The recent revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency has handed tens of millions of dollars over to the offices of the president of Afghanistan should come as no surprise. The CIA has a long history of this sort of activity. And most importantly, it’s the latest reminder of how America’s global “war on terror” has been forged through backroom deals, cold hard cash and the fostering of corruption.
From Yemen to Afghanistan to Somalia, America has prosecuted its perpetual war the usual way U.S. foreign policy is conducted: partnerships with unsavory leaders who are corrupt and commit abuses. Here are five striking examples of how the U.S. global war has been characterized by unsavory activity since 2001.
1. Bounty Payments For Alleged Terrorists
guantanamo bay prison
Cash payments in Afghanistan aren’t limited to the CIA paying off corrupt Afghan government officials. The lure of money played a major role at the start of the war on Afghanistan when the U.S. was looking for suspected terrorists to arrest and eventually throw in Guantanamo detention camp. The U.S. offered thousands of dollars to people to turn in alleged terrorists; 86% of all Guantanamo prisoners were people who were captured by bounty hunters, according to a report published by Seton Hall University in 2005. Many of them ended up being innocent of any crime–another clear example of how money is a corrupting tool in America’s never-ending global war.
The U.S. paid off Afghan warlords to capture people they suspected of having a role in terrorism. The payments ranged from $3,000 to 25,000, according to theAssociated Press. The U.S. also gave money to Pakistani security forces to do the same. The AP article on bounties for people who ended up at Guantanamo reported that “a detainee who said he was a Saudi businessman claimed, ‘The Pakistani police sold me for money to the Americans.’ ‘This was part of a roundup of all foreigners and Arabs in that area,’ of Pakistan near the Afghan border.”
Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf admitted the bounty payments to security forces in his memoir, published in 2006. “We have captured 689 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars. Those who habitually accuse U.S. of not doing enough in the war on terror should simply ask the CIA how much prize money it has paid to the Government of Pakistan,” he wrote.
2. Secret Blood-Soaked Deal With Pakistan
Despite the on-again, off-again nature of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, the country has been a major partner in the U.S. “war on terror.” The country’s tribal areas have been pounded by American drones. While the Pakistani government has never outright admitted that it accepts all drone strikes, their former president said it signed off on at least some. And Pakistan has never shot down a U.S. drone, is told about strikes in advance and even clears its airspace so drones can fly unimpeded.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, makes a statement before meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, left, and Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Asfhaq Parvez Kayani on Wednesday, April 24, 2013, in Brussels, Belgium. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool)
The American program of drone strikes in Pakistan–which has killed between 2,541-3,533 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism–started out with a secret, blood-soaked deal which wasn’t revealed until this year in a book by New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti. Here’s how the deal went down: in 2004, the Pakistani government wanted a tribal leader allied with the Pakistani Taliban dead. Nek Muhammad had been leading a fight against Pakistani troops in the largely ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan. And for a few years, the government had balked at allowing the CIA to wage a campaign of drone strikes.
But all that changed with a secret deal: the CIA would kill Muhammad in exchange for the use of airspace for its drones. Despite the fact that Muhammad was thought to be more a Pakistani internal problem than a threat to U.S. security, a drone ripped through his compound, killing him and two young boys. That paved the way for a ferocious campaign of U.S. drone strikes in the country that continues today.
Mazzetti detailed the terms of the deal in an excerpt of his book in the New York Times: “Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas…The ISI and the C.I.A. agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the C.I.A.’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.”
Indeed, the Pakistani government lied through its teeth about the killing of Muhammad. It told its people he was killed by troops who fired a rocket at him.
3. Keeping U.S. Strikes in Yemen Secret
The first American strike on Yemen occurred in 2002, but it wasn’t until the Obama administration took office that a ramped-up military campaign commenced that has so far killed between an estimated 232-333 people. But the Yemeni government wanted to keep that campaign secret because the assassination by drone program is deeply unpopular among the civilian population. The Obama administration, which has been far from transparent about its drone program and other activities in Yemen, happily obliged.
