batr.org: Iran, Gold and Oil-The Next Banksters War!

Remember the real reason why Moammar Gadhafi is dead. He dared to propose and started creating an alternative currency to the world reserve US Dollar. The lesson learned in Libya is now ready for teaching in Iran. Forget all the noise about going nuclear, the true message is that the bankers rule and nation states serve their ultimate masters. The hype and disinformation that surrounds the push for war is best understood by examining the viewpoint of Iranian MP Kazem Jalali. The Tehran Times quotes him as saying: "The European Union must be aware that it can never compel the Islamic Republic to succumb to their will and undermine the Iranian nation's determination to achieve glory and independence, access to modern technologies, and safeguard its rights, through the intensification of the pressure." "The European Union is seeking to politicize the atmosphere ahead of nuclear talks with Iran and is aware that sanctions on Iran's oil exports cannot be implemented since the world is not limited to a number of European countries!" Many political commentators warn that an embargo is an act of war. Chris Floyd provides this observation of the recent oil embargo against Iran: "This week, the warlords of the West took yet another step toward their long-desired war against Iran, meaning open war, since their covert war has been going on for decades, via subversion, terrorism, and proxies like Saddam Hussein." On Monday, the European Union obediently followed the dictates of its Washington masters by agreeing to impose an embargo on Iranian oil.    

Press TV: US Base Toxic Water Kills Americans

Prolonged fuel leakage and consequent water contamination at the largest US Marine Corps Base in North Carolina has killed many American military personnel and civilians. For decades, the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune dumped fluids containing toxic chemicals, which leaked into groundwater and eventually contaminated the water distribution system of the base. The camp's water contamination problem existed between 1957 to 1987, during which period the US Marine service members and their families used the contaminated tap water for drinking and bathing. This is while the US military camp did not study the health risks of its water after toxic chemicals were discovered in the early 1980s. The Marine base has also failed to notify Marines and their families, arguing that contacting the 750,000 to 1 million military personnel and civilians who lived at Camp Lejeune during those decades would not be easy. An undetermined number of former base residents later developed cancer or similar serious health problems, which are believed to have been caused by the contaminated drinking water. The victims accuse the US Marine Corps of concealing the information and knowledge about the contamination and failing to act on the issue and notify the former residents of the base of probable health risks. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is currently studying the effects of toxic exposure on former residents of Camp Lejeune, who lived or worked at the Marine base before 1986, and is expected to release its findings in early 2014!   

Tom Engelhardt: Iranian Commando Team Operating Near US!!h

The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard's North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the US-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels. The task force provides "highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments," Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and "seeks to confront irregular threats." The unit began its existence in mid-2009, around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership's wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the Unites States, or might do in the future, is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard: "It would be inappropriate to discuss operational plans regarding any particular nation," Arastoo says about the US. Okay, so I made that up. Sue me. But first admit that, a line or two in, you knew it was fiction. After all, despite the talk about American decline, we are still on a one-way imperial planet. Yes, there is a new US special operations team known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council, or JSOTF-GCC, at work near Iran and, according to Wired magazine's Danger Room blog, we really don't know quite know what it's tasked with doing, other than helping train the forces of such allies as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia!

The Economist: Pollution in China, Visible from Space!

"PM2.5" seems an odd term for the blogosphere to take up, but that is precisely what has happened in China in recent weeks. It refers to the smallest solid particles in the atmosphere, those less than 2.5 microns across. Such dust can get deep into people's lungs, far deeper than rated as PM10. Yet until recently China's authorities have revealed measurements only for PM10. When people realized this, an online revolt broke out. Such was the public pressure that authorities caved in, and PM2.5 data are noe being published for Beijing and a handful of other cities. What about the rest of China? At the moment, only PM10 data are available, but the government's hand may soon be forced here too. Though pollution data are best collected near the ground, a plausible estimate may be made from the vantage point of a satellite by measuring how much light is blocked by particles' chemical composition the likely distribution of their sizes, and a report prepared for The Economist by a team led by Angel Hsu of Yale University does just that, drawing on data from American satellites to map out PM2.5 pollution across the entire country. World Health Organization guidelines suggest that PM2.5 levels above ten micrograms per cubic meter are unsafe.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja: Obama's Endless Global Warfare!

A New Strategy for Securing the Realm exposes the key authors, America's sadistic neo-cons Richard Perle, David Wumser and Douglas Feith. A decade later, the authors of that study are gone in name, but their spirit of unending wars is alive and well within the Obama Administration's recently announced "Defense Strategic Guidance" as part of "Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense." Where Clean Break offered what was then a radical Middle East military strategy, Obama's DSG identifies US military priorities for the 21st century to "confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world" with an emphasis on the Middle East and Asia-Pacific region as the "greatest challenges for the future." Neither the president nor Panetta felt any need to articulate a credible global threat that requires eternal armed vigilance as the country continues to dismantle its People Programs and as its infrastructure continues to dismantle its People Programs and as its infrastructure continues to crumble, nor did the American people with a thoughtful rationale for who, why, when, where and how. After the president's departure, Panetta, once known as a liberal House Democrat from California, began to morph into a gnarl-faced Dr. Strangelove with every utterance of war, enemies, threats, death and destruction as he touted US military dominance and its ability to "decisively prevail in any conflict." "The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy. Leon Panetta, a former congressman whom Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircrafy carrier, that the US is maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against Iran and to convince Iran that "it's better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy." Washington has kept America at war for ten years while millions of Americans lost their jobs and their homes.    

Michel Chossudovsky: The Globalization of War

The Pentagon's global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously. The concept of the "Long War" has characterized US military doctrine since the end of World War II. The broader objective of global military dominance in support of an imperial project was first formulated under the Truman administration in the late 1940's at the outset of the Cold War. In September 1990, some five weeks after Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuweit, US President and Commander in Chief George Herbert Walker Bush delivered a historical address to a joint session of the US Congress and the Senate in which he proclaimed a New World Order emerging from the rubble of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. Bush Senior had envisaged a world of "peaceful international co-operation", one which was no longer locked into the confrontation between competing super powers, under the shadow of the doctrine of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) which had characterized the Cold War era. Bush declared emphatically at the outset of what became known as "the post-Cold War era" that: "a new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward on historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times a new world order can emerge: A new era freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony."

Mac Slavo: Massive US Military Buildup Around Iran.

While President Obama's supporters hailed his withdrawal of US troops from Iraq as the end of that war in the middle east, behind the scenes the Pentagon has been quietly massing troops and armaments on two islands located just south of the Strait of Hormuz, and within easy striking distance of Iran. In addition to some 50,000 US troops currently in the region waiting for orders, Nobel Peace Prize winner President Barack Obama is deploying an additional 50,000 soldiers to be ready for 'any contingency' by March: President Barack Obama is reported exclusively by Debka-Net-Weekly's military and Washington sources to build up heavy concentrations on two strategic islands: Socotra, which is part of a Yemeni archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and Omani island of Masirah at the southern exit of the Strait of Hormuz. Since 2010, the US has been quietly building giant air force and naval bases on Socotra, with facilities for submarines, intelligence command centers and take-off pads for flying stealth drones, as part of a linked chain of strategic US military facilities in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. The Socotra facilities are so secret that they are never mentioned in any catalog listing US military facilities in this part of the world, which include Jebel Ali and Al Dahfra in the United Arab Emirates, Arifjan in Kuweit, and Al Udeid in Qatar, all within short flying distances from Iran. Additional US forces are also being poured into Camp Justice on the barren, 70-kilometer long Omani island of Masirah, just south of the Hormuz entry point to the Gulf of Oman from the Arabian Sea.