21st Century Wire — Paris Attacks: A Perfect Pretext For NATO To Mobilize in Syria and Iraq (and more)

Get ready for it. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

21st Century Wire
Paris Attacks: A Perfect Pretext For NATO To Mobilize in Syria and Iraq

Magic Passports Redux: Syrian Passport Allegedly Discovered on Suicide Bomber

Meanwhile,

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has said his group is determined to continue its fight against the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL) following a double suicide bombing in Beirut’s southern suburbs that killed 43 people and left over 200 injured.

Nasrallah made the remarks in a somber speech delivered on Saturday evening, two days after the country was rocked by ISIL's attacks and a day after coordinated attacks in Paris left more than 120 dead.

Focusing largely on the recent events in Lebanon, he swore Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group currently fighting alongside the Syrian army in Syria, will "search for open fronts with Daesh [ISIL]".

"Their goal is to pressure the resistance to withdraw from the battle against the takfiris in Syria," he said in his televised address.

"[These bombings] will bring the opposite results. If they assume killing our men and women and children and burning our homes and markets will shake our will and determination, they are wrong….

Al Jazeera
Hezbollah chief vows to continue fight against ISIL

Nour Samaha

Two suicide bombers who carried out Saturday's attacks in Ankara are thought to have links to Islamic State (IS), Turkish officials have told the BBC.…

The attacks in the capital, the worst in Turkey's modern history that left 97 people dead, triggered widespread anger against the government.…

BBC NEWS
Ankara blasts: Bombers 'linked to Islamic State'

With the death toll in the Paris terror attacks still rising, French President Hollande is condemning an “act of war” by the Islamic State, but the underlying reality is that France’s rich friends in the Persian Gulf are key accomplices in the mayhem, writes Daniel Lazare.

DL: In the wake of the latest terrorist outrage in Paris, the big question is not which specific group is responsible for the attack, but who’s responsible for the Islamic State and Al Qaeda in the first place. The answer that has grown increasingly clear in recent years is that it’s Western leaders who have used growing portions of the Muslim world as a playground for their military games and are now crying crocodile tears over the consequences.

This pattern had its beginnings in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency and the Saudi royal family virtually invented modern jihadism in an effort to subject the Soviets to a Vietnam-style war in their own backyard. It was the case, too, in Iraq, which the United States and Great Britain invaded in 2003, triggering a vicious civil warfare between Shi‘ites and Sunnis.…

Consortiums News
How Saudi/Gulf Money Fuels Terror

Daniel Lazare

We, the West, overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gaddafi by violence. We are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year.
Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.”

Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations, there would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight.

Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.

The open history of the last half-century is very clear in this regard. Going all the way back to the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, the United States has deliberately and consciously pushed the most extreme sectarian groups in order to undermine a broader-based secular resistance to its domination agenda.…

Counterpunch

The Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence
Chris Floyd

Empire Burlesque
A Game Worth the Candle: Terror and the Agenda of our Elites

Chris Floyd

Another terrorist outrage – this one in Paris – is spreading fear and fury across Europe. Which makes this a key moment for President Obama to finally level with the American people about how U.S. “allies” — such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar — have been aiding and abetting extremists, reports Robert Parry.

Parry assumes that President Obama is too weak to prevent his getting rolled by the neocons and war hawks. I am not buying that line even for the "benefit of the doubt."

I am sorry to say, too, that there are photographs and documents of US leaders meeting with well-known neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

Consortium News
Can Obama Level with the People?

Robert Parry

As US Secretary of State John Kerry convenes with diplomats from Russia and other nations for a second round of political talks on the Syrian conflict in Vienna this weekend, it is becoming clear that Washington is gambling on a two-prong strategy. But the US gamble carries a grave risk of blowing up into a war with Russia.…

NSNBC
US Gambling on War with Russia in Syria?

Finian Cunningham

One America News Network

After Paris Attacks, Pressure Builds For Big Military Response To Islamic State

Phil Stewart, Warren Strobel and Matt Spetalnick

Reuters
China's Xi says willing to join France in combating terrorism

Paris shines a spotlight on the farce that we call the "War on Terror."

With all the billions and billions the U.S. spends on surveillance and intelligence and all the billions and billions that other Western nations spend on surveillance and intelligence we see that it's all a total farce. Even with all those assets they still could not pick up what was a massively coordinated, multiple-location attack that resulted in horrific carnage.

Where was the NSA on this? The NSA supposedly has the capability to listen to every electronic communication in the world? It is back-door hooked into everyone's computer. Yet still, these monsters were able to get their hands on explosives and automatic weapons and engage in what looks like significant planning, en route to unbelievable levels of slaughter.

How I laugh every time I see law enforcement praising themselves for "thwarting" some attack that was nothing more than some dumb schmuck or group of schmuck's lured into some ridiculous sting operation. Meanwhile our civil liberties are evaporating at an alarming pace, if we even have any at all these days. And, certainly, these attacks will bring the usual, "beefing up" of police presence everywhere, a pathetic, knee-jerk reaction that prevents nothing.

Let us not forget, too, that these groups, like ISIS, were created by the our own CIA, which funded and armed these supposed "moderates" so that they could fight our many proxy wars. Now, well armed and financed, they've turned their weapons on their masters.

What a fucking disgrace this whole thing is. And pardon my cynicism, here, but I'm quite sure that the CIA and the neocons in the DOD will almost certainly find this a godsend and they'll use this massacre to twist the narrative and blame Putin and the Russians, raising the stakes for all of us to an even more dangerous level as if the danger wasn't high enough already.

Finally, let's not forget that Obama recently (and uber-foolishly) gave the Iranians the green light to make nukes in his pathetically inept "deal." (As Trump has pointed out, over and over and over). These are nukes that will almost certainly fall into the hands of one of these terrorist groups and they'll use it and it will make the Paris and 9/11 attacks and everything else in between look like kindergarten.

We are fucked from every direction.
Our leaders fucked us.
We have no civil liberties.
We are not safe.
Our intelligence agencies have gone rogue.
The terrorists have shown they can strike unhindered.