VIDEO — Hezbollah State: Key Middle East player withdraws troops from Syria
RT
October 6, 2013
Hezbollah has reportedly pulled large numbers of its troops out of Syria, where they’ve been fighting against the opposition rebels. It’s thought the Lebanon-based militant group had up to ten-thousand people in the country, but that may have dwindled to just a couple of thousand. RT’s Paula Slier traces the rapid rise of Hezbollah – from a small militia, to one of the most-powerful political and military forces in Lebanon.
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Victory! New York Capitol Unanimously Passes Anti-NDAA Resolution 11-0
P.A.N.D.A. People Against The NDAA
October 8, 2013
Victory! New York Capitol Unanimously Passes Anti-NDAA Resolution
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Dan Johnson
PANDA National
dan@pandaunite.org
ALBANY, NY – On October 7, 2013, the Albany, NY Common Council unanimously passed Resolution 80.92.13, becoming the first city in America to prohibit indefinite military detention without charge or trial, specifically under the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, to declare it is not a “battlefield” and resolve that its citizens and residents are not subject to “detention under the law of war.”
The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act was overwhelmingly passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on December 31, 2011. The 2012 NDAA declares the United States to be a battlefield in the war on terror and Sections 1021 & 1022 authorize the indefinite detention, without charge or trial, of all persons, including American citizens, accused by the President of undefined “support” for terrorist activity or commission of a ‘belligerent act”. This violates multiple provisions of the US Constitution, in addition to the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and 14th amendments.
People Against the NDAA (PANDA), a national, nonpartisan, grass roots organization founded in January 2012, is committed to reversing the NDAA’s unconstitutional authorizations with activism to affect policy at the state and local government level. PANDA started in Bowling Green, OH and has since expanded into over 30 state teams nationwide.
Unlike in California, Alaska, and other states that purported to block the NDAA, but only require the state to stand down and allow Federal officials to implement it nonetheless, Resolution 80.92.13 recognizes the application of the Law of War to residents/citizens of Albany to be unConstitutional. Now that they know this is unConstitutional, every peace officer, elected official, or other person who takes an Oath to the U.S. Constitution in the City of Albany is required to interpose against those attempting to implement military detention or the “law of war” in Albany.
Under the Constitution, instead of mere noncompliance, this resolution requires interposition to protect the rights of the people and stop the Federal government from implementing military detention in the city. Period.
This is the strongest piece of legislation in the United States to date to prohibit the indefinite military detention power in the United States. 11th Ward Councilman Anton Konev, who introduced the resolution, said:
“Indefinite detention for any reason is unConstitutional and cannot be allowed. At least here in Albany we believe in those liberties our armed forces fought so hard for.”
This resolution was a collaborative effort between PANDA, the Patriot Coalition, Project SALAM, Jesse Calhoun, the Occupy Albany Civil Liberties Initiative, 518 Liberty Action Alliance, Campaign for Liberty New York, many other organizations, and numerous citizens from Albany and around the nation who flooded the council with calls, emails, written letters, and showed up for the vote.
Kelley Citrin, Team Leader Emiritus for PANDA New York, noted:
“I have never been more proud to be from the State of New York than I am today, because today reminded me that politics can still be noble, and government still responds when the cries of its people are loud enough, and persistent enough.”
Albany’s stand proves that citizen activism works. One city, however, is not enough.
Albany could be the start of a tidal wave. It’s time for every city in America to take the same step. To accomplish this, PANDA has put together a “Take Back” packet to defeat indefinite detention in your city.
It’s time to really stop the NDAA across America. The “Take Back the Town Campaign” Beta launches today. It’s time to take back your town.
Don’t let this tidal wave stop with Albany. Download your packet here: http://pandaunite.org/takeback/
Donate to keep this tidal wave going: http://pandaunite.org/donate.php
America is only a Republic…if we can keep it.
