Kourosh Ziabari: Economic Sanctions - Duplicity on Iran

As Iran refuses to bow down to the illegitimate demands of the United States, Israel and their European allies to abandon its peaceful nuclear program, the inhumane economic sanctions against Tehran are being intensified, putting an excessive and unjustifiable pressure on the ordinary Iranian citizens who are unquestionably the victims of the West's hostility and antagonism toward the Islamic Republic. Since Iran ended its voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment in August 2005, the United States and its European allies have made several efforts to put huge economic and political pressure on Iran and force it into giving up its nuclear rights. Before August 2005, Iran for two years had temporarily suspended uranium enrichment as a confidence-building measure in return for assurances by the representatives of EU that it can keep up with its civilian nuclear program while the negotiations between the two sides were underway. But the EU three bloc members, consisting of France, Germany and the UK retreated from their commitments and demanded that Iran should halt its uranium enrichment program permanently. In this juncture, Iran found out that the European negotiators have been insincere in their stance, and that it should revise its cooperation with them. Now, it has been more than seven years that Iran is under lethal international pressure to discard its nuclear program, while no single page of evidence has been pot forward indicating that Iran is after producing atomic weapons as the United States and EU members claim. Ironically, Israel, the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, has not been asked even once to open its doors to the inspectors of UN's nuclear watchdog and allow them to monitor its underground, illicit nuclear facilities.

Ted Rall: Executive Privilege is a LIE, handed from President to President.!

Presidents of both parties have asserted that the constitutional separation of powers grants the executive branch an "inherent" right to ignore subpoenas issued by Congress or the judiciary through "executive privilege." The standard argument is that compliance would reveal the internal deliberations of the president, his Cabinet officers, and other government officials who require the presumption of privacy in order to engage in internal debates and deliberations. The ongoing Fast and Furious debacle is President Obama's first use of "executive privilege" to avoid such subpoenas, but both by historical and current legal standards, the continued use of the tool is a radical overreach. I put "executive privilege" in quotes because, like terms such as "enemy combatant," it does not appear in law. The closest we have to a definite word on executive privilege dates to the Watergate scandal, when the US Supreme Court ruled against Richard Nixon's attempt to stonewall Congress. As long as a prosecutor could argue that the relevant documents were essential to the justice of a case, and did not compromise national security, Chief Justice Warren Burger said, "the president would have to fork over the documents." Operation Fast and Furious, a law enforcement matter, doesn't qualify under the Burger ruling. Yet, it's hard to imagine making a credible case that national security would be compromised if the details were made public. Since run of the mill Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives memos would be covered, the usual top-level deliberations justification doesn't apply either. Once again, Obama is following precedent established by George W Bush, whose legal advisers seem to have missed the class about how Americans decided not to be ruled by a King.   

Devon DB: Economic Austerity or Debt Default?

Currently the US is now over $15 trillion in debt. The national debt has now gotten to the point where it is larger than US GDP and is now unpayable. In response to this crisis, many in government have been arguing for austerity measures, yet they have not been using that actual term, rather there has been an argument for deep cuts in social spending, with one example being Paul Ryans budget proposal which targets mainly the poor and elderly. The debt crisis may very well lead the US to being forced to choose from two poisons, austerity on one hand and default on the other. Austerity measures are currently being pushed by the intellectual elite. Niall Ferguson argues that the main problem in Western democracies is the huge debts we have managed to accumulate in recent decades, which, unlike in the past, cannot largely be blamed on wars, and poses the question: Would young people be wise to encourage politicians to pay off national debts now, to avoid an even more miserable financial future? In the US, Pacific Investment Management Co's Neel Kashkari, states that the US should stop kicking the can down the road and implement fiscal austerity measures, so the economy can fully recover from the financial crisis. While Ferguson states that the debt cannot be blamed on large wars, the facts prove him to be incorrect, as during the Clinton Administration there  began a decrease in the national debt, and ended with the US being in the black. When President Bush came in, the US went back deeply into debt, and this debt increase can be blamed mainly on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.      

Phoenix Capital Research: The EU Has Broken UP

I've often been labeled as "Gloom and Doom" in the past, but the situation in Europe today is beyond anything I've ever seen before. It is highly likely that the EU will not exist in their current form by the end of this year. I realize some of this may sound overly dramatic. But the following should give you an idea of how serious things are getting. Germany and France's joint proposal to allow Schengen zone countries to temporarily reintroduce border controls as a means of last resort might sound harmless. But doing so would damage one of the strongest symbols of European unity and perhaps even contribute to the EU's demise. Germany and France are serious this time. During next week's meeting of European Union interior ministers, the two countries plan to start a discussion about reintroducing national border controls within the Schengen zone. According to the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, German interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich and his French counterpart, Claude Gueant, have formulated a letter to their colleagues in which they call for governments to once again be allowed to control their borders as "an ultima ratio", that is, a measure of last resort, "and for a limited period of time." They reportedly go on to recommend 30 days for the period. Granted, the Schengen system is not perfect. With the EU's eastward expansion, its external borders have become more porous. The problem areas are well known: Greece doesn't sufficiently guard its border with Turkey, and Italy simply allows refugees through to continue their journey into neighboring countries. Doing so violates the Schengen Agreement, which stipulates that immigrants have to be taken care of by the country in which they arrive. 

