Whose sarin?

The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.

On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad’s office. The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)

Pentagon labeled Benghazi a terrorist attack as Obama administration wavered: newly declassified testimony

New York Times Report: CIA-Backed Militias Linked to Benghazi, Libya Attack

The Times article, based on dozens of interviews in Benghazi, asserts that the attack that killed four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, was carried out by Libyans who had previously been allied with the US government in the 2011 war that overthrew and murdered Gaddafi. Times correspondent David D. Kirkpatrick writes that the attack was not organized by Al Qaeda or any other group from outside Libya, but “by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.”

Julian Assange rails against surveillance on Today programme

John Pilger: 'We Have Been Misled'

January 05, 2014 "Information Clearing House - When I travelled in Iraq in the 1990s, the two principal Moslem groups, the Shia and Sunni, had their differences but they lived side by side, even intermarried and regarded themselves with pride as Iraqis. There was no Al Qaida, there were no jihadists. We blew all that to bits in 2003 with 'shock and awe'. And today Sunni and Shia are fighting each other right across the Middle East.

UK politicians accused of Iraq war crimes

Bush’s Iraqi “freedom”: Bloody civil war

Ten years after the US invasion began, a stable democracy in Iraq seems further away than ever

John McCain and Lindsey Graham Want to invade Falluja Yet Again

UK taxpayers financing immoral, inefficient arms contracts and other Underground stories

Michael Parenti: The US Empire Sees Only Two Kinds of Countries: Satellites or Enemies

Britain's black power movement is at risk of being forgotten, say historians

New biography of Darcus Howe claims struggle is ignored because it does not fit idea of Britain as 'utopia of fair play'

'Educated' Black Men Appear 'Whiter' in Memory

Mandela and Misremembering US History

U.S. media coverage of Nelson Mandela's legacy celebrates the late icon's forgiveness. They mean his ability to reconcile with some of the leaders of South Africa's apartheid years, of course; but one area that gets relatively little attention is US support for the racist government Mandela fought against.

'Fake' Mandela memorial sign language interpreter provokes anger

NASA unveils 6-foot 'superhero robot' Valkyrie

Designed to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, this "female" robot could be the precursor to robo-astronauts that will help colonize Mars.

Why Obama's memorial selfie was not a mark of disrespect

The 'fake' Mandela memorial interpreter said it all

'Selfie' diplomacy: Michelle Obama looks unamused by Barack's joking with Danish prime minister

For a memorial service it was a remarkably jovial scene: Barack Obama, David Cameron and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Danish prime minister, huddled together for a smart phone photograph.

But one person looked distinctly less amused by the world leaders' "selfie" - Michelle Obama.

The First Lady stared straight ahead, hands clasped in her lap, while her husband laughed with the Europeans at Nelson Mandela's memorial in Johannesburg.

Obama and Mandela

The US president was the first of six foreign heads of state to address the crowd assembled in Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium. Filled with demagogic phrases about “struggle,” “liberation,” “freedom” and “revolution,” the speech’s attempt to cloak Obama in the legacy of Mandela’s years of sacrifice, imprisonment and persecution was an obscene exercise in hypocrisy.

Army sends troops to South Sudan, gear to African Union

The Plundering of South Sudan

Most telling of all is the BBC's reference to Libya - another nation destroyed by Western military aggression that saw both Russian and Chinese interests crumble overnight and replaced by Western corporations. While South Sudan's chaos is being orchestrated more covertly by the West, the final goal of pushing out the Chinese and taking over is the same.

EU Draws Up Plans to Send Troops to Central Africa

Draft plans for a European Union military mission in the Central African Republic envisage the deployment of hundreds of ground troops to buttress African and French forces struggling to prevent a bloodbath there, according to diplomats briefed on the proposal.

Any More U.S. “Stabilization” and Africa Will Collapse

In 2011, the U.S. midwifed the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. Though at the time Obama invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking about Ghana (“I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment”) in officially recognizing the country, many were more focused on the underlying U.S. motives, isolating the rest of Sudan as part of the war on terror, and securing the oil reserves in the south for the U.S. The State Department rushed to open an embassy in South Sudan, and U.S. money poured in to pay for the new government. Like his counterparts from Iraq and Afghanistan when the U.S. was still in charge of those places, the new South Sudan president was brought to the White House for photos, all blithely pushed out to the world via the Voice of America. The two leaders were said to have discussed “the importance of maintaining transparency and the rule of law.”

China and Philippines: The reasons why a battle for Zhongye (Pag-asa) Island seems unavoidable

Zhongye (Pag-asa) Island, the second largest in the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands, has an area of 0.33 square km, and is of great strategic significance for China if it wants to control a vast part of the South China Sea that it claims to be its territorial waters.

As the Island is located roughly in the middle of the area, if China builds an air force and naval base there, it will more easily control the sky and sea in the claimed area.

Russian Human Rights Report Casts Europe as Land of Nazis and Gay Propaganda

Schools Have Become A Playground For Food And Beverage Marketing

The vast majority of students are exposed to marketing campaigns by food and beverage companies at their schools, usually for unhealthy products, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics.

'Hitler furious' at Swedish minister's satire mishap

Sweden's Justice Minister Beatrice Ask has been criticized for sharing a satirical article about legalized marijuana killing scores of people in the US and tying it to her anti-narcotics stand as a youth politician. Her critics did not hold back.

From Hollywood to the Headlines: Art Looted by the Nazis Comes to Light

It is a story with deep roots: The chaos and destruction of World War II left a horribly fragmented cultural world: art lost forever in the confusion or destroyed in battle; art declared “degenerate” and destroyed by Hitler (whose opinions on racial purity were mirrored in his opinions on purity in art); art seized throughout the continent and carted back to Germany; and art stolen from or sold under duress by Jewish collectors. It’s now almost 70 years since the war’s end, but European authorities and the descendants of the original owners of looted art are still attempting to put the pieces back where they belong.

Close to 1,400 of these missing pieces were found in the home of 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, a recluse who has been painted by the media as tragic, bizarre and potentially culpable. He inherited the art from his father, one of only four art dealers licensed by Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, to purchase and sell “degenerate” art during the war.

Digging for their lives: Russia's volunteer body hunters

"There are so many unburied soldiers, it will take decades to find them. There will definitely be work for our grandchildren," says Marina. "But nature is working against us. The remains are decomposing and it is getting harder to find the bones, ID tags and army kit." The more years that go by. The less information there is.

Unseen Alfred Hitchcock Holocaust documentary ‘Memory of the Camps’ to be released

An Alfred Hitchcock documentary about the Holocaust which was suppressed for political reasons is to be screened for the first time in the form its director intended after being restored by the Imperial War Museum, reports the Independent.