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Analyst's note:  Absolutely must read.  On-going insight is available into this topic, but most do not want to hear about or believe the global social engineering associated with the development of the "New-World Order."  Even if you give what follows only 50% accuracy, the impact of the developing tyranny is devastating to freedom, liberty, and prosperity as well as our U.S. national security.   In your study of the issues, don't forget The Private Federal Reserve Exposed and do an internal search on "Sibel Edmonds".

For additional light reading on the subject and more insight into the specific details of operation of  "rest of the story."  I highly recommend reading "The Creature from Jekyll Island:  A Second Look at the Federal Reserve" by G. Edward Griffin.  You will better understand the major impact of this cabal.   

You  will also want to see a recent article entitled Egypt probes U.S. bribes of terror leaders -- Suspects facing charges of murder, assassination, collaborating with foreign governments. 

"Egyptian Attorney General Hisham Barakat is reportedly evaluating evidence that Muslim Brotherhood leaders, facing charges of murder, assassination and collaborating with foreign governments, accepted bribes from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

An Arabic Language press report in the Egyptian newspaper Almesryoon, translated by Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian terrorist turned advocate for Christians facing Islamic persecution, cites a “judicial source” for the information. [....]"

One last point, The Federal Reserve is Hiring Lots of New Armed Police Officers - Mirroring trend seen across federal government.

 

 
 

 

 

 

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G Edward Griffin Creature From Jekyll Island A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

 

Joel Skousen's 'Red Dawn' Warning to America

 
 

Strategic Relocation The Film FULL VERSION HQ

 
 
 
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THIS WEEK'S ANALYSIS (by Joel M. Skousen) :

The Secret World of Contract Warfare

Why the US is Spending Billions on Drones and Robots

Problem Countries in 2014

 

THE SECRET WORLD OF CONTRACT WARFARE

The US is engaging in a growing worldwide war against terror that is by-and-large of its own making. This practice goes back at least as far as the First World War when the British started arming and using terrorists for false flag operations in the Middle East but the US became the undeniable world leader in using terror as a provocation since World War II. Guerrilla warfare by terrorist surrogates has spread not only throughout the Middle East but Africa and the subcontinent as well. It’s a war that is growing not diminishing—not only because of the backlash to constant US intervention around the world but because other state entities have learned terror-as-a-weapon tactics from the US and have all gotten into the sordid business of arming thugs for hire. In short, the US is losing control of what they started, but it’s too late to stop. Each side can only increase its use of this evil tool.

Journalist Jeff Stein tried his best to debunk the story of a top former Turkish intelligence official who claims that “a worldwide moderate Islamic movement based in Pennsylvania has been providing cover for the CIA since the mid-1990s.” But the official denials are not convincing.

The memoir, roughly rendered in English as “Witness to Revolution and Near Anarchy,” by retired Turkish intelligence official Osman Nuri Gundes, says the religious-tolerance movement, led by an influential former Turkish imam by the name of Fethullah Gulen, has 600 schools and 4 million followers around the world. In the 1990s, Gundes alleges, the movement "sheltered 130 CIA agents" at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone.

Stein gets two long retired CIA men to comment that such claims are “unlikely,” though both admit that they were long retired before the war on terror began, and couldn’t know for sure. Gundes’ claim is but a tiny fraction of what’s really going on. Sibel Edmonds, an Iranian/Turkish translator for the FBI-turned whistleblower revealed,

"I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban - those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.”

Edmonds has also revealed much about Operation Gladio which started out as a system of US sponsored agents that stayed behind the Iron Curtain to help the anti-communist movement fight the Soviet Occupation (which the US facilitated). However, as the patriotic anti-communists were purged from the OSS and CIA, Gladio was turned into a covert operation spanning many years that created, funded and armed various terrorist groups useful in overthrowing governments and assassinating people who got in the way of the globalist agenda.

