HEADS MUST ROLL!

President John Dramani Mahama

By Kwesi Pratt, Jnr.

Who can believe that Ghana is continuing to import maize seed when as much as 350 tonnes has been packed in a ware house in the Upper West Region for three long years?

The fear is that the locally produced seed maize may get spoiled causing huge problems for the national economy.

Investigations carried out by “The Ghanaian Times” revealed that the locally produced maize seed is preferred to what has been imported from South Africa and Brazil because its yield is much better.

Besides locally produced maize seed is much cheaper than the imported one indeed, whiles the imported maize seed cost GH¢95 per acre, the locally produced variety cost only GH¢18.

This is a clear case of economic sabotage for which a few heads may have to roll at the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) especially as it has been confirmed that the Authority deliberately encouraged farmers to produce the maize seed.

There cannot be any doubt that SADA knew that maize seed was available in a warehouse in Wa and yet its officials spent hard eared foreign exchange to import lower grade seed from Brazil and South Africa.

One question which pops up is why officials of SADA did what they did having regard to the fact that one of the most serious problems facing farmers is how to market their products.

The fixation of importing everything needed in Ghana is partly responsible for the rising level of unemployment and low levels of production in the Ghanaian economy.

Indeed, the conduct of SADA can only amount to a direct subversion of its own objective of promoting the accelerated development of the Savannah regions.

How could SADA promote the accelerated development of the Savannah regions when it deliberately subverts the ability of farmers to market their produce?

It is legitimate to call on the Government to establish a full scale enquiry into this affair.

In the end the heads of officials responsible for this mess must most definitely roll. 

Editorial

THIS IS SERIOUS
This is serious and it is not about the contest between the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

It about what appears to be direct subversion of the national interest by public officials.

The Insight is unable to understand why 350 tons of maize seed harvested by local farmers has been lying in a warehouse for three years whilst Ghana continues to import maize seeds from Brazil and South Africa.

What is worse is that the locally produced maize seed is of a higher quality than what is imported. It is also cheaper.

In our view the importation of maize seed has the effect of discouraging the production of local substitute which would boost national agriculture?

We demand  full scale enquiry into this affair and all officials connected with it ought gto be given the boot.

There can be no compromise on this.

Russian-Czech nuclear accord to irk US

By Igor Alexeev

Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas arrived in Russia on May 27 a four-day working visit. Trade and energy policy are always topical issues for Prague and Moscow as both parties bask in joy over a six-percent increase in turnover.

Infrastructure investment projects like Temelin nuclear power plant could be the cornerstone of successful bilateral cooperation. Temelin NPP means not only thousands new jobs, but also affordable energy for the Czech industry. It can truly be a safety net at a time of Europe’s economic meltdown.

Necas’ visit to Russia resulted in signing a number of memorandums and agreements on hydropower, combined-cycle power plants and other large-scale projects of mechanical engineering.

Partnership for high-tech development also includes one crucial nuclear energy project in a small village of Temelin in southern Bohemia. The Temelin Nuclear Power Plant, with its 2,000 MW of installed capacity, is the largest power resource in the Czech Republic and a profitable business opportunity.

The stakes are high: tender winner will have to double NPP's energy output building two new reactors by 2017. Both units are to be completed in 2025 and should produce electricity for 60 years. Czech industrial sector is in need of stable and affordable energy source to boost national GDP in the middle of crisis-stricken European Union (now industry accounts for 40% of Czech GDP and employment).

The French company Areva participated in the tender process through last October but had to leave it. CEZ Group, the policy-maker in the Czech Republic on energy issues, eliminated Areva’s bid citing serious mistakes.

The French are currently trying to challenge the decision in the Office for the Protection of Competition (UOHS), but Czech experts believe Areva’s chances to open an antitrust procedure are rather slim. Eventually US-Japanese corporation “Westinghouse-Toshiba” and Russian-Czech engineering consortium of “Skoda JS”, “Atomstroyexport” and “Gidropress” have come through to the tender’s finals.

