Press TV: US report confirms Israel has at least 80 nuclear warheads!

A newly released report in the US professional journal confirms that the Israeli regime possesses at least 80 operative nuclear warheads and has enough material to produce up to 190 more. The report published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear weapon proliferation experts Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen halted its production of nuclear warheads back in 2004 "once it reached around 80 munitions," RT reports Monday. However, the experts add, the Tel Aviv regime "can easily double its arsenal since it has enough fissile material to build at least another 115 bombs." "There are rumors that Israel is equipping some of its submarines with nuclear-capable cruise missiles," the report says, echoing the 2013 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook on Armament and International Security, which also implied that the Israeli regime may have nuclear-capable submarine-launched cruise missiles and reported the same assessment of nuclear stockpiles. It is still not known how many nuclear warheads of the total inventory could already be deployed, as Israel continues to maintain its long-held policy of nuclear ambiguity, under which it never confirms nor denies its possessions of nuclear and other Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). In December 2012, Tel Aviv once again dismissed the latest demand from the members of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to join the accord. The suspicions about Israeli nuclear warheads were fueled by the fact that Germany supplied Israel with five Dolphin-class submarines, which are supposedly capable of launching nuclear missiles, ans signed a contract to build yet another one. Israeli regime's stockpiles of WMD have come under particular scrutiny following the US-Russian recent agreement for the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons, which is seen as a significant step towards a WMD-free region. This is while Syria's UN Ambassador Bashar al-Jaafari also stated last Thursday that "The main dagger of WMD is the Israeli nuclear arsenal," stressing that the Tel Aviv regime also possesses chemical weapons bit "nobody is speaking about that." The Syrian envoy further described his country's chemical weapons as "a mere deterrence against the Israeli nuclear arsenal"and other WMD, referring to a declassified CIA report on Israel's chemical weapons program. Moreover, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday: "Its well known that Syria has a certain arsenal of chemical weapons and the Syrians always viewed that as an alternative to Israel's nuclear weapons." This is while recently declassified CIA documents suggest that the Israeli regime secretly built up its own stockpile of chemical and biological weapons decades ago, adding more fuel to the lingering complaint of Arab states, who constantly accuse Tel Aviv of possessing nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, during a speech on Sunday before talks with the US Secretary of State John Kerry, Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said that "in any case, Israel must be poised and ready to defend itself, by itself, against any threat, and this capability and readiness are more important now than ever."   

By Syed Zafar Mehdi: West, Breeding Ground for Terrorism!

Today, the war drums are beating again,, and this time the target is Syria. "By ordering air strikes against Syria without UN Security Council support, Obama will be doing the same as Bush in 2003," writes Hans Blix, Swedish diplomat and politician. Blix was the head of United Nations monitoring, verification and inspection commission from March 2000 to June 2003, which searched Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, ultimately finding none." "There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism," notes Noam Chomsky in widely-acclaimed book Western State Terrorism. "One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. It comes as no surprise that the propagandistic approach is adopted by governments generally, and by their instruments in totalitarian states." Chomsky maintains that there are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States puts its rivals to shame when it comes to perpetuating 'international terrorism'. A 2010 research undertaken by Professor Marc Sageman of University of Pennsylvaniea lends credence to what Chomsky says. The research findings establish the fact that terrorism is a product of the West. Syria, more than two years into the foreign-sponsored militancy. Let's make no bones about it, the menacing threat of nuclear powers who form the core of the NATO alliance, and keeping intimidating and threatening the non nuclear weapon states. The history of US imperialism is replete with stories of unilateral belligerent military strikes, gory massacres and socio-cultural aggression. In this no-holds-barred brinkmanship, the US and its allies have sought to impose their writ on other nations, more so on those who have refused to swear allegiance to Uncle Sam's hegemony. The blatant war-mongering and sinister desire to inflict suffering on others is best explained by these words of American writer Andre Vitchek. "West has always behaved as if it had inherited, but undefined, right to profit from the misery of the rest of the world. In many cases, the conquered nations had to give up their own culture, their religions, even their languages, and convert to our set of beliefs and values that we define as 'civilized'. Guatemala Civil War that continued from 1960 to 1996 was bitterly fought between the government of Guatemala committed worst human rights abuses and engineered genocide of Mayan population of Guatemala. Historical Clarification Commission set up under the Oslo Accords of 1994 concluded that the Guatemala military committed murder, torture and rape with the tacit support of CIA. The commission stated that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations." Noam Chomsky in his book What Uncle Sam  Really Wants writes, "Under Reagan, support for near-genocide in Guatemala became positively ecstatic. The most extreme of the Guatemala Hitlers we've backed there, Rios Montt, was lauded by Reagan as a man totally dedicated to democracy. In the early 1980s, Washington's friends slaughtered tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Indians in the highlands, with countless others tortured and raped. Large regions were decimated."      

