Turkey’s parliament has authorized cross-border military operations into Syria. The move follows a cross-border mortar-shelling into Turkey which Damascus has apologized for.
The Turkish parliament voted 320-129 in favor of the bill, though the government was quick to eliminate the perception they country preparing for a unilateral military assault.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey “does not want to “start a war” with Syria while speaking at a press conference on Thursday evening .
“All we want in this region is peace and security. We have no intention of starting war. We are aware of the outcome, consequences, of war in Iraq and Afghanistan…we see the same in Syria,” Al Jazeera cites him as saying. But Errdogan warned the country was capable of defending itself against threats after he claimed that new shells coming from Syria had landed on Turkish soil on Thursday.
“An accident can be called ‘an accident’ once, twice, three times, but four, five six times,” Errdogan continued.
His statements regarding the bills follow those made by Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay following the vote on Thursday.
“The bill is not for war… It has deterrent qualities,” he said.
Atlay stressed that Turkey’s priority was to act in conjunction with “international institutions” on Syria. He further said the Syrian government “has admitted what it did and apologized. The deputy premier added that Syria had given its assurances “such an incident would not be repeated.”
Following an exchange of fire at the Syrian-Turkish border, the US and NATO have condemned Syria and pledged to support Turkey. The White House has called for more pressure to be exerted on Damascus.
NATO’s North Atlantic Council has convened tonight for an urgent meeting upon the request of Turkey, to discuss the shelling of the town of Akcakale.
“The most recent shelling on 3 October 2012, which caused the death of five Turkish citizens and injured many, constitutes a cause of greatest concern for, and is strongly condemned by, all Allies,” NATO said in a statement.
“In the spirit of indivisibility of security and solidarity deriving from the Washington Treaty, the Alliance continues to stand by Turkey and demands the immediate cessation of such aggressive acts against an Ally, and urges the Syrian regime to put an end to flagrant violations of international law.”
According to officials the meeting has been held under article 4 of NATO’s code, concerning consultations when a member state feels territorial integrity is under threat.
Syria’s UN envoy said on Thursday that “Syrian authorities confirmed that they are seriously investigating the source of the [attack] that lead to the death of Turkish citizens.”
Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari read out a letter which had been delivered to the UN Security Council expressing Syria’s “deepest condolences” to the families of the victims which killed five civilians in southeast Turkey.
He called for both sides to act “wisely” and “rationally”, saying that “undisciplined, armed terrorists” operating on the countries’ shared border posed a threat not only to Syria, but the greater region. He further claimed the long Turkish-Syrian border had been used as a conduit for terrorists to smuggle arms into Syria.
Ja’afari insinuated the Turkish response to the incident had been disproportionate, however, saying that Turkey had shelled southern Syria for nearly 12 hours straight following Wednesday’s attack.
A document posted online by an al-Qaeda affiliated group called the al-Nusra Front claimed responsibilty for the multiple bombings.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in contrast was quick to condemn Syria for Wedensday’s mortar attack in Turkey. “We are outraged that the Syrians have been shooting across the border. We are very regretful about the loss of life that has occurred on the Turkish side. We are working with our Turkish friends.”
After the Turkish parliament approved military operations against Syria, thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets of the biggest Turkish city, Istanbul. About 5,000 people joined an anti-war rally that finally turned into an anti-government demonstration against Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Anti-war protests near the parliament in the capital, Ankara, turned violent, with protesters clashing with police who tried to prevent demonstrators from moving around the capital.
After a heated debate an urgent parliamentary session has opted to apply the new law.
Originally the bill targeted militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighting for independent Kurd state for the last three decades. The Kurds have bases in northern Iraq, de-facto not controlled by the government in Baghdad. The Turkish military has conducted a number of air and ground assaults on Kurdish positions in Iraq, most of them considered successful.
Nashville – Democratic leaders point to insulting comments made by two Republican lawmakers to the Legislature’s black caucus in calling for legislators to undergo diversity and sensitivity training.
State Sen. Jim Summerville of Dickson has been criticized for an email he sent earlier this month to the chairman of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators saying: “I don’t give a rat’s ass what the black caucus thinks.”
His Republican colleague, Stacey Campfield of Knoxville, has supported the comment and even called the black caucus a “segregationist organization” that should be ignored.
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Jim Kyle of Memphis said he believes lawmakers would benefit from some type of sensitivity session, even if it means incorporating it into the mandatory ethics training.
“I mean, it is somewhat unethical to be offensive,” he said. “Perhaps we need to make that part of our ethics training every two years.”
Frank Dobson, director of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University, said the lawmakers’ offensive comments are part of what he calls the “racial divide” and that the training sessions may help to some degree.
“There’s still much work to be done in terms of healing, understanding and educating,” he said.
As more and more Americans across the country become impoverished by rising costs for essential goods, falling wages, job losses, and an unraveling social safety net, those with nothing left to lose are becoming more daring, more aggressive and more ruthless.
Nowhere is this as apparent than in the cities of Chicago, where police have compared the explosion in violence to a tribal warfare akin to what we’ve seen in Iraq or Afghanistan, and Detroit, Michigan, where acres upon acres of dilapidated homes have been razed and police have simply stopped responding to emergency calls in certain areas.
The rule of law is steadily collapsing, and in due time you may see it in your city:
Even the old-timers in Detroit never have seen anything like this… A mob of 40 black people moved into a convenience store and will not leave.
They say they now own it. They eat. Smoke. Cuss.Threaten. Spit. Rob. Sell drugs. All on video.
Police, ministers, neighbors, the store owner and just about everyone else seems powerless to stop them.
“It’s a Bad Crew gas station,” said one of the mob to the local Fox affiliate. “If you don’t know what that is, I can’t even tell you.”
The owner calls police, but nothing happens. The police “come here and then they leave. Two minutes later they (the mob) are back.”
“I am shocked he is still alive,” said the store owner. “They came into the gas station and said ‘we own this. This is our hood. This is our gas station. We are going to take whatever we want.’ It’s a war zone.”
We are living in a society where legislation and law enforcement have been aimed squarely at law abiding Americans while criminals are allowed to do as they please. As criminals realize they can indiscriminately pillage and attack innocents without being held to account under existing laws, we can fully expect this trend to spread to currently peaceful neighborhoods. At some point the violence will simply overwhelm local police departments.
