King Solomon's treasures revealed

real life Indiana Jones has uncovered details about King Solomon's riches in a newly translated Hebrew text.

But treasure hunters may have to wait a bit longer as, unlike the film ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ details about the exact location of these treasures are unclear.

Rather than a guide to lost treasure, the newly translated ‘Treatise of the Vessels’ was a legendary story written in Biblical times that was meant to entertain.

The Ark of the Covenant is a gilded case believed to have been constructed nearly 3,000 years ago

TREASURES DESCRIBED IN THE TREATISE OF THE VESSELS

The Ark of the Covenant

The Tabernacle - According to the Hebrew Bible, this was a portable dwelling where God chose to meet his people

Musical instruments made of gold

Ornaments from the Garden of Eden

77 golden tables of the Bread of the Presence -  bread placed on a special table as an offering to God

Silver trumpets

The clothing of the high priest

Thousands of garments of regular priests

Gems from the 'Celestial Pavement', or Heaven

The text, translated by Professor James Davila from St Andrews University, suggests the artefacts from King Solomon's temple were tucked away in various places throughout the Middle East.

It lists a number of treasures including the Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, musical instruments made of gold, ornaments from the Garden of Eden and various precious religious stones.

 

It describes: '77 tables of gold, and their gold was from the walls of the Garden of Eden that was revealed to Solomon, and they radiate like the radiance of the sun and moon, which radiate the height of the world.'

'The number of stones was forty-six thousands and the number of pearls was the same...seven curtains of fold in which was collected twelve thousands talents of gold and the vestments of the Levites and their belts.'

Enlarge 

The Hebrew text claiming to reveal the location of King Solomans hidden treasure and the fate of the Ark of the Covenant. The oldest confirmed example of the treatise, which survives to present day, is from a book published in Amsterdam in 1648 called 'Emek Halachah'

A modern-day Indiana Jones has uncovered details about the fate of the Ark of Covenant (pictured in this stone carving) in a newly translated Hebrew text

THE ARK OF THE COVENANT

The Ark of the Covenant is a legendary gilded case believed to have been constructed nearly 3,000 years ago.

According to biblical text, the Ark holds the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses by God. 

It was housed in King Solomon's Temple, which contained a variety of different treasures.

In the Book of Exodus, the Ark is a box made from a of wood generally translated as acacia, covered in gold. 

The top surface of the Ark is decorated with two cherubim, or angels, who crouch facing each other with wings outstretched, forming a seat. Some say God himself occupies that seat, while the Ark served as a footstool.

When King Solomon’s Temple was captured and destroyed by the Babylonians in 597 and 586 B.C., the coveted artefact disappeared forever.Some of the treasures were hidden in Israel and Babylonia, while others were delivered into the hands of the angels Shamshiel, Michael and Gabriel. 

‘The text tells us no more about where the Ark and other treasures might be than if you watched the film,’ Professor Davila told MailOnline.

‘But it does provide some interesting insights into Jewish legends in the Middle Ages….Mostly it tells us ways in which people understood the Bible that are not part of official interpretation.’

The Ark of the Covenant is a legendary gilded case believed to have been constructed nearly 3,000 years ago.

According to biblical text, the Ark holds the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses by God. It was housed in King Solomon's Temple, which contained a variety of different treasures.

But when King Solomon’s Temple was captured and destroyed by the Babylonians in 597 and 586 B.C., the coveted artefact disappeared forever.

Archaeologists are still unsure whether Ark was captured, destroyed or hidden, and many have searched for it throughout the centuries.

The text, which dates back at least as far back as the 15th century, says the ‘treasures were concealed by a number of Levites and prophets.’

‘Some of these (treasures) were hidden in various locations in the Land of Israel and in Babylonia, while others were delivered into the hands of the angels Shamshiel, Michael, Gabriel and perhaps Sariel,’ he writes.

The writer of the text draws on traditional methods of scriptural explanation to explain where the treasures might have been hidden.

