The Intercept: 07/01/2012

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Mass Upsurge around Qatif: Will the Arab Spring Turn into the Saudi Fall?

How the Republican Party Stole the Nomination from Ron Paul

Jaret Glenn If you follow mainstream election coverage, you might think Mitt Romney has coasted to an honest, easy, well-deserved Republican nomination. Unfortunately for Republican voters, nothing could be further from the truth. The primary process has been an all-out slugfest and many of the delegates Romney has won may be the result of dirty tricks and even election fraud.

The following narrative includes linksto reports, first-hand testimonials, and video evidence highlighting actions taken by the GOP to ensure a Romney victory, at the expense of fracturing the party just prior to the general election. Party leaders at the county and state level have changed or violatedparty rules, cancelled caucuses, changed vote counts, thrown out entire counties of votes, counted public votes privately, called-in the SWAT team, and inexplicably replaced Paul delegates with Romney delegates to block Ron Paul from winning the nomination.

Iowa: Days before the caucuses, Paul held a commanding lead in the polls and all the momentum, with every other candidate having peaked from favorable media coverage and then collapsed under the ensuing scrutiny. Establishment Republicans, like Iowa’s Representative Steve King (R), attempted to sabotage Paul’s campaign by spreading rumors he would lose to Obama if nominated. Even though the Iowa GOP platform reads like a Ron Paul speech, shortly before the caucuses, Iowa Governor Terry Barnstad told Politico , “[If Paul wins] people are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third. If Romney comes in a strong second, it definitely helps him going into New Hampshire”. The message from the Governor to voters of his state was: a vote for Ron Paul was a wasted vote.

Huffington Post reported that Paul was ahead by one point over Romney and Rick Santorum in entrance polls conducted by Edison Media Research for the AP before the caucuses. For the first time ever, the Iowa GOP changed the final vote count to a secret location . After the caucus, results from 8 precincts (including those with colleges, in a state where Paul won 48% of the youth vote) went missing. Interestingly, these were all precincts Romney lost in 2008. In addition, GOP officials discovered inaccuracies in 131 precincts. Though polling in a comfortable first place, Paul finished third in this non-binding straw poll, behind Romney and Santorum.

Iowa originally reported Romney in first, Santorum in a close second, and Paul third. After the recount, Santorum was named the winner with Romney in second. No mention was given to how the recount affected Paul’s vote count. Iowa GOP chairman, Matt Strawn, later resigned and was replaced by Paul supporter, A.J. Spiker and Paul went on to win the majority of delegates.

Florida: The Florida GOP broke party rules by switching to a winner-take-all state before the date allowed, which favors the candidate with the most money for advertising and attack ads. Senior Advisor
to the Ron Paul campaign, Doug Wead, claims this was done specifically to favor Romney.

Nevada: There is bad blood between Paul’s supporters and establishment Republicans in Nevada. This dates back to 2008, when Convention Chair, Sue Lowden and her enlisted delegates got up and walked out of the convention when it became apparent Paul’s supporters would claim a majority of the delegates. She claimed she would reconvene at a later time, but instead approved the McCain slate of delegates. This year, Paul supporters expected shenanigans; so his State Chairman, Carl Bunce, planned to win by outworking Romney. Just before the caucuses, he claimed to have “more IDs than Romney had votes in ’08″. This means through canvassing door-to-door and phoning voters, he had identified about 25,000 voters committed to show up and vote for Paul.

On caucus day, the media was denied access to most caucus sites and the few that were permitted were not allowed to take photos. Others were even ejected from sites. This CNN clip shows GOP staff preventing a Paul supporter from entering the premises to vote at a special caucus that was set up at the last minute for Newt Gingrich backer, Sheldon Adelson. Here, participants were asked to sign an affidavit (under penalty of perjury) stating they were Jewish and couldn’t vote earlier in the day due to “religious reasons”. CNN showed live coverage of votes being counted at this event, with Paul amassing nearly 60% of the votes. In some precincts in Clark County, the largest in Nevada, the number of ballots did not match the number of voters signed in at the caucus. Though votes were to be counted publicly, they were largely counted in private. The vote count was also inexplicably dragged out for several days, leading to a victory for Romney. Nevada State GOP Chairwoman, Amy Tarkanian resigned the day after the caucuses.

Another interesting note is that Paul’s 2012 votes had doubled, tripled, and more than quadrupled his 2008 votes in every state leading up to the Nevada caucuses, yet Paul received only 88 more votes there. Of all the places for this to occur, Nevada, the country’s most libertarian state; is the last in which anyone would expect this.

In spite of these irregularities , Paul won 22 of 25 state delegates and replaced stateparty officials with Paul supporters. Romney supporters then formed their own stateparty, called “Team Nevada”. The RNC then bypassed the official state party in order to organize for Romney and send all funds to Team Nevada.

Video: NATO’s Syria Terrorists Savagely Executes Berrie Family Leader And His Men

Alexander Higgins
NATO’s ‘loving, peaceful democracy activists’ in Aleppo on video collect people from their homes and savagely executing them.

