2938-ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? | View Thread

This was one of the first posts I made after the terrorist false flag in Paris (HERE). Zerohedge has now picked it up, and since many of you missed it, I’m posting it again tonight. Tyler’s article also adds important insights. If you missed it, take a look at this video!

I would also like to refer you to the two important insights I published earlier today HERE. Please share them widely!

Let me also urge you to keep track of the now very rapidly moving news through Zerohedge.com ~J

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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-17/theres-no-such-thing-isis-journalist-destroys-wests-terror-narrative-warns-crackdown

On Saturday, the day after the massacre in France which turned the streets of Paris into a war zone and left some 130 civilians dead, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had a message for the West.

While condemning the attacks and branding the perpetrators “savages”, he was also quick to note that Syria has been dealing with this brand of terrorism for nearly five years straight. In what amounted to an “I told you so” moment, Assad also said the following:“We said, don’t take what is happening in Syria lightly. Unfortunately, European officials did not listen.”

Assad also took the opportunity to once again suggest that the West’s sponsorship of the regional powers who support (both explicitly and implicitly) Sunni extremism in Syria is the root cause of the problem although the language he used was a bit less harsh than that which he employed in September (presumably because he was trying not to inflame tensions less than 24 hours after the Paris massacre). Here’s what he said: “The question that is being asked throughout France today is, was France’s policy over the past five years the right one? The answer is no.”

Presumably, Assad was referencing the West’s support for the various militant groups seeking to oust his government. Those groups, including ISIS, have received money, guns, and training at various times from the CIA, from Turkey, from Saudi Arabia, and from Qatar. The situation on the ground is of course so fluid that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of where the guns, money, and fighters end up, meaning that even those observers who shun conspiracy theories would be hard pressed to contend that the US has not at least indirectly armed and trained ISIS.

Perhaps the most overlooked passage in all of the leaked documents that have surfaced thus far is the following from a declassified Pentagon report dated August 2012 and obtained by Judicial Watch:

…there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

That’s it.

That’s the smoking gun and nobody seems to care.

The passage above clearly states that the US knew this was coming and viewed it as “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want” on the way to not only “isolating” Assad, but also to breaking Tehran’s Shiite crescent.

Although that’s such a critical excerpt, it has been habitually overlooked, and ironically, tragedies like that which occurred in Paris only serve to galvanize public opinion around an ideal rather than around the search for answers and that, is a dangerous, dangerous thing.

In that context and (importantly) in the context of French President Francois Hollande’s push to alter the French Constitution, we bring you the following interview with journalist Gearoid O’Colmain who pretty much blows apart the entire charade in the space of ten minutes.

“There is no such thing as ISIS. ISIS is a creation of the US, we know that from official sources of the US military themselves and declassified documents”…

Enjoy:

Credit: The Guardian

An excellent background study of ISIS fighters, for those who want to be informed. Those concentrating on spiritual practice may want to skip this article.

What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters

They’re drawn to the movement for reasons that have little to do with belief in extremist Islam.

Lydia Wilson, The Nation, October 21, 2015

No sooner am I settled in an interviewing room in the police station of Kirkuk, Iraq, than the first prisoner I am there to see is brought in, flanked by two policemen and in handcuffs. I awkwardly rise, unsure of the etiquette involved in interviewing an ISIS fighter who is facing the death penalty. He is small, much smaller than I, on first appearances just a boy in trouble with the police, his eyes fixed on the floor, his face a mask. We all sit on armchairs lined up against facing walls, in a room cloudy with cigarette smoke and lit by fluorescent strip lighting, a room so small that my knees almost touch the prisoner’s—but he still doesn’t look up. I have interviewed plenty of soldiers on the other side of this fight, mostly from the Kurdish forces (known as pesh merga) but also fighters in the Iraqi army (known as the Iraqi Security Forces or ISF), both Arab and Kurdish. ISIS fighters, of course, are far more elusive, unless you are traveling to the Islamic State itself, but I prefer to keep my head on my shoulders.

Rumors abound as to summary executions of ISIS prisoners without due process, but of course no one will go on the record to report such abuses of human rights. Anecdotally, we were told about a prisoner who was interrogated for 30 days but only said “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) for the entire month. “Wouldn’t you shoot him?” they asked. One peshmerga gave an eyewitness report about five prisoners captured, questioned, and shot in the head. We spoke to various military leaders who said they didn’t want to take prisoners, since injured bodies are often booby-trapped and kill approaching soldiers; for this reason the PKK has a take-no-prisoners policy. (The PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, is the Kurdish separatist group based in Turkey and northern Iraq that is on the international terrorism list; in proving themselves indispensable in the fight against ISIS, they have caused a dilemma for Western governments. They are seemingly not so indispensable that those governments have felt compelled to oppose Turkey’s recent bombing campaign against them.)

Another source told us of the futility of holding prisoners for their bargaining power: “With ISIS, there’s no compromise, no negotiation…they’re not interested in prisoner exchange because they believe that they’re better off dead.” Whatever the truth of the behavior of the military and security services, the fact remains: ISIS prisoners are hard to find.

One evening we watch a documentary on BBC Arabic profiling Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir, the head of police in the Iraqi governorate of Kirkuk. He is shown policing the town of Kirkuk, personally patrolling the streets and houses, arresting people suspected of fighting for ISIS. Kirkuk, then, seems like a good place to start: At least there are prisoners there, shown by the BBC, no less.