MUST READ — Was it a Psyop? Nairobi Mall Deceit Abets Israeli-Western Pipeline Wars to Oust Asian Rivals
by Yoichi Shimatsu
Global Research
October 1, 2013
The gratuitous violence and spectacular overkill by a mysterious gang of supposed “terrorists” does nothing to further the aims of either Somali nationalism or sharia law, as espoused by the original Al-Shabaab movement, which seeks the withdrawal of Kenya forces from Somalia .
As the events at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi unfolded, it became clear that the bloody spectacle was staged by a shadowy entity, which the Kenya foreign minister described as “Al Qaeda”. Her statement was based on the presence of other foreign assailants, including passport holders of the U.S. and Britain , under the command of a Western woman believed to be the so-called “White Widow”.
The obvious outcome of this bloody spectacle is not Kenyan military withdrawal from Somalia as desired by Al Shabaab rebels, but quite the opposite effect of hardening support for intervention by a majority of Kenyans who were previously opposed to cross-border troop stationing. It took a televised massacre to overturn the East African public’s aversion to military cooperation with former colonial masters and the Israelis.
The net effect of the conflicting reports from the mall and suspect photos raises troubling questions: What powerful elite group has the money to organize such an elaborate ruse to sway public opinion? Who can control a secret network inside the Kenyan military and the mass media? What is their motive? How do they benefit?
Primal Motives
From the onset of the police-military siege of Westgate, Israeli intelligence agencies assumed a key advisory role to the Kenyan police and directed the public-information releases, according to news reporters on the scene. As in many sensitive police-intelligence operations, information releases to the media are “strategic”, a euphemism for psychological operations.
Psy-ops are aimed at controlling the options for the criminals and shaping public attitudes about the event’s causes and outcomes.
Israeli experts were pre-positioned inside the mall, being in charge of the private security company whose plainclothesmen posed for “action shots”. The perfectly lit photos were taken during a lengthy power blackout in the nearly windowless mall. The viewer is led to believe as in Hollywood movies that a handgun is a match against automatic rifles. A large force of Mossad agents was still stationed inside Nairobi since the investigation of a mystery fire that had destroyed the capital’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport on August 8.
Nairobi , due to its logistical position and concentration of Jewish business interests, is the Israeli regional intelligence center for East Africa . Despite the 2002 terrorist attacks on an Israel plane over Kenya and hotel in Mombasa , the primary interest is not solely terrorism.
The two priorities for Israeli operations in East Africa are:
to open a second military front against Iranians, who allegedly channel aid, including weapons, to Hamas via Sudan ;
and in league with Western energy corporations to oust Asian oil companies from South Sudan by building an alternative pipeline to a proposed mega-port on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast,
Pipeline Wars
Prior to the independence of South Sudan in July 2011, the U.S. and Europe imposed sanctions against the central government in Khartoum while financing and covertly arming separatist forces in the southern districts neighboring Kenya and the Darfur region bordering Chad. The sanctions-based exclusion of Western energy corporations provided a rare opportunity for Asian oil companies to win bids for exploration rights and production in the vast reserves of southern Sudan .
The dominant foreign petroleum operators are China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Sinopec, Petronas of Malaysia, and India ’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). The state companies of Egypt and Yemen also hold stakes in Sudanese oil. The exploration and extraction operations are usually run as consortiums – such as Dar, Greater Nile and Sudd – that include several players in partnership with Sudapet ( Sudan state oil) and, since independence Nilepet ( South Sudan ). The crude oil flows through the Greater Nile Oil Pipeline, constructed by CNPC started in the late 1980s and since expanded over a distance of 1,300 kilometers to Port Sudan on the Red Sea .
The creation of the Republic of South Sudan , with its capital Juba , was the game-changer. The Heglig and Bamboo oil fields are well inside its boundaries and the borderline Abyei reserve remains contested and is likely to be divided between the uneasy neighbors. South Sudan now controls 80 percent of Sudanese oil reserves, estimated by BP at 6.6 billion barrels. Another noteworthy point underlying Western support of the breakaway insurgencies is that the petroleum belt stretches along a northwesterly axis into the heart of the Darfur region.
