Torture & War Crimes - The Show Must Go On

ꕤ Article SOURCE http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223831/How-Britain-tortured-Nazi-PoWs-The-horrifying-interrogation-methods-belie-proud-boast-fought-clean-war.html How Britain tortured Nazi PoWs: The horrifying interrogation methods that belie our proud boast that we fought a clean war By Ian Cobain Published: 09:34 EST, 27 October 2012 | Updated: 09:35 EST, 27 October 2012 The German SS officer was fighting to save himself from the gallows for a terrible war crime and might say anything to escape the noose. But Fritz Knöchlein was not lying in 1946 when he claimed that, in captivity in London, he had been tortured by British soldiers to force a confession out of him. Tortured by British soldiers? In captivity? In London? The idea seems incredible. Britain has a reputation as a nation that prides itself on its love of fair play and respect for the rule of law. We claim the moral high ground when it comes to human rights. We were among the first to sign the 1929 Geneva Convention on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Surely, you would think, the British avoid torture? But you would be wrong, as my research into what has gone on behind closed doors for decades shows. It was in 2005 during my work as an investigative reporter that I came across a veiled mention of a World War II detention centre known as the London Cage. It took a number of Freedom Of Information requests to the Foreign Office before government files were reluctantly handed over. From these, a sinister world unfolded — of a torture centre that the British military operated throughout the Forties, in complete secrecy, in the heart of one of the most exclusive neighbourhoods in the capital. Thousands of Germans passed through the unit that became known as the London Cage, where they were beaten, deprived of sleep and forced to assume stress positions for days at a time. Some were told they were to be murdered and their bodies quietly buried. Others were threatened with unnecessary surgery carried out by people with no medical qualifications. Guards boasted that they were ‘the English Gestapo’. The London Cage was part of a network of nine ‘cages’ around Britain run by the Prisoner of War Interrogation Section (PWIS), which came under the jurisdiction of the Directorate of Military Intelligence. Three, at Doncaster, Kempton Park and Lingfield, were at hastily converted racecourses. Another was at the ground of Preston North End Football Club. Most were benignly run. But prisoners thought to possess valuable information were whisked off to a top-secret unit in a row of grandiose Victorian villas in Kensington Palace Gardens, then (as now) one of the smartest locations in London. Today, the tree-lined street a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace is home to ambassadors and billionaires, sultans and princes. Houses change hands for £50 million and more. Yet it was here, seven decades ago, in five interrogation rooms, in cells and in the guardroom in numbers six, seven and eight Kensington Palace Gardens, that nine officers, assisted by a dozen NCOs, used whatever methods they thought necessary to squeeze information from suspects. Of course, it is crucial to put these events into context. When the gloves first came off at Britain’s interrogation centres — the summer of 1940 — German forces were racing across France and the Low Countries, and Britain was fighting for its very survival. The stakes could not have been higher.  [see:  Dresden fire-bombings war crime for comparison -- "well over 250,000 -- possibly as many as a half a million -- persons" killed "within a 14-hour period, whereas estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range from 90,000 to 140,000" -- here] In the following years, large parts of Britain’s cities were left in ruins, hundreds of thousands of service personnel and civilians died, and barely a day passed without evidence emerging of a new Nazi atrocity. Little wonder, perhaps, that it was felt acceptable for German prisoners to suffer in British interrogation centres.  [I'm going to guess that the 'new Nazi atrocity' referred to, as if to justify allied war crimes, is a production of British and allied wartime propaganda, as well as the product of illegitimate 'confessions' obtained under torture.] And it should also be said that whatever went on within their walls, it paled into insignificance compared with the horrors the Nazis visited on millions of prisoners.  [And what of the Dresden genocide and what of the post-war atrocities visited upon millions of starved German civilians and German POWs deliberately murdered?  Elements of this article sound like an apology for those that were much the same as their vilified German enemy, based articles and videos I've seen so far on the subject of allied crimes and atrocities.] So, how can we be sure about the methods used at the London Cage? Because the man who ran it admitted as much — and was hushed up for half-a-century by an establishment fearful of the shame his story would bring on a Britain that had been fighting for honesty, decency and the rule of law. That man was Colonel Alexander Scotland, an accepted master in techniques of interrogation. After the war, he wrote a candid account of his activities in his memoirs, in which he recalled how he would muse, on arriving at the Cage each morning: ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’ Because, he said, before going into detail: ‘If any German had any information we wanted, it was invariably extracted from him in the long run.’ As was customary, before publication Scotland submitted his manuscript to the War Office for clearance in 1954. Pandemonium erupted. All four copies were seized. All those who knew of its contents were silenced with threats of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. What caused the greatest consternation was his admission that the horrors had continued after the war, when interrogators switched from extracting military intelligence to securing convictions for war crimes. Of 3,573 prisoners who passed through Kensington Palace Gardens, more than 1,000 were persuaded to sign a confession or give a witness statement  for use in war crimes prosecutions. Fritz Knöchlein, a former lieutenant colonel in the Waffen SS, was one such case. He was suspected of ordering the machine-gunning of 124 British soldiers who surrendered at Le Paradis in northern France during the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. His defence was that he was not even there. At his trial, he claimed he had been tortured in the London Cage after the war. He was deprived of sleep for four days and nights after arriving in October 1946 and forced to walk in a tight circle for four hours while being kicked by a guard at each turn. He was made to clean stairs and lavatories with a tiny rag, for days at a time, while buckets of water were poured over him. If he dared to rest, he was cudgelled. He was also forced to run in circles in the grounds of the house while carrying heavy logs and barrels. When he complained, the treatment simply got worse. Nor was he the only one. He said men were repeatedly beaten about the face and had hair ripped from their heads. A fellow inmate begged to be killed because he couldn’t take any more brutality. All Knöchlein’s accusations were ignored, however. He was found guilty and hanged. Suspects in another high-profile war crime — the shooting of 50 RAF officers who broke out from a prison camp, Stalag Luft III, in what became known as the Great Escape — also passed through the Cage. Of the 21 accused, 14 were hanged after a war-crimes trial in Hamburg. Many confessed only after being interrogated by Scotland and his men. In court, they protested that they had been starved, whipped and systematically beaten. Some said they had been  menaced with red-hot pokers and ‘threatened with electrical devices’. Scotland, of course, denied allegations of torture, going into the witness box at one trial after another to say his accusers were lying. It was all the more surprising, then, that a few