These are Hillary Clinton’s “loving, peaceful democracy activists” in Aleppo, collecting people from their homes and savagely murdering them. This is because Aleppo never supported their CIA-revolution.

There will be consequences for this crime. 40,000 clan members in Aleppo have volunteered to clear the streets from these savage filth.

The brutality in this video is unheard of in Syria and even in any part of the jungles of Africa. Truly, Islam in 2012 has become worse than any religion imaginable, with these chants of “Allahu Akbar”

Source: Live Leak

But all of this OKAY because:

Al-Qaeda Is Now Our Ally As The ‘War On Terror’ Changes

US military chief Leon Panetta has blood on his hands for helping Syria’s rebels prepare the the Aleppo false flag that he tells the media will be ‘the final nail in President Assad’s coffin’.

Obama, NATO To Blame For Murder Of 1000s Of Civilians In Syria

Michael Chossudovsky details how Obama and NATO terrorists are really to blame for murder of thousands of civilians in Syria being blamed on the government.

Russia Accuses US Of State Sponsored Terrorism in Syria

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has accused the United States of committing state sponsored terrorism in Syria.

False Flags In Syria: An Operation 50 Years In the Making

Examining historical evidence which suggests the false flag operations going on in Syria is a U.S. government operation that is over 50 years in the making.

REPORT: ABC, NBC Evening News Shows Ignore Massive Banking Scandal For More Than A Month

Media Matters

American television news outlets continue to devote sparse time to one of largest banking scandals in history. The controversy over whether major banks have been manipulating the LIBOR, a crucial interest rate that banks use to borrow money from one another, has been gathering steam for more than a month since U.S. and U.K. regulators fined British bank Barclays $450 million for its role in trying to rig the rate.

CNN's Erin Burnett has explained that LIBOR is "an interest rate at the core of our entire economy," adding, "It's really not wrong to say that if you can't trust LIBOR, you can't trust anything in banking." According to The Economist, the LIBOR is used "as a benchmark to set payments on about $800 trillion worth of financial instruments." Baltimore City filed a lawsuit against major banks in the first of what may be a wave of such actions, alleging that the LIBOR manipulation potentially cost it millions of dollars in investment returns.

Despite the enormous implications of the scandal, ABC's World News and NBC's Nightly News both ignored the story in the 16 days after news of the Barclays fine broke, as we documented earlier this month. In the 16 days following the period of our original study, the LIBOR blackout has continued on ABC and NBC's flagship evening news programs. Those programs have gone more than a month without mentioning the controversy.

CBS Evening News devoted more than five and a half minutes to the story in the first 16 days following the Barclays fine, but has not returned to the scandal in the subsequent 16 day period despite a host of new developments.

After spending roughly six and a half minutes combined covering the scandal on their evening newscasts and opinion programming between June 27 and July 12, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News devoted less than 32 minutes to stories related to the controversy from July 13 to July 28, with more than two-thirds of that coverage coming from CNN.

These same news outlets spent significantly more time on trivialities like shark sightings and the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes divorce than on the banking scandal. For context, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN spent 44 minutes combined on the LIBOR scandal during their evening programming from June 27 to July 28. By contrast, these same outlets devoted nearly 65 minutes to stories about sharks for only the first sixteen days of that period.

Far from being a dormant story, fallout from allegations that the LIBOR has been manipulated has been steady.

"No Blood for Oil": The Unfinished Story of Iraq's Oil Law

Global Research
Greg Muttitt and Ali Issa

In this interview, investigative journalist Greg Muttitt talks about efforts by US occupying forces, multinational oil giants and Iraq's newly-minted 'leaders' to privatise the war-torn nation's coveted oil sector.

"No Blood for Oil" was a slogan featured on many a sign in demonstrations during the run up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, and throughout the early years of the occupation as global opposition to it grew. But as Iraq faded from the headlines in 2009, the struggle over its oil continued. In the following interview, Greg Muttitt, investigative journalist and author of the groundbreaking Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq (2012), discusses the attempts by occupying forces, multinational oil giants, and newly minted Iraqi "leaders" to privatise Iraq's oil.

Having worked directly with Iraq's oil unions, Mitt also describes the heroic role that Iraqi civil society played in challenging these efforts, how it all shook out and where it might be headed today, at an especially sensitive moment when the Iraqi labour movement is facing a series of fresh attacks. The audio interview was conducted on 13 July 2012, and what follows is an edited transcript.

Ali Issa (AI): Based on the hundreds of US/UK documents you have unearthed, what were your findings about the role of oil in the Iraq War?

Greg Muttitt (GM): Unsurprisingly, the documentary record shows that oil was a central part of the strategic thinking behind the war, and consistently shaped the conduct of the occupation. My book is primarily about what happened during the occupation. The United States, Britain, and the "international community" were keen to see Iraq's oil developed through foreign investment. It was not so much about helping out their own corporations – that was a secondary concern for them.

