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US Airstrikes Kill Hundreds of Civilians in Syria and Iraq
by Stephen Lendman
US warplanes began bombing Iraqi targets in June 2014. Last September, US Syrian airstrikes followed. Washington falsely claims it’s waging war on the Islamic State (IS) - with pinpoint accuracy against positions and fighters targeted. Just the opposite.
Bombing aims to destabilize Iraq and Syria more than already. Infrastructure sites are struck - not IS fighters as claimed. America is its de facto air force.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) in charge of the air campaign falsely claims few civilian deaths at most - saying pinpoint targeting avoids them, one of the many Big Lies proliferated in all US wars.
Civilians are considered legitimate US targets. Hundreds of thousands were willfully slaughtered since Operation Desert Storm aggression against Saddam Hussein in January 1991 alone.
Deepening Greek Depression
by Stephen Lendman
Greece is Exhibit A on how financial predators wreck economies for profit. Force-fed austerity is toxic, polar opposite what’s needed.
Weak economies need stimulus to stabilize, recover and grow - expansive monetary and fiscal policy. Euro straightjacket rules prevent member countries from controlling their own financial policies. It’s like having weapons with no ammunition when trouble strikes.
Greece’s manufacturing index is a testimony to wrongheaded euro policies. It July, it sank at a record pace - from a negative 46.9 in June to a dismal 30.2 in July.
Readings below 50 signify contraction. Greece’s new orders gauge showed no relief in sight - plunging from 43.2 in June to a record 17.9 in July.
Syria’s Refugee Crisis Just Got Worse
by Stephen Lendman
US wars on humanity caused the gravest refugee crisis since WW II - millions displaced, mostly victims of imperial conflicts and chaos, suffering hugely, many perishing from deprivation, an appalling high crime too horrific to ignore.
How do displaced people cope with limited access to nutritious food, at times any, inadequate or no medical care, lack of education for children and other essentials?
How do they survive? How can anyone not experiencing their suffering imagine life in hellhole refugee camps or displacement on their own without minimal lifelines?
Nearly half of Syria’s 23 million people are imperial war victims - displaced by violence (internally or abroad), fleeing for their lives to unknown destinies. Many perhaps running out of time, minimal resources, energy and will to go on.
America’s Sham Democracy
by Stephen Lendman
America’s political season never ends - a monied interest-driven perpetual electoral cycle too corrupted to fix. Voters are deluded to think they matter. They have no say whatever.
Duopoly power rules. Powerful interests decide everything. Democrats and Republicans are virtual clones of each other, differences between them too minor to matter on issues mattering most.
Co-founder of the Industrial Workers of America (the Wobblies) and five-time presidential candidate (first as a Democrat, later the nation’s most prominent Socialist) Eugene Debs (1855 - 1926) once said:
“The differences between the Republican and Democratic parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class has any interest.”
Russia to Veto UN Resolution for US-Controlled MH17 Tribunal
by Stephen Lendman
A veto may have been cast when this article is read. Moscow opposes a US proposed rigged process - suppressing evidence of its culpability and Kiev’s in downing MH17, pointing fingers the wrong way, a longstanding imperial practice.
The whole world SHOULD know neither Russia or Donbass freedom fighters downed MH17, killing all passengers and crew members aboard during flight over Southeastern Ukraine’s war zone. Accusations otherwise are tiresome Big Lies. They wore thin long ago. Kiev and Washington bear full responsibility for what happened - a thinly veiled scheme to wrongfully blame Russia and Donbass for their criminality.
Return to Ma’loula
Franklin Lamb
Ma’loula, Syria
As of today, approximately 900 Christians and 50 Muslims from the pre-2011 population of 5000, of whom 80% were Christian and 20% Muslim, have returned to Ma’loula, their 90 AD ancient village that many consider the second most historic Christian village, after Jerusalem.
Over the past five weeks, this observer has been surveying and updating data as part of an archeological research project, on a modest selected number of the 152 archeological sites here in Syria that have been severely damaged over the past four years. Ma’loula, is among the nearly 7000 historic places in Syria that have been looted, burned, or bulldozed or subjected to mindless jihadist iconoclasm as being ‘un-Islamic,” or which have sustained war damage from more than one source.
In some ways it has been a daunting task to visit some sites, given the security situation and need for securing various required permissions-which takes time, given currently conditions in Syria. Plus issues such as intense heat, finding a driver willing to make the trip for a reasonable fee, lining up crucial local experts at the site so one gets solid information and related matters. On 7/27/2015, this observer and his friends and guides/historians from Ma’loula, Jesus and Moses (Issa and Musa) were delayed for two hours as we sat at the Ministry of Information waiting a green light from the Syria army that the road was now safe, following a night (7/26/2015) of heavy jihadist shelling from the East Gouta\Jobar suburb of Damascus with some mortars hitting near our planned M-5 route north.
Iran's Longstanding US-Inflicted Nightmare
by Stephen Lendman
It began in August 1953 - replacing democratically elected Mohammad Mossadeq (Iran's most popular politician at the time) with a generation of brutal US-installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi dictatorship.
A 2013 declassified CIA document (marking the coup's 60th anniversary) publicly acknowledged the agency's involvement (Operation TPAJAX) - what's been well-known for decades.
Kermit Roosevelt (Theodore's grandson, Franklin's cousin) engineered the CIA's first coup. Harry Truman established the agency in 1947, saying he "considered it very important…to have a sound, well-organized intelligence system…(but) no Gestapo under any guise or for any reason." Things have a way of not evolving as planned.
More Illegal US Sanctions on Russia
by Stephen Lendman
Unilateral or jointly imposed sanctions by one or more countries against others are illegal. Authority rests solely with Security Council members.
They must first “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression,” as UN Charter, Chapter VII, Article 39 stipulates.
They may then “decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures,” as authorized under Article 41.
Zoo Animals May Starve in Greece
by Stephen Lendman
Economist Joseph Stiglitz says Troika demands for more bailout funds “make no sense either for Greece or its creditors.” The so-called “third memorandum” will devastate economic and financial conditions more than already.
The entire scheme is misguided, Stiglitz explains. Structural adjustment programs loot countries instead of helping them - “turning downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions,” wherever they’re imposed, says Stiglitz.
Greece’s future includes increasingly unrepayable debt peonage, greater unemployment and poverty with diminishing resources for vital public services.
Anti-Iranian Nuclear Deal Blitzkrieg in Full Swing
by Stephen Lendman
Administration officials answered questions on the agreement asked by House and Senate Foreign Relations Committee members. Classified private meetings were held. They’ll be more in the weeks ahead.
Israel, its lobby and bipartisan congressional Iran-haters aim to undermine the nuclear deal years in the making. It includes the most intrusive inspections of any country’s nuclear program.
Known nuclear weaponized states aren’t held to account like Iran. America and Israel prohibit inspections of their thermonuclear weapons research, development and production facilities. No IAEA complaints are lodged - only against Iran despite its known peaceful activities.
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