By James Corbett: Faking It: How the Media Manipulates the World into War!

This GRTV production by James Corbett was first released in January 2012. In the light of the recent media disinformation campaign in relation to Syria, we bring this carefully researched video-documentary report to the attention of GR readers. As the drums of war begin to beat once again in Iran, Syria, the South China Sea, and other potential hotspots and flashpoints around the globe, concerned citizens are asking how a world so sick of bloodshed and a population so tired of conflict could be led to this spot once again. To understand this seeming paradox, we must first understand the
centuries-long history of how media has been used to whip the nation into wartime frenzy, dehumanize the supposed enemies, and even to manipulate the public into believing in causes for war that, decades later, were admitted to be completely fictitious. As the US and Iranian governments escalate tensions in the already volatile Straits of Hormuz, and China and Russia begin openly questioning Washington's interference in their internal politics, the world remains on a knife-edge of military tension. Far from being a dispassionate observer of these developments, however, the media has in fact been central to increasing those tensions and preparing the public to expect a military confrontation. But as the online media rises to displace the traditional forms by which the public forms its understanding of the world, many are now beginning to see first hand how the media lies the public into war. Faking it: How the Media Manipulates the World. The term "yellow journalism" was coined to describe the type of sensationalistic, scandal-driven, and often erroneous style of reporting popularized by newspapers like William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. In one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, Hearst's papers widely trumpeted the sinking of the Maine as the work of the Spanish. Whipped into an anti-Spanish frenzy by a daily torrent of stories depicting
Spanish forces' alleged torture and rape of Cubans, and pushed over the edge by the Maine incident, the public welcomed the beginning of the US-Spanish war. Although it is now widely believed that the explosion on the Maine was due to a fire in one of its coal bunkers, the initial lurid reports of Spanish involvement stuck and the nation was led into war. In many ways, the phrase infamously attributed to Hearst in reply to his illustrator "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war," apocryphal as the story may be, nevertheless perfectly encodes the method by which the public would be led to war time and again through the decades. The US was drawn into World War I by the sinking
of the Lusitania, a British ocean liner carrying American passengers that was torpedoed by German U-boats off the coast of Ireland, killing over 1,000 of its passengers. What the public was not informed about at the time, of course, was that just one week before the incident, then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had written to the President of the Board of Trade that it was "most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany." Nor did reports of the attack announce that the ship was carrying rifle ammunition and other military supplies.
       

By Gregory Elich: Political Firestorm in South Korea!

Actions by South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) have generated a political furor that is growing by the day, pitting the ruling New Frontier Party against the main opposition Democratic Party against the main opposition Democratic Party and threatening the existence of the Unified Progressive Party. The NIS intervened in the election of December 2012 in an endeavor to bring victory to conservative candidates. NIS director Won Sei-hoon ordered the agency's psychological warfare division to launch a campaign to discredit liberal and left political candidates. Agents were instructed to each create three or four posts on the internet per day, praising the ruling party and attacking the opposition. Three teams were tasked to carry out this mission, and one team alone alone generated an average of 1,200 to 1,600 posts per month. Won was motivated by a paranoid McCarthyst frame of mind, and he was heard to say, "If there is a person or a force which condemns the government and the ruling party, they are no different from North Korea even if they are our citizens." The psychological warfare teams used IP switching software to prevent tracking. Many of the posts smeared liberal and left candidates as "followers of North Korea." According to South Korean investigators working with the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office, the NIS utilized software to generate millions of automated re-tweets of their postings, flooding the internet. In a further boost to the campaign of presidential Park Geun-hye and other conservative candidates, the NIS leaked excerpts from a classified document to the press and to the ruling New Frontier Party, containing a transcript taken from the October 2007 meetings between liberal South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. The excerpts leaked by the NIS dealt with discussions of the Northern Limit Line, the western maritime border between the two Koreas. The NIS intentionally distorted the excerpts it provided and fabricated content in order to make it appear that Roh was offering to turn over South Korean territorial waters to South Korean territorial waters to North Korea, expecting the resulting outcry to damage the chances of liberal presidential candidate
Moon Jae-in. The NIS removed a statement from the version leaked to the New Frontier Party, in which Roh stated that the Northern Limit Line should not be changed. In another example, the NIS spliced together a phrase from a morning session with a phrase from an afternoon session so as to misrepresent Roh's position. The NIS also altered words and phrases, and inserted content of its own invention into the transcript in order to discredit the liberal candidates. Two days before the December 19 election, Kim Moo-seong, head of Park's election campaign, publicly revealed quotes from the fabricated transcript, and angrily announced that he was "filled with indignation" over its  content. His comments received broad media coverage, which helped to swing votes in favor of Park. It was not until after the election that the extent of NIS meddling was revealed, and Won Sei-hoon was indicted in June. In response to demands by opposition parties that the NIS be reformed, President Park Geun-hye merely asked the agency to come up with a proposal to reform itself. 