What they wanted was to see foreign investment in Iraq as a starting point for opening up the other nationalised industries, especially of the region, so as to get oil flowing more quickly. Iraq's oil sector had been nationalised since the 1970s. The nationalisation took place mostly in 1972, and the final phases of it continued until 1975. Essentially, what they wanted to do was to reverse that: put multinational oil companies back in the dominant role in the Iraqi oil sector.

AI: You place the struggle over Iraq's 'oil law' at the centre of Iraq’s recent history. What is the oil law, how has it evolved, and what is its present status?

GM: The oil law was drafted in 2006, after the first post-Saddam permanent government was formed. Then the Bush administration pushed it especially hard through 2007.

The law had three purposes. The first was to create a framework in which multinationals would have a primary role in developing Iraq's oil industry, and to determine exactly the extent of that role, what rights they would have, and the extent of their powers. The second element was to clarify how that would work in an emerging federal system in Iraq.

To put it simply: With whom would they sign contracts? Was it with the central government in Baghdad, or was it with regional governments – in particular, the only one that exists so far, the Kurdistan regional government?

The third element of the law was to essentially dis-empower parliament in relation to decisions around oil. . . . Since 1967 Iraq has had a law in place, No. 97, which said if the government were to sign contracts to develop oil fields and run them, the parliament would have to sign a specific piece of legislation to approve them.

[In other words,] the parliament would have to say, "We support and agree with this contract and we give it validity in law." That was still in force in 2003, and indeed in 2006. The government could legally sign contacts with foreign companies. But if it did so, it would have to get the OK from parliament for them to have any force.

Therefore, the most important role of the oil law of 2006/2007 was not [so much] to allow contracts to be signed by multinationals, as that was already possible. It was to allow them [i.e., the contracts] to be signed without parliament having any oversight.
Incidentally, the importance of parliamentary oversight is that oil accounts for over 95 per cent of government revenue. So it is quite reasonable for parliament to have some say in how that works.

So this was the oil law. The United States, Britain, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other financial institutions wanted to see it passed as soon as possible once the permanent post-Saddam government was formed in May 2006. As soon as that happened, the United States and Britain started to say, "Your priority is going to be to pass the oil law."

I have documents from that period which make this very clear. They moved very quickly to draft an oil law in August 2006, and it basically delivered those three asks of it. Getting this law passed in parliament became the major political priority of the United States.

AI: But the law did not pass. What prevented its passage?

GM: There were two barriers to it passing. Only one of them was recognised. First, there were disputes between Iraq’s politicians – primarily, between Kurdish politicians and everyone else. The dispute was over the degree of decentralisation.

Essentially, it was a squabble between politicians – who thought only about their own interests, or about their ethno-sectarian groups' interests – about which of them would get the right to sign contracts and thereby control revenues. This dispute over decentralisation slowed down the law's progress, and people on either side of that debate leaked it to their allies.

This led into the second factor, which was the overwhelming opposition within the Iraqi population to giving multinationals such a central role. I think this was very well known by those in the US administration and those in the Iraqi government. So the way they planned to deal with that was by not telling anyone that this oil law was going through. But it leaked in October 2006.

Once it leaked out, it started to spread into civil society. In December 2006 I attended a meeting of Iraq's trade unions in Amman. They were discussing the law and decided that they were going to campaign against it. Their strategy, which began in early 2007, was basically just to get it known about: to tell people about it.

So they produced pamphlets, which they handed out to their members and to the general public. They also organised conferences, public meetings, demonstrations, etc. The more this was done, the more people knew about it, the more anger there was that in secret this government – that had a fairly limited mandate given the circumstances of an election under occupation – was trying to push something through that the occupation powers were demanding, and that looked like it would do considerable damage to Iraqi interests and the Iraqi economy.

Iraqis feel very strongly that oil should remain in Iraqi hands, not least because of their historical experience with foreign companies. So, during the course of 2007, this opposition spread. One after another, new groups and new constituencies got involved in it.

AI: What did the Bush administration do?

GM: At the same time that opposition to the oil law was spreading, through the first half of 2007, the Bush administration was ramping up pressure on the Iraqi parliament to get it passed. They were very frustrated and angry that it had not been passed at the end of 2006. All the time, they claimed publicly that it was the dispute with the Kurds over decentralisation that was holding things up. They then claimed that the law was about the sharing of revenues between different groups, which it was not at all.

Marine Corps Creates Law Enforcement Battalions

Global Research

Julie Watson

The Marine Corps has created its first law enforcement battalions - a lean, specialized force of military police officers that it hopes can quickly deploy worldwide to help investigate crimes from terrorism to drug trafficking and train fledgling security forces in allied nations.

The Corps activated three such battalions last month. Each is made up of roughly 500 military police officers and dozens of dogs. The Marine Corps has had police battalions off and on since World War II but they were primarily focused on providing security, such as accompanying fuel convoys or guarding generals on visits to dangerous areas, said Maj. Jan Durham, commander of the 1st Law Enforcement Battalion at Camp Pendleton.