The Czech financial regulator is now working to bring down the prices. On a more subtle level there is also a political rivalry going on between Prime Minister Necas (Civic Democrats, “ODS”) and Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek (Conservative “TOP 09”). “I must say that offers of both bidders surprised us very unpleasantly in terms of price,” Kalousek told the “Hospodarske Noviny” newspaper earlier in May.

"The tender will be transparent and the best bid will win," Prime Minister Necas announced in Moscow on May 28. The Czech Republic "absolutely welcomes the participation of the Russian-Czech MIR.1200 consortium in tender procedures to complete the two Temelin NPP units," he confirmed.

Russia treats Czech Republic as a traditional partner and plays with an open hand. "If we are able to prove the solidity of our position, Czech companies will receive very significant orders worth up to 6 billion euro," Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said.

Considering the volume of Czech business community’s net investments to Russia, this highly pragmatic scenario appears to be the most probable. First, the power core of Temelin NPP that needs an upgrade is the Soviet- designed VVER1000 reactor. Russia can ensure consistency of operations which is extremely important in such technology-intensive project. Second, Russia’s engineering solutions are well-known to be robust and stable - an important feature in densely populated Europe.

However, the US-Japanese nuclear giant Westinghouse-Toshiba does not lose hope despite its shattered public image after the Fukushima tragedy. Westinghouse's European branch vice-president Mike Kirst said in reaction to Dmitry Medvedev's words that the corporation would not officially comment on Russia's move.

This strategy of silence could be a part of a cunning PR strategy. The US has a long history of aggressive unofficial lobbying for its transnational corporations. For example, Monsanto’s notorious PR-activity abroad has recently caused global citizen protests.

In December 2012, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Prague in attempt to save the situation for Westinghouse. “Who reaps the benefits?” asked Democratic Party activist Tom Gallagher half a year ago following Czech-US talks.

Westinghouse-Toshiba spends about USD 2,000,000 annually lobbying Washington to remind the “right” people on the Hill that it is a loyal American company. The US State Department’s international lobbying for the corporation could be easily explained to the American citizens as “protecting their national interests.”

When some see it is right to invest in publicity, inhabitants of small towns and villages in Bohemia, where reactors are planned to being built, would obviously prefer construction companies to put money on modern safety actuation systems.

The final contract is to be signed by the end of 2013, but the licensing and design phase will run 44 months after the agreement's signing. It should be a matter of national consensus in the Czech Republic that Temelin NPP is such a serious strategic issue to be a subject of disputes between the two ruling parties. Prime Minister Necas guaranteed the tender transparency, therefore the market will decide on the future of Temelin.

Monsanto - the Most Hated Corporation On Earth?

By Glenn Ashton

What does it take to be the most hated corporation on earth? How many global corporations have had an entire day of global protest declared to draw attention to their nastiness? Well, the world’s leading producer of genetically modified seed, Monsanto, has just managed this feat, with millions having participated in over 450 actions across 52 countries on the 25th of May. It is worth examining how and why Monsanto has become so uniformly hated around the planet.

It is difficult to assume the bottom slot amongst a panoply of corporate villains that pollute and destroy the environment, exploit the poor, corrupt governments, lie about their products, sue their customers and do their best to avoid taxation by every legal and other means possible.

Monsanto regularly takes the honours as the most abhorred corporation, in amongst some noxious competitors. In 2012 Monsanto won the "Greenwash Award" for misinforming the public about its environmental credentials. It won the worst company of 2011 award. In 2009 it won the Angry Mermaid Award during the run-up to the failed Copenhagen climate change talks for misleadingly claiming its GM crops reduced CO2 emissions.