years later he was willing to come clean about the techniques he employed at the London Cage. In his memoirs, he disclosed that a number of men were forced to incriminate themselves. A general was sentenced to death in 1946 after signing a confession at the Cage while, in Scotland’s words, ‘acutely depressed after the various examinations’. A naval officer was convicted on the basis of a confession that Scotland said he had signed only after being ‘subject to certain degrading duties’. Scotland also acknowledged that one of the men accused of the ‘Great Escape’ murders went to the gallows even though he had confessed after he had — in Scotland’s own words — been ‘worked on psychologically’. At his trial, the man insisted he had been ‘worked on’ physically as well. Others did not share Scotland’s eagerness to boast about what had gone on in Kensington Park Gardens. An MI5 legal adviser who read his manuscript concluded that Scotland and fellow interrogators had been guilty of a ‘clear breach’ of the Geneva Convention. They could have faced war-crimes charges themselves for forcing prisoners to stand to attention for more than 24 hours at a time; forcing them to kneel while they were beaten about the head; threatening to have them shot; threatening one prisoner with an unnecessary appendix operation to be performed on him by another inmate with no medical qualifications. Appalled by the embarrassment his manuscript would cause if it ever came out, the War Office and the Foreign Office both declared that it would never see the light of day. Two years later, however, they were forced to strike a deal with him after he threatened to publish his book abroad. He was told he would never be allowed to recover his original manuscript, but agreement was given to a rewritten version in which every line of incriminating material had been expunged. A heavily censored version of The London Cage duly appeared in the bookshops in 1957. But officials at the War Office, and their successors at the Ministry of Defence, remained troubled. Years later, in September 1979, Scotland’s publishers wrote to the Ministry of Defence out of the blue asking for a copy of the original manuscript  by the now dead colonel for their archives. The request triggered fresh panic as civil servants sought reasons to deny the request. But in the end they quietly deposited a copy in what is now the National Archives at Kew, where it went unnoticed — until I found it a quarter of a century later. Is there more to tell about the London Cage? Almost certainly. Even now, some of the MoD’s files on it remain beyond reach. Scotland, his interrogators, technicians and typists, and the towering guardsmen left the building in January 1949. The villas were unoccupied for several years. Eventually, numbers six and seven were leased to the Soviet Union, which was looking for a new embassy building. Today, they house the chancery of the Russian embassy. Number eight — where it is thought the worst excesses were carried out — remained empty. It was too large to be a family home in the post-war years and in too poor a state of repair to be converted to offices. By 1955, the building had fallen into such disrepair it was sold to a developer, who knocked it down and built a block of three luxury flats. One that went on the market in 2006 was valued at £13.5 million. The Cage was not, however, Britain’s only secret interrogation centre during and after World War II. MI5 also operated an interrogation centre, code-named Camp 020, at Latchmere House, a Victorian mansion near Ham Common in South-West London, whose 30 rooms were turned into cells with hidden microphones. The first of the German spies who arrived in Britain in September 1940 were taken there. Vital information about a coming German invasion was extracted at great speed. This indicates the use of extreme methods, but these were desperate days demanding desperate measures. In charge was Colonel Robin Stephens, known as ‘Tin Eye’, because of the monocle fixed to his right eye. It was not a term of affection. The object of interrogation, Stephens told his officers, was simple: ‘Truth in the shortest possible time.’ A top secret memo spoke of ‘special methods’, but did not elaborate. He arranged for an additional 92-cell block to be added to Latchmere House, plus a punishment room — known chillingly as Cell 13 — which was completely bare, with smooth walls and a linoleum floor. Close to 500 people passed through the gates of Camp 020. Principal among them were German spies, many of whom were ‘turned’ and persuaded — or maybe forced — to work for MI5. Its first inmates were members of the British Union of Fascists.  Some were held in cells brightly lit 24 hours a day, others in cells kept in total darkness. Several prisoners were subjected to mock executions and were knocked about by the guards. Some were apparently left naked for months at a time. Camp 020 had a resident medical officer, Harold Dearden, a psychiatrist who dreamed up regimes of starvation and of sleep and sensory deprivation intended to break the will of its inmates. He experimented in techniques of torment that left few marks — methods that could be denied by the torturers and that civil servants and government ministers could disown. These techniques surfaced again after the war in a British interrogation facility at Bad Nenndorf, a German spa town, in one of the internment camps for those considered a threat to the Allied occupation. In the four years after the war, 95,000 people were interned in the British zone of Allied-occupied Germany. Some were interrogated by what was now termed the Intelligence Division. In charge of Bad Nenndorf was ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, on attachment from MI5, and drawing on his Camp 020 experiences. An inmate recalled him yelling questions at prisoners and then punching them. Over the next two years, 372 men and 44 women would pass through his hands. One German inmate recalled being told by a British intelligence officer: ‘We are not bound by any rules or regulations. We do not care a damn whether you leave this place on a stretcher or in a hearse.’ He was made to sleep on a wet floor in a temperature of minus 20 degrees for three days. Four of his toes had to be amputated due to frostbite. A doctor in a nearby hospital complained about the number of detainees brought to him filthy, confused and suffering from multiple injuries and frostbite. Many were painfully emaciated after months of starvation. A number died. The regime was intended to weaken, humiliate and intimidate prisoners. With complaints soaring, a British court of inquiry was convened to investigate what had been going at Bad Nenndorf. It concluded that former inmates’ allegations of physical assault were substantially correct. Stephens and four other officers were arrested while Bad Nenndorf was abruptly closed. But there was a quandary for the Labour government. The political fallout could be deeply damaging. There were other similar interrogation centres in Germany. From the very top, there were urgent moves to hush things up. Stephens’ court martial for ill-treatment of prisoners was heard behind closed doors. He did not deny any of the horrors. His defence was that he had no idea the prisoners for whom he was responsible were being beaten, whipped, frozen, deprived of sleep and starved to death. This was the very defence that had been offered — unsuccessfully — by Nazi concentration camp commandants at war-crimes trials. But he was acquitted. The suspicion remains that he got off because, if cruelties did occur at Bad Nenndorf, they had been authorised by government ministers. Extracted from Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain, published by Portobello Books at £18.99. © Ian Cobain 2012. To order a copy for £15.99 (p&p free), call 0843 382 0000. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223831/How-Britain-tortured-Nazi-PoWs-The-horrifying-interrogation-methods-belie-proud-boast-fought-clean-war.html ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT When it comes to propaganda, lies, corruption, cruelty, murder, war crimes, and evil, it looks like it's a level playing field:  there's no distinction between the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys'. Everything is a lie. The account in this article is a drop in the ocean of injustices and crimes committed by the 'good guys' before, during and after world wars, and in the 70 years since. Seventy years since the WWII torture of Germans and various other war crimes committed by the British and the Americans, the corrupt, lying, lawless and morally bankrupt British authorities hold an Australian journalist hostage of political persecution and detention without charge, following WikiLeaks exposure of modern day corruption and war crimes of Western governments.  Assange is denied medical access and deprived of liberty, under threat of extradition to the convicted in absentia, war criminal, torturing, kidnapping and assassinating Americans, while the bustling modern world stands by and lets these long-time bad actors and geopolitical villains get away with this crime, day after day for 5 years. Does anybody else feel sick knowing there's no limit to the depths of Western state depravity, lies and hypocrisy? How odd that the Russians have been allocated the British torture chamber interrogation suites in London as embassy premises. Is this some kind of attempt at modern-day psychological warfare on the Russian ambassadors in London, I'm wondering? Although I'm appalled by disclosures in the article, I'm also kind of drawn to the creepiness of the torture chamber and imagine a visit to the back end of the Russian embassy in London could be an interesting and eerie experience. The British were torturing German prisoners 4 years after the end of war, but it's unclear to me why, when the war was a long time over. First inmates of the London torture chambers were members of the British Union of Fascists. As the torturing war criminal Western governments are just totalitarian fronts for elites and their corporate interests, the first round targeting of fascists with state torture is probably based more on the existing political and economic elite's determination to maintain its power, than on the objective merits of proposals by fascists: "British fascist corporatism planned to replace the House of Lords with elected executives drawn from major industries, the clergy, and colonies. The House of Commons was to be reduced to allow for a faster, "less factionist" democracy."  [wikipedia] Replacement of the House of Lords sounds like a sensible idea, but replacing the overlords with industrialists and clergy is just allocating power to more of the same types of elites, isn't it? Don't know enough about political fascism to judge these ideas as a whole. Hey, I've just realised that the CAGE support for victims of 'war on terror' UK NGO is probably styled after the original British Cage torture history name. As torture and war, disguised as 'national security' and 'humanitarianism', has continued unabated the last 70 years, the warmonger elite serving Western puppet state fronts for what poses as 'democracy' and representative government, really ought to drop the entirely unconvincing 'peace' and 'humanitarian' propaganda:  the financial and social costs of serial US-led military interventions, resulting in blow-back invasion by refugee immigration that inundates the Western austerity-punished underprivileged, Western working classes and Western taxpayers, is evident to those bearing the brunt of blow-back, whose societies are being wilfully destroyed by treasonous, lying, elite and foreign interest serving politicians. About to watch this video: Eisenhower’s Rhine Meadows Death Camps   A Deliberate Policy of Extermination ꕤ

Transcript - Audio - JULIAN ASSANGE Interview By Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project

ꕤ Transcript SOURCE http://www.thepressproject.gr/podcast/final_assange.mp3 TRANSCRIPT [for quotations, confirm audio] INTERVIEW JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS INTERVIEWED BY: Kostas Ephemera The Press Project Podcast On:  Monday, 20th October 2015 AUDIO SOURCE http://www.thepressproject.gr/podcast/final_assange.mp3 Hi, I'm  Kostas Ephemera from the Press Project, and I'm speaking to you from the Embassy of Ecuador. I'm here with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and he's agreed to give us some answers for the Greek audience. The first question is:  through the work of WikiLeaks & people like Edward Snowden, people now know that the system is corrupted.  Although we've had movements like the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, they don't seem to last.  Why is that? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks The visible, apparent failure of Occupy Wall Street to produce a clear result has discouraged people, at least in the West, from engaging in large, mass gatherings. However, a great many lessons and networks did emerge from Occupy Wall Street and have continued on in other areas. More generally, the problem of mankind has always been its lack of understanding about how the world actually works, and the first task of human beings is to educate themselves and each other.  That is what has led to all the advances that mankind has achieved. Further advances in relation to how to restructure society or how to produce better institutions can only occur as a result of: (a) new information which further reveals how modern human institutions actually behave; and (b) the conveyance of that information into people's heads, in an accurate manner. The problem of (a) is the problem of secrecy.  The problem of (b) is the problem of media accuracy. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project OK, you spoke of the media.  When you started WikiLeaks, you collaborated with some of the biggest international media, but after a while they backed off.  Why? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, all institutions eventually become defined by their own quest for power, regardless of how they start. Large media organisations have been around for a long time and are powerful and, so, their management and ownership class, has learnt how to exploit that power by doing favours for other power groups that are around them, or defending their own social class or their shareholders directly. The only exception is when the organisation is small, or where it has an ideological leader that has firm control over the organisation's destiny, or, perhaps, where its business model is populist and directly relies on its readers. 2:56 As a result of our publications, we have contracts with more than a hundred and ten (110) different media organisations around the world, and in a number of different publishing projects, we've given all those hundred and ten (110) media organisations exactly the same material and, so, we're able to compare results. And we can see the geopolitical biases, cultural biases, the political interference from owners, the political interference from the management class, and redaction and censorship, for political purposes or because of fears of legal costs, or because of cultural sensitivities. For example, The Guardian newspaper, El Pais, Le Monde & The New York Times, extensively redacted material in the diplomatic cables publication, for reasons other than protecting people from retribution, whereas The Hindu newspaper (which is the highest quality English newspaper in India), only redacted two cables. 4:07 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project *** [???]  the dictum "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" works, after all, for the system. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks First of all, the national security state is very powerful. In the United States, the  Defence Department alone feeds ten percent (10%) of the US population in terms of its salaries and direct contracts. That ten percent (10%) of the population has a social group on its periphery.  It's people they are related to.  For example, they have good friends, business partners.  