The idea behind the law enforcement battalions is to consolidate the military police and capitalize on their investigative skills and police training, he said. The new additions come as every branch in the military is trying to show its flexibility and resourcefulness amid defense cuts.

Marines have been increasingly taking on the role of a street cop along with their combat duties over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they have been in charge of training both countries' security forces. Those skills now can be used as a permanent part of the Marine Corps, Durham said.

The war on terror has also taught troops the importance of learning how to gather intelligence, secure evidence and assist local authorities in building cases to take down criminal networks. Troops have gotten better at combing raid sites for clues to help them track insurgents.

They also have changed their approach, realizing that marching into towns to show force alienates communities. Instead, they are being taught to fan out with interpreters to strike up conversations with truck drivers, money exchangers, cellphone sellers and others. The rapport building can net valuable information that could even alert troops about potential attacks.

But no group of Marines is better at that kind of work than the Corps' military police, who graduate from academies just like civilian cops, Durham said. He said the image of military police patrolling base to ticket Marines for speeding or drinking has limited their use in the Corps. He hopes the creation of the battalions will change that, although analysts say only the future will tell whether the move is more than just a rebranding of what already existed within the Corps.

The battalions will be capable of helping control civil disturbances, handling detainees, carrying out forensic work, and using biometrics to identify suspects. Durham said they could assist local authorities in allied countries in securing crime scenes and building cases so criminals end up behind bars and not back out on the streets because of mistakes.

"Over the past 11 years of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, some lessons learned painfully, there has been a growing appreciation and a demand for, on the part of the warfighter, the unique skills and capabilities that MPs bring to the fight," Durham said. "We do enforce traffic laws and we do write reports and tickets, and that's good, but we do so much more than that."

Durham said the Marine Corps plans to show off its new battalions in Miami later this month at a conference put on by the Southern Command and that is expected to be attended by government officials from Central American countries, such as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Belize.

Defense analyst Loren Thompson said the battalions make sense given the nature of today's global threats, which include powerful drug cartels and other criminal gangs that often mix with religious and political extremists, who use the profits to buy their weaponry.

"This is a smart idea because the biggest single problem the Marines have in dealing with low-intensity types of threats is that they basically are trained to kill people," he said. "It's good for the Marines to have skills that allow them to contain threats without creating casualties."

Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor and judge who teaches law of war at Georgetown University, said Marines have already been doing this kind of work for years but now that it has been made more formal by the creation of the battalions, it could raise a host of questions, especially on the use of force. The law of war allows for fighters to use deadly force as a first resort, while police officers use it as a last resort.

If Marines are sent in to do law enforcement but are attacked, will they go back to being warfighters? And if so, what are the implications? Solis asked.

"Am I a Marine or a cop? Can I be both?" he said. "Cops apply human rights law and Marines apply the law of war. Now that it's blended, it makes it tougher for the young men and women who have to make the decision as to when deadly force is not appropriate."

Durham said that military police understand that better than any Marine since they are trained in both.

"They are very comfortable with the escalation of force," he said. "MPs get that. It's fundamental to what we do."

Massacre in Uzbekistan

Craig Murray

This is a trailer for an extremely important documentary by Michael Andersen. The complicity of NATO and EU governments with the Karimov regime is one of the clearest glimpses of the evil motives that lurk behind the reasonable image that western politicians strive to portray. The complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring these facts is terrifying.

As NATO intensifies its logistical transit through Uzbekistan, as Britain increases training for the Uzbek military and secret services and looks to further arms sales, please bring this documentary to the attention of everyone you can, in any way that you can.

The appearance in the trailer of Pierre Morel, EU Special Representative for Central Asia, is noteworthy. He really is one of the nastiest men in Europe, with not even the slightest pretence of any concern for human rights except as a bureaucratic box to be ticked. What is the real interest of this arch European powercrat? You will hardly be surprised to hear it is Central Asia’s oil and gas.

One of the most important diplomatic developments in the last year – not mentioned anywhere in the lamestream media – has been the westward shift of the Government of Azerbaijan. Under hereditary President Aliev, son of Putin’s ex boss and mentor in the KGB, they had seemed the closest of Russia’s allies. But I noted a few months ago that remarkably on Syria they were voting with the U.S. and against Russia at the UN Security Council. Now they have agreed that an EU hydrocarbon pipeline can pass through their waters in the Caspian – thus negating Putin’s blocking move when he effectively annexed part of Georgia.

Germany now sees the eventual transit of Turkmenistan’s and Uzbekistan’s gas through Ukraine and Poland and into the Nordstream project, while bypassing Russia, as a tantalisingly close prospect. The furious courting of Central Asian dictators is therefore viewed as an unbounded success, and mangled corpses and tortured women an irrelevancy – along with the probable extinction of the sturgeon and other inconveniences. No wonder Morel looks self-satisfied.

I do hope the Central Asians who suffer grinding poverty and terrible repression will one day understand all this, and once they have their freedom will not forgive.

Syrian rebels burn comrades' bodies in Aleppo to hide nationalities

PressTV

Rebels fighting against the Syrian government forces in the northwestern city of Aleppo have burned the bodies of their comrades to hide their nationalities, Press TVreports.

