham or even
question him on the matter. Very different has
been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about
Jewish domination of the media and Graham
invoking the “stranglehold” Jews have on the
media. On the account of James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, who has filed excellent stories down the years on Nixon’s tapes, in this 1972 Oval Office
session between Nixon, Haldeman and Graham,
the President raises a topic about which “we can’t
talk about it publicly,” namely Jewish influence in
Hollywood and the media. Nixon cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative
who was executive producer of the NBC hit,
“Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” as telling him
that “11 of the 12 writers are Jewish.” “That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to
claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, the New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others,
are “totally dominated by the Jews.” Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K.
Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite
“front men who may not be of that persuasion,”
but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.” “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the
country’s going down the drain,” the nation’s
best-known preacher declares. “You believe that?” Nixon says. “Yes, sir,” Graham says. “Oh, boy,” replies Nixon. “So do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it.” “No, but if you get elected a second time, then we
might be able to do something,” Graham replies. Magnanimously Nixon concedes that this does
not mean “that all the Jews are bad,” but that
most are left-wing radicals who want “peace at
any price except where support for Israel is
concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli
Jews.” “That’s right,” agrees Graham, who later concurs
with a Nixon assertion that a “powerful bloc” of
Jews confronts Nixon in the media. “And they’re the ones putting out the
pornographic stuff,” Graham adds. Later Graham says that “a lot of the Jews are
great friends of mine. They swarm around me
and are friendly to me. Because they know I am
friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know
how I really feel about what they’re doing to this
country.” After Graham’s departure Nixon says to
Haldeman, “You know it was good we got this
point about the Jews across.” “It’s a shocking point,” Haldeman replies. “Well,” says Nixon, “It’s also, the Jews are
irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of
bastards.” Within days of these exchanges becoming public
the decrepit Graham was hauled from his semi-
dotage, and impelled to express public
contrition. “Experts” on Graham were duly cited
as expressing their “shock” at Graham’s White
House table talk. Why the shock? Don’t they know that this sort of stuff is
consonant with the standard conversational bill
of fare at 75 per cent of the country clubs in
America, not to mention many a Baptist soiree? Nixon thought that American Jews were lefty
peaceniks who dominated the Democratic Party
and were behind the attacks on him. Graham reckoned it was Hollywood Jews who
had sunk the nation in porn. Haldeman agreed with both of them. At whatever level of fantasy they were all
acknowledging power. But they didn’t say they
wanted to kill a million Jews. That’s what Billy Graham said about the
Vietnamese and no one raised a bleat. This essay is excerpted from End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate.

ogakpatakpata: @post.email..............are you based in Dubai or Ajman?

Ajman

justi4jesu: Yes the one for 49dirhams is without email account, but du is preferable though.

What about DU?

AJMAN immigration
Important Rules:
Arab ladies can not be sponsored as a maid or servant.
Arab ladies can not be sponsored as an employee of an establishment in the industrial zone.

For sponsoring relatives:
Marriage certificates must be attested by Nigerian MOFA, Nigerian Embassy Abudhabi, Sharjah or Dubai MOFA and legally translated to Arabic.

Birth certificates must be attested by Nigerian MOFA, Nigerian Embassy Abudhabi, Sharjah or Dubai MOFA and legally translated to Arabic.

For legal translation in AJMAN:
Visit CityMart building near LULU center, opp AJMAN municipality building., Room 118. Cost: 65AED per page. Pick up the next day.

Attestation of Tenancy contract.
Buy a tenancy contract(3 leaves) at municipality for 30AED.
House owner signs all 3 pages.
Visit block B-sewerage office and pay sewerage charge for a year depending on number of rooms; 1BHK -1080AED charge. Pay and get a "no objection" stamp from them.
Visit Block D and stamp the contract. Contract charge is 1% of tenancy contract amount + 10AED.

Insight: The struggle to tame
Africa's beast of a megacity
By Tim Cocks

A walk along the two kilometers
of light rail that Lagos authorities have managed to
build in three years gives a sense of how hard it is
to impose order on one of Africa's most chaotic
cities. From either side of the concrete structure - no track
has yet been laid - the crowded slums and
highways of Nigeria's lagoon-side commercial hub
teem with activity. Its trademark yellow buses overtake, undertake and
force their way down impossibly narrow side
streets, where women stir pots next to canals
clogged with rubbish. With between 15 million and 21 million people - the
upper estimate is the official one, though no one
really knows - and generating a third of GDP for
Africa's second biggest economy, Lagos has
become almost as alluring to yield-hungry investors
as it is to the 4,000 or so economic migrants who turn up each day. Violent crime, mushrooming slums, police extortion
and widespread fraud have often held investment
back, but in the past decade, authorities have
started trying to tackle some of the obstacles,
especially maddening traffic bottlenecks. "Just keeping Lagos roads moving without rail,
pushing that kind of tonnage just through our road
network, now that's the eighth wonder of the world,"
says Governor Babtunde Fashola. Fashola and his predecessor, Bola Tinubu, have
tried to turn the city from a byword for squalor into a
glitzy business hub. Their success will rest on
projects like the light rail, which has involved
massive and controversial slum clearance. If they manage, it could become an investment hub
in Africa and a model for fast-urbanizing African
nations. If not, it might face a dystopian crime-
ridden future not unlike its past. "WE CAN'T STOP THEM COMING" If Lagos were a country its GDP would make it
Africa's seventh biggest economy - more than twice
the size of Kenya's. Its large consumer market is
already well established for firms like Unilever,
Heineken and Nestle. One of Africa's biggest stock markets sits here, as
does its second biggest market in government
bonds. Industry is hampered by poor power
generation, but the service sector is booming. Lagos accounts for more than half the non-oil
economy of Africa's leading energy producer, says
economist Paul Collier, who sees it as key to
breaking the country's dependence on oil. "Lagos is Africa's best chance of a productive
megacity," he wrote in The Plundered Planet. "As
oil runs down and is replaced by a new economy ...
Nigeria's economic future lies in Lagos." But it faces a daily challenge just trying to keep up
with the pace of population growth, much of it on
the edge of water. Nigeria, already pushing 170 million people, will be
home to 400 million by 2050, making it the world's
fourth most populous country, according to the
global Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Lagos
will have roughly doubled in size by then, Fashola
and demographers agree. On top of Nigeria's high birth rate, there is
migration. "The more successful Lagos is, the more people it
attracts. That's the Catch-22," said Kayode
Akindele, partner in a Lagos-based consultancy.
"Social services can't keep up." Fashola's planning commissioner Ben Akabueze
thinks Lagos could have 35 million people by 2025
on current growth rates. In 1970, authorities say,
there were just 1.4 million Lagosians. "We can't stop them from coming," Akabueze told
Reuters from his office in mainland Lagos's noisy,
heaving Ikeja district. "There's been a net positive
migration almost on a daily basis." To try to cope better, the government is rolling out
a compulsory residents' registration. "Everybody is
welcome," Akabueze says. "But we want to
document the people who stay." VEHICLES FOR CHANGE The influx puts pressure on inadequate housing,
and spawns unemployed youths with few options
for making a living outside the street gangs - the
infamous 'area boys' who informally control territory
and extort money from passers by. But the biggest headache is travel. The transport
authority says there are 9 million road trips a day in
the city. Some Lagosians get up at 4.30 a.m. to
make the office by nine. Things are improving; highways were widened and
police stationed at bottlenecks. New ferry services
now beat traffic by crossing the lagoon in a state
one fifth of which is water. Tutu Adewale, an assistant to a financial
professional, used to spend three or four hours
each way commuting by bus along a tangle of
bridges. Now it takes her 45 minutes by boat. "I made do with it, but it's such a relief now," she
said. The $2.5 billion light rail project will take more time.
China's state-owned China Civil Engineering
Construction Corporation (CCECC) began work in
2010, but there are still 25 km left to build on the
$1.3 billion east-west line, and no work has started
on the 35 km north-south one. The project is behind schedule because there is
barely a stretch of land on which someone isn't
living or trading. Thousands of illegal settlements erected by slum
dwellers have been destroyed this year. No one has
been compensated, because they were never
supposed to be there to begin with. Amnesty International in August condemned the
eviction of 9,000 residents of Badia East and the
razing of their homes in February, leaving many to
sleep in mosquito-infested streets. In one incident, 72 traders from the Igbo ethnic
group were deported to their ancestral lands after
their houses were bulldozed. That appeared to give
slum clearance an ugly ethnic dimension, and
Fashola made a reluctant public apology. "My shop was just right in front of that bridge," said
Igbo trader Uche Okonkwo, 43, surveying the
wreckage of a market trashed to make way for the
rail. "They demolished the warehouse, the shops,
the offices, the showroom, everything." FUTURE FOR THE POOR? Fashola's defenders say slums have to be removed
if projects like the light rail are to happen, but critics
say the heavy-handed approach shows a lack of
sensitivity to the poor. The governor is fixing the city for the besuited
business types, they say, but has been slow on
things like low-cost housing to help those sleeping
under bridges or on rubbish tips. "Much as I admire Fashola, I don't see enough
being done to help those at the bottom," blogger
Tolu Ogunlesi told Reuters in a chic art cafe in the
prestigious Victoria Island, an area housing one the
world's highest concentrations of millionaires. "They're talking about building 1,000 low-cost
housing units a year, but we need hundreds of
thousands a year," he said. There's no shortage of housing projects for the rich.
Moss-dusted colonial-era houses in leafy Ikoyi
district are becoming rare as they get torn down
and swapped for luxury flats. At Bar Beach on the Atlantic Coast, tonnes of sand
is being poured into the ocean to reclaim it for the
proposed Eko Atlantic city, a Dubai-style gated
community that will have chrome skyscrapers,
business parks, palm trees and a marina. Being on water is the only thing it will have in
common with the Makoko slum a few miles away,
where 100,000 fishing people live in houses on
stilts with no sanitation. "MORE ACCOUNTABLE" At his desk piled high with papers, Fashola resents
the notion he has neglected the poor. He points to
projects like massive mains water provision, which
will when finished provide 10-20 liters a day to
Lagosians, even if the city swells to 35 million, he
says. But the state's message is: if you leave the poverty
of your village to live on the streets in Lagos, that's
your lookout. "If you have nowhere to stay, then stay in your
village. You can't simply jump on a bus and come
live under a bridge," Akabueze says. The governor has won praise for dealing with crime.
Many area boys have been co-opted - some as
yellow-shirted traffic cops, while others keep order
in bus terminals. Violent crime has steadily fallen since he took
office in 2007, though there was been a spike in
kidnapping this year. "There was a time security was a big problem,
especially robbery, but you have to hand it to them,
things got a lot better," said Lagos tycoon Tony
Elumelu. Many fret about what will happen when the governor
steps down in 2015. "Everything Fashola's done can easily be reversed.
You'd just have to do nothing, it would be
reversed," said Akindele. Yet a growing number of business people feel the
state's efforts to bring some kind of order to Lagos
may be becoming irreversible. Corruption is rife, but
institutions function; rubbish is collected, streets
are swept, hedges trimmed. "Lagos is depersonalizing politics," United Bank for
Africa CEO Philips Oduoza said. "Institutions are
becoming more important than people, and that
could outlast the governor." Reinforcing this are rocketing tax receipts; 65
percent of state revenues are now non-oil. The governor, who gets up at 7 a.m. and works
until 3 a.m., says his to-do list isn't getting any
shorter. "In a football match, the last 15 minutes can be the
most decisive," he says, creaking back in his
leather chair. "So I intend to finish with as much
pace as we started."

