A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria

[Ed Jewett]

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[TD="class: articleTitle"]Deadly blast hits Turkish capital[/TD]
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• Vehicle explosion hits central Ankara. Three dead, over a dozen injured. There is someone with the motive, means, and avowed threat to have been behind this trademark Mossad operation. Avigdor Lieberman threatened to help terrorist Kurdish PKK in terror operations against Turkey. The bothersome Israeli gnat Lieberman could use a couple of shots of Turkish bug spray, the kind that is delivered by a red laser dot on the forehead. Isn't that how we handle terrorists? Oh, I see, just the Arab ones, not the Jewish ones. What's that? It's not terrorism when God's "chosen ones" do it. That makes no sense, of course.
  
  
• http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/
  

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[Magda Hassan]

Report: Israel scrambles IAF warplanes toward Turkish ship

Turkish media reports claim Israeli F-15s approached Turkish research vessel near contested Cyprus drilling area.

By HaaretzTags: Israel Turkey

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[TD="align: center"]Israel Defense Forces jet fighters were scrambled toward a Turkish seismic research ship in the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkish media reported on Friday, in what seemed to be a further escalation in the already fraying ties between the once longtime allies.[/TD]
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According to the report, cited by the Turkish daily Today's Zaman and based on a report by the Turkish Vatan daily, two Israel Air Force F-15s took off to face the Turkish vessel on Thursday night, flying through the airspace of both Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus.
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[TD="class: text"]Ultimately, the report indicated, Turkey launched two F-16 fighters to track the Israeli planes, at which point the IAF fighter jets returned to Israeli airspace.The report added that the warplanes approached the Turkish ship despite incessant warnings by forces in Turkish Cyprus, according to which the planes had breached the territory's airspace.[/TD]
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In addition, the report claimed that an IAF helicopter hovered over the ship, Piri Reis, while the ship was in the Aphrodite gas field off Cyprus' southern coast and near to the larger Leviathan natural gas field.
The reported incident took place as Israel-Turkey ties continued to deteriorate over Israel's refusal to apologize for its 2010 raid of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla which resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish nationals.
A recent inflammation in tensions came amid controversy over drilling rights in what could be natural gas-rich areas in the Eastern Mediterranean.
On Tuesday, Turkey said it was exploring for gas in an offshore zone where Cyprus started drilling last week, a provocative step in a dispute over Mediterranean resources.
Last week, Turkey and Turkish Cyprus signed a pact outlining maritime boundaries in the eastern Mediterranean, paving the way for gas exploration. Turkey said it would protect any research vessel with warships, raising the prospect of an armed stand-off.
On September 23, Turkey dispatched its only research vessel, the Piri Reis, to the eastern Mediterranean.

"Piri Reis, escorted by warships, has started research in the same area where Greek Cypriots are exploring," Omer Celik, Vice Chairman of the ruling AK Party who oversees foreign affairs, said on Twitter.
"We have shown clearly to everyone that we will not allow the eastern Mediterranean to become a Greek Cyprus-Israel goal," he said in another message.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-de...p-1.387407

[Magda Hassan]

Report: Russia warships to enter Syria waters in bid to stem foreign intervention

Syrian official says Damascus agrees 'in principle' to allow entrance of Arab League observer mission; 22-member body proposed sending hundreds of observers to the to help end the bloodshed.

By Jack Khoury and Haaretz Tags: Syria Arab Spring Bashar Assad
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Russian warships are due to arrive at Syrian territorial waters, a Syrian news agency said on Thursday, indicating that the move represented a clear message to the West that Moscow would resist any foreign intervention in the country's civil unrest.
Also on Friday, a Syrian official said Damascus has agreed "in principle" to allow an Arab League observer mission into the country.
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[TD="class: text"] Russia President Dmitry Medvedev, right, and Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus, May 10, 2010.
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But the official said Friday that Syria was still studying the details. The official asked not to be named because the issue is so sensitive.
The Arab League suspended Syria earlier this week over its deadly crackdown on an eight-month-old uprising. The 22-member body has proposed sending hundreds of observers to the country to try to help end the bloodshed.
The report came a day after a draft resolution backed by Arab and European countries and the United States was submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, seeking to condemn human rights violations in the on-going violence in Syria.
Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia were among Arab states that joined Germany, Britain, and France to sponsor the draft submitted to the assembly's human rights committee. In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. would sign on as a co-sponsor of the resolution.
The draft demanded an end to violence, respect of human rights and implementation by Damascus of a plan of action of the Arab League.
The move comes as clashes escalated in Syria and after Russia and China used their veto in October to block a Security Council resolution that would have condemned the Syrian government of President Bashir for the violence.
Such a veto is not applicable in the 193-nation assembly, which will consider the issue after the human rights committee reports back to it.
The UN says more than 3,500 people have been killed since unrest erupted in spring against Assad.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/...n-1.396359