The report comes as clashes between army forces and armed gangs rage on in several regions in Syria.

Signs of torture can be seen on bodies found in areas held by the armed rebels, Syrian sources say.

The Syrian army on Saturday launched a military operation to clear Aleppo, the country's biggest city, from the foreign-backed rebels.

Press TV’s correspondent in Syria said the army is inflicting heavy losses on the rebels in Aleppo.

The Red Crescent has suspended some of its operations in Aleppo because of heavy fighting.

Syrian government said its troops have freed two Italian nationals who had been kidnapped by armed groups in a suburb of Damascus.

There have also been reports of clashes in the northern province of Idlib while calm has returned to the capital Damascus after government forces flushed out the rebels there.

Government forces also defused several bombs planted near a mosque in the Hajar al-Aswad district of the capital.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011, with demonstrations being held both against and in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government.

The Syrian government says outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorists are the driving factor behind the unrest and deadly violence while the opposition accuses the security forces of being behind the killings.

Damascus also says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country.

DB/MA/AZ/IS

Lavrov Exposes State Department’s “Justification of Terrorism”

Webster Tarpley

Auditing the Fed Is a Sideshow: Who Audits the Auditors?

Daily Bell
Anthony Wile

No To Transparency: Harry Reid vows to kill
bill to audit the Federal Reserve

On Wednesday, Ron Paul's bill to audit the Federal Reserve was overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. The vote was 327 to 98. You would think that a bill with such overwhelming support would easily become law. But it won't, because Barack Obama and the Democrats plan to kill it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has already said that the Senate will not even consider the bill. But of course if Barack Obama called Harry Reid and told him that he wants this bill to get through the Senate so that he could sign it then Harry Reid would be singing a much different tune. Sadly, we all know that is not going to happen. Barack Obama's good buddy Ben Bernanke called the Audit the Fed bill a "nightmare scenario" last week, and Obama is certainly not going to do anything to upset Bernanke - especially this close to the election. – Daily Caller

An audit of the Federal Reserve would be nice but really it wouldn't change anything. In fact, it would likely prove a kind of sideshow from reality, which is that monopoly central banking should simply be abolished.
And that probably won't happen until people get so sick and tired of being driven into bankruptcy and despair that they begin to kick the doors down and arrest the criminals cowering inside.

And they ARE real criminals. The system is responsible for debasing currency the world over and driving billions into poverty and even suicide. In the West it has blighted the hopes and dreams of millions who scratched and saved and then found their portfolios devalued by half or whole on a single day.

But it is worse in Third World countries. The money never even trickles down in these countries. Billions of people live on literally a couple of dollars a day.

This despite the United Nations and other international institutions that are supposedly dedicated to eradicating poverty. In fact, these institutions create the poverty they supposedly wish to remove. They do so via institutionalized violence costing trillions. War is the health of the state but it sickens everyone else.
It's not as if people don't already know the depths of the depravity that is the modern money system.

There's really no justification for the Fed, a monopoly central bank that issues fiat money as it chooses.
The exposure is irrelevant to the evident reality. The reality is that a small group of white, middle aged men can never figure out how much money an economy needs at what price.

The reason to audit the Fed is to find out what "they" are up to. But we already know that. A limited audit examined transactions during 2008 when the world's financial system froze up. It found the Fed had loaned out more than 16 trillion dollars, almost interest free, to the "too big to fail" banks.

This is not exactly astonishing. The same men who have built this dysfunctional system handed out trillions to various cronies when the system was in danger of collapsing.

So here is what a Fed audit would discover: More of the same. It would likely also discover that a shadowy group of dynastic families control the workings of the Fed, as they do of other central banks, and use money-from-nothing to further implement world government.

Of course, even if an audit-the-Fed bill passed by some miracle it still wouldn't be effectively implemented. The best we've got is the "fox guarding the hen house," and that effectively precludes any real investigation into central banking, specifically or generally.

We can see this at work even with the audit-the-Fed bill the House just passed. Eight co-sponsors of the legislation actually voted against the bill and most of them, when contacted, refused to explain why.
This is to be expected. Money Power is a vast and intimidating force. If you want to get ahead in this world, one way to do it is to advance the agenda of Money Power, which seeks world government.

Money Power flourishes because it is resistant to the kinds of investigations offered by Ron Paul's audit. Money Power works busily many layers deep.

Money Power in aggregate is not fazed by an audit. An audit that blows up the current system would probably usher in a state-run gold standard or some new form of money, perhaps SDRs, also controlled by the power elite. Out of chaos, order ...

We don't know what societies would look like absent monopoly central bank money stimulation. The past 100 years have hyped the world's banking and industrial systems into overdrive. It's considered normal but there is nothing normal about China's empty cities or the razing of Detroit.

Long ago, the Rothschild family helped found the system under which we now labor but they've been aided and abetted by hundreds and thousands and then millions of others. The men at the top understand full well what is going on. Congress, both House and Senate, are complicit in what's taking place, which is no less than the slow-motion rape of the American people.