By Adam Larson: Rebel Capabilities and the Damascus Chemical Attacks!

The Ghouta Gas Attack: Cui Bono, Who Benefits? Despite recent maneuvers to ease the danger, the world stands entirely too close to a disastrous conflict to remove the sovereign government of Syria, aka Bashar al-Assad. Like the campaign against Iraq, aka Saddam Hussein a decade ago, this Western-driven program is over WMD allegations. The charges of course are that "Assad" killed perhaps 1,300 of his citizens with Sarin gas, in several contested cities of the Ghouta region surrounding Damascus, on August 21. Hundreds of civilian victims, including dozens of children abd babies, were shown dead on videos, they were not shot or stabbed like usual for that medium, visually appearing to be killed by poison or perhaps suffocation. Activists describe the gas differently but agree it was delivered a series of pre-dawn rocket attacks from government-held areas. This was done, allegedly, to finally drive the rebels out of Ghouta, but it's not usually explained why that method and time were chosen. Because of this alleged crime, the increasingly harassed, demonized, and isolated nation is threatened with Cruise missiles and perhaps months or years of deadly force to follow. As if to make a point, whoever chose the time made it exactly one year after U.S. President Obama first promised that an event like this, even remotely like or hinting at this, would cross a "red line," which would force him and the U.S. military to respond somehow. Aug. 20, 2012 compared to around 2-3 AM Aug. 21, 2013: adjusted for time zones, that's one year and a few hours, the exact times are unsure. Oddly, this also came not three days after the elusive United Nations CW investigation team finally arrived in Damascus. They were first invited by the Syrian government in March after a rebel gas attack on their forces in Khan al-Assal, Aleppo, an incident we will return to, and so for the first time in the conflict, they were on hand to find and expose any signs of this alleged Sarin deployment the other way. The attacks in areas all around them would also, obviously, distract the team, who never did get to Aleppo as hoped. From this vantage point, it's not hard to see who stood to lose and to benefit from the chemical attack. Everyone can seethe government had to be stupid or suicidal to willingly do just that, just there, and at that time. Explanations bandied about include that it was a rogue officer issuing the insane order, or it was approved but someone miscalculated on a massive scale. An unnamed analyst said to Foreign Policy magazine's The Cable "we don't know exactly why it happened, we just know it was pretty fucking stupid" and, presuming imminent air strikes, "they get what they deserve." Conversely, it would be to the utmost benefit for the extremist rebel cause in Syria and the region to have "Assad" do, or be blamed for such a thing. As Russia's Foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich suggested, it might be a "pre-planned provocation" timed with the arrival of the UN team. Each breathtaking massacre of civilians over the years of this horrible conflict has been sold, by opposition "activists," as a reason to finally be given a Libya-style NATO Air Force. But Syria's air defenses remain and so the lobbying efforts continue, dead baby videos and all.      

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine. Obama's True Motives on Syria!