At that point, it’ll be up to each individual American to look out for themselves and their families. Or, things will get so bad that the government will announce ‘temporary’ local, state or national emergencies, declare martial law and deploy military personnel on the streets of America in response to the disturbances and rampant crime waves.
Whatever the outcome, those who play by the rules, follow the laws, and respect the individual rights of others will be the losers.
Credit R. Wallace “Wally” Hudson, chairman of the Mecklenburg County (Va.) Republican Committee, with demonstrating how new social media platforms can broadcast ancient hates.
The Post reported this week that the county GOP’s Facebook page had displayed for months photos portraying President Obama as a witch doctor, a caveman and a drug dealer.
Virginia’s Republican Party chairman, Pat Mullins, ordered the offensive photos be taken down. But Hudson, who acknowledged posting most of the images, stood his ground, saying he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. “We know our regular readers, who are good conservatives,” he told The Post on Tuesday. “They’re gonna get a kick out of it.”
Baylor University assistant professor Mia Moody did a study of social media stereotyping of Barack and Michelle Obama; her findings appeared in the journal New Media & Culture.
Moody researched hundreds of Facebook groups and pages. She found numerous examples of the president and the first lady being targeted with racist and sexist rhetoric that, not surprisingly, also indirectly spread hatred toward women and blacks.
Moody found that some Facebook pages build on ideas that black people are different from members of the dominant group. Several photos showing Michelle Obama dancing drew comments about her “always jigging.”
One group called “Obama Sucks” primarily served as an outlet to post fake photos of the president. One picture featured him wearing a bandanna and gold teeth. The caption: “OBAMA Going For The African American Vote.”
Moody found that many Facebook hate pages also focused on cultural narratives. Some photos depict Obama or his family as animals, particularly apes. One picture showed male and female apes holding an infant ape with Obama’s face superimposed on it.
Tasteless. Disrespectful. – Colbert King, Washington Post
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he would honor temporary work permits for young illegal immigrants who were allowed to stay in the U.S. because of a decision by President Barack Obama.
Romney told The Denver Post, in an interview appearing in Tuesday’s edition, that people who are able to earn the two-year visas to stay and work wouldn’t see them revoked under a Romney administration.
“The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid. I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased,” Romney told the Post, promising to put a comprehensive immigration reform plan into place before those visas expire.
In June, Obama issued a new policy that allows some young illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to avoid deportation. Romney criticized Obama for circumventing Congress to make the change a few months before the presidential election.
During the Republican presidential primary, Romney said he would veto legislation to provide a path to citizenship for some of the young people who benefited from Obama’s new policy.
The Denver Post interview comes as Romney and Obama are fighting a heated battle for Colorado, whose significant Hispanic population could determine which candidate receives the state’s nine electoral votes.
In a video obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama tells an audience of black ministers, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism.
“The people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!” Obama shouts in the video, which was shot in June of 2007 at Hampton University in Virginia. By contrast, survivors of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Andrew received generous amounts of aid, Obama explains. The reason? Unlike residents of majority-black New Orleans, the federal government considers those victims “part of the American family.”
The racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s carefully-crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.
Obama gave the speech in the middle of a hotly-contested presidential primary season, but his remarks escaped scrutiny. Reporters in the room seem to have missed or ignored his most controversial statements. The liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan linked to what he described as a “transcript” of the speech, which turned out not to be a transcript at all, but instead the prepared remarks provided by the campaign. In fact, Obama, who was not using a teleprompter, deviated from his script repeatedly and at length, ad libbing lines that he does not appear to have used before any other audience during his presidential run. A local newspaper posted a series of video clips of the speech, but left out key portions. No complete video of the Hampton speech was widely released.
Obama begins his address with “a special shout out” to Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago pastor who nearly derailed Obama’s campaign months later when his sermons attacking Israel and America and accusing the U.S. government of “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color” became public. To the audience at Hampton, Obama describes Wright as, “my pastor, the guy who puts up with me, counsels me, listens to my wife complain about me. He’s a friend and a great leader. Not just in Chicago, but all across the country.”
By the time Obama appeared at Hampton, Jeremiah Wright had become a political problem. Wright told The New York Times earlier that year that he would no longer be speaking on the campaign’s behalf because his rhetoric was considered too militant. And yet later in the Hampton speech Obama explicitly defends Wright from unnamed critics, a group he describes as “they”: “They had stories about Trinity United Church of Christ, because we talked about black people in church: ‘Oh, that might be a separatist church,’” Obama said mockingly.
There was an article in the US World Report regarding the orderly behavior of the Japanese citizens and the absence of looting after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear nightmare.
Social scientists were baffled by the total non-existence of looting and savage behavior in Japan considering the magnitude of this catastrophe. They conferred with human study organizations as well as sociology experts throughout the United States. Japan lacks diversity, was the conclusion.
U.S. President Barack Obama, for the third year in a row, has waived almost all U.S. sanctions that would punish certain countries that use child soldiers. Most of the countries are in Africa and child soldiers are mostly black.
Late Friday afternoon, Obama issued a presidential memorandum waiving penalties under the Child Soldiers Protection Act of 2008 for Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen, penalties that Congress put in place to prevent U.S. arms sales to countries determined by the State Department to be the worst abusers of child soldiers in their militaries. The president also partially waived sanctions against the Democratic Republic of the Congo to allow some military training and arms sales to that country.
Human rights advocates saw the waivers as harmful to the goal of using U.S. influence to urge countries that receive military assistance to move away from using child soldiers and contradictory to the rhetoric Obama used in his speech.
“After such a strong statement against the exploitation of children, it seems bizarre that Obama would give a pass to countries using children in their armed forces and using U.S. tax money to do that,” saidJesse Eaves, the senior policy advisor for child protection at World Vision.
The Obama administration doesn’t want to upset its relationships with countries that it needs for security cooperation, but the blanket use of waivers is allowing the administration to avoid the law’s intent, which was to use force the U.S. government to put a greater priority on human rights and child protection when doling out military aid, he said.
