Syrian Chemical Weapons: Globalist Mag Says Kucinich is Infowars Conspiracy Theorist

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 30, 2013

Foreign Policy is portraying former Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich as a conspiracy theorist for suggesting that allegations Syria used chemical weapons are part of a manufactured pretext for war. John Hudson, who writes on national security issues for the magazine, believes Kucinich may have been influenced by Infowars.com and Wikileaks.

Trying to make sense of what’s happening in #Syria? Google “Syria #FalseFlag #ChemicalWeapons“. Very interesting…More false #intelligence?

— Dennis Kucinich (@Dennis_Kucinich) April 26, 2013

Hudson points to our story from March reporting that the United States and Israel decided to escalate tensions inside Syria and confront Assad’s military directly under the weapons of mass destruction pretext.

Events over the past week have borne this assertion out. The Obama administration says it will continue its investigation of phantom chemical weapons while Senator John McCain of Arizona has called for international troops to prepare a Syrian invasion under the pretext of securing chemical weapon stockpiles.

On Sunday, Senator Lindsay Graham said “there’s a growing consensus in the U.S. Senate that the United States should get involved” in a Syrian intervention. Congress now accepts the Syrian government chemical weapons pretext without question, a fact demonstrated by Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., who said on Face the Nation that it’s clear the order to use chemical weapons came from the al-Assad regime.

Despite the mindless stampeded toward war under the chemical weapons pretext – virtually the same pretext used to turn Iraq into a hellish failed state – a small number of establishment media journalists have questioned the claim.

“Why use them knowing that you risk losing the diplomatic support of Russia and China, knowing you risk bringing in western intervention, and therefore risk losing the gains you’ve made militarily in the past few weeks?” asks Tim Marshall, the foreign affairs editor of Sky News. “Why now? It doesn’t make sense. If the evidence of use was overwhelming, the question would still remain. But the evidence is underwhelming.”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Middle East envoy, said from Beirut last week the U.S. should not use the unverified use of chemical weapons as a pretext to invade Syria. Bogdanov made his comment the same day Syria’s Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi called the allegation “a bald-faced lie.” The previous day, on April 26, Obama warned Damascus that the use of chemical weapons would be a “game changer,” in other words it would provide a pretext for an invasion of the country.

In March, the so-called rebels supported by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and trained and armed by the CIA were accused of launching a chemical attack in the Khan al-Assal region north of Aleppo. “Terrorists launched a missile containing chemical products into the region of Khan al-Assal in the province of Aleppo, killing 15 people, mainly civilians,” Syria’s Sana news agency reported.

“An alleged audio recording of a phone conversation between two members of the Free Syrian Army contains details of a plan to carry out a chemical weapons attack capable of impacting an area the size of one kilometer,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote for Infowars.com the following day, on March 20. “The video also contains footage of western-backed FSA rebels announcing their intention to carry out chemical weapons attacks while surrounded with bottles of nitric acid and other substances.”

Despite a promise by the United Nations to investigate the use of chemical weapons by the so-called rebels – who are, the New York Times has admitted, primarily Salafist terrorists – Obama and other American officials dismissed the allegation, stating there was no intelligence to substantiate reports that rebels used chemical weapons against government troops.

Hudson discounts Kucinich’s assertion and writes him off “as a fringe voice in U.S. politics.” He then says that Kucinich’s “remarks are part of an ongoing effort to provide a counternarrative to the idea that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is an absolute tyrant and his opposition are well-intentioned freedom fighters.”

In fact, the “freedom fighters” in Syria, as noted above, are almost exclusively radical Salafists of the al-Nusra and al-Qaeda variety, a fact ignored by Mr. Hudson despite the appearance of the information in the New York Times.