One of the offshoots of Gladio was mobilized to fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (to fight the Soviet invasion there) with money coming circuitously through Saudi Arabia via Osama bin Laden—the CIA’s hand-picked manager, who would later be blamed for 9/11. Even though Bin Laden had worked for the agency, he was deemed expendable because he was already dying of kidney disease. The US would later put on a grand military drama falsifying the death of bin Laden in a dramatic raid at Abbottabad, Pakistan—even though the real bin Laden was dead years earlier.

The Terror Competition: Here’s a partial view of the growing competition the US has encountered in its covert sponsoring of terror groups. For example, US military and intelligence units stayed in Iraq when the troops left to continue managing the war on terror. The US and Saudi Arabia supported al Qaeda rebels with cash, weapons and intelligence and that is still going on. But there are other terror groups that have developed using the al Qaeda moniker as well which makes the entire war on terror a mass of contradictions, even to US planners. The Wall Street Journal posted this on the Iraq situation, getting only part of the picture right.

The Central Intelligence Agency is ramping up support to elite Iraqi antiterrorism units to better fight al Qaeda affiliates, amid alarm in Washington about spillover from the civil war in neighboring Syria, according to U.S. officials. The stepped-up mission expands a covert U.S. presence on the edges of the two-year-old Syrian conflict, at a time of American concerns about the growing power of extremists in the Syrian rebellion.

American concerns” implies surprise. None of this is any surprise for the higher ups who ordered support for jihadist groups fighting in Syria. One of the problems in Syria is that the discernable boundaries between the various factions are increasingly fluid as fighters flow back and forth between competing factions depending on who has the latest equipment and funding.

In a series of secret decisions from 2011 to late 2012, the White House directed the CIA to provide support to Iraq’s Counterterrorism Service, or CTS, a force that reports directly to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, officials said. The CIA has since ramped up its work with the CTS—taking control of a mission long run by the U.S. military, according to administration and defense officials.

But that is only half the story. The US also sponsors those who keep Iraqi minorities inflamed with terror attacks. Perhaps that is why the CTS is so ineffective—they depend on US intel sources which protect the false flag perpetrators.

In Turkey, the CIA has officers working with select rebel groups, U.S. officials said. In Jordan, U.S. special-operations troops are training Jordanian forces in how to deal with Syria’s chemical weapons should Damascus lose control of them or use them.

That isn’t all that is going on in Jordan. According to the AP:

For months now, the United States has been training secular Syrian fighters in Jordan with the goal of bolstering the array of forces battling President Bashar Assad's regime while at the same time strengthening the hand of moderates among the country's fractured opposition, American and foreign officials said. They said the effort is ongoing.

The US denies this, of course, because they are using Jordanians to do the actual training—but the US is directing things and paying for all the equipment and manpower. On the Iraqi border with Syria, the US also has a role in carving out an enclave for Iraqi “al Qaeda” fighters who will help the Syrian rebels in overthrowing Assad. Here is the Iraqi source: Niqash

The Sunni Muslim extremist group, “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” has made it clear that it wants to annex Sunni Muslim areas of Iraq. One of the biggest Iraqi military operations in recent history has now been launched against them. But it doesn’t seem to having any impact on the group...the organization has continued to wage a kind of guerrilla war on the streets of Iraq’s cities – it’s been successful in launching simultaneous waves of suicide bombings. As the New York Times noted recently the group is sending suicide bombers into Iraq “at a rate of 30 to 40 a month, using them against Shiites but also against Sunnis who are reluctant to cede control”.

ISIS clearly stated that its ambition was to annex the Anbar province, which shares a border with Syria. The extremist group already has control over various areas in Syria and it seems it wants to add this part of Iraq too.

And this is a bigger problem than it might appear at first. Anbar is one of the biggest provinces in Iraq and actually makes up about a third of the country. It has deserts and rugged mountainous landscape which makes it difficult for regular military forces to control it. The long borders with Syria, from where it’s assumed many of the extremists are coming, are also difficult to control.

