Clinton: Syria on brink of catastrophe as rebels advance. The region in danger

DEBKAfile Special Report

“There is still a chance to save the Syrian state from a catastrophic assault that would be very dangerous not only to Syria, but to the region,” said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Tokyo, Sunday, July 8. She did not elaborate, but stressed earlier, “… the opposition is getting more effective in defense of themselves and going on the offensive against the Syrian military.”

debkafile’s military sources note that her over-the-top language comes at a pivotal moment in the Syrian conflict: The rebels are winning more and more territory and not only encircling Damascus but fighting inside the capital. To save itself, the Assad regime which still controls the army outside Damascus may in desperation open up its arsenals and deploy weapons of mass destruction in a bid to drive off the rebels while also spreading the flames to other parts of the region, including Israel.

Persian Gulf sources reported Sunday that inside the capital, the Syrian army no longer moves troops in military convoys for fear of rebel attack. They now travel in unmarked civilian vehicles. Some officers prefer to stay on base for fear of assassination or kidnap on their way home.

Clinton did not explain how the rebels were suddenly able in the last few days to develop their ubiquitous capabilities, rising numbers and military organization - or where they procured weapons for their wholesale offensive against the Syrian army.

According to debkafile’s intelligence and military sources, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have substantially stepped up the flow of munitions to the rebels. They are reaching combatants inside Syria as well as the trainees at Turkish military facilities.

Their numbers have, furthermore, risen to 50,000 armed men who are efficiently organized in 17 brigades. Fighting inside the country are 260 military units, each consisting of one or two battalions, which mostly range from 1,000-1,500 men - depending on the arena. Some are brigades of 3,000 men.

By the first week of July, the rebel army had put in place an efficient logistical system:

1. The Free Syrian Army had been able to establish a geographical presence in all of Syria’s provinces, barring the minority regions (Kurds and Druzes) which are outside the conflict, and the pro-regime Alawite region.

2.  A regional operational command was working in all those provinces (260). It was equipped with hi-tech communications connecting the provinces and linked to the FSA’s high command in Turkey.

3.  A well-organized arms smuggling ring was transferring weapons from one command to another as required for local attacks on Syrian military and security forces. This pipeline is fed by Turkish, Saudi and Qatari suppliers via Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Turkey..

4.  A foreign “military adviser” is posted at each provincial command center. They are usually special forces experts mainly from the British, French, Turkish, Saudi and Qatari armies.

Up until last month, the rebels were fighting primarily to sever a strategic strip of land from Idlib in the north to Deraa in the south in order to tie down the regime in Damascus and its Allawite loyalist forces in the west and center and cut it off from the rest of the country. 

This goal has now been abandoned. Today, the anti-Assad forces are concentrating on a single objective: The regime’s overthrow.

Rockefeller Foundation Predicts 13,000 Dead at London 2012 Olympics

By James Britpod

A 2010 Rockefeller Foundation document entitled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” outlines a scenario which results in the death of 13,000 during the 2012 Olympics.

The first worrying prediction begins in 2012 when ‘the pandemic the world had been anticipating for years’, finally hits, infecting nearly 20 percent of world population and claiming 8 million lives. Due to this pandemic, the Rockefeller Foundation outlines how the public will welcome a more authoritative government and a tighter control across all aspects of life, including Biometric IDs for all citizens.

The 2012 London Olympics Bombing

In the document, the Rockefeller Foundation ‘predicts’ that the decade of 2010-2020 will be named “The Doom Decade”, because of a wave of terrorist attacks, natural disasters as well as civil uprisings and financial collapses.

The years 2010 to 2020 were dubbed the “doom decade” for good reason: the 2012 Olympic bombing, which killed 13,000, was followed closely by an earthquake in Indonesia killing 40,000, a tsunami that almost wiped

out Nicaragua, and the onset of the West China Famine, caused by a once-in-a-millennium drought linked to climate change.

Mirroring events in real life, the document also predicts that by 2015 a large share of the US’ armed forces are recalled from countries such as Afghanistan to be stationed domestically, apparently posse comitatus no longer being a concern.

In 2015, the U.S. reallocated a large share of its defense spending to domestic concerns, pulling out of Afghanistan—where the resurgent Taliban seized power once again.

As is happening right now, the document outlines how nations will lose power over their own finances due to massive debt, apparently handing over financial sovereignty to the banking technocrats.