Attestation at Sharjah Ministry of foreign affairs.
Location: behind king Faisal road next to Buhairah corniche.
First floor above health dept
GPS Coordinates:25.333616,55.389388
Cost: 150aed per page + 6aed for e-dirham card.

New Nigerian Embassy Location in Abudhabi.
GPS Coordinates:24.447164,54.366187
Landmark: next to Singapore embassy
Address:Villa 642/3off Al Khaleej Al Arabi Street, Al Bateen.Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

-taxi fare is about 12~14aed from AlWahdi bus station

Attestation of Documents at the Embassy:
-40AED per Page. Same day collection.
Time: 9am to 1pm

UK Ministry of Defense sets out how to sell wars to the public

The armed forces should seek to make British
involvement in future wars more palatable to
the public by reducing the public profile of
repatriation ceremonies for casualties,
according to a Ministry of Defence unit that
formulates strategy. Other suggestions made by the MoD thinktank in
a discussion paper examining how to assuage
"casualty averse" public opinion include the
greater use of mercenaries and unmanned
vehicles, as well as the SAS and other special
forces, because it says losses sustained by the elite soldiers do not have the same impact on the
public and press. The document, written in November 2012 and
obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of
Information Act, discusses how public reaction
to casualties can be influenced and recommends
that the armed forces should have "a clear and
constant information campaign in order to influence the major areas of press and public
opinion". It says that to support such a campaign the MoD
should consider a number of steps, one of which
would be to "reduce the profile of the
repatriation ceremonies" – an apparent
reference to the processions of hearses carrying
coffins draped in the union flag that were driven through towns near RAF bases where bodies
were brought back. For four years up to 2011, 345 servicemen killed
in action were brought back to RAF Lyneham
and driven through Royal Wootton Bassett, in
Wiltshire, in front of crowds of mourners. Since
then, bodies have been repatriated via RAF Brize
Norton, in Oxfordshire, with hearses driven through nearby Carterton. The MoD's suggestion received a scathing
reaction from some families of dead military
personnel. Deborah Allbutt, whose husband
Stephen was killed in a friendly fire incident in
Iraq in 2003, described the proposals for
repatriation ceremonies as "brushing the deaths under the carpet". She said: "They are fighting and giving their
lives. Why should they be hidden away? It would
be absolutely disgraceful." Allbutt, with others,
gained a landmark ruling this year that relatives
of killed or injured soldiers can seek damages
under human rights legislation. The paper, by the MoD's development, concepts
and doctrine centre (DCDC), recommends taking
steps to "reduce public sensitivity to the
penalties inherent in military operations" and
says the ministry should "inculcate an attitude
that service may involve sacrifice and that such risks are knowingly and willingly undertaken as a
matter of professional judgment". The paper amounts to what could be considered
a prescient analysis of why the British public and
MPs were so reluctant to support an attack on
Syria. It also says that in any conflict the MoD
should ensure that the reason for going to war is
"clearly explained to the public". The eight-page paper argues that the military
may have come to wrongly believe that the
public, and as a result the government, has
become more "risk averse" on the basis of recent
campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. "However, this assertion is based on recent,
post-2000 experience and we are in danger of
learning false lessons concerning the public's
attitude to military operations," the paper,
which has no named author, adds. "Historically, once the public are convinced that
they have a stake in the conflict they are
prepared to endorse military risks and will
accept casualties as the necessary consequence
of the use of military force." To back this up, it cites "robust" public support
for earlier conflicts – the Falklands war and
operations in Northern Ireland between 1969
and 2007. "In those cases where the public is
unconvinced of the relevance of the campaign to
their wellbeing they are not prepared to condone military risk and are acutely sensitive to
the level of casualties incurred. "Neither the action in Iraq nor the operations in
Afghanistan have enjoyed public support and we
are in danger of learning a false lesson from the
experience of the last 10 years." The report adds: "The public have become
better informed and our opponents more
sophisticated in the exploitation of the sources
of information with the net result that
convincing the nation of the need to run military
risks has become more difficult but no less essential." Among other suggestions that could contend
with worries about casualty numbers, the DCDC
recommends a major investment in
"autonomous systems for unmanned vehicles",
cyber-operations and the increased use of
mercenaries, referred to as "contractors". Noting that the growth of private security
companies has proceeded at a spectacular rate
during the past 10 years, it adds: "Neither the
media nor the public in the west appear to
identify with contractors in the way that they do
with their military personnel. Thus casualties from within the contractorised force are more
acceptable in pursuit of military ends than those
from among our own forces." Investing in greater numbers of special forces is
also recommended. The paper suggests: "The
public appear to have a more robust attitude to
SF [special forces] losses." In a reference to a
May 1982 helicopter crash, it says: "The loss of
19 SAS soldiers in a single aircraft accident during the Falklands campaign did not arouse
any significant comment." An MoD spokesman said: "It is entirely right that
we publicly honour those who have made the
ultimate sacrifice and there are no plans to
change the way in which repatriation ceremonies
are conducted. A key purpose of the
development, concepts and doctrine centre is to produce research which tests and challenges
established doctrine and its papers are designed
to stimulate internal debate, not outline
government policy or positions. To represent
this paper as policy or a potential shift of policy
is misleading." Christopher Dandeker, a professor of military
sociology at King's College London, said that the
issues raised in the paper were timely as the
public had recently shown that they were
unconvinced by what political elites wanted to
do in relation to the use of force in Syria. It also made sense that the military would pay greater
attention to the role of military families, who
were becoming "a more politically active,
questioning independent stakeholder in the
military community".

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/26/mod-study-sell-wars-public

Israel Still Angling for Attacks on Syria and Iran
by JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.

President Barack Obama may have drawn his seemingly regretted “red line” around Syria’s chemical weapons, but it was neither he nor the international community that turned the spotlight on their use. That task fell to Israel.

It was an Israeli general who claimed in April that Damascus had used chemical weapons, forcing Obama into an embarrassing demurral on his stated commitment to intervene should that happen.

According to the Israeli media, it was also Israel that provided the intelligence that blamed the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, for the latest chemical weapons attack, near Damascus on August 21, triggering the clamour for a US military response.

It is worth remembering that Obama’s supposed “dithering” on the question of military action has only been accentuated by Israel’s “daring” strikes on Syria – at least three since the start of the year.

It looks as though Israel, while remaining largely mute about its interests in the civil war raging there, has been doing a great deal to pressure the White House into direct involvement in Syria.

That momentum appears to have been halted, for the time being at least, by the deal agreed at the weekend by the US and Russia to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

To understand the respective views of the White House and Israel on attacking Syria, one needs to revisit the US-led invasion of Iraq a decade ago.

Israel and its ideological twin in Washington, the neoconservatives, rallied to the cause of toppling Saddam Hussein, believing that it should be the prelude to an equally devastating blow against Iran.

Israel was keen to see its two chief regional enemies weakened simultaneously. Saddam’s Iraq had been the chief sponsor of Palestinian resistance against Israel. Iran, meanwhile, had begun developing a civilian nuclear programme that Israel feared could pave the way to an Iranian bomb, ending Israel’s regional monopoly on nuclear weapons.

The neocons carried out the first phase of the plan, destroying Iraq, but then ran up against domestic opposition that blocked implementation of the second stage: the break-up of Iran.

The consequences are well known. As Iraq imploded into sectarian violence, Iran’s fortunes rose. Tehran strengthened its role as regional sponsor of resistance against Israel – or what became Washington’s new “axis of evil” – that included Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Israel and the US both regard Syria as the geographical “keystone” of that axis, as Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Jerusalem Post this week, and one that needs to be removed if Iran is to be isolated, weakened or attacked.

But Israel and the US drew different lessons from Iraq. Washington is now wary of its ground forces becoming bogged down again, as well as fearful of reviving a cold war confrontation with Moscow. It prefers instead to rely on proxies to contain and exhaust the Syrian regime.

Israel, on the other hand, understands the danger of manoeuvring its patron into a showdown with Damascus without ensuring this time that Iran is tied into the plan. Toppling Assad alone would simply add emboldened jihadists to the troubles on its doorstep.

Given these assessments, Israel and the US have struggled to envision a realistic endgame that would satisfy them both. Obama fears setting the region, and possibly the world, ablaze with a direct attack on Iran; Israel is worried about stretching its patron’s patience by openly pushing it into another catastrophic venture to guarantee its regional hegemony.

In his interview published yesterday by the Jerusalem Post, Michael Oren claimed that Israel had in fact been trying to oust Assad since the civil war erupted more than two years ago. He said Israel “always preferred the bad guys [jihadist groups] who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys [the Assad regime] who were backed by Iran.”

That seems improbable. Although the Sunni jihadist groups, some with links to al-Qaeda, are not natural allies for either the Shia leaders of Iran or Hizbollah, they would be strongly hostile to Israel. Oren’s comments, however, do indicate the degree to which Israel’s strategic priorities are obsessively viewed through the prism of an attack on Iran.

More likely, Israel has focused on using the civil war as a way to box Assad into his heartlands. That way, he becomes a less useful ally to Hizbollah, Iran and Russia, while the civil war keeps both his regime and the opposition weak.

Israel would have preferred a US strike on Syria, a goal its lobbyists in Washington were briefly mobilised to achieve. But the intention was not to remove Assad but to assert what Danny Ayalon, a former deputy Israeli foreign minister, referred to as “American and Israeli deterrence” – code for signalling to Tehran that it was being lined up as the next target.

That threat now looks empty. As Silvan Shalom, a senior government minister, observed: “If it is impossible to do anything against little Syria, then certainly it’s not possible against big Iran.”

But the new US-Russian deal to dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons can probably be turned to Israel’s advantage, so long as Israel prevents attention shifting to its own likely stockpiles.

In the short term, Israel has reason to fear Assad’s loss of control of his chemical weapons, with the danger that they pass either to the jihadists or to Hizbollah. The timetable for the weapons destruction should help to minimise those risks – in the words of one Israeli commentator, it is like Israel “winning the lottery”.

But Israel also suspects that Damascus is likely to procrastinate on disarmament. In any case, efforts to locate and destroy its chemical weapons in the midst of a civil war will be lengthy and difficult.

And that may provide Israel with a way back in. Soon, as Israeli analysts are already pointing out, Syria will be hosting international inspectors searching for WMD, not unlike the situation in Iraq shortly before the US-led invasion of 2003. Israel, it can safely be assumed, will quietly meddle, trying to persuade the West that Assad is not cooperating and that Hizbullah and Iran are implicated.

 

In a vein Israel may mine later, a Syrian opposition leader, Selim Idris, claimed at the weekend that Damascus was seeking to conceal the extent of its stockpiles by passing them to Lebanon and Iraq.

Obama is not the only one to have set a red line. Last year, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, drew one on a cartoon bomb at the United Nations as he warned that the world faced an imminent existential threat from an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Israel still desperately wants its chief foe, Iran, crushed. And if it can find a way to lever the US into doing its dirty work, it will exploit the opening – regardless of whether such action ramps up the suffering in Syria.