A Federal Reserve facility that can issue US$ 15 trillion in a weekend to preferred clients is not an entity that should stand another minute. And the political institutions that tolerate this sort of facility should be removed as well.

Congress is a bastion of bought-and-paid for front men. Those in Congress have created a US$ 3 trillion Leviathan that bestrides the world with tax collectors, murderous Intel agents, endless warfare and the poisoning of millions, including US vets, with depleted uranium.

Now this same Congress has brought down the curtain of fascism on the American people via "Homeland Security" with its groping, ID checks and poisonous radiation machinery.

This is the group that is supposed to audit the engine of this dysfunctional, murderous funding?
Even if it did, it wouldn't make any difference.

The cleansing must go far deeper. It starts with ... you.

The US-NATO War on Syria: Western Naval Forces Confront Russia Off the Syrian Coastline?

Global Research

Michel Chossudovsky

As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan." General Wesley Clark

While confrontation between Russia and the West was, until recently, confined to the polite ambit of international diplomacy, within the confines of the UN Nations Security Council, an uncertain and perilous situation is now unfolding in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Allied forces including intelligence and special forces have reinforced their presence on the ground in Syria following the UN stalemate. Meanwhile, coinciding with the UN Security Council deadlock, Moscow has dispatched to the Mediterraean a flotilla of ten Russian warships and escort vessels led by the Admiral Chabanenko anti-submarine destroyer. Russia's flotilla is currently stationed off the Southern Syrian coastline.

Back in August of last year, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin warned that "NATO is planning a military campaign against Syria to help overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad with a long-reaching goal of preparing a beachhead for an attack on Iran,..." In relation to the current naval deployment, Russia’s navy chief, Vice Admiral Viktor Chirkov, confirmed, however, that while the [Russian] flotilla was carrying marines, the warships would "not be engaged in Syria Tasks". "The ships will perform "planned military manoeuvres", said the [Russian Defense] ministry"

The US-NATO alliance has retorted to Russia's naval initiative, with a much larger naval deployment, a formidable Western armada, consisting of British, French and American warships, slated to be deployed later this Summer in the Eastern Mediterranean, leading to a potential "Cold War style confrontation" between Russian and Western naval forces.

Meanwhile, US-NATO military planners have announced that various "military options" and "intervention scenarios" are being contemplated in the wake of the Russian-Chinese veto in the UN Security Council.

The planned naval deployment is coordinated with allied ground operations in support of the US-NATO sponsored "Free Syrian Army. In this regard, US-NATO has speeded up the recruitment of foreign fighters trained in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

( Russian warships enter the Med, bound for Syria - timesofmalta.com, July 24, 2012)

Russian warship in the Syrian port of Tartus

France and Britain will be participating later this Summer in war games codenamed Exercise Cougar 12 [2012]. The games will be conducted in the Eastern Mediterranean as part of a Franco-British "Response Force Task Group" involving Britain's HMS Bulwark and France's Charles De Gaulle carrier battle group. The focus of these naval exercises will be on amphibious operations involving the (planned simulated) landing ashore of troops on "enemy territory".

Second Amendment: It’s Not About Hunting, It’s About Tyranny

InfoWars Via 12160
Kurt Nimmo

Obama and his globalist handlers – who ultimately want every gun confiscated – understand that the American people by and large support the Second Amendment. This is why the president patronized hunters and shooters with an oily sleight of hand.

“I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals,” Obama said. “That they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.”

In fact, according to the founders, guns – including AK47s in the modern context – belong in the hands of the citizens and their state militias, as plainly and eloquently spelled out in the Second Amendment. Thomas Jefferson and the founders did not craft the Second Amendment to protect the right of hunters and target shooters. It was included – right after the First Amendment guareenting political speech – to ensure the right of citizens to violently oppose a tyrannical federal governmentif need be.

AK47s and other “assault” weapons are the sort of tools that will be used if push comes to shove and the people must violently oppose the government.

Obama supporters and other lovers of the state recoil at the prospect of armed resistance to a tyrannical centralized federal government and refuse to accept that this is what the Second Amendment is all about. “The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people,” wrote Fisher Ames, a member of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Constitution in 1788. This concept is antithetical to the modern liberal who believes government to be a force of good.

“The Second Amendment was to protect the ability of the people to violently overthrow the government,” writes Richard Schrade, an attorney from Georgia and member of the Libertarian National Committee. “Let’s remember that this country was formed in a violent revolution. Let’s remember that at Lexington and Concord citizen fired on and killed government soldiers sent by the central government to confiscate their weapons and arms…. When viewed in this light, it is apparent that a limitation on automatic weapons would be an infringement on the purposes of the Second Amendment.”

If Obama supporters, Democrats, “progressives” and others demanding the government take our firearms in a misplaced effort to stop maniacs from killing people were honest, they would work to repeal the Second Amendment instead of chipping away at it piecemeal. “If we are going to have gun control then let’s not dicker around the fringes. Let those who would limit the law-abiding citizen’s access to arms first repeal the Second Amendment. That would be the intellectually honest way to address the issue,” writes Schrade.