Finally, it should be noted that Foreign Policy is a tool in the establishment’s kit designed to shape propaganda and public consensus in favor of war. After all, the magazine lists the PNAC neocon, Robert Kagan, as one of its “top globalist thinkers.” PNAC served as an institutional vehicle for advocating the invasion of Iraq under the pretext that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons. The invasion resulted in the death of well over a million Iraqis. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

This article was posted: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 at 10:27 am

A New Containment-Policy – The Curbing of War and Violent Conflict in World Society

This RSIS Working Paper issue no. 259 dated 2 May 2013 by Professor Andreas Herberg-Rothe entitled  A New Containment-Policy – The Curbing of War and Violent Conflict in World Society can be accessed by clicking: http://www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/workingpapers/wp259.pdf

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No. 259 dated 2 May 2013

A New Containment-Policy –

The Curbing of War and Violent Conflict in World Society
By Professor Andreas Herberg-Rothe

We are witnessing a worldwide expansion of war and violence, which should be countered by a new containment, just as George Kennan emphasized as early as 1987: “And for these reasons we are going to have to develop a wider concept of what containment means (…) – a concept, in other words, more responsive to the problems of our own time – than the one I so light-heartedly brought to expression, hacking away at my typewriter there in the northwest corner of the War College building in December of 1946.” Sixty years have already passed, since George Kennan formulated his original vision of containment. Although his original concept would be altered, in application by various administrations of the US-Government, in practice it has been incorporated within the concept and politics of common security, which has been the essential complement to pure militarily containment. These ideas are still valid – and as Kennan himself pointed out, they are in more need of explication and implementation than ever. The idea behind this concept is very simple: if the “world” is "flat" and something like a global network, the task is to protect our connections in the net and to contain the spreading of war and violence through this network.

Click on the following link to download the working paper

http://www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/workingpapers/wp259.pdf

Bio

Dr phil. habil. Andreas Herberg-Rothe is a permanent lecturer at the faculty of Social and Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Sciences, Fulda and was a private lecturer of Political Science at the Institute for Social Sciences, Humboldt-University Berlin (up to 2012). He was an associate of the Leverhulme Programme, “The Changing Character of War” (2004-2005) at the University of Oxford and convener (together with Hew Strachan) of the conference “Clausewitz in the 21st Century” (Oxford 2005). He was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Centre for International Studies (2005-2006).

He is the author of “Clausewitz's Puzzle: The Political Theory of War,” Oxford University Press, 2007 and edited together with Hew Strachan the anthology “Clausewitz in the 21st Century,” Oxford University Press, 2007.” His articles include “New Containment Policy: Grand Strategy for the Twenty-first century?” RUSI-Journal, Whitehall, London Whitehall Vol. 153 No. 2, (April 2008), pp. 50-55; “The Re-Politicisation of War and Violent Conflict - The World Powers are Striking Back.” Ralph Rotte/Christoph Schwarz (Eds.), War and Strategy, New York (Nova Science), 2010. His last book about Clausewitz (together with Jan Willem Honig and Dan Moran) has just been published, Clausewitz: The State and War, Stuttgart, 2011. In 2010 and 2011 he held lectures at West Point Academy about Tolstoy and Clausewitz as well as in Washington about a new containment policy, the emergence of world order conflicts, Clausewitz and partisan warfare and in Oxford about the democratic warrior. Some of his political-philosophical articles are collected in his volume “Lyotard und Hegel: Dialektik von Philosophie und Politik.Wien,” 2005 (Lyotard and Hegel: The dialectics of the political and philosophy). He held his most recent lecture about the last topic at the 29th international Hegel conference in Istanbul in October 2012.

Rise of the conservative revolutionaries

Almost half of Republicans think an armed revolution may be needed soon. What does it mean for guns and democracy?

BY DAVID SIROTA 

Tea Party supporter William Temple of Brunswick, Ga. (Credit: AP/David Goldman)http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/rise_of_the_conservative_revolutionaries/singleton/

There’s plenty of proof of an authoritarian streak and animus toward democratic ideals in today’s conservative movement. There was the movement’s use of its judicial power to halt a vote recount and instead install a president who had lost the popular vote. There is the ongoing GOP effort to make it more difficult for people to cast a vote in an election. There is the GOP’s record use of the Senate filibuster to kill legislation that the vast majority of the country supports. There is a GOP leader’s declaration that what the American people want from their government simply “doesn’t matter.”

Up until today, you might have been able to write all that anti-democratic pathology off as one infecting only the Republican Party’s politicians and institutional leadership, but not its rank-and-file voters. But then this morning Fairleigh Dickinson University released this gun control-related pollshowing that authoritarianism runs throughout the the entire party.