But the document doesn’t just cover these topics. The growing mistrust in vaccines is covered in the Rockefeller document, where they state that due to corruption within national and global bodies such as WHO, “bogus” vaccines will result in mass deaths. According to the paper, the resulting mistrust in vaccines results in a large number of parents who avoid vaccination, which causes infant and child morality to rise to levels not seen since the 1970s.

In the context of weak health systems, corruption, and inattention to standards—either within countries or

from global bodies like the World Health Organization—tainted vaccines entered the public health systems of several African countries. In 2021, 600 children in Cote d’Ivoire died from a bogus Hepatitis B vaccine, which paled in comparison to the scandal sparked by mass deaths from a tainted anti-malarial drug years later. The deaths and resulting scandals sharply affected public confidence in vaccine delivery; parents not just in Africa but elsewhere began to avoid vaccinating their children, and it wasn’t long before infant and child mortality rates rose to levels not seen since the 1970s.

Technology becomes an increasing theater of battle in the Doom Decade, with cyber terrorism and hacking mafia organizations becoming more and more widespread. A worrying prediction outlined in the document covers “Bio-Hacking” where GMO and DoItYourself-Biotech push the Globalist’s love for Transhumanism forward.

Interestingly, not all of the “hacking” was bad. Genetically modified crops (GMOs) and do-it- yourself (DIY) biotech became backyard and garage activities, producing important advances. In 2017, a network of renegade African scientists who had returned to their home countries after working in Western multinationals unveiled the first of a range of new GMOs that boosted agricultural productivity on the continent.

Just as desired by Globalists for over a hundred years, the developed world begins to fall back into feudalism, with the gap between the rich and poor growing to levels not seen for hundreds of years as the middle class becomes extinct.

The rich moving into fortress like compounds, whereas the poor are forced to move into ghettos. By 2030, the document portrays the “developed” and “developing” nations to no longer be relevant or distinguishable.

Nigel Farage - Europe is Collapsing, Buy Gold & Expect QE

On the heels of Fed Chairman Bernanke’s comments, Spain being downgraded and key meetings taking place in Europe, today King World News interviewed MEP (Member European Parliament) Nigel Farage, to get his take on the ongoing crisis.  Farage told KWN that “when I look into the eyes of the leaders of Europe ... what I’m seeing now is madness, absolute, total and utter madness.” 

Farage also discussed the action in the gold market, but first, here is what Farage had to say about the deteriorating situation in Europe:  “Of course, over the last couple of years we’ve had two bailouts of Greece, a bailout of Ireland, Portugal.  We’re now on the verge of needing a bailout in Cyprus, but perhaps more significantly, a bailout in Spain.”
     
“There is all sorts of twisting and turning going on with the Spanish saying, ‘Please save our banks, but don’t put us under the austerity measures that you’ve put the other countries under.’

If one looks globally, we’ve got people like David Cameron, and importantly, President Obama, who are basically saying, ‘The euro project must be saved.  It must be saved at all costs.’ ....

“For that to happen the Eurozone has to turn into a state, and a state that effectively has a Fed.

The Germans are saying, “Hang on guys, we don’t really want to take on the debt for the whole of ‘Club Mediterranean’ countries.”  There’s been a meeting in Berlin today, and Angela Merkel has, for the first time, said that she’s prepared to countenance this becoming a full fiscal and political union, but it has to be constructed on German terms.

So it would appear that despite the fact that the eurozone is a disaster, despite the fact that nobody is prepared to recognize just what a mess our banks are in, despite all of this, our political classes in Europe and America are prepared to continue this project of total failure. 

If we continue with this route, we are heading for money printing on a scale that has never been seen before in the history of mankind.  Clearly, as history teaches us, that will lead to massive inflation, and huge asset depreciation.”

Farage also added:  “All I can tell you is when I look into the eyes of the leaders of Europe, and as a leader of a group in the European Parliament I do get eyeball to eyeball with them, when I look into the eyes of these people, frankly what I’m seeing now is madness, absolute, total and utter madness.

The project, the idea is what must be protected and to hell with the consequences.  I really believe that when we look back in decades or centuries to come, we will see what is happening now in the eurozone as something of huge historical significance.

People will say to themselves in classrooms, in a couple of hundred years time, ‘How could they have been so stupid?’”

Farage also had this to say regarding gold:  “I think we are at that level where people who have waited to add to their gold portfolios should be adding now.  You may well get a situation where if they do pull off some grand deal that gold falls ... but we are now back in the buying zone for gold.