Yet Another War for Imperial Capitalism
Obama Goes Full Bush on Syria
by ROB URIE

In an interview with filmmaker Oliver Stone Argentina’s former President Nestor Kirchner recalled a conversation he had with U.S. President George W. Bush in which Mr. Bush expressed his view that war is ‘good for the economy.’ Given the context, a high level discussion over the efficacy of government programs to boost ‘the economy,’ Mr. Bush was apparently voicing a crude variant of ‘military Keynesianism,’ the theory that government military spending during WWII brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression. With WWII being one of the greatest slaughters in human history, the difference between the unintended auxiliary ‘benefit’ of the U.S. having the only industrial economy still standing as ‘the West’ was in need of rebuilding and Mr. Bush starting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the lunatic theory war has constructive benefits seems not to have occurred to him. Put differently, as long as ‘the economy’ for which war is considered good is Mr. Bush’s, the costs in terms of death, destruction and misery are apparently debits destined for someone else’s social accounting.

A quick glance at a map of the world shows Syria, the object of current President Barack Obama’s blood lust, just west of Iraq and just north and East of Israel, with Iran to the east of Iraq and Afghanistan to the east of Iran. Mr. Bush’s war on, and occupation of, Iraq sent approximately one million Iraqi refugees fleeing into Syria and opened a Sunni-Shia divide that is a primary factor in current Syrian tensions. U.S. ‘cold’ hostilities with Iran date to the waning days of the (Jimmy) Carter administration when the Iranian people rebelled against the puppet regime the U.S. had installed to ‘secure’ Iranian oil for the company that became British Petroleum (BP). Oil geopolitics explain some fair portion of the U.S.-Israeli ‘alliance,’ the overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran by the U.S., the repeated wars the U.S. has launched against Iraq and the geographical importance of Afghanistan to U.S. control of the region. In fact, the continuing presence of the U.S. in the Middle East over the last century has been the central cause of political instability in the region. And bogus rationales were given to suggest that slaughter and destruction were in some way for the benefit of those killed in every military conquest the U.S. has carried out in the last century.

Now we have current U.S. President Barack Obama, himself the leaker of classified ‘intelligence’ that has him personally ordering the extra-legal (illegal) murders of hundreds of women and children through his drone program, the political leader who refused to allow the prosecution of senior Bush administration officials for war crimes related to the war against, and occupation of, Iraq and Commander-in-Chief of a military that is one of the shadow protagonists in the ongoing conflict in Syria, claiming that the U.S. has the legal and moral authority to launch ‘official’ war against the Assad regime in Syria. However, under existing international law Mr. Obama lacks the legal authority to do so, given his own culpability for knowingly murdering hundreds of innocents he lacks the moral authority to do so, and as political leader of one of the shadow protagonists he already bears legal culpability for illegal acts being carried out by the U.S. military and intelligence services in Syria. And to paraphrase the charge made against the U.S. when baby Bush was selling his war on Iraq: how do we know Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons?—because Mr. Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, still has the receipts. Press reports have it that U.S. ally Great Britain was in fact selling the ‘precursor’ chemicals for Sarin gas to at least one side in the Syrian conflict until the EU (European Union) forced them to stop a few months ago.

Mr. Obama’s ‘official’ rationale for launching war on Syria—that chemical weapons represent a special class and their use requires a U.S. response, might be slightly less ludicrous if the U.S. hadn’t so recently launched an illegal war of aggression on Iraq in which over one million people were killed, the country was substantially destroyed and banned white phosphorous, depleted uranium shell casings, cluster bombs and illegal torture were liberally used against the civilian population. Across the Middle East today U.S. military drones are being used to terrorize and murder civilians and the murders are being covered up with the knowingly inaccurate classification of civilians as ‘terrorists.’ The CIA continues to run illegal ‘black sight’ torture facilities across the Middle East (and the world) where people accused of no crime are routinely tortured, raped and murdered against the Geneva Conventions and international law. And in fact the very same Syrian government now being accused of illegal acts was delivered hundreds, if not thousands, of people by the U.S. to be illegally tortured and murdered through the CIA’s and U.S. military’s ongoing ‘extraordinary rendition’ program. Mr. Obama’s cynicism in selling his war as ‘humanitarian’ intervention is nearly heroic in its contempt for U.S. history in the region, for the people who elected him and for his intended victims.

Public relations surrounding wars of imperial plunder have in recent centuries and decades tidied them up with alleged moral authority replacing naked self-interest as their stated intent. However, oil geopolitics alone tie together the last century of U.S. military actions in the Middle East. Much as with the development of ‘AFRICOM,’ the U.S. military adjunct to Western capitalist expansion in Africa, Mr. Obama’s external goal in Syria is to offset competing imperial claims on Middle Eastern oil. In so doing he is following U.S. geopolitical ‘tradition’ by using military force to maintain a ‘balance of power’ with chaos, death, terror and destruction the tools used to gain and maintain control of resources for the benefit of ‘Western’ multi-national corporations. The official U.S. line has been and remains that oil is a strategic resource, but it is strategic by design. Western corporations have engineered modern economies to be dependent on oil. To use this engineered dependence as the ongoing rationale for military conflict demonstrates Western capitalism to be incapable of the introspection needed for basic self-preservation in the face of changing circumstance–history has most decidedly not yet ended.

Part of the near-term pushback against Mr. Obama’s war on Syria is the implicit admission that Mr. Bush’s war on Iraq was an unmitigated disaster. Mr. Bush’s main accomplishment with his war, in addition to creating murder, mayhem and destruction on an industrial scale, was to demonstrate the limits of American military power. And the presence of Russia as the other central shadow protagonist in Syria points to changing circumstance for the U.S. as imperial power. Across the Middle East, Africa and Asia the cost of imperial capitalism is rising as control of the resources necessary for Western capitalist production is more effectively contested and these resources become more broadly distributed. And Mr. Obama’s desire to go to war in Syria is related in a fashion to his revival of Wall Street, the predatory and dysfunctional financial system in the U.S. and Europe—in that rather than addressing the historical trajectory of the increasing costs of the social and economic catastrophes it causes, Mr. Obama’s intent is to maintain this existing system at all costs. And the reason, as it has always been, is that the class that benefits from imperial capitalism and that has ‘led’ U.S. foreign policy from one catastrophe to another over the last century has control of Western political economy. It is hardly an accident that the Wall Street banks Mr. Obama has pledged undying allegiance to are central players in global commodities (oil, food, water) markets.

With the experience of the U.S. catastrophe in Iraq so fresh in Western minds it is unlikely Mr. Obama’s bid for more of the same will come so easily. Regardless of whether or not he gets his war, the Western political economies of engineered dependence will remain dependent on increasingly costly and destructive imperial wars until the economic system that benefits from chaos, death and destruction is replaced by one that has the possibility of working. Mr. Obama’s implied intent to maintain the existing system at all costs demonstrates the incapacity for systemic ‘self’ correction. And how closely liberal Democrat Barack Obama’s policies have followed those of conservative Republican George W. Bush’s is testament to the unity of interests guiding all public policy in the West. That at this point in history dropping bombs retains an internal logic in ‘official’ Washington demonstrates just how small the realm of political imagination is. To be clear, Mr. Obama, like Mr. Bush before him, is calling on the U.S. military to ‘punish’ the political instability the U.S. created and perpetuated along with the use of chemical weapons the U.S. and  / or its allies sold for a ‘profit’ into this manufactured instability, all in an effort to maintain control of oil for the very Western corporations that engineered Western political economies to be dependent on this oil. Perhaps Mr. Bush’s minions had it right, but for the wrong reasons, with their idiot chant of ‘freedom ain’t free.’

War is everywhere and always a moral and economic catastrophe. That its costs and ‘benefits,’ to the extent looting and pillage can be considered benefits even to those doing the looting and pillaging, are unevenly distributed, tend to result from the basest of human power relationships and premise social relations on material gain rather than social cohesion make imperial war a rough analog of capitalism. And while Western economic indicators like GDP (Gross Domestic Product) have long been understood to count devastation and carnage as ‘positives’ because economic destruction is not subtracted while the economic production from rebuilding is counted as a positive, these are quirks of national accounting, not indications that death, destruction and carnage are even in a perverse sense ‘constructive.’ That Mr. Bush (and Mr. Obama) was educated at America’s most elite schools and apparently believes that war is ‘good for the economy’ has a class dimension that likely goes beyond his expressed disinterest in the Keynesian economics grudgingly taught in American schools—the class he was born into has tended to benefit greatly from the looting and pillage of imperial capitalism. It was no accident that his Cabinet was loaded with ‘chicken hawks,’ advocates of wars that other people fight, who also happened to be ‘oil men’ (and women) —it is a class privilege in the U.S. With yet another war for imperial capitalism looming, it is time to end this class privilege.