It maybe extends to thirty (30%) or forty (40%) percent of the entire US population. Media proprietors tend to have many business interests and, so, those business interests intersect with the national security state. So there has been suppression of the story, first of all. Secondly, it is a complex story about spy agencies and it involves the interception of nearly the entire world. It's not easy for people to imagine such a thing and still believe in it. This interception is a lot like the concept of god:  it is invisible; intangible; knows what you're doing; knows what everyone is doing; it seems that one has to take it on faith. The fact is, strangely, mass surveillance is the first god in that respect, that has been proven to exist, that even atheists can believe in. 5:53 But-- atheists can say they believe in, but, really, most people don't believe in things they haven't directly seen themselves, because most people don't see direct -- they don't see the National Security Agency or GCHQ spies under their bed -- they don't understand the danger. 6:17 But I'm pleased that they don't understand the danger, because if everyone understood the danger, the response wouldn't be to stop mass surveillance:  the response, by most people, would be become extremely conformist. Now, this old result of 'nothing wrong'.  So what is it? 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.' That encodes within it exactly the problem. People try and guess what it is that these powerful agencies might consider wrong, and they are not sure where the boundaries are, and so they adjust their own behaviour and start to self-censor.  But it's intellectually bankrupt. 7:00 In the end, even if you are a baker, not involved in any politics at all, its not simply a matter of arbitrary injustice might trip you up anyway, because of confusion and incompetence in the national security state.  But it is necessary to protect forces in society that keep society honest. For example, human rights activists, journalists, and opposition politicians. These are all involved in preventing society collapsing due to corruption or incompetence. And if those elements can't operate, then society will decay. 7:46 And it will even affect 'the baker' when society does decay. So it's not just about you. It is about this professional class of people who are involved in trying to holding government to account. If they can't hold government to account, government will go bad. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Oh, yeah. Lately, governments are becoming more aggressive, while their people find it harder to control them. Are conspiracy theorists not wild enough anymore? 8:11 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks The US government is prosecuting me for conspiracy to commit espionage and general conspiracy. And the government has conspiracy theories about the people, and even laws called 'conspiracy'. It is interesting if you look at some conspiracy.  You know, some unfounded paranoid conspiracy theories, spread around by people about the capacities of the National Security Agency and some other national spying services, they were not paranoid about. 8:46 I knew that at that time, and we know even more now. But the bigger concern is where all of that is going. I like to joke that the only thing that has saved mankind is bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence, because massive spy agencies like the National Security Agency that are intercepting nearly all the world's electronic communication, of nearly every person, would completely dominate the Earth if they were not corrupt, if they were not bureaucratic, and if they were not incompetent. But, fortunately, secrecy breeds incompetence and corruption, and these are very large secret organisations, so they are also very corrupt ones -- corrupt and incompetent. The problem is that the commercial sector like Google and Facebook are not corrupt or incompetent, as traditionally defined. They are in a highly competitive commercial market and so they have become extremely efficient at collecting information, and the security agencies then simply stick their fangs into the big corporate players and suck the information out from there. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Let me ask you something different. Greece, now, has a left-wing government with very friendly relationships with Ecuador and with *** [???] How would you like to ask Greece for political asylum? 10:08 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks I would be very interested to hear of such an offer from Greece, as we know there's a lot of support from the Greek population, and it would be a legally and politically important gesture here in Europe. It's an interesting question [whether] the true nature of Greek power permits such an action or not. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Why do you think Greek government is powerless to offer you asylum? 10:33 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks If I had been Cyprus, what would I have done in this conflict with the troika? I can see that there's different arguments for going different ways, but what I would have found most interesting would be to use the conflict to create an intense unity within Greece and, provided you have control over the police, the army and the law, and you have a healthy population and no natural disasters, you can do a lot. But there is really that question. And you effectively create a war-time footing, which has effectively been a problem like war for Greece, and Greece has survived much harsher circumstances in war, so there's no reason to believe it couldn't survive a conflict of that type and, in fact, a number of good things might come out of that conflict -- but only if you have control of the police and the army.  And, I think, the reality is that Syriza did not have full control over those three services, so that was not an option. 11:42 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project In Greece, we have suffered and continue to suffer the results of austerity. Does the TTIP mean such kind of austerity for the whole of Europe? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks TTIP is the US-EU portion of a much grander project. That grand project [is] the three t'd agreements:  TTIP, TISA, and TPP. It's a project to create a new grand enclosure, a modern form perhaps analogous to the partition of Africa or the construction of the European Union -- a new economic and legal regime that will incorporate fifty-two (52) nations -- 1.6 billion people -- and, most importantly, two-thirds of global GDP. It has been constructed politically by playing the China card. So whenever something that radical and that large occurs, it's because it has the backing of several powerful forces. In this case, it has the backing of the major US multinationals, who have been always trying to achieve agreements like this. But it has also managed to get the backing of the US national security class, who view it as a strategic way of isolating China, India and Russia. 13:07 By playing that China card, they've also scared much of the establishment in Western Europe to coming into the system, and a lot of the South-East Asian countries like Australia. It is the most radical construction of an international regime since the construction of Europe [ie the European Union], and it cements once and for all, international and neoliberalism [interests?] into those fifty-two (52) countries, in a binding international treaty which is exceedingly difficult to withdraw from -- much more difficult than Greece withdrawing from Europe [ie the European Union]. 13:45 It covers nearly every aspect of the economy:  transportation, all services -- and services make up about seventy-five percent (75%) of the European economy, so that means all internet services, banking services, consulting engineers and accountants.  