But there are a number of inconsistencies in the text. For example, in the prologue it states that Shimmur the Levite and his companions hid the treasures.

Later on the text mentions the treasures being in the keeping of, or hidden by, Shamshiel and other angels.

‘I believe the author looked at various legends without much concern about making them consistent,’ said Professor Davila.

He added that the treatise is similar in some ways to the metallic ‘Copper Scroll,’ one of the Dead Sea Scrolls found near the site of Qumran in the West Bank.

WHO WAS THE LEGENDARY KING SOLOMON?

King Solomon

King Solomon has fascinated historians, scholars and treasure hunters for centuries.

Some have been drawn to his poetry, others to his tales of wisdom - and many to the tales of his phenomenal wealth.

Although the only accounts of him come from the Bible, many historians believe he was a real and immensely powerful figure.

The son of King David - of the David and Goliath story - and Queen Bathsheba, he was the third King of Israel and ruled for 40 years, between 965BC and 925BC.

During his reign, Israel was at the heart of a prosperous and stable empire.

He rebuilt Jerusalem, creating magnificent palaces and fortresses, and also built the first temple to store the Ark of the Covenant.

His life was extravagant. The Book of Kings reveals he had 700 wives, including the daughter of a pharoah and 300 concubines. 

The Old Testament also reveals how he was visited by the Queen of Sheba, who was so impressed by his wealth that she arrived on camel with spices, gifts and tons of gold.

According to Bible, he was a prolific writer, composing 1,005 songs and 3,000 proverbs.

Many are still in use, with the expression 'pride comes before a fall' based on one of his sayings.

According to biblical text, the Ark holds the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses by God. This image (ca. 1725-1727) shows the Ark of the Covenant and is by Giovanni Battista Pittoni

Indiana Jones, right, carries away the glistening Ark of the Covenant in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark by Steven Spielberg

The Copper Scroll, which dates back around 1,900 years, shows several ‘striking parallels’ with the newly translated treatise, Professor Davila said.

The treatise says that the treasures from Solomon's Temple were recorded ‘on a tablet of bronze,’ a metal like the Copper Scroll.

The Copper scroll also discusses the location of hidden treasure, although not from Solomon's Temple. Professor Davila said this might reveal a tradition of inscribing lists of treasures on metal.

The oldest confirmed example of the treatise, which survives to present day, is from a book published in Amsterdam in 1648 called ‘Emek Halachah.’

However, Professor Davila is the first to translate the text into English.

Credit to Mail Online
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2536549/King-Solomons-treasures-revealed-Newly-translated-Hebrew-text-lists-legendary-riches-including-Ark-Covenant.html#ixzz2q0WEvsj9 

New Nationalism: Far-right voices get louder in Japan

The wristband that tracks your child's every move

The ability to track the location - and perhaps behaviour - of children - has become a reality thanks to a team from Manchester and what they claim is a "first of its kind" GPS tracker and mobile phone wristband.

Hidden in the depths of the auxiliary halls at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas is a small British company usually based in Manchester’s MediaCityUK, showing off a prototype its pioneering wearable safety device for children and the elderly.

Working in conjunction with Manchester University, KMS say its wristband is essentially a very simple small, wrist-worn mobile phone with integrated GPS that has just one button.

Panic button
It works like a panic button that when pressed dials a series of pre-programmed phone numbers until it gets an answer from a human, automatically detecting answer machines and skipping to the next number in the list.

“Simplicity was the key for our target audience of children and vulnerable adults. It had to be easy enough for anyone to use, even for those people who would not be able to operate a standard mobile phone,” said Chris Etchells, co-founder of KMS talking to the Guardian at CES.

The Wristband is charged wirelessly and the battery lasts around two days of use, but will notify the manager of the device when it hits 20% battery by email, and then call the designated number at 10% battery.

KMS also made the wristband automatically answer incoming calls, allowing parents, relatives and friends to call to check up on the child even if they wouldn’t necessarily answer a ringing phone from their parents.