Take a look at the cross-tabs on page 3 of the national survey. That’s right, you are reading it correctly: Almost half (44 percent) of all self-described Republican voters say they believe “an armed revolution might be necessary to protect our liberties.” Just as bad, more Republicans believe an armed revolution might be necessary than believe one isn’t necessary.

This poll raises two obvious questions, each more disturbing than the next.

The first question is about gun control and gun ownership, and more specifically, what the latter is all about.

Typically, GOP leaders say that their opposition to minimal gun regulations has nothing to do with helping arm those who want to commit acts of violence, and everything to do with wanting to make sure people can defend themselves. Based on the poll, of course, it is certainly likely that many are buying such weapons in an effort to defend themselves, both for day-to-day life and in the event of a sudden armed revolution. But here’s the scary part: How many are buying weapons to arm themselves in order to foment an armed revolution? Maybe none, but maybe a lot. I don’t have an answer, but this poll suggests the question should at least be aired.

The other question is about republican democracy: Can it survive in an age when almost one-half of one of the major parties seems to support the concept of violently thwarting it?

“Politics is war by other means”: That aphorism sums up the democratic theory undergirding the American idea for two centuries. Though we haven’t always lived up to that ideal, it is a pretty simple one: A civilized society should solve disputes through a democratic process and democratic institutions, rather than through the barrel of a gun. And while our democracy has been corrupted by Big Money, it still functions better than autocracy. In that sense, Churchill had it right when he said “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

Incredibly, though, almost half of Republicans don’t seem to necessarily see it that way. According to the Fairleigh Dickinson poll, 44 percent of rank-and-file Republicans seem to believe that because they aren’t getting their way through the ballot box, bloodshed may be justified to impose their will on everyone else. Think of it as sore loser-ism juiced by violence.

Of course, GOP apologists will say that the poll just asked specifically about armed revolution “to protect liberties,” the idea being that almost half of Republican voters don’t support using violence to advance their own political agenda, they only support it in the face of a future dystopian nightmare whereby the population is terrorized by police-administered drone bombings and Waco-esque invasions of private homes.

But that’s the thing: We can’t be so sure that’s really true when conservative media voices and politicians are using the broad and incendiary language they now regularly employ. Today, those voices often claim that almost everything in the Democratic/liberal agenda — from Obamacare to taxes to environmental regulations to contraception policy — is an assault on “liberty.”

That means the poll might indicate something much more significant than understandable opposition to Big Brother turning our country into Oceania. It might show us that all the vitriolic language employed by the right is undermining the most basic nonviolent democratic ideals that are supposed to define America.

David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

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Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.

- James 5:4-5

Enhancing Global and Regional Mechanisms for Conflict Management and Resolution

This RSIS Working Paper issue no. 258 dated 2 May 2013 by Professor Ibrahim Gambari entitled  Enhancing Global and Regional Mechanisms for Conflict Management and Resolution can be accessed by clicking: http://www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/workingpapers/wp258.pdf

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No. 258 dated 2 May 2013

Enhancing Global and Regional Mechanisms for Conflict Management and Resolution
By Professor Ibrahim Gambari

In this paper I provide an overview of the global perspectives on conflict management and conflict resolution and the international and regional efforts to address them. In this regard, I begin with some general and theoretical observations followed by a synopsis of three case studies (Cyprus, Darfur/Sudan and Myanmar), each one chosen from three regions (Europe, Africa and Asia) and based on my direct involvement in helping to resolve them. I then make some concluding remarks and recommendations on enhancing the mechanisms for conflict management and resolution.

Click on the following link to download the working paper

http://www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/workingpapers/wp258.pdf

Bio

Ibrahim A. Gambari is a Professor at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, currently on leave, and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. A graduate and post-graduate of Columbia University, New York, he was a lecturer and then Assistant Professor at the State University of New York between 1969 and 1977. He became Senior Lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University in 1977, then Assistant Professor in 1980 and Professor in 1983. He was a visiting professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University and Howard University from 1986-1989.

Professor Gambari was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nigeria 1984-1985 and served as Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1990-1999. He joined the UN as Under-Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on Africa from 1999-2005, during which period he was also the UNSG’s Special Representative to Angola. He became Under-Secretary-General and Head of the UN Department of Political Affairs (2005-2007) and also served as UNSG’s Special Envoy on Cyprus, Zimbabwe and Myanmar. Ambassador Gambari was Joint Special Representative of the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur in 2010 and was Joint Chief Mediator in Sudan in 2011.