In fact, it covers everything that you can't drop on your foot. [Laughter] 14:10 It arises -- let's go back to World War II. After World War II, the US had fifty percent (50%) of the global GDP and it started to construct some international institutions to deal with that and the  Bretton Woods system, the WTO [World Trade Organisation] and, eventually the WTO became an institution with its own goals to expand, and it included India, Brazil, Russia and China. And the WTO became too democratised for the United States and there was several rounds of negotiation in the WTO in the 2000s, called the Doha Rounds, to negotiate some mutual lowering -- lower of tariffs and other mechanisms -- and the the US didn't like where things were going.  So it effectively created a negotiation outside the WTO with its allies that it could push around, and the result is those T-3 agreements. So, as negotiations originally started in Doha show, [the US] set up this legal and trading system covering two-thirds of global GDP.  So its multinationals get what [they] want and, also, to isolate China. 15:35 To my mind, the single most significant issue is that it locks in, for at least decades, the US model of global multinational-led neoliberalism -- this radical new form of international neoliberalism -- which means that if Greece elects a different government, or Syriza wants to go a different way, it can't.  It's too late.  There's clauses in the treaty, such as if the government tries to introduce new legislation it will be penalised. 16:25 It may even be seriously anti-economic. It does introduce the establishment of a great many new monopolies for the US pharmaceutical and copyright industries, which is anti-economic. But just having such an invasive level of regulation for ninety-seven percent (97%) of industry in an international trade agreement suggests that it will calcify around economic activity. 17:01 It's very hard to change this international agreement, and as industry changes and new inventions come onto the scene, and there's new ways of working and new ways of trading, countries which have signed up to this treaty system will be bogged down in this international regulation. 17:22 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project One last question. These days, the refugee crisis is the main issue for all Euro summits, but the people who participate in those meetings are the very same leaders of countries who sold their weapons, or, actually, their armies actively contributed to the bombing of the refugee countries. What are your thoughts on that? 17:40 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, it's a moral disgrace, you know, that the US is not taking Syrian refugees, and that the UK has said it will take only four thousand (4,000) per year over five (5) years. It's no surprise to anyone.  But, I mean, the situation comes about as a result of US, UK and French policy in the Middle East, together with the behaviour of US regional allies in the Middle East -- Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia. But we published cables, including in my new book -- The WikiLeaks Files -- showing that the US has been trying to overthrow the Syrian government since at least 2006 and has very serious plans to do that; was trying to make the Syrian government 'paranoid,' trying to get it to 'over-react' by instilling that fear and paranoia, trying to make it worried about coups; trying to stir up sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shi'ites; trying to make its efforts to stop the originator of ISIS -- the ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq -- to make Syria look weak, and the fact that it was trying to crack down on terrorists at all, pushed that as an example of Syrian government not having full control over its territory, to encourage the government overthrow; trying to stop foreign investment in Syria and secretly funding a variety of NGOs in Syria and, also, *** [???], using Saudi and Egypt to help push that along. There's an interesting question:  what is even in it for the US, this result? 19:37 Well, it's not about the US population as a whole, of course.  It's about the particular factions that pushed for it -- whether they have a benefit -- and, of course, the CIA perceives they have a benefit.  They create a problem and then they're given a greater budget to clean 'the problem' up. Similarly, with the contractors, arms dealers and arms manufacturers:  if there's no 'problem', then their budgets are cut.  So they create problems. It's also part of a grand area strategy to, you know, weaken Hezbollah, to allow Israel greater control over Golan Heights and maybe a buffer zone as well; to knock out a regional ally of Iran; to knock out the last Russian base, that's left outside the former Soviet Union, in Tartus; to create a path for a gas pipeline [with] a proposed path from Qatar to Saudi, up through Syria to Europe, which will compete with Russian gas. 20:39 So there's like, as I said before:  like most significant changes that happen in the world, they happen because significant forces come together, and with multiple motivations. It's what we see here. But an easily predictable disaster.  But from the US perspective there's nothing for them to dislike about having Europe flooded with Syrian refugees. In fact, we have an interesting speculation about the refugee movements.  We looked through our cables. So the speculation was this: occasionally, opponents of a country will engage in strategic depopulation -- which is, to decrease the fighting capacity of a government, you try and get people to flee the country. 21:28 In the case of Syria, it is predominantly the middle class that is fleeing, because it is the most able to flee -- it has the language skills, money, some connections, and that's the engineering class, the management class, the bureaucratic class, precisely the class that is needed to keep the government functioning, and encouraging it to flee Syria -- for example, Germany saying that they will accept any refugees and by Turkey taking nearly two (2) million refugees, it does significantly weaken the Syrian government. 22:09 So we looked for other recent precedents of that. In 2007, the Iraqi government made a formal demand of Germany to stop encouraging migration from Iraq to Germany. Now, in that case clearly Germany wasn't trying to collapse the Iraqi government, but nonetheless the Iraqi government was feeling the same effect, that it was weakening its governing capacity. Sweden, in the Iraq war, is documented in the cables as making its contribution to the Iraq war, as it said to the United States, the acceptance of the Iraqi refugees was part of its contribution. So, regardless of whether there is design behind it, the forces engaged in trying to overthrow the Syrian government must be happy with the results. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project We have the same effect of brain-drain from Greece due to the economic crisis now.  Or the brains go. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Exactly. So, the result is to weaken. As a political asylee myself, I'm not suggesting at all that Syrians shouldn't be treated kindly as refugees. But we should understand that engaging in the situation that causes depopulation of a country does encourage its collapse. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Thank you very much. --- end audio --- More Article by Kostas Ephemera  (Greek)  http://www.thepressproject.gr/article/83422/Ligi-ora-me-ton-Julian-Assange  (English translation)   here 2014 US population estimated at 322,583,006 -- ref:  http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/ USA DOD Beneficiaries Therefore, 10% of that estimate total population is equal to 32,258,300.6 Americans -- ie over 32-million US citizens benefit directly from US Dept of Defence. Adding estimates of periphery associations, perhaps up to over one-third of the total US population would benefit, either directly or indirectly, from the US Dept of Defence. Troika = European Troika  /  tripartite committee led by European Commission (Eurogroup) with European Central Bank (ECB) & the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - representing the European Union (EU) in its foreign relations, particularly re common foreign policy & security policy -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_troika Syriza - a left-wing political party in Greece, originally founded in 2004 as a coalition of left-wing and radical left parties. It is the largest party in the Hellenic Parliament, with party chairman Alexis Tsipras serving as Prime Minister of Greece -- ref:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriza Bretton Woods system -- landmark system for monetary and exchange rate management established in 1944  - ref:  http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brettonwoodsagreement.asp ꕤ