Israel Makes Its Move
The Foreign Ministry in Juba posted this January 18, 2013, report on its New Delhi embassy website, titled “South Sudan signs oil deal with Israel ”:
“ South Sudan says it has signed an agreement with several Israeli oil companies, a potentially significant strategic move that will consolidate the Jewish state’s relations with the fledgling, oil-rich East African state. South Sudan’s petroleum and mining minister, Dhieu Dau, announced the oil deal last week after he returned from a visit to Israel.
It will also bolster Israeli moves to counter Iranian inroads into the Red Sea and a major gunrunning route from the Revolutionary Guards base at Bandar Abbas in the Persian Gulf to the Gaza Strip via Sudan . Sudan has become a battleground in the mostly clandestine war between Israel and the Islamic Republic, which funnels missiles and other arms for Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip through the Red Sea.
South Sudan, which became independent of Arab-ruled Sudan in July 2011 after a decades-long civil war, is locked in a frequently violent confrontation over its oil reserves with the military-run Khartoum regime, an ally of Iran , under President Omar al-Bashir.”
The bilateral deal can be summarized as: Israel will form a military alliance with South Sudan against Khartoum and Tehran , to be repaid with Sudanese oil exports to be controlled by Israeli energy companies.
Infrastructure Intrigues
Although unnamed so far, the Israeli oil companies with key technologies include pipeline operator Zion Oil and exploration company Shemen Oil, which conducts drilling in the former Rothschild-owned fields on Azerbaijan ’s Caspian Sea coast. Israeli companies, by themselves, lack the scale of financial and technical resources necessary for a proposed $3 billion mega-project that will include a 1,000-kilometer pipeline and railways from Juba to Lamu on the Kenya coast, along with docks for supertankers and a massive portside refinery.
The ambitious Juba-Lamu project was launched by former Kenyan President Mawai Kibaki, whose administration was beset by corruption allegations. Environmental groups have raised objections to a petroleum port and refinery near the UNESCO heritage site of Lamu Island , brushed off by officials as a small matter when billions of dollars are at stake. The Westgate Mall attack has surely convinced Kibaki’s successor, President Uhuru Kenyatta, to drop any objections and go with the flow.
A top figure in East African infrastructure construction is Joseph Schwartzman, owner of the H. Young engineering company and business leader of Nairobi ’s Israeli community.
Schwartzman, closely allied with business interests in South Africa and Israel , is an outspoken opponent of the Chinese role in African infrastructure projects. His neoconservative old-school instincts were expressed in a 2009 remark, reported in The Nation ( Nairobi ):
“Chinese companies’ presence in Kenya is not beneficial to the country. Their presence has only one purpose: transfer of hard currency back to China .”
In an unintended way, he is correct. In contrast with more beloved homelands, Beijing has zero to gain from charitable projects like waging proxy wars and staging false-flag massacres inside shopping centers.
U.S. Leads From Behind
Israel ’s African oil dreams gain muscle from the participation of heavyweights like the Vitol energy trading company, which has signed aboard for the Juba-Lamu pipeline. Despite the arms-length appearance of this Europe-based trading house, it is an asset for the American corporate-and-state power structure. The Israeli-U.S. alliance is so widely distrusted worldwide, based on a proven record of misdeeds and skullduggery, their agents have to operate under the cover of sock-puppet companies.
Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader, is a Geneva-headquartered holding company that owns a string of oil terminals, including Rotterdam , the world center for spot-market trading. Founded in 1966 by two Dutchmen, the firm is now run by an English CEO named Ian Roper Taylor and American-born corporate president Miguel “Mike” Loya. Oxford graduate Taylor worked for Shell Oil, a firm linked with the Rothschild group, prior to joining Vitol, while Harvard MBA Loya was an executive at ExxonMobil.
Earning notoriety as the oil trader for rogue states, Vitol took a lead role in the Iraq oil-for-food deal and defied U.N. sanctions against Serbian energy imports. More recently during the Libya insurrection against the Gadhafi regime, Vitol transported the first shipment of light crude out of insurgent-controlled Tobruk, aboard a tanker that somehow managed to pass through a NATO blockade. It also delivered $1 billion in gasoline and diesel for the rebel convoys during the assault on Tripoli . None of this derring-do is remotely possible unless the company acted on orders from the CIA.
