Jason Ditz joins us to discuss the Israeli bombings of Syria, the chemical weapons hype/re-hype, the US’s capricious nature on their foreign policy regarding Syria and the latest attempted peace negotiations for Syria held jointly between the US and Russia. On a grander scale, is the UN Security Council just a dysfunctional bully’s pulpit? Who can hold powerful governments accountable if not their own public? And how can that happen without independent media?

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On January 2, the UN News Center headlined “Data suggests death toll could be more than 60,000, says UN human rights office.”

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) commissioned the analysis. It covers the March 15, 2011 – November 30, 2012 period.

It’s impossible to compile precise figures. Analysis depends on methodology and sources used. Bias corrupts findings.

UN Human Rights Council High Commissioner Navi Pillay long ago fell from grace. Like Ban Ki-moon, Kofi Annan, and Lakhdar Brahimi, she’s a reliable imperial partner.

Her previous reports on Syria expressed one-sided anti-Assad sentiment. She part of the conspiracy to replace him with a pro-Western puppet. Read more È

Investigative journalist and foreign affairs correspondent Joe Lauria joins us to discuss the re-election of Obama and its potential foreign policy consequences, the implications of coming elections in Israel, the brewing tensions involving Iran and the regional power-players’ stands, the United Nations, Syria and more.

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Here is our guest Joe Lauria unplugged!

Joe Lauria is an author, foreign affairs correspondent and investigative reporter. He has covered the United Nations for 19 years for numerous newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the London Daily Telegraph, the Montreal Gazette and the Johannesburg Star. Joe is a member of the Sunday Times of London’s investigative unit. He is co-author of A Political Odyssey, a look at America’s defense industry and the false threats it thrives on.

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Punishing the Population into Hunger

The economic sanctions imposed upon Iran are having the desired effect of punishing the population through hunger and economic strangulation, making life miserable for the many. As tensions increase between the “international community� (the West) and Iran, talk of war is in the air. For years, sanctions have been imposed upon Iran in an attempt to devastate its dependence upon the oil industry for 80% of its revenues. The West seeks ‘regime change,’ and we hear a never-ending proliferation of proclamations from Western leaders about respecting democratic rights and freedom for Iranians, in lambasting the Iranian government for its human rights record, portraying it as a state sponsor of terrorism, and, of course, that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons with a stated goal of wanting to ‘wipe Israel off the map.’

The propaganda has been consistent and increasingly desperate, and the claims are dubious at best, often relegated to the realm of blatant lies. Gazing through the propaganda, however, we must ask some important questions: what are the effects and purpose of sanctions? What has Iran done to make it the primary target of Western imperialism? Why is Iran such a ‘threat’ to the ‘world’? Read more È

With the National Defense Authorization Act, the Enemy Expatriation Act, and other startling measures by the US government to crack down on their own population making headlines around the world at the moment, the idea of an American police state is becoming an all too familiar tale. Less examined, however, are the international aspects of this encroaching police state, a high-tech 21st century control grid which adheres to no national boundaries and whose influence is increasingly being felt in countries throughout the so-called “free world.”

Just as the tracking, surveillance, pain-compliance and database technology behind this control grid is manufactured and marketed by multinational corporations who profess no loyalty to any nation state, so too is the police state itself nothing more than an idea for the consolidation and leveraging of power in the hands of a select few at the apex of business, government and finance. This idea in turn can be marketed, adapted and adopted from nation to nation, and that is the exact process that has been developing for decades now.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting the internationalization of the police state through the increasingly sophisticated technological control grid, and the collusion of international corporations and institutions to implement a homogenous and interconnected system for tracking, tracing and controlling the citizenry of the world regardless of nationality.

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This is Part 5 of our interview series on the New World Order. You can listen to the previous interviews in this series here: Part I, Part II, Part III , and Part IV.

Richard Moore shares with us his unique perspective on the working of the political world at the highest levels, the matrix of a fabricated collective illusion, how this matrix of unreality is formed for us, and his proposals for escaping it. He discusses consensus reality, as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media, and how this perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, bears very little relationship to actual reality, and remain as a fabricated collective illusion. Mr. Moore further discusses the new post World War II paradigm which was designed and planned in a series of meetings, by a handful of people selected from the Council on Foreign Relations, to specifically serve the interests of central bankers. He talks about the recent rise in collective activism energy such as the Arab Spring uprisings, the Occupy Movement, and various protests in Europe, the left and right as illusions foisted on us to keep us divided, the importance of localism and inclusiveness in pursuit of real changes, and more!

Richard K Moore, an expatriate from Silicon Valley, retired and moved to Ireland in 1994 to begin his ‘real work’ – trying to understand how the world works, and how we can make it better. Many years of researching and writing culminated in his widely acclaimed book Escaping the Matrix: How We the People Can Change the World (The Cyberjournal Project, 2005). His Cyberjournal email list has been going since 1994 (cyberjournal.org). The book’s website is http://escapingthematrix.org, and his website is http://cyberjournal.org. He can be contacted via email at rkm@quaylargo.com.

Here is our guest Richard Moore unplugged!

Interview with Richard moore [ 56:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The United States last week turned the U.N. Security Council into a courtroom. It wanted to try Iranian suspects before foreign governments in the bizarre story of an alleged assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador to Washington. 

Behind closed doors in the council chambers U.S. officials admitted the story was “hard to believe.�  This is according to a Western diplomat who was among the council ambassadors shown evidence by U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, who was accompanied by  officials of the F.B.I., CIA and the State and Justice Departments.