And with the impending drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan, a war of surrogate terror forces is bound to erupt. War correspondent Umar Farooq writing for www.thediplomat.com has the story. I’ll try to explain the US connections that he fails to mention:

When American special forces plucked the second in command[Latif Mehsud] of the Pakistani Taliban from the hands of Afghan officials this October, they laid bare the extent of a largely covert war between Afghanistan and Pakistan that has been going on for several years. With a drawdown - perhaps even to zero - of U.S. troops from Afghanistan next year, the secret war might just become an open one.

The capture of proved to be an embarrassment for the Afghans, and a vindication for Pakistan, which has long complained that the Pakistani Taliban - called the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP) - receives support from Karzai's government [which is supported by the US government]. Afghanistan and the United States, for their part, have laid the blame for a 12-year insurgency at Pakistan's feet, saying its intelligence agencies support the most effective insurgency group, led by Jalaluddin Haqqani.

This kind of official reporting is typical in that it only tells half the story. The CIA has long used the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), their equivalent to our CIA/FBI and the Soviet styled KGB, to create and manage terror, nuclear smuggling, and drugs on behalf of the CIA and its chain of money and weapons. The US doesn’t have the same kind of control over the Pakistani government, and that explains why Pakistan can never ever defeat the warring factions.

No terrorist group of any size on earth today exists without a major state sponsor, and many of those sponsoring nations are fronting for the CIA (Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, etc).

Latif spent much of his time since 2010 between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it is believed he was a conduit for funding to the TTP. It now appears some of that funding might have come from Afghanistan's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS).

And, where do you suppose the NDS gets its training and funding? That’s right–the CIA. So now we have the CIA funding both sides of the terror game, but the various parties often go “off the reservation” (CIA lingo) and the US has to engage in damage control.

On October 5, Latif was being taken by Afghan officials to a meeting with agents from the NDS when American special forces stopped his convoy, taking Latif to Bagram, where the U.S. runs a prison of its own [so much for closing down Bagram].

Because of the obscure nature of who’s really running terror in this part of the world, one can’t be sure if Latif has been taken into custody by the US for prosecution or protection. Sometimes expendable al Qaeda secondary leaders are killed by US drones or executed because they aren’t under US control, or as a lesson to others who compete in this evil world. It is even to reinforce the mostly false notion that the US is actually fighting terror. It’s a very muddled subject as this paragraph illustrates:

The TTP has been blamed for tens of thousands of deaths in Pakistan, in brazen attacks on government and civilian targets alike that began in 2007. The group has also claimed responsibility for an attempted car bombing in New York City in 2010. It's not the kind of group Karzai's government would ostensibly want to be associated with. Yet, the president's spokesperson, Aimal Faizi,openly told reporters the NDS had been working with Latif "for a long period of time." Latif, Faizi said, "was part of an NDS project like every other intelligence agency is doing."

The Afghans evidently decided it was time to cultivate their own proxies for leverage with Pakistan. Nobody trusts the US and expect eventually to be betrayed. The Haqqani insurgent network, which has inflicted the most damage on Afghan and U.S. forces, is based in North Waziristan where Pakistan has thousands of troops stationed. But for some reason the Pakistani military has been reluctant to purge the area of militants.

Admiral Mike Mullen, a former American military official told Congress in 2011. "The Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's ISI" which the US claims is a rogue outfit. Of course, the US will call it “rogue” in order to deny any historical links to ISI-channeled funds for US sponsored terror. The US-ISI-Haqqanni connection could well be the only explanation for why they haven’t been eliminated by the Pakistani army.

This February, Faqir[former TTP leaders] was arrested by Afghan intelligence agents, and Karzai's government has refused to extradite him to Pakistan. Afghan officials have said they are unwilling to do so until Pakistan hands over senior Taliban leaders in its custody like Mullah Baradar. Baradar was once the second in command of the Afghan Taliban, and is the natural point of contact for initiating peace talks between the insurgents and the Afghan government.