“The intent in this law was to use this waiver authority only in extreme circumstances, yet this has become an annual thing and this has become the default of this administration,” Eaves said.
The Romney campaign has made Obama’s record on human rights a feature of its foreign-policy critique, with top advisors accusing the president of deprioritizing the issue, often in sweeping terms.
“Barack Obama has broken with a tradition that goes back to Woodrow Wilson about human rights and values animating our foreign policy. This administration has not been an effective voice for human rights,” said Romney campaign senior advisor for foreign policy Rich Williamson, who also served as George W. Bush‘s special envoy to Sudan, toldThe Cable in July.
Bushsigned the child-soldiers law in 2008. It prohibits U.S. military education and training, foreign military financing, and other defense-related assistance to countries that actively recruit troops under the age of 18. Countries are designated as violators if the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report identifies them as recruiting child soldiers. The original bill was sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL).
Obama first waived the sanctions in 2010, the first year they were to go into effect. At that time, the White House failed to inform Congress or the NGO community of its decision in advance, setting off a fierce backlash. A justification memo obtained by The Cable at the time made several security-related arguments for the waivers. Sudan was going through a fragile transition, for example. Yemen was crucial to counterterrorism cooperation, the administration argued.
But NSC Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs Samantha Powertold NGO leaders at the time that the waivers would not become a recurring event.
“Our judgment was: Brand them, name them, shame them, and then try to leverage assistance in a fashion to make this work,” Power said, saying the administration wanted to give the violator countries one more year to show progress. “Our judgment is we’ll work from inside the tent.”
But the next year, in 2011, Obama waived almost all the sanctions once again, using largely the same justifications, except that the administration argued that the law didn’t apply to South Sudan because it wasn’t a country until July 2011. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) tried to pass new legislation to force Obama to notify Congress before issuing the waivers.
Fortenberry called the decision an “assault on human dignity,” and said, “Good citizens of this country who do not want to be complicit in this grave human rights abuse must challenge this administration.”
This year, the State Department held a briefing for NGO leaders and human rights activists to answer questions about the waivers and try to ally their concerns.
“They are addressing the concerns of the legislation in a more pragmatic and useful way than in the past, but they still have a ways to go and this was a clear missed opportunity,” Rachel Stohl, a senior associate at the Stimson Center who attended the briefing, told The Cable. “You want the waivers to be used very sparingly but some of these countries get the waiver every year.”
Stohl rejects the administration’s argument that countries like South Sudan are so fragile that they can’t be leaned on to do better on human rights.
“I would argue that this is exactly the right time to make clear what the parameters are,” she said.
Jo Becker, advocacy director for the children’s rights division at Human Rights Watch, told The Cable that where the United States has used some pressure, such as in the DRC, where there was a partial cutoff of military aid last year, there was a positive effect.
“After years of foot-dragging, Congo is close to signing a U.N. action plan to end its use of child soldiers,” she said. “But in other countries with child soldiers, including South Sudan, Libya, and Yemen, the U.S. continues to squander its leverage by giving military aid with no conditions.”
Former British prime minister Tony Blair was the only person capable of turning George W Bush against the 2003 Iraq invasion, ex-United Nations chief Kofi Annan claimed in an interview published on Saturday.
Annan argued in an interview published in the Times newspaper that Blair could have changed Bush’s mind because of the special relationship between the two nations and the two leaders.
Annan said he often had contemplated what might have happened if “Blair had said ‘George, this is where we part company. You’re on your own’,” following the failure to secure a second UN resolution.
“I really think it could have stopped the war,” added the Nobel peace laureate.
Annan was UN secretary general at the time of the crisis.
A first Security Council resolution, which offered Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations passed unanimously in November 2002.
But a second resolution proposed by the US, Britain, and Spain in 2003 that called for action to be taken against Saddam Hussain’s regime was withdrawn when it became clear it would be vetoed.
The US decided that the resolution was not needed before military action could lawfully take place, and the invasion commenced on March 20.
The invasion triggered eight years of sectarian conflict in Iraq, resulting in more than 100 000 civilian deaths.
Annan rejected suggestions that his resignation, or that of then US secretary of state Colin Powell, would have altered the course of history.
And he dismissed Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s call for Bush and Blair to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court. Both had been democratically elected, he said, and were only acting in their national interests.
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Annan was the UN Arab League envoy to Syria from February until August, but resigned after his peace plan failed to prevent further fighting between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar Assad.
The diplomat told the Times that Assad had to go, arguing that the leader had lost all legitimacy.
Annan gave the interview to mark the launch of his memoirs: Interventions – a Life in War and Peace. – Sapa
David Viens in a wheel chair, photographed in a Los Angeles court
A chef who told Los Angeles police he boiled his wife’s body for four days to hide evidence of her death was convicted Thursday of second-degree murder.
David Viens showed no reaction as the verdict was read. The sister of his victim burst out sobbing.
In a recorded interrogation presented by prosecutors during the trial, Viens, 49, can be heard saying he cooked the body of his 39-year-old wife, Dawn Viens, in late 2009 until little was left but her skull.
“He treated her like a piece of meat and got rid of her,” said Karen Patterson, the couple’s best friend who spoke to reporters outside court.
She was the key witness in Viens’ trial and the person who prodded police to investigate her friend’s disappearance.
At a news conference, she tearfully warned others to take heed of domestic violence among friends and call police. She apologized for failing to call police when Dawn Viens called her during an incident of abuse but begged her not to call police.
“Maybe you have to go beyond your friend’s trust and try to save lives,” she said.
Juror Tal Erickson said it was Viens’ own words in two confessions that convinced them of his guilt.
The chef spoke to authorities from a hospital bed in March 2011 after leaping off a cliff in Rancho Palos Verdes. Authorities say he jumped after learning he was a suspect in her disappearance.
The trial relied heavily on recorded interviews with authorities in which the chef acknowledged the crime in detail.
“I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days,” Viens could be heard saying on the recording.
Viens, who attended his trial in a wheelchair, said in the interview that he stuffed his wife’s body in a 55-gallon drum of boiling water and kept it submerged with weights.
He said he mixed what remained after four days with other waste, dumping some of it in a grease pit at his restaurant in Lomita, and putting the rest in the trash.
