News Release

* Stopping ISIS * Saudi Backing Al-Qaeda * Carter and Accelerating U.S. Nuke Spending

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JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN, amadea311 at earthlink.net
Faculty associate in Middle East Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Loewenstein just wrote the piece “Burnt Offering” about the latest ISIS killing video. She writes: “Too few people, I fear, will understand that the monstrous activities of ISIS will continue, if not increase, as long as the former colonial and imperial powers of the West, Japan, and their Arab allies — all of them run by tyrants and dictators beholden to or in league with US state power and seeking ‘security’ — persist in their attempts to shape and control the destiny of the Middle East.”

MICHAEL SPRINGMANN, attorney at springmannslaw.net
The New York Times published a piece today titled: “Moussaoui Calls Saudi Princes Patrons of Al Qaeda.” Springmann is the former head of the U.S. visa section in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and is author of the soon-to-be-released book Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts that Rocked the World. He said today: “During the 1980s, the CIA recruited and trained Muslim operatives to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Later, the CIA would move those operatives from Afghanistan to the Balkans, and then to Iraq, Libya, and Syria, traveling on illegal US visas. These US-backed and trained fighters would morph into an organization that is synonymous with jihadist terrorism: al-Qaeda.”

ALICE SLATER, aslater at rcn.com
Slater is with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Abolition 2000 coordinating committee. Hearings for Ashton Carter to head the Pentagon are slated for today.

Center for Public Integrity notes regarding the administration’s new budget proposal: “Obama proposes to boost spending for nuclear armaments.”

Slater said today: “The news that President Obama, a recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize , notably for his 2009 Prague speech envisioning a nuclear weapons free world, is planning to expand the US nuclear weapons complex, budgeting for new warheads and their delivery systems — missiles, planes and submarines — as well as two new bomb factories, estimated to cost $348 billion over the next 10 years with a projected price tag of one trillion dollars over thirty years, is simply astonishing!

“How has the US lost its way so badly? After the wall fell in Eastern Europe and Gorbachev miraculously let go of all of Eastern Europe without a shot, Reagan and Gorbachev actually came close to eliminating their nuclear weapons at a conference in Reykjavik, but Reagan wouldn’t give up Star Wars and the deal fell through. Now the US with NATO, is expanding its military right up to Russia’s border as Russia in reaction, begins to rebuild its nuclear arsenal, feeling threatened by US expansion and its growing arsenals of space and nuclear weapons. The expansion began during the Clinton Administration, and the proposed incoming Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, played a major role in the opening encroachment of NATO in Eastern Europe, particularly in the expanded US missile program that led to missile bases planted in Eastern Europe and the US walking out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, which it had signed with the Soviet Union in 1972.

Background: See Slater’s comments on Carter just before he was nominated.

See AP story from September: “Russia developing new nuclear weapons to counter US, NATO.”