Jadaliyya
Turkish Politics, Kurdish Rights, and the KCK Operations: An Interview with Asli Bali

I think the AKP has shown itself to be truly in the model of its own former opponents on the Kemalist or secular side of Turkey, organizing precisely around the same ultra-nationalist positions as those parties did; whether in terms of its orientation towards Abdullah Öcalan, who remains in detention in Turkey and was convicted and is serving his prison sentence, or whether in terms of the general attitudes towards peaceful political organizing, or in terms of their tolerance for elected political officials, or in terms of the reach of their operations against academics, progressive publishers, basically every potential part of civil society that supports Kurdish autonomous political organizing. So the AKP has shown itself to not be a source of hope on this question.

AFP

The United States has deployed Predator drones to Turkey from Iraq for surveillance flights in support of Ankara's fight against Kurdish rebels, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday.

Richard Silverstein

The Guardian’s Julian Borger quotes a former Iranian government official as conceding that the explosion at an Iranian missile base was the work of the Mossad, news I was the first to report here based on a confidential authoritative Israeli source

AT

TEHRAN - Deadly explosions at a military base about 60 kilometers southwest of Tehran, coinciding with the suspicious death of the son of a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, have triggered speculation in Iran on whether or not these are connected to recent United States threats to resort to extrajudicial executions of IRGC leaders.

Craig Murray

"... Since I became a notorious whistleblower, several of my ex-friends and contacts have used me to get out information they wanted to leak, via my blog. A good recent example was a senior friend at the UN who tipped me off in advance on the deal by which the US agreed to the Saudi attack on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain, in return for Arab League support for the NATO attack on Libya. But this was rather different, not least in the apparent implication that our Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, was engaged in something with Werritty which went beyond official FCO policy.

...My source says that co-ordinating with Israel and the US on diplomatic preparation for an attack on Iran was the subject of all these meetings. That absolutely fits with the jobs Gould held at the relevant times. The FCO refuses to say what was discussed. My source says that, most crucially, Iran was discussed at the Tel Aviv dinner, and the others present represented Mossad. The FCO again refuses to say who was present or what was discussed...

Links from FLC, AA, and elsewhere.

AA: "Is there a doubt that Western and Arab attitude toward the Syrian regime has nothing to do with its repression and killing?"

Repeat. Crooke: The Great Game in Syria