The United States, which has deployed its CBW
arsenal against the Philippines, Puerto Rico,
Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia, Cuba, Haitian boat people and
Canada, plus exposure of hundreds of thousands
of unwitting US citizens to an astonishing array of germ agents and toxic chemicals, killing dozens
of people. The US experimentation with bio-weapons goes
back to the distribution of cholera-infect blankets
to American Indian tribes in the 1860s. In 1900,
US Army doctors in the Philippines infected five
prisoners with a variety of plague and 29
prisoners with Beriberi. At least four of the subjects died. In 1915, a doctor working with
government grants exposed 12 prisoners in
Mississippi to pellagra, an incapacitating disease
that attacks the central nervous system. After World War I, the United States went on a
chemical weapons binge, producing millions of
barrels of mustard gas and Lewisite. Thousands
of US troops were exposed to these chemical
agents in order to “test the efficacy of gas masks
and protective clothing”. The Veterans Administration refused to honor disability claims
from victims of such experiments. The Army also
deployed mustard gas against anti-US protesters
in Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the 1920s
and 1930s. In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, then under
contract with the Rockefeller Institute for
Medical Investigations, initiated his horrific
Puerto Rico Cancer Experiments, infecting
dozens of unwitting subjects with cancer cells.At
least thirteen of his victims died as a result. Rhoads went on to headof the US Army
Biological Weapons division and to serve on the
Atomic Energy Commission, where he oversaw
radiation experiments on thousands of US
citizens. In memos to the Department of Defense,
Rhoads expressed his opinion that Puerto Rican dissidents could be “eradicated” with the
judicious use of germ bombs. In 1942, US Army and Navy doctors infected 400
prisoners in Chicago withmalaria in experiments
designed to get “a profile of the disease and
develop a treatment for it.” Most of the inmates
were black and none was informed of the risks of
the experiment. Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg cited the Chicago malaria
experiments as part of their defense. At the close of World War II, the US Army put on
its payroll, Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of the
Imperial Army of Japan’s bio-warfare unit. Dr.
Ishii had deployed a wide range of biological and
chemical agents against Chinese and Allied
troops. He also operated a large research center in Manchuria,where he conducted bio-weapons
experiments on Chinese, Russian and American
prisoners of war. Ishii infected prisoners with
tetanus; gave them typhoid-laced tomatoes;
developed plague-infected fleas; infected women
with syphilis; performed dissections on live prisoners; and exploded germ bombs over
dozens of men tied to stakes. In a deal hatched by
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Ishii turned over more
than 10,000 pages of his “research findings”to
the US Army, avoided prosecution for war crimes
and was invited to lecture at Ft. Detrick, the US Army bio-weapons center in Frederick,
Maryland. In 1950 the US Navy sprayed large quantities of
serratia marcescens, a bacteriological agent, over
San Francisco, promoting an outbreak of
pneumonia-like illnesses and causing the death of
at least one man, Ed Nevins. A year later, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai
charged that the US military and the CIA had
used bio-agents against North Korea and China.
Chou produced statements from 25 US prisoners
of war backing him his claims that the US had
dropped anthrax contaminated feathers, mosquitoes and fleas carrying Yellow Fever and
propaganda leaflets spiked with cholera over
Manchuria and North Korea. From 1950 through 1953, the US Army released
chemical clouds over six US and Canadian cities.
The tests were designed to test dispersal patterns
of chemical weapons. Army records noted that
the compounds used over Winnipeg, Canada,
where there were numerous reports of respiratory illnesses, involved cadmium, a highly
toxic chemical. In 1951 the US Army secretly contaminated the
Norfolk Naval Supply Centerin Virginia with
infectious bacteria. One type was chosen because
blackswere believed to be more susceptible than
whites. A similar experiment was undertaken
later that year at Washington, DC’s National Airport. The bacteria was later linked to food and
blood poisoning and respiratory problems. Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida were
the targets of repeatedArmy bio-weapons
experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army CBW
researchers released millions of mosquitoes on
the two towns in order to test the ability of
insects to carry and deliver yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents fell ill,
suffering from fevers, respiratory distress,
stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid. Army
researchers disguised themselves as public health
workers in order photograph and test the
victims. Several deaths were reported. In 1965 the US Army and the Dow Chemical
Company injected dioxin into 70 prisoners (most
of them black) at the Holmesburg State Prison in
Pennsylvania. The prisoners developed severe
lesions which went untreated for seven months.
A year later, the US Army set about the most ambitious chemical warfare operation in history. From 1966 to 1972, the United States dumped
more than 12 million gallonsof Agent Orange (a
dioxin-powered herbicide) over about 4.5 million
acresof South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The
government of Vietnam estimate the civilian
casualties from Agent Orange at more than 500,000. The legacy continues with high levels
of birth defects in areas that were saturated with
the chemical. Tens of thousands of US soldiers
were also the victims of Agent Orange. In a still classified experiment, the US Army
sprayed an unknown bacterial agent in the New
York Subway system in 1966. It is not known if
the test caused any illnesses. A year later, the CIA placed a chemical substance
in the drinking water supply of the Food and
Drug Administration headquarters in
Washington, DC. The test was designed to see if
it was possible to poison drinking water with LSD
or other incapacitating agents. In 1969, Dr. D.M. McArtor, the deputy director
for Research and Technologyfor the Department
of Defense, asked Congress to appropriate $10
millionfor the development of a synthetic
biological agent that would be resistant” to the
immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative
freedom from infectious disease”. In 1971 the first documented cases of swine fever
in the western hemisphere showed up in Cuba. A
CIA agent later admitted that he had been
instructed to deliver the virus to Cuban exiles in
Panama, who carried the virus into Cuba in
March of 1991. This astounding admission received scant attention in the US press. In 1980, hundreds of Haitian men, who had been
locked up in detention camps in Miami and
Puerto Rico, developed gynecomasia after
receiving “hormone” shots from US doctors.
Gynecomasia is a condition causing males to
developfull-sized female breasts. In 1981, Fidel Castro blamed an outbreak of
dengue fever in Cuba on the CIA. The fever killed
188 people, including 88 children. In 1988, a
Cuban exile leader named Eduardo Arocena
admitted “bringing some germs” into Cuba in
1980. Four years later an epidemic of dengue fever
struck Managua, Nicaragua.Nearly 50,000
people came down with the fever and dozens
died. This was the first outbreak of the disease in
Nicaragua. It occurred at the height of the CIA’s
war against the Sandinista government and followed a series of low-level “reconnaissance”
flights over the capital city. In 1996, the Cuba government again accused the
US of engaging in “biological aggression”. This
time it involved an outbreak of thrips palmi, an
insect that kills potato crops, palm trees and
other vegetation. Thrips first showed up in Cuba
on December 12, 1996, following low-level flights over the island by US government spray planes.
The US was able to quash a United Nations
investigation of the incident. At the close of the Gulf War, the US Army
exploded an Iraqi chemical weapons depot at
Kamashiya. In 1996, the Department of Defense
finally admitted that more than 20,000 US
troops were exposed to VX and sarin nerve
agentsas a result of the US operation at Kamashiya. This may be one cause of Gulf War
Illness, another cause is certainly the
experimental vaccines unwittingly given to more
than 100,000 US troops.

Has anyone heard the evidence they(west) have against Assad?

The Turkish General Directorate of Security … seized 2 kg of sarin gas in the city of Adana in the early hours of yesterday morning. The chemical weapons were in the possession of Al Nusra terrorists believed to have been heading for Syria. Haaretz reported on March 24th, “Jihadists, not Assad, apparently behind reported chemical attack in Syria“. UN investigator Carla Del Ponte said that there is strong evidence that the rebels used chemical weapons, but that there is not evidence that the government used such weapons: There is also evidence that the rebels have recently used chemical weapons.




The yanks got intel from the Israelis about the intercepted call from a high ranking officer in the Syrian government. And apparently this evidence and youtube videos are what the almighty western superpowers have against Assad. There is blog by UK MP, a good read for those being brainwashed by the popular western media:






The Troodos Conundrum
By Craig Murray

The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in
Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which
the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence
cooperation. The communications intercept
agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US,
share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6). Troodos is valued enormously by the
NSA. It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave
traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt
and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus.
Even almost all landline telephone communication
in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos. Troodos is highly effective – the jewel in the crown
of British intelligence. Its capacity and efficiency,
as well as its reach, is staggering. The US do not
have their own comparable facility for the Middle
East. I should state that I have actually been
inside all of this facility and been fully briefed on its operations and capabilities, while I was head of the
FCO Cyprus Section in the early 1990s. This is
fact, not speculation. It is therefore very strange, to say the least, that
John Kerry claims to have access to
communications intercepts of Syrian military and
officials organising chemical weapons attacks,
which intercepts were not available to the British
Joint Intelligence Committee. On one level the explanation is simple. The
intercept evidence was provided to the USA by
Mossad, according to my own well placed source
in the Washington intelligence community.
Intelligence provided by a third party is not
automatically shared with the UK, and indeed Israel specifies it should not be. But the inescapable question is this. Mossad have
nothing comparable to the Troodos operation. The
reported content of the conversations fits exactly
with key tasking for Troodos, and would have
tripped all the triggers. How can Troodos have
missed this if Mossad got it? The only remote possibility is that all the conversations went on a
purely landline route, on which Mossad have a
physical wire tap, but that is very unlikely in a
number of ways - not least nowadays the purely
landline route. Israel has repeatedly been involved in the Syrian
civil war, carrying out a number of illegal bombings
and missile strikes over many months. This
absolutely illegal activity by Israel- which has killed
a great many civilians, including children - has
brought no condemnation at all from the West. Israel has now provided “intelligence” to the
United States designed to allow the United States
to join in with Israel’s bombing and missile
campaign. The answer to the Troodos Conundrum is simple.
Troodos did not pick up the intercepts because
they do not exist. Mossad fabricated them. John
Kerry’s “evidence” is the shabbiest of tricks. More
children may now be blown to pieces by massive
American missile blasts. It is nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. It is, yet again, the
USA acting at the behest of Israel.

Yes, the Syrian Rebels DO Have
Access to Chemical Weapons

One of the U.S.
government’s
main
justifications
for its claim that the Syrian
government carried out a chemical weapons attack is that the rebels don’t have chemical weapons. However, multiple lines of evidence show that the rebels do have chemical weapons. Potential Looting of Syrian Weapons The Washington Post noted last December: U.S. officials are increasingly worried that Syria’s weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of Islamist extremists, rogue generals or other uncontrollable factions. Last week, fighters from a group that the Obama administration has branded a terrorist organization were among rebels who seized the Sheik Suleiman military base near Aleppo, where research on chemical weapons had been conducted. Rebels are also closing in on another base near Aleppo, known as Safirah, which has served as a major production center for such munitions, according to U.S. officials and analysts. *** A former Syrian general who once led the army’s chemical weapons training program said that the main storage sites for mustard gas and nerve agents are supposed to be guarded by thousands of Syrian troops but that they would be easily overrun. The sites are not secure, retired Maj. Gen. Adnan Silou, who defected to the opposition in June, said in an interview near Turkey’s border with Syria. “Probably anyone from the Free Syrian Army or any Islamic extremist group could take them over,” he said. *** As the Syrian opposition steadily makes territorial gains, U.S. officials and analysts said the odds are increasing that insurgents will seize control of a chemical weapons site or that Syrian troops guarding the installations will simply abandon their posts. “It’s almost inevitable,” [Michael Eisenstadt, a retired Army officer who directs the military and security studies program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy] said. “It may have already happened, for what we know.” *** Last week, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said the al- Nusra Front — an anti-Assad group that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and is also known as Jabhat al-Nusra — had seized a chlorine factory near the town of Safirah, east of Aleppo. “Terrorist groups may resort to using chemical weapons against the Syrian people,” the ministry cautioned. AP reports: Questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria’s chemical weapons stores …. A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats — including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime’s chemical weapons are stored …. U.S. and allied spies have lost track of who controls some of the country’s chemical weapons supplies, according to the two intelligence officials and two other U.S. officials. *** U.S. analysts … are also not certain that when they saw what looked like Assad’s forces moving chemical supplies, those forces were able to remove everything before rebels took over an area where weapons had been stored. AP hit the nail on the head when it wrote: U.S. intelligence officials are not so certain that the suspected chemical attack was carried out on Assad’s orders, or even completely sure it was carried out by government forces, the officials said. *** Another possibility that officials would hope to rule out: that stocks had fallen out of the government’s control and were deployed by rebels in a callous and calculated attempt to draw the West into the war. Looting of Libyan Chemical Weapons Fox News reported in 2011: In August, Fox News interviewed Rep. Mike Rogers, R.-Mich., who said he saw a chemical weapon stockpile in the country during a 2004 trip. At the time, he said the U.S. was concerned about “thousands of pounds of very active mustard gas.” He also said there is some sarin gas that is unaccounted for. The Wall Street Journal noted in 2011: Spread across the desert here off the Sirte-Waddan road sits one of the biggest threats to Western hopes for Libya: a massive, unguarded weapons depot that is being pillaged daily by anti-Gadhafi military units, hired work crews and any enterprising individual who has the right vehicle and chooses to make the trip. In one of dozens of warehouses the size of a single- family home, Soviet-era guided missiles remain wrapped inside crates stacked to the 15-foot ceiling. In another, dusted with sand, are dozens of sealed cases labeled “warhead.” Artillery rounds designed to carry chemical weapons are stashed in the back of another. Rockets, antitank grenades and projectiles of all calibers are piled so high they defy counting…. Convoys of armed groups from all over Libya have made the trek here and piled looted weapons into trailer trucks, dump trucks, buses and even empty meat trucks…. The highly-regarded NTI reported the same year: In the desert near Sirte, there was no security for dozens of small armories at the complex, where weapons are removed every day by opposition fighters, paid contractors and others. In one structure, the word “warhead” was stamped on dozens of sealed containers. At another depot, empty chemical agent munitions were found. There is at present no viable Libyan government- sanctioned force with the capacity to keep freelancer fighters from taking what they please from the warehouses, according to the Journal. *** U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) visited the Libyan capital, where he said gaining control over the country’s armories was a “very big topic.” “We have a game plan to secure the weapon caches, particularly biological and chemical weapons,” McCain said. The Telegraph reported last year: Al Qaeda terrorists in North Africa could be in possession of chemical weapons, a leading Spanish intelligence officer said on Monday. The head of National Police counter-terrorist intelligence, Commissioner-General Enrique Baron, told a strategic security conference in Barcelona that it was believed that the self-styled Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb – AQMI – could have acquired such arms in Libya or elsewhere during the Arab Spring last year. *** Commissioner Baron told his audience: “The Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb has acquired and used very powerful conventional arms and probably also has non-conventional arms, basically chemical, as a result of the loss of control of arsenals.” The most likely place where this could have happened was in Libya during the uprising which overthrew the Gaddafi regime, said Commissioner Baron. In his position as the head of Spanish National Police intelligence the Commissioner-General works closely with MI6, the CIA and other Western European intelligence services. Remember, the head of the Libyan rebels admitted that the rebels were largely Al Qaeda. CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Times, and many other mainstream sources confirm that Al Qaeda terrorists
from Libya have since flooded into Syria to fight the Assad regime … bringing their arms with them. And the post-Gaddafi Libyan government is also itself a top funder and arms supplier of the Syrian opposition. (CNN notes that the CIA may have had a hand in this operation.) Other Countries A reporter who has written extensively for Associated Press, BBC and National Public Radio reports that locals in the area hit by chemical weapons allege that Saudi Arabia supplied the chemicals. And see this. Bush administration official Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and British MP George Galloway speculate that Israel or another country may have given chemical weapons to the Syrian rebels. We don’t know which countries did or didn’t give chemical weapons to the rebels. The point is that there are quite a few opportunities or possibilities. Evidence of Possession and Use The above, of course, is simply speculation. More important is actual evidence of possession and use. Turkish state newspaper Zaman reported earlier this year (Google translation): The Turkish General Directorate of Security … seized 2 kg of sarin gas in the city of Adana in the early hours of yesterday morning. The chemical weapons were in the possession of Al Nusra terrorists believed to have been heading for Syria. Haaretz reported on March 24th, “Jihadists, not Assad, apparently behind reported chemical attack in Syria“. UN investigator Carla Del Ponte said that there is strong evidence that the rebels used chemical weapons, but that there is not evidence that the government used such weapons: There is also evidence that the rebels have recently used chemical weapons. No wonder experts are skeptical.