This long list of negative awards should be incredibly damaging to the company. However the investor community embraces rogue corporations and Monsanto's shareholders have been richly rewarded for its bad behaviour. Were Monsanto an individual and not a corporation it would certainly have been sentenced to jail, probably indefinitely, for repeatedly breaking laws around the world. Yet corporations manage to evade responsibility for the sort of behaviour you or I cannot.

None of this is new. In 2002 Monsanto was found guilty of not only contaminating the town and surrounds of Anniston, Alabama with carcinogenic polychlorinated bi-phenyls (PCBs), but of covering up this pollution for decades. Beside being ordered to pay a paltry $800 000 settlement, it was found guilty of the crime of "outrage." Outrage is legally defined as conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society." It really is difficult to beat that.

Monsanto not only opposed the Anniston case, it attempted to avoid prosecution through its sale of its chemical business to Solutia, insisting it was the problem of the new owner. It took exactly the same tack with its pollution of its 'home town' of Sauget, which originally was incorporated under the name of Monsanto in 1926.

In the US Monsanto is linked to nearly 100 superfund sites, two in Sauget alone, where its historical pollution is being remediated, mainly through taxpayer funds. It has managed to avoid similar responsibility in the UK as well. The infamous Vietnam War defoliant, Agent Orange, manufactured by Monsanto and others, was routinely contaminated with PCBs.

When Rachel Carson wrote her carefully researched book "Silent Spring," outlining the dangers of agricultural chemicals and heralding the a emergence of the environmental movement, she was aggressively targeted by Monsanto, responsible for production of chemicals like DDT that she questioned. Monsanto parodied Carson's book while viciously attempting to undermine her reputation and vilifying her as a "hysterical woman." Tactics have changed very little with opponents of GM crops denigrated as luddites or unscientific.

Today Monsanto is better known for its GM crops than its chemicals. It is the world's single biggest producer of genetically modified (GM) crops, responsible for around 95% of global GM plantings. 

The most widely grown GM crop, GM soy, is specifically engineered for resistance to Monsanto's herbicide "Roundup". The chemicals in Roundup have been linked to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer and gut disease, as well as having serious documented impacts on amphibians, fish, soil biota and other ecological processes. Needless to say herbicide resistant crops have sharply increased the use of chemicals. As weeds develop resistance more potent chemicals are needed and further GM crops are being introduced to resist these chemicals in turn.

The pursuit of GM crops has led Monsanto to morph from a chemical corporation into the worlds largest seed company. Through purchase of seed companies around the world it has acquired an unimaginable wealth seed germplasm. Yet it has sharply reduced the number of seed varieties sold by its subsidiaries, instead concentrating on its core business of pushing GM crops.

Monsanto is fully aware of its inherent unpopularity, which continues despite its every attempt to reform its reputation through extensive public relations campaigns. Its strategy to sidestep this is to form and fund groups and alliances that promote its interests. 

Organisations like BIO, the US biotechnology association, as well as Africa- and Europa-Bio, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications and Crop Life each support Monsanto's interests as supposedly independent voices. Additionally, Monsanto spends millions of dollars directly lobbying governments around the world.

Monsanto then negates these massive PR campaigns by its aggressive legal prosecution of farmers it alleges are re-using its seed containing its patented GM genes. While there are constant high profile cases in the USA, Monsanto insists it will not prosecute African farmers for saving or possessing seed contaminated by their genes. In South America Monsanto has gone directly to the governments of Argentina, Brazil and other nations in order to try to leverage royalties on farmer saved GM seed.

Monsanto has also ensured its continued domination of the chemical herbicide industry by contractually linking the sale of Roundup to herbicide resistant "Roundup Ready" and "Yieldguard" soy, maize and cottonseed. Pushing this technology into developing markets has exposed farmers to increased debt through the purchase of seed and chemicals. When crops fail, as they repeatedly have, farmers lose their land or, as happens in India, choose to take their lives to escape debt bondage.

