Syrians run to Jordan – and into a humanitarian crisis [video]
Russia Today
August 20, 2012
The newly confirmed peace envoy for Syria says his main task is to stop the civil war in the country. This, as the UN observer mission there has come to an end amid escalating violence there. Tens of thousands are fleeing the conflict to neighboring states, including Jordan. RT’s Paula Slier has the latest from the border.
Syrian opposition admits British intelligence is assisting terrorist FSA along with U.S., Germany and Turkey [video included]
By Madison Ruppert
Editor of End the Lie
August 19, 2012
A Free Syrian Army fighter fires his sniper rifle in Aleppo, on August 14, 2012. (Image credit: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)
It is no longer by any means secret that the Syrian opposition terrorist group known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) is being supported by the governments of the United States, Turkey, Germany and Britain.
Recently, the United States government made it completely legal to donate money to the Syrian opposition. While you can’t go out and buy an AK-47 and mail it to the FSA, you can instead send the same terrorists the money to buy it.
Keep in mind, these are the same individuals who have shown no willingness to give up the chemical weapons belonging to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if they get their hands on them.
One might also want to take note of the fact that there have been multiple reports claiming that the Syrian military captured military officers from foreign nations and that even mainstream international news sources are now being forced to report the truth about Syria as you can see in the below video:
Now news agencies as large as the United Kingdom’s Sky News and Daily Mail along with the Australian Herald Sun are reporting on the fact that these opposition terrorists are receiving assistance from Western intelligence including the location and movements of regime troops along with their communications.
According to reports, both British and German spies are working to pass on critical information to the Syrian rebels and it appears that these intelligence agencies have absolutely no qualms about what they are doing.
“We can be proud of the significant contribution we are making to the fall of the Assad regime,” an official from Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service told Bild am Sonntag, according to the Herald Sun.
According to the German news outlet, German spies have been stationed both off the Syrian coast and at a NATO base in Turkey while the British Sunday Times stated that British intelligence was passing on information gathered from listening posts in Cyprus.
The reports state that the intelligence is passed through Turkey to the FSA which is hardly surprising given the fact that there have been reports in the past of cross-border incursions from Turkey into Syria.
“British intelligence is observing things closely from Cyprus,” an opposition official said to the Sunday Times, according to Sky News.
“It’s very useful because they find out a great deal,” continued the unnamed official. “The British are giving the information to the Turks and the Americans and we are getting it from the Turks.”
The mention of Americans is critical because recent reports have stated that the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been working to funnel weapons to the armed Syrian opposition.
“The British monitor communications about movements of the government army and we got information about reinforcements being on their way to Aleppo,” the official stated.
“We hit at the government troops in Idlib and Saraqib (southwest of Aleppo), with success,” said the official.
Now the Washington Post is reporting fighting in and around Aleppo with heavy clashes in Salahuddin, Ansari, Sabbagh, Sukkari, Sakhour and Hanano.
It appears that the British are attempting to maintain plausible deniability and remove themselves from being associated with directly putting guns in the hands of the Syrian rebels.
“One diplomat denied that the British were ‘facilitating’ the supply of heavy machineguns. But he said he could not rule out the possibility that private contractors financed by countries such as Qatar were involved in providing arms,” according to the Daily Mail.
“Wealthy families in Qatar and Saudi Arabia are understood to be providing substantial financial support to the rebel forces,” they added.
This would hardly be surprising given that we now know that Qatar was running operations on the ground for the Libyan rebels.
However, the Daily Mail reports, “Britain has officially ruled out giving any covert help to the rebels,” which is quite doubtful since Britain had troops on the ground in Libya giving covert help to the rebels.
It only makes sense that the British would deny any such activities to the ends of the Earth given that, “William Hague, the foreign secretary, has been advised that it would be illegal under international law for Britain to supply weapons directly to any group in Syria, which is covered by a European Union arms embargo,” as the Daily Mail reports.
Another issue of significant concern to many is the treatment of Christians in Syria. According to Sky News, Christians located in Damascus have been informing Tim Marshall, the foreign affairs editor for Sky, that they are fearful of the future as the bloodshed continues.
“The patriarch of a Greek Catholic church in the Syrian capital says some Christians fear they could be forced out of the country after a civil war, as has happened in other countries touched by Arab Spring unrest,” reports Sky.
The number of people killed in the bloodshed in Syria continues to rise with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – which is actually an anti-Assad opposition group run out of the United Kingdom by a man who hasn’t even been in Syria for over a decade – claiming that 23,000 people have died since March 2011 while the United Nations claims the number is around 17,000.
Both of these figures, however, are based on unverified, unsubstantiated reports from groups and individuals who are far from independent or disinterested.