And so my colleagues and I drive to Kirkuk from the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, Erbil, to meet Qadir. Despite the workload of maintaining security in this uneasy city of mixed ethnicity (mostly Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen), rife with ISIS sleeper cells, he is welcoming, sending armed guards to bring us in from the highway to the city. We are served tea in his office, and he sits with us for half an hour before we are taken to the interview room with two colonels. (The week after I left the country he and other officers would be caught in a huge car bomb; Qadir was wounded for the fourteenth time in the service of Kurdistan.)

Once the first prisoner is there, and with no possibility of small talk, we launch straight into the research questions I am there to ask, the same questions asked of fighters and non-fighters all over the country, questions I’ve asked in Lebanon too, and which have been replicated in other parts of the world by my colleagues at Artis International, a consortium for the scientific study in the service of conflict resolution. The research is based on cognitive and moral psychology, exploring when and why humans commit the most extreme sacrifices—including their lives and the lives of their families—for abstract causes, for so-called “sacred values.” Our research tries to determine why people will change their minds about these sacred values, and whether and how they will change their behavior in defending them. We hope to find out how to persuade people to abandon violent pathways, though I am fast losing faith in that possibility in this part of the world.

For this trip I am accompanied by senior colleagues; by Scott Atran, an academic based in France; and by Doug Stone, a retired American general who spent over two years in Iraq during the US occupation, interviewing prisoners on a daily basis. This, of course, changes the interview experience fundamentally, crowding the room and giving the event more importance, more formality, but also bringing entirely different questions, emphases, and expertise to bear and so drawing out many different angles on the interviewees. In any case, informality is never going to be achieved with prisoners on death row.

First are questions probing perceptions of the strength of various groups—some of which the interviewee might have sympathy with (although he might not express this). Other groups he would quite clearly consider to be the Other, the Enemy. I bring out a flashcard with pictures of half-naked men on it, ranging from the fairly puny to the biggest bodybuilder—each head replaced by a flag of the Islamic State. Whatever this youngster was expecting, whatever he’s been asked before—this was neither. He looks up, startled, at my colleague Hoshang Waziri—his first human reaction—who begins to explain.

“This is the Islamic State—look, this is the flag here,” Hoshang says, pointing at the bodybuilder and flexing his biceps. “This picture shows the Islamic State as the strongest it could be. Here, they are very, very weak; and here are all the things in the middle. How strong do you think they are?” The boy timidly points at the weakest—to be expected, as he doesn’t want to seem to be a fan—and we move to a similar picture, but with the Kurdish flag rather than the Islamic State flag superimposed on the bodies. “Now the peshmerga: How strong are they?”

The prisoner got the hang of the question, and points to the second-strongest picture. In other pictures, he decides that the Iraqi army is in the middle, Iran a little weaker than that, and America the strongest. (He hasn’t heard of the PKK, despite their repeated victories over ISIS.) We ask him to rank all the forces, using the cards, and then I realize that he is still handcuffed and I ask for them to be taken off. In the ensuing hiatus, with policemen fetching keys and walking to and fro, I try to chat more informally, and finally he looks at me, answering questions in one-word answers as to his age, background, education, family. Slowly, with snippets emerging from the rest of the interview, I piece together a picture that is to be repeated, with only minor differences, with other prisoners we talk to that day, stories familiar to General Stone from during the allied occupation, and to journalists and researchers I’ve spoken to since.

This man is 26, the eldest of 17 children from two mothers (that is, his father had two wives at the same time), from Kirkuk. He completed sixth grade, meaning that at least he was literate, unlike others we were to interview. He is married, with two children, a boy named “Rasuul,” meaning Prophet, and a girl named “Rusil,” the plural of Prophet—indicating the centrality of Islam to his life. He was working as a laborer to support his huge family when he hurt his back and lost his job. It was then, his story goes, that a friend, from the same tribe but only distantly related, approached him with the offer to work for ISIS. The story has been honed through repeated interrogation and the trial, and comes out pat. Life under the Islamic State was just terror, he says; he only fought because he was terrorized. Others may have done it from belief, but he did not. His family needed the money, and this was the only opportunity to provide for them.

Later in the interview we find out just how committed he is to his family, first with flashcards that we use to test the degree of fusion of the individual with various groups. We ask about Iraq, Islam, family, friends, and the Islamic State. The choices are again made pictorially: We use a set of two increasingly overlapping circles (at one end of the spectrum the circles are not even touching, at the other they are fully overlapping, with four circles of varying degrees of overlap in between), and again, they are unexpected and confusing to the prisoner—there is not an obvious “right” answer for most of them. The man is drawn out of his shell in spite of himself, losing his self-consciousness in his concentration and his questions to Hoshang. Eventually he decides that he is almost, but not entirely, fused with Iraq and with Islam, completely separate from the Islamic State (again, to be expected), barely connected to friends (“I have no friends”), and fully fused with his family. In fact, his family is the only group he was fully fused with, a decision that took no time at all. During more informal questioning about his family and tribe comes this telling statement: “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war…. all I want is to be with my family, my children.”