Felicity Arbuthnot: Ambassador Ford Disgraces Diplomacy

Diplomacy is the conduct of relations of one state with another by peaceful means: Remember that "Crusade"? It is back, it seems, if it ever went away! On the 16th of September 2001, George W Bush announced, This Crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while! Six months later, that designated "dove" of the Bush Administration, General Colin Powell, gave an ultimatum to Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, demanding he be on board to topple the Taliban and "neutralize" al- Qaeda in Afghanistan. Powell, in testimony before a Commission investigating the September 11th attacks stated that, "We gave them twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and then I called President Musharraf and said, "We need your answer now, We need you as part of this campaign, this Crusade". Now, Robert S Ford, US Ambassador to Syria, has imaginatively resurrected the "Crusade" as diplomatic representative of a President who pledged, at Cairo University in June 2009: "I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world. America is not, and will never be, at war with Islam." In his article, "The Salvador Option for Syria," Michel Chossudovsky gives a crash course on the multiply diverse Ambassador Ford, to whom, it must be said, diplomacy would seem to be yet another far away land. However, even the insightful Professor Chossudovsky was unlikely to have foreseen that after Ambassador Ford slunk out of Syria in October last year, having indulged in ten months of provocative, divisive, inflammatory and politically confrontational actions!  

Felicity Arbuthnot: State Murder of Daddam Hussein's Secretary!

"There was no honor left, ruin and war and the blood was flowing, Sadness, hate and the reign of arbitrary destruction." (Rachid Taha, Algerian Musician  and lyricist) Shocking details have emerged from an impeccable source of the execution on Thursday the 7th of June, in Baghdad, of Abed Hamid Hamoud, President Saddam Hussein's former personal secretary and aide. Mr Hamoud, fourth on America's asinine, juvenile playing card list of Iraq's sovereign government, has been held in jail since June 2003, after being arrested by US occupying forces. He was sentenced to death in October 2010 with former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Tareq Aziz, and former intelligence chief, Sadoun Shakir, heightening fears for their imminent execution. "What you have not heard, states the commentator "is that Mr Hamoud was led to his execution while under the impression that he was going for a medical check up. "The Iraqi government didn't even notify his family or relatives, or make arrangements with them to deliver the body." A chilling observation on America and Britain's "New Iraq" is that the Maliki government is, so intent on revenge that they have waved the formalities of telling a person they were taking him to his execution." Deep concern is expressed for the fate of both Tareq Aziz and Sadoun Shakir in light of this appalling act. They were sentenced at the same Court hearing. Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki's Press Secretary stated earlier this year that they would execute Tareq Aziz, and now that they are done with the formalities, there is nothing to stop them. The world must know what these people have done and what I am sure they will do. God forbid, in the near future, concludes our contact bleakly, pleading that pressure be brought to "stop what they are planning to do" in the case of Tareq Aziz, Sadoun Shakir and many others! Amnesty USA has called the number of executions in Iraq alarming !

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey: NATO's Libya: A Fine Mess!

The map is from June 25, 2012. The green flags show Jamahiriya-held areas, the flames show combats with the NATO-backed NYC terrorists, the rats show terrorist-controlled areas and the bombs denote NATO terrorist attacks against Libyan patriot forces defending their country from this scourge. Let us take a look at NATO's Libya: At the beginning of 2011, Libya had the highest human development indices in Africa, one of its highest literacy rates, education was available to all for free, housing was provided to all for free, transportation was subsidized, food was distributed for free. Communities regulated themselves through the Jamahiriya system, self-governance through People's Congresses. These Congresses basically met and decided what they needed and the Government provided it. Enter the FUKUS-Axis (France, UK, US) coveting Libya's vast sovereign fund, Libya's vast energy resources and standing against Colonel Gaddafi's vast humanitarian projects in Africa, for which he was to receive a special humanitarian prize from the UNO and which also denied the FUKUS Axis' banking, arms, telecoms and other business lobbies of dollars in revenue from loans made to corrupted officials across Africa. Look at this second picture and you will see a young girl, allegedly beaten, tortured and raped by the FUKUS-backed terrorists. Thisis the scourge they have been backing. There are countless tales of torture, of decapitation, slicing breasts off women in the streets, murder, arson, looting, vandalism, theft, rape. This is what the FUKUS Axis and its leaders have done to Libya: They have turned a peace-loving and peaceful society, a fun-loving society into a land of terrified communities trying their best to fight off the terrorist scourge, trying to block it entering their towns and villages and cities to perpetrate the most shocking acts of butchery Africa has seen in a long time!