Ismail Salami: Orwellian Ramifications Unfold in Syria!

There is speculation that Western supported insurgents in Syria may have seized hold of chemical weapons. Apart from the unthinkable havoc the rebels can wreak in Syria, and in the region with WMD's in their possession, the rhetorical question which remains, is how these weapons of mass destruction have fallen into the hands of the insurgents, who are chiefly composed of Wahhabi al-Qaeda mercenaries of different nationalities including Afghans, Iraqis, Turkish, Yemenis, Jordanians, Pakistanis, and Saudis. The situation in Syria is assuming Orwellian ramifications, and the possibility to clearly understand or dissect the situation in the country is not an easy task: In addition to the active role the Saudi backed Wahhabis, CIA and some western intelligence organizations are playing in Syria, there is one entity, namely Israel which is stealthily espying every single development in Syria. For the first time, an Israeli spy official clearly stated that Israel supports regime change in Syria, and that it really demands an end to the government of President Bashar Assad. I hope it will happen, even though I don't know how, Intelligence Agencies Minister Dan Meridor said on Tuesday. The top spy chief implicated why Assad should go, and how it would damage the Islamic Republic of Iran. I am not going to try to calculate when Assad's end will come, but when it happens, Iran's biggest ally will be gone. Taking it for granted that Assad is doomed to go, he said, I hope the new Syria will understand that joining Iran is a mistake that brings isolation from the Western world. Such a feeble perception of the Syrian situation is indicative of one who is either too optimistic or one who is well aware of what is going on behind the scene, and that which is not visible to the ordinary people with no intelligence savvy. Furthermore, Dan Meridor does not seem to understand that the situation in Israel is spiraling out of control with people protesting against social injustice almost on a daily basis.

David Swanson: Soldiers Who Refuse to Kill?

One of the most inspiring events thus far at the Veterans for Peace National Convention underway in Miami was a presentation by several veterans who have refused to participate in war. Typically, they have done this at the risk of significant time in prison, or worse. In most cases, these resisters avoided doing any time. Even when they did go behind bars, they did so with a feeling of liberation: Gerry Condon refused to deploy to Vietnam, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, escaped from Fort Bragg, left the country, and came back campaigning for amnesty. President Jimmy Carter pardoned resisters as his first act in office. Condon never served a day, in either the military service or prison. Jeff Paterson of "Courage to Resist" refused to fly to Iraq, choosing instead to sit down on the tarmac. Ben Griffin from VFP's new chapter in the UK refused to participate in our nations' wars and has been issued a gag order. He is not permitted to speak, and yet he speaks so well. Mike Prysner of March Forward and Camilo Meijia of VFP here in Miami described their acts of resistance: Mejia did us all the enormous favor some years back, of putting his story down in a book, an extremely rarity, sadly for peace activists with great stories to tell. Mejia's book "Road From Ar Ramadi" is a terrific introduction for anyone wondering why someone would sign up for the military and then refuse to kill people. Mejia, who now works on domestic civil rights issues in Miami, while remaining part of the antiwar movement, is a co-convenor of the VFP convention. In October 2003, Mejia was the first US soldier to publicly refuse to fight in Iraq. At that time, only 22 members of the US military had gone AWOL from that war, a number that would quickly climb into the thousands, as the war worsened and as belief in the various rationales offered for the war evaporated.     

Gordon Duff: Does the NATO Free Libyan Government Overshadow America?

At home, Romney builds a "new Self" of dung stacked high. The reality of being a Mormon candidate is you can't drink a Coke because of the caffeine, but you can take $100 million from the earnings of prostitutes to pay for your "expenses." We call that "moral flexibility." Libya Yesterday: During the entire struggle for independence, hundreds of "independent journalists," some paid up to $15,000 per day by Colonel Gaddafi, others working for the Washington Israeli axis were publishing wild stories about heroic Libyan freedom fighters. To them, all were Al Qaeda or Navy "SEALS" or both. No reason or rationale was crazy enough as long as the money flowed. Their stories, in the thousands, discredited themselves and proved that the "independent media" was unaccountable to fact, Islamophobic, greedy and willing to back a monster in order to express rabid anti Americanism. Not one photo of an American was ever taken, no Al Qaeda were seen, only endless thousands of Israeli hired mercenaries, hired to murder for Gaddafi, filled prison camps for months. Gaddafi is dead, or most likely dead, as nothing we see, less we hear nothing we read can be depended on anymore. I mourn his passing, as I think nostalgically of him as a Cold War holdover, a "larger than life" political theorist who borrowed too much from East Germany, guaranteeing a long rule but at a cost to individual rights and freedoms, misrepresented by some as "benevolence." Gaddafi wasn't Stalin, but an opponent of Gaddafi was anyone who failed to give him undying blind support, and such failure would cost beatings and even death. Thus my criticism of those who saw his dollars, and failed to recognize the brutality, or the simple fact that "rule for life" is wrong: Israeli hired African mercenaries put in a zoo and fed flags, as reported by Russia Today. The irony? Foreign death squads were supplied to Gaddafi by his "pretend Zionist enemy," making every word of his mouth a lie. The lesson? Stay home! Are we also talking to Saudi Arabia, and more than one or two other regimes as well?    

Gordon Duff: Turkey Enters a Dangerous Game!