When he has been taken away we have the chance to find out just what he was found guilty of, how they found him, and what the evidence was. He was a master of the car bomb, detonating at least four of them in Kirkuk itself and also one scooter bomb, which exploded in a crowded souq selling weapons, killing many scores of people and also weakening the ability of local residents to fight ISIS. He was found through the capture of one of the financers of the sleeper cells in Kirkuk, who had on him a list of pseudonyms along with phone numbers and amounts of money. The police had this man call each person on the list, a cell of six, and set up meetings, where the police captured them—all of them swept up in one day. When the ISIS bomber saw that they were there “he collapsed; he gave us 5 pages of confession.” He stuck to his confession in court, where he was tried under Article 40, the Iraqi law on terrorism, which carries the death penalty.

Why did he do all these things? Many assume that these fighters are motivated by a belief in the Islamic State, a caliphate ruled by a caliph with the traditional title Emir al-Muminiin, “Commander of the faithful,” a role currently held by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; that fighters all over the world are flocking to the area for a chance to fight for this dream. But this just doesn’t hold for the prisoners we are interviewing. They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate. But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.

In fact, Erin Saltman, senior counter-extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, says that there is now less emphasis on knowledge of Islam in the recruitment phase. “We are seeing a movement away from strict religious ideological training as a requirement for recruitment,” she told me. “If we were looking at foreign fighter recruits to Afghanistan 10 or 20 years ago, there was intensive religious and theological training attached to recruitment. Nowadays, we see that recruitment strategy has branched out to a much broader audience with many different pull factors.”

There is no question that these prisoners I am interviewing are committed to Islam; it is just their own brand of Islam, only distantly related to that of the Islamic State. Similarly, Western fighters traveling to the Islamic State are also deeply committed, but it’s to their own idea of jihad rather than one based on sound theological arguments or even evidence from the Qur’an. As Saltman said, “Recruitment [of ISIS] plays upon desires of adventure, activism, romance, power, belonging, along with spiritual fulfillment.” That is, Islam plays a part, but not necessarily in the rigid, Salafi form demanded by the leadership of the Islamic State.

More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

An illustration of the less-than-total commitment to the cause of the Islamic State by Iraqis came from the Kurdish peshmerga Gen. Aziz Waysi, commander of the elite Zerevani (“Golden”) forces. He relates an overheard conversation between an ISIS fighter on the battleground and his leader, via a walkie-talkie previously confiscated from an ISIS corpse. “My brother is with me, but he is dead, and we are surrounded, we need help at least to take away my brother’s body,” General Waysi heard, and then the reply: “What else could you want? Your brother is in heaven and you are about to be.” This answer wasn’t what the poor surrounded young man was hoping for. “Please come and rescue me,” he said, “That heaven, I don’t want it.” But they didn’t, leaving him to whatever paradise awaited.