The Troodos Conundrum
By Craig Murray

The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in
Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which
the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence
cooperation. The communications intercept
agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US,
share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6). Troodos is valued enormously by the
NSA. It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave
traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt
and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus.
Even almost all landline telephone communication
in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos. Troodos is highly effective – the jewel in the crown
of British intelligence. Its capacity and efficiency,
as well as its reach, is staggering. The US do not
have their own comparable facility for the Middle
East. I should state that I have actually been
inside all of this facility and been fully briefed on its operations and capabilities, while I was head of the
FCO Cyprus Section in the early 1990s. This is
fact, not speculation. It is therefore very strange, to say the least, that
John Kerry claims to have access to
communications intercepts of Syrian military and
officials organising chemical weapons attacks,
which intercepts were not available to the British
Joint Intelligence Committee. On one level the explanation is simple. The
intercept evidence was provided to the USA by
Mossad, according to my own well placed source
in the Washington intelligence community.
Intelligence provided by a third party is not
automatically shared with the UK, and indeed Israel specifies it should not be. But the inescapable question is this. Mossad have
nothing comparable to the Troodos operation. The
reported content of the conversations fits exactly
with key tasking for Troodos, and would have
tripped all the triggers. How can Troodos have
missed this if Mossad got it? The only remote possibility is that all the conversations went on a
purely landline route, on which Mossad have a
physical wire tap, but that is very unlikely in a
number of ways - not least nowadays the purely
landline route. Israel has repeatedly been involved in the Syrian
civil war, carrying out a number of illegal bombings
and missile strikes over many months. This
absolutely illegal activity by Israel- which has killed
a great many civilians, including children - has
brought no condemnation at all from the West. Israel has now provided “intelligence” to the
United States designed to allow the United States
to join in with Israel’s bombing and missile
campaign. The answer to the Troodos Conundrum is simple.
Troodos did not pick up the intercepts because
they do not exist. Mossad fabricated them. John
Kerry’s “evidence” is the shabbiest of tricks. More
children may now be blown to pieces by massive
American missile blasts. It is nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. It is, yet again, the
USA acting at the behest of Israel.

THE ROVING EYE US:
The indispensable (bombing) nation
By Pepe Escobar

Yes We Scan. Yes We Drone. And Yes We Bomb.
The White House's propaganda blitzkrieg to sell the
Tomahawking of Syria to the US Congress is
already reaching pre-bombing maximum spin -
gleefully reproduced by US corporate media. And yes, all parallels to Iraq 2.0 duly came to
fruition when US Secretary of State John Kerry
pontificated that Bashar al-Assad "now joins the list
of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein" as an evil
monster. Why is Cambodia's Pol Pot never
mentioned? Oh yes, because the US supported him. Every single tumbleweed in the Nevada desert
knows who's itching for war on Syria; vast sectors
of the industrial-military complex; Israel; the House
of Saud; the "socialist" Francois Hollande in France, who has wet dreams with
Sykes-Picot. Virtually nobody is lobbying Congress
NOT to go to war. And all the frantic war lobbying may even be
superfluous; Nobel Peace Prize winner and
prospective bomber Barack Obama has already
implied - via hardcore hedging of the "I have decided
that the United States should take military action"
kind - that he's bent on attacking Syria no matter what Congress says. Obama's self-inflicted "red line" is a mutant virus;
from "a shot across the bow" it morphed into a "slap
on the wrist" and now seems to be "I'm the Bomb
Decider". Speculation about his real motives is idle.
His Hail Mary pass of resorting to an extremely
unpopular Congress packed with certified morons may be a cry for help (save me from my stupid "red
line"; or - considering the humanitarian imperialists
of the Susan Rice kind who surround him - he's hell
bent on entering another war for the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the House of
Saud lobby under the cover of "moral high ground". Part of the spin is that "Israel must be protected".
But the fact is Israel is already over-protected by an
AIPAC remote-controlled United States Congress.
[1] What about the evidence? The former "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" are
doing their part, enthusiastically supporting the
White House "evidence" with a dodgy report of their
own, largely based on YouTube intel. [2] Even Fox News admitted that the US electronic intel
essentially came from the 8200 unit of the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) - their version of the NSA. [3]
Here, former UK ambassador Craig Murray convincingly debunks the Israeli intercepted intel
scam. The most startling counterpunch to the White House
spin remains the Mint Press News report by AP
correspondent Dale Gavlak on the spot, in Ghouta,
Damascus, with anti-Assad residents stressing that
"certain rebels received chemical weapons via the
Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the gas
attack''. I had a jolt when I first read it - as I have been
stressing the role of Bandar Bush as the dark arts
mastermind behind the new Syria war strategy (See Bandar Bush, 'liberator' of Syria, Asia Times Online, August 13, 2013). Then there's the fact that Syrian Army commandos,
on August 24, raiding "rebel" tunnels in the
Damascus suburb of Jobar, seized a warehouse
crammed with chemicals required for mixing
"kitchen sarin". The commando was hit by some
form of nerve agent and sent samples for analysis in Russia. This evidence certainly is part of
President Vladimir Putin's assessment of the White
House claims as totally unconvincing. On August 27, Saleh Muslim, head of the Kurdish
Democratic Union Party (PYD), told Reuters the
attack was "aimed at framing Assad''. And in case
the UN inspectors found the "rebels" did it,
"everybody would forget it". The clincher; "Are they
are going to punish the Emir of Qatar or the King of Saudi Arabia, or Mr Erdogan of Turkey?" So, in a nutshell, no matter how it happened, the
locals in Ghouta said Jabhat al-Nusra did it; and Syrian Kurds believe this was a false flag to frame
Damascus. By now, any decent lawyer would be asking cui bono? What would be Assad's motive - to cross the "red line" and launch a chemical weapons attack on
the day UN inspectors arrive in Damascus, just 15
kilometers away from their hotel? This is the same US government who sold the world
the narrative of a bunch of unskilled Arabs armed
with box cutters hijacking passenger jets and turning
them into missiles smack in the middle of the most
protected airspace on the planet, on behalf of an evil
transnational organization. So now this same evil organization is incapable of
launching a rudimentary chemical weapons attack
with DIY rockets - a scenario I first outlined even
before Gavlak's report. [4] Here is a good round-up of the "rebels" dabbling with chemical weapons.
Additionally, in late May, Turkish security forces
had already found sarin gas held by hardcore Jabhat
al-Nusra jihadis. So why not ask Bandar Bush? We need to keep coming back over and over again
to that fateful meeting in Moscow barely four weeks
ago between Putin and Bandar Bush. [5] Bandar was brazen enough to tell Putin he would
"protect" the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. He
was brazen enough to say he controls all Chechens
jihadis from the Caucasus to Syria. All they needed
was a Saudi green light to go crazy in Russia's
underbelly. He even telegraphed his next move; "There is no
escape from the military option, because it is the
only currently available choice given that the
political settlement ended in stalemate. We believe
that the Geneva II Conference will be very difficult in
light of this raging situation." That's a monster understatement - because the
Saudis never wanted Geneva II in the first place.
Under the House of Saud's ultra-sectarian agenda of
fomenting the Sunni-Shi'ite divide everywhere, the
only thing that matters is to break the alliance
between Iran, Syria and Hezbollah by all means necessary. The House of Saud's spin du jour is that the world must "prevent aggression against the Syrian
people". But if "the Syrian people" agrees to be
bombed by the US, the House of Saud also agrees.
[6] Compared to this absurdity, Muqtada al-Sadr's
reaction in Iraq stands as the voice of reason.
Muqtada supports the "rebels" in Syria - unlike most
Shi'ites in Iraq; in fact he supports the non-armed
opposition, stressing the best solution is free and
fair elections. He rejects sectarianism - as fomented by the House of Saud. And as he knows what an
American military occupation is all about, he also
totally rejects any US bombing. The Bandar Bush-AIPAC strategic alliance will take
no prisoners to get its war. In Israel, Obama is
predictably being scorned for his "betrayal and
cowardice" in the face of "evil". The Israeli PR
avalanche on congress centers on the threat of a
unilateral strike on Iran if the US government does not attack Syria. As a matter of fact congress would
gleefully vote for both. Their collective IQ may be
sub-moronic, but some may be led to conclude that
the only way to "punish" the Assad government is to
have the US doing the heavy work as the Air Force
for the myriad "rebels" and of course jihadis - in the way the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the
Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq and the anti-Gaddafi
mercenaries in Libya duly profited. So here, in a nutshell, we have the indispensable
nation that drenched North Vietnam with napalm and
agent orange, showered Fallujah with white
phosphorus and large swathes of Iraq with depleted
uranium getting ready to unleash a "limited",
"kinetic" whatever against a country that has not attacked it, or any US allies, and everything based
on extremely dodgy evidence and taking the "moral
high-ground". Anyone who believes the White House spin that this
will be just about a few Tomahawks landing on
some deserted military barracks should rent a condo
in Alice in Wonderland. The draft already circulating
in Capitol Hill is positively scary. [7] And even if this turns out to be a "limited", "kinetic"
whatever, it will only perpetuate the chaos. Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has referred to it as
"controlled chaos". Not really; the Empire of Chaos
is now totally out of control.

For you folks, too much western media inhibits common sense. Hope you remember these:

1. A few months back, Syrian rebels were caught with chemical weapons (Sarin) in Turkey.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=xiaDSIxs4GM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DxiaDSIxs4GM&sa=X&ei=nFIjUqKuBo7GrAex6YDgDw&ved=0CBAQqwQ

2. Over 900 protesters were killed by Egyptian Army. Obama should bomb the Egyptian Army for the mass killing, afteral Death is death whether by sarin gas or bullet.

