Admiral Lyons on Obama’s Strategy: ‘It’s Anti-American ... Pro-Islamic, Pro-Iranian'

"Until you recognize that Islam is a political movement masquerading as a religion, you’re never going to 

come to grips with it."

Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, Jr.

(CNS News)  -  Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, Jr. (Ret.), the former commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said that President Barack Obama does have a strategy for dealing with Islamic radicals in the Middle East and it is an “anti-American” and “pro-Islamic” strategy,” as well as “pro-Iranian” and “pro-Muslim Brotherhood” strategy.

In his remarks at a recent Defeat Jihad Summit sponsored by the Center for Security Policy, Admiral Lyons spoke of a number of failed opportunities the United States had, since the late 1970s, to deal a crippling blow to Islamic jihadism and “change the course of history.”

Towards the end of his comments, Admiral Lyons, who commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet under President Ronald Reagan in 1985-87, said, “You know, we all say we have to identify the threat. Well, I think the one who identified it the best was [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan from Turkey when he said, ‘Islam is Islam. There are no modifiers [e.g., Islamic extremism]. Democracy is the train we ride to our ultimate objective.’”

“He couldn’t have said it any plainer,” said Lyons. “And until you recognize that Islam is a political movement masquerading as a religion, you’re never going to come to grips with it. And as far as a strategy – let me just conclude one thing, as I just had in my latest op-ed -- the Obama Administration has a strategy.”

“It’s very simple, any thinking American should be able to grasp,” said the admiral.  “It’s anti-American, anti-Western, it’s pro-Islamic, it’s pro-Iranian, and pro-Muslim Brotherhood!”

Lyons, a Naval Academy graduate who served 36 years in the U.S. Navy,  currently is the president and CEO of Lion Associates, an international consulting firm that specializes in anti-terrorist security services.

Further commenting on the threat posed by Islamists, Admiral Lyons said, “We’ve had many opportunities to change the course of history. And it hasn’t mattered whether it’s been a Republican or a Democratic administration, we failed every one of them, starting with Carter and the takeover of our embassy [in Iran in 1979].”

“We could have cut off [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeni and Islamic fundamentalism at the knees,” said the admiral.  “We were going to take Kharg Island [in the Persian Gulf], and he [Carter] rejected it.   We could have walked in. The next time was the Marine barracks bombing [in Beiruit, Lebanon, 1983], and you all probably wonder why we never responded.”

“I won’t go into the long detail but the guy that sabotaged the strike – and I’m glad you’re all sitting down – was the Secretary of Defense [Caspar Weinberger],” said Lyons. “Not once, but twice. Reagan approved -- the French wanted to do a combined strike and Reagan approved it, and Weinberger wouldn’t issue the order.”

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CIA backed Syrian troops dissolve and join Islamists

Another Fuck Up

• In the 7th grade, while other kids were playing dodgeball, I was reading the military histories of Gustavus Adolphus, Hannibal and Frederick the Great.  As a military historian I have to wonder if our generals and politicians are taking idiot pills.  I can honestly say that the crop of "generals" we have produced since WWII are nearly worthless.

ISTANBUL -- The first Syrian rebel group to receive U.S. heavy weapons officially dissolved over the weekend after losing hundreds of men in back-to-back battles against Jabhat al-Nusra, the al Qaeda offshoot in Syria, officials from the group told International Business Times. 

The disintegration of Harakat Hazzm marks a turning point for the fight to control the surroundings of Aleppo, Syria's biggest city and economic center. The area, once controlled by what the U.S. considered moderate rebels who could be trusted and armed to fight President Bashar Assad, is now dominated by Sunni Muslim extremists.

Harakat Hazzm, the first Syrian rebel group to receive long-range TOW missiles from the U.S., fought in the northern countryside outside Aleppo. Some rebels defected, with their U.S.-supplied anti-tank missiles and personal weapons, to more extremist groups fighting in the area, while others folded into the Levant Front -- a combination of multiple rebel groups, some with connections to al-Nusra reports the International Business Times.

The breakdown of moderate forces in northern Syria and the rise of extremist groups is making it more difficult for the U.S. to pinpoint reliable allies in the region to support.

In the spring of 2013 the U.S. selected groups of rebels fighting within the Free Syrian Army, first through a classified CIA-led program, which was formally announced in August 2013. The program allowed for the transfer of U.S.-made weapons to Turkey via other countries’ aircraft. The weapons were then driven into Syria by truck. The program was partially funded by Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Sunni states.

But the emergence of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, set those rebels back. They had to fight on multiple fronts, against Assad and against ISIS, with little resources and dwindling U.S. support. 

