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Pentagon Frantic on How to Counter Successful Russian/Syrian Campaigns Against ISIS
Stephen Lendman
Russia’s effective aerial campaign, along with Syrian air and ground forces, are relentlessly pounding ISIS.
They’re inflicting heavy casualties, destroying their supply lines, disrupting their oil smuggling operations, regaining lost territory, defeating Obama’s scheme to transform Syria into another US vassal state, its sovereignty destroyed.
Syrian army troops have renewed vigor, on the offensive effectively. For the first time since Obama launched naked aggression in March 2011, Russia’s General Staff chief General Valery Gerasimov said his government’s airstrikes helped Syrian forces launch attacks in 10 directions at once.
“Currently, strategic initiative in almost all directions is in the hands of (Syrian) government forces,” he said. “They are actively fighting, so sooner or later Daesh's resistance (will) be broken.”
“At the moment, out of 15 fronts where fighting is taking place… offensives are carried out in 10. The Syrian army…has become different over (recent) months - a desire to advance, and self-confidence has appeared."
Since Russian aerial operations began on September 30, over 6,000 sorties were flown, thousands of terrorist targets destroyed, massive numbers of ISIS and other takfiris fleeing to Turkey and Iraq.
Amnesty International Blasts Erdogan’s Collective Punishment of Kurds
Stephen Lendman
On January 21, AI called for “end(ing) abusive operations under indefinite curfews” in Kurdish eastern and southeastern communities.
War without mercy raged since last summer. Arbitrary round-the-clock curfews imposed for over a month and other abusive practices “left residents without access to emergency health care, food, water and electricity for extended periods.”
Turkish forces target residential neighborhoods. Deaths and injuries mount, civilians mostly affected, indiscriminately killed and injured. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds are at risk. “According to the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, curfews have been imposed on at least 58 occasions in at least 19 different towns and districts across seven provinces of east and south-east Turkey since they were first introduced in August last year.”
US and UK: Merchants of Death and Destruction
Stephen Lendman
US and UK weapons makers thrive on sales to Saudi Arabia, a rogue state sponsor of regional terrorism, waging naked aggression on Yemen, a US-orchestrated war.
Washington is Riyadh’s leading arms supplier. In 2010, the Obama administration approved up to $60 billion in multi-year sales, the largest US weapons deal ever.
Naval and missile defense upgrades may be worth tens of billions more. In 2011, Riyadh said it plans on around $90 billion worth of US arms purchases in coming years.
It’s the world’s largest arms buyer, accounting for an estimated one in seven dollars spent in 2015. In 2014, Riyadh and the UAE imported more weapons and munitions than all Western European countries combined.
ISIS: A US-Created Instrument for High Crimes
Stephen Lendman
ISIS didn’t arrive out of thin air. Washington created it along with other terrorist groups.
They’re used as imperial foot soldiers, taught to commit appalling atrocities, largely against civilians.
A new UN report on the Iraq conflict said “the scourge of ISIL continues to kill, maim and displace Iraqi civilians in the thousands and to cause untold suffering.”
Conflict from January 2014 through October 31, 2015 claimed “at least 55,0547 civilian casualties,” 18,802 killed, another 36,245 wounded, the report said.
It ignored millions of Iraqi deaths from US imperial wars since the 1980s - from violence, preventable diseases, severe malnutrition, starvation, lack of potable water and overall deprivation.
Why the Washington Post's Campaign Against Glass-Steagall?
Paul Gallagher
Jan. 20: It is astonishing that the {Washington Post} should run exactly the same, lengthy "Fact Checker" column on two consecutive Sundays -- Jan. 10 and Jan. 17 -- with no explanation, nor even a note on the fact that it was publishing the identical edition of this regular column a second time.
But consider that this column was an attempt to debunk the idea that the Glass-Steagall Act would have stopped Wall Street from causing the 2008 global financial crash. That suggests what the {Post} is up to, as does regular columnist Catherine Rampell's furious anti-Glass-Steagall rant Jan. 20, and other pieces in the same vein.
This "Fact Checker" column, by regular author Glenn Kessler, intended to disprove Sen. Bernie Sanders' widely reported New York speech, asserting that Glass-Steagall would have stopped the big commercial bank holding companies from lending vast sums to "shadow banks" -- hedge funds, investment banks, private equity funds, money market mutual funds, etc. -- for securities speculation. The activities of those London and Wall Street "non-banks" clearly triggered the 2008 crash, by their wildly leveraged securities and derivatives speculations. But who provided them the leverage?