3. UN investigators are in Syria.Why not wait for the UN inspectors report on their investigation? No! POTUS - The Nobel peace laureate loves war.

4.CNN, FOX, ALJ, ABC CBS, all prepping for war. Funny, no western media is asking POTUS for evidence the Syrian gov't ordered a chemical attack. Because, there's NONE! The same intercepted call evidence was used by Powell in Iraq 1.0 that turned out no chemical weapon. Same media..

Isn't it better every nation bomb their neighbor when it's interest is at stake. I guess that will make a beautiful world.

The Banality of Empire
by JASON HIRTHLER

You have to ask: does Syrian President Bashar al-
Assad have a death wish, launching a chemical
attack within miles of a U.N. chemical inspection
team? He must. Like those cloistered mullahs in
Qom, whom Zionist sage Benjamin Netanyahu
claims would fire a nuclear warhead at Tel Aviv the moment one fell into their hands, a mere fait accompli. Even though Iran would be instantly vaporized by American WMDs. Even though all
those coiling spires would turn to dust. Because,
as Bibi makes clear, you have to set aside the
survival instinct when you’re dealing with
madmen. Framing the Enemy Assad, of that nefarious Alawite sect, must have
similar dementia, since according to the Obama
administration he launched a chemical weapons
attack on Syrian “rebels” in Ghouta, a suburb of
Damascus, at perhaps the most ill-advised
moment in the two-year conflict. A moment when Assad had just welcomed United Nations
chemical weapons inspectors into his country to
see whether accusations of a May chemical attack
were true. The latest attack has generated a
freshet of rhetorical fraud we haven’t seen since
the lofty height of the Bush administration, when Dick Cheney was touring the Sunday talk shows
waving his imminent-threat manifesto and
sneering uncontrollably at spineless pacifists. It’s
Iraq all over again. Just like the fabricated
charges against a fangless Saddam Hussein,
Assad awaits the verdict of history—a false accusation, a war fever in the West, and then the
falling skies. There’s no preventing it. Nobody
mainstream has bothered to point out that Assad
would have to be suicidal to launch an attack with
inspectors in-country, and with the use of
chemical weapons being President Barack Obama’s vaunted “red line” across which no
sovereign Shi’ite government can cross. Rebels in Desperate Straits On the other hand, there are plenty of perfectly
reasonable pretexts by which the so-called “Free
Syrian Army” might have launched a chemical
weapons attack, as they likely did in May, according to Carla Del Ponte of the U.N. and the Independent International Commission of
Inquiry on Syria. She has now suggested the latest attack may have again been launched by the
rebels. Despite the support of al-Qaeda and their
al-Nusra Front affiliates, who each want Assad
gone for very different reasons, this mercenary
melting pot has been ceding territory to Syrian
government forces at an alarming rate in recent months. It would behoove them to stage a
chemical attack that the Americans could quickly
attribute to the Assad regime, and begin fueling
the drones and launching destroyers. Otherwise,
the government might subdue all the factions
ranged against it, consolidate its power, and be that much more difficult to unseat. Better to
conjure a crossed line from the dust of civil,
sectarian, and proxy strife. Baseless accusations
can then issue from the White House lawn, being
loudly seconded in Tel Aviv, where lawmakers
have just rubberstamped another bank of illegal settlements for prime West Bank real estate,
while Palestinians refugees in Ramallah are shot
in murky dust-ups with the IDF. Illegal
interventions. Outlawed occupations. Suspect
crackdowns. World conflicts in miniature are
always afoot in the Knesset. The Bi-Partisan Blueprint Regardless of the trigger mechanism, the
administration seems intent on pushing through
Donald Rumsfeld’s old madcap blueprint for the Middle East, which involved toppling the
governments of seven consecutive countries on
the way to unchallenged dominion over Arab and
Persian fossil fuels. Their eyes are on the prize.
The rest is detail. It seems to make little
difference to the Americans what becomes of Syria, only that Assad is overthrown, and the
warlord that plants his flag atop the wreckage is
hostile to Tehran and is willing to viciously put
down any foolhardy bids for self-determination
that might emerge from the populace. After all,
the U.S. has left a trash bin of fallen monuments and blown infrastructures in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Libya. If the entire Arab world is a flaming
midden whose only functional entities are oil
derricks, what cause for concern is that to our
imperial chieftains? Let the Islamists slaughter
each other on the peripheries of the bonfire while we vacuum every ounce of natural gas and
petroleum from the core of the earth. (One
conjures visions of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, mocking his young evangelical rival and shouting, “I drink your milkshake!”) Revving Up the Propaganda Machine The more controversial actions of state always
require a heavy dose of cheerleading from the
press, the better to manufacture the consent of
the general population, or at least seed enough
doubt to prevent a riot. To that end, The New York Times is back in the organ well, lifting its chorus of fearmongering to new heights. The Washington Post is cranking up the shrill calls for intervention. The ‘Situation Room’ is firing
on all cylinders. Fox News is delivering thumping polemics on how slow-footed Obama is on
foreign policy. Liberals stare blankly from the
sidelines while their “lesser evil” does another
expert impression of the “greater evil”. Obama
channels Clinton. Kerry channels Cheney. But
this is par for the course; justification cometh before the sword. It feels like 2003 again. All we
need is Judith Miller to surface with a source in
the chthonian depths of the Assad
administration. Or Colin Powell to crack open
PowerPoint and lift a few hollow tube photos
from Google. And for someone to climb into the bully pulpit and tell us in mournful tones that
yes, yes, we must once again wage war on those
nomadic savages pitching their tents above our
God-given bounty. Four Steps to War What can you expect in the coming days and
weeks? Here’s a sneak preview. It’s none too
surprising, since the formula has been refined
over decades. Its architects have their names
inscribed on the walls of the White House,
infamy emeritus. The model calls for Obama to undertake a series of anti-democratic and pro-
war actions that will be reformulated as pro-
democratic and anti-war: * First, he’ll ignore the people that elected him.
He’ll cite some moral platitude from a posture of
deep anxiety—the man of peace forced to
confront the need for noble violence. His
wrinkled brow will slowly morph into the steely
eyed gaze of determination—the defender of liberty come to rescue the hapless Syrian proles.
He’ll wave a flag of universal human rights,
declare that actions have consequences, and
point a heavy finger at Bashar al-Assad. Just nine percent of the American population want this. But Obama will be too transfixed by his moral
crusade to take notice. * Next, he’ll ignore Congress. This is the formal
equivalent of ignoring the people. But unlike
laughing off a Reuters poll, disregarding the
entire legislative branch of government will
require some nuanced prose from the
Department of Justice (DOJ). No problem. For the Libyan war, the DOJ asserted that the provision of guns, drone strikes, missile
launchers, and other weaponry didn’t collectively
amount to “hostilities.” Hence there was no war.
Hence no need to bother with Congressional
approvals. * Feeling more confident by the day, Obama will
then ignore the United Nations. He and deputy
John Kerry have already said it is too late for U.N. weapons inspectors in Damascus to
investigate the new claim of chemical weapons
abuse. They offered a smattering of nonsense
about “corrupted” evidence, despite the fact that
sarin can sit in the soil for months. In any case,
the U.N. could normally be relied upon to roll over in the General Assembly and Security
Council on war authorization, but for the
annoying presence of Russia, finger poised above
the veto button, awaiting for the Obama
administration to ask the Security Council
legitimate its belligerence. Russia, of course, is itself hiding behind a façade of shocked
innocence, saying it was fooled by America on
Iraq in 2003 and won’t be fooled again. This, too,
is sophistry. * Then he’ll bomb. Missiles will be fired from the
safety of the Mediterranean or the comparative
calm of high clouds. The missiles will target
heavily populated areas in Damascus, much to
our great leader’s great regret. Images of wailing
Muslims will dot the airwaves. NGOs will assemble lists of the collateral dead. The refugee
count—already at one million—will climb toward
two. And Syria, part of the cradle of civilization,
will begin to resemble Iraq and Afghanistan and
Libya in its kaleidoscopic mix of blasted
infrastructures, sectarian slaughter, rampant abuse of women, genetic deformities in the birth
population, and the steady buzz of Predators and
Reapers policing the carnage from the sky. But, in the end, the oil and gas will be ours, and in
Washington, that’s all that matters. Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the communications industry. He lives and works in New York City

THE ROVING EYE
Operation Tomahawk with cheese
By Pepe Escobar.
This deafeningly hysterical show of Syria as Iraq 2.0
is only happening because a president of the United
States (POTUS) created a ''credibility'' problem
when, recklessly, he pronounced the use of
chemical weapons in Syria a ''red line''. Thus the US government urgently needs to punish
the transgressor - to hell with evidence - to maintain
its ''credibility''. But this time it will be ''limited''.
''Tailored''. Only ''a few days''. A ''shot across the
bow'' - as POTUS qualified it. Still, some - but not all
- ''high-value targets'', including command and control facilities and delivery systems, in Syria will
have to welcome a barrage of Tomahawk cruise
missiles (384 are already positioned in the eastern
Mediterranean). We all know how the Pentagon loves to christen its assorted humanitarian liberations across the globe with
names like Desert Fox, Invincible Vulture or some
other product of brainstorming idiocy. So now it's
time to call Operation Tomahawk With Cheese. It's like ordering a pizza delivery. ''Hello, I'd like a
Tomahawk with cheese.'' ''Of course, it will be ready
in 20 minutes.'' ''Hold on, wait! I need to fool the UN
first. Can I pick it up next week? With extra
cheese?'' In 1988, Operation Desert Fox - launched by Bill ''I
did not have sex with that woman'' Clinton - was
designed to ''degrade'', but not destroy, Saddam
Hussein's capacity to manufacture non-existent
weapons of mass destruction. Now, the deployment
of those deeply moral Tomahawks is also designed to ''degrade'' the Bashar al-Assad's government
capacity to unleash unproven chemical weapons
attacks. Yet there's always that pesky problem of perennially
ungrateful Arabs who, according to the New York
Times, ''are emotionally opposed to any Western
military action in the region no matter how
humanitarian the cause''. The deeply humanitarian Operation Tomahawk With
Cheese is running into all sorts of problems with the
calendar. POTUS leaves next Tuesday to Sweden -
and from there he will go to St Petersburg for the
Group of 20 summit, on Thursday and Friday next
week. The proverbial horde of ''unnamed White House officials'' has been spinning like mad
centrifuges, emphasizing that POTUS must wrap up
Tomahawk With Cheese before he musters the
courage to face Russian President Vladimir Putin
and other leaders of emerging powers. Surveying his impossibilities - with one eye to the
calendar and another to the resistance to enlarge his
mini-coalition of the willing - now POTUS seems to
be looking for an exit strategy that in fact would all
but abandon Operation Tomahawk With Cheese. Others are way more resilient. A predictable bunch
of 66 former ''government officials'' and ''foreign
policy experts'' - all of them Ziocons under the
umbrella of the Foreign Policy Initiative - has
published a letter urging POTUS to go way beyond
Operation Tomahawk With Cheese, arguing for a pizza sparing no lethal ingredients. This would be a
true humanitarian mission, able to support
''moderate'' Syrian ''rebels'' and on top of it ''dissuade
Iran from developing nuclear weapons''. A rebel, but not a jerk Let's see what a ''moderate'' Syrian ''rebel'' thinks
about all this. Haytahm Manna, in exile for 35 years,
is a key member of the non-armed Syrian opposition
(yes, they do exist). But he's not following the
script; he's resolutely against Operation Tomahawk,
with cheese or with extra cheese. (See here (in French). Worse; he debunks the US government's ''evidence''
of a chemical weapons attack as ''propaganda'' and
''psychological war''. He stresses the chemicals
were launched with ''artisanal weapons''; that ties up
with Russian intelligence, which is sure gas that it
was delivered by a homemade missile fired from a base under opposition control (extensive details
compiled here; scroll down to ''Qaboun rocket launches''). Manna also points to ''videos and photos on the
Internet before the attacks''; to al-Qaeda's previous
use of chemical weapons; and to the Russians as
''seriously working for the Geneva II negotiations'',
unlike the Americans. Ooops. This is not exactly what the designers of
Operation Tomahawk With Cheese were expecting.
If a Syrian exile draws these conclusions, the same
applies to Syria civilians who are about to be
greeted by those deeply moral Tomahawks. The Pentagon could always go for Plan B. A single
Tomahawk costs at least US$1.5 million. Multiply
that for 384. That's not a great bang for your buck -
because even if they all go humanitarian, the
Bashar al-Assad government would still remain in
place. So why not drop planeloads of sexy, Pininfarina-
designed Ferrari Californias? They retail for around
$200.000. Imagine the frenzy among Assad elite
forces struggling to seize the Big Prize, one among
2,000 Californias. With their eyes off the ball, the
''rebels'' could easily sneak in everywhere and take over Damascus. And perhaps even stage the
victory parade on a fleet of photogenic Ferraris. Call
that an improvement over Libya. Operation Tomahawk With Cheese may still happen;
even with the calendar pressing; even bypassing the
UN; even with a mini-coalition of the willing; even
making a total mockery of international law. The
White House has made it clear that ''diplomatic
paralysis'' cannot infringe on its ''credibility''. As for what is happening 10 years after the invasion
and occupation of Iraq, it's about the US
government, parts of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (Britain and France) and parts of the
Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates) burying the previous, much- lauded Euro-Arab ''dialogue'' and turning into a shady
Atlanticist-Islamist cabal bent on smashing yet
another secular Arab republic. Talk about rotten
cheese.