Weev On Cuckservative Gavin McInnes & More

ꕤ Video SOURCE | here "I'm Going To Prison For Arithmetic" Andrew Auernheimer aka Weev March 2013 Source  | here YouTube Comment Wei Bin Wang 2 months ago "To explain the 'hack' that he did: On the Apple site, they gave a number to any registered user who uses the site in its URL, and that was what save them the page with their saved email address. What weev did was just add 1 to it, press enter, and it spat out another person's email address. Do the same thing several more times and you'll eventually end up with everyone's email addresses. Hence why he said he was "going to prison for arithmetic." On how he used it, he didn't use it for anything malicious, he just gave his discovery to a journalist. The safest move was to report the exploit to Apple and get a free job or recommendation on his future career, but it's not in his character to do that. The real fault lies in the incompetent design of such a site that made this "gaping hole" in their security. If weev wasn't there, it was only a matter of time before someone else decided to be curious and add 1 to the number of the URL on that site and discover the exploit themselves. The way both the media blasted this out of proportions and the way the judicial system handled it is in some ways surprising, and in other ways very disappointing. The guy just added 1 to a number on a website URL a few times and he gets a trip to prison...for arithmetic! Even to this day, I can't believe he got sentenced to jail for that." source | as above YouTube Comment WellingtonBikeCam01 1 year ago "Someone from AT&T should be in jail over this one." source | as above non-pc Cuckservative "No defense for Gavin McInnes" http://weev.livejournal.com/413176.html#comments Video, Post & Comments ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT Bear with video #1 ... it's a little high-energy and seems too much like hard work trying to figure what's going on at first, but it's worthwhile persevering. Jaw-dropping what this guy went to prison for in the US (and the ridiculously huge financial penalty they've slapped him with). Above are a couple of the comments I liked on that YouTube source link. Finally, there's a humorous comment on the state of the MSM. I find this Weev guy funny.  Funny interesting.   And funny humorous, too. Wish I was as creative as Weev.  lol ꕤ

Video - German journalist Lars Schall talks with J. Michael Springmann - 'Is the Whole “War on Terror” a Fraud?'

ꕤ Video SOURCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCMfiGseUIc&feature=youtu.be Is the whole "War on Terror" a fraud? Published on Apr 15, 2015 "In this exclusive Foreign Policy Journal interview, German journalist Lars Schall talks with J. Michael Springmann, the former head of the U.S. visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and author of the book "Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World"." ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- Is the Whole “War on Terror” a Fraud? by Lars Schall       April 15, 2015 http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2015/04/15/is-the-whole-war-on-terror-a-fraud/ ꕤ

No Nuremberg for Anglo-American War Criminals

ꕤ Article SOURCE as indicated http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/10/18/433878/Tony-Blair-Bush-Iraq-war- Bush, Blair plotted Iraq war 1 year before invasion had started: White House memo Sun Oct 18, 2015 12:54AM A damning White House memo has revealed details of the so-called “deal in blood” forged by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush over the Iraq war. The document, titled “Secret... Memorandum for the President”, was sent by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell to President Bush on March 28, 2002, a week before Bush’s summit with Blair at his Crawford ranch in Texas, Britain’s Daily Mail reported on Sunday. The sensational memo revealed that Blair had agreed to support the war a year before the invasion even started, while publicly the British prime minister was working to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis. The document also disclosed that Blair agreed to act as a spin doctor for Bush and convince a skeptical public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which actually did not exist. In response, Bush would flatter Blair and give the impression that London was not Washington’s poodle but an equal partner in the “special relationship.” Powell told Bush that Blair “will be with us” on the Iraq war, and assured the president that “"the UK will follow our lead in the Middle East."  In November 2002, US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell applaud at a summit in Prague. Between them is National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, to their right, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (Reuters photo) Another sensational memo revealed how Bush used “spies” in the British Labour Party to help him to influence public opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of the Iraq war. Both documents were obtained and published by The Mail on Sunday. They are part of a number of classified emails stored on the private server of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton which courts have forced her to reveal. Blair has always denied the claim that he and Bush signed a deal “in blood” at Crawford to launch a war against Iraq that began on March 20, 2003, that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Powell memo, however, showed how Blair and Bush secretly prepared the Iraq war plot behind closed doors at Crawford. Powell told Bush: “He will present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause.” The top US diplomatic official added that the UK premier has the presentational skills to “make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace.” Powell wrote that Blair will “stick with us on the big issues” but he needs to show the British public that “Britain and America are truly equal partners in the special relationship.”  In March 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding WMDs; but no such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq. More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion, and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored. The US war in Iraq cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, according to a study called Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/10/18/433878/Tony-Blair-Bush-Iraq-war- http://www.globalresearch.ca/kuala-lumpur-war-crimes-tribunal-bush-convicted-in-absentia-it-s-official-george-w-bush-is-a-war-criminal/30839 Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal. Bush Convicted in Absentia: IT’S OFFICIAL – George W Bush is a war criminal. By Yvonne Ridley Global Research, May 14, 2012 Foreign Policy Journal 14 May 2012 EXTRACT In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were today (Friday) found guilty of war crimes. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia. The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is also asking that the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals for public record. The tribunal is the initiative of Malaysia’s retired Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who staunchly opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. FULL AT SOURCE http://www.globalresearch.ca/kuala-lumpur-war-crimes-tribunal-bush-convicted-in-absentia-it-s-official-george-w-bush-is-a-war-criminal/30839 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111128105712109215.html Kuala Lumpur tribunal: Bush and Blair guilty A war crimes tribunal in Malaysia offers a devastating critique of international criminal law institutions today. 