US President Barack Obama speaks at a campaign rally October 4, 2012 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GettyImages)

Universities across the country have begun actively pushing polyamory on campus, encouraging students to be more “affirming” of non-monogamous relationships and instructing them to view polyamorous relationships as an acceptable lifestyle choice.

Just this March, Portland State University hosted an event on polyamory as part of “Sex Week,” sponsored by the university’s Queer Resource Center. Students were invited to attend a discussion titled “Exploring Non-Monogamy.” The event was hosted in partnership with PSU’s “Polyamory Alliance,” a pro-polyamory student group.

According to the group’s description, the Polyamory Alliance “advocates, educates, and provides support and community to those who are polyamorous or those who identify as monogamous but would like to show support to the polyamorous person in their life.” Similar pro-polyamory student groups exist at the University of Minnesota, Kalamazoo College, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Also in March, the University of Michigan held an event titled “Navigating Relationships: Routing Our Own Courses,” as part of the university’s LGBTQ+ Health and Wellness Week. The event was advertised as “a facilitated discussion-style workshop on navigating healthy relationships, with an emphasis on polyamory and relationships involving asexual and/or aromantic partners.”

By Claire Bernish

Saudi Arabia, the United States, and their allies have developed a nasty habit of “epidemic” proportions in various military theaters, particularly around the Middle East — bombing hospitals, healthcare facilities, and, in at least one instance, an ambulance. But despite countless pleas from humanitarian organization Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders), that bombing continues, so the United Nations was finally forced to issue its own resolution on the matter.

Resolution 2286, co-sponsored by 80 member nations, condemns attacks on medical personnel and facilities in conflict situations and demands “an end to impunity for those responsible and respect for international law on the part of all warring parties.”

Though it might seem superficially absurd to issue a condemnation for something so patently fundamental, evidence of its necessity remains unfortunately prevalent in headlines.

One egregious example came at the end of April in the conclusion of an investigation into the targeted bombing of an MSF hospital facility in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 3 of last year. Though 16 U.S. service members were found responsible for the attack, accountability in the form of punishment lacked the severity warranted for the deaths of 42 medical staff, patients, and civilians.

“The 16 found at fault include a two-star general, the crew of an Air Force AC-130 attack aircraft, and Army special forces personnel, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal investigations” with the Los Angeles Times. “One officer was suspended from command and forced out of Afghanistan. The other 15 were given lesser punishments: Six were sent to counseling, seven were issued letters of reprimand, and two were ordered to retraining courses.”

It would be difficult, when taken with the magnitude of what actually took place in the Kunduz hospital attack, to classify such a punishment as even slaps on the wrists of those responsible.

“Many staff describe people being shot, most likely from the [AC-130] plane, as people tried to flee the main hospital building that was being hit with each airstrike,” MSF said in a statement following the bombing. “Some accounts mention shooting that appeared to follow the movement of people on the run.”

Though the official explanation from U.S. officials inexplicably characterizes the bombing as an ostensibly horrible mistake, details of the harrowing 90-minute siege stretch the veracity of such a claim beyond the limits of feasibility. Médicins Sans Frontières has in place numerous safety precautions to protect both staff and patients — particularly since the organization treats any injured parties, regardless of affiliation, in conflict areas — including a staunch prohibition on weapons in their facilities.

A series of multiple, precise and sustained airstrikes targeted the main hospital building, leaving the rest of the buildings in the MSF compound comparatively untouched. This specific building of the hospital correlates exactly with the GPS coordinates provided to the parties of the conflict (GPS coordinates were taken directly in front of the main hospital building that was hit with the airstrikes).

Absolving itself of responsibility for what has been widely deemed a war crime, the Pentagon’sofficial explanation significantly downplays the attack as “a combination of human errors, compounded by process and equipment failures,” and that “fatigue and high operational tempo also contributed” to what it calls the “fog of war.”

In actuality, no excuse exists for a targeted attack on a civilian structure which dually functions as a safe haven for those injured in an already relentless, violent military campaign — itself with questionable motives and practices. No whitewash strong enough exists to paint over an inexcusably egregious so-called error.