He is the author of Political and Comparative Dimensions of Regional Integration: The Case of ECOWAS and Theory and Reality in Foreign Policy Making.

Will the British, Once Again, Provoke a Sino-Japanese War?

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2012/eirv39n41-20121019/18-21_3941.pdf#page=1&zoom=auto,0,756

Will the British, Once Again,

Provoke a Sino-Japanese War?

 

This is a link to a 25 minute interview I gave to LaRouchePAC TV on the Abe Administration's decision to implement a large Quantitative Easing (QE), to the delight of some of the City of London pundits. The video explores the "Two Japans" -- that of the Meiji Restoration, highly influenced by the American System of Alexander Hamilton, as opposed to that of imperial Japan, influenced by the British Empire, which induced Japan into several wars against China and Russia, helping to launch two world wars. The question is, which way will Japan go today? The interview is at:

http://larouchepac.com/node/26189

The interview was on April 11 - sorry for sending it out so late, but I have been in Asia over the past weeks.

If you are interested in following up on issues raised in the interview, you may want to read my earlier articles:

Will the British, Once Again, Provoke a Sino-Japanese War? EIR, Oct. 19, 2012

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2012/eirv39n41-20121019/18-21_3941.pdf

 

May 3, 2013

Are We Believing Lies?

By Charles Payne

5/2/2013

 

He warns the head of parties against believing their own lies.
Dr. Arbuthnot

Well, it's too late to warn politicians on either side of the aisle in America about believing their own lies. There's a perverse Adonis-like affliction that sees our political leaders fall head over heels for their own words even as they drip out their mouth. Oddly, the people disbelieve almost all they hear unless it's election season and then they take their guy at face value. Still, it's been a long time since a politician in America has gotten the masses to rally around something important...one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

It's a contradictory situation but then again we are a nation of contradictions.

We are very rich but with scores of poor people. We have the best universities in the world but freefalling grades among the k-12 education system. We live in the land of unlimited lawyers and two million prisoners. A nation built on an amazing Constitution which many are trying to dismantle, mostly by using the freedoms in the Constitution. It's an odd time in the country that is being ripped apart by the people hired to heal it. For many these contradictions are breeding a certain kind of contempt. Being pulled in all directions makes all paths look crooked. We have become a nation of skeptics, dizzy from non-stop spin and frustrated and fading hope.

Contradictions of the Market & Economy
As we head into Friday's jobs report each day brings greater confusion and more questions than answers when it comes to the economy and the stock market rally. The slew of revenue misses have been amazing and yet stocks continue to rally higher more or less on the word of chief executive officers that say nothing has changed for the entire year, implying any shortfalls in the first quarter will be made up in the second half of the year. It's an interesting leap of faith the market seems willing to risk. Of course for many there is no risk to the market as long as the Federal Reserve continues to print money.

I continue to believe the Fed's impact on the market is slim at the moment although there is an impact of fresh money trying to get ahead of that impact of the Fed's extraordinary efforts to spark economic growth. I think the actual Fed-induced top comes with the usual pomp and circumstances and just about everyone will be drunk with glee. Right now there are too many bears and too little volume in the stock market to point to a bubble on the verge of bursting.

Contradictions:

Case - Shiller Index saw amazing year to year home pricing gains for the month of February. For the first time since 2006, January and February saw all 20 cities with year to year gains. Moreover, there were eight cities that enjoyed month over month gains and double digit year over year gains. Yet despite the obvious momentum in home prices ownership rates continues to plunge.

According to the Bureau of the Census, American homeownership dropped to its lowest level since 1995, of 65.0%. Interestingly the area with the fastest growing home prices, the West (see chart above) has the lowest homeownership rate of only 59.5%.

This is an amazing contradiction but speaks to a different reality - the Dropout Nation that's given up on owning and would rather pay Wall Street investors exorbitant rent than buy the house themselves. Ironically vacancies are lower for rentals and homeownership, the former from demand by regular folks and the latter by investors in a win-win situation. Oddly I don't hear bubble talk from many when it comes to housing prices or the housing market (Save for David Stockman who thinks everything is a bubble except all the doom and gloom).