The model of industrial agriculture Monsanto promotes exacerbates problems of chemical pollution, water extraction and indebtedness, while also aggravating social upheaval. Small farmers whose lands and crops are contaminated not only by chemicals, but by patented GM crops are forced into burgeoning urban slums where they are trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty.

Monsanto has shifted focus toward developing nations in Africa and Asia, after saturating the Americas and rejection from within the EU. It dominates the GM seed market in South Africa, Brazil and India. There is nothing intrinsically beneficial about Monsanto's business model, as much as it is supported and promoted within the dominant capital market.

These are just some of the reasons why millions of people protest against Monsanto's destructive proposals to create profit through the privatisation of our food. That this model perversely masquerades as something beneficial, purporting to offer a hope of feeding a burgeoning planet is even more grotesque. The deeper one looks, the more outrageous is the behaviour of this rogue corporation.

In reality Monsanto epitomises so much that is wrong with the world and how corporations conduct themselves. Were it a living person it would be languishing in jail. The time has come to consider instituting a global criminal court for corporations, where their charters are withdrawn and they are put out of business. That is probably wishful thinking in a world where too big to fail has become a corporate mantra embraced by the very governments these psychopathic corporations support and maintain in power. In the meantime it is up to us, the 99%, to direct our ire toward curbing the misbehaviour of this particular corporate misanthrope.

The FBI's New Wiretapping Plan Is Great News for Criminals

By Bruce Schneier

The FBI wants a new law that will make it easier to wiretap the Internet. Although its claim is that the new law will only maintain the status quo, it's really much worse than that. This law will result in less-secure Internet products and create a foreign industry in more-secure alternatives. It will impose costly burdens on affected companies. It will assist totalitarian governments in spying on their own citizens. And it won't do much to hinder actual criminals and terrorists. 

As the FBI sees it, the problem is that people are moving away from traditional communication systems like telephones onto computer systems like Skype. Eavesdropping on telephones used to be easy. The FBI would call the phone company, which would bring agents into a switching room and allow them to literally tap the wires with a pair of alligator clips and a tape recorder. In the 1990s, the government forced phone companies to provide an analogous capability on digital switches; but today, more and more communications happens over the Internet. 

What the FBI wants is the ability to eavesdrop on everything. Depending on the system, this ranges from easy to impossible. E-mail systems like Gmail are easy. The mail resides in Google's servers, and the company has an office full of people who respond to requests for lawful access to individual accounts from governments all over the world. Encrypted voice systems like Silent Circle are impossible to eavesdrop on -- the calls are encrypted from one computer to the other, and there's no central node to eavesdrop from. In those cases, the only way to make the system eavesdroppable is to add a backdoor to the user software. This is precisely the FBI's proposal. Companies that refuse to comply would be fined $25,000 a day. 

The FBI believes it can have it both ways: that it can open systems to its eavesdropping, but keep them secure from anyone else's eavesdropping. That's just not possible. It's impossible to build a communications system that allows the FBI surreptitious access but doesn't allow similar access by others. When it comes to security, we have two options: We can build our systems to be as secure as possible from eavesdropping, or we can deliberately weaken their security. We have to choose one or the other. 

This is an old debate, and one we've been through many times. The NSA even has a name for it: the equities issue. In the 1980s, the equities debate was about export control of cryptography. The government deliberately weakened U.S. cryptography products because it didn't want foreign groups to have access to secure systems. Two things resulted: fewer Internet products with cryptography, to the insecurity of everybody, and a vibrant foreign security industry based on the unofficial slogan "Don't buy the U.S. stuff -- it's lousy."
In 1993, the debate was about the Clipper Chip. This was another deliberately weakened security product, an encrypted telephone. The FBI convinced AT&T to add a backdoor that allowed for surreptitious wiretapping. The product was a complete failure. Again, why would anyone buy a deliberately weakened security system? 