28 Nov 2011 13:37 GMT Richard Falk Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He is also former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. EXTRACTS In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a tribunal (the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, or KLWCT) consisting of five judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict that found George W Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide as a result of their roles in the Iraq War. The proceedings took place over a four-day period from November 19-22, and included an opportunity for court-appointed defense counsel to offer the tribunal arguments and evidence on behalf of the absent defendants. They had been invited to offer their own defense or send a representative, but declined to do so. ... Universal jurisdiction The KLWCT did not occur entirely in a jurisprudential vacuum. It has long been acknowledged that domestic criminal courts can exercise universal jurisdiction for crimes of state wherever these may occur, although usually only if the accused individuals are physically present in the court. The underlying legal theory is based on the recognition of the limited capacity of international criminal trials to impose accountability in a manner that is not entirely dictated by geopolitical priorities and reflective of a logic of impunity. In this regard, universal jurisdiction has the potential to treat equals equally, and is very threatening to the Kissingers and Rumsfelds of this world, who have curtailed their travel schedules. The United States and Israel have used their diplomatic leverage to roll back universal jurisdiction authority in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom and Belgium. "War must be outlawed. That will have to be our struggle for now. We must struggle for justice and freedom from oppression, from economic hegemony. But we must remove the threat of war first. With this sword of Damocles hanging over our heads we can never succeed in advancing the interests of our countries.  War must therefore be made illegal. The enforcement of this must be by multilateral forces under the control of the United Nations. No single nation should be allowed to police the world, least of all to decide what action to take, [and] when." Mahathir Mohamed anti-war speech of February 24, 2003 ... In his 2007 statement, Mahathir promised that a future KLWCT would not, in his words, be "like the 'kangaroo court' that tried Saddam". Truly, the courtroom proceedings against Saddam Hussein was a sham trial excluding much relevant evidence, disallowing any meaningful defense, and culminating in a grotesque and discrediting execution.  ... FULL AT SOURCE http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111128105712109215.html ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT When you don't know what's going on, the conviction for war crimes in absentia sounds vaguely amusing -- as if the Malaysians were off their heads and had gone rogue in deciding to convict such fine and upstanding Americans (and Blair) for war crimes. It's only down the track that you learn that, yes, there really is grounds for such an outlandish-sounding conviction, as there is a convention against torture and against waging wars of aggression. Yes, people were tortured and, yes, the Iraq invasion was illegal and was launched on false pretexts (WMDs). So these government representatives are totally bent and criminal in their actions. And, as time progresses, more information comes out supporting that ugly fact.  The latest is just more confirmation that these people and their governments really are criminals. Germans were tried by the victors at Nuremberg and hanged for war crimes. But there won't be any such trials for the Anglo-American war criminals. ________________ Wonder if those Clinton e-mails were meant to come out, to maybe influence elections.  As in, Bush is Republican and Clinton is Democrat.  So creating a situation (private server) where this information would be released could maybe have been deliberate to advantage the Democrats, I'm thinking. Of course, I could be completely wrong.  lol ꕤ

European Destruction - Sacrifice to American Capitalist Empire

ꕤ Article SOURCE http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/opinion/2015/10/07/arab-states-take-syrian-refugees/73522124/ Why Arab States won’t take in Syrian refugees Mohammad Ahmad 12:53 p.m. CDT October 7, 2015 Greece Migrants_Fran The discovery of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi‘s body on a Turkish beach on Sept. 2 pricked the conscience of the world. Everyone wants to do something. However, many people are perplexed that the Arab states, despite their geographical proximity, historical links and shared religion and language with Syrian refugees, are not making any significant contribution to the resettlement of those refugees in their lands. Arabs share this surprise. They can’t understand this inaction when a quarter of a century ago, thousands of Kuwaitis were given refuge in the Gulf after the Iraqi invasion. They have expressed their dismay over the situation on social media. On Twitter, the Arabic hashtag that translates to #WelcomingSyrianRefugeesIsaGulfduty has provided them a place for expressing the indignation many Arabs feel when they witness European states such as Germany and Britain taking in thousands of refugees while their governments sit idle. A recent post expresses the distress: It shows a photo of a drowned refugee with the comment: “It is shameful that they have to roam all about God’s earth and drown in the seas while fleeing death when we are supposed to be closer to them than the West.” In the meantime, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan share the bulk of the 4.1 million Syrian refugees who have fled a civil war that has killed more than 250,000 and displaced more than 7 million. The wealthiest Arab countries have formally taken in no Syrian refugees, arguing that doing so would open them up to the risk of terrorism. To placate citizens who feel compassion for the Syrian refugees, Arab governments point to the money they have given to help Syrian refugees. Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait have been among the world’s largest donors to Syrian refugees, via United Nations agencies and private charities. While aid through the U.N. and its agencies is verifiable, the portion given through private charities is not. While Kuwait has provided $784 million through the U.N. since 2012 and the UAE more than $350 million, these amounts are still less than the almost $800 million from Britain or the $3 billion the U.S. has provided. The Arab states’ argument about the risk of terrorists entering their lands is lame. Any significant movement has been in the reverse direction. The Syrian resistance has had the tactical support of the Arab states, which share the resistance leaders’ doctrinal agenda. These pseudo-Islamist leaders have little interest in destabilizing the Arab States that are funding them, especially when their most important immediate goal is a victory in Syria. The threat of state-sponsored terrorism by Syria’s Assad government is also far-fetched since Syria’s ruler has his hands full fighting for his survival. The real reason for this inhuman blocking of Syrian refugees is different. The Syrians have lived under secular governments far too long for the comfort of the Arab states. While Syrian rulers may have been undemocratic, they did protect religious freedom for most groups. As a result, many Syrians accept religious plurality and are more inclusive than exclusive. This does not fit in with the doctrinal rigidity of the ruling Arab elite. That the Syrians share a common language makes them dangerous in the eyes of some Arab rulers. They fear that refugees could dangerously pollute the minds of subjects who are kept under strict religious monitoring although even the Quran says, “Admonish thou then; thou art but an admonisher. Thou art not over them a warden.” Additionally, figures