The evidence for this comes via WikiLeaks. In January 2010, General David Petraeus, then the head of US Central Command, met with Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president of Yemen at the time. Their discussion centered around U.S. assistance for Yemen’s fight against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. By that time, the U.S. had conducted a few cruise missile and drone strikes on Yemeni territory to beat back the militant group which has been accused of plotting attacks on the U.S.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus. That telling line was prompted by a discussion about a controversial cruise missile strike that occurred in December 2009 that killed 41 civilians, including women and children. The Yemeni government insisted it carried out the attack in al-Ma’jalah, Abyan.
Yemen’s Deputy Prime Minister Alimi joked that “he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.” The reference to Arhab and Shebwa was a nod to other American attacks on Yemen in those areas.
It was Amnesty International that exposed the fact of U.S. involvement in the strike. The human rights group published photos of U.S. cluster munitions and Tomahawk cruise missiles that were used in the deadly strike in al-Ma’jalah.
Despite the fact that the drone program is deeply unpopular in Yemen and has helped fuel Al Qaeda recruitment, the campaign continues, though it has become untenable to pretend that the Yemeni military was carrying out the attacks. In September 2012, the new Yemeni president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, praised U.S. drone strikes in his country. “They pinpoint the target and have zero margin of error, if you know what target you’re aiming at,” he said. The U.S., though, continues to maintain a policy of silence on specific drone strikes in the country.
4. Working With Somali Warlords
Somalia is yet another front in the U.S. war on terror. Since 2011, the U.S. has carried out drone strikes on the country targeting al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group in the country that is also an affiliate of Al Qaeda. The U.S. has also snatched and rendered alleged terrorists in the country and has operated a secret prison there run by the CIA.
To do all this, U.S. intelligence and military officials have worked with unsavory Somali warlords and intelligence agents. Nation investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill exposed details of the CIA’s backing of Mohamed Afrah Qanyare, a notorious Somali warlord. Since Qanyare owned a secretive airport the CIA wanted to use, they began paying him $100,000 to $150,000 a month. Although the U.S. did not begin carrying out direct strikes in the country until 2007, Qanyare thought he had U.S. backing to carry out his own attacks. So he and other warlords began hunting down people they thought Washington would want taken care of, according to Scahill’s reporting. But these activities ended up producing blowback and empowered Al Qaeda-affiliated forces, much as other U.S. policies, like supporting Ethiopia’s war in the country, ended up spreading militant influence.
“These people were already heinous warlords; they were widely reviled in Mogadishu. And then they start assassinating imams and local prayer leaders who had nothing to do with terror,” one expert on Somalia, Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, told theNation. “They were either capturing them and then renditioning them to Djibouti, where there is a major American base, or in many cases they were chopping their head off and taking the head to the Americans or whoever. And telling them, ‘We killed this guy.’”
Another example of misguided policy is the secret sites the U.S. operates in Somalia, which Scahill also exposed. One of the sites is a prison used by the CIA and run by Somali intelligence agents, who get paid $200 a month. The prisoners held at the site in Mogadishu are alleged members of al-Shabaab. But some of them have been held for over a year, and haven’t been charged with a crime.
And in 2003, a Somali militia sold an alleged Al Qaeda member named Suleiman Abdallah to the CIA after capturing him from a hospital. Abdallah was then spirited off to Kenya, and eventually to Afghanistan. He was reportedly beaten and tortured by CIA agents. No charges were ever brought against him, and he was released in 2008.
5. Cash for the Karzais
The New York Times revealed April 29 that “wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.” The literal bags of cash to Karzai’s office were made in an effort to influence the Afghan president and maintain access to his inner circle, thus ensuring that the CIA continued to play a role in prosecuting the Afghanistan war.
What the cash ended up doing, though, was fueling corruption–an inevitable outcome considering the fact that Karzai and his family are known to be corrupt, as WikiLeaks cables revealed.
AFGHANISTAN; US MARINES in the POPPY FIELDS
The money went to paying off warlords and politicians, “many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban,” the New York Times reported. The CIA pays these unsavory figures to ensure that they continue serving as proxies in the fight against the Taliban. In turn, the money ended up bolstering the corrupt patronage networks the U.S. insists it wants dismantled. Some of the money also went directly into the pockets of aides to the Afghan president.