I always felt, and I’ve said for some months on your show, that I thought gold would come back (down), and indeed it has.  I think investors that are scared of what may happen to paper money, you’d have to be very complacent not to be, we are in a buying territory for gold now in my view.”

This is an incredibly important and timely interview with Farage. The KWN interview with Nigel Farage will be available shortly and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE.

Flame virus most powerful espionage tool ever, UN warns

The Flame virus is the most powerful espionage tool ever to target countries, a United Nations agency responsible for regulating the internet has warned.

By Damien McElroy

This is the most serious warning we have ever put out," said Marco Obiso, cyber security coordinator for the UN's Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union.

The formal warning will tell member nations that the Flame virus is a dangerous espionage tool that could potentially be used to attack critical infrastructure, he said. "They should be on alert."

Orla Cox, a security analyst at the security firm Symantec, said that Flame was targeting specific individuals, apparently Iranian related. "The way it has been developed is unlike anything we've seen before," she said. "It's huge. It's like using an atomic weapon to crack a nut."

Figures released by the Kaspersky Lab show that infections by the programme were spread across the Middle East with 189 attacks in Iran, 98 incidents in the West Bank, 32 in Sudan and 30 in Syria.

Other countries where the virus was detected include Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Evidence suggest that the virus, dubbed Flame, may have been built on behalf of the same nation or nations that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran's nuclear program in 2010, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that took credit for discovering the infections.

"I think it is a much more serious threat than Stuxnet," Mr Obiso said.

Unlike the Stuxnet virus that was previously used to disrupt Iranian systems, Flame does not disrupt or terminate systems.

Iran, whose nuclear facilities and oil ministry have previously been the target of virus attacks, accuses the US and Israel of trying to sabotage its programme. It denies the allegation that its programme is weapons related.

A leading Israeli politician hinted at the country's involvement in the virus. Israel rejects Tehran's claims that its nuclear programme is designed to produce energy, not bombs. It considers Iran to be the greatest threat to its survival.

"Whoever sees the Iranian threat as a significant threat is likely to take various steps, including these, to hobble it," Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon told Army Radio. "Israel is blessed with high technology, and we boast tools that open all sorts of opportunities for us."

Private Dragon Spacecraft Is 'Golden Spike' of Final Frontier, Astronaut Says

by Robert Z. Pearlman, collectSPACE.com Editor

HOUSTON — The arrival of the first commercial spacecraft at the International Space Station this week is tantamount to the golden spike that completed the first railroad to span the United States 143 years ago this month, an astronaut on the orbiting lab said Saturday (May 26).

"We all remember the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which opened up the western frontier of the United States and it was celebrated by pounding in a golden spike," NASA astronaut Don Pettit radioed from inside the privately-built Dragon spacecraft. "This is sort of the equivalent of the golden spike."

The robotic Dragon space capsule, which was designed by Hawthorne, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) was captured via robotic arm by Pettit and attached to the space station on Friday (May 25). Today, Pettit opened the hatch to the cargo craft and was the first to go inside.

"One other interesting detail, nobody remembers who pounded that golden spike in. The important thing to remember was that the railroad was completed and was now open for use to help settle the western frontier," Pettit added.

This test flight, conducted under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation (COTS) program, is paving the way for a change in how the space agency launches cargo and, eventually, astronauts to the space station. SpaceX, headed by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to provide 12 Dragon cargo ship flights to the station, not counting this test flight.

iPads could scan palms for passwords

By Matt Liebowitz

Like palm-activated ATMs and retina-scanning smartphones, tablet computers like the iPad may soon authenticate their rightful users by reading the unique movement of their hands, not their passwords.

Napa Sae-Bae, a doctoral student at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, is working to build an app that, using multitouch sensors, will biometrically authenticate tablet users' hand gestures. Her goal, she told NextGov, is for the tablet device to recognize its owner's specific biological traits — their hand shape and finger length, for example — and use those unique characteristics, which do not change, to replace passwords, which run the risk of being cracked.

Although she says it will be at least a year before her app is ready, Sae-Bae has already developed an iPad app that asks users to make gestures on a touch screen, such as rotating an open palm and opening a closed fist, in order to verify their identity. The hand sensor technologies she's using are currently available and already used, in different capacities, on iPads and Android tablets.

She also built a biometric-analyzing algorithm that will be the technological basis of the app; in experiments with 34 people, she achieved a 90 percent accuracy rate in authenticating the hand movements made by each participant, NextGov said.