Geo-fencing and tracking
Coupled to the mobile phone is an assisted GPS chip, which allows parents or carers to track the wearer on a map using a website or smartphone app.

KMS has also developed a geographic ring-fencing feature, which automatically tracks the child wearing the wristband and notifies its parents when it leaves a pre-defined safe zone or route of travel, allowing them to call the band.

On top of the band is a Vcode 2D barcode which encodes information about the person wearing the band including their blood type, their allergies and an emergency contact number, should the child or wearer get lost or involved in an incident.

“It took eight months to develop, but I’ve been working on the idea behind it for the best part of 10 years,” said Etchells talking about how he came up with the concept while working with vulnerable adults.

Etchells explains that in the testing of the device, rather than feeling like they were being watched, the child testers saw it as a gateway to allowing them to play outside without supervision, as the parents felt more comfortable letting the kids play knowing they could keep an eye on them remotely and track them if they wandered off.

The wristband is in its final stage of development, and is expected to be ready for production and will then go on sale for about £200 in September 2014.

Credit to the Guardian

The Mother of All False Flag Attacks

In the past 30 days, I have been privately approached by four high level media types with regard to the fact that President Obama  was planning on using a false flag event to take down all, or part of the power grid and then enact martial law under the auspices of DHS with the use of their Hessian troops, primarily Russian.  These four media figures are people whose names would be recognizable. To various degrees, they want to break with their media controllers and get this truth out. It is safe to say that all four are on America’s side and are opposed to what Obama is trying to do the country on behalf of his puppet masters. The truth is becoming apparent for all who want to see it. Of course, the sheep will still go to great lengths to deny what is truly happening to our country.

It Is Time for Straight Talk

I have been writing about various aspects of this scenario for 16 months, such as using the Russians as martial law enforcement troops. I began focusing on the power grid as a target in August/September of 2013. I first mentioned that Benghazi was the first real hint that a military coup would someday topple Obama. It is now time to categorize and review the events connected to the Grid EX II drill and the attempt to initiate a false flag event followed by martial law.

The Mother of All False Flag Events

For months, I felt like one of the few voices in the wilderness trying to call attention to what was about to happen. I took a fair amount of criticism for reporting on these events despite the fact that events were documented as could be when dealing with clandestine activities.
I had Jim Garrow on my show on December 22, 2013 and many of these claims were validated by the words of a 43 year veteran of being deep cover for the CIA.

Assassination Attempt on Jim Garrow

I might not have published this information about the very recent attempt on Dr. Garrow’s life, except that it has already been widely reported.  While on my show, Dr. Garrow acknowledged that Obama did plan to take down the power grid on November 13, 2013 in the Grid EX II drill and initiate a brutal martial law. According to the Congressman Franks and my military sources, a power grid takedown would result in a 90% fatality rate following two years. Interesting, since the quoted globalists call for a 90% reduction in population.

                                  The Military Saves America

I first wrote an article on the intention of this administration to use the Grid EX II drill on September 7,  2013.  Dr. Garrow was  a three hour guest on my show on December 22, 2013 as he validated these claims.
I  came to understand that the Grid EX II drill false flag event was stopped as soon as it was announced that the Obama administration had brought the Russians and the Chinese into the drill. This is remarkable, since both nations threatened to nuke us over Syria and Iran.

Then it was quickly announced that the Russians and Chinese would be first time participants in the upcoming RIMPAC war games. The RIMPAC war games are the largest war games in the world and have historically been war games that are designed to practice fighting against Chinese and Russian military tactics. Now our enemies are in the RIMPAC drill, which makes no sense.  This is all documented in the bibliography listed at the bottom of the article.

I suspected that the RIMPAC forces were being morphed into an international peace keeping force. I just had this confirmed in past few days by one of my insider sources. Here is where it gets very interesting. The UN Small Arms Treaty Ban calls for countries to use foreign troops to confiscate guns because they are more likely to fire on their own citizens. I was told that this is what RIMPAC is morphing into. We are going to see the use of foreign troops to seize American guns.