THE ROVING EYE
Hi, I'm your new Axis of Evil
By Pepe Escobar

I have argued that what has just happened in Egypt is a bloodbath that is not a bloodbath, conducted by
a military junta responsible for a coup that is not a
coup, under the guise of an Egyptian "war on terror".
Yet this newspeak gambit - which easily could have
been written at the White House - is just part of the
picture. Amid a thick fog of spin and competing agendas, a
startling fact stands out. A poll only 10 days ago by
the Egyptian Center for Media Studies and Public Opinion had already shown that 69% were against the July 3 military coup orchestrated
by the Pinochet-esque Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. So the bloodbath that is not a bloodbath cannot
possibly be considered legitimate - unless for a
privileged coterie of Mubarakists (the so-called fulool), a bunch of corrupt oligarchs and the military- controlled Egyptian "deep state". The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government led by
Mohamed Morsi may have been utterly incompetent
- trying to rewrite the Egyptian constitution; inciting
hardcore fundamentalists; and bowing in
debasement in front of the International Monetary
Fund. But it should not be forgotten this was coupled with permanent, all-out sabotage by the
"deep state". It's true that Egypt was - and remains - on the brink
of total economic collapse; the bloodbath that is not
a bloodbath only followed a change in the signature
on the checks, from Qatar to Saudi Arabia (and the
United Arab Emirates). As Spengler has
demonstrated on this site (see Islam's civil war moves to Egypt, Asia Times Online, July 8, 2013), Egypt will remain a banana republic without the
bananas and dependent on foreigners to eat any.
The economic disaster won't go away - not to
mention the MB's cosmic resentment. The winners, as it stands, are the House of Saud/
Israel/ Pentagon axis. How did they pull it off? When in doubt, call Bandar In theory, Washington had been in (relative) control
of both the MB and Sisi's Army. So on the surface
this is a win-win situation. Essentially, Washington
hawks are pro-Sisi's Army, while "liberal
imperialists" are pro-MB; the perfect cover, because
the MB is Islamic, indigenous, populist, economically neoliberal, it wants to work with the
International Monetary Fund, and has not threatened
Israel. The MB was not exactly a problem for either
Washington and Tel Aviv; after all ambitious ally
Qatar was there as a go-between. Qatar's foreign
policy, as everyone knows, boils down to
cheerleading the MB everywhere. So Morsi must have crossed a pretty serious red
line. It could have been his call for Sunni Egyptians
to join a jihad against the Bashar al-Assad
government in Syria (although that's formally in tune
with Barack Obama's "Assad must go" policy).
Arguably, it was his push to install some sort of jihadi paradise from the Sinai all the way to Gaza.
The Sinai, for all practical purposes, is run by Israel.
So that points to a green light for the coup from both
the Pentagon and Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is totally at ease with Sisi's Army and the
flush Saudi supporters of the military junta. The only
thing that matters to Israel is that Sisi's Army will
uphold the Camp David agreements. The MB, on
the other hand, might entertain other ideas in the
near future. For the House of Saud, though, this was never a
win-win situation. The MB in power in Egypt was
anathema. In this fateful triangle - Washington, Tel
Aviv and Riyadh - what remains to be established is
who was been the most cunning in the wag the dog
department. That's where the Incredibly Disappearing Qatar act
fits in. The rise and (sudden) fall of Qatar from the
foreign policy limelight is strictly linked to the
current leadership vacuum in the heart of the
Pentagon's self-defined "arc of instability". Qatar
was, at best, an extra in a blockbuster - considering the yo-yo drifts of the Obama administration and
that Russia and China are just playing a waiting
game. Sheikh Hamad al-Thani, the emir who ended up
deposing himself, clearly overreached not only in
Syria but also in Iraq; he was financing not only MB
outfits but also hardcore jihadis across the desert.
There's no conclusive proof because no one in
either Doha or Washington is talking, but the emir was certainly "invited" to depose himself. And not
by accident the Syrian "rebel" racket was entirely
taken over by the House of Saud, via the
spectacularly resurfaced Bandar Bush, aka Prince
Bandar bin Sultan. So the winners once again were the Saudis - as the
Obama administration was calculating that both the
MB and the al-Qaeda nebulae would then fade into
oblivion in Syria. That remains to be seen; it's
possible that Egypt from now on may attract a lot of
jihadis from Syria. Still, they would remain in MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa). As for Sisi, he was clever enough to seize the
"terror" theme and pre-emptively equate MB with al-
Qaeda in Egypt, thus setting the scene for the
bloodbath that is not a bloodbath. The bottom line is
that a case can be made that the Obama
administration has in fact subcontracted most of its Middle East policy to the House of Saud. Pick your axis Only two days before the bloodbath that is not a
bloodbath, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Martin Dempsey was in Israel getting cozy
with General Benny Gantz and Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, discussing the proverbial
"threats that could emanate out of the region - globally and to the homeland - and how we can
continue to work together to make both of our
countries more secure". It's unthinkable they did not
discuss how they would profit from the imminent
bloodbath that is not a bloodbath. At the same time, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe
Ya'alon bombastically announced a new "axis of evil"; Iran, Syria and Lebanon. That implies Tehran, Damascus and, significantly, Beirut as a whole (not
only the predominantly Shi'ite southern suburbs).
Ya'alon explicitly told Dempsey it was "forbidden"
for them to win the civil war in Syria. Considering that the Central Intelligence Agency
itself has deemed the civil war in Syria as a "top
threat" to US national security in case al-Qaeda-
style outfits and copycats take over in an eventual
post-Assad situation; and at the same time
Washington is extremely reluctant to stop "leading from behind", a case can be made that Israel may
be entertaining another invasion of Lebanon. An
always alert Sheikh Nasrallah, Hezbollah's
secretary-general, has already been talking about
the possibility. Then Dempsey went to Jordan - which already holds
around 1,000 US troops, F-16s with crews, and an
array of Patriot missiles. The spin is that the
Pentagon is helping Amman with "border control
techniques" as in one of those favorite Pentagon
acronyms, ISR ("intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance". That's just spin. Most of all Dempsey went to
survey the progress of the recent batch of anti-tank
missiles, bought by - who else - the Saudis and
supplied by the CIA, via Jordan, to (in theory)
selected "good rebels" in southern Syria. Those
"rebels", by the way, were trained by US Special Forces inside Jordan. Obviously Damascus will be
preparing a counterpunch to this offensive by the
American/Saudi/Jordanian axis. Pick your evil There's hardly any "American credibility" left in the
Middle East - apart from puppet entities like Jordan
and selected elites in the feudal Gulf, that
"democratic" realm of corruption, mercenaries and
imported proletariats treated like cattle. It hardly helps that US Secretary of State John
Kerry has recommended Robert Ford, the former US
ambassador to Syria, as the next US ambassador
to Egypt. Perception is everything. Informed opinion all across
the Middle East immediately identifies Ford as a
creepy death squad facilitator. His CV prior to Syria
- where he legitimized the "rebels" - is matchless;
sidekick to sinister John Negroponte promoting the
"Salvador Option" in Iraq in 2004. The "Salvador Option" is code for US-sponsored death squads, a
tactic first applied in El Salvador (by Negroponte) in
the 1980s (causing at least 75,000 deaths) but with
deep origins in Latin America in the late 1960s
throughout the 1970s. Sisi will keep playing his game according to his own
master plan - bolstering the narrative myth that the
Egyptian army defends the nation and its
institutions when in fact defending its immense
socio-economic privileges. Forget about civilian
oversight. And forget about any possible independent political party - or movement - in Egypt. As for Washington, MB or "deep state", even a civil
war in Egypt - Arabs killing Arabs, divide and rule ad
infinitum - that's fine, as long as there is no threat to
Israel. With Israel possibly mulling another invasion of
Lebanon; the Kerry "peace process" an excuse for
more settlements in Palestine; Bandar Bush back
practicing the dark arts; the pre-empting of any
possible solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier;
Egypt in civil war; Syria and also Iraq bleeding to death, what's left is the certified proliferation of all
kinds of axes, and all kinds of evil.