Pakistan released him from prison in September, but only recently allowed Afghan negotiators limited access to him. So each country now controls access to key militant leaders that could be used to influence the insurgency plaguing its rival.

As you can see, this kind of warfare isn’t ever going to end.

Even as the covert war between Afghanistan and Pakistan continues, real skirmishes at the border have seen a dramatic rise over the last few years, foreshadowing the kind of tensions that might arise after coalition forces withdraw. Pakistan and Afghanistan maintain more than a thousand border posts along the disputed, largely unmarked 2,600 kilometer border, but militants still move across with apparently little difficulty.

Meanwhile at home, the US continues to grow the dark side of government with the expanding use of military/civilian contractors.

Secret CIA Contractors:  Once addicted to the benefits of putting on a false show of fighting terror, government contractors are more than willing to help the US government with its special operations. Patriotic enlisted men are too easily tempted to see right from wrong and become whistleblowers. Pratap Chatterjee of tomdispatch.com, wrote a critical piece about the problems with CIA secret contracting—used for operations that must continually go deeper underground in order to evade Congressional scrutiny:

The agency decided that there was no aspect of secret war which couldn’t be corporatized. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world’s most notorious prisoners [from Guantanamo Bay].

The first group of undercover agents were recruited by private companies from the Army Special Forces and the Navy SEALs and then repurposed to the CIA at handsome salaries averaging around $140,000 a year; the second crew was recruited from the prison cells at Guantanamo Bay and paid out of a secret multimillion dollar slush fund called “the Pledge.”

Last month, the Associated Press revealed that the CIA had selected a few dozen men from among the hundreds of terror suspects being held at Guantanamo and trained them to be double agents at a cluster of eight cottages in a program dubbed “Penny Lane.” These men were then returned to what the Bush administration liked to call the “global battlefield,” where their mission was to befriend members of al-Qaeda [not controlled by the CIA-run al Qaeda leadership] and supply targeting information for the Agency’s drone assassination program.

Over the last year or so, however, a trickle of information about the other secret program has come to light and it opens an astonishing new window into the privatization of U.S. intelligence. In July 2010, at his confirmation hearings for the post of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper explained the use of private contractors in the intelligence community: “In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War… we were under a congressional mandate to reduce the community by on the order of 20%… Then 9/11 occurred… With the gusher… of funding that has accrued particularly from supplemental or overseas contingency operations funding, which, of course, is one year at a time, it is very difficult to hire government employees one year at a time. So the obvious outlet for that has been the growth of contractors.

But this was merely the excuse Clapper would hand to Congress, eager to accept anything that would justify continued funding for the War on Terror. In reality, the NSA and CIA were having trouble with internal dissent as more and more employees were realizing the US was building a domestic spy system, which they knew was illegal. The move to contractors would allow the US to hire people that had already proven themselves corrupted.

Thousands of “Green Badges” were hired via companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and Qinetiq to work at CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) offices around the world, among the regular staff who wore blue badges. Many of them — like Edward Snowden — performed specialist tasks in information technology meant to augment the effectiveness of government employees.

Then the CIA decided that there was no aspect of secret war which couldn’t be corporatized. So they set up a unit of private contractors as covert agents, green-lighting them to carry guns and be sent into U.S. war zones at a moment’s notice. This elite James Bond-like unit of armed bodyguards and super-fixers was given the anodyne name Global Response Staff (GRS).

Among the 125 employees of this unit, from the Army Special Forces via private contractors came Raymond Davis and Dane Paresi[killed along with the CIA commander at Camp Chapman, a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan]; from the Navy SEALs Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods [killed in Benghazi protecting ambassador Stevens, who the US didn’t want to survive. That’s why Doherty, and Woods weren’t initially allowed to accompany Stevens to the annex]. All five would soon be in the anything-but-covert headlines of newspapers across the world. These men — no women have yet been named — were deployed on three- to four-month missions accompanying CIA analysts into the field.