In 1994, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act mandated that U.S. companies build eavesdropping capabilities into phone switches. These were sold internationally; some countries liked having the ability to spy on their citizens. Of course, so did criminals, and there were public scandals in Greece (2005) and Italy (2006) as a result.
In 2012, we learned that every phone switch sold to the Department of Defense had security vulnerabilities in its surveillance system. And just this May, we learned that Chinese hackers breached Google's system for providing surveillance data for the FBI.

The new FBI proposal will fail in all these ways and more. The bad guys will be able to get around the eavesdropping capability, either by building their own security systems -- not very difficult -- or buying the more-secure foreign products that will inevitably be made available. Most of the good guys, who don't understand the risks or the technology, will not know enough to bother and will be less secure. The eavesdropping functions will 1) result in more obscure -- and less secure -- product designs, and 2) be vulnerable to exploitation by criminals, spies, and everyone else. U.S. companies will be forced to compete as a disadvantage; smart customers won't buy the substandard stuff when there are more-secure foreign alternatives. Even worse, there are lots of foreign governments who want to use these sorts of systems to spy on their own citizens. Do we really want to be exporting surveillance technology to the likes of China, Syria, and Saudi Arabia? 

The FBI's short-sighted agenda also works against the parts of the government that are still working to secure the Internet for everyone. Initiatives within the NSA, the DOD, and DHS to do everything from securing computer operating systems to enabling anonymous web browsing will all be harmed by this. 

What to do, then? The FBI claims that the Internet is "going dark," and that it's simply trying to maintain the status quo of being able to eavesdrop. This characterization is disingenuous at best. We are entering a golden age of surveillance; there's more electronic communications available for eavesdropping than ever before, including whole new classes of information: location tracking, financial tracking, and vast databases of historical communications such as e-mails and text messages. The FBI's surveillance department has it better than ever. With regard to voice communications, yes, software phone calls will be harder to eavesdrop upon. (Although there are questions about Skype's security.) That's just part of the evolution of technology, and one that on balance is a positive thing.

Think of it this way: We don't hand the government copies of our house keys and safe combinations. If agents want access, they get a warrant and then pick the locks or bust open the doors, just as a criminal would do. A similar system would work on computers. The FBI, with its increasingly non-transparent procedures and systems, has failed to make the case that this isn't good enough. 

Finally there's a general principle at work that's worth explicitly stating. All tools can be used by the good guys and the bad guys. Cars have enormous societal value, even though bank robbers can use them as getaway cars. Cash is no different. Both good guys and bad guys send e-mails, use Skype, and eat at all-night restaurants. But because society consists overwhelmingly of good guys, the good uses of these dual-use technologies greatly outweigh the bad uses. Strong Internet security makes us all safer, even though it helps the bad guys as well. And it makes no sense to harm all of us in an attempt to harm a small subset of us.
 

Hussein Obama's war on whistle blowers

US President Hussein Obama

By Dr. Dylan Murphy

 “If you had free reign over classified networks… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?” 

“God knows what happens now. Hopefully, worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms… I want people to see the truth… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” -Quotes from an online chat attributed to Bradley Manning

On 3 June, the trial of PFC Bradley Manning finally begins. He will have spent over three years in prison. During his first year of incarceration, the conditions Bradley was kept in amounted to torture and were condemned by the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez. 

The American government has devoted great energy and resources to the persecution of Bradley Manning since his arrest in 2010 for releasing documents to WikiLeaks that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is all part of President Obama's war on whistle blowers that has led to his administration arresting more people under the 1917 espionage Act than all of the previous governments put together. Up to Obama taking office, the US government had only prosecuted three whistle-blowers in 40 years. Now under Obama six people have/are being prosecuted for their whistle blowing activities.

The persecution of John Kiriakou, a former CIA intelligence analyst, who was sentenced to two and half years in prison for exposing torture as official US policy sums up the attitude of Obama's government. 

Obama's government is trying to send a very clear message to both servicemen and women and those in the intelligence services. To those Americans he is saying don't you dare release any document that might be critical of US foreign policy or we will come after you and put you in prison for a very long time. 