This isn’t the first time the CIA was caught paying off corrupt Afghan officials. In October 2009, the New York Times exposed cash payments to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and a powerful figure in southern Afghanistan. The intelligence agency made the payments because Karzai helps operate an Afghan paramilitary force that is a partner in the CIA’s effort against militants battling the U.S. occupation of the country. There was a big problem with these payments: Ahmed Karzai is suspected of being a major player in the drug trade in Afghanistan, the same drug trade the U.S. has been fighting against.
“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” one U.S. military intelligence official told the New York Times.
So despite high-minded rhetoric from U.S. leaders about how American wars are conducted, cash payments, backroom deals and the fostering of corruption are the norm. The CIA’s payments to corrupt Afghan leaders are the latest in a long line of counter-productive U.S. actions taken in the name of the war on terror. And if history is any guide, more of these activities will be revealed in the future.
Where do we even start with this mess? How did America get to this point – where we are in danger of being over-run by the allies of a rogue intelligence agency that we are powerless against? How did the USA go from being the champion of the free world to being the greatest threat to the peace and security of its own citizens, and instant death from remote-control-in-the-skies for everyone else on earth?
It’s tempting to start out with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the story starts with the creation of the CIA and the National Security State, founded in 1947 by President Harry Truman to address the fact that, with the war against fascism over, it was time for the US government to rid itself of communists and other socialists who had poured into President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. The fear being that communists loyal to Russia’s revolutionary leader and communist party chairman Joseph Stalin would help him gradually transform the US into a communist state.
Government and business leaders wanted to ensure that there were “trusted people” in charge of things here, behind the scenes. These unaccountable, largely unknown people would be free to pursue their own agenda, without interference from government oversight and regulation. They set up fake businesses and NGOs. They hired CIA operatives to help facilitate business overseas and converted media mouthpieces to their cause.
They justified this by making sure the world knew of the dangers of “creeping socialism.” For years, the world was able to watch the Congress of the United States, along with their partners in business, destroy people’s lives by accusing them of being communists. Sometimes the accusations were merely petty acts of malice against people who had rejected the committee chairman’s homosexual advances – this happening in an era much more judgemental and less accepting of ANY expression of sexuality, much less one which many people could not comprehend.
Despite the fact that several courageous individuals succeeded in exposing the gross abuse of power of the anti-communists (even today, one of the more vocal anti-communists’ name is used to describe persecution for political gain – “McCarthyism.”), several of them retained power, and even increased this power in the decades afterwards – both Richard Nixon (HUAC) and Ronald Reagan (anti-communist president of the Screen Actors Guild) eventually took over the White House (in possession of the CIA since the intelligence/industry coup that had JFK assassinated), largely on the political clout earned in the 1940′s and 50′s anti-communist witch-hunts.
The longterm consequences of the 1963 coup has been a nation in a state of perpetual warfare. At first, the war was against the Communist Menace, anywhere on the globe (Greece, Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the list goes on…). After the Soviet Union collapsed – as it was always intended to – the old Cold Warriors needed a new boogeyman to seek out and destroy anywhere an oil field or other valuable natural resources were in danger of being stolen from American corporations by foreigners.
However, in the 1970s a glitch in the system developed. The American people had become unwilling to finance and die for wars abroad, being fought for very unclear purposes. Two strategies were developed to compensate for this. First, blue-blood businessmen helped the CIA set up their own drug-running operations. This would give them international contacts, with people who would do just about anything for money. It would also give the CIA a ways of building a “black budget” of money from drug-running operations, with the good people of the United States and their elected representatives none the wiser.
Also, this allowed industries to develop their own private military and intelligence businesses. Both to set up their own smuggling networks, and to deal with those pesky foreigners who kept trying to utilize their nation’s natural resources for the benefit of the local population. How dare they!
This privatization and outsourcing of warfare for the benefit of multinational corporations picked up steam under the guidance of President James Earl Carter, who came up with the brilliant idea of recruiting and arming the most intolerant and violent people to be found on Earth and sending them to fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, rather than risk an outright war if the US were involved in some kind of official capacity. These mujahadeen eventually became the current crop of Afghan warlords and Opium barons. We are allegedly at war with this group, forever. We are currently arming this group. Not the exact same people, of course – but the ideology (or “theology” if you want to legitimize their insane version of Islam) remains the same. They exist to cause violence and chaos in countries not under the direct control of one of “their” Imans. There are no nations that fit this description, and the Holy Terror Army (a name i just made up and will now use to refer to any fundamentalist religion that resorts to extreme violence to impose it’s version of “god’s” law on nonbelievers) is spreading nightmarish violence around the world.