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 11/18/2015 4:21:18 PM
	Woman blows herself up, man killed, in massive Paris assault By Guy Jackson with Sarah BRETHES in Saint-Denis4 hours ago Police conduct an anti-terror operation in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on November 18, 2015, five days after the deadly terror attacks in the capital (AFP Photo/Kenzo Tribouillard) View Gallery Paris (AFP) - A woman blew herself up and a suspected jihadist was killed during a huge police assault in Paris Wednesday targeting the suspected mastermind of last week's attacks in the capital. Related Stories Two killed in fierce police raid targeting Paris attack commander AFP Police hurt during anti-terrorist raid in northern Paris: source AFP Europe on edge as hunt on for ninth Paris attack suspect AFP Two die in police raid targeting suspected Paris attack mastermind Reuters 2 dead, 7 arrested in raid targeting Paris attack mastermind Associated Press Explosive Cryptocurrency Replacing the US Dollar? Wall Street Daily Sponsored  Gunfire and explosions rocked the Saint-Denis area in the north of the capital near the Stade de France stadium from before dawn as terrified residents were evacuated or told to stay in their homes. Authorities arrested seven people, while five police officers suffered minor injuries in the operation which turned into a seven-hour stand-off between security forces and a group of people holed up in an apartment. Gunfire first rang out in the darkness at around 4.00am (0300 GMT) in the streets close to where three suicide bombers had detonated their explosives outside the stadium at the start of Friday's attacks. Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said telephone surveillance and witness reports "led us to believe" that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of Friday's series of attacks in Paris that killed 129 people, had been in the apartment. However, Molins added it was too early to say if he was among those arrested or killed. View gallery French soldiers and members of police special forces stand guard in the northern Paris suburb of Sai … Abaaoud is an Islamic State fighter who was previously thought to be in Syria after fleeing raids in his native Belgium earlier this year. Residents of the Paris suburb, some of whom were evacuated in their underwear, said they had been caught in a terrifying exchange of fire. Hayat, 26, had been leaving a friend's apartment where she had spent the night when the shots erupted. "I heard gunfire," she said. "I could have been hit by a bullet. I never thought terrorists could have hid here." The raid came after footage from the scene of one of Paris attacks revealed a ninth suspect may have taken part. It is known that seven were killed in the carnage on Friday, most after detonating suicide belts. View gallery Candles and flowers are laid at the base of the Monument a la Republique in Paris, in tribute to the … It was not clear if the ninth man was one of two suspected accomplices detained in Belgium or was still on the run, potentially with 26-year-old fugitive Frenchman Salah Abdeslam who took part in the attacks with his suicide-bomber brother Brahim. Police also carried out multiple raids in southwest France. The operations were part of an anti-terrorism strategy but not directly linked to the Paris attacks, an investigator said. - Extending the emergency - French President Francois Hollande was to hold discussions Wednesday on extending to three months the state of emergency declared after the worst attacks in French history. Lawmakers will vote on the proposal on Thursday and Friday. As police stepped up the hunt for the fugitives, French and Russian jets pounded IS targets in the group's Syrian stronghold of Raqa for a third consecutive day. View gallery The police raid in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis came as Europe was placed on high alert after foo … A monitoring group said the French and Russian air strikes had killed at least 33 IS jihadists in the last 72 hours. France and Russia have vowed merciless retaliation for the Paris attacks and last month's bombing of a Russian airliner over the Egyptian Sinai peninsula which killed 229 people and was also claimed by IS. The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle steamed from the southern port of Toulon on Wednesday, heading for the eastern Mediterranean to participate in intensified airstrikes against Islamic State targets. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that "it's necessary to establish direct contact with the French and work with them as allies". The attacks have galvanised international resolve to destroy the jihadist group and end Syria's more than four-year civil war, while potentially restoring ties between Russia and France that had collapsed since last year's Ukraine crisis. View gallery Police conduct an operation in Saint-Denis, near Paris on November 18, 2015, five days after the ter … Hollande will meet Putin in Moscow on November 26, two days after seeing US President Barack Obama in Washington. In a sign of the nervousness gripping Europe after Friday's carnage, a football match between Germany and the Netherlands in Hanover was cancelled Tuesday and the crowd evacuated after police acted on a "serious" bomb threat. The body representing Muslims in France said it would ask all 2,500 mosques in the country to condemn "all forms of violence or terrorism" in prayers this Friday. The message will condemn such acts "unambiguously", the French Muslim Council (CFCM) said. France has invoked a previously unused European Union article to ask member states for help in its mission to fight back against the Islamic State organisation, which received unanimous backing from Brussels. The alliance comes as international players meet to discuss ways of ending the Syrian war, which has spurred the rise of the Islamic State group, forced millions into exile and triggered Europe's worst migrant crisis since World War II. On a solidarity visit to Paris, US Secretary of State John Kerry said a "big transition" in Syria was probably only weeks away after Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia reached agreement at the weekend on a path towards elections. Highlighting US fears over the attack, two Air France flights bound for Paris from the United States were diverted Tuesday and landed safely after anonymous threats that the carrier described as a "bomb scare". Related Video: France hits Islamic State heartland after Paris carnage
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 11/18/2015 5:09:30 PM
	2 Dead, 7 Arrested in Raid Targeting Paris Attack Mastermind By RAPHAEL SATTER AND JAMEY KEATEN, ASSOCIATED PRESS SAINT-DENIS, France — Nov 18, 2015, 9:46 AM ET Soldiers patrol in St. Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Authorities in the Paris suburb of St. Denis are telling residents to stay inside during a large police operation near France's national stadium that two officials say is linked to last week's deadly attacks. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena) Amid gunfire and explosions, police raided a suburban Paris apartment where they believed the suspected mastermind of last week's attacks was holed up. The siege ended Wednesday with two deaths and seven arrests but no clear information on the fugitive's fate. The dead were a woman who blew herself up with an explosive vest and a man hit by projectiles and grenades, the Paris prosecutor said at the end of the seven-hour siege in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. Prosecutor Francois Molins said the raid was launched after information from tapped telephone conversations, surveillance and witness accounts indicated that the suspected planner of the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, might be in a safe house in the district. Authorities could not immediately confirm whether Abaaoud, a Belgian Islamic State militant, was killed or arrested Wednesday morning. Investigators have identified 27-year-old Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, as the chief architect of Friday's attacks in Paris, which killed 129 people and injured 350 others. A U.S. official briefed on intelligence matters said Abaaoud was a key figure in an Islamic State external operations cell that U.S. intelligence agencies have been tracking for months. Abaaoud was believed to be in Syria after a January police raid in Belgium, but bragged in Islamic State propaganda of his ability to move back and forth between Europe and Syria undetected. Speaking at the scene of Wednesday's raid, Molins said the operation began with a pre-dawn shootout and resulted in the capture of three people inside the apartment, the