Market
The jobs report out from ADP was a major disappointment. The street was looking for 150,000 the report came in at only 119,000 matching March's number which was revised lower. It's clear the rate of job growth is in freefall after peaking at 273,000 in November and even bumping to 237,000 in February.

The glaring decline in manufacturing backs up data from regional fed reports over the past couple of weeks. Manufacturing was supposed to save America and now I'm wondering what's going to save manufacturing?

Charles Payne

Charles V. Payne is a regular contributor to the Fox Business and Fox News Networks. He is also the Chief Executive Officer and Principle Analyst of Wall Street Strategies, Inc. (WSSI), founded in 1991 which provides subscription analytical services to both individual and institutional investors.

May 3, 2013

The Know-it-All Suddenly Knows Nothing

By John Ransom

5/2/2013

 

Apparently a lot of people who know nothing reside at the top levels of the Obama administration. Why does that not come as a surprise?
It’s probably because the tone of any organization is set from the top, the very pointy top.
Still it’s surprising that the administration that knows more about banking than bankers, more about healthcare than doctors, more about firearms than people who legally possess arms, more about budgets than citizens who have to balance their checkbooks and more about practically everything than anyone else, would admit that on a few things, they really know nothing. 
“On most days it's hard to tell him he's wrong about anything,” recently confessed one top Democrat about the Commander in Brief.
It’s seems equally hard to TELL him about anything too.
But here it is:
Obama knows nothing about Benghazi.
He knows nothing about Boston’s Tsarnaev brothers.
He knows nothing about Fast and Furious; he knows nothing about green energy loans, either.
Yes, the man who recently proclaimed: I AM IN CHARGE NOW, FINALLY! knows nothing.
This seems strange coming from the administration that leaked every damn detail about how Barack Obama personally hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden, while simultaneously saving Detroit from bankruptcy… saved Detroit at least until after the election in 2012, that is.
The “I don’t know” claim is not just at odds with the know-it-all-ness of the administration either.  It’s at odds with what others are saying, others who seem to know what they are talking about.
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012,” reports the U.K.’s Daily Mail,  “long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document.”
The Department of Homeland Security and the White House however say they know nothing about it.
From the Daily Mail:
'DHS has no knowledge of any communication from the Saudi government regarding information on the suspects in the Boston Marathon Bombing prior to the attack,' MailOnline learned from one Homeland Security official who declined to be named in this report.
The White House took a similar view. 'We and other relevant U.S. government agencies have no record of such a letter being received,' said Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the president’s National Security Council.Who? Us? We never got the message.
Russia had similar problems being understood in Washington says the Boston Globe: “In a closed briefing on Tuesday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee learned that Russia alerted the United States about Tsarnaev in ‘multiple contacts’ -- including ‘at least once since October 2011,’ said Richard Burr, a Republican of North Carolina, speaking with reporters afterward.”
Obama? As I said, he knows nothing about it.
Too busy playing golf.
The Government Accountability Institute (GAI) says that in 2012 Obama spent less time on intelligence briefings than at any other time during his presidency. Last year Obama had 125 “daily” intelligence briefings on his calendar, availing himself of the “daily” briefing only 34.2 percent of the time.  These briefing are most likely where a topics like “Hey, someone might be trying to blow-up the Boston Marathon next year,” might come up.
That means that Obama attended on average only 2.5 personal intelligence briefings for every seven-day week. That’s like showing up for your job on Monday, Wednesday and every other Friday.
They don’t call them “daily” briefings for nothing.
By contrast, the GAI says that Obama played 976 hours of golf while president of the United States.
The president’s daily briefing (PBD) has its roots in the Truman administration, although reporters often mistakenly say it started in 1961. Truman used to get a summary of the overnight developments that he called his “newspaper,” followed by a short briefing by a Naval Intelligence officer.
Bush had his PDBs from 8am to 9am.
Assuming one hour for daily intelligence briefings, Obama has spent 645 hours (of a possible 1800) on daily intelligence briefings and 976 on golf over the course of his presidency.
So, yes, of course he knows nothing.
It’s nice though that, finally, the administration is willing to admit they are as ignorant as the rest of us knew they were all along. 

John Ransom

John Ransom is the Finance Editor for Townhall Finance. You can follow him on twitter @bamransom and on Facebook: bamransom.