United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

"Those around the globe with the computer skills to search out the secrets of empire are now those whom empire fears most," wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges last week[1].  --  "If we lose this battle, if these rebels are defeated, it means the dark night of corporate totalitarianism."  --  Hedges visited Julian Assange recently in the London embassy where the founder of WikiLeaks has lived as a political refugee for the past year.  --  For Hedges, there is no doubt that the U.S. has already obtained a sealed grand jury indictment against Assange and is simply waiting for the right moment to use it.  --   The attorney who led the grand jury investigation "has been mentioned as a potential head of the FBI."  --  Meanwhile, "Manning’s 12-week military trial is scheduled to begin in June.  The prosecution is calling 141 witnesses."  --  Assange concluded:  "The world has been turned upside down. . . I fear for us all."  --  In an interview broadcast by Democracy Now! on Wednesday Chris Hedges called the U.S. Government's seizure of the telephone records of the Associated Press for two months "one more assault in a long series of assaults against freedom of information and freedom of the press," of which the pursuit of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is an important part.[2]  --  Hedges also believes the reason for the government's action is clear:  "everyone knows, within the administration, within the National Security Council, the effects of climate change, the instability that that will cause, the economic deterioration, which is irreversible, and they want the mechanisms by which they can criminalize any form of dissent.  And that’s finally what this is about." ...

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the co-founder of France's Parti de Gauche, wrote at length on Monday on his blog about violations of human rights in Côte d'Ivoire committed by the new regime that France helped install a few years ago, and the failure of French authorities to do much about these violations.[1]  --  He also offered some general remarks about how the media cover wars....

On May 9, The National (Abu Dhabi) reported an account by an unnamed Syrian rebel leader according to which the U.S. is focused on eliminating Jabhat Al Nusra, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime.  --  According to this account, a senior U.S. intelligence officer told the rebel commander: "I'm not going to lie to you.  We'd prefer you fight Al Nusra now, and then fight Assad's army.  You should kill these Nusra people.  We'll do it if you don't."[1] ...

In a long interview given to the French news site Mediapart that was published on May 10 and that is translated below in its entirety, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Itamar Rabinovich presented Israel's strategy in dealing with the Syrian crisis.  --  Syria today is, Ambassador Rabinovich said in a remarkable admission, "a case of an Israeli-Iranian conflict."[1]  --  He commented extensively in this context on the significance of Israel's heavy strikes inside Syria on May 3 and 5, 2013.  --  BACKGROUND:  Rabinovich, 70 or 71, is a former president of the University of Tel Aviv and is currently professor emeritus at the the Brooking Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington and president of the Israel Institute, founded in 2012 with money from the fortune of oil-and-finance billionaire Lynn Schusterman and her late husband Charles.  --  COMMENT:  The dominant conception of the mind of Itamar Rabinovitch, who holds a Ph.D. from UCLA, is that of international politics as a matter of dealings not of individuals, but of quasi-immortal beings known as States or Powers.  --  Individuals hardly matter; it is the state that endures.  --  This mentality is a heritage of Western diplomacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  --  The "Interests of France" of the "Viewpoint of Prussia" came in this period to be spoken of with assurance and belief.  --  This bizarre statist mythology has come to form the basis of a lethal game in which individual human lives shrink in significance and groups that do not figure on this mythological plane (Palestinians, for example) count for little or nothing.  --  It may well be that the Bible has contributed much to such superstitions:  there we read over and over that "Moab was sore afraid" (Numbers 22:3) and "Israel was sore distressed" (Judges 10:9) and so on and so forth.  --  Numberless are those who in the course of the past four hundred years have given themselves up entirely to this mythology, and it has proved to be the most convenient vehicle there is for militant nationalism and war, especially when linked with romantic notions of national identity.  --  This manifestly regressive way of thinking is no doubt a natural tendency of the human mind.  --  It is well known, however, that tribal personalities are screens for interests of a very different nature.  --  At present, to return to the case at hand, an entity like "Syria" is entirely fictitious.  --  But not in Itamar Rabinovich's mind, and it is notable that Rabinovich's interviewer never questions this mythology.  --  For Rabinovich, as well as for his interviewer, Syria (in spite of the well-known history of its human fabrication) is an immortal entity.  --  The most he will allow is that "Israel also thinks that Syria will perhaps no longer be a unified state for a while."  --  It may be that the statist mentality is the result of a deep fearfulness:  by enclosing one's life in something larger and more lasting, one not only cloaks oneself in the power and prestige of a mighty collectivity, one also assuages one's unconscious fears: the fear of being isolated, the fear of being alone, and the fear of that great human universal, death....

