WORLD WAR III HAS STARTED POPE FRANCIS

The pope prayed at a cemetery for some 15,000 soldiers from five nations of the Austro-Hungarian empire [AP]

"Even today, after the second failure of  another  world  war, perhaps one can speak of a third war,  one  fought  piecemeal, with crimes, massacres,  destruction. " Pope Francis has said the spate of conflicts around the globe today were effectively a "piecemeal" Third World War, condemning the arms trade and "plotters of terrorism" sowing death and destruction. "Humanity needs to weep and this is the time to weep," Francis said in the homily of a Mass during a visit to Italy's largest war memorial, a large, Fascist-era monument where more than 100,000 soldiers who died in World War One are buried. Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction. Pope Francis The pope began his brief visit to northern Italy on Saturday by first praying in a nearby, separate cemetery for about 15,000 soldiers from five nations of the Austro-Hungarian empire which were on the losing side of the Great War that broke out 100 years ago. "War is madness," he said in his homily before the massive, sloping granite memorial, made of 22 steps on the side of hill with three crosses at the top. "Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction," he said. In the past few months, Francis has made repeated appeals for an end to conflicts in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Gaza and parts of Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Gaza and parts of Africa. "War is irrational; its only plan is to bring destruction: it seeks to grow by destroying," he said. "Greed, intolerance, the lust for power. These motives underlie the decision to go to war and they are too often justified by an ideology ...," he said. Re-Share if you agree to Beat Censorship

SPREAD OF BRITISH HYPOCRISY FROM GERRY ADAMS TO SYRIA

The Spread of British Hypocrisy, From Gerry Adams and Northern Ireland to Syria If arresting Adams just before the European elections was not political, then surely the British refusal to inquire into the slaughter in Ballymurphy was. By Robert Fisk May 11 2014 "ICH" - "The Independent" - The law is the law is the law. So I was taught as a child. But it’s all baloney. Take the case of Gerry Adams, “arrested” and then released after chatting to the Northern Ireland police – I notice the cops did not use the old cliché about “helping the police with their inquiries” – about the torture and murder and “disappearance” of Jean McConville. It is, to quote Fintan O’Toole, that wise old bird of Irish philosophy, “an atrocity that cries out for accountability” – in which Adams has consistently denied any involvement. Sinn Fein announced that Adams’s “arrest” was political, a remark that got the usual tsk-tsk from Unionists and British alike. But alas, Theresa Villiers, the latest in the hordes of Northern Ireland secretaries to be visited upon Belfast, also announced, a wee bit before Adams’s “arrest”, that there would be no independent inquiry into the killing of 11 unarmed civilians in Ballymurphy in August 1971 by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, the most undisciplined British military unit to be sent to the province, which later killed another 14 civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday. In the Ballymurphy shooting, the Brits managed to kill a Catholic priest carrying an improvised white flag and a mother of eight children who went to help a wounded boy. The deaths of Father Hugh Mullan and Mrs Joan Connolly were also deaths that “cry out for accountability”. But of course, there will be none. Ms Villiers has seen to that.She also ensured that there would be no inquiry into the fire-bombing of the La Mon hotel in 1978, when the IRA burned 12 people to death. Families of the dead have their suspicions that transcripts of police interviews with IRA suspects to this crime were removed from the archives to protect important people involved in the “peace process” in Northern Ireland. No complaints about that, needless to say, from the IRA. But you can see the problem: if arresting Adams just before the European elections was not political, then surely the British refusal to inquire into the slaughter in Ballymurphy – assuming the soldiers involved have not died of old age – was political. After all, the Brits know who these soldiers were, their names, their ages and ranks. They have much more than the statements of two dead IRA supporters – the “evidence” against Adams – to go on. Now you may argue that the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday cost far too many millions of pounds to warrant another investigation into the Ballymurphy deaths. But then you may also ask why the soldiers who gave evidence to the original inquiry were given the cover of anonymity. This was something Gerry Adams was not offered – nor, given the favourable political fallout, was he likely to have asked for it. But then it would also be pleasant if the Brits who know something about the Dublin and Monaghan bombings during the worst days of the Irish war could pop over to Dublin and give a little evidence about this particular atrocity. No chance of that, of course. And you don’t have to stick in Ireland for further proof of legal hypocrisy. Take our beloved Home Secretary’s decision to deprive British immigrants of their British passports if they go to fight Assad’s regime in Syria. Quite apart from the fact that William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, and his friends originally supported the armed Syrian opposition, there are problems with the passport story. Many British supporters of Israel, for example, have fought on Israel’s behalf in Israeli uniform in that country’s wars. But what if they served in Israeli units known to have committed war crimes in Lebanon or Gaza? Or in the Israeli air force, which promiscuously kills civilians in war. Are they, too, to be deprived of their passports if they were not born in the UK? Of course not. One law for Muslims, another for non-Muslims – not unlike Spain’s offer of passports to the descendants of those driven from their homes in the 15th century, a generous act somewhat damaged by the fact that only Jews (not Muslims) may take advantage of it. We will not dwell upon all the other hypocrisies of the Middle East – the outrage at any Iranian interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, for example, when another country in the region has an awful lot of nuclear weapons; or US fury at Russian annexation of Crimea but no anger at all about the annexation of Golan or the theft of Arab land in the West Bank, which are equally illegal under international law. Upon such foundations is aggression built: the illegal invasion of Iraq, for instance. I contemplate all this because of a little research I’m undertaking about a Moroccan air force colonel who, in 1972, tried to stage a coup against the brutal King Hassan who was also, by the way, quite an expert on “disappearances”. Mohamed Amekrane flew to Gibraltar and threw himself upon the dodgy mercy of Her Majesty. He pleaded for asylum (after all, the coup had failed) but we packed him off back to Morocco because, while the European Convention on Human Rights gives anyone the right to leave his or her own country, no international treaty obliges a country to give that person asylum. So back Amekrane went – and was, of course, put to death. His widow eventually got £37,500 from the British government – ex gratia, needless to say, out of goodwill not guilt, you understand – and Colonel Amekrane was then erased from history. Interesting to see what happens to the ex-Brits who lose their passports for going to Syria – and have to go back to the country of their birth. They might be better off – and live longer lives – if they to go off to fight in another jihad. The Great War’s forgotten victims in the Levant Horrors of the Great War you will not read about this year: among the casualties were another million dead, the men, women and children of the Ottoman Levant – for which read modern-day Lebanon and Syria – who died of famine, victims of both the Allied blockade of the east Mediterranean coastline (which is why we ignore these particular souls) and of the Turkish army’s seizure of all food and farm animals from the civilian population; all this in addition to the million and a half slaughtered Armenians of 1915. Many Lebanese remember parents who ate nettles to stay alive, just as the Irish did in the famine. I have a book by Father Antoine Yammine, published in Cairo in 1922, illustrated with photos of stick-like children and of a priest in his habit lying dead on a Beirut street, another of a baby suckling at his dead mother’s breast outside their front door. “And some there be which have no memorial; who are perished as though they had never been"