He said he stashed his wife’s skull in his mother’s attic in Torrance. But a search of the house turned up nothing, nor did an excavation of the restaurant.
Erickson told reporters the gruesome evidence shocked jurors.
“A few of us had a hard time sleeping at night,” he said. “I would think about it and ask, ‘Why?'”
If there was any question about the guilt of Viens, it was wiped out by his plunge off the cliff, Erickson said.
“My opinion was if he was innocent, he wouldn’t jump off a cliff,” the juror said.
On the recording played in court, Viens was asked what happened on Oct. 18, 2009, the night his wife disappeared.
He said he had noticed money missing from his restaurant and suspected his wife. They got into an argument, he said, and he forced her onto the floor where he wrapped her up and put a piece of duct tape over her mouth before going to bed.
He awoke to find her dead, and he panicked, he said.
Viens was charged with first-degree murder, which means the killing was premeditated, but jurors had the option of convicting him of that or second-degree murder or manslaughter. The six men and six women on the panel deliberated for about five hours before reaching the verdict.
Erickson said the jury did not believe the killing was premeditated, even though Viens had threatened to kill his wife after finding the money missing.
“Anyone can say that and not follow through,” the juror said.
Viens’ lawyer, Fred McCurry, declined comment on the way out of the courtroom except to say he planned to appeal.
Viens is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 27. He could face 15 years to life in prison.
Dawn Viens’ sister, Dayna Papin, said, “There’s no happy ending. Two families have suffered tremendously. This is a man I’ve known for 20 years who was like a father to me.”
Patterson, the longtime friend, said she would like to visit Viens in prison.
“Even through all this, he is still my friend,” she said. “I struggle with the lovely person who killed another lovely person. I would remind him of how much Dawn loved him.”
She said she was satisfied with the second-degree murder verdict.
The New York Times has essentially become a “propaganda megaphone” to peddle the establishment’s narrative — especially when it comes to war — charged foreign correspondent Daniel Simpson, who resigned from the paper in disgust. According to Simpson, the paper, which is often lambasted and ridiculed by conservatives and libertarians for its blatant “liberal” bias, is actually just a propaganda tool for the ruling establishment.
In an explosive interview, the former Times correspondent, who was based in the Balkans during his stint at the newspaper, offered an inside look at how it all works. What appears to have bothered him more than anything was how the supposed paper “of record” was so determined to sell the Iraq war to the American people, even if it meant basically lying or repeating government lies to do so.
“It seemed pretty glaringly obvious to me that the ‘news fit to print’ was pretty much the news that’s fit to serve the powerful,” Simpson explained, citing the warmongering over Iraq as a prime example. “The way that the paper’s senior staff think is exactly like those in power — in fact, it’s their job to become their friends.”
An ambitious reporter, Simpson joined the paper a decade ago when he was just 27 years old. He had been hired to report on the Balkans, where the U.S. government and other Western powers had intervened in an internal conflict. However, within a few months, disillusioned by the Times‘ war-mongering, he resigned.
“I was young and naive and idealistic, I suppose. I thought I was going to be holding people in power to account,” said Simpson, who wrote a recently published book about his experiences entitled A Rough Guide to the Dark Side. “It turned out instead that when I joined in 2002, the New York Times was very much engaged in doing exactly what those in power wanted them to do, and printing fake intelligence information to start the war in Iraq.”
As the establishment’s propaganda about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq was getting in full swing, Simpson said he was asked to report bogus information about Serbians selling WMD delivery parts to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The Serbs, however, were actually just selling spare airplane parts, not WMD delivery systems, he explained.
“They were looking for every possible way of getting this weapons-of-mass-destruction story into the news media,” Simpson told RT, adding that the Washington Post quickly jumped on the dubious allegations. “So I came under enormous pressure from my bosses to start looking at it the same way, and I couldn’t see any evidence for doing that.”
While the Times did apologize for some of its most outrageously bogus WMD “reporting” — or war-mongering, as critics have labeled it — the paper “hasn’t really changed its policy,” Simpson explained. Among other problems, he pointed to Howell Raines, the executive editor during his time at the paper, who wrote a long article in the Atlanticafter losing his job in 2004 that offered insight into the way top officials at the paper view its role.
Raines wrote that the Times was “the indispensable newsletter of the United States’ political, diplomatic, governmental, academic, and professional communities.” To Simpson, though, the former executive editor was basically admitting that “he sees his newspaper as being this propaganda megaphone for those who run the world.”
RT host Abby Martin agreed, slamming the paper and the “illegal and immoral” war repeatedly. She said the Times had indeed become a “propaganda megaphone” by simply reprinting government press releases and official statements — the “establishment line” — as if it were truth. Critics of the paper have been saying that for decades.
Asked about how the censorship over such a vast organization could function, Simpson explained that “there are different processes at work.” Citing his own experience, the self-styled “renegade” correspondent said that even in the Balkans, the Times had a pre-determined view of what happened. Editors were not interested in analyzing the tragic effects of Western military intervention, and they certainly were not open to exploring alternative explanations and views.
Reporters, meanwhile, would quickly adapt to their environment and learn to parrot the establishment narrative — at least if they hoped to advance their careers and have their stories published. “I was just so disgusted by this situation that I didn’t want to play the game anymore,” Simpson said, adding that he had previously been “very keen” to “play the game” in order to further his ambitions.
During the interview, Simpson gave various examples of how stories were framed to suit the Times’ — or the ruling establishment’s — world view. “You learn, you internalize these little phrases that you apply to other countries, like Serbia is ‘nationalist’ or engaged in ‘extremist policies,’ but the United States is never doing those things, of course — and you wouldn’t put them in a story,” Simpson explained.
Times employees are expected to tout the agenda no matter how hypocritical. “You’d never frame a story that said the United States has started a war of aggression, but it’s instead engaged in a ‘foreign policy project,’” Simpson added. “Or you would talk about ‘harsh interrogation techniques’ as opposed to torture. These are things that people just learn to do.”
In a separate interview with Green Left Weekly, Simpson echoed those comments, explaining how reporters themselves learn to accept the situation if they want to move forward. “It only seemed possible to rise higher at the Times if I bought their illusions, and having seen through them, this would have been consciously corrupt,” he explained. “Until that point, I’d been unconscious of cooption as a journalist — like most of my peers. But as my eyes lost their scales, I saw my own flaws more clearly, and freaked out.”