death of a woman who set off an explosive charge, and the death of "another terrorist ... who was hit by projectiles and grenades." He said two people were detained while trying to hide in the rubble, and two others were also arrested, including the man who had provided the apartment and one of his acquaintances. Police at the scene were seen escorting away one man who was naked from the waist down, and another wrapped in a gold emergency blanket. "As things stand, it is impossible to give you the identities of the people detained, which are being verified," Molins said. "All will be done to determine who is who, and based on the work of forensic police, we'll tell you who was in the apartment — and what consequences it will have for the development of the investigation." Molins and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve did not specify whether any suspects might still be at large. A police official not authorized to be publicly named because of police rules said four police officers were injured. French President Francois Hollande praised the bravery of the security services and said that France was "at war." "It is the entire country that's been attacked," Hollande told a gathering of French mayors. "For what it represents, the fight we are leading to eradicate terrorism. And simply for what we are." In Saint-Denis on Wednesday, police cordoned off an area around the building, in a narrow street lined with low-rise buildings. Riot police cleared people from the streets, pointing guns at curious residents to move them off the roads. The area is less than two kilometers (just over a mile) from the Stade de France stadium, near where three suicide bombers blew themselves up during an international soccer match Friday. Residents said the first explosion Wednesday shook the neighborhood shortly after 4 a.m. "We guessed it was linked to Friday night," said Yves Steux, barman at L'Escargot restaurant 250 meters (yards) from the assault."My wife panicked and was scared and told me not to leave, but I ignored her. Life goes on." Another witness, Amine Guizani, said he heard the sound of grenades and automatic gunfire. "It was continuous. It didn't stop," he said. "It lasted from 4:20 until 5:30. It was a good hour. I couldn't say how many shots were fired, but it was probably 500. Hundreds, definitely. There were maybe 10 explosions." Saint-Denis is one of France's most historic places. French kings were crowned and buried through the centuries in its famed basilica, a majestic Gothic church that towers over the area. The district is home to a vibrant and ethnically diverse population and sees sporadic tension between police and violent youths. Seven attackers died in Friday's attacks, which targeted several bars and restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall, as well as the national stadium. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the carnage. Police had said before the raids that they were hunting for two fugitives suspected of taking part as well as any accomplices. That would bring the number of attackers to at least nine. French authorities had previously said that at least eight people were directly involved in the bloodshed: seven who died in the attacks and one, Salah Abdeslam, who got away and slipped across the border to Belgium. A Spanish security official said Wednesday that French authorities have sent out a bulletin to police across Europe asking them to watch out for a Citroen Xsara car that could be carrying Abdeslam. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of department rules preventing the official from being named. Officials have told The Associated Press they believe at least one other attacker was involved and they were working to identify and track down that person. Surveillance video obtained by the AP also indicated that a team of three attackers carried out the shootings at one of the cafes. The video was among evidence authorities used in concluding that at least one other attacker was at large, the French officials indicated. The brief clip shows two black-clad gunmen with automatic weapons calmly firing on the bar then returning toward a waiting car, whose driver was maneuvering behind them. Authorities believe the car is the same black SEAT-make vehicle that was found Saturday with three Kalashnikovs inside. Meanwhile, French fighter jets attacked Islamic State targets in Syria for a third night. The French defense ministry said 10 jets had hit two Islamic State command centers in the militants' base of Raqqa, Syria. Hollande said French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle had left to support military operations against IS in Syria. He called for a "large coalition" against IS militants to destroy a group that threatens the whole world and "commits massacres" in the Middle East. The Paris attacks have galvanized international determination to confront the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, bringing France, Russia and the United States closer to an alliance. Across France, police have carried out 414 raids since Friday, making 60 arrests and seizing 75 weapons, including 11 military-style firearms, the Interior Ministry said. A nationwide police dragnet has seen nightly raids by security forces under powers granted by the state of emergency declared in the wake of last week's terrorist rampage. Parliament is expected to vote by the end of the week to extend the state of emergency for three months. France — and the rest of Europe — remain on edge. Two Air France flights bound for Paris from the U.S. were diverted Tuesday night — one to Salt Lake City and one to Halifax — because of anonymous threats received after they had taken off. Both were inspected and cleared to resume their journeys. In the German city of Hannover, a soccer game between Germany and the Netherlands was canceled at the last minute and the stadium evacuated by police because of a bomb threat. Lower Saxony state Interior Minister Boris Pistorius said the match was called off after "vague" information that solidified late in the day. No arrests have been made and no explosives found. Pistorius said this may be because the plot was called off after the game was canceled. "We won't know what would have happened if we didn't cancel it," he said. ——— Keaten reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Thomas Adamson in Saint-Denis, Philippe Sotto, Sylvie Corbet, Lori Hinnant, Angela Charlton and Jill Lawless in Paris, David Rising in Berlin, Ciaran Giles in Madrid and Ken Dilanian in Washington contributed to this report. ——— This story has been corrected to show that the witness's name is Amine Guizani, not Amin.
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 11/18/2015 6:02:43 PM
	What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters November 18, 2015 by Steve Beckow Credit: The Guardian An excellent background study of ISIS fighters, for those who want to be informed. Those concentrating on spiritual practice may want to skip this article. What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters They’re drawn to the movement for reasons that have little to do with belief in extremist Islam. Lydia Wilson, The Nation, October 21, 2015 No sooner am I settled in an interviewing room in the police station of Kirkuk, Iraq, than the first prisoner I am there to see is brought in, flanked by two policemen and in handcuffs. I awkwardly rise, unsure of the etiquette involved in interviewing an ISIS fighter who is facing the death penalty. He is small, much smaller than I, on first appearances just a boy in trouble with the police, his eyes fixed on the floor, his face a mask. We all sit on armchairs lined up against facing walls, in a room cloudy with cigarette smoke and lit by fluorescent strip lighting, a room so small that my knees almost touch the prisoner’s—but he still doesn’t look up. I have interviewed plenty of soldiers on the other side of this fight, mostly from the Kurdish forces (known as pesh merga) but also fighters in the Iraqi army (known as the Iraqi Security Forces or ISF), both Arab and Kurdish. ISIS fighters, of course, are far more elusive, unless you are traveling to the Islamic State itself, but I prefer to keep my head on my shoulders. Rumors abound as to summary executions of ISIS prisoners without due process, but of course no one will go on the record to report such abuses of human rights. Anecdotally, we were told about a prisoner who was interrogated for 30 days but only said “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) for the entire month. “Wouldn’t you shoot him?” they asked. One peshmerga gave an eyewitness report about five prisoners captured, questioned, and shot in the head. We spoke to various