Personally, I do not think that any figures are reliable since all sides of the conflict have good reason to skew the facts to their benefit. I encourage extreme skepticism when dealing with this issue.
Regardless of what the actual number is, it is undeniable that people have died in Syria and any loss of life is both tragic and unacceptable. I sincerely hope that the Western intelligence agencies will cease aiding terrorists and that this horrific situation will be resolved without further death and suffering.
Unfortunately, it appears that so long as Assad remains in power, the West will not give up and will continue to support the bloodshed in Syria.
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UN Vote on Syria Reflects Changing Battlefield
UN Syria Resolution Signals Ebbing Western Legitimacy, Growing Western Aggression
by Tony Cartalucci
August 4, 2012 – Friday’s UN vote will no doubt be declared by the Western media as a resounding condemnation of Syria and a “universal” call for a “political transition” to install the US State Department’s stable of hand-picked and groomed administrative proxies. However, aside from CNN, BBC, and Qatari Al Jazeera’s ever-shrinking audiences, few on the planet will be convinced of these headlines.
Image: The UN General Assembly has become an instrument of corporate-financier interests. Able to abuse the one-nation, one-vote structure of resolution votes, it can repeatedly pass “resolutions” despite nations representing over half the world’s population abstaining or voting against said resolutions. It should also be noted that Western representatives cast votes and produce “resolutions” without input or approval of their own populations – it is the very embodiment of the dysfunction brought about by overly centralized, unchecked supranational governance.
133 nations did indeed vote for the resolution tabled by the despotic absolute monarchs of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, both of whom are ironically conducting their own campaigns of brutal repression both at home, and in neighboring Bahrain – this not counting the overt weapons and militants they have sent into Syria to destabilize Syria in the first place. The hypocritical nature of the resolution’s sponsors is only outmatched by the feeble support it received. Should one actually analyze how many people were represented by the 133 nations that voted for the resolution, versus the 43 nations that did not support it, they would see a different story.
UN Vote is a Shift Away From Wall Street and London
31 nations abstained, a muted protest to the resolution, with 12 nations voting firmly “no.” The combined population represented by these votes consists of the majority of humanity, and had Western representatives actually reflected with their vote their own population’s sentiments toward what is becoming yet another overt case of military aggression built on false pretenses – just as the notoriously reviled Iraq War was – the majority standing in opposition to this resolution would have been greater still.
But the West’s UN representatives did not reflect the sentiments of their respective populations. Instead, they represented a minority sect of corporate-financiers whose vast ill-gotten fortunes and the unwarranted influence it grants them, has driven the political destabilization and violence sweeping the Arab World since the so-called “Arab Spring” began.
Nations who didn’t support the resolution included China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Pakistan, South Africa, India, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Iraq, North Korea, Belarus, Nicaragua, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe. It is an incomplete list that is already far too long, and already includes nearly half of the world’s population to be labeled as an “Axis of Evil.” It represents a shift from a Wall Street and London centric global hegemony, toward a balance of power amongst a multipolar world.
That such a resolution could be tabled by despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and then subsequently passed, exposes the shortcomings of “global governance” and the so-called “international community.” What little sense the UN General Assembly’s “one nation, one vote” arrangement makes is further undermined by the fact that representatives of their respective nations rarely vote according to the will and aspirations of their own people in the first place. The UN has become a tool entirely of corporate-financier interests, articulated by UN representatives detached from their own populations, who have hijacked their collective voice and use it to ram through their own narrow, self-serving agendas.
The UN, if it ever even had a realistic constructive role on Earth, has proven itself a menace – a variable ultimately undermining, not promoting world peace, justice, freedom, progress or any of the other pretenses its dominating members hide their true agendas behind. The UN has become a medium within which grand crimes against world peace can unfold, rather than a bulwark against them.
UN Vote Signals West’s Shift Toward Naked Military Aggression
The UN General Assembly vote signals yet another shift – one from feigned diplomacy by the West to achieve long planned hegemonic-driven regime change in Syria, to one of naked military aggression. Kofi Annan’s retreat from his self-mutilated peace plan follows the collapse of NATO’s “Operation Damascus Volcano” and the subsequent UN General Assembly vote.
His retreat allows for the West to clear the table of “diplomatic options” leaving only military aggression. This was forewarned in March 2012’s “UN’s Kofi Annan: An Agent of Wall Street,” where Annan’s ties to the very corporate-financier interests driving Syria’s destabilization were exposed. The peace plan was an admitted gambit aimed at satisfying public expectations that “diplomacy” would be tried before a more aggressive military campaign was launched.
