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TEHRAN (FNA)- The so-called Free Syrian Army, the main armed rebel group fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s government, announced that it has set up two battalions called ‘Martyr Saddam Hussein’ in the cities of Idlib and Deir al-Zour in Syria.

In a blatant act of defiance and in a move aimed at provoking the feelings of Kurds in general and Syrian Kurds in particular, the FSA formed the two battalions.

Analysts believe that these acts, which are condemned and seen as worrisome by Kurds and all Syrians, might push the opponents to retract and backtrack on their moves against Bashar Assad’s government.

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The Turkish military shelled Syria for a sixth straight day Monday after the provincial governor’s office claimed a Syrian round landed in a cotton field near the town of Altinozu in the border province of Hatay.

The CIA-backed Free Syria Army is based in Antakya, the largest city in Hatay. The FSA is armed and funded by the Gulf States of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and receives logistics from the United States. As we noted in September, there is ample evidence that a large number of FSA rebels are in fact members of al-Qaeda.

The Hatay city of Akcakale is a key supply route for the FSA and other so-called rebels.

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Turkey fires rounds into Syria after unknown attackers fire mortars into Turkish border town.

After over a year of harboring foreign terrorists and supporting their operations near and across the Turkish-Syrian border, NATO-member Turkey has claimed it has retaliated with military force against “targets” inside Syria for an alleged attack on Turkish territory that it has blamed on the Syrian government.

Despite heavily armed listed-terrorist organizations operating in large numbers on both sides of the Turkish border with Turkey’s explicit approval and logistical support, the government in Ankara appears to have excluded the possibility that these terrorist forces, not the Syrian military, were responsible for the attack which consisted of mortar rounds the armed militants are known to widely use.

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A federal appeals court has ruled that the US government can still indefinitely detain citizens should it wish to do so, under the Obama Administration’s National Defense Authorization Act.

The ruling came in the form of an extension of an “emergency” stay of a district court judge’s order that had previously struck down the defence bill’s provisions altogether.

Last month District Judge Katherine Forrest permanently blocked the NDAA provision, saying that “First Amendment rights have already been harmed and will be harmed by the prospect of (the law) being enforced.”

However, the very next day the Obama administration moved to appeal the decision in an attempt to reinstate the indefinite detention provisions. The administration characterized the ruling by Forrest as unconstitutional.

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It came to me like a revelation on my morning commute: Bread is a tool of the state. It sounds crazy, I know, but it is clear, and in the weeks since then, the “staff of life,” the very symbol of food itself, has become to me a symbol of the domestication of humankind. It has also suggested one more way I can work to strengthen the individual and weaken the state.

I had recently read The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson and was eliminating grain from my diet. According to Sisson, grains are a recent addition to the human diet that we are not well adapted to and cause many health problems, including obesity and diabetes. He claims that by adjusting our diets and lifestyles to fit our biological make-up, we can regain some of the health and vitality that our primal ancestors had. I had begun to adjust my diet to consist of mostly meats, nuts, eggs, fruits, and vegetables, and I lost weight, gained muscle tone and strength, and felt better than I had in a long time (for example, my previous IBS symptoms had all but disappeared).

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BEIRUT –– At least 40 people were killed and 90 wounded, most of them soldiers, when three car bombs struck the heart of Syria’s second city Aleppo on Wednesday, a monitoring group said.

“A medical source said that at least 40 people were killed and 90 injured,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. “Most of them were regime troops.”

Meanwhile, official television channel Al Ikhbariya said 31 people were killed and dozens wounded.

“The toll could rise because many people were badly injured,” a city official told AFP, shortly after three bombs exploded around Saadallah Jabiri Square, near a military officers’ club and a hotel.

Two of the blasts hit the area near the club within a minute of each other.

A third car bomb then exploded some 150 metres (yards) away in the Bab Jnein district, at the entrance of the Old City neighbourhood of Aleppo.

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Bradley Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, has filed a 117-page motion calling for the dismissal of all charges with prejudice, for lack of a speedy trial. When he argues the motion at Ft. Meade, October 29 – November 2, Bradley will have been in pretrial confinement for nearly 900 days.

It’s appropriate that David Coombs’ longest motion of this trial yet, which argues for dismissal of all charges, details PFC Bradley Manning’s extraordinarily and illegally long pretrial confinement. The prosecution’s repeated and unjustifiable delays point “unmistakably to the conclusion that PFC Manning’s statutory and constitutional speedy trial rights have been trampled upon with impunity.”

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“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.” ~ James Madison

For most Americans, the detention center at Guantanamo Bay – once the topic of heated political debate by presidential hopeful Barack Obama but rarely talked about by the incumbent President Obama – has become a footnote in the government’s ongoing war on terror.

Yet for the approximately 167 detainees still being held in that godforsaken gulag, 86 of whom have been cleared for release yet continue to be imprisoned at the facility, Guantanamo Bay is a lesson in injustice, American-style. It is everything that those who founded America vigorously opposed: kidnapping, torture, dehumanizing treatment, indefinite detention, being “disappeared” with no access to family or friends, and little hope of help from the courts.

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Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano told a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday that a blatantly unconstitutional Obama administration executive order is “still being drafted in the inter-agency process” and “is close to completion depending on a few issues that need to be resolved at the highest levels.”

Obama will implement crucial element of the surveillance state by executive fiat.
The latest Obama EO – he has issued 135 thus far – is a response to the failure of a cybersecurity bill to pass in the Senate. The Lieberman-Collins Cyber-security bill failed 52-46. Following the vote, Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, said “the President is determined to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today’s cyber threats and we will do that” despite the will of the American people.

