Ron Paul Forums - Liberty Forest Forums - Foreign Policy & Affairs

Rand Paul: Senate Is Arming Al-Qaeda and Rushing to War in Syria

FrankRep — Sat, 25 May 2013 23:15:00 GMT

During a Senate hearing, Senator Rand Paul warned that his colleagues were rushing to war in Syria and were arming members of al-Qaeda in Syria.

Rand Paul: Senate Is Arming Al-Qaeda and Rushing to War in Syria

The New American
25 May 2013

“This is an important moment. You will be funding, today, the allies of al Qaeda.”

That was the declaration Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.; pictured) made on May 21 during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Paul’s comments were directed at his colleagues, nearly all of whom voted to send arms to Syrian rebels.

Senators Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) co-sponsored the bill that authorizes “critical support to the Syrian opposition through provision of military assistance, training, and additional humanitarian support.”

The bill sailed through the committee, passing with bipartisan support by a vote of 15-3.

Senator Paul offered two amendments to the bill — officially styled the Syria Transition Support Act — one that would have forbidden the transfer of weapons to the rebel forces fighting to oust the government of current Syrian president Bashar al-Asad, and another that would have prevented the use of U.S. military armed forces in Syria.

Both of Paul’s amendments were rejected by the committee.

Apart from supplying lethal and non-lethal weaponry to Syrian opposition forces, the Menendez-Corker bill contains several other regime-toppling provisions, all of which are boastfully reported by Mendendez on his website. They include:

• “Creation of a $250 million transition fund each year through FY2015 drawn from funds otherwise appropriated for regional transition support”;

• “Sanctions on arms and oil sales to Assad: Targeting any person that the President of the United States determines has knowingly participated in or facilitated a transaction related to the sale or transfer of military equipment, arms, petroleum, or petroleum products to the Assad regime.”; and

• “Amendment to the Syria Accountability Act: To allow for sanctions removal once a transitional government is in place and certain terrorism and WMD criteria have been met.”

Neither Paul’s warnings nor his amendments were enough to counteract the powerful politicians pushing to arm the Syrian rebels. A cadre of lawmakers from seemingly distinct bands of the political spectrum lined up behind the move to add Syria to the list of Middle Eastern countries with U.S.-approved ruling parties. As in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, these dictators-in-waiting will walk a path to power paved with American money and likely covered in the blood of American soldiers.

Rubio, described by many as a Tea Party favorite, chastised Senator Paul, refuting his allegation that a vote for arming the Syrian rebels was tantamount to giving guns to al-Qaeda.

"I don't think any member of this committee would vote for anything we thought was going to arm al Qaeda," said Rubio.

Mendendez piled on, saying, "Al Qaeda, unfortunately, is well-armed. That is the present reality in Syria."

Senator Corker tried striking a less hostile tone, arguing that arming rebels vetted by Congress — as called for in his bill — would prevent U.S. weaponry from being funneled into more radical segments of the coalition of anti-Asad armed forces.

Seing through Corker’s false dilemma, Paul responded, saying, “It’s impossible to know who our friends are.” He later said that the vote was nothing more than a “rush to war.”

In an exclusive interview with The New American, Senator Paul pointed out the irony in the fact that the original Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) enacted after September 11, 2001 called for finding and destroying al-Qaeda, while the legislation passed on May 21 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would arm known associates of that very organization.

“These people [Syrian rebels] will say they love America knowing that that’s how to get weapons. They lie to us and then shoot us in the back,” Paul explained.

Another bit of irony apparently lost on 15 members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is the fact that the United States has walked this road before. In the 1980s, Congress voted to arm militant Islamic forces under the pretext that the enemy of our enemy was our friend. Then, within 20 years, the very beneficiaries of U.S. military largesse in Afghanistan seized control of that country and reportedly sheltered and trained the men who carried out the attacks of September 11.

One wonders how (or if) the Senate fails to appreciate the destruction that will surely come from once again sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind that comes from arming those who would do us harm. Some senators, however, seemed determined to deploy troops in every corner of the planet, regardless of the fact these young men and women could be killed by militants armed with weapons supplied by their very own government.

Never one to miss a chance to take his turn banging on the war drum, Senator John McCain mocked an amendment offered by Senator Tom Udall (D-N.M.) that would have placed more stringent controls on the type of weapon shipped to Syrian rebels.

"The senator from New Mexico wants to use shotguns against SCUD missiles," McCain said.

Rand Paul has been banging another drum, however. During the hearings on the attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, Paul brought up the possibility that the Obama administration was covering up the existence of a gun running pipeline running throughout the Middle East.

Paul, in fact, tried to get answers to these questions from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the Senate’s investigation of the Benghazi raid that left four people dead, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Addressing Secretary Clinton, Paul asked directly, “Is the U. S. involved with any procuring of weapons, transfer of weapons, buying, selling, anyhow transferring weapons to Turkey out of Libya?”

Clinton demurred, claiming that she’d never heard about that allegation.

Undaunted, Paul continued, “It’s been in news reports that ships have been leaving from Libya and that may have weapons, and what I’d like to know is the annex that was close by, were they involved with procuring, buying, selling, obtaining weapons, and were any of these weapons being transferred to other countries, any countries, Turkey included?”

Always the savvy politician, Clinton responded, “Well, Senator, you’ll have to direct that question to the agency that ran the annex. I will see what information is available.”

“You’re saying you don’t know?” asked Paul.

“I do not know,” Clinton said. “I don’t have any information on that.”

Americans have a right to know, however, who’s receiving millions in tax dollars taken from them.

A Reuters article from last August, which detailed a secret order signed by President Obama providing support to Syrian rebel forces opposing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, noted, “Recent news reports from the region have suggested that the influence and numbers of Islamist militants, some of them connected to al Qaeda or its affiliates, have been growing among Assad's opponents.”

Later, The New American covered the same story, writing that “Western governments, brutal Sunni-Arab dictatorships, an assortment of terror groups including al-Qaeda, and other powerful interests have all been backing the uprising since long before violence even broke out last year.”

In a story covering the violence of the Syrian uprising, the BBC added credibility to the accusations:

The al-Qaeda-styled group in Syria is Jabhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham (the Front for the Protection of the Syrian People).

Like other al-Qaeda affiliated groups, al-Nusra's statements and videos are usually issued by its own media group, al-Manara al-Baida (the White Minaret) in Syria.

Al-Nusra has claimed responsibility for several attacks against the Syrian army, security and shabiha (state-sponsored thugs) since it announced its formation early this year.

Finally, under a headline reading "Al-Qaida turns tide for rebels in battle for eastern Syria,” the Guardian (U.K.) reported:

They try to hide their presence. "Some people are worried about carrying the [black] flags," said Abu Khuder. "They fear America will come and fight us. So we fight in secret. Why give Bashar and the west a pretext?" But their existence is common knowledge in Mohassen. Even passers-by joke with the men about car bombs and IEDs [improvised explosive devices].

According to Abu Khuder, his men are working closely with the military council that commands the Free Syrian Army brigades in the region. "We meet almost every day," he said. "We have clear instructions from our [al-Qaida] leadership that if the FSA need our help we should give it. We help them with IEDs and car bombs. Our main talent is in the bombing operations." Abu Khuder's men had a lot of experience in bomb-making from Iraq and elsewhere, he added.

Regardless of Rand Paul’s efforts to keep the U.S. from running headlong into an armed conflict in Syria and his accurate depiction of the duplicity of those Syrian opposition forces waiting for the shipment of weapons from the United States, the Senate is speedily moving toward awarding al-Qaeda with crates of technologically advanced U.S. weaponry.

The Menendez-Corker bill will now move to Senate floor for debate by the entire body. A member of the staff of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told The New American that he was unsure when the bill would be put on the calendar.

Related Articles:

Top Syrian Rebel Group Merges With Al-Qaeda in Iraq

U.S. Increases Aid to Syrian Rebel Forces, Again

Reports: U.S. Personnel Arming and Training Syrian Rebels

UN Investigator Claims Evidence Syrian Rebels Used Sarin Gas

Most Arms Shipments to Syria Go to Jihadists

Federal Europe Coming Soon, EU Boss Says

FrankRep — Sat, 25 May 2013 19:39:10 GMT

TNA's 1989 Prediction Coming True:

The United States of Europe

The architects of the European Common Market, including members of the Council on Foreign Relations, (CFR), deceived the people of Europe concerning the secret agenda of socialism and federalism in the plans for the European Union.

===

European Commission President Jos� Barroso said this week a federal Europe ruled from Brussels will be a reality in a few years, sparking furious criticism.

Federal Europe Coming Soon, EU Boss Says

The New American
10 May 2013

Former Maoist revolutionary and current European Commission President Jos� Manuel Barroso (shown) declared this week that a federal Europe ruled by the European Union from Brussels would be a “reality within a few years,” sparking furious criticism from Europeans and renewed calls in Britain and other countries to withdraw from the increasingly power-hungry EU. Whether the formerly sovereign member states use the controversial single euro currency or not, Barroso announced, all of the 27 EU governments will be ensnared in the dubious project.

While acknowledging that today the idea of a federal regime ruling over Europe may seem like “political science fiction” to many, the commission chief echoed previous statements claiming that a “federation” was all but inevitable — and coming soon. It was not immediately clear whether Barroso believed the peoples of the bloc would be consulted about the radical change. In the announcement, the former communist said plans for the federalization of the continent would be unveiled by next spring, prior to the 2014 elections for the so-called European Parliament.

The process is already well underway, Barroso suggested, pointing to the emerging eurozone “fiscal union” that he claimed would lead to a "intensified political union" between all of the 27 formerly independent nations. "This is about the economic and monetary union but for the EU as a whole," the EC chief said in a speech, with the U.K. Telegraph reporting that the radical statements had “fanned the flames” in the raging British debate over continued membership in the controversial bloc.

"The commission will, therefore, set out its views and explicit ideas for treaty change in order for them to be debated before the European elections," Barroso continued. "We want to put all the elements on the table, in a clear and consistent way, even if some of them may sound like political science fiction today. They will be reality in a few years' time."