Taylor personally became embroiled in a lawsuit against a collective of Scottish artists, who accused him of being the main Tory financier of advertising campaigns and lobbyists opposed to Scotland independence. Britain ’s North Sea oilfields are located in the territorial waters of Scotland . When and if independence is achieved, Shell and BP, now protected by the Crown Estate, would be forced to pay a fair price to the government of free Scotland , which would be a full EU member. For an apolitical rogue trading company, Vitol takes on many high-risk positions on behalf of the Anglo-American elite, thus acting more like a privateer than a pirate.
A Different Nigerian Fraud
Vitol’s position in Africa, anchored at a refinery in Mombasa , is strengthened by a partnership with Helios Investment Partners in the joint acquisition of Shell-BP retail fuel stations across the African continent. Although only a minor consumer of the crude output from South Sudan , local filling stations are important for influencing the logistics and transportation sector, which is influential in infrastructure policy.
Ostensibly a long-awaited pan-African investment fund, Helios is just another Oreo cookie from the old bag of neocolonialist tricks. The two principals holding together this confection are Nigerians, while the sweet filling comes from Dallas , Texas . Tope Lawani and Babatunda Soyoye are both former employees of the London branch of Texas Pacific Group (tpg), headquartered in Dallas and San Francisco.
Tope and Baba were trained in takeovers and buyouts by TPG boss David Bonderman, a Los Angeles-born business attorney who studied Arabic language in Cairo . A corporate raider who targets troubled companies, Bonderman finances his hostile takeovers with help from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Carlyle and Blackstone. His acquisitions of Asian firms are done through the subsidiary Newbridge Capital. Bonderman also serves on the board of the American Himalayan Foundation, a project of Richard Blum, the husband of Senate foreign-intelligence queen Dianne Feinstein.
The Helios takeovers of African telecom firms and cell-phone networks are funded by prominent investors including Lord Jacob Rothschild, Madeleine Albright, the World Bank’s IFC division and the U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Globalist financial power, aligned with Zionism, is being focused on a still-fledgling African economy, with all eyes now staring at the South Sudan-Kenya pipeline.
Whatever the PR hype about New Africa’s potential, the underlying motivation of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and Israeli elite is to deny African resources to the rising Asian industrial centers. Sudan offered China its first major oil exploration contract, and since then India ’s state petroleum firm has teamed up with Chinese companies there. As a Muslim-predominant oil-producing country at the center of Asia, Malaysia with its technology-adept Petronas oil firm is a target of Israeli and American political subversion and even a proxy invasion.
The surest method of curtailing Asian industrial and military strength is through the “Asian premium”, an added fee for every barrel of oil that passes through the Strait of Malacca . The steady stream of tankers is watched over by the Israel-U.S. agents posted in Singapore . An Israeli nuclear ally, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has quietly pushed Toyota Tsusho, the giant carmaker’s holding company, to enter talks with South Sudan on the Juba-Lamu pipeline deal. (The term nuclear ally refers to the presence of Israeli technicians and security staff from Dimona at the Fukushima No.1 plant at the time of the March 2011 meltdowns.) The Zionist-neocolonialist stranglehold on Asia’s energy jugular must be broken, and place to do it is Kenya.
Children of Ham
Beyond the twin objectives of countering Iran and controlling African petroleum output, Israeli policymakers harbor a third ambition of a visionary nature: to establish a Hamitic-controlled region stretching from the Horn at Somalia across Ethiopia and agriculture-rich Uganda and into the mineral resources of Central Africa.
No nation on Earth is today more race-conscious than Israel , which seeks to establish an alliance of so-called Lost Tribes and descendants of Ham, the country cousins of the Semitic people. Whenever an expansionist power conjures up ancient ancestral memories, it is a sure-fire formula for aggression and massacres. Africa , be warned.