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Follow the discussion Comments (5) Dashboard | Edit profile | Logout Logged in as ACHUSLA Sort by: Date Rating Last Activity +4 duplicitousdemocracy· 9 hours ago Robert Fisk puzzles me. He can write observant pieces such as this but on other occasions he seems to miss out the blatant provocation and involvement of Israel in Middle East affairs. British crimes in Ireland have thus far been largely conveniently forgotten but how can we keep ignoring them whilst the high profile arrest of Adams and other Republicans takes place? We either investigate all sides of the conflict or draw a line under it and that includes British Secret Service suspicions. In the interests of (albeit) an uneasy peace, I suggest the latter.  A pattern seems to be emerging quite recently of these 'enemies of the state' actually working for MI5 . Strange old world, eh? Report Reply +2 bozhidar balkas· 7 hours ago what can we do? the rich and powerful haven't left the planet yet and we cannot kick them out; so, exploitation, abuse, torture, genocides to continue... Report Reply +2 Andrew P Nichols· 6 hours ago It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. Harold Pinter 2008 Report Reply +2 bobby smiley· 6 hours ago Thank you Mr. Fisk for this most enlightening piece. It's been long in coming but we are getting there steadily. The menace of white Jewish supremacists with their genocidal impulses has to be resisted before it is too late. These psychopaths and their soulless offspring…... Report Reply +3 Haggai One NineGuest· 4 hours ago It's a pity that most commentators on Israel seem to be still unaware that the evil, hypocritical and cowardly nature of the Beast of the Middle East has been very evident right from its birth in 1919, when it arrived in Palestine, cowardly cowering behind the shorts and kilts of the English Establishment's military mercenaries.  It's influence on British politics is the prime reason for that country's current decline into the destitution among its working class that existed back in 1919.  Its influence on American politics was widely exposed 65 years ago, particularly by the well-known political commentator, Douglas Reed in his book Far and Wide.  It is very appropriate that Mr. Fisk reminds the Beast that their Lord and Messiah displayed his feelings about hypocrisy in a particularly emphatic manner

REAL NEWS : Chris Hedges on Obama's Syria Address

GESTAPO COURTS OXYMORON PEACE PROCESS WITHOUT DUE PROCESS BRITISH OCCUPIED IRELAND

Annie Machon

Director, LEAP, formerly MI5

Gestapo Courts

A lot of sound and fury has been expended in the British media over the last few months about the Coalition government's proposal to enact secret courts via the proposed Justice and Security Bill - purely for terrorist cases, you understand. Which, of course, is OK as we all know terrorists are by definition the Baddies.