According to Barroso and other anti-sovereignty extremists plotting to foist an all-powerful regime on Europe, the eurozone’s adoption of a federalist system in fiscal and economic matters will eventually require complimentary political structures. The “political union,” the argument goes, would ultimately ensnare every member state, regardless of whether or not it uses the euro.

"Further economic integration would transcend the limits of the intergovernmental method of running the EU and the eurozone in particular," Barroso alleged. “We must remember that the present configuration of the euro area is only temporary, since all member states but two [the UK and Denmark, which have opt-outs] are destined to become full members of the Economic and Monetary Union under the Treaties.”

Speaking during the opening speech at the “Conference on the Blueprint for a deep and genuine EMU,” Barroso spent some time with the obligatory nod to “democracy” and “accountability.” However, despite claiming to care about what people think and harping on the need to have a “debate,” the commission chief all but demanded that European nations give up all power and authority to Brussels as soon as possible. It “will” be a “reality” within a few years, he claimed.

“Fiscal union, banking union and political union; all three need to move forward together,” Barroso demanded, adding that the people essentially would have to be brought along as well. “Europe's economic interdependence — so strikingly highlighted by the financial crisis — calls for increased political integration. We will not get away with half-hearted solutions any more, and half-integrated institutions will no longer do.”

Unsurprisingly, Barroso called on attendees — “distinguished members of the European Parliament, of national parliaments, ambassadors, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen” — to “seize” the opportunity. Blasting critics of the EU and ever closer so-called “integration,” the EC boss claimed that with enough convincing, the peoples of Europe would soon be ready to live under a supreme Brussels-based regime.

"This is why I believe the mainstream forces in European politics must seize the initiative, should leave their comfort zone to welcome and embrace this debate, rather than relinquish the momentum to euroskeptic or europhobic forces," Barroso said, referring to EU critics and even hesitant skeptics while suggesting that they were not part of the mainstream. "If you believe in the democratic resilience of Europe, if you take Europe's citizens seriously, you have to fight with rational arguments and unwavering convictions — and be convinced, as I am personally, that these will win the debate for us in the end."

For decades, the European “project” was sold as just a common market aimed at increasing trade and prosperity. Everyone who suggested that something bigger might be in the pipeline was immediately attacked as a “conspiracy theorist,” fear monger, or worse. In recent years, however, perhaps convinced that there is no turning back at this point, EU officials and even national leaders have been far more brazen about the agenda to smash national sovereignty.

In October of last year, for example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a push to give Brussels veto power over national governments’ budgets. "We have made good progress on strengthening fiscal discipline with the fiscal pact but we are of the opinion, and I speak for the whole German government on this, that we could go a step further by giving Europe real rights of intervention in national budgets," she told the Bundestag lower house, drawing swift criticism.

Merkel’s plan, supported by more than a few European leaders, would give the EU more power than even the out-of-control U.S. federal government. Her announcement came shortly after Barroso declared that Europe needed to move toward a full-blown “federation” during his “state of the union” speech, adding that changes to the treaties that form the basis of the EU’s purported legitimacy were “unavoidable.” Socialist French President Francois Hollande also claimed there was “no choice” but to “march toward a unified Europe.”

Despite support from top political leaders, EU-funded organizations, and media elites, the push to openly abolish national sovereignty and self-government has also sparked an increasingly fierce backlash. Then-Czech President Vaclav Klaus, for example, said last year that the EU’s bid to destroy democracy throughout Europe might be in its final phases. He also blasted the fact that the Czech Republic joined a union, not a federation, when it agreed to participate in the EU almost a decade ago.

"We need to think about how to restore our statehood and our sovereignty. That is impossible in a federation,” Klaus explained in an interview with the U.K. Sunday Telegraph, adding that the EU should be moving in the “opposite” direction. "Especially after our Communist experience, we know, very strongly and possibly more than people in Western Europe, that the process of democracy is more important than the outcome. It is an irony of history — I would never have assumed in 1989 that I would be doing this now: that it would be my role to preach the value of democracy."

In the United Kingdom, where polls show most people want to leave the EU and the vast majority of Britons are deeply unhappy about the scheme, the outrage has been particularly fierce. After Barroso’s latest speech, leading Conservative Party Parliamentarian Douglas Carswell said the EC president was “delusional,” adding that the mainstream sentiment in Britain was to leave the EU. “Only career politicians and other weirdos believe we should be run by Brussels,” MP Carswell added.

Increasingly harsh anti-EU sentiment has also sent the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which advocates a British withdrawal, soaring in the polls. UKIP leader and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Nigel Farage recently said that Britain leaving the EU "now appears to be pretty much inevitable, it's just a question of when." If a referendum were held today — one has been promised by 2017 — he believes Britons would vote to secede by a 10 to 15 percent margin.

"I think in the end, what is going to break up the eurozone is going to be violence on a very large scale in those Mediterranean countries," Farage told an Australian television program before Barroso’s controversial speech. “The European Union has now become the new communism,” he continued, adding that some 75 percent of the laws governing Britain come from Brussels. Speaking to the European “Parliament,” Farage compared EU leaders, many of whom he previously identified as “former” communists, to “common criminals” for looting people’s bank accounts in Cyprus.

The New American magazine and its predecessor publications have been warning for decades that the so-called “European project” was eventually aimed at abolishing national sovereignty on the continent — ideas that were long blasted as mere “conspiracy theories” by the very same forces that were quietly working to build a federal Europe all along. Now that even top EU bosses are openly talking about it and claiming that the scheme is inevitable, it remains to be seen whether the peoples of Europe will finally rise up and put a stop to it. Meanwhile, Obama and the EU are working to bring “North America” into the bloc too.

Related articles:

1989 - The United States of Europe

2013 - Secretly Trading Away Our Independence

2009 - EU-U.S. Integration: Unattractive Union

2013 - CFR Applauds European Union's "Real Subversion of Sovereignty"

2011 - EU Creates "Dictatorship" Under Guise of Financial Stability

2012 - Europe Must Further Centralize Fiscal Power, Claims Fed Boss Bernanke

2013 - Obama Pushing Trans-Atlantic Union with EU

The United States of Europe

FrankRep — Sat, 25 May 2013 18:57:34 GMT

TNA's 1989 Predictions Coming True:

2013 - Secretly Trading Away Our Independence

2013 - Federal Europe Coming Soon, EU Boss Says

2009 - EU-U.S. Integration: Unattractive Union

2013 - CFR Applauds European Union's "Real Subversion of Sovereignty"

===

The architects of the European Common Market, including members of the Council on Foreign Relations, (CFR), deceived the people of Europe concerning the secret agenda of socialism and federalism in the plans for the European Union.

The United States of Europe

The New American
April 10, 1989

This article first appeared in the April 10, 1989 print edition of The New American, providing seminal research that exposed the hidden agenda behind the developing European Economic Community. Not only did Mr. Jasper present crucially important information that was almost completely unknown at that time, even to generally well-informed Americans and Europeans, concerning the individuals and organizations pushing for European "integration," but he also accurately "projected the lines" — decades ahead of other analysts — presciently sounding the warning that false appeals to free market rhetoric were masking a plan for socialism and the destruction of personal liberty and national independence for the nations of Europe. With the White House and Congress now considering action on legislation for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), to further entangle the United States with the European Union, this article from 24 years ago is more relevant than ever. — The Editor

1992. In the minds of most Americans, the year probably holds no significance beyond being another presidential election year, and the occasion of another Olympic Games. Increasingly though, Americans will begin to realize that fast-approaching year carries far greater political and economic significance.

Readers of business publications and economic journals have already seen a surge of articles heralding 1992 as the year of the "European market," as a benchmark period during which a host of trade barriers and other restrictions among the 12 countries of the European Community, or Common Market, will come tumbling down. Nineteen ninety-two is the year that the Single European Act (SEA) goes into effect. That act, agreed to by the 12 member states in 1986, calls for the establishment of "an area without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital is ensured."

"With progress toward a single market, European industry will be able to achieve greater economies of scale," said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury M. Peter McPherson in an address to the Institute for International Economics in 1988. "The demands of competition will spur technological innovation and greater productivity. The program can help stimulate growth and employment, reduce consumer prices, and raise standards of living throughout Europe." McPherson added: "The force that will drive this transformation is opportunity -- the opportunity to compete in a larger and freer marketplace. European manufacturers today face a myriad of obstacles to trade with other member states, ranging from profound differences in regulatory and tax systems to varying national technical standards. For example, an electronics company in the Netherlands now has to meet 12 separate sets of technical standards to be able to sell throughout the Community."

Free Market Rhetoric

Dr. Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman from Texas and recent candidate for U.S. President on the Libertarian Party ticket, is one of those who sees that approaching milestone very differently. Long an ardent champion of free market economics, he warns that the movement toward European "union" and "integration" is a statist scheme cloaked in free-market rhetoric that is likely to "produce a monster." "International statists have long dreamed of a world currency and a world central bank," wrote Dr. Paul in the October 1988 issue of The Free Market, published by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. "Now it looks as if their dream may come true."

In his essay, "The Coming World Central Bank," Paul commented:

European governments have targeted 1992 for abolishing individual European currencies and replacing them with the European Currency Unit, the Ecu. Next they plan to set up a European central bank. The next step is the merger of the Federal Reserve, the European central bank and the Bank of Japan into one world central bank....

The European central bank (ECB) will be modeled after the Federal Reserve. Like the Fed in 1913, it will have the institutional appearance of decentralization, but also like the Fed it will be run by a cartel of big bankers in collusion with politicians at the expense of the public.

Of course, the much-touted "free-market reforms" are really only bait laid out to entice Europeans into the trap of an (eventually) all-powerful supranational government. Many of the coming reforms are laudable in and of themselves and will indeed bring genuine market benefits to the people of Common Market countries. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), for instance, will lose its monopoly on television broadcasting, which will both allow viewers in the U.K. access to foreign programming and encourage the growth of domestic private sector television stations. Financial services will be revolutionized by the invigorating winds of competition, as banks and corporations are given freer rein to operate across national borders. Powerful national unions will lose their strangleholds on vital economic sectors. Air travel should become more affordable as the European air carrier industry is opened to free competition.