It isn’t known whether the CIA official revealed classified information that went beyond the F.B.I. criminal complaint in the case, which was made public. The U.S. isn’t normally in the habit of sharing intelligence at the U.N. 

Reuters quoted a U.S. official saying classified wire transfer documents used to pay for the alleged assassination had “some kind of hallmark� showing they were approved by Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of the elite Iranian al-Quds Force. Because the circumstances of the story are so strange, one cannot rule out forgery by Iranian agents working for the U.S.—or for another government that may have even fooled at least some U.S. authorities. Just recall the forged Niger uranium document that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The Clinton administration in 1999 went to court in the Southern District of New York in U.S.A. v. bin Laden in the African Embassy bombings. I covered the trial and saw al-Qaeda operatives on the witness stand. They were convicted by a civilian jury.  The Bush administration ridiculed criminal trials for the crime of terrorism and insisted it was a national security matter without any need to test innocence or guilt in a courtroom.  

When the Obama Justice Department wanted to try terrorism suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the same New York court, the Right howled until Obama backed down.  The handling of this alleged Iranian plot appears to be a weird hybrid between a criminal proceeding and a rush to judgment to convince foreign governments of two suspects’ guilt before they are even indicted. The U.S. is also inferring a sovereign state is involved, rather than merely rogue individuals, who, incidentally, are innocent until proven guilty. 

Though the U.S. admitted the story seems far-fetched, U.S. allies Britain, France, Germany and Colombia said they believed Rice’s U.N. presentation. These countries may be ready to support new sanctions against Iran—or other action, even though each of them presumably guarantees due process in their legal systems.

Rush to Judgment

On the day the alleged plot was revealed, and before a Grand Jury has even been empaneled,  Downing Street issued a statement “congratulatingâ€� U.S. authorities on the “successful operation to disrupt a conspiracy to attack diplomatsâ€� in the U.S. “The United Kingdom is in close touch with the U.S. authorities on this case. We will support measures to hold Iran accountable for its actions,” the British statement said. It did not prefix conspiracy with “alleged,â€� and assumed proof that the plot was already underway when “disrupted,â€� dismissing the possibility it was suggested to an Iranian-American suspect by the U.S. informant, posing as a Mexican drug gangster.  Read more È

A combination of mistakes—whether through ignorance or design—and significant omissions of fact have left the American public misinformed about why the Palestinians went to the United Nations last week and what they are trying to achieve.

The biggest error repeated across the media in hundreds of headlines and stories is that the Palestinians are seeking statehood at the U.N. In fact, Palestine is already legally a sovereign state and is seeking membership of the United Nations, not statehood. The United Nations does not grant or recognize statehood. Only states can recognize other states bilaterally. The U.N. can only confer membership or non-member, observer state status to already existing states. The U.N. Charter is clear. Article 4 says that only existing states may apply for U.N. membership.

Last Friday Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon accepted an application for U.N. membership from PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Ban sent the application to the Security Council, which began deliberating on it on Monday (Sept. 26).

The very act of the Secretary General accepting the membership application is an acknowledgement from the U.N. that Palestine is already a state, since only states can apply.

The Montevideo Convention of 1933 lays out the requirements for statehood: a population living on a defined territory with a government that can enter into relations with other governments. The Palestinians have all three. Though its borders with Israel are not set, other countries with border disputes have been admitted as U.N. members, such as Pakistan and India. Trygve Lie, the first U.N. Secretary-General, also wrote a 1950 memo that states do not need universal recognition to apply.

Palestine declared its independence on November 15, 1988, a fact found nowhere in the American mainstream reporting of the past week. A Palestinian walked out of the Al Asqa Mosque that day in Al Quds/Jerusalem and read the declaration aloud, much as someone read the American Declaration of Independence to a crowd in the courtyard of the Philadelphia State House on July 4, 1776.

Almost immediately one hundred nations recognized an independent Palestinian state. Since then 30 more nations have recognized Palestine, some having opened Palestinian embassies in their capitals. This crucial fact too was not reported in the U.S. media. For Palestinians and those countries that recognize them, Israeli troops are occupying a sovereign nation.

It was the same as when Morocco and then France and other nations recognized an independent United States years before the war against Britain was won. For Americans and those nations recognizing America , British troops became an occupation force, not an army defending British territory.

The problem for the Americans then and for the Palestinians now is that the occupying nation and the world’s biggest power are not among the 130 who’ve recognized them.

If there were a United Nations in 1777 the Americans could have applied for membership. And if Britain had a veto on the Security Council then as it does now, it would have blocked that membership. Read more È

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to visit New York next week to unveil a formal bid for Palestinian membership in the United Nations. The bid has been widely reported since its announcement this month and has been fiercely opposed by the United States and Israel, who fear that such a bid represents a unilateral move on the Palestinians’ part toward implementing a two-state solution, something that they argue must be the result of negotiations between the parties.

The Palestinians have expressed frustration with Israel’s refusal to extend a 10-month moratorium on settlements in areas that are likely to be part of a future Palestinian state, and its rejection of the use of the 1967 borders with land swaps as the basis for a two-state solution.

Now all sides are shaping up for protracted political wrangling as the specter of a Palestinian UN membership bid has upset the balance of power in an already volatile region.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett on facts and issues missing in the mainstream media and comments by distinguished journalists Pepe Escobar and Joe Lauria on US-Israel vs. Palestine: :  A Two-Faced Rejection of a Two-State Solution:

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