Who Owns Jesus?
By Tasbeeh Herwees

Every 10 years, millions of Middle Easterners
in the U.S. turn to their census forms and
check the box under race labeled “white.” This
is, after all, their legal classification. The U.S.
government formally recognizes anyone from
“Europe, the Middle East or North Africa” as white. This seems counterintuitive, but it’s the
product of several contentious court battles
that occurred in the early 1900s. The most
prominent of these was Dow v. United States, a 1915 case in which Syrian immigrant George Dow fought to overturn
two lower court decisions that found him
ineligible for naturalization because he wasn’t
white. A federal appeals court ruled in Dow’s
favor. And he won because of Jesus. Part of Dow’s successful argument was couched in the logic that if Jesus, a Middle Easterner, was white, it only followed that George Dow, also from
the Middle East, was white too. It was notions of
Jesus’ whiteness—in a largely white Christian
American culture—that ultimately won the case
for Dow. White Christians owned Jesus and the
right to call him theirs, and they were unable to let him go. Perhaps popular perceptions of Jesus have not
changed since then, as evidenced by the
extremely uncomfortable Fox News interview with Reza Aslan—a religious scholar and professor
at UC Riverside—that has gone viral since it was
posted July 26. Aslan is the author of “Zealot: The
Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” which has
been the center of some controversy at Fox News,
but not for anything that’s in the book. The point of contention for Lauren Green, host of the
FoxNews.com program “Spirited Debate,” and Fox
News guest writer and Christian pastor John S.
Dickerson is the author himself, who is Muslim. “I want to be clear, you are a Muslim,” Green
began the interview. “So why did you write a book
about the founder of Christianity?” In a manner befitting that of an elementary
school teacher, Aslan carefully explained to
Green that he was a scholar who’s devoted
much of his academic career to the history
of religions. His own religion was
inconsequential. “Well, to be clear,” replied Aslan, “I am a scholar of
religions with four degrees, including one in the
New Testament, and fluency in biblical Greek, who
has been studying the origins of Christianity for
two decades, who also just happens to be a
Muslim.” But Green’s line of questioning did not let up, and
she continued to prod Aslan’s motives for writing
the book, even quoting from the Dickerson Fox
News op-ed piece that purported to “out” Aslan as
a Muslim. Aslan, clearly unsurprised by her
persistence, informed her patiently that he’s never tried to hide the fact that he’s Muslim—it’s
something he states quite clearly on the second
page of his new book. This went on for almost 10 minutes, making it
clear that this wasn’t an interview. It was an
interrogation. In Dickerson’s op-ed and in Green’s
interview, it was not Aslan’s book that was being
put on trial, but Aslan himself. “But it still begs the question,” Green persisted in
the interview, “why would you be interested in the
founder of Christianity?” The insinuation underlying Green’s questions was
that a Muslim writing about Jesus was not just
outlandish, but inconceivable without some kind of
hidden agenda. Aslan’s religion nullified his
scholarly objectivity. Throughout the interview,
Aslan appeared unfazed, perhaps because this has come to be the modus operandi of Fox News
hosts, or perhaps because Aslan, like many
Muslims, faces this kind of suspicion in his
everyday life—by policemen, TSA officers and
passers-by who find his dark skin and foreign
name threatening. But what’s really revealing about Green’s interview
is what it exposed about how Jesus exists in the
popular Christian imagination—not just white, but
exclusively Christian. Green overlooked the fact
that Jesus appears in Islamic theology as one of
the great prophets of God, one of the few prophets mentioned by name in the Quran. He’s highly
revered among Muslims, who acknowledge Jesus
as the founder of Christianity, and Christianity as a
precursor to Islam. But Green and Dickerson both
ignored these facts—something that could have
made for a better interview discussion—and chose instead to attempt to implicate Aslan in some
grand conspiracy against Christianity itself. Despite Aslan’s academic distinctions, Fox News
will view him only as a Muslim writing about Jesus.
But what Aslan tried to get across to Green was
that he was just an interested scholar writing
about a man who 2,000 years after his death,
plays a role in the lives of billions of people around the world. Ultimately, however, Aslan has no right
to Jesus’ story. As far as Fox News—and much of
white, Christian America—is concerned, Jesus’
whiteness is fact, and Aslan, no matter what box
he checks on his census form, will never be white

Our man in Moscow
By Pepe Escobar

So what is the "extremely disappointed" Obama
administration, the Orwellian/Panopticon complex
and the discredited US Congress to do? Send a
Navy Seal Team 6 to snatch him or to target
assassinate him - turning Moscow into Abbottabad
2.0? Drone him? Poison his borscht? Shower his new house with depleted uranium? Install a no-fly
zone over Russia? Edward Snowden, under his new legal status in Russia, simply cannot be handed over to Bradley Manning's lynch mob. Legally, Washington is now as powerless as a tribal Pashtun girl facing an
incoming Hellfire missile. A President of the United
States (POTUS) so proud of his constitutional law pedigree - recent serial trampling of the US
constitution notwithstanding, not to mention
international law - seems not to have understood the
message. Barack Obama virtually screamed his lungs out telling Russian President Vladimir Putin he had to
hand him Snowden "under international law". Putin
repeatedly said this was not going to happen. Obama even phoned Putin. Nothing. Washington
even forced European poodles to down Bolivian
President Evo Morales's plane. Worse. Moscow
kept following the letter of Russian law and
eventually granted temporary asylum to Snowden. The Edward Snowden saga has turned the
Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine on its
Hydra-head. Not only because of the humbling of
the whole US security state apparatus, but also for
exploding the myth of Full Spectrum Dominance by
POTUS. Obama revealed himself once again as a mediocre politician and an incompetent negotiator. Putin
devoured him as a succulent serving of eggs
benedict. Glenn Greenwald will be inflicting death by
a thousand leaks - because he is in charge of
Snowden's digital treasure chest. And Snowden took a taxi and left the airport - on his own terms. Layers and layers of nuances have been captured in this fascinating discussion at Yves Smith's blog - something impossible to find across Western corporate media. For POTUS, all that's left is to probably boycott a bilateral meeting with Putin next month, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in St Petersburg. Pathetic does not even begin to explain
it. I did it my way What a boost for good literature; Snowden spent most of his time in airport transit reading
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a collection of Chekhov stories, a history of the Russian state by
19th century historian Nikolai Karamzin - and
learning the Cyrillic alphabet. He did take a taxi to the bright side when he left, alongside Sarah Harrison of
WikiLeaks. He may have gone to a FSB safehouse
- with zero chance of the CIA's Moscow station
finding him, although his lawyer said he would
choose his place of residence and form of protection. His father Lon may soon visit. Even self-
described "pole-dancing superhero" girlfriend
Lindsay Mills may soon resurface. How he must have relished to close the nerve-
racking waiting game by having the last word - as in
his statement published by WikiLeaks; "Over the
past eight weeks we have seen the Obama
administration show no respect for international or
domestic law, but in the end the law is winning. I thank the Russian Federation for granting me
asylum in accordance with its laws and international
obligations." Snowden is legally allowed to work - and has
already received a job offer, by the founder of
Vkontakte (Russia's Facebook), Pavel Durov, to be
a member of his "all-star security team". By 2018 he
will be entitled to Russian citizenship. He promised
Putin he won't leak "information that may harm the US" - the key condition for the asylum request to be
granted. But then he does not have to; Greenwald
has everything since those heady initial days in
Hong Kong. What's Washington to do? Turn
Greenwald's apartment in Rio into a Pashtun
wedding party? The timing could not have been more dramatic.
Snowden finally landed in Russia immediately after
Greenwald revealed the details of XKeyscore [1] -
once again stressing how US public opinion, US
media and the cosmically inept US Congress had no
clue about the full extent of the NSA's reach. "Constitutional checks and balances", anyone? There's got to be a serious glitch with the collective
IQ of these people. The Obama administration as
well as the Orwellian/Panopticon complex are in
shock because they simply cannot stop death by a
thousand leaks. The Roving Eye is among those
who suspect the NSA has no clue about what Snowden, as a systems administrator, was able to
download (especially because someone with his
skills can easily delete traces of access). Even the
top NSA robot - General Keith Alexander - admitted
on the record the "no such agency" does not know
how Snowden pulled it off. He could have left a bug, or infected the system with a virus. The fun may
have not even started. Watch lame duck POTUS Credit to some cynical latitudes, as in South
America, where people for years have been joking,
"the gringos spy on everything we do"; the Internet,
after all, was originally an American military
program. Professor John Naughton of Britain's Open
University goes one step ahead, [2] stressing that "the days of the internet as a truly global network
are numbered." What lies ahead is balkanization -
geographical subnets governed by the US, China,
Russia, Iran, etc. Naughton also stresses that the US and other
Western sub-powers have lost their legitimacy as
governors of the internet. To top it off, there's no
more "internet freedom agenda", as parroted by the
Obama administration. This Big Brother obsession with watching, tracking,
monitoring, controlling, decoding virtually everything
we do digitally is leading to monumental stupidities
like Google searches attracting armed US
government's agents to one's house, as is
pricelessly detailed here. And still Paranoia Paradise has not isolated Washington from a major
ass kicking in Afghanistan and Iraq, or has foreseen
the 2008 financial crisis; but then again it probably
did, and the elites who arbitraged all that massive
inside information royally profited from it. For the moment, what we have is an Orwellian/
Panopticon complex that will persist with its
unchecked powers; an aphasic populace; a quiet,
invisible man in a Moscow multitude; and a POTUS
consumed with boundless rage. Watch out. He may
be tempted to wag the (war) dog.

fadex56: Helo house, i'm a silent follower of this tread. I had a little problem wich i would be glad if anybody in d house could solve it for me. My brother was in dubai presently wit a month visa. He was employed as a worker in an hotel and he needs to get d working permit visa but unfortunately, what he was told that his visa was rejected by deir immigration office. So wat can he do to get d working permit?

All emirates have different visa policies. If his work permit was rejected in Dubai, he could seek employment and try other emirates -Sharjah, Abudhabi, RAK, Fujairah, etc. Also he could seek employment in the freezones. They have different visa policy, too.
If he gets his employment approval, he would have to leave UAE, and return with the new employment visa. Some people travel to Kish island, and some do the 'u' turn at doha airport.

Optimisticgondy: @House. Sorry for asking this question if it has been treated here already.

Should one go to Dubai with dollar cash or credit card?

If cash, will he/she be able to open account there and what are the criteria?

What are those Nigerian banks' branches there in Dubai that one can directly withdraw money from if deposit is made here?

Your reply to this questions will be appreciated. Thanks

You can use the UBA Africard in Dubai at any ATM. Cash withdrawal charge per 2,000AED(88,000Naira) is 1600naira. You can also do shopping with the card.
Simply go to any UBA bank and get one. You can get an 'instant card' immediately or a personalized card after 2 days. The cost of the card is about 750 Naira, and available for those that do not have a UBA bank account.

Bobbybenard: d cost of processing,salary(80k per month),accommodation n transport(dat he said d company will provide)

Let me explain the nature of these jobs. They are fairly typical.
Fixed 2 yr contract with no option of changing employment. Sometimes, depending on the sponsor, you could pay 2000~5000AED for your sponsor to issue you a No-objection certificate, this allows you to change your employer.

Your passport will be held by your sponsor to avoid you absconding. Don't think "agidi or strong head" can help you here if you are having issues with your sponsor. He can easily go to Ministry of Labor or Immigration and cancel your visa without you knowing. By the time your one-month grace period elapses, you have overstayed your visa and illegal in UAE without passport. Police and Nigerian Embassy CAN NOT help you. To get a "travel certificate" from the embassy, you'd need a police report on lost passport. And, the worst part, to get that police report, YOU NEED A LETTER FROM YOUR SPONSOR! That sucks. Now you are in a mess.

Salary - this employment visa done here for folks in Nigeria are mostly security jobs. They pay 1000~1200 in Dubai and Ajman. I don't know about other emirates. It's a 7-day a week job. No weekend off. Probably a day-off in a month.

Accommodation -typical 9ja secondary school kinda boarding with 6 guys in a room of 3-double bunk beds. Yes, there's AC in the rooms. The problem is most of these labor camps are far from city center like the AL-Quoz labor camp. You might be boarding with some dodgy nationalities. Living with Paks and Banglas won't be a nice experience if you na confirmed Lasgidi boy!

Transport -yeah! They will provide you a comfy ride to work in a hummer bus or a molue experience in a TATA bus. It all depends on the company. Most security, cleaning , construction companies provide the latter.

Uniform - free uniform. Security companies provide nice wears that will make you feel like a cop.

Now... Typical 9ja guy thought: make I enter here find one local Omo marry take get paper. Bro, just forget that one. Obo scarce for here die.

godzlove: Pls friends in d forum that are already in dubai, just wanted to confirn if therez a travel agency in dubai called sama travels?

You mean SAMA Dubai travels?
Well, there's one located on Al Karama street near lulu center, Ajman.