Short-Lived Reforms

However, these reforms, if they do come about, will likely be short-lived. The reason is that the Single European Act has committed the 12 member nations to increased political and monetary integration, meaning an increased shift of sovereign powers from national capitals to the Common Market institutions in Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg. These institutions are controlled by Keynesian interventionists, socialists, and internationalists.

In the European Parliament, where the 518 elected deputies sit in political, not national, groupings, the Socialist Group is by far the largest force, with 165 members. It is followed by the European People's Party Group (114 members), the European Democratic Group (66 members), the Communist and Allies Group (48 members), the Liberal Democratic and Reformist Group (44 members), the Group of the European Democratic Alliance (29 members), the Group of the European Right (16 members), and the Non-Attached (15).

The makeup of the European Community Commission and the Council of Ministers, the institutions with the real legislative and executive power, is no better. They are dominated by men like Commission President Jacques Delors, a former French Finance Minister who is leading the push for a European central bank, as well as other assaults on national sovereignty; Commissioner Willy de Clercq, a member of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission and, as the Common Market's trade minister, a leading proponent of Western financial and technological assistance to the Communist bloc; Commissioner Karl-Heinz Narjes, who also is a Trilateralist; Italian Socialist Carlo Ripa di Meana, the Commissioner now in charge of "environment and nuclear security"; and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who urges Europeans "to take Mr. Gorbachev seriously, to take him at his word," passes out "I like Gorby" buttons, and champions unilateral Western disarmament.

Formally known as the European Community, the Common Market is the direct creation of individuals and organizations that have been involved in various utopian and conspiratorial schemes to establish a world government, a "New World Order," for the better part of this century.

In the aftermath of World War I, world leaders met in Paris in 1919 to settle war claims, redraw the face of Europe, and hammer out what became the Treaty of Versailles. President Woodrow Wilson came to the Peace Conference with his famous "fourteen points," the spring-board that helped launch the League of Nations. Among those who accompanied Wilson to the Conference were his ever-present advisor and mentor Colonel Edward M. House and three young men who were destined to play key roles in the forming of a United Europe: John Foster Dulles, Allen W. Dulles, and Christian A. Herter -- Mr. Wilson's "Brain Trust."

According to Wilson and House biographers, it was the mysterious Colonel House (an advocate of "Socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx") who actually drew up the "fourteen points," drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations, assembled the "Brain Trust," and imbued Wilson with the vision of a socialist one-world government. Be that as it may, the Wilson-House dream of the League as a nascent world superstate came to naught when the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty as a dangerous assault on our Constitution and our national sovereignty.

The Council on Foreign Relations

Realizing that the American public and the U.S. Congress were not sufficiently "internationalist-minded," and that such "outdated" concepts as the nation-state, patriotism, inalienable personal rights, constitutionally-limited government, and a foreign policy with "no entangling alliances" were still widely and tenaciously adhered to, Colonel House and his fellow internationalists set about to change the American consciousness. In 1921 they established the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York as a "study group" on foreign relations. Drawing together influential one-world-minded men from high finance, industry, the news media, politics, and academe, the CFR soon became the dominant force directing American foreign policy and promoting centralized government planning and socialism at home and abroad. Men like Rockefeller, Morgan, Aldrich, Baruch, Warburg, and Lippmann provided financial backing, prestige, and political clout to the new organization dedicated to building "international order."

A sister organization of similar purpose, and comprised of an equally impressive array of monied and titled persons, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, also known as Chatham House) was established in Britain. Both of these powerful, dynastic groups grew out of a dinner at the Hotel Majestic in Paris attended by European and American internationalists at the Versailles Conference in 1919. They set up additional branch organizations in other European, and then Asian, countries to spread the gospel of world government.

With the failure of the Senate to ratify U.S. entry into the League of Nations, the CFR-RIIA establishment threw support to (and, indeed, initiated) efforts to unify the war-ravaged nations of Europe under a supranational, regional government as an interim arrangement on the way toward a completed world government. The arguments in favor of a United Europe were the same as those advanced for the League: that the chief cause of the just-concluded Great War was "rampant nationalism," and that the only solution was the surrender of certain prerogatives of national sovereignty to a higher international authority. In truth, the causes of the war had far less to do with the unrestrained appetites of nation-states than with the conspiratorial machinations of the same internationalist insiders who were planning and advocating an "end to nationhood."

Monnet's Mercurial Rise

European heads of state and heads of government gathered in solemn ceremony at the Pantheon in Paris on November 9, 1988 to inter the remains of Jean Monnet, the French internationalist who is often called "the Father of Europe." The ceremony marking the centennial of his birth high-lighted the numerous tributes to the principal architect of the Common Market.

Jean Omar Marie Gabriel Monnet was born in Cognac, the son of a brandy merchant. In 1910, at the age of 20, he was sent to Canada by his father to open new markets for the family business. Hooking up with the Hudson Bay Company and the Lazard Brothers banking house, two of the most eminent Establishment companies, the parvenu Frenchman was given entr�e into the high British circles of power and soon became the prot�g� of the Anglo-American insiders. Thus began the mercurial rise of Jean Monnet, who -- though lacking even the equivalent of a high school diploma -- was to become a renowned wizard of high finance, a political mastermind, and a confidant and advisor to presidents and prime ministers.

Through the influence of French Foreign Minister Etienne Clementel, Monnet gained an exclusive and very lucrative contract for shipping vital mat�riels from Canada to France during the First World War. Following that conflagration, he was appointed to a seat on the Allied Supreme Economic Council, made an advisor to the committee preparing the Treaty of Versailles, and introduced to that closed group around Colonel House that was preparing the way for the emerging League of Nations. In 1919, he became an international figure at the age of 29, with his appointment as Deputy Secretary-General of the League. Biographers Merry and Serge Bromberger write: "Behind the scenes he helped to arrange the appointment of the French Socialist Albert Thomas as head of the International Labor Organization." They also record Monnet as boasting: "I've always voted Socialist, except on one occasion." That single exception was in the 1965 presidential election, when he publicly supported Jean Lecanuet, who championed a federated Europe.

In 1925 Monnet moved to America to accept a partnership with the Blair Foreign Corporation, a New York bank that had done bonanza business in the "war effort." From there he went on to become vice president of Transamerica, the giant San Francisco holding company that owned Bank of America.

Coudenhove's Pan Europa

At that time there were many campaigns underway to create a United States of Europe. In 1923, Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi of Austria published his book, Pan Europa; three years later he organized his first Pan European Congress in Vienna. By the end of the 1920s, branches of the Pan European Union were operating throughout the continent and Britain.

In his piercing critique of Coudenhove's Pan European idea (How Can Europe Survive, New York: Van Nostrand, 1955), the eminent free-market economist Hans F. Sennholz observed that there is no getting around "the fact that his plan is a scheme for the attainment of wholesale socialism in Europe." (Emphasis in the original) Nevertheless, it received the support and patronage of many of Europe's leading statesmen and men of letters, not to mention that of the Anglo-American Establishment.

One of Count Coudenhove's most important disciples was Aristide Briand, who between 1909 and 1930 was Socialist Premier of France 11 times and Minister of Foreign Affairs 12 times. Briand, in 1930, unveiled a plan for "European Union" that provided for a regional supranational union within the League of Nations. It failed not because of antipathy to the idea, but largely because of differences of opinion among the various socialist and integrationist factions on the best means to accomplish the shared goal. That same year, another important apostle of Coudenhove's Pan Europa, Sir Winston Churchill, wrote an essay titled, "The United States of Europe," that was aimed at winning support for the idea from the American public. It was published in the February 15th issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

Coudenhove spent the devastating years of World War II in the United States. "In seeking to persuade America, once she becomes a belligerent, to adopt European unity as one of her war aims," says the Count's colleague and hagiographer, Arnold J. Zurcher, in The Struggle to Unite Europe, 1940-1958, "Count Coudenhove enlisted the cooperation of certain leading American citizens whom he had interested in his movement some years prior to his enforced wartime sojourn." These "leading citizens" -- all CFR heavies -- were: Nicholas Murray Butler, president of both Columbia University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Dr. Stephen Duggan, founder and first president of the International Institute of Education, a CFR-controlled internationalist propaganda operation; and William C. Bullitt, ambassador to the U.S.S.R. and to France.

With the help of these high-powered patrons, Coudenhove and Zurcher obtained positions at New York University, where, for the remainder of the war years, they held graduate seminars devoted exclusively to the problems of European federation. Their CFR contacts aided greatly in obtaining favorable media coverage. "The New York press, for example, was wholly sympathetic," wrote Zurcher, "both major morning dailies, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, having given generous space to reporting the Count's occasional public utterances and to the efforts of the New York University seminar on federation." Due to the academic respectability conferred by the NYU seminars and the popular dissemination of their ideas by a friendly press, said Zurcher, "For the first time in the twentieth century, the slogan 'United States of Europe' had become something more than a label for hortatory idealism."

Monnet Pushes Lend-Lease

While Coudenhove-Kalergi and sidekick Zurcher labored among the intelligentsia and the captains and kings of industry in New York, Citizen Monnet was shuttling back and forth among Washington, Paris, and London on transatlantic diplomatic missions for French Premier Edouard Daladier, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and General De Gaulle. It was Monnet who gave Roosevelt the slogan that he was later to use in one of his fireside chats: "America will be the great arsenal of democracy." "Monnet was above all a public relations man," say biographers Merry and Serge Bromberger. "He was particularly close to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's right-hand man. Through Hopkins he became President Roosevelt's personal advisor on Europe."

The Roosevelt-Hopkins relationship has often been compared to that between Wilson and House, one of almost total dependence of the President upon a mysterious, shadowy advisor. Hopkins, like House, admired Communism and played a key role in formulating many of the pro-Soviet policies of the Roosevelt Administration that proved so disastrous for the United States and the Free World. He and Monnet worked together famously. Mr. Bloch-Morhange, writing in the authoritative Information Et Conjectures of March 1957, summed up the French internationalist's pro-Communist record thusly: "Never in his long career has Jean Monnet a single time criticized the Soviet Union publicly." According to the Brombergers, "behind the scenes Monnet played an important role in the negotiations that prepared the ground for lend-lease," the operation that funneled to the USSR massive infusions of war mat�riel and money, as well as the blueprints and nuclear materials that enabled the Soviets to develop the atomic bomb. The lend-lease program was supervised by Harry Hopkins.

