Obamessiah Says We Leave Iraq 'With Heads Held High'

Not counting those without heads...

Source: CBS News via Media Monarchy

President Obama marked the end of the United States' almost nine-year war in Iraq on Monday, saying at an appearance with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the final U.S. troops leave Iraq this year "with their heads held high."

Mr. Obama is taking something of a victory lap this week for fulfilling his campaign promise to end the war, which will effectively end when the several thousand remaining troops exit the country by December 31. On Saturday, he thanked service members at the annual Army-Navy football game; on Wednesday, he and first lady Michele Obama will visit Fort Bragg in North Carolina to speak to troops about the war.

"This is a season of homecomings," Mr. Obama said Monday at the White House, flanked by al-Maliki. "Military families across America are being reunited for the holidays."

Report: Iran To Practice Closing The Strait Of Hormuz

Source: Prison Planet
Paul Joseph Watson

The Iranian Army has refused to comment after a member of the country’s National Security Committee said today that Iran was to practice closing the Strait of Hormuz, the most important choke point for oil shipments in the world.

“The legislator, Parviz Sarvari, told the student news agency ISNA: “Soon we will hold a military manoeuvre on how to close the Strait of Hormuz. If the world wants to make the region insecure, we will make the world insecure,” reports Reuters.

The Straight of Hormuz, just 34 miles wide at its narrowest point, is a key transport passage for petroleum exporting countries from the Persian Gulf, with the 15.5 million barrels of oil that pass through it each day representing 33% of the world’s total oil shipments.

The Iranian military refused to comment on the report, but Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the shipping channel in the event of a US or Israeli-led attack, a potential action the United States has characterized as an act of war.

Following speculation that sanctions would be placed on Iranian oil exports, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast warned last week that oil prices would soar above $250 dollars barrel.

In response , US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated, “Any disruption of the free flow of commerce through the Persian Gulf is a very grave threat to all of us and a red line for the US.”

Experts have forecast that a 30 day closure of the Strait of Hormuz would send oil prices skyrocketing to between $300-$500 dollars a barrel, a level that would trigger global economic instability and cost the U.S. nearly $75 billion in GDP.

As we reported last week, the United States has deployed a total of three warships to the Middle East, along with several other attack boats, as tensions in the region escalate.

With the USS John C. Stennis already stationed just outside Iranian territorial waters, the the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Carl Vinson are on their way to join her.

The United States now has a total of five major aircraft carriers deployed around the world, the same number of warships that were in action shortly before the invasion of Iraq in early 2003.

Facebook Page Removed after Uploading Video Exposing Obviously Skewed Barbara Walters Interview with Assad

Source: End The Lie
Madison Ruppert

In a clear act of censorship, after a video was uploaded to the official Facebook page for the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) which exposed the highly manipulated ABC interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the page was removed by Facebook.

The video was of a press conference held by the spokesman for the Syrian Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Ministry, Jihad Makdessi, showing how the ABC interview was deceitfully edited.

“The conference showed how the US TV channel ABC manipulated the content of their interview with President Bashar al-Assad and distorted it through editing and omission,” writes SANA.

Syrians on Facebook have apparently already created a new page dedicated to the Syrian TV station, but this instance of Facebook controlling the narrative is hardly something which can be ignored.

The entire interview, conducted by Barbara Walters, is an exercise in Western propaganda which is completely divorced from objective reality and instead based solely on pulling the heart strings of viewers in hopes that they will not go through the effort of verifying any of the claims.

In this article we will also explore just how Walters goes about misrepresenting the truth and misleading the viewer during the interview.

Why you shouldn’t trust the Western media’s picture of Syria

The Federal Reserve Cartel: Part III: The Roundtable and The Illuminati

Source: The Intel Hub
Dean Henderson

(Excerpted from Chapter 19: The Eight Families: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf…)

You can read part 1 here and part 2 here

According to former British intelligence agent John Coleman’s book, The Committee of 300, the Rothschilds exert political control through the secretive Business Roundtable, which they created in 1909 with the help of Lord Alfred Milner and South African industrialist Cecil Rhodes.

The Rhodes Scholarship is granted by Oxford University, while oil industry propagandist Cambridge Energy Research Associates operates out of the Rhodes-supported Cambridge University.

Rhodes founded De Beers and Standard Chartered Bank.  According to Gary Allen’s expose, The Rockefeller Files, Milner financed the Russian Bolsheviks on Rothschild’s behalf, with help from Jacob Schiff and Max Warburg.

In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour penned a letter to Zionist Second Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild in which he expressed support for a Jewish homeland on Palestinian-controlled lands in the Middle East. [1]

The Balfour Declaration justified the brutal seizure of Palestinian lands for the post-WWII establishment of Israel.  Israel would serve, not as some high-minded “Jewish homeland”, but as lynchpin in Rothschild/Eight Families control over the world’s oil supply.