Meaningless EU Criticism of Israel
Stephen Lendman
Decades of critical Security Council and General Assembly resolutions did nothing to deter Israeli ruthlessness. War without mercy rages on defenseless Palestinians, an entire population at risk.
Peace is pure fantasy, democracy nonexistent. Settlement expansion continues unabated on stolen Palestinian land. Longstanding ethnic cleansing facilitates it.
A unanimously adopted critical EU resolution was meaningless without teeth, saying in part:
Its member states “unequivocally and explicitly indicate their inapplicability to the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. This does not constitute a boycott of Israel, which the EU strongly opposes.”
“The EU will continue to closely monitor developments on the ground and their broader implications and will consider further action in order to protect the viability of the two-state solution, which is constantly eroded by new facts on the ground.”
MPs Debate Banning Trump from Britain
Stephen Lendman
Following Trump’s call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” a UK petition began circulating to prevent him from entering Britain.
It gathered over 570,000 signatures, passing the required threshold for mandatory parliamentary debate.
The irony wasn’t lost on observers - the hypocrisy of denouncing Trump’s opposition to Muslim immigration in America while voting up or down on banning his entry to Britain - along with attacking his free expression right, no matter how offensive. A Trump Organization statement said “Westminster would create a dangerous precedent and send a terrible message to the world that the United Kingdom opposes free speech and has no interest in attracting inward investment.”
Unprecedented Global Wealth Disparity
Stephen Lendman
Ahead of wealthy and powerful financial and political elites meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam released a report, titled “An Economy for the 1%,” highlighting global inequality “reaching new extremes.”
“The richest 1% now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Power and privilege is being used to skew the economic system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest,” it said.
“A global network of tax havens further enables the richest individuals to hide $7.6 trillion. The fight against poverty will not be won until the inequality crisis is tackled.”
In 2015, 62 billionaires had more wealth than half the world’s population - compared to 388 in 2010. The wealth of 62 richest people increased 44% since 2010 to $1.76 trillion. In contrast, resources of humanity’s bottom half fell over $1 trillion, a 41% decline.
Half of all newly created new millennium wealth went to the top 1% - at the expense of the world’s least advantaged
America’s Arab Allies Debate Need for Genocide Against ‘Infidels’
Eric Zuesse
Two key allies of the United States are the fundamentalist-Sunni governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia — two fundamentalist Sunni countries whose ruling families are (like the U.S. Government) hostile to countries that are ruled by Shiites, particularly Iran and Syria. (In Syria, most Shiites, including the leader Bashar al-Assad, are called Alawites.)
Qatar is owned by the anti-Shiite Thani family; Saudi Arabia is owned by their friends the anti-Shiite Saud family. All of the Arabic royal families are Sunnis who support one-another, and the leading family of them all, and the world’s wealthiest by far, are the Sauds. Here are photos of the royals of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain, relaxing together in 1959. Here a book (p.48) notes that, “Through intermarriage with Al-Thani line, Al-Khalifa [Bahrain’s royals] remain perhaps the second most powerful and influential tribe in Qatar.” And, here was a news-report that CNN refused to air because it showed Saudi soldiers using American tanks against Shiites in Bahrain who were peacefully demonstrating for Shiites to have rights in Bahrain; another report there shows the fired reporter herself, courageously talking about American censorship.
No Solution But To Shut Down Wall Street Now
Lyndon LaRouche
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Mass deaths and economic devastation are now on the immediate agenda for the population of the United States, as well as Europe, as the effect of Wall Street's policy as implemented under the Obama Presidency. "There is no possibility of keeping people alive, under the present trends of conditions," Lyndon LaRouche warned in a discussion with the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee today, emphasizing that the collapse of the international financial system of which he had warned in mid-December, is fully underway.
"Your economic policy of the United States, and of the British Empire in general, demands the immediate mass genocide of the people of the trans-Atlantic community," LaRouche stated. "That's a fact! If we expose that now, we still have a last moment of chance to reverse that effect by shutting down Wall Street and removing Obama from office."
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