Many voices on the right and in the Israel lobby in the U.S. are trying to stampede the Obama administration into intervening in Syria, and many in U.S. mainstream media are cooperating.  --  Advocates of intervention are claiming that the Assad régime has employed the nerve gas sarin, thereby crossing a "red line" that President Barack Obama announced in August 2012.  --  However, this claim was undermined by Carla del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the BBC reported Monday.[1]  --  (The BBC posted a clip of the interview with del Ponte, which she gave in English, and it can be viewed at the link below.)  --  A leading member of a U.N. commission of inquiry, del Ponte told Swiss TV that there were "strong, concrete suspicions" rebels had unleashed the sarin.  --  (The commission itself has not come to any conclusive findings as yet.)  --  Bloomberg Businessweek said Tuesday that "A State Department official today said the U.S. takes all allegations of chemical weapons use seriously, including del Ponte’s statement."[2]  --  "The U.S. has no information suggesting that rebel forces opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime have either the capability or the intent of using chemical weapons, said the official, who briefed reporters on condition of not being named," Flavia Krause-Jackson reported.  --  But this news was played down in most U.S. media news outlets.  --  WSWS put this in perspective:  "Time and again -- in the Houla massacre of May 2012 and the murder of journalist Gilles Jacquier in January 2012 -- the media blamed atrocities perpetrated by the opposition on the Assad regime, then dropped the issue when it emerged that the opposition was responsible. . . . Now the U.S. media are burying news of del Ponte’s interview, as Washington moves towards direct intervention in Syria.  --  Her interview was not mentioned in any of the three major network evening news programs yesterday."[3] ...

On Monday the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a strong supporter of Israel, introduced legislation "that would explicitly allow the U.S. to provide arms, military training, and non-lethal aid to the rebels," Fox News reported.[1]  --  Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) said the legislation was a response to the Assad regime's had crossed a "red line."  --  Concerning the supposed crossing of a red line, however, "Carla Del Ponte, a member of the U.N. commission looking into the alleged use of the nerve gas sarin in Syria, said Sunday that opposition forces -- and not the Assad regime -- may have been the ones who used the weapons.  According to Reuters, she told Swiss-Italian television there are 'strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof' of sarin gas being used.   She said it was 'on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.'"  --  Banker Sanjay Sanghoee, meanwhile, who works at Lazard Frères and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein as well as a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, in a Huffington Post piece, was saying "thank you" to Israel for bombing targets inside Syria:  "the Syrians don't have time for us to do [the] type of soul searching" that President Barack Obama is supposedly engaged in, he said.[2]  --  He urged that the U.S. take belligerent action in the name of "our democratic ideals and humanitarian principles."  --  These developments came as the Syrian government "said that Israeli air strikes [early Sunday morning] against military targets around Damascus amounted to a 'declaration of war' and threatened retaliation," the London Guardian said.[3]  --  Egypt denounced the Israeli attack as illegal and destabilizing, Julian Borger and Joel Greenbert reported.  --  But Bloomberg editorialized that Obama's deliberations were "unseemly" and presented U.S. intervention including "a significant deployment of air power and, inevitably, some U.S. boots on the ground in Syria" as inevitable:  "continued inaction may be the surest path to the large-scale intervention the U.S. wishes to avoid."[4] ...

On Saturday, on the eve of a large demonstration in Paris calling for the founding of a Sixth Republic in France, Edwy Plenel published a resounding statement of support, translated below in its entirety.  --  Plenel called for moving beyond the Fifth Republic, an "anachronistic, exotic, and a-democratic" system of government, to a Republic in France that would restore it "to its only sovereign, the people."[1]  --  BACKGROUND:  Edwy Plenel, 60, was for twenty-five years a leading journalist at Le Monde, serving as its editor-in-chief from 2000 to 2004.  --  In 2008 he created the online newspaper Mediapart, which has played a leading role in independent investigatory journalism in France, most recently in bringing down a budget minister (Jérôme Cahuzac) who was hiding an off-shore bank account and engaged in tax evasion.  --  The ensuing crisis of confidence has shaken France's political establishment and led to Sunday's demonstration in Paris, which drew more people than this year's traditional Mayday celebration....

In the case of Syria, the choice of a term to describe event "denotes a political position," Darth Nader (an Arab blogger who grew up in Beirut) pointed out a few weeks ago.[1]  --  Those who support the Syrian opposition call the struggle a "revolution"; those who are unsympathetic call it a "proxy war."  --  "[T]he most helpful precedent that we can use is that of the Spanish Civil War," wrote Nader.  --  "So, was what is today known as the “Spanish Civil war” a revolution, a civil war, or a proxy war?  The answer is all of the above."  --  And the same is true in Syria today.  --  "In fact, historically, there is very little precedent for any conflict in any place being only one or the other without some intersection and overlap."  --  "[I]f we wish to characterize the armed opposition in Syria as a 'proxy,' meaning they get support from foreign states, this is accurate.  However, if by 'proxy' we mean that they simply do foreign states' bidding for them with no popular support base on the ground, this is inaccurate."  --    In fine:  "[using the term 'proxy war'] does not preclude that there is also a revolution happening in Syria today." ...