in some of these Arab states have made inflammatory statements about Syrian refugees, many of whom are Alawites, Christians or Druze. Given how things operate in these states, it is difficult to assume that these have been made in contradiction to government policies. A sermon delivered by the pseudo-Islamist Saudi cleric Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq in Doha’s state-controlled Grand Mosque called for the destruction of the faithful of other religions: “Allah, strengthen Islam and the Muslims, and destroy your enemies, the enemies of the religion,” he said. The preacher went on to say, “Allah, destroy the Jews and whoever made them Jews, and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.” Not long ago, Saudi Arabia’s highest Islamic authority, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Abdullah, called for the destruction of “all the churches in the (Arabian peninsula).” Such sentiments from the pulpit by quasi-official figures provide a good insight into the mindset of Arab rulers. In that light, their decision to block the entry of Syrian refugees makes perfect sense. This refusal by the Saudi-led Arab States to bar Syrian refugees hasn’t just resulted in misery to hundreds of thousands of people. It also has provided an opportunity to Christian-majority states to again help Muslims in dire need. In the seventh century, early Muslim refugees also were helped by the Christian kingdom of Aksum, present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea (formerly referred to as Abyssinia). This act of kindness is remembered by all Muslims with extreme thankfulness. Pope Francis’ guidance to his flock regarding Syrian refugees — “Every Catholic parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary in Europe should accommodate one family, beginning with my diocese of Rome” — reminds one of that kind, long-ago gesture by the Christian king of Abyssinia. The pseudo-Islamist extremists have been trying to portray humanity’s war against terrorism as a clash of civilizations and religions. Humane treatment of the Syrian refugees would go a long way in countering their propaganda. The best-case scenario would be for Israel, which borders Syria, to open its borders to the refugees. While this is probably too much to hope for, it would be a death blow to the extremists. Is Israel prepared to take this giant leap to befriend Muslims? Mohammad Ahmad is a director of a company in Lahore, Pakistan. http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/opinion/2015/10/07/arab-states-take-syrian-refugees/73522124/ Ethiopia Islam in Ethiopia dates back to the founding of the religion; in 615, when a group of Muslims were counseled by Muhammad to escape persecution in Mecca and travel to Ethiopia via modern-day Eritrea, which was ruled by Ashama ibn Abjar, a pious Christian king. According to the most recent 2007 CSA governmental data, Muslims are 33.9% of the population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Ethiopia Eritrea United States Department of State indicates that 50% of the population are Sunni Muslims but gives no figures for Shias, while a 2009 Pew Research Center report says that less than 1% are Shia. Islam accounts for approximately 36% to 50% of the population. More than 99% of Eritrean Muslims practice Sunni Islam. Islam first arrived to the region when immigrants from Mecca, persecuted by the ruling Quraysh tribe were accepted into Abyssinia by the ruler of Ethiopia whom Arabic tradition has named Aṣḥama ibn Abjar, and he settled them in Negash, located in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia. Islam later spread in Eritrea under the Ottoman Empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Eritrea ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT Thought this article was interesting, as it provides a bit of an overview of the Syrian and the Arab scenarios. As the author points out, it's the Saudi Arabians that are funding the terrorists.  So the argument that they're protecting themselves by denying Syrians asylum on ground that they're shutting out terrorists doesn't wash, when they themselves are sponsors of terrorism. It's also worth bearing in mind that the 'Syrian refugees' everyone's referring to aren't strictly 'Syrian' refugees -- they're immigrants from all over the Middle East and Africa that are migrating to Europe. Doha is in Qatar, where preachers at the state-controlled mosque call for the destruction of Jews and Christians (and others). Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority, calls for the destruction of all churches in the Arabian Peninsula. Meanwhile, Europe has had its borders open to Muslim immigration for decades and most European major cities are now mosque sites.  From a quick look, it appears that the construction of mosques has been funded in Europe by the Saudi Arabian fundamentalists, by Qatar and by Turkey, while Europe has bent over backwards to accommodate what amounts to foreign, non-secular invasion, that lives in parallel, religious dominated, and often violent and insular communities, that even police and emergency vehicles don't enter without backup. Europe and the West, which has opened its borders to immigration that (a) cannot be assimilated and (b) immigration that represents an ongoing threat; subjects domestic populations to totalitarian surveillance and life under high terror alert, even as Europe fails to protect its populations from internal chaos and violence that is integral to hosting these outsider communities.  At the same time, Europe and the West continue to ally themselves with fundamentalist regimes that fund the Islamisation of Europe, regimes whose clerics call for destruction of Christians and churches. Europe and the West meanwhile continue to take part in destabilisation and destruction of secular Middle Eastern targets of direct, or proxy, Western intervention (at a staggering financial and social cost to European and Western taxpayers), displacing millions in the Middle East and in Africa, and generating floods of unassimilable non-European immigrants, headed to Europe and the West. This must be the definition of insanity. That the US has spent $3 billion (since 2012) on post-intervention humanitarian mop-up operations in the guise of 'humanitarian' relief channelled through the UN (while America's own citizens live below the poverty line, America's water infrastructure crumbles & private companies rip off the American poor - here) indicates this is about American corporate imperialism and that Europe is absorbing the human costs for its American ally:  costs that will destroy Europe, in sacrifice to the expansion of the American capitalist empire. What one allows into a nation does not remain static.  Sooner or later what is foreign increases in number and in demand for political power.  In the case for people for whom the religious and the political is often one and the same, there can only be problems ahead. I'd wager that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and other Islamic nations are also funding the current diverse and highly organised tsunami of Muslim immigration to Europe. While there's a number of extraneous reasons the Arab states may ostensibly be reluctant to take in Syrians, the bulk of immigration to Europe is not Syrian. Gulf Arab states and like Muslim counterparts have no interest in absorbing the tidal wave of Muslim immigration because their primary motivation and goal is Muslim domination.  Hence Saudi offers of 200 mosques for every 100 refugees to Germany - here. The Syrian refugees are just a small fraction of the onslaught of Middle Eastern and African immigration. Four out of five migrants are NOT from Syria: EU figures expose the 'lie' that the majority of refugees are fleeing war zone http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3240010/Number-refugees-arriving-Europe-soars-85-year-just-one-five-war-torn-Syria.html  ________________ *An 'Islamist' is an Islamist.  There's no such thing as a pseudo-Islamist (referred to above), although it's convenient to create the impression that there is, for political reasons. ꕤ