Clarence Streit, a Rhodes scholar and correspondent for the New York Times, published his book, Union Now, in 1939, on the eve of World War II. In it, he advocated immediate political union among the U.S., Britain, Canada, and other Atlantic "democracies," and then, finally, world union. It was avidly praised in the CFR-dominated press, and by 1949 had been translated into several languages, selling more than 300,000 copies. Union Now and Union Now With Britain, published in 1941, gave rise to a sizable Federal Union movement (which later changed its name to Atlantic Union Committee and still later to the Atlantic Council of the United States), the leadership of which has always been top-heavy with CFR members. In 1941, Streit's Federal Union proposed the adoption of a joint resolution by Congress favoring immediate union with the aforementioned Atlantic states. The resolution had been written by John Foster Dulles (CFR), who was later to become Eisenhower's Secretary of State and a key player in the formation of Monnet's united Europe.

One of the most ambitious visionary schemes of this period was put forth in a book titled Plan for a Permanent Peace, by Hans Heymann, a German economist and refugee with a research and teaching post at Rutgers University. Funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a major pillar of the CFR establishment, the book asserted: "Nations have created international disharmony in the vain belief that harmony in our society can be achieved on a national basis .... This narrow-minded attitude has left us one strong hope, namely, that this fallacious concept may hold only during a transitional period .... After the debacle [World War II] an international organization will be imperative for the well-being of society as a whole." Herr Heymann proceeded then to unveil his detailed scheme for a global superstate headed by a Federal World Authority, a Bank of Nations (with three branches: the Hemisphere Bank, the Europa Bank, and the Oriental Bank) and a World Army, Navy, and Air Force. Plan for a Permanent Peace includes several impressive fold-out maps and diagrams detailing the monstrous bureaucracy that would regiment the hapless citizens of the proposed planetary union.

An End to Nationhood

At the conclusion of World War II, the myriad of organizations, individuals, movements, and publications advocating various models of global governance all coalesced in a concerted crusade to insure U.S. adoption of the United Nations charter. Once that was accomplished, however, they returned to campaigning for what Walt W. Rostow (CFR) endorsed as "an end to nationhood," since the United Nations could never become a genuine world government as long as member nations retained any vestige of sovereignty and autonomy.

Winston Churchill and his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, led the United Europe Movement, which convened a Congress of Europe at The Hague from May 7 to 10, 1948. While world attention focused on the glittering assembly of current and former heads of state -- Churchill, Leon Blum, Aicide de Gasperi, Paul Henri Spaak, et al -- it was Jean Monnet and the mysterious Polish socialist, Joseph Retinger, bon vivant and globe-trotting master of political intrigue, who ran the show. One of the accomplishments of The Hague Congress was the adoption of seven Resolutions on Political Union. Resolution number seven stated: "The creation of a United Europe must be regarded as an essential step towards the creation of a United World."

General George C. Marshall, then Truman's Secretary of State, delivered a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947 that detailed the suffering and privation of war-ravaged Europe and called for an American response. Thus was launched the European Recovery Program (ERP), better known as the Marshall Plan -- a massive foreign aid program intended to reconstruct Europe along "cooperative," i.e., internationalist and socialist, lines.

The ERP, however, did not originate with General Marshall, but rather with Jean Monnet and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Brombergers write that, prior to the Harvard speech, Marshall sent assistants H.G. Clayton and George F. Kennan (CFR) to confer with Monnet, and that Marshall himself conferred at length with Monnet at the Paris Peace Conference. Laurence Shoup and William Minter reported in their study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust: "In 1946-1947 lawyer Charles M. Spofford headed a [CFR study] group, with banker David Rockefeller as secretary, on Reconstruction in Western Europe: in 1947-1948 that body was retitled the Marshall Plan." David Rockefeller would go on to head Chase Manhattan Bank, serve as Chairman of the Board of the CFR from 1970-1985, launch the Trilateral Commission, and in numerous other ways promote global "interdependence."

Selling the Marshall Plan

The immediate problem of the Marshall Planners was to sell the idea to Congress. Considerable opposition to the scheme was being aroused, led principally by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, former President Herbert Hoover, and free-market economist and commentator for Newsweek, Henry Hazlitt. Taft, et al, argued that the proposed program would force U.S. taxpayers to subsidize the socialist policies of European governments -- nationalizing of industries, central planning, wage and price controls, excessive taxation, trade restrictions, burdensome regulation, currency devaluation -- just the opposite of what was needed to help Europe recover from the war's devastation. They argued instead in favor of a program that would unleash private enterprise to solve Europe's economic problems.

The establishment responded by organizing an impressive assemblage of notables to campaign for the ERP. "The leadership of this group," says Michael J. Hogan, professor of history at Ohio State University and editor of Diplomatic History, "came largely from academic circles, from the major American trade unions, and from such business organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Business Advisory Council (BAC), the Committee for Economic Development (CED) and the National Planning Association (NPA)." They believed in the "New Deal synthesis" and accepted the need for greater economic planning and for Keynesian strategies of fiscal and monetary management. These four organizations, says Hogan, "played an important role in shaping and promoting the ERP":

They published briefs on behalf of the program. Their spokesmen testified before relevant congressional committees. They served on the President's Committee on Foreign Aid, on the Harriman Committee, and on the Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery, a private, nonpartisan organization composed of labor, farm, and business leaders who worked closely with government officials to mobilize support behind the ERP. The result was something like a coordinated campaign mounted by an interlocking directorate of public and private figures. Of the nineteen people on the executive board of the Marshall Plan Committee, eight were members of the CFR and two of these eight were also members of the BAC, CED, or NPA. Included in this list were Allen W. Dulles, president of the CFR, and Philip Reed, chairman of the board of General Electric. Former Secretaries of War Henry L. Stimson and Robert P. Patterson, along with former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, also served on the executive board....

Anti-Communist Rhetoric

However, even with this massive, well-orchestrated campaign, the ERP advocates did not have it easy. They had originally packaged the plan as a humanitarian operation to alleviate the suffering, starvation, and devastation caused by the war. But Congress was not so willing to accept that Europe's economic woes could be solved by American taxpayers' dollars. So the Insiders changed to a different tack: They said U.S. aid was urgently needed to protect Western Europe from the threat of Communism. "People sat up and listened when the Soviet threat was mentioned," said John J. McCloy (president of the CFR from 1953-1970). McCloy, who served as U.S. High Commissioner to Germany after the war and as a central figure in the ERP effort never demonstrated any antipathy towards Communism, said that this taught him a valuable lesson: "One way to assure that a viewpoint gets noticed is to cast it in terms of resisting the spread of Communism." President Truman also admitted to paying lip-service to anti-Communism in order to win support for his aid plan. When Secretary of State Marshall cabled Truman, concerned that the president's "Truman Doctrine" speech was too anti-Communist in tone, "The reply came back from Truman: without the rhetoric, Congress would not approve of the money."

The deception worked, and Congress did indeed approve the money: some $13 billion dollars for the Marshall Plan, and tens of billions more through various other reconstruction programs. From the close of World War II through 1953, the United States Government poured more than 43 billion dollars into Europe. Professor Hans Sennholz describes it as a "windfall for socialism" and in How Can Europe Survive details the myriad of destructive government programs and wasteful state-owned monopolies that swallowed up these enormous funds while thwarting real economic growth and progress.

In the ERP, European socialists and one-worlders had hit on a veritable bonanza, and American Establishment Insiders had hit on a scheme that gave them the leverage they needed to push independent-minded European governments in a "cooperative" direction. "American officials interfered with foreign governments which endeavored to abolish controls and return to sounder principles of government," says Dr. Sennholz. "American Fair-Deal officials repeatedly exerted pressure on the Belgian and German governments to inflate their national currencies at a greater degree and create more credit through simple expansion. Fortunately for these nations, their governments usually resisted this Fair-Deal pressure."

Through American aid, says Professor Hogan, "and particularly through the use of counterpart funds, Marshall Planners tried to underwrite industrial modernization projects, promote Keynesian strategies of aggregate economic management ... encourage progressive tax policies, low cost housing programs, and other measures of economic and social reform." From its very inception, the ERP's main purpose was to destroy the European nation states by merging them into a regional government.

The early planning for the program was carried out by a special agency under the direction of George Kennan, called the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC). One of the concerns of the agency, says Hogan, was "to consider how national sovereignties might be transcended." As Joseph Jones, who attended the meetings, recalled, the State Department's economic officers encouraged committee members to think of Europe as a whole and to administer aid so as to foster economic unification.

The Fulbright Resolution

Of course, not everyone advocating the abolition of Europe's sovereign governments was so subtle. Some took a head-on approach. On March 21, 1947, before Marshall had made his Harvard speech, Senators William Fulbright and Elbert D. Thomas submitted to Congress the following concurrent resolution: "Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring) that Congress favors the creation of a United States of Europe." The CFR-Insider press sprang forth to champion the incredibly arrogant Fulbright resolution. According to the March 17, 1947 issue of Life magazine (whose publisher, Henry Luce, was a leading CFR member), "our policy should be to help the nations of Europe federate as our states federated in 1787." "Europe desperately needs some effective form of political and economic federation," wrote Sumner Welles (CFR) in the Washington Post, owned by Eugene Meyer (CFR). The Christian Science Monitor (long a CFR mouthpiece) of April 28, 1947 advised: "For its part, the US could hardly impose federation on Europe, but it could counsel .... It could mold its leading and occupational policies toward upbuilding a single continental economy." The New York Times (the CFR's most influential organization) of April 18, 1947 editorialized: "But it is only too true ... that Europe must federate or perish." The St. Louis Post Dispatch of March 16, 1947 declared that "for Europe it is a case of join -- or die."

Cooler heads among the "brain trust," however, realized that any attempt at openly forcing a European federation would stir nationalist resistance and resentment in Europe, and would rightly be viewed as American imperialism. They had to make it appear that the call for a United States of Europe was coming from "the people" of Europe themselves.