Harakat Hazzm, or "movement of steadfastness" in Arabic, began to lose ground in November when al-Nusra, also known as the Nusra Front, pushed it out of Idlib province. Al-Nusra took over the movement’s headquarters there and seized weapons, including some of the TOW missiles. In January, Hazzm lost control of one of the only two open border crossings between Turkey and Syria, the Bab al-Hawa crossing in northwestern Syria, on the road to Aleppo. Rebel groups linked to extremist factions took it over.

Last year, the U.S. ramped up efforts to support the moderate opposition and began training several thousand rebels at a secret base in Jordan. Since then, those rebels have failed to make any significant advances in Syria. In fact, they lost Homs, once dubbed the "heart of the revolution," to the Assad regime in May. But in November, IBTimes reported exclusively, the U.S. began pulling back its supplies of lethal aid to moderate groups in the north of the country.

Iraq Starts Attack on Tikrit With Iranian Help, No U.S. Strikes

'We don’t trust the U.S. coalition' 

Could be they are smarter than they look.

(Bloomberg) -- Iraq is deploying 27,000 troops to retake the city of Tikrit from Islamic State, in a mission that will test the military’s ability to stage major offensives against the group before trying to capture its stronghold in Mosul.

Shiite militias are backing up police and army soldiers, according to state-run al-Iraqiyah television. Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, arrived two days ago to “review and advise” Iraqi field commanders, the Fars news agency reported on Monday.

Iraqi forces have struggled to roll back Islamic State gains since June, when the group routed the army to capture Mosul, the north’s biggest city. It seized Tikrit soon after, and has declared a caliphate in the parts of Iraq and Syria it controls. The U.S. is leading a bombing campaign against the jihadist group, though there’s been no air support for the Tikrit attack, and Iraqi and American officials say a ground offensive to retake Mosul is planned in the coming months.

Operations on Monday began before 6 a.m., and the army and its “popular forces” allies have succeeded in regaining the town of Albu Hassani near Tikrit and are clearing the road of explosives before the next advance, Ahmed al-Asadi, an Iraqi lawmaker and ally of the militia fighters, said by phone.

No Request For US Help

While counter-offensives against Islamic State by the Iraqi army and Kurdish forces elsewhere in the country have been backed by U.S. airstrikes, there have been none so far in Tikrit, where Iranian-backed forces are playing a role.

There’s been no air cover because “the Iraqis haven’t requested any,” Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters Monday. Major General Emad al-Zahiri, commander of Samarra military operations for the Iraqi army, said by phone that the defense ministry or army command were responsible for deciding whether to ask for air support.

Naim al-Aboudi, a spokesman for the Iranian-backed Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia, one of the main forces fighting around Tikrit, said that “the U.S.-led coalition has never decisively ended any battle.”

“We don’t trust the coalition and we don’t need their help,” he said by phone.

Saddam’s Hometown

Tikrit is the hometown of ousted President Saddam Hussein, who was executed in 2006, three years after the U.S. invasion to topple him. Government forces have made several unsuccessful efforts to recapture it from Islamic State.

Announcing the start of the latest one, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi told a televised press conference that he was “proud to witness the cooperation between security forces, paramilitary forces and the tribes of these areas.”

Al-Asadi, the lawmaker, said government forces had approached Tikrit from three fronts and were allowing residents to flee the city. “This time we will not let Islamic State fighters flee,” he said.

Suleimani, the Iranian commander, has played an increasingly visible role in the fight against Islamic State in Iraq, helping to organize Kurdish and Shiite fighters.

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The Iraq Baathist Republican Guard.
Thanks to the United States the strong million man anti-Iran
army of Iraq no longer exists.  It has been replaced by ISIS
monsters and pro-Iranian Arab politicians.

Censorship - Google will hide "untruthful" content from your searches

All the speech that you are allowed to read

• Definition  -  "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."  - Benito Mussolini
• Corporatism Today  -  The State under der Führer Obama has seized control of the Internet.  Now the Internet corporations that funded der Führer's rise to power are going to control what sites you will be allowed to read.  You can bet your last dollar the the "truthful" sites that will pop up at the top of the search engines will be pro-government sites.

(New Scientist)  -  The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google's rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links.

The internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free "news" stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.

(Editor  -  Yes I know.  Who decides what is truth?  Why the big multinational corporations who are in bed with corrupt government political hacks.)

Google's search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. "A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," says the team. The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

There are already lots of apps that try to help internet users unearth the truth. LazyTruth is a browser extension that skims inboxes to weed out the fake or hoax emails that do the rounds. Emergent, a project from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, New York, pulls in rumours from trashy sites, then verifies or rebuts them by cross-referencing to other sources.