Dr. Garrow and I were brought together by a mutual friend, Ken Keeling, because what I was writing was matching what Ken knew that Garrow believed. The military is actively opposed the planned GRID EX II drill on November 13, 2013.

The Bifurcation Between the Military and the Administration

Obama has fired over 200+ command level officers. The conflict between Obama and the military is becoming a case of the immovable object meeting the irresistible force. Obama wants martial law to usher in his communist, NWO agenda. The military will not support the mass harming of American citizens. The military has already blocked a nuclear detonation in Charleston, SC., late last summer.

Some of the deposed military officers are planning a coup and a long term guerrilla civil war against the Obama administration, the DHS and their martial law enforcing troops of the Russians and the Chinese. A false flag event will precipitate this.  My sources are one ex-FEMA who has gone off the grid and two deposed generals who are not yet willing to go on the record for obvious reasons. As soon as I wrote this material on my website, Jim Garrow appeared and he confirmed every word I have written here.

I also want to point out that Senator Lindsay Graham, on the same day that Alex Jones reported missing nuclear missiles, said that “if we did not not hurry up and attack Syria, that Charleston Harbor would be nuked”. Graham knew something and it freaked him out. He was almost incoherent at this news conference.  By the way, the military intercepted the nuke intended for Charleston and detonated it 500 miles east of Charleston in the Atlantic and the Russians confirmed the explosion.

Obama has been thwarted. However, he is undeterred. There will be more false flag attack attempts with the purpose of subjugating this country under martial law.

As I said, Jim Garrow confirmed every bit of this on my interview with him. The first half hour of the interview, Jim and I danced around the topics. The last 2 and a half hours were explosive. Click on the above link to hear Dr. Garrow.
I have been writing about the Russians, who are here in this country, and they will be used as martial law troops because Obama cannot count on the military.  Because I was on to the truth that the Russians are going to be used to enforce martial law,  I was brought on to the Voice of Russia show and interviewed about the coming martial law only to have the Russians discredit me on the website as being extremist for believing that martial law was coming. This was their intention all along. My message was dangerous to the completion of their mission because they risked widespread exposure. The Russians and their propagandists were covering their backsides because they know that this is true and they were trying to discredit me to cover the truth. The interview played in Washington DC and New York and then in 38 countries. Here is the link to the interview I did with the Russians and the subsequent attack upon me following the interview
I have written extensively on martial law and the use of Russian troops on my website. I have a video of Russian troops training inside of DHS vehicles courtesy of Sherrie Wilcox and her blog

The government plans to use stadiums and shopping malls as FEMA camps and I have written about this extensively. FEMA and DHS even practiced for this at Giants Stadium and in Denver where they took elementary kids, without parent permission to sports stadiums and then hired mock parents to beg for the release of the kids. This was clearly a desensitization exercise for the guards to not succumb to parental demands. It is one of three ways to draw parents into FEMA camps. This is documented in the bibliography below.

Conclusion

These claims may sound extraordinary, except I can prove all of it. Do your own research by visiting the links in this article, including the bibliography listed below. Perhaps you will form different conclusions from myself, and that is OK. At least then, you cannot be considered to be a sheep.

The media attention that is now being paid to these events is significant. Mainstream media people are ready to break ranks with the purveyors of the corporate controlled message. The military is approaching rebellion and the public is waking up.  This adds up to the biggest civil unrest in American history.

The more attention we call to this, the more we can push this back due to the exposure. Perhaps, you should act like you like depends on this information getting out, because it does.

Partial Bibliography

Grid EX

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/11/12/grid-ex-ii-and-the-impact-of-an-emp-attack-on-america/

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/11/13/congressman-franks-on-grid-ex-ii-and-emp-threat/

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/11/11/grid-ex-ii-and-martial-law-using-foreign-mercenaries/

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/09/08/after-the-lights-go-out/

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/10/15/personal-preparation-for-grid-ex-ii/

Martial Law

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/12/29/the-third-wave-of-us-martial-law-mass-detentions/

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/09/03/where-will-fema-take-your-children/

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/12/07/the-nfls-role-in-the-coming-martial-law/

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/11/27/why-are-the-bankers-and-ex-intel-types-running-for-their-lives/

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/12/17/nukes-on-the-loose/

 Credit to The Common Sense Show

Florida Police New Toy: A U.S. Military Battle Wagon

“If you see my SWAT team roll up in this, it’s over, so just give up” 

 

Lily Dane

A Florida police department has a new toy – a U.S. military surplus battle wagon.