Of course, this is not the only target in Obama's sights. It is very clear from the pre-trial hearings that the military prosecutors want to send a message to journalists which is: if you have any contact with the enemies of America then you may be guilty of aiding the enemy and we will come after you also. 

Journalist Alexa O'Brien has covered the Bradley Manning case from the start. As she points out, the persecution of Manning is one of the most important civil rights cases since 9/11. In her blog she commented, “At issue in the Manning trial is the danger posed to democracy and the rule of law by the government's expanding control over information in the digital age and the use of prejudicial prosecutions that turn whistle-blowing into treason and journalism into espionage or an act of war.'' 

It is not surprising that they have gone after Bradley Manning considering the revelations he allegedly made to WikiLeaks when he was serving in Iraq as an intelligence specialist. The documents released by WikiLeaks have opened a Pandora’s Box of highly embarrassing and illegal activities committed by American forces. The ''Iraq War'' logs revealed that American armed forces routinely ignored the torture of suspects by the Iraqi security forces. Indeed, they often used torture themselves. They also revealed war crimes committed by American troops. The infamous video of an Apache attack helicopter shooting and killing 11 people in Baghdad in 2007 is probably the most famous revelation. 

The Afghan war logs reveal a relentless catalogue of civilian killings by NATO forces, many of which are war crimes. Not surprisingly, most of these unlawful killings have not been investigated. The most infamous of which is the major scandal surrounding the NATO bombing of a village at Kunduz. This massacre of 140 Afghani civilians gained worldwide media coverage at the time. 

The military trial that Bradley Manning will receive will not be open and transparent. Military judge Denis Lind had ruled that some sections of the trial would be closed to the public to protect classified material. She has also ruled that the testimony of 24 of the 150 witnesses for the prosecution will be heard in closed sessions of the court. 

On 22 May, a group of prominent journalists, that includes Julian Assange, filed a lawsuit that tries to force military judge Denise Lind to grant the public and press access to transcripts of the trial proceedings, the government's filings and court orders. 

Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal has commented, “If this lawsuit fails, Manning’s trial will take place under conditions where journalists and the public will be unable as a practical matter to follow what is going on in the courtroom. That ensures that any verdict will be fundamentally unfair …'' 

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! is one of the journalists bringing the lawsuit against military judge Denis Lind. She has warned: 

“Secret trials are commonplace in dictatorships, but have no place in this country. The Obama administration conducts unconstitutional dragnet surveillance of journalists to uncover protected sources, and targets whistle blowers with unprecedented use of the espionage act. Access to court documents and proceedings in the court martial of Bradley Manning is vital to the public's right to know to what lengths their government will go to keep secret their conduct of wars and occupations abroad.”

This is one of the most important trials of the last decade yet it is largely ignored by the mainstream media in the US. Internationally support is growing for Bradley Manning. In the UK, he was recently voted The Guardian’s Person of the Year by readers.

In early December three Nobel Peace Prize winners, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Perez Esquivel called upon the American people to stand up for the whistle-blower who has done so much to defend their democratic rights. Their letter of support for Bradley Manning concludes: 

“We Nobel Peace Prize laureates condemn the persecution Bradley Manning has suffered, including imprisonment in conditions declared “cruel, inhuman and degrading” by the United Nations.... In the conflict in Iraq alone, more than 110,000 people have died since 2003, millions have been displaced and nearly 4,500 American soldiers have been killed. If Bradley Manning released the documents, as the prosecution contends, we should express to him our gratitude for his efforts toward accountability in government, informed democracy and peace.”

Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, that exposed the destructive and immoral nature of America's war in Vietnam, has made an appeal for people all over the world to support Bradley Manning: 

“We need money to support ongoing grass roots efforts-including rallies, petitions, and ads. Most importantly, however, we need to continue fully funding Bradley’s legal defense efforts-including possible appeals, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, if need be. The future of truth-telling is at stake, and a young man’s sel?ess, heroic act of patriotism deserves our support.”