The most informative account of the role of America's Insider Establishment in organizing the movement for a United Europe can be found in a six-part report on the Common Market that appeared in installments in the authoritative H. du B. Reports during 1972 and 1973. Written by the distinguished Hilaire du Berrier, who has been publishing his highly respected intelligence reports from Europe for more than 30 years, the "Story of the Common Market" series detailed the intrigues of the American CFR-Atlantic Council-Bilderberger-Trilateral Commission coterie and their European accomplices in their campaign for a supranational European government. In part five of his series, du Berrier related a story from the diary of Joseph Retinger that illustrates how the CFR's agents built the movement for European merger. Retinger was seeking more funds for the European Movement, which was headed at the time by Belgian Prime Minister Paul Henri Spaak, who was known as "Mr. Socialist":

Retinger and Duncan Sandys, the British Eurocrat, went to see John J. McCloy, who in 1947 was American High Commissioner to Germany. McCloy, we learn from Retinger's diary, embraced the idea at once. Sheppard Stone, who was on McCloy's staff, and Robert Murphy, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, whom Retinger called one of the European Movement's best supporters, joined McCloy in raiding the huge reserve of European currencies called "counter-part funds" which had piled up as a result of Marshall Plan aid .... McCloy, Stone and Murphy "promptly and unhesitatingly put ample funds at the disposal of Paul Henri Spaak," Retinger recorded.

It was the same Joseph Retinger who recruited Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to host the meeting at the Hotel Bilderberg in Oosterbeck, Holland in May 1954, that launched the annual secretive Bilderberg conclaves, at which the international ruling elite meet to scheme and palaver.

The Merger Begins

The first concrete step forward in the plan for abolition of the European nation-states came in 1951 with the signing of the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). "This was a truly revolutionary organization," wrote Carroll Quigley, the Insiders' own inside historian, "since it had sovereign powers, including the authority to raise funds outside any existing state's power." The ECSC treaty, which went into force in July 1952, merged the coal and steel industries of six countries (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) under a single high Authority. "This 'supranational' body," observed Professor Quigley in his Tragedy and Hope, "had the right to control prices, channel investment, raise funds, allocate coal and steel .... Its power to raise funds for its own use by taxing each ton produced made it independent of governments. Moreover, its decisions were binding, and could be reached by majority vote without the unanimity required in most international organizations of sovereign states."

The proposal for the ECSC was introduced, amidst great fanfare, in May 1950, as the "Schuman Plan." Although devised by Monsieur Monnet, who was then head of France's General Planning Commission, Monnet thought it expedient to name it for his comrade Robert Schuman, the Socialist French Foreign Minister (and, later, Prime Minister). The American Insiders leapt to praise the Schuman Plan. John Foster Dulles called it "brilliantly creative." Dean Acheson termed it a "major contribution toward resolution of the pressing political and economic problems of Europe." President Truman called it "an act of constructive statesmanship." The Carnegie Foundation awarded Monnet its Wateler Peace Prize of two million francs "in recognition of the international spirit which he had shown in conceiving the Coal and Steel Community .... "Monnet, whom columnist Joseph Alsop (CFR) dubbed "the good, gray wizard of Western European union," was appointed the first president of the powerful new ECSC.

Monnet knew full well just how powerful and revolutionary his new creation was. The Brombergers report in Jean Monnet and the United States of Europe that, when Monnet and his "brain trust" had outlined the basics of the ECSC proposal, they called in legal expert Maurice Lagrange to take care of the detail work:

Lagrange was stunned. An idea of revolutionary daring had been launched and was being acclaimed by the Six and the United States -- a minerals and metals superstate....

The brain trust worked feverishly from ten o'clock in the morning until midnight, without taking Sundays or holidays off, not even Christmas day. Even the secretaries and the office boys were infected by the general excitement, by the feeling that they were part of a fantastic undertaking.

The Brombergers, who are ardent admirers of Monnet, admit the totalitarian mindset of their hero:

Gradually, it was thought, the supranational authorities, supervised by the European Council of Ministers at Brussels and the Assembly in Strasbourg, would administer all the activities of the Continent. A day would come when governments would be forced to admit that an integrated Europe was an accomplished fact, without their having had a say in the establishment of its underlying principles. All they would have to do was to merge all these autonomous institutions into a single federal administration and then proclaim a United States of Europe.

Actually, the founders of the Coal and Steel Community would have to obtain from the various national governments -- justifiably reputed to be incapable of making sacrifices for the sake of a federation -- a whole series of concessions in regard to their sovereign rights until, having been finally stripped, they committed hara-kiri by accepting the merger.

Realizing that some nations might at some point rebel against the "new order," the "good gray wizard" and his Eurocrats sought to establish their own army, which they dubbed the European Defense Community (EDC). After clamoring for national disarmament, the Eurocrat pacifists were now demanding that an independent armed forces, complete with nuclear weapons, be put under their command. The EDC treaty was signed by the six ECSC nations in 1952, but plans for the supranational army fell apart, when, after two years of bitter debate, the treaty was rejected by the French Parliament.

The Treaties of Rome

The next nail in the coffin of national sovereignty came on March 25, 1957 with the signing by the six ECSC nations of the two Treaties of Rome. These created the European Economic Community (EEC, or Common Market) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), which greatly furthered the merging of the economic and energy sectors of the member states. (The ECSC, Euratom, and EEC are now collectively referred to as the European Community or EC.) "The EEC Treaty," said Carroll Quigley, "with 572 articles over almost 400 pages ... looked forward to eventual political union in Europe, and sought economic integration as an essential step on the way." But the merger architects settled on an approach of "patient gradualism"; what Richard N. Gardner (CFR) would later call "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece." According to the late Professor Quigley, "This whole process was to be achieved by stages over many years."

The next stages involved bringing the rest of Western Europe into the fold. In 1973, after more than two decades of resisting, the United Kingdom came in, along with Ireland and Denmark. Greece joined in 1981, bringing the number of member states to ten. Spain and Portugal became the 11th and 12th members in 1986.

"The CFR," wrote du Berrier in January 1973, "saw the Common Market from the first as a regional government to which more and more nations would be added until the world government which [the] UN had failed to bring about would be realized. At a favorable point in the Common Market's development America would be brought in. But the American public had to be softened first and leaders groomed for the change-over."

The CFR spared no expense in aiding its European co-conspirators, especially Jean Monnet, to establish their dreamed-of Brave New World. A very enlightening source on this phenomenon is Insider Ernst H. van der Beugel, Honorary Secretary General of the Bilderberger Group, Vice Chairman of the Netherlands Institute for Foreign Affairs (a CFR affiliate), Harvard lecturer, etc. In his book From Marshall Aid to Atlantic Partnership, van der Beugel explained:

Not only has Monnet been the auctor intellectualis of many steps on the road to European unification, he has also been a driving force in the execution of existing plans.

His most remarkable capacity has been his great influence on the formulation of United States policy towards Europe.

He exercised this influence through a network of close friendships and relationships, some of them going back to the pre-war period.

Diplomatic Bludgeoning

Explaining further the workings of the Monnet-CFR symbiosis, van der Beugel cites examples of the diplomatic bludgeoning of those officials who balked at administering national "hara-kiri." For instance, he reported how Monnet's Action Committee, which was "supported by funds from United States foundations," ramrodded the negotiations for the Rome Treaties:

Monnet and his Action Committee were unofficially supervising the negotiations and as soon as obstacles appeared, the United States diplomatic machinery was alerted, mostly through Ambassador Bruce... who had immediate access to the top echelon of the State Department....

At that time, it was usual that if Monnet thought that a particular country made difficulties in the negotiations, the American diplomatic representative in that country approached the Foreign Ministry in order to communicate the opinion of the American Government which, in practically all cases, coincided with Monnet's point of view.

Monnet's high-level friends, who assisted him in these strong-arm tactics, included President Eisenhower, Dulles, McCloy, Bruce, George Ball, and C. Douglas Dillon.

In his editorial column for April 10, 1976, New York Times publisher C.L. Sulzberger (CFR, Trilateralist, Bilderberger) waxed rhapsodic concerning the emerging European union: "The continent's most splendid dream following World War II has been the European Economic Community or Common Market, which was designed to lead nations that had lost their global influence into a political confederation based on joint trading and financial interests." Sulzberger's paean notwithstanding, the Common Market was clearly designed to lead nations into a suicidal merger.

That design is coming to fruition at a frightening pace. The Single European Act is intended as the measure that will make political and economic union irreversible. Citizens of the Common Market are finding their lives and livelihoods increasingly controlled by Eurocrats in Brussels, even as national governments find their sovereign rights sacrificed under such deliberately vague and ambiguous rubrics as "cooperation," "union," "integration," "convergence," and "harmonization." The SEA will soon make it impossible for member states to block policies that go against national interests. EC Commissioner Willy De Clercq, in a 1987 speech, boasted that the SEA should make it possible for two-thirds of the EC decisions to be made by a qualified majority, in contrast to the 90 percent that previously required unanimous consent.

The principal assaults underway now include the campaigns for a European central bank, led by French President Fran�ois Mitterrand, and the unified value added tax (VAT) being pushed by Jacques Delors. The major opposition to both schemes has come from Britain's Margaret Thatcher. "A European Central Bank, in the only true meaning of the term, means surrendering your economic policy to that banking system," said the British Prime Minister in October of 1988. "I neither want nor expect ever to see such a bank in my lifetime -- nor, if I am twanging a harp -- for quite a long time afterwards."

But there are indications that the "Iron Lady" may have weakened on this matter. Du Berrier, in a recent telephone interview with THE NEW AMERICAN, expressed grave concern over rumors that Mrs. Thatcher "may have cut some sort of deal with Mitterrand on the issues of a central bank and a common currency" during her visit with the French socialist president in Paris at the end of February.

World Union of Socialist Republics

Another dangerous development that has been incubating for several years and is now fast approaching is the admission of European Communist-bloc countries into the EC. "Communist Hungary will probably be the first, or perhaps, East Germany," du Berrier believes. "Since January 1987, the European Parliament has had a permanent delegation, headed by Madame Deputy Anne-Marie Lizia, a Belgian socialist, negotiating with Moscow and other Communist capitals on the subject of Common Market membership. It is now being openly advocated." This coincides with the increasing trade and economic covergence between the Common Market and the Soviet-led trading bloc, Comecon (comprising the USSR, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslavakia, Mongolia, Vietnam and Cuba).