Prior to this current age of holy terror, acting President Ronald Reagan expanded the proxy wars to Angola, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Cambodia, and Grenada. His successor invaded Panama and Kuwait. And dirty old man Bill Clinton gave al Qaeda it’s biggest test, installing the CIA’s Holy Terror Army into the former Yugoslavia.
After that, the CIA/al Qaeda alliance was ready for the big time, and despite having trained, funded, and armed the Holy Terror Army, President Slick Willy justified military actions abroad by claiming they were targeting the workings of Holy Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. This was the reason given for striking a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan being built to provide cheap prescription drugs to a continent being decimated by AIDS. Millions of Africans have died over the years due to this, and not just of AIDS - they’ve died of numerous maladies that could have been treated with pharmaceuticals, but the patent-holders demand prices that few people in Africa can afford.
Which brings us to 9/11/2001, the invasion of a country for fun and profit, and the start of a second perpetual war, the first one being the war on drugs, which the U.S. intentionally escalates by selling arms to drug cartels.
So, the CIA has assassinated an American President, set up an international drug-running operation which employs the most insanely violent people imaginable, and conducts wars with proxy armies which it cannot control, only finance. And the Government continues to use the war on drugs as a pretext to wage war on its own citizens, despite a proven will by the American public to legalize Ganja. But, this isn’t enough.
The war on terror has to be continually justified, despite a proven inability to militarily defeat a state of mind. Otherwise, it could lose its precious funding. Money is hard to come by, with the Government printing it as fast as it can in order to give it to European Banking cartels. There’s nothing left for the rest of us. I guess we are supposed to take solace in the roles left to us – fodder for their highly profitable, never-ending wars – and learn to love Big Brother.
Here in the spring of 2013, it looks as if the cycle has run its course, and the extreme violence of the late 20th century is finally coming back to its spawning grounds in North America. In the past two years, there have been numerous instances of mass shootings that were so obviously orchestrated by someone other than the “fall guy,” who usually ends up dead, that the Government is losing credibility. Washington has lost the Hearts and Minds campaign in the homeland, to the bloggers.
In addition to being nothing more than future collateral damage to our government, Americans are also guinea pigs in Monsanto’s GMO playground. They have been given immunity from prosecution for the damage their poisons are causing.
Our government is unaccountable to us. It is out of control, and the people in the positions of political power can only find solutions to the problems the banks, corporations, Holy War Terrorists, and drug cartel violence create by spreading more of the same.
If the US government continues to escalate the war of attrition it is waging against Americans, there may come a day when we welcome intervention by some foreign power. In the meanwhile, some countries may not wait for an invitation to intervene here. Just as they are saying about Syria, and like they said about Bosnia, the world cannot sit idly by and watch a violent regime continue to slaughter its own people.
It seems like our nation is doomed, and if we don’t want to go down with it, we had damn well better starting envisioning our lives in the ruins of the former United States, and living our lives to accommodate the changing world around us – one that an out-of-control CIA completely fucked over. I doubt the people of Yugoslavia had much of an idea how things would go after Tito died. Their society imploded. NATO intervened. Everything fell apart. Fortunes were lost in the destruction. New fortunes were made in the reconstruction – mostly for foreign corporations. And I don’t see things turning out much differently for us.
rob los ricos
The National Security State
The apparatus of the National Security State, largely established in the National Security Act of 1947, laid the foundations for the extension of American hegemony around the globe. In short, the Act laid the foundations for the apparatus of the American Empire. The National Security Act created the National Security Council (NSC) and position of National Security Adviser, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) as the Pentagon high command of military leaders, and of course, the CIA.