To learn more about Bradley Manning’s case or to get involved, visit the Bradley Manning Support Network website.

Colonial terror returns to Mideast

By Jim W. Dean

The Syrian situation has been getting more bizarre by the day but we are entering back into the Twilight Zone again. The Geneva conference still has momentum and the decision not to attend by the ‘Syrian National Council’ found no one jumping off of buildings and bridges in disappointment. 

In fact the reason they gave was like an old skit out of Saturday Night Live. Their spokesman actually said that an international political conference to the situation in Syria has no meaning in light of the massacres that are taking place. 

Mind you these are the heads of an opposition that have no control over their fighters whatsoever. They are looting and raping where they please, and have begun taking religious hostages like the Christian Orthodox bishops. 

This blew up in John McCain’s face when one of the kidnapped victims’ families spotted one of the kidnappers in McCain’s front line photo op. He was the one in the rear with the camera. It looks like ‘bomb bomb McCain’ bombed his credibility into further oblivion. But he is still for sale, especially to the Israelis, so that makes him dangerous. 

We had the story break that the FSA has been running a sex slave business out of the camps in Turkey using teenage refugee girls. This even beats the pretend-a-mullahs in the Persian Gulf giving the OK for the al-Nusra brigades to rape who they want by allowing three-day temporary marriages to do so. 

The Salafists are desperately in need of some PR management and I am surprised the Israelis have not moved in to scoop up the business. They usually do by creating a problem and then offering to fix it for a price. 

There is a joke going around the Intel community that the real reason the ‘SNC’ would not attend Geneva 2 was that the Swiss would not provide them five-star hotel accommodations and all the teenage Swiss girls they could pick out during school tours. 

Most of the military and Intel people have nothing but contempt for these ‘SNC’ gangsters and their thugs. They will be a scarlet letter tattoo on the dummies in Congress for backing them with no real controls. They have no MPs, no judge advocate set up, no arrests inside their ranks for any of their own atrocities. They have killed their credibility and have now retreated to whining.

They had the gall to tell McCain they not only wanted heavy weapons and a no-fly zone, but air strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, too. Who do they think they are… Israelis??

The world’s grownups are trying to tame the Syrian situation down as they know now that expanding it will only make it worse, much worse. But there are those who actually want that. Israel for example wants to see American military fighting at their beck and call like they are used to. That is why they made the provocation attacks they did, hoping Assad would shoot some missiles back at them so they could launch a full-scale attack. 

Assad did not take the bait. But it seems that the Israelis did as their attacks gave the Russians perfect cover to move the fleet back into the Med and commit to defending Syria’s airspace from attack, a game changer. The Israeli leadership is in full panic now as they know they brought this on themselves. All they can think of is to do what they always have, claim they are under attack when they aren’t. 

Not surprisingly we have seen the anticipated false flag attempts. Despite the American poodle Congress giving Israel a blank check to attack Iran for whatever reason they desire, the usual bio weapon tainted letters have shown up at Mayor Bloomberg’s office in New York City, and in the White House mail room. The usual easy to make ricin was used for these. 

And the Turks caught some al-Nusra operatives with two kilos of Sarin nerve gas canisters, obviously planning to use these in an attack and blame on Assad to push him over some Western red line. 

The French played their gas card this week, too. But what they described was very similar to the nasty crowd control gas that the Israelis flew in to help Mubarak out early in his demise. We saw Egyptians on TV with the same reactions.

Britain and France have joined the Western pity parade with their calls to unilaterally provide heavy weapons to the rebel terrorists to cause more mayhem. The British offer comes when amputee War on Terror Vets are being cleared off the assistance rolls in the national health system budget cuts. And these were the military machines that ran out of ammunition during the Libyan no-fly zone days. Both countries need to throw their leaderships into the river, and do it quickly.