military leaders who said they didn’t want to take prisoners, since injured bodies are often booby-trapped and kill approaching soldiers; for this reason the PKK has a take-no-prisoners policy. (The PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, is the Kurdish separatist group based in Turkey and northern Iraq that is on the international terrorism list; in proving themselves indispensable in the fight against ISIS, they have caused a dilemma for Western governments. They are seemingly not so indispensable that those governments have felt compelled to oppose Turkey’s recent bombing campaign against them.) “With ISIS, there’s no compromise…they’re not interested in prisoner exchange.” Another source told us of the futility of holding prisoners for their bargaining power: “With ISIS, there’s no compromise, no negotiation…they’re not interested in prisoner exchange because they believe that they’re better off dead.” Whatever the truth of the behavior of the military and security services, the fact remains: ISIS prisoners are hard to find. One evening we watch a documentary on BBC Arabic profiling Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir, the head of police in the Iraqi governorate of Kirkuk. He is shown policing the town of Kirkuk, personally patrolling the streets and houses, arresting people suspected of fighting for ISIS. Kirkuk, then, seems like a good place to start: At least there are prisoners there, shown by the BBC, no less. And so my colleagues and I drive to Kirkuk from the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, Erbil, to meet Qadir. Despite the workload of maintaining security in this uneasy city of mixed ethnicity (mostly Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen), rife with ISIS sleeper cells, he is welcoming, sending armed guards to bring us in from the highway to the city. We are served tea in his office, and he sits with us for half an hour before we are taken to the interview room with two colonels. (The week after I left the country he and other officers would be caught in a huge car bomb; Qadir was wounded for the fourteenth time in the service of Kurdistan.) Once the first prisoner is there, and with no possibility of small talk, we launch straight into the research questions I am there to ask, the same questions asked of fighters and non-fighters all over the country, questions I’ve asked in Lebanon too, and which have been replicated in other parts of the world by my colleagues at Artis International, a consortium for the scientific study in the service of conflict resolution. The research is based on cognitive and moral psychology, exploring when and why humans commit the most extreme sacrifices—including their lives and the lives of their families—for abstract causes, for so-called “sacred values.” Our research tries to determine why people will change their minds about these sacred values, and whether and how they will change their behavior in defending them. We hope to find out how to persuade people to abandon violent pathways, though I am fast losing faith in that possibility in this part of the world. Most Popular 1 What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters 2 The Saudis Are Stumbling. They May Take the Middle East with Them. 3 To Defeat ISIS, We Must Call Both Western and Muslim Leaders to Account 4 There Is Only One Way to Destroy ISIS 5 France Should Stop Listening to Saudi Arabia on Syria For this trip I am accompanied by senior colleagues; by Scott Atran, an academic based in France; and by Doug Stone, a retired American general who spent over two years in Iraq during the US occupation, interviewing prisoners on a daily basis. This, of course, changes the interview experience fundamentally, crowding the room and giving the event more importance, more formality, but also bringing entirely different questions, emphases, and expertise to bear and so drawing out many different angles on the interviewees. In any case, informality is never going to be achieved with prisoners on death row. First are questions probing perceptions of the strength of various groups—some of which the interviewee might have sympathy with (although he might not express this). Other groups he would quite clearly consider to be the Other, the Enemy. I bring out a flashcard with pictures of half-naked men on it, ranging from the fairly puny to the biggest bodybuilder—each head replaced by a flag of the Islamic State. Whatever this youngster was expecting, whatever he’s been asked before—this was neither. He looks up, startled, at my colleague Hoshang Waziri—his first human reaction—who begins to explain. Related Articles 14 Years After 9/11, the War on Terror Is Accomplishing Everything bin Laden Hoped It Would Tom Engelhardt After the Paris Attacks, a Call for Justice—Not Vengeance Phyllis Bennis To Defeat ISIS, We Must Call Both Western and Muslim Leaders to Account Laila Lalami France Should Stop Listening to Saudi Arabia on Syria Juan Cole “This is the Islamic State—look, this is the flag here,” Hoshang says, pointing at the bodybuilder and flexing his biceps. “This picture shows the Islamic State as the strongest it could be. Here, they are very, very weak; and here are all the things in the middle. How strong do you think they are?” The boy timidly points at the weakest—to be expected, as he doesn’t want to seem to be a fan—and we move to a similar picture, but with the Kurdish flag rather than the Islamic State flag superimposed on the bodies. “Now the peshmerga: How strong are they?” The prisoner got the hang of the question, and points to the second-strongest picture. In other pictures, he decides that the Iraqi army is in the middle, Iran a little weaker than that, and America the strongest. (He hasn’t heard of the PKK, despite their repeated victories over ISIS.) We ask him to rank all the forces, using the cards, and then I realize that he is still handcuffed and I ask for them to be taken off. In the ensuing hiatus, with policemen fetching keys and walking to and fro, I try to chat more informally, and finally he looks at me, answering questions in one-word answers as to his age, background, education, family. Slowly, with snippets emerging from the rest of the interview, I piece together a picture that is to be repeated, with only minor differences, with other prisoners we talk to that day, stories familiar to General Stone from during the allied occupation, and to journalists and researchers I’ve spoken to since. This man is 26, the eldest of 17 children from two mothers (that is, his father had two wives at the same time), from Kirkuk. He completed sixth grade, meaning that at least he was literate, unlike others we were to interview. He is married, with two children, a boy named “Rasuul,” meaning Prophet, and a girl named “Rusil,” the plural of Prophet—indicating the centrality of Islam to his life. He was working as a laborer to support his huge family when he hurt his back and lost his job. It was then, his story goes, that a friend, from the same tribe but only distantly related, approached him with the offer to work for ISIS. The story has been honed through repeated interrogation and the trial, and comes out pat. Life under the Islamic State was just terror, he says; he only fought because he was terrorized. Others may have done it from belief, but he did not. His family needed the money, and this was the only opportunity to provide for them. “We need the war to be over, we need security…all I want is to be with my family, my children.” Later in the interview we find out just how committed he is to his family, first with flashcards that we use to test the degree of fusion of the individual with various groups. We ask about Iraq, Islam, family, friends, and the Islamic State. The choices are again made pictorially: We use a set of two increasingly overlapping circles (at one end of the spectrum the circles are not even touching, at the other they are fully overlapping, with four circles of varying degrees of overlap in between), and again, they are unexpected and confusing to the prisoner—there is not an obvious “right” answer for most of them. The man is drawn out of his shell in spite of himself, losing his self-consciousness in his concentration and his questions to Hoshang. Eventually he decides that he is almost, but not entirely, fused with Iraq and with Islam, completely separate from the Islamic State (again, to be expected), barely connected to friends (“I have no friends”), and fully fused with his family. In fact, his family is the only group he was fully fused with, a decision that took no time at all. During more informal questioning about his family and tribe comes this telling statement: “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war…. all