Sae-Bae's work falls in line with other advancements in biometric authentication that have made headlines in recent months, both for the consumer market and for the government. As part of its human measurements and signatures intelligence (human MASINT) program, the U.S. Air Force has expressed interest in developing security cameras that can detect a suspect's age and ethnicity, and even whether that person is a terrorist smuggling a bomb.

Last month, a Japanese bank announced that beginning in September, it would equip 10 ATMs with biometric sensors that read customers' palms for identity verification.

Ehud Barak refuses to rule out military strike against Iran

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, refused to rule out military action against Iran yesterday, heightening expectations that his government is preparing to authorise an attack on Tehran's nuclear facilities.

By Adrian Blomfield, Jerusalem

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Barak said that sanctions and international diplomacy had so far failed to deter Iran from seeking to build a nuclear bomb, a prospect that would, he warned, threaten the stability of the "whole world".

"We strongly believe that sanctions are effective or could be effective if they are ... paralysing enough, that diplomacy could work if enough unity could be synchronised between the major players, but that no option should be removed from the table," he told the Andrew Marr Show.

The minister's comments come after a week of increasingly insistent claims in the Israeli press that Mr Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, his prime minister, are lobbying cabinet colleagues to support military strikes against Iran.

The two men, considered Israel's chief political hawks when it comes to Iran, are hoping that a report to be submitted by the UN's nuclear watchdog this week will provide justification for military action, observers and officials have suggested.

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency are expected to present the most compelling evidence yet that Iran is exploring ways to build a nuclear weapon, although European diplomats say the report will not amount to "a smoking gun".

Even so, the Israeli government will seize on its findings to urge the international community to take more decisive action.

The Netanyahu administration tasked Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, with mounting a diplomatic offensive over the weekend in the belief that his dovish credentials will make its case even more compelling.

In a series of interviews, Mr Peres warned that time was running out to prevent Iran from fulfilling its perceived nuclear ambitions and appeared to urge the international community to consider the military option.

"The possibility of a military attack against Iran is now closer to being applied than the application of a diplomatic option," he told the Israel Hayom newspaper.

The key conclusions of the IAEA report will inevitably refocus international attention on Iran. It is expected to confirm that Iran has enough fissile material to build four nuclear bombs if it were further to enrich the uranium in its stockpiles. But it is an appendix, already partly leaked, that concentrates of the military aspect of Iran's nuclear programme which will garner most interest.

Satellite images will show a large steel container at the Parchin base near Tehran that appears to be designed for nuclear-related explosive testing.

Documentary evidence will also be provided to flesh out earlier IAEA suspicions that Iran is researching the construction of an atomic bomb trigger, has carried out computer simulations on building a nuclear device and is experimenting with the neutron technology needed to ignite a nuclear chain reaction.

The report is likely to conclude that Iran is researching how to construct a nuclear weapon but is not actively building one. Iran's foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the report was based on "counterfeit" claims.

As alarming as the findings are, European states are still likely to countenance against military action and call instead for a fifth round of sanctions.

"We gave imposed sanctions that continue to expand," Alain Juppe (ED: Acute on e please), the French foreign minister, said yesterday. "We can toughen them to put pressure on Iran. We will continue on this path because a military intervention could create a situation that completely destabilises the region."

Some observers have suggested that the bellicose rhetoric emerging from Israel is recent days is intended to alarm the international community into imposing tougher sanctions that it might otherwise ensue.

But there is also concern in the West that Israel could pursue unilateral military action.

US intelligence agencies have reportedly stepped up their monitoring of Israel to glean clues of a surprise attack after allegedly failing to win sufficiently concrete assurances from Mr Netanyahu that he would confer with Washington before taking military action.

Israeli intelligence has concluded that Iran intends to move the bulk of its nuclear production to a heavily fortified underground facility near the hold city of Qom by the end of the year, increasing the pressure to strike before it does so.

But Israel is thought only to have a window of only a few weeks if it wants to launch military action before the onset of winter, when heavy cloud would hamper aircraft targeting systems, making an attack impracticable. Some military experts predict that if an attack does come it will take place either in the spring, or, more likely, next summer.

As Billy Graham prepares for his 93rd birthday, America’s most famous preacher mulls mortality

By Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. — For the Rev. Billy Graham, America’s most famous evangelist across a career that lasted some six decades, the prospect of old age and death was for a long time something he tried not to think about, despite his convictions about the eternity that awaits human beings.