The Israelis are putting on one hell of a show. Step number one is to hustle their own people into believing that the Russians coming in with their air defenses has something to do with attacking the Israel public. This makes no sense at all as neither Syria nor anyone else has any offensive capability toward Israel. All of their military expenditure has had to go into defense, which includes some realistic retaliation ability.

The IDF must have read Gordon Duff’s piece about how the Russian state-of-the-art missiles could sweep the Golan Heights clean of Israeli defenses in a day if they needed to. But there would be no point to do it other than as a retaliation for an attack on the fleet or Damascus. The Israelis have had the Heights mined with nukes for decades now as part of their ‘if we can’t have it, nobody is going to have it’ strategy. When the Israelis leave, the Golan will be a no man’s land. 

The one-upsmanship game continues with the EU ending the weapons sanctions ban to open those doors for rebel supply, and where the Russians the next day stated they would have to consider more weapons shipments themselves. Western governments are trying to spin this as a Russian threat when it is just a reaction to their own aggression. 

Israel is sweating the worst of all nightmares, losing its dominance to strike anywhere it wants to with impunity. The debacle they are now seeing unfolding is that what they thought would be a proxy war to take out Assad at no cost to themselves could end up costing them their air space dominance.

The battles now in south Syria are strategic because the supply lines from the ports to Damascus have to be secured. And I don’t mean just to funnel ammo and critical civilian supplies in, but to protect the air defense system from local ground attack. 

So I suspect the deal was made on the missiles that the rebels had to be cleared out from all the border areas permanently and their supply lines completely cut off. Because Israel has Hezbollah in the cross hairs all the time with the constant overflights, Nasrallah is saving himself by helping to provide safe ground for their deployment. Military and defensively it is no-brainer. 

In return southern Syria would get complete air cover all the way down to the border of Jordan and southern Lebanon where they could provide air cover for all of Lebanon, especially with the Russian fleet offshore with the S-400s and more. Israel’s pre-emptive strike threat would be gone the first time they used it, from a defensive retaliation. 

Israeli cities would not be targeted as the missiles are too expensive to waste on civilian targets. They are for destroying enemy offensive military capability which is absolutely critical. This includes Israel’s subs which the Russians will track with their satellites and if a move is made on the fleet they will be killed with air launched torpedoes within a few hours. The Germans can then rob their own people again to build them more. 

If there is a political settlement you can then bet the Israelis will want the Russian air defenses removed. But guess what? Then the Russians might ask for all the Israeli WMD put under UN control, all their facilities opened for inspection and the Russians promising only to fire on Israeli targets when they were attacking someone… that they would never be used in a first strike. 

Do you think the Israelis would like that? Their bully days would be over. And what would the US do… move what is left of our shrinking military to the Golan Heights and all of our Patriots to Israel to protect their flanks next time they want to pound Gaza or the West Bank with impunity? 

The Russian move has been met with acclaim all around the world, but not by broke Western former colonialists looking for an economic bad news distraction on the cheap. Respect for Western leadership is not only way down around the world but inside their own countries as more and more citizens realize they are being ruled over by gangs of uber thugs.

Even Americans are saluting the Russian response because they know American leaders are cowards and even worse when it comes to standing up to the Israel lobby subversion here. Israeli espionage runs rampant from one end of the country to the other and all our institutions sworn to protect us do virtually nothing but stay out of their way. 

The Syrian ‘SNC’ rebels, along with the al-Nusra cannibals are our tar babies thrown into the briar patch of the Levant. We made them. They are terrorists. And that makes us guilty of aiding and abetting terrorism. There are supposed to be serious penalties for that but the UN’s reputation here is just destroyed as they have done nothing. They will not even issue an arrest warrant for the self-confessed al-Nusra cannibal.

The legacy of all of this insanity, if a silver lining can be found in it, might be that the world woke up to find out their governments were mainly in the extortion business, and we put them all on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors… and oh yes… terrorism.