LazyTruth developer Matt Stempeck, now the director of civic media at Microsoft New York, wants to develop software that exports the knowledge found in fact-checking services such as Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org so that everyone has easy access to them. He says tools like LazyTruth are useful online, but challenging the erroneous beliefs underpinning that information is harder. 

"How do you correct people's misconceptions? People get very defensive," Stempeck says. "If they're searching for the answer on Google they might be in a much more receptive state."

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Young women flocking to witchcraft

Freedom of Religion Never Looked so Hot

(The Guardian)  -  “I’m really a witch,” rapper Azealia Banks quipped last January, shortly before all hell broke loose on her Twitter account.

Banks is known for her online rants. She tends to share fairly dense ideas, spontaneously spun out in punchy lines liberally interspersed with curse words. I don’t know a person on this earth who can agree with every one of them, but her opinions are smarter than she usually gets credit for.

Still, even by Banks’s standards, the witch thing was weird. It came out in the middle of a run about black Americans and their relationship to Christianity:

I wonder if most of the black American Christians in the US know WHY they are Christian. I wonder if they even consider for a SECOND that before their ancestors came to the Americas that they may have believed in something ELSE.

Not uncontroversial, but not wrong.

She joked that racism might end a lot sooner if black people could make their enemies sicken and die with a thought, and of course the rightwing publications started sounding the klaxons.

It was the strangest thing: simply by calling herself a witch in public, Banks had managed to evoke real fear. Rightwingers treated her as if she were actually planning to blight crops and hex her enemies, all the while claiming that they didn’t believe in witchcraft.

Given the strength of the reaction, you would think that Banks was the first woman to cross over to the dark side. You would be wrong. Witchcraft – and the embrace of “magical” practices, like reading tarot cards – has recently experienced a resurgence of sorts among young, creative, politically engaged women.

The 1979 book The Spiral Dance.is in its third edition, and has sold over 300,000 copies. It is many people’s first introduction to Wicca, the earth-based spiritual movement that was created in the 1950s and has come to be a recognized religion around the world.

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Feds raid Texas political meeting - Fingerprint, photograph all attendees, seize phones

Free Speech Attacked

• The fact that the Big Brother State attacks free speech is one matter.  What is far more interesting to me are the jackbooted thugs on the Federal payroll who wet their pants in eagerness to mindlessly obey their Masters in government.

(WND.com)  -  In a deliberate “show of force,” federal and local police forces raided a political meeting in Texas, fingerprinting and photographing all attendees as well as confiscating all cell phones and personal recording devices.

.

Members of the Republic of Texas, a seccession movement dedicated to restoring Texas as an independent constitutional republic, had gathered Feb. 14 in a Bryan, Texas, meeting hall along with public onlookers. They were debating issues of currency, international relations and celebrating the birthday of one of their oldest members. The group, which describes itself as “congenial and unimposing,” maintains a small working government, including official currency, congress and courts.

According to MySanAntonio.com: “Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, agents of the Texas district attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.

“In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine’s Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.”

“We had no idea what was going on,” said John Jarnecke, president of the Republic of Texas. “We knew of nothing that would warrant such an action.”
.

The search warrant against the Republic of Texas authorized the seizure of “all computers, media storage, software, cell phones and paper documents.” Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer said the seized devices “will be downloaded and reviewed to determine if others conspired in the creation and issuance of false court documents.”

Police searched and fingerprinted each person at the meeting, but they did not perform cheek-swab DNA testing as the warrant allowed.
.

“The Republic has a lengthy list of qualms with the federal government, among them that Texas was illegally annexed in 1845,” wrote TeaParty.org. “But most of their complaints have to do with the behavior of the American legislature and executive. Robert Wilson, a senator in the Republic, equated politicians in Washington, D.C., to the ‘kings and emperors’ of the past, and sees Texas independence as part of a worldwide movement for local control."

”

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The Republic of Texas

Iraq Deploys 27,000 Troops to Retake Tikrit From ISIS

A Rag-Tag Thrown Together "Army"

• Call me "crazy" but I don't have a lot of faith in this thrown together armed mob.

(Bloomberg) -- Iraq is deploying 27,000 troops to retake the city of Tikrit from Islamic State, in a mission that will test the military’s ability to stage major offensives against the group before trying to capture its stronghold in Mosul.

The state-sponsored al-Iraqiyah television said that paramilitary forces, a term that usually describes Shiite militias, are backing up police and army soldiers. The forces will also seek to liberate other areas in the Salahuddin province, where Tikrit is located.