Such a debate is only possible today because formerly free men no longer have a grasp of history and have been brainwashed by decades of government mandated public education and propaganda. Early on in America, both the Federalists and the anti-Federalists agreed that arms and liberty are inextricably linked. George Mason and others knew reflexively that the most effective way to enslave a people is to disarm them. Mason, in particular, argued that divine providence had given every individual the right of self-defense – including the right to defend against a tyrannical government. Today, we have forgotten all of this.

Obama can easily get away with making an outrageous speech about hunting and target shooting and almost completely ignore criticism and not be called to task. We are told that he is a constitutional scholar. How could a constitutional scholar be completely ignorant of the Second Amendment’s true purpose and the admonitions of the founders? What constitutional scholar would be ignorant of Jefferson’s famous assertion, made in a letter to William Smith in 1787, that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants”?

Obama is not a constitutional scholar. It is a phony title like just about everything else about the man. He is a teleprompter reader for a shadow global elite determined to debar access to weapons and take away those already in our possession. Not because of maniacs in theaters or classrooms, but in order to render us helpless against the violence of the state.

Syria defeats NATO’s swarming terrorists

PressTV
Webster G. Tarpley

NATO created a multi-layered strategy to subvert and destroy the Syrian state using covert action below the threshold of bombing and invasion, although including out special forces and espionage."
Last week, the NATO powers launched their long-awaited summer offensive against Syria. This was a multi-pronged effort designed not just to overthrow the government of President Assad, but also to totally disintegrate the existing structures of the Syrian state, dissolving the entire country into chaos, confusion, secession, attempted coups d’état, and a likely massacre of Assad backers, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, and other minority groups.

This assault peaked between July 18 and July 21. Almost a week later, all indications suggest that Assad, the Baath party, and the Syrian state have proven to be much stronger than the NATO planners had imagined, and that the imperialist attack has been defeated for the time being.

The easiest way for NATO to destroy independent Syria would be to obtain a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone, a bombing campaign, and incursions by special forces, many of them sent by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the other reactionary Gulf monarchies. But this path has been blocked by the courageous resistance of Russia and China. Another method would be to form a coalition of the willing outside of the United Nations and proceed to the attack, as was done in the cases of Serbia and Iraq. But, with Russian President Vladimir Putin reasserting Russia’s support for Syria, this method poses the risk of Russian and Chinese retaliation in ways which the Anglo-Americans might find extremely painful. Therefore, NATO created a multi-layered strategy to subvert and destroy the Syrian state using covert action below the threshold of bombing and invasion, although including out special forces and espionage.

The signal to activate the assembled capabilities was given by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on July 8, when she warned Damascus that little time remained to avoid a “catastrophic assault” capable of destroying the Syrian state. This is exactly what was attempted last week.

First, NATO attempted to isolate Syria by interrupting communications with its traditional ally, Iran. According to the Wall Street Journal of July 23, the United States in particular has exerted pressure on the government of Iraq to deny overflight permission for flights between Syria and Iran through Iraqi airspace. An official US diplomatic demarche delivered in Baghdad demanded that such flights be banned. At the same time, pressure was exerted on the government of Egypt to violate the international status of the Suez Canal by preventing the transit of Iranian ships allegedly headed for Syrian ports. But these efforts have yielded only mixed results, according to this account.

The main diplomatic thrust of the destabilization effort was yet another UN Security Council resolution opening the door to Chapter Seven economic sanctions and military attack on Syria. This transparent bid for a general war in the Middle East was duly vetoed by Russia and China, while Pakistan and South Africa abstained despite US pressure. United States Ambassador to the UN Susan E. Rice became hysterical, raving that the Russian Federation was “pitiful,” “dangerous,” and “deplorable” after she lost the vote. Hillary Clinton had previously branded Russia as “despicable” and “intolerable.” One imagines these charming ladies chewing the carpet as Hitler reportedly did during the run-up to the Munich conference of September 1938.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov correctly described the US diplomatic posture as “justifying terrorism.” According to Lavrov, the US stance amounted to, “We will continue to support terrorist attacks until the Security Council does what we want.” It would now be in order for Russia and China to propose a Security Council resolution condemning the United States and its allies for giving material support to terrorism.

Washington's Blog

Yet Another Government Report Finds that Fluoride Lowers IQ in Kids

The Harvard School for Public Health reports:

For years health experts have been unable to agree on whether fluoride in the drinking water may be toxic to the developing human brain. Extremely high levels of fluoride are known to cause neurotoxicity in adults, and negative impacts on memory and learning have been reported in rodent studies, but little is known about the substance’s impact on children’s neurodevelopment. In a meta-analysis, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and China Medical University in Shenyang for the first time combined 27 studies and found strong indications that fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children. Based on the findings, the authors say that this risk should not be ignored, and that more research on fluoride’s impact on the developing brain is warranted.
The study [click for abstract] was published online in Environmental Health Perspectiveson July 20, 2012.