In the interest of fairness, it is worth pointing out that the Times recently became the first media outlet to admit that much of the establishment press — the Times included — was allowing the Mitt Romney and Barack Obama presidential campaigns to censor news reports about themselves. The Times actually published a front-page story about the startling practice, leading to an uproar among media critics that eventually sparked policy changes at newspapers nationwide.
The Times also recently ran a column by then-Public Editor Arthur Brisbane openly admitting that “the paper’s many departments … share a kind of political and cultural progressivism … that virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.” Of course, that has long been obvious to honest observers. But the fact that the newspaper was actually willing to publicly acknowledge its bias was celebrated by analysts.
On the other hand, the paper has been complicit in covering up some of the worst atrocities in human history. Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Walter Duranty, for example, played a key role in hiding Josef Stalin’s mass murder of millions of Ukrainians while serving as the Times’ chief correspondent in Moscow. Other savage tyrants have benefited from the paper’s “reporting,” too.
Of course, the Times is hardly the only establishment news outlet to peddle propaganda as truth. Amber Lyon of CNN, for example, recently exposed censorship at the Cable News Network and accused her employer of “making me put what I knew to be government lies into my reporting.” Former reporters at Fox and other media outlets have made similar accusations.
The largest media companies in the United States — most of the market is controlled by just a handful of mega-corporations — are regularly deceiving hundreds of millions of Americans through lies, omissions, self-censorship, and by unquestioningly parroting government claims no matter how absurd. And they are starting to pay the price.
Less than one fourth of Americans trust TV news programs, and newspapers across the nation are dying as readers flock to alternative media sources online. In fact, a new Gallup survey just found that distrust in the media hit a new high, with 60 percent of Americans saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news.
As the Founding Fathers knew when they enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, if the American people hope to remain free, they must have a free press to keep them informed. Today, with much of the “mainstream” press serving as a propaganda megaphone for the establishment, it appears increasingly likely that the alternative media will have to fill the void. The New American
Pravda.Ru interviewed Paul Craig Roberts, an American economist, who served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and became a co-founder of Reaganomics – the economic policies promoted by the U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. We asked Mr. Roberts to share his views about the current state of affairs inside and outside the United States.
Pravda.Ru: Mr. Roberts, you are known in Russia as the creator of Reaganomics, which helped the country overcome stagflation. What were the key aspects of that policy and how would you estimate its results today? Do you think your faith in free market has shattered?
Paul Craig Roberts: Free market means the freedom of price to adjust to supply and demand. It does not mean the absence of regulation of human behavior.
Reaganomics was a political word for supply-side economics, a new development in economic theory. In the post World War 2 western world, governments used Keynesian demand management economic policy to control inflation and to boost employment. John Maynard Keynes was the British economist who explained the Great Depression in the West as a consequence of insufficient aggregate demand to maintain full employment and stable prices.
Keynesian demand management relied on government budget deficits and easy monetary policy (money creation) to stimulate demand for goods and services. To control inflation from too much demand for goods and services, high tax rates were used to reduce disposable income.
The problem that developed is that the high tax rates on income made leisure inexpensive in terms of lost current earnings from not working, and made current consumption inexpensive in terms of lost future income from not saving and investing. In other words, high tax rates on income made leisure and current consumption cheap in terms of foregone present and future income. Thus, high tax rates on income depressed the supply of labor and capital.
Using the UK’s 98% tax rate on investment income (pre-Thatcher), the Nobel economist Milton Friedman illustrated the problem with this example. You are an Englishman with $100,000. Shall you invest it for future income, or shall you purchase a Rolls Royce and enjoy life? The true price of the Rolls Royce (or Bentley, or Ferrari or Maserati) is not the purchase price. The price of the exotic car is the foregone future income from not investing the $100,000.
Suppose you could earn 10% on the $100,000. That would be $10,000 per year as the cost of purchasing the luxury car. But after tax (98%) the car would only cost $200 per year, a very cheap price.
The same example works for labor and salary income. Because of the high marginal tax rates, many professionals such as medical doctors closed their practices on Fridays and went to the golf course.
By changing the policy mix, that is by tightening monetary policy and reducing marginal tax rates (the tax rate on increases in income), the supply-side economic policy of the Reagan administration caused aggregate supply to increase. Thus output expanded relative to demand, and inflation declined.
This supply-side policy was instrumental as Reagan’s first step toward ending the cold war with the Soviet Union. As long as the US economy was afflicted with stagflation–the simultaneous rise in both inflation and unemployment, the Soviet government saw capitalism failing along with communism. But when Reagan corrected the economic problem, it made the Soviet government unsure that it could withstand an arms race.
Reagan’s next step was to bring the Soviet government to the negotiating table to end the cold war. The cold war was an economic drain on both societies and always had the risk of a miscalculation that would result in nuclear war, wiping out life on earth. Gorbachev, an intelligent person aware of the risk, came to agreement with Reagan.
This was a great accomplishment for the Americans and for the Russians. Friendship and cooperation was now possible.
But it was not to last. Reagan’s successors took advantage of the good will between the countries that Reagan and Gorbachev had created to achieve American hegemony over the world.
Q: During the 80s, relying on the revived economic power of the United States, Ronald Reagan managed to convince the Soviet government to end the Cold War. All those agreements, as you believe, were destroyed by Reagan’s successors. Russia shares a completely different opinion about Reagan. The Russians think of him as the man, who resumed the arms race, designed the space shield and “cut out the cancer of communism” having won (or maybe bribed) Gorbachev over to his side for cooperation. Maybe one shouldn’t strike him out of the list of the authors of today’s American “idiotism?”
A: Reagan was not a member of the Republican Establishment. He defeated the Establishment’s candidate, George H. W. Bush (father of George W. Bush) for the Republican presidential nomination. By appealing to Democratic as well as Republican voters, Reagan had a great electoral victory. Reagan had two goals: one was to end stagflation, the other was to end the cold war. Hewas not much interested in anything else. The “arms race” and the “anti-ballistic missile defense–star wars” were never real. They were threats used to bring Gorbachev to negotiate the end of the cold war. Unlike the present Republican Party, Reagan wanted peace, not war.