Iraqi forces have struggled to roll back Islamic State gains since June, when the group routed the military’s northern command to capture Mosul, the north’s biggest city. It seized Tikrit shortly after. In August, the U.S. launched air strikes to support the Iraqi military and Kurdish forces as they sought to regain momentum in the battle.

“We are proud to witness the cooperation between security forces, paramilitary forces and the tribes of these areas,” Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi said in a televised news conference to announce the latest offensive on Tikrit. “Dae’sh not threatening the security of Iraq but threatening the security of the world,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the al-Qaeda breakaway group.

‘Attack From Different Directions’

The troops “are trying to enter the city from different directions,” he said by phone.

The attack comes after an official from U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, told reporters Feb. 19 that an offensive for Mosul could begin in April or May.

 The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. would train 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops to defeat 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from Islamic State, the militant Sunni group that declared a self-styled caliphate in Iraq and parts of Syria.

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ISIS liberating the locals of all their worries.

Sunday Comics

This happens every time she refers to "licking ISIS"

13-Year-Old Drinking Prodigy Accepted To Ohio State   

Government Funded Castrations - Forced sterilization victims to be compensated by Virginia

State Run Castration Centers

You can't say "It can't happen here" 

because it did happen here.

(Daily Mail)  -  Victims who were involuntarily sterilized by state officials more than 30 years ago will be compensated.

More than 7,000 people were permanently made infertile between 1924 and 1979 under the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act.

The Act was widely accepted at the time and was even said to have partly inspired Adolf Hitler to create a master race in Germany.

But now the 11 victims who are still alive will receive $25,000 in compensation, Virginia General Assembly decided on Thursday.

Eugenics sought to improve the genetic composition of humankind by preventing those considered 'defective' from reproducing. 

Sterilized by the Big Brother State
Victims, including former firearms instructor Lewis Reynolds (above),
were involuntarily sterilized by state officials in Virginia more than
30 years ago and will now be given $25,000 compensation each.

The All-Powerful State decides who is worthy to have sex.

One victim, Lewis Reynolds, was presumed to have epilepsy when he was 13-years-old and was taken to one of six state institutions to be treated.

Decades later he discovered the fits were a temporary symptom after he was hit in the head with a rock - but the sterilization was permanent.

The 87-year-old former firearms instructor, from Lynchburg, said: 'I think they've done me wrong.

'I couldn't have a family like everybody else does. They took my rights away.'

Reynolds' first wife left him after she learned they couldn't have children. 

And although his marriage to second wife Delores lasted 47 years, the couple would cry about their inability to have a family. 

The compensation measure was sponsored by Ben Cline, a conservative Republican from Rockbridge, and Patrick Hope, a liberal Democrat from Arlington.

Mr Cline said: 'There was a growing consensus that we needed to act while we still had the opportunity to look these people in the eye and acknowledge the wrong that was committed against them so many years ago.' 

Nearly 65,000 Americans were sterilized in 33 states, including more than 20,000 in California alone. 

One judge, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., said in 1927: 'Three generations of imbeciles are enough.' 

Virginia is the second state to approve compensation for victims of the eugenics program. North Carolina approved payments of $50,000 to around 1,800 victims in 2013. 

Read more: Read More . . . . 

A
"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.
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When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.
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But always—do not forget this Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
.
George Orwell
1984

Al-Qaeda defeats US backed rebels

The Nightmare Continues

• Factions attacking factions screwing factions. . . . and our politicians just can't wait to send in American troops.

Beirut (AFP News) - Al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate on Saturday drove US-backed rebels out of a strategic northern military base in fierce fighting that left dozens dead, a monitor said.

At least 29 fighters from the Western-armed Hazm movement were killed along with six Al-Nusra Front jihadists, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

It said fierce fighting had broken out on Friday night for Base 46, west of the city of Aleppo.

"Al-Nusra captured Base 46," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Britain-based Observatory.

Base 46 is a sprawling military compound that rebel fighters seized in November 2012 from troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In a statement, residents in the nearby rebel-held village of Atareb criticised the attack on the base and appealed to Al-Nusra to instead fight the "infidel regime and its allies".

The offensive came a month after Al-Nusra -- Al-Qaeda's official affiliate in Syria -- expelled Hazm from Regiment 111, another base they had taken from Assad's forces.

Hazm is mainly present in northern Syria. Last year, it was the first to receive US-made anti-tank missiles from its Western backers.

It is one of a number rebel groups that the United States classes as "moderate". They are loosely branded as the Free Syrian Army.

Ghosts of Aleppo  

Freezing and Fighting for Aid: Syrian Refugees in Lebanon