The six wheel, 30-ton armored Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle (or MRAP) is in “lightly used condition” and only has 5,000 miles on it. It is worth $700,000, but the department got it for $2,000. What a deal!

Fort Pierce Police Chief Sean Baldwin told WPTV that he hopes the vehicle remains parked:

Hopefully, we’ll never need the MRAP, but knowing that it is ready to roll is comforting.Fort Pierce Police posted an ominous warning to citizens on their Facebook page:

Chief Baldwin has some advice for anyone that may find themselves facing the MRAP on the wrong side of the law. ‘If you see my SWAT team roll up in this thing… it’s over, so just give up.’Yes, how comforting.
Guess how the department got the vehicle?

Officer Keith Holmes got it through the generosity of the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the military to transfer excess military vehicles to law enforcement agencies (among all of the other wonderful things the NDAA allows the government to do).

Over $4.2 billion worth of property has been transferred to law enforcement since the program began, in the ongoing effort to militarize US police.

The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office helped get the vehicle painted for free, so the sides say “Police” and “Fort Pierce.”
Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!”

 

Credit to The Activist Post

UK Mint Runs Out of Gold Coins

Disease resistance to antibiotics at tipping point, expert warns

The director of the Wellcome Trust has warned that resistance of disease to antibiotics has reached a tipping point at which it could creep into the UK almost without notice.

Prof Jeremy Farrar said the effects would be gradual and would be seen not just in resistant new infections but in everyday medical practice and the treatment of everything from diabetes to minor wounds at risk of turning septic.

Having worked in Vietnam for the past 18 years Farrar said he had already seen firsthand resistance to drugs in the shape of tuberculosis that had spread from patients' lungs to their brain.

"This is happening now," Farrar told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "It's been happening for the last decade or so or more and it will continue to happen. What we will see is people actually spending longer in hospital, patients getting sicker and having complications and dying and it will creep up on us almost without us noticing.

"This will not be the sort of contagion-like event of somebody landing from Hong Kong in London with a pneumonia that is emerging that we've all feared. This will creep up on us insidiously, and of course that's in many ways more difficult to cope with."

He said there had been a "golden age" of antibiotics but complacency had set in in the 1970s and 1980s when there could have been more investment and antibiotics could have been used better, for example in combinations, to prevent the development of resistance to them.

"We're watching evolution happening," he said. "The viruses, the parasites have a pressure put on them from the drugs. They want to respond to that by surviving and not being killed by these antibiotics so therefore they evolve in ways that make them resistant."

Farrar said that 20 years ago there had been 18 companies in the commercial sector working in the field of antibiotics but now there were just four, and consequently only five new classes of antibiotics had emerged in the past 10 years.

He called for more imaginative ways to incentivise the pharmaceutical industry, for example through changes to patents, and for regulation around clinical trials to be eased. He said access to antibiotics needed to be regulated as they were available over the counter at low cost in many countries.

"No government can do this on its own because this is a truly global issue," he said. "This is getting to the tipping point where you will start to see this in you and your families and we will start to see this not in infections many, many miles away but here in London."

Last year the chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, described what she called an "apocalyptic scenario" where people going for simple operations in 20 years' time would die of routine infections "because we have run out of antibiotics".

Farrar said he was not presenting the crisis in apocalyptic terms but recalled the impact of HIV as an example of when a disease emerges that has no antibiotic for it.