The first major foreign operation carried out by the National Security State, or rather, the “secret government,” was the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Iran. In 1952, the British were concerned at the efforts of Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohommad Mossadeq, in nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, taking the monopoly away from British Petroleum. So the British intelligence, the SIS, proposed to the Americans a joint operation, and the CIA obliged.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation in which he warned America and indeed the world about the growing influence of the National Security State in what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex”:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower was speaking from the point of view of having first-hand knowledge of this “influence” in the corridors of power, himself as President being unable to challenge it, and unable to do so simply in the first decade of the American Empire. He was warning against the influence of the interconnected relationship and organized power of the military, government, and industry, in that the growing influence of this “complex” was so vast that it threatened to take over the government and subvert democracy itself. It was the functions of this complex that saw profit created through war and empire, and thus, there was a constant drive and impetus towards pursuing empire and resorting to war. If you build a massive military structure, you are going to use it; if it is profitable to go to war, you will go to war.
Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. “He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.”
Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can’t remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination. – from The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t the Joint Chiefs alone who were trying to push for war, the “CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis,” as Kennedy had ordered the CIA to halt all raids against Cuba during the crisis, “to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration.” However, Bill Harvey, the CIA agent in charge of “Operation Mongoose,” the CIA plan which employed the Mafia to attempt to kill Castro, in brazen defiance of Kennedy’s orders, mobilized “every single team and asset that we could scrape together” and then dropped them into Cuba, “in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow.”`
Robert Kennedy became the conduit through which the back-channel negotiations took place with the Soviets that ultimately ended the crisis without catastrophe. Nikita Khrushchev recounted the situation in his memoirs, in which he explained that Robert Kennedy “stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on,” which struck Khrushchev as “especially urgent.” Robert Kennedy warned the Soviets that, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.” Khrushchev even later wrote that, “for some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” and that, “now he was admitting this to us himself.” Thus:
“Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”
Thirteen days after the crisis began, the Soviets announced that they would remove the missiles from Cuba, with the US agreeing to remove missiles from US bases in Turkey and “pledging not to invade Cuba,” which Kennedy and future presidents would honour. At the announcement of the end to the crisis, General LeMay roared at Kennedy, “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” and that, “We should invade today!” A defense analyst at the Pentagon, Daniel Ellsberg, who was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy at the end of the crisis, remarked that after the settlement was reached, “there was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” explaining, “not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.” - from lew rockwell, The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK
Zbigniew Brzezinski:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” and “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” Portions of the books can be read at: <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>
Mujahideen trained and funded by the US are among its deadliest foes
American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist.- from the gaurdian, Frankenstein the CIA created
CONTROLLING THE ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE
The more one studies the dark history of the US national security state, the more transparent the CIA – Wall Street connections become. The links to the international drug trade are less obvious, but have existed from the beginning, that is, from the days of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Time and again, the same pattern has played out: US military interventions in Southeast Asia, Central America and, since 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq, have been accompanied by a sharp increase in narco-trafficking, with all of the attendant evils. These include the plague of drug addiction, drug-related crime, the devastation of the family and as I hope to show, the corrupting of democratic institutions at home and abroad.
The morally bankrupt policies that are responsible for all of the above have had another deleterious effect: They have crippled our nation’s capacity to play a positive role on the world stage. It is no wonder that foreigners no longer view the United States with admiration and respect, but increasingly with fear and loathing. But US elites are oblivious to such concerns. They do not care, and are quite candid about what they view as the CIA’s pragmatic “need” to associate with unsavory individuals and criminals in the interest of furthering US foreign policy goals. Their realpolitik can be read between the lines of the policy papers. Take, for instance, the 1996 intelligence report, already noted, prepared by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and for which Greenberg was nominated to replace John Deutch as director of the CIA. In the paper Greenberg affirms that “the capability to undertake [covert operations]….constitutes an important national security tool.” Later, in the section titled “Intelligence and Law Enforcement” he insists that foreign policy ought to take precedence over law enforcement when it comes to overseas operations. The bulk of U.S. intelligence efforts overseas is devoted to traditional national security concerns; as a result, law enforcement must ordinarily be a secondary concern. FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents operating abroad should not be allowed to act independently of either the ambassador or the CIA lest pursuit of evidence or individuals for prosecution cause major foreign policy problems or complicate ongoing intelligence and diplomatic activities.