But the worst facet of the Pentagon’s self-declared impunity is that Kunduz isn’t the only healthcare facility bombed by the U.S. and its allies — and Afghanistan isn’t the sole location such an attack has been carried out. Not by far.

Between March and November 2015, the U.S.-backed coalitionmanaged to bomb nearly 100 hospitals in war-ravaged Yemen — though with the media’s attention trained on the imbroglio raging in Syria, that report caused little more than a ripple. Echoing innumerable unanswered pleas by MSF, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) asserted the targeting of health facilities “represent a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”

“The neutrality of health care facilities and staff is not being respected,” contended deputy head of the ICRC delegation in Yemen, Kedir Awol Omar. “Health facilities are deliberately attacked and surgical and medical supplies are also being blocked from reaching hospitals in areas under siege.”

Apparently and typically, repeated calls to end targeted violence fell on deaf ears.

At the end of April, Al Quds Hospital in Aleppo fell under attack, killing 27 people — including three children and one of the decimated city’s last qualified pediatricians — and eliciting one of the most gut-wrenching open letters to date, courtesy of the director of the Aleppo Children’s Hospital.

“Like so many others,” wrote Dr. Hatem, “Dr. [Mohammad Waseem] Maaz was killed for saving lives. Today we remember Dr. Maaz’s humanity and his bravery. Please share his story so others may know what medics in Aleppo and across Syria are facing.

“The situation today is critical — Aleppo may soon come under siege. We need the world to be watching.”

Addressing the United Nations in utter frustration on Tuesday, MSF head, Joanne Liu, beseechedthe members responsible to “Stop these attacks! You … must live up to your extraordinary responsibilities and set an example for all states.”

Though her sentiment may be broadly shared, the Pentagon’s less than lackluster response to the U.S. military members complicit in the Kunduz bombing make the likelihood of her demands being met exceedingly unlikely anytime soon.

(activistpost.com)

By Tony Cartalucci

How the United States presumes to possess the authority to determine the fate of a sovereign nation thousands of miles from its own shores in the Middle East is never explained by US Secretary of State John Kerry when he recently announced a new ultimatum leveled at Damascus. Nor is it explained why Syria should capitulate to US demands to begin a political transition that has demonstrably left other nations across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) divided, destroyed, and safe-havens for state-sponsored terrorism years after “successful” US-backed regime change has been achieved – Libya most notably.

Yet despite all of this, according to the Associate Press (AP) in their article, “Kerry warns Assad to start transition by Aug. 1 or else,” the United States fully expects Damascus to concede to a “political transition” engineered by Washington, leaving the nation in the hands of verified terrorists linked directly to the political and militant forces currently laying waste to Libya and those nations that put them into power.

The article reports:

Secretary of State John Kerry warned Syria’s government and its backers in Moscow and Tehran on Tuesday that they face an August deadline for starting a political transition to move President Bashar Assad out, or they risk the consequences of a new U.S. approach toward ending the 5-year-old civil war.

AP would also claim:

…it’s unlikely that the Obama administration, so long opposed to an active American combat role in Syria, would significantly boost its presence beyond the 300 special forces it has authorized thus far in the heart of a U.S. presidential election season. More feasible might be U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia giving the rebels new weapons to fight Assad, such as portable surface-to-air missiles.

Again, the US is making demands of “Syria’s government and its backers in Moscow” while it is openly allied with Saudi Arabia who is admittedly backing US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organizationsincluding the Al Nusra Front – quite literally Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq.

This point has inconveniently surfaced even across the West’s own media, including the Independent in an article titled, “Turkey and Saudi Arabia alarm the West by backing Islamist extremists the Americans had bombed in Syria.” In it states that:

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are actively supporting a hardline coalition of Islamist rebels against Bashar al-Assad’s regime that includes al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, in a move that has alarmed Western governments.

The two countries are focusing their backing for the Syrian rebels on the combined Jaish al-Fatah, or the Army of Conquest, a command structure for jihadist groups in Syria that includes Jabhat al-Nusra, an extremist rival to Isis which shares many of its aspirations for a fundamentalist caliphate.