"It's etched on my mind 30 years later," he said. "Young people, predominately male at that time, coming in and dying withing days, weeks and months of their infections because we had no way of treating it, and that is a risk that's really worth being concerned about coming back. Even in HIV we run the risk of returning at some point in the future to resistant HIV and that would be truly devastating."

Credit to the Guardian

Media Manipulating West Coast Radiation Statistics

Al Qaeda Now Controls More Territory In The Arab World Than Ever Before

Remember this?

This was the neo-conservatives' victory lap when they supposedly achieved one of their main stated goals: to discover and neutralize terrorist organizations, primarily al Qaeda.

Well, things have changed.

In what can be described a truly ironic event and a major failure for America's stated mission (because one can't help but wonder at all the support various Al Qaeda cells have received from the US and/or CIA) of eradicating the Al Qaeda scourge from the face of the earth, we learn today that al Qaeda appears to control more territory in the Arab world than it has done at any time in its history. According to a CNN report "from around Aleppo in western Syria to small areas of Falluja in central Iraq, al Qaeda now controls territory that stretches more than 400 miles across the heart of the Middle East, according to English and Arab language news accounts as well as accounts on jihadist websites."

The following recent map from Jane's shows just how extensive Al Qaeda's influence has grown in recent years.

And nowhere is the surge of Al Qaeda more visible than in recent events in Iraq. From CNN:

The focus of al Qaeda's leaders has always been regime change in the Arab world in order to install Taliban-style regimes. Al Qaeda's leader Ayman al-Zawahiri acknowledged as much in his 2001 autobiography, "Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet," when he explained that the most important strategic goal of al Qaeda was to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world, explaining that, "without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing."

Now al-Zawahiri is closer to his goal than he has ever been. On Friday al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq seized control of parts of the city of Falluja and parts of the city of Ramadi, both of which are located in Iraq's restive Anbar Province.

Anbar is home to predominantly Sunni Muslims, who feel that that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki treats the Sunnis as second-class citizens.

Sectarian tensions in Anbar recently burst into several all-out revolts against the government, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as the al-Qaeda affiliate there is known, quickly seized the opportunity to notch some battlefield victories.

Government forces increased their presence around Falluja in response and on Tuesday tribal leaders issued a statement urging people who had fled the city or stopped reporting to work to return.

America's escapade in Syria - where it was merely a puppet for Qatari nat gas oligarchs - has also backfired.

ISIS is also operating in Syria, where it has established a presence in many areas of the Aleppo and Idlib Governorates in the northwest. In August, ISIS launched a propaganda series on video highlighting their activities in Syria, which includes interviews with fighters; the "graduation" of a group of mujahedin "cubs" (aged about 7 to 10 years old) from training, and sermons at local mosques preaching al Qaeda's interpretation of Islam.

The al-Nusra front has claimed to control parts of at least a dozen Syrian towns. Those include sections of the ancient city of the Aleppo in the northwest, where fighters have been filmed running a community fair and preaching al Qaeda's values to crowds of children. The group has also released videos on jihadist websites claiming that it is providing services to the people of several towns in the governorate of Idlib, which borders the Aleppo Governorate to the west. Al Nusra claims that it is a quasi-government and service-provider in the towns of Binnish, Taum, and Saraqib.

Al-Nusra fighters allied to al Qaeda function like a government in areas they control in Syria. The group provides daily deliveries of bread, free running water and electricity, a health clinic, and a strict justice system based on Sharia law in the eastern Syrian city of Ash Shaddadi, where it also took control of the city's wheat silos and oil wells. In September a CNN reporting team concluded, "Al Qaeda has swept to power with the aim of imposing a strict Islamist ideology on Syrians across large swathes of Syria's rebel-held north."

In sum, al Qaeda affiliates now control much of northern and northwestern Syria as well as some parts of eastern Syria, as well as much of Anbar province, which is around a third of Iraqi territory.

It wouldn't be a US diplomatic debacle without at least one soundbite from John Kerry. So here it is:

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that the United States will "do everything that is possible to help" the Iraqi government control al Qaeda's expansion in Anbar, but stressed that no American troops would be sent back to the Middle Eastern nation . Last month, the United States quietly sent Hellfire missiles and surveillance drones to the Iraqi government to support their fight against increasing al Qaeda-related violence.