[Christer Forslund]

The "Free Syria Army": Placard-Waving Protesters are actually Machine Gun-Wielding Terrorists

By Tony Cartalucci [ URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27766 ]

Global Research, November 20, 2011 landdestroyer.blogspot.com - 2011-11-15

The "Free Syria Army" is literally an army of militant extremists, many drawn not from Syria's military ranks, but from the Muslim Brotherhood, carrying heavy weapons back and forth over the Turkish and Lebanese borders, funded, supported, and armed by the United States, Israel, and Turkey. The latest evidence confirming this comes in the form of a report out of the International Institute for Strategic Studies which clearly states that Syria's opposition is armed and prepared to drag Syria into more violence.

This report comes in sharp contrast to the propaganda fed via the corporate-media and the West's foreign ministers on a daily basis, where the violence is portrayed as one-sided, with Syria's President Bashar al-Assad "gunning down" throngs of peaceful, placard waving protesters. Just as in Libya where these so-called "peaceful protesters" turned out to be hordes of genocidal racist Al Qaeda mercenaries, led by big-oil representatives, fighting their cause upon a verified pack of lies, so too is Syria's "pro-democracy" movement which is slowly being revealed as yet another militant brand of extremists long cultivated by Anglo-American intelligence agencies, whose leadership is harbored in London and Washington and their foot soldiers supplied a steady stream of covert military support and overt rhetorical support throughout the compromised corporate media.

The unrest in Syria from the beginning was entirely backed by Western corporate-financier interests and part of a long-planned agenda for region-wide regime change. Syria has been slated for regime change since as early as 1991. In 2002, then US Under Secretary of State John Bolton added Syria to the growing "Axis of Evil." It would be later revealed that Bolton's threats against Syria manifested themselves as covert funding and support for opposition groups inside of Syria spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations.

In an April 2011 CNN article, acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner stated, "We're not working to undermine that [Syrian] government. What we are trying to do in Syria, through our civil society support, is to build the kind of democratic institutions, frankly, that we're trying to do in countries around the globe. What's different, I think, in this situation is that the Syrian government perceives this kind of assistance as a threat to its control over the Syrian people."

Toner's remarks came after the Washington Post released cables indicating the US has been funding Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005 and continued until today.

In an April AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, stated that the "US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments." The report went on to explain that the US "organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there." Posner would add, "They went back and there's a ripple effect." That ripple effect of course is the "Arab Spring," and in Syria's case, the impetus for the current unrest threatening to unhinge the nation and invite in foreign intervention.

With planted "speculation" running through the corporate media that a recent explosion, amongst several other "incidents" in Iran, were the work of Western covert operations, and the Jerusalem Post all but admitting the entire Western-backed destabilization in Syria aims not at ushering in "democracy" or upholding "human rights," but to weaken Iran by proxy, it is clear that everything within Wall Street and London's power is being done to provoke Iran. Iran has downplayed the recent explosion at their military base as an accident and has thus far maintained a persistent patience in the face of criminal provocations and overt acts of war by an alarmingly and increasingly depraved West.

It is quite clear that the stratagems spelled out in the corporate-funded Brookings Institute report "Which Path to Persia?" have been read and understood by both sides and that Iran realizes that any act of retaliation not expertly played, only gives the West what it has stated it wants - an excuse to go to war with the Islamic Republic. Should the public in Syria, Iran, and throughout the West also read "Which Path to Persia?" and realize that the only threat Iran and its allies pose to the West is toward the extraterritorial ambitions of Wall Street and London, perhaps a bloody, entirely unnecessary war can be avoided, and the first steps taken toward dismantling the parasitic corporate-financier oligarchy that has misled the world for the past several decades.