I know this because when I succeeded in establishing the new economic policy that cured stagflation, President Reagan appointed me to a super-secret presidential committee that had subpoena power over the CIA.
The CIA opposed Reagan’s effort to end the cold war, as did the powerful military-security complex, about which President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American people in his last address to the American nation. The end of the cold war threatened the profits of the powerful military industries and the power of the CIA.
The CIA said that the Soviet Union would win an arms race, because the Soviet Union could control investment, unlike the US, and could allocate the entire Gross Domestic Product of the Soviet Empire to the military. Reagan’s secret committee over-ruled the CIA.
I had been a member of the US-USSR student exchange program to the Soviet Union in 1961 and had observed the situation. My first book (1971) said that the Soviet economy had failed. When decades later I addressed the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1989 and 1990, members of the Economic Institute brought me copies of my book to be autographed. And I had thought that censorship existed in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union collapsed three years after Reagan left office. It came as a surprise to those of us who had helped Reagan to end the cold war and dispose of the nuclear war threat.
Myself and many other Reagan supporters opposed the extension of NATO to Russia’s reduced borders. What the world seems to be unaware of is that the Soviet collapse unleashed a new, highly dangerous ideology in the US known as neoconservatism.
Q: You wrote that the insane and criminal government in Washington, no matter Democratic of Republicans, no matter the outcome of the next elections, is the biggest threat to life on Earth ever. How would you describe this threat, what is it made of and who represents it in the US?
A: The threat is the neoconservative ideology, unleashed by the Soviet collapse. It is a form of Marxism in which American “democratic capitalism” instead of the proletariat has won history’s verdict–“the end of history.” Americans are the “indispensable people,” and the US is the “indispensable nation” with the right and responsibility to establish its hegemony over the world. Adolf Hitler called the same thing “Aryan Superiority.” Now Washington asserts the superiority. The neoconservative ideology threatens the world with nuclear war.
Q: What would you say about the Russian law, according to which political parties funded from abroad should be registered as foreign agents?
A: The US has laws that require foreign interests to register as foreign agents. This law does not always apply to all Israeli lobby groups, such as AIPAC.
There are no political parties in the US that are funded by foreign interests. No such thing would be permitted. It would be regarded as high treason. What is surprising is that the Russian government permitted for 20 years its political opposition to be funded by Washington and still permits that today as long as the opposition registers as an American agent. The ability of Washington to fund the Russian government’s political opposition and also protest groups, perhaps including Pussy Riot, allows Washington free access to destabilize Russia.
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Q: What role do so-called non-governmental organizations play in the US? The National Endowment for Democracy, for example?
A: NGOs play no role inside the US. NGOs are Washington’s means of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, such as funding and organizing “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine. The National Endowment for Democracy is a principle funder of political opposition and protest groups in countries with governments to which Washington is opposed. Despite its original purpose, the National Endowment for Democracy has been converted into an agent for US hegemony.
Q: You wrote a lot about the fate of Pussy Riot. As you said, “they were brutally deceived and used by the Washington-financed NGOs that have infiltrated Russia.” What is the goal of such stunts?
A: It might be the case that Pussy Riot’s assaults on Russian probity are independent protests. On the other hand, the offending stunts could be provoked and funded by NGOs that are funded from Washington. Regardless, it is the result that is important. The result is that the controversy over Pussy Riot has shifted criticism from Washington’s destruction of Syria to Putin, “the suppressor of free speech.” It is folly for Russians to ally with Washington’s propaganda against their own government. If this folly continues, Russia will end up as another American puppet state.
Q: If an act like that of Pussy Riot took place in America, in a location of national significance, how would the general public and the government react? What do common people say about the Pussy Riot scandal in Russia?
A: Ordinary Americans know nothing about Pussy Riot. Despite the propaganda from Washington, most Americans have never heard of the incident. The importance of Washington’s propaganda about Pussy Riot is to send the signal to Washington’s European puppet states that Russia is to be demonized for opposing Washington’s destruction of Syria and Iran. It was the Russian and Chinese governments that blocked Washington’s UN resolution that would have allowed an opening for NATO to bomb Syria as it did Libya. Instead of being praised for its concern with life, human rights, and international law, Russia has been damned.
The consequence in the US of an act like those performed by Pussy Riot would vary depending on state and local laws. Also, depending on where the act takes place–a Jewish synagog for instance–the US Department of Justice could declare the act a hate crime or a form of discrimination against a “preferred minority” and bring a federal case.
Q: You wrote that the US government was full of determination to have the war on three fronts: Syria, Lebanon and Iran – in the Middle East, China – in the Far East and Russia – in Europe. Does the country have financial possibilities for that?
A: The US is bankrupt. However, the US dollar remains the world reserve currency. This means that the US can print money to pay its bills. As long as the world accepts the dollar as world reserve currency, the US will be able to continue its wars.
Q: Being in the insular situation, the USA experiments on other countries hoping that war will never come to the US territory. The US spends a lot more on defense of its forward-based forces in Europe and in the Middle East than it does on defense of its own borders. Maybe Russia should be more active and put the threat closer to the US borders by deploying a sea-based missile defense system near the shores of a friendly Latin American country?
A: Like President Reagan, I am in favor of peace. I believe that Americans, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and everyone else should spend their resources in getting along with one another, not in trying to dominate one another. I believe that Washington is forcing Russia and China to spend resources on military preparedness that the countries could better use in economic development and in protecting the environment. It is my belief that Washington’s drive for world hegemony is driving the world toward nuclear war. I have no way of knowing how the Russian and Chinese governments might respond to Washington’s drive for hegemony.
Q: What stops Russia and China from uniting to oppose the USA?
A: This question is outside my knowledge. Perhaps suspicion of one another, like the suspicion between Sunni and Shia that allows the US to dominate the Middle East.
Q: You said that the US is a police state, which was set up in the name of mystification of the “war on terror.” Can you give a clear explanation as to what the American Big Brother is doing?
A: The Bush/Cheney regime rammed through the PATRIOT Act, which assaulted the US Constitution and took away US civil liberties. The Bush regime established that the president did not have to obey either statutory US law, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which requires a court warrant for spying on US citizens. President Bush violated the law, a felony, and was not held accountable.
