CounterCurrents: US To Give Arms, Air Support To Islamist Militias In Syria, Iraq Leans Toward Russia, U.S. Still Fights To Win Long-Term

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Binu Mathew
Editor
www.countercurrents.org


US To Give Arms, Air Support To Islamist Militias In Syria 
By Bill Van Auken

http://www.countercurrents.org/auken101015.htm

The Obama administration Friday announced an “operational pause” of the disastrously failed Pentagon program for arming and training “vetted rebels” in Turkey and sending them back across the border into Syria. Instead, Pentagon and White House officials indicated, the focus will now shift to cementing ties with leaders of existing “rebel” militias, consisting overwhelmingly of Sunni Islamist forces with connections to Al Qaeda. US backing to these groups will apparently include both arms and ammunition as well as close air support from warplanes deployed by the US and its so-called coalition


Columbus Lives 
By David Swanson

http://www.countercurrents.org/swanson101015.htm

Columbus was a murderer, a robber, an enslaver, and a torturer, whose crimes led to possibly the most massive conglomeration of crimes and horrific accidents on record. But Columbus was a product of his time, a time that has not exactly ended. If Columbus spoke today's English he'd say he was "just following orders." Those orders, stemming from the Catholic "doctrine of discovery," find parallels through Western history right down to today's "responsibility to protect," decreed by the high priests of the United Nations


Iraq Leans Toward Russia, U.S. Still Fights To Win Long-Term 
By Eric Zuesse

http://www.countercurrents.org/zuesse101015.htm

On October 7th, Reuters headlined, “Iraq Leans Toward Russia in War on Islamic State,” and reported, from Baghdad, that, “Iraq … wants Moscow to have a bigger role than the United States in the war against the militant group, the head of parliament's defense and security committee said on Wednesday.”


Afghanistan And Iraq: Lessons For The Imperial 
By Ralph Nader

http://www.countercurrents.org/nader101015.htm

Guess who is winning? An estimated thirty-thousand Taliban soldiers with no air force, navy, or heavy weapons have been holding down ten times more Afghan army and police and over 100,000 U.S. soldiers with the world’s most modern weaponry – for eight years. ISIS forces from Syria have taken over large areas of northern and western Iraq, including its second largest city, Mosul, and the battered city of Fallujah. ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria are estimated to number no more than 35,000. Like the Taliban, ISIS fighters, who vary in their military training, primarily have light weaponry. That is when they are not taking control of the fleeing, much larger, Iraqi army’s armored vehicles and ammunition from the United States


Why A US Congressional Special Investigative Committee (CSIC) 
Must Be Created To Investigate The MSF Hospital Bombing
By Franklin Lamb

http://www.countercurrents.org/lamb101015.htm

The bombing of the DoctorsWithoutBorders/Medicine Sans Frontiers (MSF) hospital at Kunduz is a punishable war crime and the Pentagon stands indicted and must be held accountable depending on the findings of fact. Massive international customary law and a host of treaties and conventions in force, including the Geneva Conventions specifically protect medical facilities and their medical staffs and patients make this plain


Book Review: "The Educator And The Oligarch:
A Teacher Challenges The Gates Foundation" 
By Raghav Kaushik

http://www.countercurrents.org/kaushik101015.htm

The book notes that the Gates Foundation is careful to distance itself from crude applications of its principles. For example, it recommends using value-added models as only one of multiple measures of effective teaching. However, such a defense is facile. As noted earlier, much of the funding in the “school reform” movement is by the Gates Foundation itself, making it hard to excuse the gap between principle and practice. Even setting aside the funding aspect, a set of principles can only be judged by how it is actually put into practice, not by some putative non-existent ideal