As GRS expanded, other contractors went to Djibouti, Lebanon, and Yemen, among other countries, according to a Washington Post profile of the unit. From early on, its work wasn’t exactly a paragon of secrecy. By 2005, for instance, former Special Forces personnel had already begun openly discussing jobs in the unit at online forums. The Post portrayed the focus of GRS personnel more mundanely as “designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.”

A former U.S. intelligence official told that paper. “Their main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down informants, and provide an ‘envelope’ of security… if push comes to shove, you’re going to have to shoot.”  In the ensuing years, GRS embedded itself in the Agency, becoming essential to its work. Today, new CIA agents and analysts going into danger zones are trained to work with such bodyguards. In addition, GRS teams are now loaned out to other outfits like the NSA for tasks like installing spy equipment in war zones.

Take Dane Paresi and Jeremy Wise. In 2009, not long after Paresi left the Army Special Forces and Wise the Navy SEALs, they were hired by Academi, (Formerly Xe Services and Blackwater) to work for GRS and assigned to Camp Chapman, a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan.

Principal covert mercenary contractors are Xe/Blackwater, Dyncorp, Carlyle Group (financial support), Triple Canopy, Vinnell Corporation, MPRI, and Northrop Grumman.

A long-term purpose of the push to replace military people with contractors (at much higher cost) is to slowly prepare a cadre of unprincipled enforcers who can be used to take down American patriot-dissidents who oppose the overreach of government. Over the years, the dark side of black operations has had to silence many whistleblowers who object to illegal operations. Even contractors have to be fired who don’t prove compliant. That leads us into the next subject:

 

WHY THE US IS SPENDING BILLIONS ON DRONES AND ROBOTS

In a nutshell, it’s about human resources. Most people have a conscience and resist killing innocent people. Robots do not and the US is pushing for more automated drones that don’t need operators using joy-sticks behind a computer screen. Too often, they see on those screens the damage they did with their drone and have fits of remorse. Although the media has kept this very much under wraps, several drone pilots have committed suicide over being forced to take innocent lives.

Here’s a heart-wrenching article from a drone whistleblower, Heather Linebaugh, who told the UK Guardian what US newspapers wouldn’t print. Heather served in the United Stated Air Force from 2009 until March 2012. She worked in intelligence as an imagery analyst and geo-spatial analyst for the drone program during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

[....] That’s right. They want robotic control of drones so humans don’t have to pull the kill trigger.

One of the only mentions of kill-bots is a reference to the DoD’s official kill-bot policy, DoD Directive 3000.09 (pdf). This lays out only a few concrete rules beyond basically requiring them to be rigorously tested, though it does make sure to point out that robots should not start indiscriminately killing civilians upon losing a connection to command.

Robots have been helping clear explosives and blind corners for years — but they still need human drivers.

Bear in mind that when this report says “unmanned systems” it means a whole lot more than just predator drones. In terms of unmanned systems, DoD prioritizes air first, maritime second, and ground last. In 2014, DoD expects about $4 billion will go to unmanned aerial systems, while maritime funding won’t exceed $350 million.

The report makes only a few concrete predictions. From now to 2017, the department will focus on moving its compliment of unmanned systems from automated to autonomous. The distinction between an autopilot and a robot pilot is in the ability to make decisions, and that’s one of DoD’s biggest priorities.

In terms of current capabilities, if DoD is conducting any meaningful field tests of truly autonomous vehicles, it’s not talking about it — and since software can be discreetly switched on and off without alerting any outside forces, the department certainly has no reason to start.