Bush asserted and established by assertion, the power to negate Constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus, and confined US citizens to indefinite detainment (life in prison) without any evidence or court proceedings. Nothing was done about this violation of constitutional order. President Obama has declared that he has the power to execute US citizens on suspicion alone without evidence or due process of law. These are the most extreme police state measures of modern times.
The Department of Homeland Security has announced that it has shifted its focus from Muslim terrorism to “domestic extremists,” an undefined term. Recently the Department of Homeland Security has purchased more than one billion rounds of deadly ammunition, such as hollow point bullets, enough to shoot the entire US population several times. There are also reports that detainment camps have been constructed, allegedly for such events as hurricane evacuation. Congress and the media are not asking questions about these developments.
Q: President Barack Obama said that one of the principles to resume peace talks between Israel and Palestine was about the retrieval of 1967 borders. How could the Jewish lobby let him say that?
A: President Obama has been declared by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby to be a lackluster friend of Israel, because Obama has not yet launched a military attack on Iran. Obama, perhaps believing himself to be the president of the world’s only superpower, and not a puppet of the Israeli prime minister, has taken offense at the public bullying to which he has been subjected by the far right-wing Israeli government. Obama’s statement referring to the 1967 borders was Obama’s way of letting the Israeli government know that it was going too far and pushing too hard.
Q: You see the basic problems of the US economy in moving production to China. If you were invited to serve as an advisor to the president, what would be your plan for taking America out of the crisis?
A: I will never again be permitted to serve as an advisor to the president of the US. Since the Clinton presidency, the only permitted advisors are those who lie for the government. I will not do that.
I an unsure that America can be taken out of economic crisis. Much of the most productive part of the US economy has been moved offshore in order to increase corporate profits, the performance-based bonuses for executive compensation and capital gains to equity owners. The US has lost critical supply chains, industrial infrastructure, and the knowledge of skilled workers.
Theoretically, the US could bring its corporations back to America by taxing their profits according to the geographical location in which value is added to their product. If value is added abroad, in China or India, for example, the tax rate would be high. If value was added domestically in the US, the tax rate would be low.
The US could also resort to the protective tariffs that were responsible for its rise as an economic power.
These changes would be difficult to enact as the changes are contrary to the material interests of the one percent.
The US today is ruled by an oligarchy of private interests. The US government is not very independent of the powerful interest groups that fund political campaigns. The US ceased being a democracy during the Clinton administration.
Anti-Islamic advertisements will go up across New York City’s subway system next week after a federal judge ruled that the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority could not legally refuse to host the signs on the basis of “demeaning” language.
As early as next Monday, ten NYC subway stations will showcase adverts declaring, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” The campaign was created by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), an organization considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center watch group.
Pamela Geller, the executive director of the AFDI, stands by her signage despite rampant complaints circulating before the campaign has even begun.
“I will not abridge my freedoms so as not to offend savages,” Geller tells Sky News
Geller has long advocated against so-called “Islamist propaganda” in America and has campaigned in the past to call for the shutting down of a Washington, DC museum exhibit that highlighted Muslim contributions to science. The installation was declared “Best Touring Exhibit” by the Museum Heritage Awards in 2011, but Geller claimed “It has indoctrinated hundreds of thousands of children into a rosy and romanticized view of Islam that makes them less appreciative of their own culture’s achievements and more complacent about Islamization in the West.”
For her overt actions waged against Islamic culture, the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League has said Geller “fuels and fosters anti-Muslim bigotry in society.”
Those ideals will be brought to New York subway stations next week despite a legal battle that ended in July with a Manhattan federal judge agreeing that the First Amendment allowed Geller to have her ads run in the metro system.
“I live in America and in America we have the first amendment,” Geller tells Sky News.
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Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, responded to the outlet by condemning Geller’s actions, but agreeing with the federal judge’s decision regardless.
“Our basic position is that the first amendment means that everyone is free to be a bigot or even an idiot like Pamela Geller,” Hooper tells Sky. “We wish she wasn’t provoking and inciting hatred, but in America that’s her right.”
“We encourage Muslims to exercise the same right to publicly denounce such adverts. The real danger is the spread of hatred in our society, which can lead to attacks on innocent people.”
On the website for the AFDI, Geller critiques a journalist who has labeled her efforts as anti-Muslim, insisting that such a label “implies that every Muslim is a jihadi who wants to impose sharia and ‘eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within and sabotage its miserable house.’”
Defending her advertisements to KQED News last month, Geller said it was right to refer to Islamic worshipers as “savage,” because “any targeting of innocent civilians is savagery.”
“Mothers and children on a bus are targeted, and that is savagery. Kidnapping and murdering is savagery. The U.S. does not conduct war that way, and neither does Israel. Now, there is sometimes the accidental death of civilians, which is far different than the targeting of innocent civilians,” she said.
Previously, Geller told Huffington Post of her ads, “If I had my way, they’d be in every city in the United States of America and if I can get the funding, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
She has successfully campaigned to have the adverts included in San Francisco and is all but certain to expand to New York in the coming days. In California, San Francisco’s transit authority promised to donate the $3,400 Geller spent on advertising fees to the Human Rights Commission.
US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney waves to one of his sons and grandsons before addressing the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles on September 17, 2012.
Mitt Romney appeared on Univision Wednesday alongside Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas, but something was a little peculiar about his appearance — his skin tone. Looking back at the hundreds of photos logging his every moment on the campaign trail, the Republican presidential nominee is usually not so shockingly tan.
While his orangey-brown appearance on Univision could have been the result of bad lighting or a makeup mishap, left-wing blog the Democratic Underground concluded that Romney “dyed his face brown for his Univision interview.”
The claim is not completely out of the ballpark. After all, as Gawker points out, Romney did say “it would be helpful to be Latino,” in a video secretly recorded at a campaign fundraiser earlier this year.
Appearing at a campaign fundraiser in Atlanta, Georgia, before his Univision interview, Romney showed a bit more color, but nowhere near the amount of bronze as seen on stage at the 6:30 p.m. ET filming.