Except we need to drill down into the detail of the proposals, have a look at some history, and think through the future implications.

The concept of secret courts emerged from the official UK spook sector - MI5 and MI6 have been lobbying hard for such protection over recent years. Their argument revolves around a number of civil cases, where British victims of extraordinary rendition and subsequent torture have sued the pants off the spies through civil courts and received some recompense for their years of suffering.

The most notorious case was that of Binyam Mohamed, who was repeatedly tortured in a black prison in Morocco, with British spies allegedly contributing to his questioning. And we're not talking about a few stress positions, awful as they are. Mohamed was strung up and had his penis repeatedly slashed with a razor.

MI5 and MI6 are aggrieved because they could not defend themselves in the resultant civil actions brought against them, and they (and their former political master Jack Straw) are particularly worried about future cases around the MI6-organised Libyan renditionsexposed last year. The spies' argument is that having to produce evidence in their own defence would damage that ever-flexible but curiously vague concept of "national security".

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?

The spooks have traditionally used the "national security" argument as the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. It has never been legally defined, but it is unfailingly effective with judges and politicians.

We saw similar arguments during the post-9/11 security flap, when many terrorist suspects were scooped up and interned in high security British prisons such as Belmarsh on the say-so of faceless intelligence officers. No evidence needed to be adduced, nor could it be challenged. The subsequent control order system was equally Kafkaesque.

That's not to say that certain interned individuals might not have been an active threat to the UK. However, in the "good" old days (god, I sound ancient), suspects would have had evidence gathered against them, been tried by a jury, convicted and imprisoned. The system was never perfect and evidence could be egregiously withheld, but at least appeals were possible, most notably in the case of the Birmingham Six.

Since 9/11 even breathing the word "terrorist" has meant that all these historic common law principles seem to have been jettisoned. Even before the proposed enshrinement of "secret courts" in the new Bill, they are already being used in the UK - the Special Immigration Appeal Commission (SIAC) tribunals hear secret evidence and the defendant's chosen lawyer is not allowed to attend. Instead a special, government-approved advocate is appointed to "represent the interests" of the defendant who is not allowed to know what his accusers have to say. And there was no appeal.

But all this is so unnecessary. The powers are already in place to be used (and abused) to shroud our notionally open court process in secrecy. Judges can exclude the press and the public from court rooms by declaring the session in camera for all or part of the proceedings. Plus, in national security cases, government ministers can also issue Public Interest Immunity Certificates (PIIs) that not only bar the press from reporting the proceedings, but can also ban them from reporting they are gagged - the governmental super-injunction.

So the powers already exist to protect "national security". No, the real point of the new secret courts is to ensure that the defendant and, particularly in my view, their chosen lawyers cannot hear the allegations if based on intelligence of any kind. Yet even the spies themselves agree that the only type of intelligence that really needs to be kept secret involves ongoing operations, agent names, and sensitive operational techniques.

And as for the right to be tried by a jury of your peers - forget it. Of course juries will have no place in such secret courts. The only time we have seen such draconian judicial measures in the UK outside a time of official war was during the Troubles in Northern Ireland - the infamous Diplock Courts - beginning in the 1970s and which incredibly were still in use this year.

As a former MI5 intelligence officer, I am not an apologist of terrorism although I can understand the social injustice that can lead to it. However, I'm also very aware that the threat can be artificially ramped up and manipulated to achieve preconceived political goals.

I would suggest that the concept of secret courts will prove fatally dangerous to our democracy. It may start with the concept of getting the Big Bad Terrorist, but in more politically unstable or stringent economic times this concept is wide open to mission creep.

We are already seeing a slide towards expanding the definition of "terrorist" to include "domestic extremists", activists, single issue campaigners et al, as I have written before. And just recently information was leaked about a new public-private EU initiative, Clean IT, that proposes ever more invasive and draconian policing powers to hunt down "terrorists" on the internet. This proposal fails to define terrorism, but does provide for endemic electronic surveillance of the EU. Pure corporatism.

Allowing secret courts to try people on the say-so of a shadowy, unaccountable and burgeoning spy community lands us straight back in the pages of history: La Terreur of revolutionary France, the creepy surveillance of the Stasi, or the disappearances and torture of the Gestapo.

Have we learned nothing?

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DEMANDS USA OUT OF IRELAND POST McKEVITT FBI FRAME-UP PRE SYRIA

A report this Thursday will reveal MI5, the FBI in the USA, and special branch in the Irish State in the south, "starved" paramilitary police in British Occupied Ireland, of vital intelligence, that would have prevented a massacre, in which twenty-nine people died after a 500lb bomb exploded in the middle of Omagh..The victims families commissioned a private report by a London law firm, the SBP, which included experts, who obtained sensitive intelligence, demonstrating major failings by all the Police forces, before the attack, which caused the massacre.