Everyone from search and rescue teams to Kickstarter entrepreneurs is working on autonomous quadcopter software, but their work likely pales to what DARPA (the military’s moonshot division) has behind closed doors. Though details are scarce, we do know that agency is hard at work making pilots, drivers, and helmsmen obsolete, having just completed its Grand Challenge in robot AI [Artificial Intelligence].Very little such work has seen the light of day, but that’s precisely what DoD wants to change over the coming 3-5 years.

DARPA’s Transformer X concept, currently under development, sees autonomy applied to a troop transport that can both fly and drive.

Potential challenges to this future are many, and are more than just technological. The United Nations recently advised the world that autonomous war machines are a de-facto threat to humanity, and should be banned. Additionally, while responsibility for a single case of human error, negligence, or malevolence ultimately falls on the soldier alone, a computational error that leads to a number of dead civilians could cast doubt on every unit under control that software. And, frankly, the algorithms of today simply cannot measure up to the flexibility of a human actor — and while it might seem short-sighted to say so, we should consider the possibility that they perhaps never will.

And finally, this important word of caution:

At the very least, our justified squeamishness about killer robots could restrict specifically those robot freedoms that would allow autonomy to truly come into its own. We must ensure that the quest to hit a budget, or improve efficiency, or even keep American soldiers out of harm’s way, doesn’t make the US military rush heedless into a moral and political quagmire with no end in sight.

I’m not optimistic that the government has the moral standing to program autonomous drones and killer robots with adequate safeguards for civilians. The Washington Times reports that the government is already loosening its guidelines for drone operators. The word changes are small but they hint that the government wants more leeway rather than less:

The Pentagon has loosened its guidelines on avoiding civilian casualties during drone strikes, modifying instructions from requiring military personnel to "ensure" civilians are not targeted to encouraging service members to "avoid targeting" civilians.

In addition, instructions now tell commanders that collateral damage "must not be excessive" in relation to mission goals[but they fail to define excessive].

And, there is no transparency or Congressional oversight in this whole process:

The number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. drone strikes is a point of contention among Washington, human rights groups and countries where strikes are conducted, chiefly Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Because the strikes are classified operations, the U.S. typically does not acknowledge when they occur, or reveal how many combatants and civilians are killed or injured.

Administration officials say the strikes are legal because the U.S. is at war with al Qaeda and its associates [that eternal excuse that justifies all evil]. They also insist there is a wide gap between the government's civilian casualty count and those of human rights groups.

The 2009 version directs military personnel to take reasonable precautions to ensure that civilians are not targeted in attacks; the 2012 version says service members should "avoid targeting" civilians.

 

PROBLEM COUNTRIES IN 2014

Here’s a list of countries with acute problems for 2014:

Afghanistan: With the US pulling out most troops this year, Afghanistan will not have access to the steady stream of US dollars that has bought off many in opposition to US puppet Hamid Karzai. Expect the country to descend into some form of civil war. NBC filed this report:

Desperately poor [except those tied to the burgeoning drug trade] Afghanistan is a country riddled with fear and uncertainty. "The mood is not good," said Wadeer Safi, who has been a professor of political science at Kabul University for 25 years. "Without Western support there will be chaos ... there is even potential for civil war."

Many believe that key to the country’s future is a U.S.-Afghan security agreement that would allow some American troops to remain in the country beyond 2014 and open the door to billions of dollars in foreign aid.

But Karzai has not signed the pact, knowing that he’ll have to face a hostile opposition after the US leaves—and this in spite of the reported unanimous endorsement of it at a recent meeting of tribal elders and other dignitaries. That has to be a lie. The tribal elders are never united, unless the ones in opposition aren’t invited.

The climate of uncertainty is taking a toll on the economy. Prices for food and fuel have rocketed, and unemployment is rampant. Foreign investment has stalled and with the economy almost entirely dependent on foreign aid, business confidence is very low.

There are even doubts that national elections scheduled for April will actually take place. Observers and Western diplomats are concerned that there will be delays, and agree that there will almost certainly be a run-off.