Baron Edmond de Rothschild built the first oil pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean to bring BP Iranian oil to Israel.  He founded Israeli General Bank and Paz Oil. He is considered by many the father of modern Israel. [2]

Roundtable inner Circle of Initiates included Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes, Arthur Balfour, Albert Grey and Lord Nathan Rothschild.  The Roundtable takes its name from the legendary knight of King Arthur, whose tale of the Holy Grail is paramount to the Illuminati notion of Sangreal or holy blood.

John Coleman writes in The Committee of 300, “Round Tablers armed with immense wealth from gold, diamond and drug monopolies fanned out throughout the world to take control of fiscal and monetary policies and political leadership in all countries where they operated.”

While Cecil Rhodes and the Oppenheimers went to South Africa, the Kuhn Loebs were off to re-colonize America.  Rudyard Kipling was sent to India. The Schiffs and Warburgs manhandled Russia. The Rothschilds, Lazards and Israel Moses Seifs pushed into the Middle East.  In Princeton, New Jersey the Round Table founded the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) as partner to its All Souls College at Oxford.  IAS was funded by the Rockefeller’s General Education Board. IAS members Robert Oppenheimer, Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein created the atomic bomb. [3]

The Milky Way's Two Billion Earthlike Planets: An Update

Source: The Daily Galaxy

"Aliens could have been pointing their antennas at Earth for 4.6 billion years, without picking up a signal. Maybe the inhabitants [of a Twin Earth] are at the level of the classical Romans ... or maybe trilobites. We need to check out hundreds of thousands of Earthlike worlds."

Dimitar Sasselov -- Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

NASA announced that Kepler has uncovered 1,094 more potential planets, twice the number it previously had been tracking, including more than 500 planets found to orbit stars beyond our solar system. IThe newly discovered Kepler 22-B is the smallest and the best positioned to have liquid water on its surface – among the ingredients necessary for life on Earth. It is 2.4 times the size of the Earth, putting it in a class known as “super-Earths”.

“We have now got good planet confirmation with Kepler-22B,” said Bill Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center. “We are certain that it is in the habitable zone and if it has a surface, it ought to have a nice temperature,” he said.

Our Milky Way galaxy may be home to at least two billion Earthlike planets, a new study based on initial data from from NASA's Kepler space telescope says -- a number that is actually far lower than many scientists anticipated, which could make it hard to find twin "Earths" in our galaxy.

Based on what Kepler's found so far, the study authors think that up to 2.7 percent of all sunlike stars in the Milky Way host so-called Earth analogs. Kepler will collect transit data for a minimum of three and a half years, allowing for a more complete planetary census at a later date.

"There are about a hundred billion sunlike stars within the Milky Way," said Joe Catanzarite, a scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Two percent of those might have Earth analogs, so you have two billion Earth analog planets in the galaxy," he added. "Then you start thinking about other galaxies. There are something like 50 billion, and if each one has two billion Earthlike planets, it's mind boggling."

Pakistan: U.S. Drones In Its Air Space Will Be SHOT Down

Source: KHQ via StratRisks

Pakistan will shoot down any U.S. drone that intrudes its air space per new directives, a senior Pakistani official told NBC News on Saturday.

According to the new Pakistani defense policy, “Any object entering into our air space, including U.S. drones, will be treated as hostile and be shot down,” a senior Pakistani military official told NBC News.

The policy change comes just weeks after a deadly NATO attack on Pakistani military checkpoints accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, prompting Pakistani officials to order all U.S. personnel out of a remote airfield in Pakistan.

Pakistan told the U.S. to vacate Shamsi Air Base by December 11.

A senior military official from Quetta, Pakistan, confirmed to NBC News on Saturday that the evacuation of the base, used for staging classified drone flights directed against militants, “will be completed tomorrow,” according to NBC’s Fakhar ur Rehman.

Pakistan’s Frontier Corps security forces took control of the base Saturday evening after most U.S. military personnel left, Xinhua news agency reported. Civil aviation officials also moved in Saturday, Xinhua said.

Pakistani Military Chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani had issued multiple directives since the Nov. 26 NATO attack, which included orders to shoot down U.S. drones, senior military officials confirmed to NBC News on Saturday.

It was unclear Saturday whether orders to fire upon incoming U.S. drones was part of the initial orders.

The Pakistani airbase had been used by U.S. forces, including the CIA, to stage elements of a clandestine U.S. counter-terrorism operation to attack militants linked to al-Qaida, the Taliban and Pakistan’s home-grown Haqqani network, using unmanned drone aircraft armed with missiles.

President Barack Obama stepped up the drone campaign after he took office. U.S. officials say it has produced major successes in decimating the central leadership of al-Qaida and putting associated militant groups on the defensive.

Since 2004, U.S. drones have carried out more than 300 attacks inside Pakistan.

Pakistani authorities started threatening U.S. personnel with eviction from the Shamsi base in the wake of the raid last May in which U.S. commandos killed Osama bin Laden at his hide-out near Islamabad without notifying Pakistani officials in advance.