In 1936 the official program of the Communist International, issued in Moscow, declared that "dictatorship can be established only by a victory of socialism in different countries or groups of countries, after which the proletarian republics would unite on federal lines with those already in existence and this system of federal unions would expand ... at length forming the World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

The plans of the CFR-Trilateral-Bilderberger elite for "world order" more and more converge with those laid down by Stalin's Communist International more than 50 years ago.

Related articles:

2013 - Secretly Trading Away Our Independence

2013 - Federal Europe Coming Soon, EU Boss Says

2009 - EU-U.S. Integration: Unattractive Union

2013 - CFR Applauds European Union's "Real Subversion of Sovereignty"

'Multiculturalism failing': Swedish PM pleas for order as riots engulf Stockholm suburbs

FrankRep — Sat, 25 May 2013 13:39:30 GMT

'Multiculturalism failing': Swedish PM pleas for order as riots engulf Stockholm suburbs

RT.com
May 22, 2013

Hundreds youths hurling rocks, burning cars and smashing windows for the second day in a row in Stockholm say they are protesting against police brutality and inequality. In Sweden, critics of the multiculturalism policies lash out at immigration laws.

Seven policemen were injured, at least ten cars and countless containers set on fire, and dozens of windows smashed in several heavily immigrant-populated neighborhoods of the Swedish capital on Tuesday.
...

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Tuesday commented on the matter, urging a halt to the violence, but acknowledged in the short term that may be unlikely.

�We have groups of young men who think that that they can and should change society with violence. Let�s be clear: This is not okay. We cannot be ruled by violence,� Reinfeldt said as cited by the Local.

He also urged �everyone, including parents and adults� to help restore calm.

�Husby residents must get their neighborhood back,� Reinfeldt stressed, speaking of the district, where around 80 percent of about 11,000 residents are first- or second-generation immigrants. This particular district has seen employment increasing and crime falling in the last seven years, Reinfeldt added, speaking of the �right direction� it has been going.
...

But not everyone agreed with Reinfeldt�s assessment of immigrant-populated Swedish districts development, with critics saying the integration policies of the country � and that of the whole of Western Europe � are �not working.�

�This is a clear consequence of this multiculturalism politics that Sweden adopted around �80s and increased in the �90s... And this is not a unique one single occasion� we have had these ethnic-based riots against Swedish authorities. We have seen this in Western Europe, that is very sad, and I think we will see more of this, if we don�t change the politics,� the chairman of the Sweden�s National Democrats Party Marc Abramsson told RT.
...

�Sweden has been trying harder than any of the countries in Europe to try to push for integration. We have invested virtually billions from taxpayers� money into it, we have tried everything that the scientists have presented � and still it�s not working,� the politician argued.
...

-----

Related Articles:

2011 - French President: Multiculturalism Has Failed

French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared Thursday that multiculturalism had failed, joining a growing number of world leaders or ex-leaders who have condemned it.

2011 - British PM: Multiculturalism Has Failed

Over the weekend, British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed the sentiment that multiculturalism in Britain had failed, explaining that residing in Great Britain meant loyalty to its culture, history, and political ideas, such as freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and the rule of law.

2010 - Angela Merkel says German Multicultural Society Has Failed

Germany had "kidded itself" that multiculturalism was working. Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

2010 - Canada National Security: Muslim 'Parallel Society' within Canada a Threat

Islamists aim to build a "parallel society" in Canada that risks undermining its democracy and multiculturalism and becoming a "catalyst for violence," warned a national security report published Monday.

Thomas Sowell

The Multicultural Cult

Somebody eventually had to say it � and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud: Multiculturalism has utterly failed. by Thomas Sowell

The Multicultural Cult: Part II

Cultural differences matter � and they have always mattered, however much that may be denied by the multicultural cult. By Thomas Sowell

Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld.

Multiculturalism: Cultural Insanity Run Amok

The philosophy of Multiculturalism has been around since the 1970s and it now infects every aspect of American life.

Afghan Terrorism: Made in USA ?

enhanced_deficit — Sat, 25 May 2013 04:11:08 GMT

Back when we used to call them "freedom fighters" while they were blowing up Ruissian troops occupying Afghanistan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXb_BUSU91s

Chechen Terrorism: Made in Moscow

FrankRep — Sat, 25 May 2013 03:50:18 GMT

After the Boston Marathon bombing, political pundits claimed we should partner with Russia against terror. But the Kremlin is still the main promoter of terrorism, not its innocent victim.

Chechen Terrorism: Made in Moscow

The New American
24 May 2013

The Boston Marathon bombing has focused America’s attention on Chechnya, a small mountainous country of 1.2 million people in the North Caucasus near the Caspian Sea. As our companion article points out, current and former U.S. government officials, as well as media commentators and so-called terrorism experts, have been making many statements claiming that the Boston terror attack is intimately linked to the ongoing series of terror attacks that have been plaguing Russia for the past decade and a half. All are the work, it is alleged, of Chechen Islamic jihadists demanding independence and an end to Russian occupation of Chechnya.

Many of the stories in the American press have mentioned some of the more spectacular terrorist incidents in Russia that are routinely attributed to Chechen terrorists: the 1999 bombings of a shopping mall and apartment buildings; the 2002 siege of Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater; and the 2004 Beslan school massacre. These and other terror attacks, we are being told, demonstrate that Russia and the United States are facing the same vicious enemy and we must put aside our differences and unite against the common foe.

However, what do the known facts from the cited terror cases in Russia actually show? As we have reported in The New American repeatedly over the past decade (in print and online), the accumulated evidence very convincingly demonstrates that the sensational terror attacks, rather than being the work of Chechen terrorists, were actually “false flag” operations of the Russian intelligence services, the FSB and GRU, designed to serve multiple purposes of the Yeltsin-Putin Kremlin rulers. Those purposes included:

• Covering up and diverting attention from the rampant corruption and massive theft of national wealth by Yeltsin, his family, and his cronies, which was becoming impossible to conceal, both from the Russian people as well as foreign governments, journalists and investors;

• Installing an unknown KGB-FSB operative (Vladimir Putin) and providing him with a “cause” that would build his stature and rally public support around him;

• Providing Putin and the Kremlin leaders with an excuse to make war on Chechnya and focus Russian public attention on an external threat;

• Casting Russia as a victim of terror groups, to encourage the United States and Western Europe to cooperate and converge with Moscow on fighting a common global terror threat.

The Russian Apartment Bombings

In September of 1999, a series of large explosions hit apartment buildings in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buynaksk, killing nearly 300 people, injuring close to 1,000, and leaving thousands homeless. Several additional bombings were averted when explosives were discovered and disarmed before they detonated. Fear and outrage gripped the Russian public. Where and when would the bombers strike next?

In an April 2002 report for the Hudson Institute entitled The Shadow of Ryazan: Who Was Behind the Strange Russian Apartment Bombings in September 1999?, David Satter, the former Russian correspondent for the Financial Times of London and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, provided the backstory context for the deadly drama. He wrote:

In August 1999, on the eve of the bombings, it appeared that the Yeltsin “family” and the rest of the corrupt oligarchy that ruled Russia were facing an unavoidable day of reckoning. As the economic situation in Russia got steadily worse, Yeltsin’s approval rating dropped to 2 percent and an uneasy awareness spread among the persons closely connected to the Yeltsin regime that their positions, their wealth, and possibly their freedom and even their lives were in jeopardy.

Satter continued:

By the summer of 1999, there was reported to be an atmosphere of near panic in the Kremlin, and there were reports that the Yeltsin “family” was planning provocations in Moscow, including acts of terror.... One such report, by Alexander Zhilin, which appeared on July 22 in Moskovskaya Pravda said that there was a plan to destabilize the atmosphere in Moscow by organizing terrorist acts, kidnappings, and a war between criminal clans.

Zhilin’s report of the coming terror wave (codename “Storm in Moscow”) appeared more than a month before the bombings began. However, even prior to Zhilin’s announcement, on June 6, 1999, three months before the bombings, correspondent Jan Blomgren wrote in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that an option being considered by the Kremlin leadership was “a series of terror bombings in Moscow that could be blamed on the Chechens.” A still higher source, Sergei Stepashin, provides an even more startling confession. As reported by Patrick Cockburn, Moscow correspondent for the Independent (U.K.), Stepashin, who was interior minister and prime minister under Yeltsin, said the plan to send the Russian army into Chechnya “had been worked out in March.” In interviews with the daily Nezavissimaya Gazeta and Interfax agency, he says he played a central role in organizing the military buildup before the invasion.

However, one of the most astounding and damning (and almost completely ignored) pieces of evidence concerning foreknowledge of the planned state-terror operation surfaced as a result of operational foul-up. On September 13, just hours after the second explosion in Moscow, Gennadiy Seleznyov of the Communist Party, who was speaker of the Duma at that time, made an extraordinary announcement: “I have just received a report … an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night.” The announcement was so extraordinary because the Volgodonsk bombing would not occur for another 72 hours! Someone at Putin’s FSB had mixed up memos and jumped the gun announcing the “Chechen” terror attack.

Cui Bono?

The Roman orator and statesman Cicero reminds us to always ask concerning any crime, “Cui bono?” — “Who benefits?”, or “To whose benefit?” When applied to the “Chechen” bombings in Russia, the answers are obvious: Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and the current shadowy Kremlin leadership. Certainly the Chechen nationalists did not benefit; the attacks turned Russian public opinion, which was very negative on the costly Chechen war prior to the bombings, into a feverish call for vengeance and a patriotic appeal to defend the homeland against terrorists. Groz*ny, the capital of Chechnya, was pounded into rubble and tens of thousands of civilians were brutally killed. The Russian boot was planted even more firmly on Chechnya’s neck. No Chechen leader or organization took credit for the attack. In fact, Chechnya’s president, Aslan Maskadov, absolutely denied any involvement by his government; Chechen Islamic leaders likewise denied any involvement.

In testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on May 17, 2007, David Satter explained who benefited from the bombings.

“With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution,” said Satter, “a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination.”

Satter continued:

For “Operation Successor” to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September 1999 of the apartment building bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed 300 lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. In the meantime, all talk of reexamining the results of privatization was forgotten.