The Old Testament myth of Noah’s sons – Seth, founder of the Semites; Ham, of related peoples in Africa; and Japhet in Asia – is being used as a mirror image of the Aryan beliefs of another modern racial-obsessed cult. DNA studies of questionable authenticity are being used by Israeli geneticists to justify political footholds in Judeo-Christian Ethiopia and to churn out propaganda support for the “superior” herding Tutsi versus the “inferior” peasant Hutu in Rwanda and Eastern Africa. By stressing a common heritage, intelligence agents assigned to Jewish-funded charities for Somali, Iraqi and Afghan refugees in, say, Minnesota , London or Marseilles can selectively recruit naïve young Muslim immigrants for penetrating Islamist movements.
Just months before the Kenyan mall attack, according to a Guardian report by Simon Tisdall, a hardline faction led by Ahmed Abdi Godane assassinated the founders of Al Shabaab known by the noms de guerre Al-Afghani and Burhan. By design and certainly not accident, all Israelis inside the Westgate Mall were allowed to leave unharmed – while even Kenyans of Muslim faith were butchered. In the Syrian conflict, too, the more brutal foreign fighters are closely cooperating with the Israeli Defense Force against moderate rivals.
The Westgate Mall hostage crisis was a overblown spectacle in the vein of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or a Quentin Tarantino blood-fest. The so-called White Widow, so reminiscent of Patty Hearst, is a clone of the vengeful female assassins from “Kill Bill” and “Inglorious Bastards”. The initial 30 assailants are now whittled down to eight suspects, with the remainder mysteriously gone as in “Ocean’s Eleven” or “Mission Impossible”. The smokescreen caused by bombs that collapsed the parking garage, and the gallons of red liquid on the floors were Hollywood special effects, as if blood never coagulates nor change color. Every detail from the siege demands forensic reexamination for slip-ups in fakery. Westgate was not West End . Nairobi was a bad show, poorly scripted, sloppily directed and clumsily acted. A much more convincing performance should be expected from the CIA and Mossad. It would be a slapstick comedy if not for the fact that so many innocent bit actors were murdered in cold blood by the intelligence services.
A Hard Road to Peace
On the road to development and cooperation, the weak link has been the lack of a security arrangement between the African Union and Asia ’s regional groupings, including SAARC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN. Western military advisory groups and intelligence agencies, which create more terrorism and conflict than they can ever suppress, must be uprooted from every inch of Africa . In their stead, competent and professional law enforcement and security forces should be financed and trained under a cross-continent program to protect the resources of Africa for the benefit of African people and to carry forth the worldwide struggle against the systemic deprivation that causes impoverishment and injustice.
Today the only viable path ahead, against the incessant wars, horrendous crimes and dirty tricks perpetrated by the Western neocolonialists and their Zionist allies, is to remain faithful to the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference, as reaffirmed at 2005 Bandung 2 with the drafting of the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership (NAASP). Those past promises must be transformed from mere words on paper into real deeds on the soil, seas and skies of Mother Africa.
Author: Yoichi Shimatsu, a Hong Kong-based science writer, is former editor of the Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo and earlier with the Pacific News Service in San Francisco .
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US Navy SEALs strike al-Shabab fighters in Somalia — video included
PressTV
October 6, 2013
The SEALs attacked a senior al-Shabab commander’s seaside villa in a pre-dawn raid in the town of Baraawe, The New York Times reported.
A US military official said that the SEALs did not get their target.
A former US military official also confirmed the assault by the SEALs, but did not give more details.
“The Baraawe raid was planned a week and a half ago,” a US security official said.
“It was prompted by the Westgate attack,” he added, referring to the September 21 attack by the al-Shabab on a shopping mall in Nairobi that left 67 people dead during a four-day siege.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
According to reports, the dead also included three British nationals, two French women, two Canadian citizens including a diplomat, a Chinese woman, two Indians, a Ghanaian poet, a South Korean, a South African, and a Dutch woman. Several Americans were also injured during the hostage crisis.
The US Defense Department declined to comment over the issue.
The al-Shabab confirmed the strike, but said that the attack had failed.
Al-Shabab spokesman Abdulaziz Abu Musab said that commandos had stormed the beach by boat.