Drones Officially Take Flight for Domestic Law Enforcement, Heralding a New Level of Police State

Source: Activist Post
Michael Edwards

It is a sign of just how fast the police state is advancing that drones in American skies have gone from conspiracy theory to admitted fact in about a year.

In a precedent-setting event, local law enforcement in North Dakota nabbed three suspected armed men with the help of a Predator B unmanned drone.  It was only after the drone confirmed that the men were unarmed that police moved in to make the arrest.

It has now become clear that, as we have written and warned about for the past year, the drones that were supposedly commissioned strictly as tools for border control will now patrol inland for suspected criminals on American soil, heralding a new level of police state oppression.

In April I wrote about the future expansion of unmanned drones over America based on the admissions made by two-star General, John Priddy, from the U.S. National Air Security Operations Center, evidenced in the video below, that the continued expansion of predator drone surveillance was a stated goal for the coming years.

His comments were echoed by Al Palmer, Director of Unmanned Aircraft Training at the world's largest center at the University of North Dakota, which just so happens to be the location of the arrest alluded to above, that "The world is going to spend $80 billion on unmanned aircraft between now and 2016."

As the Los Angeles Times report states:

Congress first authorized Customs and Border Protection to buy unarmed Predators in 2005. Officials in charge of the fleet cite broad authority to work with police from budget requests to Congress that cite 'interior law enforcement support' as part of their mission.

True to form, once the cat is out of the bag, we learn just how extensive the program really is.

Michael C. Kostelnik, a retired Air Force general who heads the office that supervises the drones, said Predators are flown 'in many areas around the country, not only for federal operators, but also for state and local law enforcement and emergency responders in times of crisis.'

Beyond the troubling announcement that military drones have arrived from overseas to conduct operations in America, the way in which this first arrest was made -- and the family that was targeted -- should be equally disturbing. 

Life Possible on 'Large Parts' of Mars: Study

Source: PhysOrg
Amy Coopes

Australian scientists who modeled conditions on Mars to examine how much of the red planet was habitable said that “large regions” could sustain life.

Charley Lineweaver’s team, from the Australian National University, compared models of temperature and pressure conditions on Earth with those on Mars to estimate how much of the distant planet was liveable for Earth-like organisms.

While just one percent of Earth’s volume — from core to upper atmosphere – was occupied by life, Lineweaver said their world-first modelling showed three percent of Mars was habitable, though most of it was underground.

“What we tried to do, simply, was take almost all of the information we could and put it together and say ‘is the big picture consistent with there being life on Mars?’,” the astrobiologist told AFP on Monday.

“And the simple answer is yes… There are large regions of Mars that are compatible with terrestrial life.”Where previous studies had taken a “piecemeal” approach by examining particular sites on Mars for signs of life, Lineweaver said his research was a “comprehensive compilation” of the entire planet using decades of data.

Frozen water has been found at the poles on Mars and the ANU study examined how much of the planet could sustain water “that could be habitable by Earth-like standards by Earth-like microbes“.

READ FULL ARTICLE

Corbett Report Episode 212 - Remembering Mae Brussell

Source: Corbett Report
James Corbett

Incensed by the lies told to the American public about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Mae Brussell transformed from an ordinary Beverly Hills housewife to a voracious researcher and tenacious broadcaster. Overcoming the incredulity of the public, the prejudices of her peers, and death threats from the establishment, Mae took to the Santa Cruz airwaves in 1971 to inform the public about the real powers behind the throne and didn’t stop researching, writing or broadcasting until her untimely death in 1988. Join us today on The Corbett Report as we shine a spotlight on the life and work of Mae Brussell.

Don't Be Fooled: President Obama Will Not Veto the NDAA

Source: End The Lie
Madison Ruppert

Those who are still relying on President Barack Hussein Obama to veto the National Defense Authorization Act are either easily deceived or simply delusional.

President Obama will not veto the NDAA Fiscal Year 2012, also known as S.1867 and H.R.1540, and there is simply no debating it.

For those who are unaware, S.1867/H.R.1540, or the NDAA, would allow the military to round up and indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or trial on suspicion of being a terrorist or linked to terrorists.

The best possible case scenario under this bill is that Americans like myself who are opposed to the disturbing turn our government is taking would be held as so-called Civilian Internees, and this scenario is far from a positive one.

The fact that Obama will not veto this legislation becomes painfully obvious when one realizes that Senator Carl Levin of Michigan actually revealed on the Senate floor that it was the Obama administration that requested that the language preventing section 1031 from being applied to U.S. citizens be removed.

You can see Senator Levin, who was involved with secretly drafting the bill with Senator John McCain, admit this in the following video:

Even if the Obama administration wasn’t behind pushing to have the NDAA apply to American citizens, which Levin clearly revealed on the Senate floor, his word is far from reliable.