President Obama reiterated his case for a U.S. led strike in Syria last night, asking Congress to postpone voting on military intervention while the administration pursues a diplomatic solution. It appears unlikely that the House will approve the use of force. Did Obama really think his speech would swing votes? Or was there another aim? The last time many of last night's viewers tuned into President Obama en masse, he was imploring the nation in much the same terms and tone to join him in stopping the grotesque slaughter of innocent children. On that occasion, Newtown, many Americans were in grief and, according to polls, on his side. But we saw the results from his pitch for new gun-control legislation: zero. So let's at least hope that he didn't really think he would swing votes with last night's mishmash of an address. The notion that it would bring around a citizenry and a Congress that are both overwhelmingly opposed to intervention in Syria's civil war is proposterous than anything else that has happened over the past week. And Obama's brief speech was nothing if not of a piece with what came before. He started with a call for military action, then veered into a prayer for diplomacy before trailing off into an inchoate "stay tuned" denouement. I guess this proves that if you mate as hawk with a dove, you end up with the rhetorical equivalent of turducken. I'd like to believe there was some other aim, but what could it have been? A humanitarian preemption of ABC's The Bachelor? This address should have been put on hold by the White House the moment the attack was put on hold because the urgency of the appeal for force had evaporated. Now, if the Hail Putin Pass proves a Russian-Syrian bluff or some other form of mirage, the president can't give the same speech again, minus the diplomatic part. One prime-time strike to sell the country on air strikes, and you're out. Obama mentioned the specter of Iraq and Afghanistan several times during his speech, and his entire approach, seeking explicit congressional approval and guaranteeing "no boots on the ground" seems to reflect his wariness of those wars. Of course, public opposition to the Syria strike is also colored by the country's wariness of those wars. Of course, public opposition to the Syria strike is also colored by the country's experiences over the past ten years. Are we right to see Iraq and Afghanistan in Syria? Or have all of us, Obama included, overlearned their lessons? As someone who was so riveted and outraged by the Bush administration's successful propaganda campaign to sell the Iraq War that I wrote a book deconstructing it, I am here to say that there are many differences between the run-up to that disastrous national misadventure and what's going on now. Obama has been clear about these distinctions, not just last night but all weak. He has assiduously pointed out that he "could not honestly claim" that Syria represents an "imminent threat" to America, and much to his credit last night he did not evoke 9/11 on the eye of its anniversary. The evidence of Bashar al-Assad's atrocities and his repeated use of chemical weapons has not been seriously challenged by anyone and is far more persuasive than Colin Powell's notorious display of show-and-tell props before the U.N.  

By John Chuckman: America's Rediculous Posiition on Syria!

I read that an American Senator, Bob Menendez, wanted "to vomit" when he was supplied with a copy of Vladimir Putin's New York Times' op-ed piece about Syria. Well, I'm sure it wasn't just a matter of Sen. Mendez's delicate stomach: there have been many times in the past I wanted to vomit over something in The New York Times. It is, after all, an impossibly pretentious, often-dishonest publication faithfully serving America's military-industrial-intelligence complex, one which never fails to support America's countless wars, insurgencies, dirty tricks, and coups, all this while publicly flattering itself as a rigorous source of journalism and even a newspaper "of record." Many regard The Times as simply the most worn-out key of that thunderous public-relations instrument an ex-Agency official once called his "mighty Wurlitzer." Only in the antediluvian political atmosphere of America could The Times manage to have something of a reputation for being "liberal." Mr. Menendez, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, holds a powerful position, one he has used in lockstep with President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to promote illegal war. Like them he blubbers about rights and democracy and ethics while planning death and destruction to people who have done nothing against the United States except disagreeing with it and being hated by that greatest single outside determinant of American foreign policy, Israel. Sen. Mendez's personal anecdote actually provides a perfect miniature replica of the entire operation of America's foreign affairs. American officials never fail to invoke words about democracy or human rights when addressing their next piece of dirty work or effort to pressure another people into doing what America wants. So naturally the Senator might be a bit upset over Putin's upstaging the top officials of the United States and proving himself the superior statesman and rational politician in every detail. First, every honest, well-read person, not trying to promote American special interests, knows there is no proof that Assad used chemical weapons. Absolutely none. Even as I write, an Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports that the UN inspection team could find no evidence of chemical weapons used in the place cited by Syria's rebel army. A video which made the rounds among American allies and which purported to show the attack has been declared a fake by the U.N. Russia's secret services also declared it a fake. The only other bit of "evidence" worth mentioning is a supposed recording of Syrian officials  provided to American officials by Mossad. Yes, that's Mossad, the very people who pride themselves on deception and who have a long track record of expertly using it, even in several cases successfully against the United States. You do not kill thousands of people and destroy a country's infrastructure citing rubbish kike that. Again, as I write this, a former British Ambassador, Craig John Murray, states that the United States has been deceived by Mossad with its purported recording and that Britain's super-sensitive listening post in Cyprus, vastly superior to Israel's listening assets, had picked up no such information. Germany, based on its secret service operations, also has publicly stated that Assad did not use chemical weapons.