China: China is portrayed in the Western press as immune to the recession hitting the US and Europe, but that isn’t true. In fact, China has its own problem—too much inflation. Even though Chinese money creation figures are never public, analysts using other market figures feel confident that China is inflating at a rate of $15 trillion a year—about 2-3 times the US rate of money creation.

China also has overspent and overpaid for future growth in industry that is underutilized since the export markets are relatively flat. A lot of Chinese have been caught in the transition zone between rural and urban life and are stuck in shanty towns with below-standard lives.

Another big problem is pollution: According to the same NBC article,

Nearly a month of near-apocalyptic levels of air pollution in northern China in 2013 forced Beijing to acknowledge the toxic air plaguing much of the mainland. The government’s sudden willingness to address the environmental crisis shows the power of China’s growing urbanized middle classes, who are more aware of their rights than the country’s rural population.

I previously reported that China now claims its reeducation camps have been abandoned, but it’s too good to be true. Yes, the camps have been abandoned, but prisoners have merely been transferred to jails and prisons elsewhere, mixing with common criminals. A report from Amnesty International confirmed that dissidents and activists are being sent to “black jails.” If the Gulag experience is accurate, dissidents get treated harshly there by the criminal element.

Syria:Syria is on the rebound, temporarily, as the US has temporarily halted it’s assault via Israel and the Syrian opposition is in disarray. Assad’s Air Force has even attacked rebel sanctuaries in Lebanon. Aleppo is in danger of going back to government control. NBC says,

When Syrian President Bashar Assad first vowed to remain in office and maybe run for another term in 2014, few outside took the statement seriously. Since the beginning of the uprising, many analysts have seen it not as a matter of if the president will fall, but when.

Now Assad looks poised to have the last laugh, appearing stronger than at any point in the nearly three-year civil war. Not only is he set to run for another term, 2014 could be the year that defines the outcome of the civil war.

But NBC succumbs to a bit of propaganda:

As extremist rebel groups gain ground in Syria, the United States and its allies are showing signs that they are suddenly reluctant to see Assad go. “Our Western friends have made it clear … that Assad cannot be allowed to go now because they think chaos and an Islamist militant takeover would ensue,” a senior member of the Syrian opposition recently told Reuters.

No, the US is not vying to keep Assad, and it is still funding the radicals, although more carefully through surrogates. But NBC was correct to say:

Even if the violence were to stop on Jan. 1, it would take years for Syria to recover from the human catastrophe the war has triggered in the country and across the region... Success may have little to do with the Syrians in the room and more to do with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Russia and the U.S., each of which are backing their own horse in the war with weapons, money and diplomatic cover.

Lebanon: There is a covert war on to topple Hezbollah in Lebanon and it is driven by foreign intervention—some of it due to the recent and secret coalition between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This is the Saudi’s way of getting to Iran—Hezbollah’s main sponsor.

Yesterday an explosion killed at least four people in the Hezbollah district of Beirut. This was just a few days after a former minister and vocal critic of the Shiite group was himself killed in an explosion. Arabic News Digest correctly noted that,

The serious developments unfolding in Lebanon create the perfect recipe for a civil war which might be worse than the one that erupted in 1975 and lasted for 15 years, warned Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the news website Rai Al Youm.

Lebanon is now home to a proxy war between outside powers – and the Lebanese people are paying dearly for it in their blood, security, well-being, national unity and territorial integrity, the writer said.

The car bomb that exploded in a high-security area in downtown Beirut as the Lebanese people celebrated Christmas was predictable, and similar bombings are likely to take place as the country slides into chaos, sectarian strife and retaliations.

This will cause panic and turmoil and exacerbate the economic crisis in Lebanon, especially now that the warring parties have greater experience in bombings and large numbers of fighters.

That war is part of a larger war between Saudi Arabia and Iran on Syrian territory, amid a conspicuous Shiite-Sunni polarization across Lebanon. Mr Nasrallah [leader of Hezbollah] openly accused Saudi Arabia of being responsible for the blasts near the Iranian embassy in the Southern suburbs of Beirut.