Amnesty International has challenged the American government, with Ireland and the British to co-operate with a new inquiry into the bombing. Amnesty says said there are major concerns about the way intelligence was used leading up to the attack. Amnesty's director in British Occupied Ireland, Patrick Corrigan, said: "Fifteen years since the bomb ripped through Omagh, taking lives and causing injury, the families bereaved and those injured by the bomb are still left seeking the full truth about what happened that day and whether it could have been prevented.Beyond addressing the families' need for answers, there remains a broader public interest in establishing such an inquiry, in order to prevent such a tragedy recurring.The families have had to suffer the indignity of being drip-fed information over the years, with new wounds opened each time and with none of the bombers ever being held criminally responsible.It is doubly sad that the bereaved families and those injured have now had to commission their own report as a result of the many partial investigations, each one of which opens up new questions."

Michael Gallagher a relative said: "All good policing is based on intelligence especially prior intelligence before any criminal act is committed. In the case of the events running up to the Omagh bomb it is now clear that the police in the north were starved of information." Aidan Gallagher,the father of a young man killed, said access to new intelligence, proved the FBI, the police and the Garda's crime and security branch all withheld critical information, saying "The security forces in America, Britain and the republic had two key agents inside the Real IRA but did not share the information they were providing to the police in Northern Ireland. Should the state fail to do so it is our view that they will be failing in complying with their obligations under article 2(1) and article 3 of the European convention on human rights," it said. "This report is compiled from a significant amount of information, some of a sensitive nature, which has come into the possession of the families."

The report to be released  on Thursday, will focus on the role of two agents who infiltrated the group. David Rupert, an American gangster/informer run by the FBI and Paddy Dixon, a criminal who acquired stolen cars in the southern Irish state, for transporting car bombs into British Occupied Ireland.The Gangster Rupert, came to Ireland in the mid 1990s and volunteered his services for the Continuity IRA  but was rejected and later volunteered for the Real IRA.The gangster Rupert infiltrated the Irish American community in the States, while being directed by the FBI as their agent. In 1997 British intelligence sneakily took control of him as well. Later an FBI agent took him to London, where he was introduced to an MI5 transvestite who called himself/herself Norman. Norma the Brit whispered to Rupert not to pass any serious information to the police in southern Ireland, branding them as eejits. and instead gave him a PO. box address, with a secret contact phone number.

MI5 then tried again to infiltrate the Continuity IRA, getting Rupert to offer intelligence, while willing to sacrifice more British army and police bases, as nice juicy targets for the IRA's mortat bombs in British Occupied Ireland. Posing as American tourists, admiring  the installations, Rupert, his wife and other American agents, would stop at border-crossings, gawk and take pictures, making hundreds of videos of themselves, police, soldiers for tageting inside the bases. According to the Omagh Support group new intelligence files demonstrate Rupert and the FBI, were also aiding the Real IRA, sending parts from America to bomb the British. It was Rupert's false, untruthful evidence, that sent the innocent brother-in-law of Bobby Sands, Michael McKevitt to prison for 20 years on false evidence, coached by the FBI, against the loving Irish father and devoted husband of Bobby Sands sister.

Dixon meanwhile, provided intelligence to a handler of the Irish state garda (police) on the IRA. He had a connection with a republican in Dublin called "the Long Fellow". Senior Garda ordered the agent to reactivate an old relationship with "the Long Fellow", who had a breaker's yard in south Dublin, where cars stolen by Dixon, were re-plated and explosives hidden inside the vehicles. Dixon gave the Garda vital information on the Real IRA, with inside information on more than nine Real IRA attacks, culminating in the Omagh bombing.The victims families maintain, that the "starving of intelligence" of Rupert and Dixon by MI5, was meant to improve their credibility within the the Real IRA, despite the huge loss of life, caused by the British directing the innocent crowd,.towards the bomb after an IRA warning, where they were totally informed about the precise location.The Omagh campaigners will demonstrate, that this lethal action by MI5 and the British, caused the catastrophe, whether by false Flag intent or American dirty war disinformation, to discredit the Irish insurgency with the bombing. 

Michael McKevitt, the totally innocent, brother-in-law of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, was indirectly made the fall guy and the Irishman, was convicted on the false FBI evidence, rehearsed with FBI Gangster/Informer, Rupert, under direct FBI control. The affair has considerably soured Irish/American relations and in the run up to another invasion of Syria, there have been strident demands, that the American Airforce and Army stay out of Ireland altogther. They are no longer welcome, as the collaborate with the occupying British. imperialists, invading country after country and recruiting senior Irish politicians, as warmongers for their international war crimes with the British.The Omagh Support Group are also demanding a cross-border inquiry into the American/British bombing in Omagh.