If Romney did indeed alter his skin tone, it was likely done in the past few days. Three days earlier, on Sunday, Sept. 16, Romney appeared much paler when he landed in Missouri.
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And on Monday, Sept. 17, when Romney addressed Los Angeles’ Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, his face was a bit redder than usual.
With his bustling campaign schedule, Romney spending enough time outside to develop a natural tan of that color within the time frame is doubtful — making it even more possible that he somehow altered his skin tone as Democratic Underground suggests.
Though the intentions behind this plausible move are a mystery, some have ventured to make a guess, speculating that Romney’s “brownface” is an attempt to appeal to Latino voters — a voting bloc Romney desperately needs if he hopes to win the election.
Romney is currently trailing nearly 40 points behind Obama in Latino support.
To aid in his effort to lure Hispanic voters, the campaign released two new ads on Monday detailing Romney’s 5-point economic plan and criticizing Obama’s record. Romney also made a major push for Hispanic voters Monday, speaking at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles and granting interviews to Univision and Telemundo.
But that push could be partially undermined by another of the covert video clips, where Romney candidly discusses some of the problems encountered by his campaign, including trouble attracting female and Hispanic voters.
Romney jokes of his father, who was born in Mexico, “Had he been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this.”
Later, Romney admits that Republicans are having a difficult time attracting Hispanic voters — and there could be severe repercussions for the party.
“We are having a much harder time with Hispanic voters, and if the Hispanic voting bloc becomes as committed to the Democrats as the African-American voting bloc has in the past, why, we’re in trouble as a party and, I think, as a nation,” Romney said.
Romney also told donors the campaign was using his wife, Ann, “sparingly … so that people don’t get tired of her.”
And he admits that the president remains popular with many voters, which makes attacking him difficult.
“But when you say, ‘Are you disappointed that his policies haven’t worked?’ they say yes,” Romney said. “And because they voted for him, they don’t want to be told that they were wrong, that he’s a bad guy, that he did bad things, that he’s corrupt. Those people that we have to get, they want to believe they did the right thing, but he just wasn’t up to the task.” – various sources
Washington said it was deploying forces to cope with violence in as many as 18 different locations as deadly Muslim anger spreads over a US-made movie that mocks Islam.
Two US marines were killed in Afghanistan when insurgents armed with guns and rockets stormed a heavily fortified air base late on Friday in an attack that the Taliban militia said was to avenge the film.
The attack on Camp Bastion in Helmand province, which continued until Saturday morning, was a major security breach at a base where Britain’s Prince Harry is stationed and has been the target of specific death threats.
It came after at least six protesters died in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon and Sudan on Friday as local police battled to defend American missions from mobs of stone-throwers.
Symbols of US influence in cities across the Muslim world came under attack — embassies and schools as well as fast food chains — as protesters vented their fury at the low-budget American-made YouTube film, “Innocence of Muslims”.
US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said Washington was configuring its forces to be able to cope with widespread violence following its deployment of Marine counter-terrorism units to Libya and Yemen and its stationing of two destroyers off the North African coast.
“We have to be prepared in the event that these demonstrations get out of control,” Panetta told Foreign Policy magazine.
He did not offer any specifics. But the magazine said that the Pentagon was discussing, but had not yet decided, whether to send a third platoon of 50 specially trained Marines to protect the US embassy in Khartoum.
Guards on the roof of the embassy fired warning shots on Friday as the compound was breached by protesters waving Islamic banners, after earlier ransacking parts of the British and German missions in the Sudanese capital.
The US embassy compounds in Egypt and Yemen have also been breached in the past week, and on Tuesday the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed when a mob torched the consulate in Benghazi.
Panetta said Friday that it was still too early to say exactly what happened in Benghazi where there have been suggestions that Al-Qaeda sympathisers rather than angry Muslim protesters may have been responsible.
“It’s something that’s under assessment and under investigation, to determine just exactly what happened here,” he said.
The assault on the consulate came on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States and the head of Libya’s national assembly, Mohammed al-Megaryef, on Friday blamed Al-Qaeda as he laid a bouquet of flowers in front of the devastated mission.
Protests spread across continents
In Friday night’s attack in Afghanistan, the assailants managed to penetrate the air base and damaged several aircraft although military spokesman Major Adam Wojack declined to say what type or how many.
Wojack said 18 insurgents were killed — including a suicide bomber. Prince Harry was never in danger, officials confirmed.
A Taliban spokesman said the attack was to avenge the YouTube movie.
“Last night, a number of mujahedeen fighters have carried out suicide attacks on Camp Bastion of Helmand in revenge for the insulting movie by the Americans,” spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP by telephone.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence said in June that the massive base, spread over several square kilometres (miles) of desert, is home to more than 28,000 people and the attack raised serious questions about security.
Police in Sydney fired pepper spray to contain protesters trying to enter the building housing the US consulate on Saturday, as Australia became the the latest focus of disturbances.
Bottles, shoes and other objects were hurled during the clashes with police which resulted in eight arrests, with six police officers injured as the unexpected protest brought parts of the city to a standstill.
Shoppers looked on in surprise as protesters, including children, shouted “Down, down USA” and waved banners such as “Behead all those who insult the prophet”.
Hundreds also demonstrated in Indonesia and the Maldives.
In Somalia, the Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab militia, which controls large swathes of the country called on Muslims to launch revenge attacks on Western targets.
“The Shebab mujahedeen are urging people of Somalia to show their love for Islam and particularly to our Prophet Mohammed by making attacks against the West,” Shebab spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage told AFP by telephone.
US President Barack Obama urged Americans not to be disheartened by images of anti-American violence in the Islamic world, expressing confidence that the ideals of freedom America stands for would ultimately prevail.
“I know the images on our televisions are disturbing,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address. “But let us never forget that for every angry mob, there are millions who yearn for the freedom, and dignity, and hope that our flag represents.”
Obama said his administration was doing everything it could to protect Americans serving abroad.
“We are in contact with governments around the globe, to strengthen our cooperation, and underscore that every nation has a responsibility to help us protect our people,” he said. – AFP
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Turkey’s parliament has authorized cross-border military operations into Syria. The move follows a cross-border mortar-shelling into Turkey which Damascus has apologized for.