The question of how quickly the US "gift" was intercepted by Al Qaeda is rhetorical. The other rhetorical question is how long until the now much better armed (with US weapons) jihadists will turn those same weapons on the liberating Western powers. The US for now seems safe. Europe is a different matter.

For the United States the widening reach of al Qaeda in the Middle East doesn't necessarily translate into an immediate threat at home. So far only a handful of Americans have fought in the Syrian conflict alongside al Qaeda's affiliates there so concerns about some kind of "blowback" from the Syrian war in the U.S. are, at this point, unfounded.

European countries are rightly concerned, however. Many European countries have seen their citizens drawn to the Syrian war; more than a hundred from Britain and many dozens from countries like Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, according to multiple European officials we have spoken to. These countries are concerned that the returning veterans of the Syrian conflict might launch terrorist attacks in Europe.

In October for instance, British authorities arrested militants who were allegedly planning a terrorist attack. Two British officials who work on counterterrorism issues told us that that the militants had recently traveled to Syria.

Finally, none of this should come as a surprise to anyone. Ron Paul, for one, has long predicted precisely this chain of events. In this context his latest commentary, posted here over the weekend, bears repeating.

Iraq: The ‘Liberation’ Neocons Would Rather Forget

Remember Fallujah? Shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military fired on unarmed protestors, killing as many as 20 and wounding dozens. In retaliation, local Iraqis attacked a convoy of US military contractors, killing four. The US then launched a full attack on Fallujah to regain control, which left perhaps 700 Iraqis dead and the city virtually destroyed.

According to press reports last weekend, Fallujah is now under the control of al-Qaeda affiliates. The Anbar province, where Fallujah is located, is under siege by al-Qaeda. During the 2007 “surge,” more than 1,000 US troops were killed “pacifying” the Anbar province.  Although al-Qaeda was not in Iraq before the US invasion, it is now conducting its own surge in Anbar.

For Iraq, the US “liberation” is proving far worse than the authoritarianism of Saddam Hussein, and it keeps getting worse. Last year was Iraq’s deadliest in five years. In 2013, fighting and bomb blasts claimed the lives of 7,818 civilians and 1,050 members of the security forces. In December alone nearly a thousand people were killed.

I remember sitting through many hearings in the House International Relations Committee praising the “surge,” which we were told secured a US victory in Iraq. They also praised the so-called “Awakening,” which was really an agreement by insurgents to stop fighting in exchange for US dollars. I always wondered what would happen when those dollars stopped coming.

Where are the surge and awakening cheerleaders now?

One of them, Richard Perle, was interviewed last year on NPR and asked whether the Iraq invasion that he pushed was worth it. He replied:

I've got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can't a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn't have done that.

Many of us were saying all along that we shouldn’t have done that – before we did it. Unfortunately the Bush Administration took the advice of the neocons pushing for war and promising it would be a “cakewalk.” We continue to see the results of that terrible mistake, and it is only getting worse.

Last month the US shipped nearly a hundred air-to-ground missiles to the Iraqi air force to help combat the surging al-Qaeda. Ironically, the same al-Qaeda groups the US is helping the Iraqis combat are benefiting from the US covert and overt war to overthrow Assad next door in Syria. Why can’t the US government learn from its mistakes?

The neocons may be on the run from their earlier positions on Iraq, but that does not mean they have given up. They were the ones pushing for an attack on Syria this summer. Thankfully they were not successful. They are now making every effort to derail President Obama’s efforts to negotiate with the Iranians. Just last week William Kristol urged Israel to attack Iran with the hope we would then get involved. Neoconservative Senators from both parties recently introduced the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013, which would also bring us back on war-footing with Iran.

Next time the neocons tell us we must attack, just think “Iraq.”

Credit to Zero Hedge

Conjoined whale twins found in Mexico first documented case