UN’s Last Chance
With the court of global public opinion clearly turning against the machinations of Wall Street and London, now would be a good opportunity for a resolution to be leveled not against Syria, but against the regimes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar who openly admit to funneling weapons and even foreign fighters into Syria. Libya could also be added to that list, with the United States, France, and Britain also cited under the resolution for undermining world peace and pursing an agenda that demonstrably supports international terrorism.
Surely the West could cobble together a majority based on its vast collection of neo-fiefdoms in the General Assembly, but it would yank the last bit of moral high-ground out from under them, forcing them, their policy makers, and the corporate-financier backers to proceed with their Hitlerian campaign in full light as the aggressors – as the villains.
Cutting foodstamps but 5 billion for botched camo is OK [video]
Rys2sense
July 20, 2012
http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10432 dragon skin botching
more on this idiot http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=29448
UN Security Guard Kidnapped, Tortured and Mudered
Friends of Syria
August 18, 2012
Last week a UN security guard was kidnapped, tortured and murdered near his home. Why was this not news worthy?
“He will not survive,” my Syrian friend said, and I think he was right.
The man on the state television was bearded down to his chest, a self-confessed Salafist – nom de guerre “Abu Dolha”, real name Ahmed Ali Gharibo. A Syrian – “alas,” said my friend – from the Ghouta district of Damascus. He admitted, right there in front of the cameras, that he “regretted” killing 200 people with his own hands.
What did it take to get a man like this to admit such things on television? Sitting up in this breezy villa, 16 miles from Damascus – Bashar’s brother Maher lives just round the corner – I could well believe what my friend said: Ahmed Gharibo will not survive.
Like all civil conflicts, rumours turn into facts, facts into rumours. Damascus is almost deserted, near-empty boulevards with more military checkpoints than traffic lights, some “mukhabarat” security, some army, the occasional “shabiha”, friendly to me – they would be, wouldn’t they, as I drive towards the elite mansions outside town – but a bit down-at-heel.
“How in the West, being advocates of democracy and liberty and freedom, can you support these people?” my friend asks. “Do your readers know that Her Majesty sends weapons and money to these people?”
I am about to point out that HMG claims that it doesn’t give weapons at all – the word “claim” is all-important in Syria these days, like the conspiracy theory of history.
“The first step to dismantle Iran is to dismantle Syria – we are isolated and 123 countries are against us; that was the figure of those who gathered for the so-called ‘Friends of Syria’ conference in Paris.”
I begin to think of the Serbs and their total conviction that the world was against them, that their innocence was without question. Ah, but like the old Yugoslavia, you only have to walk the streets of Damascus to realise that the storm has not yet fully broken. Behind the walls of the old French mandate barracks down from Umayyad Square, the burned wreckage of this week’s fuel-truck bomb stands below a wizened tree. Was it aimed at the run-down “caserne” that the Syrian army still uses or a little trick for the UN officers in the Dama Rose Hotel across the road? The last 100 military observers are packing for the road journey to Beirut airport on Wednesday. The transit point of Beirut rather than Damascus airport tells its own story. “We are defunct in five days,” I heard one of the UN officers say in the lobby. Funny word, “defunct”, French for dead.
But maybe the truck bomber wanted the UN dead too? Shortly after the explosion, several aimed shots were fired at the UN’s third-floor hotel offices. Is it true that a Syrian camera crew were already on the eighth floor, ready to tape the bomb? That ambulances came within three minutes?
The UN were beginning to realise that their men were increasingly endangered in the provinces. In Aleppo, they started off with a 30-mile radius of the city and within months, their government escorts would not venture beyond the last government checkpoint on the city limits. The rebels were less friendly to the UN, and several of the international observers saw foreign fighters among the “Free Syrian Army”.
Last week – the UN has not exactly advertised the fact – a security man working for the UN, a former government security agent, was kidnapped and tortured and then murdered near his home north of Damascus. They found 20 bullet wounds in his body. The UN’s men are not talking – rarely have they been so uncommunicative – but they have counted the corpses in Artous, 25 miles west of Damascus, 70 bodies in all, Sunnis, in a mass grave, just two weeks ago. Killed, it seems, by the “shabiha”.
The FSA have been well and truly cleared out of the centre of Damascus – the suburbs at night are a different matter – and few Damascenes seem to believe that the armed rebels are winning in Aleppo.
“The Christians are protesting,” another Syrian friend tells me. “The Greek Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo has just made an appeal to the Western powers not to send weapons to the fundamentalists. The Syrian Catholic church in Aleppo has now been bombed.”
How does one reply to all this? Does the Syrian government really want the UN to leave? “No!” cries my friend. “We want UN pressure here to force these ‘people’ into dialogue.”