 “I fought growing old in every way,” Graham, who turns 93 on Monday, writes in the newly-published “Nearing Home,” a book that ranges from Scripture quotations about the end of life to brass tacks advice on financial planning. “I faithfully exercised and was careful to pace myself as I began to feel the grasp of Old Man Time. This was not a transition that I welcomed, and I began to dread what I knew would follow.”

Graham’s book, his 30th, comes not only as he reaches another year, but as America’s huge Baby Boom generation moves into old age, its senior members now eligible for Social Security and retirement. And although in recent years Graham has stepped away from active public ministry, his willingness to be frank about the trials as well as the pleasures of growing old may still have an effect on the millions of Americans whose lives coincided with his time as the country’s most famous preacher.

 “I find that, talking to students and a lot of younger people, many of them don’t know who Billy Graham is,” said William Martin, author of “A Prophet With Honor: The Billy Graham Story” and a professor at Rice University. “But the people who will be most interested in this are older, and they do remember and adore Billy Graham.”

Graham has said he wants to preach one last sermon before he dies, and while the new book is not quite that, it has a similar set of themes. Pondering Bible passages on aging and death, exhorting his readers to make sensible changes in their lives (”Take full advantage of your company’s retirement plan, and borrow from it only in an extreme emergency”) in down-to-earth language, Graham’s ultimate focus is always on Jesus Christ.

 “We were not meant for this world alone,” he writes. “We were meant for Heaven, our final home.”
All together, it’s a set of advice that youth-fixated Boomers might not be immediately eager to hear, but coming from Graham it may have more influence. After all, Graham first rose to national prominence with a huge Los Angeles revival in 1949, just as the first Boomers were old enough to notice. Swiftly, Graham — who at the time was just 31 years old — became virtually synonymous with American Protestant Christianity, leading massive crusades at sports stadiums, traveling the globe, and meeting with presidents from Eisenhower to Obama.

Graham’s appeal has not only been durable, it’s extended far beyond the world of evangelical Christianity, according to Grant Wacker, a professor at the Duke University Divinity School, who’s working on a biography of the evangelist.

 “It’s his influence on the broader public that’s intriguing,” Wacker said. “There are a lot of people who are not evangelicals who really admire him.”

Partly that’s because of longevity, Wacker said, and partly because Graham has a reputation for personal integrity that’s in marked contrast with other prominent evangelical leaders tarnished by moral or financial scandal. Primarily, though, Wacker said people outside the world of evangelical Christianity respect the evolution of Graham over his long career as someone who, for example, went from strident anti-Communism in his early days to advocating nuclear arms control in the 1970s, a position scorned by Cold War hawks.

 “He’s acquired first a national and then an international vision over the years,” Wacker said.

“Whether or not they like his theology, people admire anybody who can grow into a wider vision.”
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Is the CIA "following" you on Twitter, Facebook?

By Edecio Martinez

(CBS/AP) - In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, the CIA is following tweets - up to 5 million a day.

Now don't panic, chances are they're not "following" you.

But the idea is that when rebels, militants, activists or diplomats broadcast information on Twitter or elsewhere, America's spies scoop it up.

At the agency's Open Source Center, the analysts the CIA affectionately calls its "vengeful librarians" pore over all forms of social media in many different languages, from all over the world.

The CIA studies and cross-references the material with clandestinely intercepted information to form a snapshot of anything from the mood in Pakistan after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden to whether a Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Ronald Reagan Statue Vandalized In Newport Beach

by CBS News

NEWPORT BEACH (CBS) — A bronze statue of former President Ronald Reagan was vandalized early Sunday, according to officials.

Police received a call at approximately 5:30 Sunday morning about a possible vandalism in progress at the Bonita Canyon Sports Park.

A witness saw a suspect tie something around the top of the statue and the other end to the front of his vehicle. The witness said the suspect then got into his vehicle and put it in reverse in an attempt to pull the statue down.

The suspect, described as a male in dark clothing, fled the scene before officers arrived.

Police said the vehicle was a tan pickup with an extended cab, circa early 2000s.

It’s not known if the suspect was trying to simply cause damage to the statue, or try and steal it, as there has been a recent spike in thefts of bronze and copper items across the country.

City workers were called to assess the damage to the statue and decide it had to be removed because it was compromised.

There is no word from officials on when the statue can be replaced and put back on its pedestal.

The statue debuted last month during a dedication memorial to celebrate the former president’s 100th birthday.