The following short article was printed on Press TV (Iran) website today. The meaning of it is clear to those familiar with the region, and, as hundreds, perhaps thousands of journalists have worked in Iraq and the Kurdish regions, where I have also worked, the story is obvious, it just can't be printed. Many of "players," the Mossad, big oil, the Bush family, are beyond the reach of the press, protected from the laws of man, empowered to play the world as a grand chessboard, to quote Zbigbiew Brzezinski. Today's pawn is Kurdistan, unaware they are being played. "The Iraqi government has summoned Ankara's envoy to Baghdad in protest to a recent visit by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to the disputed Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Turkey's foreign minister traveled to Kirkuk on Thursday, while on a visit to Iraq's semi autonomous Kurdistan region. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry says Ankara must have informed it ahead of the visit. Iraq has warned that Turkey should be ready for the results of this action and its potential negative effects on relations between the two countries. The real story is Turkey, whose armies have entered have entered Iraq chasing terrorists on many occasions, to the point their artillery would awaken me, has decided to become involved in Iraq's internal affairs. Kurdistan may well have a right to be a free nation. Were it so, 70% of the land making up Kurdistan would come from inside Turkey, not just Iraq. For decades, Turkey violently suppressed the role of Kurds within Turkey, in large regions where they make up the majority of the population. So, what has driven the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, to visit Kurdish regional officials in the city of Kirkuk? Before Saddam realigned the population of Iraq, Kirkuk, home of one of the world's largest oil fields, was a Kurdish city. There have been continual political confrontations over Kirkuk for years. My personal views tend to side with the Kurds. They are my friends, some are as my own family. However, the value of Kurdistan has changed since Israel moved in. They had been there for many years, operating in the shadows, assassinating Christian leaders, pitting side against side, but Kurdistan never joined in the civil war planned for them.    

Jill Richardson: Huge Food Corporations Will Make Price Hikes Worse!

Farmer George Naylor sounds a little too much like the fictional character Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, when asked about his corn crop. June is usually a wet month, but not this year. One time it rained so little it just barely wet the bottom of his rain gauge. Add that to several days of triple digit temperatures that accelerated water loss from his soil and his crop, and his corn is in a sad state. But he's actually relatively lucky, because he is in Iowa, which got some rain early in the season. Farmers in Illinois and Indiana are faring much worse. The 2012 drought is now the worst drought our country has faced in half a century. As of the end of June, a third of the nation was in severe drought, and more than half faced moderate to extreme drought. All in all, June ranks as the 14th warmest and 10th driest June on record. By the end of July, the USDA had declared 1,584 counties in 32 states as primary disaster areas, making farmers and ranchers in those counties eligible for federal relief programs. Analogies to the Dust Bowl are becoming common. Most of the time, Americans don't need to worry much about how the food gets to our table, and whether the weather has anything to do with it. It gets hot, and we put on the air conditioning. It doesn't rain for weeks on end, and we celebrate the sunshine. But now, the fate of the corn crop on Midwestern farms even has comedian Stephen Colbert worried. Agricultural economist Bruce Babcock appeared on his show, warning him that the prices of meat, dairy and eggs will increase because "American livestock are fed a corn heavy diet." As Colbert put it, "It is one thing for global warming to make sea levels rise, but nobody told me it would make my cheese levels recede."  

James Rohrer: A Simple Recipe for "Us vs Them"

My Uncle Richard did not need to die prematurely. He was a victim of the most relentless killer the world has ever known: Us and Them. This assassin can slay victims in countless ways. In my uncle's case, it looked like either a stroke or medical malpractice, but it really was US and Them. Richard had left our Appalachian family farm at the tag end of the Great Depression. He moved to a big city in New York, got a job with a rising company, and soon he became management. He made a bundle, joined a country club, had a good life, but got burned out. When I was about ten years old, he decided to take early retirement and move back to the farm. He wanted out of the city, out of the rat race, and back to nature. Soon after he returned, he went to our local small town doctor for a physical exam. He felt fine, but the doctor told him that he needed immediately to stop taking a medication that his family physician in New York had prescribed. Uncle Richard derisively ignored the advice. His New York doctor was an old friend, a member of the country club, while the small town doctor was a refugee from the Soviet Union. This was during the Cold War, when most Americans imagined that nothing in the Soviet Union could possibly be up to American standards, and certainly not medical training. The last time I ever saw my Uncle, he was fuming about the "damned Russkie." "Can you imagine the nerve of that damned Russkie, thinking he knows more than my doctor?" Two weeks later, Uncle Richard was dead. The coroner's report made it clear: He should have listened to the Russkie. My uncle was not particularly stubborn or foolish. He was just being human. We humans are by nature social creatures, even the most introverted of us, and we tend to trust and follow the thinking of the groups with which we identify. 

W. Henry Wall, Jr: How the CIA's LSD Experiments Destroyed My Father's Mind

From Healing to Hell, a memoir in which oral surgeon and inventor W. Henry Wall Jr. explores how a mind control experiment destroyed his father, former Georgia senator and mental health advocate, Dr. W. Henry Wall, Sr."Daddy" became addicted to the narcotic Demerol after a routine dental procedure. His dependency eventually landed him in prison, where he became a victim of the CIA's MK-Ultra experiment. "We do not target American citizens. The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we who lead the CIA are honorable men, devoted to the nation's service." Richard Helms, former CIA director. In March 1979 the revelation came. After Times Books published journalist John Marks's nonfiction opus, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a horrifying expose of a Central Intelligence Agency program known as MK-Ultra, that focused on attempts to find an effective mind control or "truth"drug, the Atlanta Journal Constitution featured a series of six articles detailing the book's content. By the time I read the second page of the second installment, I knew exactly what had happened to my dad. Stunned, I read it again slowly to be quite sure. As Marks reported, the linchpin of the MK Ultra program was the compound d-lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. I had heard plenty about this hallucinogen through the 1960s headline grabbing antics of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and other derangement devotees. Sought by some as a mind expander, at times the LSD experience or "acid trip" plunged other users into terrifying sensations and led to ghastly flashbacks that might persist for years. More to the point, as far as Daddy was concerned, its bad effects were said to be even greater for a person given the drug in "circumstances not conducive to pleasant feelings" as when you were given it by someone you despised.