September 10, 2014

BOOM!!!! Huge blast kills most leaders of Syrian resistance.

Well this IS a new wrinkle in the ME
mashup of interests & disparate players, isn't it?

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/09/09/4338944/blast-in-northern-syria-kills.html

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/09/09/239338/blast-in-northern-syria-kills.html

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/mortar-attack-kills-syrian-capital-25372598

September 9, 2014

MoJo: A "Convention" for militarization of US police? What we saw...

...before being thrown out.
This ugly cancer in our nation isn't going away anytime soon apparently.


Video: What We Saw Before Being Kicked Out of the SWAT Convention
—By Shane Bauer| Tue Sep. 9, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

This weekend, my colleague Prashanth Kamalakanthan and I attended Urban Shield, a first-responder convention sponsored by over 100 corporations and the Department of Homeland Security. The five-day confab included a trade show where vendors display everything from armored trucks to sniper rifles to 3D printable drones. (We documented a few of the more remarkable offerings here.) It also involved the largest SWAT training exercise in the world. Some 35 SWAT teams competed in a 48-hour exercise involving 31 scenarios that included ambushing vehicles, indoor shootouts, maritime interdiction, train assaults and a mock eviction of a right-wing Sovereign Citizens group. The teams came from cities across the San Francisco Bay area, Singapore, and South Korea and included a University of California SWAT team, a team of US Marines, and a SWAT team of prison guards.

But on Sunday, at a competition site near the Bay Bridge, our coverage was cut short. A police officer confiscated our press badges, politely explaining that his captain had called and given him the order. The captain, he said, told him we had been filming in an unauthorized location, though he could not tell us where that location was. (We'd been advised earlier that it was okay to film so long as we did not go on the bridge itself.) After several phone calls from both me and my editors, no one could tell us exactly what we had done wrong, but Sgt. J.D. Nelson, the public information officer for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department (which hosts the Department of Homeland Security-funded event) made it clear that we could not have our passes back.

We'll have a more in-depth report, and a lot more images and videos, in a few days.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/09/video-highlights-oaklands-urbanshield-conference

September 6, 2014

MoJo: ISIS Is America's Legacy in Iraq

ISIS Is America's Legacy in Iraq
How 13 years of the War on Terror led to the Islamic State.

Whatever your politics, you're not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there's Ferguson (the whole world was watching!), an increasingly unpopular president, a Congress whose approval ratings make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list. Abroad, from Libya and Ukraine to Iraq and the South China Sea, nothing has been coming up roses for the US Polls reflect a general American gloom, with 71% of the public claiming the country is "on the wrong track." We have the look of a superpower down on our luck.

What Americans have needed is a little pick-me-up to make us feel better, to make us, in fact, feel distinctly good. Certainly, what official Washington has needed in tough times is a bona fide enemy so darn evil, so brutal, so barbaric, so inhuman that, by contrast, we might know just how exceptional, how truly necessary to this planet we really are.

In the nick of time, riding to the rescue comes something new under the sun: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), recently renamed Islamic State (IS). It's a group so extreme that even al-Qaeda rejected it, so brutal that it's brought back crucifixion, beheading, waterboarding, and amputation, so fanatical that it's ready to persecute any religious group within range of its weapons, so grimly beyond morality that it's made the beheading of an innocent American a global propaganda phenomenon. If you've got a label that's really, really bad like genocide or ethnic cleansing, you can probably apply it to ISIS's actions.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/isis-americas-legacy-iraq

September 6, 2014

And it's Assad to the rescue! "Syria launches airstrikes on ISIS stronghold"

Syria launches airstrikes on Islamic State stronghold
Syria launched a series of airstrikes targeting a stronghold of the Islamic State extremist group on Saturday, killing at least 25 people, most of whom died when one of the missiles slammed into a crowded bakery, activists said.

The eight airstrikes smashed parts of buildings, set cars alight and crushed people under rubble in the northeastern city of Raqqa, which is ruled by the extremist group, according to video of the aftermath uploaded to social media networks.
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/syria-launches-airstrikes-on-islamic-state-stronghold-slideshow/

September 6, 2014

USA's Middle East policy in a nutshell.

Basically arming all sides to gin-up sectarian violence, destabilizing the ME immeasurably.

And of course, we're expected to believe this has "nothing to do" with oil.

September 3, 2014

McCain: “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar" who lavished funding to make ISIS "unstoppable"

Tell me again, why exactly does our US gov't still regard Saudi Arabia an "ally"?


The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.

The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/14/america-s-allies-are-funding-isis.html

“Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,” John McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014. “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends,” the senator said once again a month later, at the Munich Security Conference.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isis-saudi-arabia-iraq-syria-bandar/373181/

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia'. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."

The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shia, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shia jihad in Iraq and Syria.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/iraq-crisis-how-saudi-arabia-helped-isis-take-over-the-north-of-the-country-9602312.html

The governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar are very loudly blaming the “sectarian and exclusionary policies” of Nouri al-Maliki for the violence in Iraq. They’re not wrong, but this also deflects from an issue they’d rather not discuss—the role of wealthy funders in the Gulf in helping ISIS rise to prominence.

Qatar has officially stopped giving aid to more radical groups under U.S. pressure, and Saudi Arabia has also backed off its support of the rebels, a process the culminated in the removal of spy chief and Syria point man Prince Bandar bin Sultan earlier this year, but private donations from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states—notably Kuwait—have likely continued.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/06/16/the_saudis_helped_create_a_monster_they_can_t_control_in_iraq.html

September 3, 2014

Militarizating US Police is NO accident: "I can hire half the working class to kill the other half"

"Frequently attributed to RR Baron Jay Gould, in the context of strikebreaking activities during the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jay_Gould

Apparently nothing much has changed since 1886.

How much more obvious could this be? Not much IMHO. Greedy over-weened capitalists have been working pretty much openly for over a hundred years towards the gradual enslavement of We the People.

This is nothing other than highway robbery of an entire nation in broad daylight via the creeping incremental hyper-militarization of local police forces to the point of absurdity, all pointing towards the gruesome end result articulated by Mr. Gould 128 years ago -- all in service to the 1%.

This ^^ ruthless ^^ heartless ^^ strategy ^^ by our super-wealthy uber-greedy Oligarchs has not changed one whit in the last 128 years, only the means have been exponentially expanded & heightened by many technological advances in weaponry and such.



Much more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022451350

September 2, 2014

Is it possible to upload a pic directly from my computer to post on DU?

or does it need to be a pic hosted by Photobucket or some such website?

Thanks for any help doing this, as I'm trying to post an OP, but want to include a pic and can't remember my photobucket password.

August 20, 2014

"We are KOCH" OMFG!

On Edit: Here's link to actual ad I saw.

Just saw mind-blowing freeking commercial by and for the Koch Brothers evil corporatocracy.

a freaking shwarmy commercial, warm & fuzzy music, saying how awesome Koch Industries is, making better food, better housing, for all of us ... blah blah blah.

They are not just "coming out" as capitalist fascists, they are stampeding out, to try to turn themselves -- and fascism -- into a fucking BRAND.

Really?

This is totally nuts man.

August 19, 2014

Capt. Johnson live on CNN saying "this has to stop!"

WTF? peaceful protests have to stop?

really?