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There have been several different predictions and scenarios involving how inflation and austerity measures in the U.S. could bring about food shortages and other shortages, food riots, looting, violent protests, flash mobs, and martial law.

All these things can be prevented, of course, if more people could wake up to the fact that government central planning in money and economic matters is inherently flawed and doomed to failure, societal self-destruction and collapse.

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1. Why did the Bush administration allow numerous Saudi nationals, and, more importantly, the family of Osama bin Laden to leave the United States in the days following the events of 9/11?

Read the rest of the very interesting article.

This is a revised version of a talk given October 28th at this year’s Mises Institute Supporter’s Summit, “Imperialism: Enemy of Freedom.” The original talk, “Taxation, Inflation, and War” is available in MP3 audio from Mises Media.

Praxeology and War

Commentaries on war stretching back more than two millennia to the Peloponnesian Wars have enshrouded the fundamental causes of war in an almost impenetrable fog of myths, fallacies, and outright lies. In most studies, war is generally portrayed as the inevitable outcome of either complex historical forces or accidental circumstances generally beyond the understanding or control of the human combatants.

Fortunately, there exists a science of human action that is applicable to all purposeful activities. This science is referred to as “praxeology.” Although economics is its most developed branch, the basic principles of this science can also be applied to analyzing violent action including warfare. Thus Murray Rothbard wrote:

The rest of praxeology [besides economics] is an unexplored area. Attempts have been made to formulate a logical theory of war and violent action, and violence in the form of government has been treated by political philosophy and by praxeology in tracing the effects of violent intervention in the free market.

As Rothbard suggested, what we might call the “Logic of War Making” is a relatively undeveloped area of the science of human action. Its elaboration is therefore especially necessary if we are to dispel the mythology of war and elucidate its true origin and character. The basic axiom of this praxeological discipline is that war is the objective outcome of the human endeavor of war-making.

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When international law designed to stop war crimes is used by war criminals.

A historic ruling handed down by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal found former-US President George W. Bush and his associates guilty of war crimes including torture. Using standards provided by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and based on the precedent set by the Nuremberg trials, the tribunal succeeded in observing existing international standards in reaching its verdict before forwarding the results to the ICC and the United Nations.

However, for those involved, they are under no illusions that the ICC or the UN will take actions against the accused. As noted by Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization, the very institutions charged with maintaining international rule of law, have been in fact instrumental in facilitating its violation by the hands of powerful Western nations. Professor Chossudovsky stated, “the fact that if war criminals are not prosecuted by the domestic and international legal system, that means that the legal apparatus, the judicial system is turned upside down and is serving the interests of the war criminals who actually call the shots.”

Indeed, it is clear, as in Libya, genocidal terrorist organizations, stated as such on both US and British terror organization lists, were empowered by this very upturning of “international law,” where baseless claims of “human rights” violations were not only used to accuse and undermine leaders of sovereign nation-states, but used to justify acts of war in deposing targeted governments. In Libya, not only were militants led by terrorist organizations like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group committing very real atrocities, but NATO itself did as well. Militants on the ground purposefully blockaded entire cities, cutting off food, water, electricity, and medical supplies while NATO flattened the city with daily airstrikes. In other words, NATO did demonstratively before the eyes of the world what it accused the Libyan government of doing used to justify its military intervention in the first place.

We see a similar scenario unfolding in Syria, however, now, the US has already admitted that despite a UN brokered ceasefire, it is arranging the arming of militants now exposed as having direct ties to Al Qaeda and other extremist organizations, admittedly carrying out a campaign of terror across Syria, specifically targeting civilian populations. The US has also admitted, in the midst of an alleged UN ceasefire, that it is attempting to trigger a violent Kurdish uprising. As Professor Chossudovsky has illustrated, “international law” has clearly been turned upside down to the benefit of real, demonstrative war criminals.

So then, the tribunal held in Malaysia successfully exposed “international law” as dysfunctional and in fact, counter productive – enabling, not deterring gross acts of global injustice, wars of aggression, and the systematic abuse of human rights and freedom in nation after nation by an expanding international criminal cartel centered on Wall Street and London. And while this is useful in and of itself, the tribunal and those involved, by extending convictions beyond figure heads like George Bush and Richard Cheney to include advisers and policy makers of corporate-funded think-tanks, a wider network of criminality has been exposed as well.

The ICC and UN will predictably do nothing regarding this ruling. This should not even be expected. Instead, the tribunal should be understood in the context as not only a form of protest, but the boycotting of a corrupt system and the creation of a viable, more inclusive alternative. Legal proceedings are designed to examine evidence and convict guilty parties, then determining appropriate and practical punitive measures.

Those involved in the crimes described by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal are but a small proportion of a much larger international criminal cartel representing the largest corporate-financier powers on earth. While imprisonment may be the most ideal punishment to level against those convicted in Malaysia, it is not currently practical.

Instead, identifying the individuals, corporations, and institutions directly responsible and in fact harboring many of those convicted, and imposing “sanctions” on them, is not only practical, but will help erode the unwarranted base of power from which these global elite operate with absolute impunity. Eventually, if the silent majority finds the resolve to act on the tribunal’s ruling, and impose “sanctions” on the special interests driving these criminal acts, and should this atmosphere of impunity be eroded, imprisoning international war criminals may eventually become a practical reality.

Tony Cartalucci is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Tony Cartalucci