Environmental Health Perspectives is a publication of the United States National Institutes of Health’sNational Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Harvard’s announcement continues:

The researchers conducted a systematic review of studies, almost all of which are from China where risks from fluoride are well-established. Fluoride is a naturally occurring substance in groundwater, and exposures to the chemical are increased in some parts of China. Virtually no human studies in this field have been conducted in the U.S., said lead author Anna Choi, research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health at HSPH.
***
Choi and senior author Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at HSPH, and their colleagues collated the epidemiological studies of children exposed to fluoride from drinking water. The China National Knowledge Infrastructure database also was included to locate studies published in Chinese journals. They then analyzed possible associations with IQ measures in more than 8,000 children of school age; all but one study suggested that high fluoride content in water may negatively affect cognitive development.
The average loss was only half of one IQ point, but some studies suggested that even slightly increased fluoride exposure could be toxic to the brain. Thus, children in high-fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-fluoride areas. The children studied were up to 14 years of age, but the investigators speculate that any toxic effect on brain development may have happened earlier, and that the brain may not be fully capable of compensating for the toxicity.
“Fluoride seems to fit in with lead, mercury, and other poisons that cause chemical brain drain,” Grandjean says. “The effect of each toxicant may seem small, but the combined damage on a population scale can be serious, especially because the brain power of the next generation is crucial to all of us.”

Numerous other government reports have shown fluoride’s adverse impacts on intelligence:

[A] 2006 National Academy of Science [report ] reviews the scientific studies which have been performed on fluoride, and concludes:
It is apparent that fluorides have the ability to interfere with the functions of the brain and the body by direct and indirect means. (bottom of page 222).
The NAS report also notes that fluoride may actually impair intelligence, and that more testing should be done in this regard.
Indeed, studies from around the world continue to find that exposure to sodium fluoride – especially in the very young – lowers IQ. See this and this. The same is true for rats exposed to fluoride. See this and this. And see the studies listed here.
Dr. Vyvyan Howard – a PhD fetal pathologist, who is a professor of developmental toxico-pathology at the University of Liverpool and University of Ulster, president of the International Society of Doctors for the Environment and former president of the Royal Microscopical Society and the International Society for Stereology, and general editor of the Journal of Microscopy – said in a 2008 Canadian television interview (short, worthwhile video at the link) that studies done in several countries show that children’s IQ are likely to be lower in high natural water fluoride areas.
He said that these studies are plausible because fluoride is known to affect the thyroid hormone which affects intelligence and fluoride is also a known neurotoxicant. Such studies have not been conducted in countries that artificially fluoridate the water such as the US, UK and Canada, but should be, he said.
And as the International Business Times noted last month on the newest Chinese study on fluoride:
Exposure to fluoride may lower children’s intelligence, says a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a publication of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Fluoride is added to 70 percent of U.S. public drinking water supplies.
***
About 28 percent of the children in the low-fluoride area scored as bright, normal or higher intelligence compared to only 8 percent in the “high” fluoride area of Wamaio.
In the high-fluoride city, 15 percent had scores indicating mental retardation and only 6 percent in the low-fluoride city. The authors of the study eliminated both lead exposure and iodine deficiency as possible causes for the lowered IQs.
One scientist – Jennifer Luke – alleged in a 2001 scientific article that fluoride accumulates in the brain (specifically, in the structure of the pineal gland) more than it accumulates in our bones. In other words, she implies that fluoride may accumulate more in the brain than in the teeth, doing more harm than good (here’s Luke’s 1997 PhD dissertation on the topic.)
The 2006 National Academy of Sciences report corroborates some of Luke’s allegations:
As with other calcifying tissues, the pineal gland can accumulate fluoride (Luke 1997, 2001). Fluoride has been shown to be present in the pineal glands of older people (14-875 mg of fluoride per kg of gland in persons aged 72-100 years), with the fluoride concentrations being positively related to the calcium concentrations in the pineal gland, but not to the bone fluoride, suggesting that pineal fluoride is not necessarily a function of cumulative fluoride exposure of the individual (Luke 1997, 2001). Fluoride has not been measured in the pineal glands of children or young adults, nor has there been any investigation of the relationship between pineal fluoride concentrations and either recent or cumulative fluoride intakes.
Donald Miller – cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington – alleges:
Fluoride … inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase in the brain, which is involved in transmitting signals along nerve cells.
***
Fluoride also damages the brain, both directly and indirectly. Rats given fluoridated water at a dose of 4 ppm develop symptoms resembling attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. High concentrations of fluoride accumulate in the pineal gland, which produces serotonin and melatonin.
***
People with Alzheimer’s disease have high levels of aluminum in their brains. Fluoride combines with aluminum in drinking water and takes it through the blood-brain barrier into the brain. Dr. Russell Blaylock, MD, a neurosurgeon, spells out in chilling detail the danger fluoride poses to one’s brain and health in general in his book Health and Nutrition Secrets that can Save Your Life (2002).