This means, over and above diplomacy, that when criminals are judged to be intelligence assets, they are granted protection from prosecution (emphasis added) for narco-trafficking, money laundering, extortion, rape, even terrorism and murder. In 1982, the CIA and the US Department of Justice actually worked out a secret agreement to this effect. The deal exempted the CIA from having to report drug trafficking by CIA assets, which, notice, made a mockery of then presidential wife Nancy Reagan’s much ballyhooed “just say no” anti-drug campaign. At the time, most Americans trusted Ronald Reagan and believed that his administration was serious about the so-called war on drugs. But hindsight shows that the Reagan White House badly abused the public’s good faith.
The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses. The United States lost more than 700 soldiers in the war.
The foreign policy advocated by Maurice Greenberg, above, is in large part responsible for the drug-related violence on the streets of our cities, and for the epidemic of narcotic addiction among our children, who have been sacrificed to the false god of national security. But the social carnage is not limited to the United States. Drug addiction in Muslim Iraq was almost unknown prior to the US invasion in 2003; but has since become a major problem. A similar recent explosion of heroin use has occurred in Iran, which, notice, is right next door to Afghanistan, where the poppies are grown with the blessing of the CIA. Such foreign policies are evil, a scourge upon the planet, yet, are intimately associated with US empire building. Quite simply, the US power elite has followed in the footsteps of the British and French who, in their day, also exploited the immensely profitable opium and heroin trade. The writer Chalmers Johnson has termed this descent into darkness the sorrow of empire.
The CIA’s secret collusion with the Department of Justice gave the CIA veto over law enforcement, effectively blunting the capacity of US drug enforcement agencies to interdict the flow of illegal drugs into the US. The timing was no accident. The deal coincided with the start of the CIA’s Contra war in Central America. This explains why, the next year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), under pressure from the Pentagon, closed its office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The flow of drugs through Honduras had not diminished; in fact, just the opposite. For years, the country had been a transfer point for illegal drug smuggling into the US, a reality that Contra leaders readily exploited to finance their war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas; and they did so with the full knowledge and approval of the CIA. For many years after, Langley’s veto blocked legitimate efforts by US law enforcement to curb the drug trade.
I must emphasize that, meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects, at every point in the chain: from the formulation of the policy to its implementation to the phony packaging of the policy for mass consumption. In fact, we only know about it, today, thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb, who published a groundbreaking series of articles in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The series, appropriately titled “Dark Alliance”, was one of the first big stories to be carried on the Internet; and later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he lays out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb’s series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on the drug issue; and which compelled CIA director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the agency simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.
The campaign against Gary Webb has been called “one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.” The fawning mainstream press, always eager to do the CIA’s bidding, appeared to take pleasure in savaging the messenger, even while tacitly conceding that his facts were basically correct. One of the low points occurred on live TV, on November 15, 1996, when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, wife of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, referred to Webb’s exhaustively documented expose as “a conspiracy theory,” the kiss of death for any serious journalist. At this same time, as we know, Greenspan was busily engineering the deregulation of Wall Street, setting the stage for the 2008 financial meltdown of the global economy. – from foreign policy journal, Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side Part 3: AIG and the Linkage to the Drug Trade
when assets go bad
Phillip (alternately, “Philip”) Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA during the Iran-Contra affair, shot and killed his two teenage children, and the family dog, then killed himself.
Michael Ruppert. Mike is a former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) narcotics officer who in the late 1970′s, trained in narcotics by the U.S. Justice Department. The CIA tried to recruit Mike to traffic drugs with them. When Mike tried to expose the corruption that he saw (the moral thing to do), he was fired without cause. As Governor Jesse Ventura says, “Don’t just go along to get along.”
Mike Ruppert has spent the last 25 years fighting the system, trying to expose the lies and tyranny of the CIA (and many other offices of our government). This is no conspiracy theory, Mike Ruppert has presented over 6,000 documents indicting the U.S. government’s involvement in decades of heroin and cocaine drug-trafficking into the cities and towns of the United States. You can subscribe to Mike’s newsletter at www.copvcia.com or go to www.fromthewilderness.com
Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
The CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan … found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
To this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.
The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings ….
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….