I want is to be with my family, my children.” When he has been taken away we have the chance to find out just what he was found guilty of, how they found him, and what the evidence was. He was a master of the car bomb, detonating at least four of them in Kirkuk itself and also one scooter bomb, which exploded in a crowded souq selling weapons, killing many scores of people and also weakening the ability of local residents to fight ISIS. He was found through the capture of one of the financers of the sleeper cells in Kirkuk, who had on him a list of pseudonyms along with phone numbers and amounts of money. The police had this man call each person on the list, a cell of six, and set up meetings, where the police captured them—all of them swept up in one day. When the ISIS bomber saw that they were there “he collapsed; he gave us 5 pages of confession.” He stuck to his confession in court, where he was tried under Article 40, the Iraqi law on terrorism, which carries the death penalty. Why did he do all these things? Many assume that these fighters are motivated by a belief in the Islamic State, a caliphate ruled by a caliph with the traditional title Emir al-Muminiin, “Commander of the faithful,” a role currently held by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; that fighters all over the world are flocking to the area for a chance to fight for this dream. But this just doesn’t hold for the prisoners we are interviewing. They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate. But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS. “I didn’t like Saddam, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.” In fact, Erin Saltman, senior counter-extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, says that there is now less emphasis on knowledge of Islam in the recruitment phase. “We are seeing a movement away from strict religious ideological training as a requirement for recruitment,” she told me. “If we were looking at foreign fighter recruits to Afghanistan 10 or 20 years ago, there was intensive religious and theological training attached to recruitment. Nowadays, we see that recruitment strategy has branched out to a much broader audience with many different pull factors.” There is no question that these prisoners I am interviewing are committed to Islam; it is just their own brand of Islam, only distantly related to that of the Islamic State. Similarly, Western fighters traveling to the Islamic State are also deeply committed, but it’s to their own idea of jihad rather than one based on sound theological arguments or even evidence from the Qur’an. As Saltman said, “Recruitment [of ISIS] plays upon desires of adventure, activism, romance, power, belonging, along with spiritual fulfillment.” That is, Islam plays a part, but not necessarily in the rigid, Salafi form demanded by the leadership of the Islamic State. More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.” ISIS is the first group since Al Qaeda to offer these young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.” These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too. An illustration of the less-than-total commitment to the cause of the Islamic State by Iraqis came from the Kurdish peshmerga Gen. Aziz Waysi, commander of the elite Zerevani (“Golden”) forces. He relates an overheard conversation between an ISIS fighter on the battleground and his leader, via a walkie-talkie previously confiscated from an ISIS corpse. “My brother is with me, but he is dead, and we are surrounded, we need help at least to take away my brother’s body,” General Waysi heard, and then the reply: “What else could you want? Your brother is in heaven and you are about to be.” This answer wasn’t what the poor surrounded young man was hoping for. “Please come and rescue me,” he said, “That heaven, I don’t want it.” But they didn’t, leaving him to whatever paradise awaited. Editor’s note: This article has been adjusted to indicate more accurately the ethnic makeup of Kirkuk and the fact that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is present in both Turkey and northern Iraq.
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 11/18/2015 11:42:56 PM
	Russia Pounds ISIS With Biggest Bomber Raid in Decades by David Axe SHOCK & AWESKI 11.17.155:35 PM ET Putin’s air force just used its nuclear bombers to lay waste to the capital of the ‘Islamic State.’ But they also hit areas that have little to do with ISIS. The Russian air force just pulled off one of the biggest and most complex heavy bomber missions in modern history—sending no fewer than 25 Backfire, Bear, and Blackjack bombers on a coordinated, long-range air raid against alleged ISIS forces in Syria. The Tuesday mission, which launched under the cover of darkness from a base in Ossetia in southern Russia, signaled a significant escalation of Moscow’s air war in Syria—and heralded the rebirth of Russian heavy bomber squadrons that once had withered from a lack of funding. Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff, announced the raid on Tuesday, calling it part of “a new plan [for] the air campaign.” “During a massive airstrike today, 14 important ISIL targets were destroyed by 34 air-launched cruise missiles,” Gerasimov said, using an alternative acronym for the terror army. “The targets destroyed include command posts that were used to coordinate ISIL activities in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, munition and supply depots in the northwestern part of Syria.” Idlib and Aleppo are not ISIS strongholds. Indeed, U.S.-backed rebels hold much of both provinces. Russia has maintained all along that its roughly six-week-old intervention in Syria is aimed at defeating ISIS, but in fact many Russian air and missile strikes have hit rebel groups that oppose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ISIS. Russian officials notified U.S. planners at a coalition headquarters in Qatar before the strike, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said. It was the first time the Russians and Americans have put into action an October agreement to coordinate their countries’ respective operations in Syria. The raid came the same day Kremlin officials publicly announced that a “terrorist act” brought down Russian Metrojet 9268 last month over the Sinai Peninsula. ISIS has since taken credit for the attack. The Russian Defense Ministry released a video depicting three types of Russian bombers arming, taking off, dropping munitions, and then returning to base, escorted along their flight paths by Su-27 fighters. The swing-wing, jet-propelled Tu-22M Backfires apparently carried unguided “dumb” bombs. The video depicts airmen loading clusters of cruise missiles in the bomb bays of the propeller-driven Tu-95 Bears and the huge, swing-wing Tu-160 Blackjack jets, which at 177 feet long are the biggest combat planes ever built. All three models of bomber can fly thousands of miles while hauling no less than 20 tons of weaponry. Only China and the United States possess similar heavy warplanes. Launching 25 bombers on one mission is an impressive undertaking. Russia possesses just 70 Backfires, 58 Bears, and 13 Blackjacks. The 14 Backfires, six Bears, and five Blackjacks that reportedly struck Syria represent a significant portion of the overall fleet. The massive raid is evidence of improving readiness on the part of the Russian air force, which in the 1990s and early 2000s grounded most of its aircraft because it couldn’t afford to fuel them or pay their pilots. By comparison, on any given day 57 of the U.S. Air Force’s 77 B-52s, 35 of its 60 B-1s, and nine of its 20 B-2 stealth bombers are even flyable, according to statistics from 2013. The Tuesday mission signaled a significant escalation of Moscow’s air war in Syria—and heralded the rebirth of Russian heavy bomber squadrons that once had withered from a lack of funding. And when they do fly, America’s bombers often sortie alone or in pairs, only rarely coming together in large numbers. Seven B-52s flew together to launch cruise missiles at Iraq in the early hours of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and a group of eight of the giant warplanes repeated the feat on the first day of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. In other words: This Russian attack was “shock and awe”—on steroids. Russia’s bomber raid was certainly impressive, and has propaganda value in addition to bolstering Moscow’s operations in Syria. When 25 of the planet’s most powerful warplanes attack at the same time, it’s more than a mere air raid. It’s a statement to the whole world. (THE DAILY BEAST)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Woman blows herself up, man killed, in massive Paris assault