In his book Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003, Yale University Press), Satter amassed impressive evidence to demonstrate that the “Chechen” terror attacks in Russia were indeed provocations of the Russian intelligence agencies, the FSB and the GRU.

Since then the evidence supporting that thesis has, well, exploded. As Russian expert Amy Knight, whom the New York Times has described as “the West’s foremost scholar” of the KGB, has written, the proof is now “overwhelming” that these terror attacks were the work of the Russian authorities.

Among the major works that have provided important details about the terror provocations are: Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror by FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko and journalist Yuri Felshtinsky (2007); Allegations by Alexander Litvinenko (2007); The Assassination of Russia, a film by Jean-Charles Deniau, based on the book Blowing Up Russia; The Litvinenko File by BBC reporter Martin Sixsmith (2007); Disbelief, a documentary film by Andrei Nekrasov; and The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow John Dunlop (2012).

Unfortunately, none of these works have received the attention they deserve. In fact, they have been studiously ignored or panned by the vast majority of the media’s terrorism “experts.”

Ryazan: The Game Changer

In our January 22, 2007 article, “Putin, Poison, and Murder,” we provided this brief, thumbnail sketch of “The Ryazan Incident”:

On the night of September 22, 1999, an alert resident of an apartment complex in the Russian city of Ryazan reported suspicious activities to local police. Responding, the police found a large quantity of hexogen explosive, timed to detonate at 5:30 the next morning. They evacuated the building and captured some of the bombers, who turned out to be (surprise!) FSB agents. Caught red-handed, the FSB then claimed that this had been merely an “exercise” and the substance was not really hexogen, but sugar. Litvinenko, in his book and in interviews, showed that the planned Ryazan bombing was to be the culminating incident justifying the invasion of Chechnya.

At Ryazan, the bombers were caught red-handed; firm suspicions were now confirmed with solid facts. The perpetrators were not shadowy Chechen terrorists, but FSB agents answering to Putin, the “Savior” who was leading the war against the fabricated foreign enemy.

In the space available here we can merely touch on a small amount of the overwhelming evidence that indicts the Russian government as the real enemy in the ongoing series of provocations in their War on Terror:

• The explosives planted at the Ryazan apartment by the captured FSB agents were of the same type and followed the same modus operandi as in the previous Moscow and Volgodonsk bombings;

• Ryazan police explosives specialist Yuri Tkachenko testified that he had conducted tests on the substances seized and had confirmed the presence of hexogen; it was not sugar;

• Various experts have confirmed that only the Russian military and intelligence services have access to hexogen explosives in Russia — it is next to impossible for independent terrorist groups to acquire it;

• After being repeatedly blocked in attempts to get an official inquiry into Ryazan, Duma members Yuri Shchekochikhin and Sergei Yushenko launched their own independent investigation. Yushenko was shot dead outside his apartment, Shchekochikhin died suddenly of a mysterious “allergic reaction” that was almost certainly an assassination by poison;

• Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB agent and author of Blowing Up Russia, was poisoned and suffered an agonizing and lingering death;

• Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s most famous investigative journalist and a relentless pursuer of truth concerning the Chechen War, was first poisoned, but when she survived that, she was shot dead, execution style, in the elevator to her apartment;

• Vladimir Romanovich, an FSB officer who had rented the basement room that was used to bomb one of the buildings, was suddenly run over and killed in a hit and run “accident” in Cyprus before he could talk to Duma investigators;

• Mikhail Trapashkin, a former FSB officer-turned-attorney, who was assisting the independent investigation, was arrested on trumped-up charges and planted evidence — and thrown into prison;

• The Duma, obviously responding to directives from the Kremlin leadership, voted to seal all evidence from the Ryazan incident and to forbid any investigation into what occurred there.

Chechens or Chekists?

The foiled Ryazan terror bombing may be the most well-known example of the Russian intelligence services getting caught utilizing false-flag terrorist operations, but it is far from being an isolated incident. In fact, anytime one hears a reference to Chechen terrorism, it is wise to ask if the perpetrators are Chechens or Chekists. Chekist refers to a member of the Russian intelligence service, the Cheka, which was established by Vladimir Lenin in 1917 and placed under the control of the infamous Felix Dzerzhinsky. “Iron Felix” once told his Chekists: “We stand for organized terror.” And terrorize the Russian people he did. The Cheka evolved into the KGB and now the FSB. Putin and his fellow KGB/FSB agents still refer to themselves as Chekists — and they still stand for organized terror.

One of the most important Chechen/Chekist terrorists throughout the 1990s and until his death in 2006 was Shamil Basayev. Basayev, reportedly, was one of the military supporters who came to the aid of Boris Yeltsin on the barricades around the Russian White House when Yeltsin was under siege by the “hardliners” in August 1991. He was placed in charge of a “Chechen Battalion” and sent to aid Russian forces in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict, both in 1992. According to the Russian newspapers Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Novaya Gazeta, as well as the U.K. paper the Independent, Shamil Basayev and his brother Shirvani were agents of the GRU, Russian military intelligence. They received their arms, training, and assignments through the GRU. However, in the early 1990s, Shamil supposedly converted to militant Islam and turned against his former Soviet-Russian comrades. But the evidence points to the conclusion that the conversion was a cover to enable him to work as an agent provocateur.

On August 3, 1999, the Russian newspaper Versiya published an article that reported, according to their sources in French intelligence, that Shamil Basayev attended a secret meeting in Beaulieu, France, near Monaco at the luxury villa of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. It was at this meeting, in July 1999, allegedly, where the apartment bombing terror plot and the invasion of Chechnya were planned. The key person Basayev was reported to have met with was GRU operative Anton Surikov, a top planner of sabotage under Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian prime minister and former head of the KGB/FSB — and best known as the Kremlin’s “Middle East terror master” during the Soviet era. Alexander Litvinenko analyzes the Versiya story and other evidence concerning the Surikov-Basayev-GRU connection in his book Blowing Up Russia.

Basayev and/or terrorists reputedly under his command carried out a number of notorious attacks throughout the Russian Federation, the most infamous being the Beslan school hostage crisis, which turned into the grizzly Beslan massacre. It ended with 334 hostages killed, including 186 children. Beslan not only provided Putin with an enormous political boost at home, but a very large sympathy lobby internationally. His supporters in the U.S. media and academia would argue that we must not be too squeamish and demanding concerning his stamping on human rights because, after all, he’s dealing with the likes of Shamil Basayev, murderer of the Beslan children.

As with the apartment bombings, no inquiries into the many troubling facts and conflicting official stories about the Beslan massacre were allowed.

What bearing does all of this have on our current relations with Russia in respect to cooperation on combatting terrorism in general and concerning the Tsarnaev brothers, the accused perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing? It is very central to it. From information that is now publicly available, Russian authorities have been less than forthcoming concerning whatever information they had concerning the Tsarnaev brothers and their connections to Dagestan and Chechnya. Moreover, most of the key Kremlin leaders who orchestrated the Chechen terrorist provocations throughout Russia over the past decade and a half are still in power. Besides Putin, some of the key players include:

• Nicolai Patrushev, a KGB veteran and director of the FSB from 1999 to 2008, all of the critical years during which the FSB’s Chechen false-flag terror operations were most deadly. Patrushev made some of the most absurd public statements and ridiculous explanations in his attempts to deny his agency’s involvement in the bombings and other terrorist acts. He is now Putin’s secretary of the Security Council;

• Yevgeny Primakov, mentioned above, has been a top KGB/FSB terror master for decades, helping to train and set in motion generations of terrorists worldwide. Now in his 90s, he remains a close advisor to Putin, along with Henry Kissinger, on matters of terrorism.

• Victor Ivanov, a KGB/FSB veteran who heads the Federal Narcotics Service of Russia and Aeroflot airline and who is chairman of the board of the giant Almaz-Antei Air Defense corporation.

Were the Tsarnaev brothers part of an elaborate provocation organized by the proven masters of provocation? The history of “Chechen” terror in Russia suggests that that scenario is not only a possibility, but a very strong probability.

Related Articles:

Boston Bombing: Latest Globalist Pretext for U.S.-Russia Convergence

Putin, Poison, and Murder

Beheading UK soldier isn't terrorism. It's guerrilla war.

DadaOrwell — Fri, 24 May 2013 22:48:58 GMT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_ytBkg-45M

More discussion of Rand's Iran vote (split)

asurfaholic — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:17:27 GMT

Quote:

Originally Posted by Warlord

Yes, millions watch that show.

Well good, maybe rand can explain why he voted for the Iran crap

UK Fighter Jets Scrambled to Escort Pakistani Plane

Bruno — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:35:46 GMT

http://news.sky.com/story/1095214/fi...assenger-plane

RAF fighter jets have escorted a Pakistan International Airlines aircraft from Manchester Airport to Stansted Airport, a Ministry of Defence spokesman has said.

A witness speaking in Urdu to Pakistani station Geo TV, said that two men over 6 feet tall tried to enter the pilot's cabin.
Essex Police have confirmed that two men have been arrested on suspicion of endangerment of an aircraft after the plane landed safely at Stansted.

There are understood to have been 297 passengers on board flight PK709, who were travelling from Lahore.

The aircraft - due to land at 1.30pm - was heading west towards Manchester when it was suddenly re-routed near York and headed back out to the North Sea, before travelling south to Stansted.

An Essex Police spokeswoman said: "An incident has occurred on an aircraft. Police and partners are responding."

Mashood Takwar, from Pakistan International Airlines, told Sky News that 25 minutes before landing Manchester air traffic control contacted the pilot after apparently receiving some information from British security services.

An MoD spokesman earlier confirmed that Typhoon jets had been scrambled from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire.

The aircraft is understood to be being held in an isolated stand at Stansted, but the airport is operating as normal.

Sky correspondent Alistair Bunkall said: "It is potentially precautionary, it doesn't necessarily mean there is a direct or real threat. Sometimes this might happen simply because of an incident on board involving a single passenger.

"It would be wrong at the moment to draw any conclusions but an incident nonetheless that the military feel is necessary to carry out this operation to make sure that plane lands safely at Stansted Airport."

Stansted is one of two UK airports designated to deal with emergency situations and has specially-trained teams.