John Adams once called the vice presidency, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” FDR’s VP, John Nance Garner, said the job wasn’t “worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
It’s quotes like these that make Dick Cheney—who pretty much ran his own separate government from the VP’s office—all the more impressive, not to mention terrifying. For not only was Cheney out of control, he was out of control in a job that had no controls attached to it. No one had ever thought them necessary before.
Give the man credit for creativity. Cheney found even more ways to overturn the Constitution, undermine the separation of powers, and possibly make the U.S. government an accessory to murder many times over.
The New York Times broke half the story in Sunday’s paper as Scott Shane explained that “the Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney.” Congress finally found out eight years after Cheney gave the order, when CIA Director Leon E. Panetta informed the House and Senate intelligence committees upon learning of the program himself.
According to current law, when a U.S. intelligence agency is involved in a covert action, at least eight members of Congress—the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees—must be informed in order for the program to be legal.
CIA defenders insist compliance with the law is actually a gray area because “this program never went fully operational” as one official put it. And Panetta terminated the program as soon as he learned of it. But given the history of both Cheney and many in the CIA’s contempt for both Congress and the Constitution, it’s entirely possible that we still don’t know the full story. - from the daily beast
there are some flaws to this video, but it’s a treasury of good information.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of contractors reached a level unprecedented in U.S. military operations. As of March 31, 2010, the United States deployed 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in the war zones. Contractors represented 50 percent of the Department of Defense (DOD) workforce in Iraq and 59 percent in Afghanistan.
This increase is the logical outcome of a series of decisions going back decades. Force structure reductions ranging from the post-Vietnam decisions that moved most Army logistics support elements to the Army Reserve and Guard4 to the post–Cold War reduction that cut the Army from 18 to 10 divisions with corresponding cuts in support forces greatly reduced the Services’ ability to support long-term operations. Next, a series of decisions in the 1990s led to the employment of contractors in the Balkans for tasks from traditional camp-building to the new concept of “force development” that saw MPRI training the Croatian army. Finally, the decision to invade Iraq with minimum forces left the United States with too few troops in-theater to deal with the disorder that resulted from the removal of Saddam. Thus, it is understandable that the immediate, unanticipated need for large numbers of logistics and security personnel, the shortage of such troops on Active duty, and the precedent for using contractors in the Balkans caused the Pentagon to turn to contractors to fill the immediate operational needs. However, the subsequent failure to conduct a careful analysis of the wisdom of using contractors is less understandable. The executive branch has conducted numerous investigations into fraud, waste, and corruption in the contracting process. Congress has held hearings and established the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. Government has not systematically explored the essential question: Does using contractors in a conflict zone make strategic sense?
By the end of 2009, contractors reported almost 1,800 dead and 40,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the fighting in Afghanistan gets worse, contractors are now suffering more deaths than U.S. forces: “In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractor deaths represented more than half—53 percent—of all fatalities. This point bears emphasis: since January 2010, more contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military soldiers.” For practical purposes, these casualties were “off the books” in that they had no real impact on the political discussions about the war. As Peter Singer noted:
there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. . . . These figures mean that the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined. The losses are also far more than any single U.S. Army division has experienced.
Contractor casualties are not reported via the Pentagon, but only through the U.S. Department of Labor. Labor’s Web site notes that these are not comprehensive statistics but only represent those injuries and deaths that resulted in insurance claims. Thus, it is difficult if not impossible to determine how many additional casualties were suffered by other nations’ contractors in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
In reality, it is virtually impossible to determine the actual effectiveness of any contractors—armed or unarmed—until they begin to operate in theater (and only then if a member of the U.S. Government can observe the contractors as they operate).
Compounding the problems created by lack of quality control, the government does not control the contractor’s daily contact with abuse, intimidation, and even killing of local civilians such as the DynCorp employee who ran a child sex ring in the Balkans or the September 2007 Blackwater shootings in Nisour Square, Baghdad.