All the ingredients for a repeat of the 1975 civil war are there: instigators, sponsors, arms, gunmen and clerics’ sectarianism-fanning fatwas. Alas for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have taken refuge in Lebanon from the sectarian strife in their homeland, sectarianism is rapidly spilling over into Lebanon.

As long as Mr Al Hariri is adamant that he is going to liberate Lebanon from the Iranian occupation and Mr Nasrallah is bent on liberating Syria from the radicals – and as long as Iran and Saudi Arabia continue to reject dialogue to find a way out of the bloody conflict in Syria – the worst should be expected in Lebanon.

Reuters reported that, Saudi Arabia is giving the Lebanese army $3 billion in aid, but France is involved under the table because there was a stipulation that most of the money had to be spent on weapons from France. French President Francois Hollande, was (not so coincidentally) on a visit to Saudi Arabia where he admitted that France would supply weapons to the Lebanese army if it was asked to do so.

Egypt: While the US and Britain continue to play both the terrorist side (Muslim Brotherhood) and the government (with aid), Egypt is drifting back to its old military ally Russia. Egypt is actively supporting the Assad regime in Syria as well by allowing its facilities to be used to ship oil between nations governed by UN anti-Syrian sanctions and Syria—subtly defying the boycott.

And Egypt has decided to play hardball with the Muslim Brotherhood opposition—something they wouldn’t be allowed to do if still under the exclusive influence of the US and NATO. By switching sides to Russia they feel they have a freer hand to outlaw the Brotherhood, as the Arab News Digest reports.

The Egyptian government had no choice but to make the decision to brand the Muslim Brotherhood group a terrorist organization in view of a plethora of evidence everywhere around it, said the Dubai-based daily Al Bayan in its editorial on Sunday.

In Sinai, terrorist attacks have been targeting troops and army installations. In the cities and at universities, no one has been safe from the Brotherhood’s terrorist actions. But the last straw came last week with the terrible explosive attack in Al Mansoura which left 14 people dead and more than 30 injured.

“The government made the decision because there was no time to waste” in the lead-up to the referendum over the constitution and finalization of the road map for the future, the paper said.

Egypt is still giving Palestinian fighters refuge in the Gaza border town controlled by Egypt, which is bound to exacerbate problems with Israel. Analysts anticipate another Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israel this year when it becomes obvious that no peace deal will be forthcoming.

Turkey: Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a reliable US puppet on both the proxy war against Syria in allowing the US to use its airspace and bases for black operations elsewhere in the region. Now, he’s been caught in a corruption scandal which threatens to break the West’s hold on Turkey. The National.ae from the United Arab Emirates has the story:

Since the Justice and Development Party’s accession to power in 2002, its leader has relied on popular support to protect him from the erosion that afflicts most ruling parties in democratic systems. He thought his Islamic cover would give him and his party further immunity... The Islamist leader wagered on wearing out the military establishment, and with the military out of the picture, Turkish-European relations were significantly improved.

“Mr Erdogan became a necessity for the West, especially because his early years in power witnessed great economic advances in Turkey, which in turn translated into increased exchanges with European nations,” the writer said.[Turkish admission into the EU in 2008 served globalist purposes as well since Turkey became one of the main sources of Muslim immigration into Europe—with all its attendant cultural problems].

Mr Erdogan became an acknowledged political partner with the West, and many Arab Islamists looked to Turkey as a role model. But Islamists have failed in inheriting power in the Arab Spring countries and the Turkish Islamist model is now failing as well.

The corruption scandal in Turkey revealed that corrupt ruling-party officials have been protected by the cloak of Islamism – as if the pretense of piety alone is sufficient to cover up blatant infractions of the law.

Erdogan has played both sides, Islamists and the West, for a long time, but it looks like he won’t survive this one. [END]
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