The Salafist told his audience today that his enemies were “Alawites [of course, for Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite] and Shiites and Christians”. So is that it? War by television? An acknowledgement that the man won’t live long beyond this broadcast. And the UN are indeed leaving. There is an idea of a miniscule office remaining in Damascus with a military and a political observer. But otherwise, the great gloomy eyes of the UN donkey will close sleepily on Wednesday; it’s the failure of another mission – and not a single international soldier will be left behind to watch the storm burst.
The Syrian Government is Not Isolated
Largest nations on Earth converge to support embattled Syrian government.
by Tony Cartalucci
August 11, 2012 – Iran has recently hosted 30 nations including Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Oman, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Jordan, Tunisia, Palestine, and many others in Tehran this week in efforts to support the Syrian government against foreign destabilization. Upon the agenda were calls to end foreign arms currently flowing into terrorist hands inside Syria, proposals to broker a meaningful ceasefire, the coordination of humanitarian aid, and supporting the Syrian people’s right to reform without foreign interference.
The unique conference featured representatives of over half of the world’s population, and signals that indeed, Syria’s government is not as “isolated” as portrayed by Western neo-imperialists.
Image: An impressive counter to the so-called “Friends of Syria” confabs held by Wall Street and London corporate-financier interests in an attempt to sway global opinion toward a repeat of Libya’s destruction at NATO’s hands, the International Consultative Conference hosed by Iran seeks to end the flow of foreign arms into militant hands and resolve political differences through more civilized means.
The meeting comes as revelations emerge that the United States, United Kingdom, NATO-member Turkey, and members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are supplying weapons, cash, and other assistance to foreign militants with direct links to Al Qaeda. These include Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) militants who are in fact listed by both the US State Department and the UK Home Office (page 5, .pdf) as a foreign terrorist organization and a proscribed terrorist organization respectively.
As foreign militants continue to flow over Syria’s borders bolstered with an increase in foreign aid, sectarian violence has spiraled out of control. The UN has categorically failed to condemn the West’s state sponsorship of international terrorism now ravaging Syria. It appears that nations around the world, including shareholders in the Anglo-American establishment, may be having second thoughts about the increasingly untenable enterprise the West has chosen to pursue.
Earlier this month, during a Saudi-Qatari sponsored, US-UK-backed UN resolution, a large number of nations either voted no, abstained, or failed to attend the vote, indicating slipping support for what is sometimes called the “Washington consensus.”
US, GCC, and NATO actions in Libya in support of sectarian militants to install a stable of Western-created proxies into power has stripped away much of the “primacy” of “international law” and left the willfully abused geopolitical tenant of “responsibility to protect” (R2P) irrevocably in tatters. With the West’s attempted destabilization of Syria stalled, global public opinion has grown aware of the true nature of Syria’s so-called “rebels,” and that many are foreign fighters committing an array of abhorrent atrocities. The UN’s failure to act, or even worse, its role in facilitating what equates to military aggression couched in “humanitarian” pretenses, jeopardizes international law all together.
The West has ungracefully faced this quandary of its own creation by simultaneously attempting to use the presence of Al Qaeda terrorists as a causus belli to militarily intervene while also rebranding Al Qaeda as champions of freedom in Syria. One breathtaking account was given by the Fortune 500-funded Council on Foreign Relations in their article, “Al-Qaeda’s Specter in Syria,” claiming:
“The Syrian rebels would be immeasurably weaker today without al-Qaeda in their ranks. By and large, Free Syrian Army (FSA) battalions are tired, divided, chaotic, and ineffective. Feeling abandoned by the West, rebel forces are increasingly demoralized as they square off with the Assad regime’s superior weaponry and professional army. Al-Qaeda fighters, however, may help improve morale. The influx of jihadis brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results. In short, the FSA needs al-Qaeda now.”
Clearly, no nation in good conscience, or at least interested in self-preservation, could condone the overt destabilization of Syria by foreign powers with disingenuous motives, using listed-terrorist organizations to do so. The potential of this same ploy then being turned against other nations including members of Iran’s 30 nation conference, or even the US and UK’s “Friends of Syria” confabs, becomes increasingly more likely if such tactics are not condemned and altogether balked.
While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talks of “no-fly zones” with NATO-member Turkey this week, the successful conference in Tehran illustrates that any such act of aggression will be carried out unilaterally, further undermining the West’s own contrived “international order” with a growing number of nations standing in direct opposition, not in support of, Wall Street and London’s next move.
Iran plans to hold another such conference later this month.
For more information, please listen to the first half of Dr. Webster Tarpley’s August 11th broadcast of World Crisis Radio.
US-NATO Meddling in Syria Faces International Condemnation [video]
Land Destroyer Report
August 12, 2012
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
PressTV – Tarpley.net
August 12, 2012
PN 