France hits Islamic State heartland after Paris carnage

2 Dead, 7 Arrested in Raid Targeting Paris Attack Mastermind

Zerohedge: “There’s No Such Thing As ISIS”: Journalist Destroys West’s Terror Narrative, Warns Of Crackdown On “Dissidents”

That’s the smoking gun and nobody seems to care.

The passage above clearly states that the US knew this was coming and viewed it as “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want” on the way to not only “isolating” Assad, but also to breaking Tehran’s Shiite crescent.

Although that’s such a critical excerpt, it has been habitually overlooked, and ironically, tragedies like that which occurred in Paris only serve to galvanize public opinion around an ideal rather than around the search for answers and that, is a dangerous, dangerous thing.

In that context and (importantly) in the context of French President Francois Hollande’s push to alter the French Constitution, we bring you the following interview with journalist Gearoid O’Colmain who pretty much blows apart the entire charade in the space of ten minutes.

What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters

Russia Pounds ISIS With Biggest Bomber Raid in Decades

11.17.155:35 PM ET

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Woman blows herself up, man killed, in massive Paris assault

Related Stories

France hits Islamic State heartland after Paris carnage

2 Dead, 7 Arrested in Raid Targeting Paris Attack Mastermind

Zerohedge: “There’s No Such Thing As ISIS”: Journalist Destroys West’s Terror Narrative, Warns Of Crackdown On “Dissidents”

That’s the smoking gun and nobody seems to care.

The passage above clearly states that the US knew this was coming and viewed it as “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want” on the way to not only “isolating” Assad, but also to breaking Tehran’s Shiite crescent.

Although that’s such a critical excerpt, it has been habitually overlooked, and ironically, tragedies like that which occurred in Paris only serve to galvanize public opinion around an ideal rather than around the search for answers and that, is a dangerous, dangerous thing.

In that context and (importantly) in the context of French President Francois Hollande’s push to alter the French Constitution, we bring you the following interview with journalist Gearoid O’Colmain who pretty much blows apart the entire charade in the space of ten minutes.

Russia Pounds ISIS With Biggest Bomber Raid in Decades

11.17.155:35 PM ET