Despite superficial attempts to portray Al Nusra at “arms length” from Saudi Arabia, and thus from Saudi Arabia’s closest and most valuable ally, Washington, the inseparable nature of those the US and Saudi Arabia are supporting and those they claim not to support is documented fact.

America Essentially Demands Syria’s Surrender to Al Qaeda

Considering the verified nature of the so-called “opposition” in Syria and the verifiable nature of what US foreign policy has done to Libya – leaving it to this day in the hands of state-sponsored terrorist organizations including the notorious “Islamic State” or ISIS – what the US is essentially demanding of Syria and its allies is capitulation to Al Qaeda.

It is a surreal full-circle US foreign policy has made, from first creating Al Qaeda in the late 1980s jointly with Saudi Arabia and elements within the Pakistani government, then claiming to have been struck egregiously by the terrorist organization on September 11, 2001 triggering over a decade of very profitable war, before finally arriving in Libya and Syria beginning in 2011 where once again US politicians found themselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder with literal commanders of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, waging proxies wars against their collective enemies.

Indeed, US Senator John McCain would find himself in a Libya utterly devastated by NATO at the end of 2011, shaking hands with the commander of US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) – literally Al Qaeda in Libya. The LIFG commander, Abdelhakim Belhadj, had at one point been arrested by the US before being handed over to the Libyan government and imprisoned for his terrorism.

Syria’s Clear Course of Action

Syria is undoubtedly being overrun by heavily armed and extremely dangerous terrorists backed by foreign powers. These are terrorists that have proven already in Libya, that upon coming to power, they will first carry out genocide against their ethnic and political enemies, then transform Syria into a devastated wasteland and springboard for terrorism and proxy war elsewhere in the region – likely Iran and then southern Russia.Syria’s only clear course of action is to resist and defeat these terrorist factions and restore order within the nation’s boundaries. It must do this by interdicting terrorists and their supplies along the Turkish-Syrian border in the north, and the Jordanian-Syrian border in the south. It is abundantly clear that the terrorists operating within Syria cannot sustain their fighting capacity without significant and constant logistical support from their foreign sponsors beyond Syria’s borders. This fact alone, undermines the legitimacy of the so-called “uprising” and “civil war” in Syria that upon closer examination is clearly a proxy invasion.

The US’s Clear Course of Action

The US itself, in its own military manuals (MCWP 3-35.3) regarding combat operations, states in reference to defeating terrorism that:

In countering this threat, [it should be determined] whether it is internally or externally directed terrorism. Terrorism rooted externally must be severed from its roots. Against internal terrorism, [attempts should be made] to penetrate the infrastructure and destroy the leadership of the terrorist groups.

The US has already boasted of having struck hard at the leadership of various terrorist groups in Syria it claims to be at war with, yet these groups appear unfazed. This is precisely because the terrorism is being direct externally, from Turkey and Jordan where the US itself has based its forces for its ongoing Syrian operations. The clear and obvious course of action for the US is to identify the “roots” of this externally directed terrorism and “sever” them.

However, the US refuses to do this. Instead, even as it continues its feigned war against terrorism in Syria, it is doubling down on support for its proxies, including Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who in turn, are harboring, arming, funding, training, and directly supporting the very terrorist groups the US claims to be fighting.

US Secretary of State John Kerry threatens a “new approach” by the US in Syria, if Syria does not capitulate to what is essentially the end of its existence as a functioning nation-state. The “new approach” is likely simply the continuation of existing plans to incrementally invade and occupy Syrian territory, particularly in the east through the infiltration of Iraq-based Kurds operating under US proxy Masoud Barzani, as well as to trigger a cross-border incident north of Aleppo by using their ISIS proxies to attack Turkish targets – reminisced ofstaged attacks Ankara had planned earlier during the war to justify the invasion and occupation of northern Syria.

Warning the world of the “success” America’s previous “political transitions” have wrought in Libya or Iraq, and raising awareness of the current nature of US-Saudi support for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Syria today, is essential in undermining the legitimacy and authority upon which the US is attempting to base its demands directed at Damascus. The demands are illegitimate and the authority they are made with constitutes not principles nor rule of law, but naked and unjust aggression that must be resisted today lest it succeed and set a precedent for further acts of injustice against other nations tomorrow.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

(activistpost.com)