[Magda Hassan]

"No Fly Zone" Over Syria Imminent?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/22/2011 18:18 -0500



Roughly six months after the imposition of the No Fly Zone over Libya, which ultimately led to the liberation of the country's Light Sweet Crude and the placement of an Eni SpA executive (Italy's largest oil company) as Libya's oil minister and also had a side effect of getting Gaddafi murdered in broad daylight by the reformed freedom fighters, the script is about to be rewound from the beginning, and a few thousand miles east, this time next to explosive powderkeg Syria. Albawaba news, which cites Kuwait's al Rai daily, reports that Arab jet fighters, and possibly Turkish warplanes, backed by American logistic support will implement a no fly zone in Syria's skies, after the Arab League will issue a decision, under its Charter, calling for the protection of Syrian civilians. In other words, foreign countries will take it upon themselves to do what only America has done with impunity so far: decide what is best for a given sovereign nation's population. Granted, we have yet to verify the credibility of both Al Bawaba and Al Rai, although at first blush they appear substantially more credible than Debka-type fly by night operations. Which then leads to a sobering conclusion: if indeed Europe and the Western world is dead set upon an aerial campaign above Syria, then all eyes turn to the East, and specifically Russia and China, which have made it very clear they will not tolerate any intervention. And naturally the biggest unknown of all is Iran, which has said than any invasion of Syria will be dealt with swiftly and severely. Then again, the Iranian war foreplay has gone on for far too long at this point that we have gotten to where headlines about the "imminent" Iranian war are almost as ignored as headlines about how "Europe is bailed out" all over again.
From Al Bawaba:

Senior European sources said that Arab jet fighters, and possibly Turkish warplanes, backed by American logistic support will implement a no fly zone in Syria's skies, after the Arab League will issue a decision, under its Charter, calling for the protection of Syrian civilians.

The sources told Kuwait's al Rai daily that the no fly ban will include a ban on the movement of Syrian military vehicles, including tanks, personnel carriers and artillery, adding that this move would aim at curbing the movement of Assad forces, and cripple their ability to bomb cities. The European sources said the no fly ban might lead to the paralysis of the Syrian regime forces "in less than 24 hours."

Meanwhile, it is reported that the leadership of the Turkish General Staff informed all the concerned parties with the Syrian issue its rejection of the idea that the Turkish army would launch any invasion to the Syrian territory including the area adjacent to the Turkish border to establish a "buffer zone" to protect civilians fleeing the violence.

Perhaps "buffer zone" in the Farsi translates as Lebensraum. Pardon us while we look it up.

[Keith Millea]

Iran: Alleged CIA Agents Reportedly Arrested

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran has arrested 12 agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency, the country's official IRNA news agency reported, quoting an influential lawmaker.

Parviz Sorouri, a member of the powerful parliamentary committee on foreign policy and national security, said the alleged agents were operating in coordination with Israel's Mossad and other regional agencies, targeting the country's military and its nuclear program.

"The U.S. and Zionist regime's espionage apparatuses were trying to damage Iran both from inside and outside with a heavy blow, using regional intelligence services," Sorouri was quoted as saying Wednesday.
"Fortunately, with swift reaction by the Iranian intelligence department, the actions failed to bear fruit," Sorouri said.

The United States and its allies suspect Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon program, a charge Iran denies.
The lawmaker did not give the nationality of the alleged agents nor when or
where they were arrested.

The CIA declined to comment on the report.

Iran periodically announces the capture or execution of alleged U.S. or Israeli spies, and often no further information is released.
The latest claim follows the unraveling by Lebanon's Hezbollah of a CIA spy ring in that country. Hezbollah has close ties to Iran.
Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, boasted in June on television he had unmasked at least two CIA spies who had infiltrated the ranks of the organization. Though the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon denied that, American officials conceded that Nasrallah was not lying and that Hezbollah had subsequently methodically picked off CIA informants.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/24...11885.html

[Ed Jewett]

There are reports of new goings-on in Cairo. Cryptome has three collections of photos. Boiling Frogs (Sibel Edmonds) and others have report of the use of chemical weapons (nerve gas). American college students have been arrested in the possession of molotov cocktails.

[Ed Jewett]

There are reports of new goings-on in Cairo. Cryptome has three collections of photos. Boiling Frogs (Sibel Edmonds) and others have report of the use of chemical weapons (nerve gas). American college students have been arrested in the possession of molotov cocktails.