“The bungled operation was carried out by white people, who came with two small boats from a larger ship out at sea … one Shabab guard was killed, but reinforcements soon came and the foreigners fled,” he said.
“Where the foreigners had been, afterwards we saw lots of blood, so maybe we wounded some,” he added.
On September 25, the leader of Somalia’s al-Shabab, Ahmed Godane, confirmed that the group was behind the attack on the mall, saying the raid was in retaliation for the Kenyan military’s invasion of southern Somalia in October 2011.
“Take your troops out or prepare for a long-lasting war, blood, destruction and evacuation,” Godane said.
Kenya has more than 4,000 army soldiers in southern Somalia, where they have been battling the al-Shabab fighters since 2011.
The Kenyan troops are part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) that gets training and equipment from the United States.
Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991, when warlords overthrew former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
GJH/NN/AS
VIDEO — Terror Raids US targets Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda leaders in Somalia, Libya
Ryan Dawson
October 6, 2013
VIDEO — Syria is NOT a Civil War, It Is a Foreign Intervention
RT
October 4, 2013
Syria is entering a new stage of secular-on-extremist violence, with the collective war against President Assad almost sidelined by the growing mayhem. Outside plans for chaos have begun uncontrollably to shift the war, according to a number of experts.
Analyst and editor of the Corbett Report, James Corbett, feels it important to emphasize the gap between the motives displayed by various factions inside Syria and the initial aim of external powers to remove Assad.
This view is furthered by professor of international relations Mark Almond, who believes that a diffuse groupings all dangerously seeking personal gain may put disarmament process off the rails.
On one hand, the Syrian conflict is seen as painstakingly planned and funded chaos from outside in Corbett’s view. On the other are several civil wars within the main struggle, which are prone to constant shifts in allegiances due to the aforementioned chaos, according to Almond.
For full transcript, visit:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-is…
Originally aired on RT, October 4, 2013
http://rt.com/op-edge/almond-corbett-…
Portraits of Soldiers Before, During, and After War
My Modern Metropolis
November 12, 2012
Photographer Lalage Snow, who is currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan, embarked on an 8-month-long project titled We Are The Not Dead featuring portraits of British soldiers before, during, and after their deployment in Afghanistan. Similar to Claire Felicie’s series of monochromatic triptychs, Snow captures the innocent expressions of these men transformed into gaunt, sullen faces in less than a year.
The three-panel juxtaposition allows the viewer to observe the physical changes a stationed soldier in a war zone goes through. Time is sped up for these men under the beating sun, amidst combat. Regardless of age, the boys that went in came back as men with experiences beyond their years. As weathered and worn as their skin or sunken in faces may appear, it’s their dilated eyes that are the most telling.
Additionally, Snow’s series accompanies each triptych with quotes from each of the servicemen that gives a great deal of insight into their mental and emotional state at each given time. Sergeant Alexander McBroom’s first portrait, before deployment, features him bravely saying, “I am not worried about going out – it is my job after all.” Three months later, he is quoted as saying, “It has been an eye opener.” And, finally, another four months after, he says, “It is always that fear, that apprehension, what is going to happen if I get blown up?” Having gone through life-altering trials and warfare, it is no surprise that fear is no longer a foreign feeling to these courageous men.
Snow’s intention with the series is to not only honor their bravery by featuring them, but to also draw attention to every soldiers’ psychological transformation. She says, “It was a very personal project and stemmed from having embedded with the military on and off for 4 years in Iraq and Afghanistan and bearing witness to how many young men return as shadows of their former selves and, in many cases, with deep, psychological scars. As the body count of British servicemen killed or wounded rose and the political ramifications of the British army’s presence in Afghanistan became increasingly convoluted, more and more soldiers felt like they didn’t have a voice, or at least, weren’t being listened to. We Are The Not Dead is an attempt at giving the brave young men and women the chance to explain how it really is.”
Update: See more triptychs and read our exclusive, one-on-one interview with Lalage Snow, here.

Lance Corporal Sean Tennant, 29

Private Ben Frater, 21