Multiple blasts rock Afghan capital

Warlord — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:30:28 GMT

Explosions and suicide attacks in Kabul.

Stand by for press reports.

Julie Borowski to White House: Stop Funding Al-Qaeda in Syria!

FrankRep — Fri, 24 May 2013 01:54:12 GMT

LOL!!

Background:

Top Syrian Rebel Group Merges With Al-Qaeda in Iraq

U.S. Increases Aid to Syrian Rebel Forces, Again

Reports: U.S. Personnel Arming and Training Syrian Rebels

UN Investigator Claims Evidence Syrian Rebels Used Sarin Gas

Most Arms Shipments to Syria Go to Jihadists

26 killed in two simultaneous car bombs in Niger

Warlord — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:48:14 GMT

Attackers in Niger detonated two car bombs at dawn on Thursday, one in the city of Agadez where a military barracks was targeted and one in Arlit where a French company operates a uranium mine, killing a total of 26 people and injuring 30

Residents in the two towns said that both attacks occurred at around 5-30 a.m., indicating a level of coordination among the attackers.

Alhousseiny Moussa, a resident of Agadez, was already awake and just steps away from his local mosque for the first prayer of the day, when he heard the boom coming from the city�s military camp. �I heard the explosion and immediately after I heard a volley of gunfire. The area where it happened was inside the military camp and it�s now been roped off so we cannot go in,� he said.

At 5-30 a.m., an all-terrain Toyota sports-utility vehicle penetrated the SOMAIR mine, where Areva is extracting uranium in Arlit, located 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) to the north of the capital, Niamey, according to residents. The car exploded not far from the machinery used at the mine.

�We saw a car enter the factory and immediately it exploded,� said Agoumou Idi, a worker inside the factory who was reached by telephone. �The terrorists, probably from MUJAO, took advantage of the fact that the entrance gate was open in order to let in a truck carrying the next shift of workers. They used that opening to enter the heart of our factory and explode their vehicle.�

No group immediately claimed responsibility for Thursday�s attack, but because Niger shares a border with the troubled nation of Mali, whose north was occupied for most of last year by fighters loyal to al-Qaida, residents and government officials assume the attackers are Islamic extremists, possibly from the Movement of Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, or MUJAO, which has led repeated suicide attacks inside Mali.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/interna...cle4742783.ece

Pakistan car bomb attack kills 12

Warlord — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:46:01 GMT

The remotely detonated bomb containing around 100 kilos (220 pounds) of explosives targeted a truck carrying members of a government paramilitary force on the outskirts of Quetta, the capital of restive Baluchistan province.

Baluchistan, Pakistan's largest but most undeveloped province, is wracked by Islamist and sectarian violence as well as a long-running insurgency waged by separatists, and attacks on security forces are common.

"At least 12 people have been killed, 11 of them were security personnel," senior police official Fayyaz Sumbal told AFP.

"The bomb was planted in a rickshaw (tricycle). The target was a truck of Baluchistan Constabulary which was carrying the security personnel."

A further 11 people were wounded in the attack, he said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-kills-12.html

Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity:Senate Votes Unanimously Toward War Against Iran

cajuncocoa — Thu, 23 May 2013 02:32:52 GMT

by Daniel McAdams

Quote:

Today the US Senate voted unanimously in favor of a Lindsey Graham resolution, S.Res.65, which "[s]trongly support(s) the full implementation of United States and international sanctions on Iran and urg[es] the President to continue to strengthen enforcement of sanctions legislation."

The legislation, as expected from a Lindsey Graham product, is full of misstatements, historical revisionism, and war-drum-beating hyperbole. Particularly revolting is the distortion and lies about Iran's not being in compliance with IAEA nuclear safeguards requirements and the irony of Graham's using Iran's refusal to implement UN resolutions as evidence of its rogue status. Also deceptive is the sleight of hand claiming that Iran pursuing a "nuclear weapons capability" is the real violation, rather than an Iranian failure to uphold its agreed upon obligation to not actually divert fissile material to build a nuclear weapon. It is a unilateral lowering of the bar, which is in fact itself a US violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Most alarming, however, is that this resolution contains among the clearest legislative language to date promising that should Israel decide to attack Iran, the US would back Israel militarily. It is breathtakingly foolhardy for the US Senate to give such carte blanche permission to any foreign country to attack another nation as it sees fit with the promise of the backing of the United States military. The move will likely embolden Israel to continue recent escalation of military action in the region and will likely propel Israel closer to an attack on Iran. In economic theory this is known as "moral hazard."

The resolved clauses of the resolution must be seen to be believed, so I reproduce them here (see especially the original point (8), which was apparently even too over-the-top for the Senators -- the substitute language is just as bad but it adds a layer of vagueness as a fig leaf):

Congress--
(1) reaffirms the special bonds of friendship and cooperation that have existed between the United States and the State of Israel for more than sixty years and that enjoy overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and among the people of the United States;

(2) strongly supports the close military, intelligence, and security cooperation that President Obama has pursued with Israel and urges this cooperation to continue and deepen;

(3) deplores and condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the reprehensible statements and policies of the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran threatening the security and existence of Israel;

(4) recognizes the tremendous threat posed to the United States, the West, and Israel by the Government of Iran's continuing pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability;

(5) reiterates that the policy of the United States is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon capability and to take such action as may be necessary to implement this policy;

(6) reaffirms its strong support for the full implementation of United States and international sanctions on Iran and urges the President to continue and strengthen enforcement of sanctions legislation;

(7) declares that the United States has a vital national interest in, and unbreakable commitment to, ensuring the existence, survival, and security of the State of Israel, and reaffirms United States support for Israel's right to self-defense; and

[Struck out->] (8) urges that, if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence. [< -Struck out]

(8) urges that, if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran's nuclear weapons program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.

A meaningless statement is added at the end which likely guaranteed unanimous support:

SEC. 2. RULES OF CONSTRUCTION.
Nothing in this resolution shall be construed as an authorization for the use of force or a declaration of war.

This last part is Congressional weasel language, as the point was not to declare war but rather to define the circumstances under which war would be authorized. Point (8) lays down those circumstances, which is a trap for any Senator who voted for this bill. Imagine if the criteria in point (8) are satisfied by an Israeli attack on Iran claiming self-defense. Any Senator hesitating to authorize the US military to join Israel's war would be shown his vote on this resolution and told that he is already on record supporting war in these circumstances. That is how it works on the Hill.
This is an important vote.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives...inst-iran.aspx

Afghans Claim Video of US Special Forces Guy Torturing, Feet Severed in Body Found

enhanced_deficit — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:21:02 GMT

If allegations are true, this torture would be far worse than Abu Ghraib. This apparenty has been a big story in Afghanistan but US media had been giving it a pass for the most part.
If claim about torture video is factual, not sure if Obama team will be able to keep it from becoming public in US.

Afghan Officials: Body of US Torture Video Victim Found Near Base Wardak Torture Victim's Footless Corpse Just 200 Yards From Base

May 21, 2013

The complaints about Afghan-American torturer Zakaria Kandahari took an ugly turn for the worse today, as Afghan officials announced that the victim in a torture video showing Kandahari was discovered just 200 yards outside of the US military base at which he was stationed.

The victim, a Wardak Province civilian named Sayid Mohammad, had disappeared into the custody of US Special Forces before the video emerged last week showing Kandahari torturing him. The US denied the video showed US troops, but Kandahari was heard taking instructions from an unseen man with an American accent.

Mohammad�s fate was a mystery until laborers digging a ditch just outside of the base at which Kandahari was said to be stationed uncovered a �military-style black body bag,� with most of Mohammad�s corpse inside. Both feet were missing, and still unaccounted for.
The grim story is part of the ongoing fight among Wardak residents to see US special forces removed from the region, and follows the similar disappearance of Mohammad Qassim, another local whose body was found at a trash pit outside the base after his own �detention.�

Afghans Claim to Have Video of US Special Forces Guy Torturing Civilians

05.13.13

Afghan officials say they�ve got video of a man overseeing the torture of Afghan civilians. Exactly who ordered the man to torture is a matter of fierce dispute � and also helps explain this year�s erosion of trust between Washington and Kabul.
Allegedly, there�s a videotape in Afghan government hands showing a man named Zakaria Kandahari presiding over the torture of an Afghan civilian who, along with 15 others, recently disappeared from Wardak Province. According to the New York Times, Kandahari, an American citizen, is �seen conducting� the torture session and �supervising� others.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/worl...CMN/story.html

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/05/21/a...und-near-base/

Details about different Afghan allgations about previous killing of civilians by so called "kill team" were in news last week:

Afghan woman recounts how US soldier killed her husband in rampage; case set for court-martial

Published May 16, 2013

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan � Sitting on a dirty straw mat on the parched ground of southern Afghanistan, Masooma sank deeper inside a giant black shawl. Hidden from view, her words burst forth as she told her side of what happened to her family sometime before dawn on March 11, 2012.
According to Masooma, an American soldier wearing a helmet equipped with a flashlight burst into her two-room mud home while everyone slept. He killed her husband, Dawood, punched her 7-year-old son and shoved a pistol into the mouth of his baby brother.

"We were asleep. He came in and he was shouting, saying something about Taliban, Taliban, and then he pulled my husband up. I screamed and screamed and said, 'We are not Taliban, we are not government. We are no one. Please don't hurt us,'" she said.
The soldier wasn't listening. He pointed his pistol at Masooma to quiet her and pushed her husband into the living room.
"My husband just looked back at me and said, 'I will be back.'" Seconds later she heard gunshots, she recalled, her voice cracking as she was momentarily unable to speak. Her husband was dead.

The AP also interviewed other villagers about the case, all of whom are identified by the U.S. Army as witnesses or relatives of witnesses. They included a sister and brother who were wounded and two men who were away during the killings and returned to find wives and children slain. The sister and brother told AP how they tried to run away and hide from a soldier with a gun, only to be shot � and see their neighbors and grandmother killed.
U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales of Lake Tapps, Washington, is accused of the killings. Prosecutors say Bales slipped away from his remote outpost to attack two nearby villages, returning in the middle of the rampage and then for a final time soaked in blood.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/05...-case-set-for/