American Kids In Cairo Held for Molotov Cocktails (link has embedded CNN video, which identified them As Americans, one with a driver's license from Indiana)

According to these video reports, these were American University (in Cairo) students of unknown citizenry, origin, etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipc37cxNy...r_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPZJr4fK0...r_embedded

http://cryptome.org/info/egypt-protest/e...rotest.htm

http://cryptome.org/info/egypt-protest2/...otest2.htm

http://cryptome.org/info/egypt-protest3/...otest3.htm

http://cryptome.org/info/egypt-protest4/...otest4.htm

[Ed Jewett]

Obama Must Condemn Egyptian Military

by Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans / November 22nd, 2011
As we watch the Egyptian police and military viciously attack democracy activists on the streets of Cairo, using U.S. weapons, it is outrageous that the Obama Administration has failed to issue a strong condemnation of this latest attempt to crush a revolution that has inspired people around the world, including millions of Americans.
During the fateful 18 days in January and February when Egyptians took to the streets by the millions to topple the brutal Mubarak dictatorship, President Obama remained largely silent, refusing to call directly for democracy until it was clear that young Egyptians were about to topple the dictator's three-decade-long rule.
In the months since then, as thousands of Egyptians have been attacked, imprisoned, sexually assaulted and murdered by their government, the United States has not merely remained silent, but has continued to provide crucial diplomatic, economic and military aid to the regime responsible for these crimes.
The latest Egyptian protests were sparked by growing anger over signs that the military leadership plans to hold on to power indefinitely. The military rulers say they will relinquish power once presidential elections are held, but have refused to commit to a plan and a timetable for handing over power to a democratically elected government.
The first of many rounds of voting for parliament is scheduled to begin November 28, but the military has not agreed to form a new government based on these elections. Moreover, it is trying to limit any civilian government from having control over the military's budget. And it has postponed a presidential election to an indefinite time late in 2012 or in 2013.
Now the façade of a democratic transition has been ripped away and Egyptians are once again battling the military government in Tahrir Square for the future of their country, with at least 35 civilians killed since Saturday. The Obama administration remains as quiet as it was in the early days of the revolution. Such silence is both morally indefensible and politically and strategically disastrous for the United States.
The United States, with $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt every year, supplies a large part of the Egyptian military budget. But it refuses to use its considerable leverage. During Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's visit to Egypt in October, he actually praised the Egyptian military. "I really do have full confidence in the process that the Egyptian military is overseeing," he said, "I think they're making good progress."
On Monday, November 21, White House spokesman Jay Carney only mustered up the courage to call for restraint from "all sides"as if the pro-democracy activists were somehow equally responsible for the violence. When asked if the generals should specify the date for a presidential election, Carney replied, "I don't want to dictate specifics to Egypt."
As during the Mubarak era, the administration appears to believe that U.S. interests, including Egypt's peace accord with Israel, are more important than the lives of the Egyptian people.
The march for freedom in Egypt cannot be stopped and when Egyptians finally rid themselves of the military government and establish a democratic system, the United States will have few friends in Egypt, or the Arab world more broadly, if it is seen as having supported the military rather than the people at this pivotal moment.
A principled U.S. position would be to immediately issue a strong condemnation of the violence unleashed by the Egyptian military on its people. The U.S. government should suspend all military aid to the Egyptian government until it stops attacking peaceful protesters, and until it releases the 12,000-plus citizens jailed since Mubarak's ouster and commits to handing over power to a transitional civilian government as soon as parliamentary elections are completed. President Obama should coordinate with other Western allies and supporters of the Egyptian government to develop a clear and strong policy in support of a rapid transition to democracy and apply the full weight of international diplomatic, economic and legal pressure on the military junta towards that end.
Anything less will be a stain on the United States that will haunt this administration, and the United States more broadly, for years to come.
Join us in signing this letter urging President Obama to condemn the military crackdown and stand with Egypt's brave citizens struggling for democracy.
Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans are cofounders of CODEPINK: Women for Peace. Read other articles by Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, or visit Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans's website.
This article was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Activism, Egypt, Military/Militarism, Obama, Police,Revolution.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/11/obama-...more-39484

[Ed Jewett]

The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack[Paperback]

James Petras (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1...sivoice-20