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
In addition to undercutting government legitimacy, the use of contractors may actually undercut local government power. In Afghanistan, security and reconstruction contracts have resulted in significant shifts in relative power between competing Afghan qawmsas well as allegations of corruption. Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times, notes that the power structure in Orugzan Province, Afghanistan, has changed completely due to the U.S. Government’s selecting Matiullah Khan to provide security for convoys from Kandahar to Tirin Kot:
With his NATO millions, and the American backing, Mr. Matiullah has grown into the strongest political and economic force in the region. He estimates that his salaries support 15,000 people in this impoverished prov ince. . . . This has irritated some local leaders, who say that the line between Mr. Matiullah’s business interest and the government has disappeared. . . . Both General [Nick] Carter [commander of ISAF South] and Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, said they hoped to disband Mr. Matiullah’s militia soon—or at least to bring it under formal government control. . . . General Carter said that while he had no direct proof in Mr. Matiullah’s case, he harbored more general worries that the legions of unregulated Afghan security companies had a financial interest in prolonging chaos.
Thus, an unacknowledged but serious strategic impact of using contractors is to directly undercut both the legitimacy and the authority of the host nation government. - this article was originally published as Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 260 (NDU Press, November 2010)
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that QinetiQ, a high tech defense contractor specializing in secret satellites drones and software used by U.S. special forces, was the victim of a sustained cybersecurity breach for several years starting in 2007.
According to Bloomberg, documents released in the Anonymous Stratfor hack reveal QinetiQ was compromised as part of a cyber-espionage attack originating in China — and notes the breach was part of a much broader campaign targetting U.S. contractors:
“QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed [...]
QinetiQ was only one target in a broader cyberpillage. Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.“
U.S. intelligence reports ranked cyber threats as the top danger facing the country for the first time in April, but tensions have been running high about the government’s ability to protect digital assets and intelligence for years. A 2011 Department of Justice report noted that only 64 percent of FBI agents assigned to national security-related cyber investigations had the appropriate skills and expertise to handle those types of cases.
Government cybersecurity contracting exploded during the Bush Administration, with many roles traditionally filled by government employees or resources outsourced to external companies over whom the government has less oversight. The Obama Administration has made efforts to curb that trend, but that expansion, combined with a lack of cybersecurity expertise in the military and federal agencies, resulted in many cybersecurity defense operations being outsourced or completed under the heavy supervision of outside contractors. – from think progress, The U.S. Outsources Cybersecurity & Defense To Contractors That Keep Getting Hacked
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
It is now beyond reasonable doubt that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own National Security State in what was a violent coup d’état that is, an overthrowing of the legitimate elected government of the United States by force through the use of the clandestine black-ops services of the CIA, elements of the Secret Service, the US military, the FBI and organized crime.
Unless and until the United States publicly discloses to the citizenry that its duly elected government was overthrown in 1963 and that since then the replacement/imposter government has been at least technically/legally speaking illegitimate[12] it will likely be impossible to reverse the increasingly rapid disintegration of America. The reality is that since the murder of President John F. Kennedy, there has been an extra-constitutional imposter “government” in place which prior to that time existed only in the shadows. It has been given many different names including the “war party” the MIMIC (media, intelligence, military, industrial complex) the secret government, the shadow government etc. That entity or “Regime” as a result of the JFK assassination appears to have profoundly altered the trajectory of the United States by placing the country on a constant war footing and building and sustaining an enormous foreign military base presence throughout the world which serves to project American power and enlarge the “empire.” – from jericho rendezvous, After the JFK Assassination–a True Coup d’état: Is the Current US Government Legitimate?
A handful of polls conducted in the days after the Boston Marathon bombings show that US citizens are responding much differently than in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people. Not only are Americans more opposed now to giving up personal freedoms for the sake of security than they were after 9/11, but other statistics show that distrust against the federal government continues to climb.
Just one day after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, pollsters with Fox News asked a sample of Americans, “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce thethreat of terrorism?” Forty-three percent of the respondents said they would, while 45 percent said no. Comparatively, 71 percent of Americans asked a similar question in October 2001 said they’d be willing to give up personal freedoms, while only 20 percent opposed at the time.
A separate poll conducted by the Washington Post just three days after the Boston Marathon bombing reveals that nearly half of those surveyed say that the government will go too far in trying to prevent future acts of terrorism. The Post asked a random national sample of 588 adults, “Which worries you more: that the government (will not go far enough to investigate terrorism because of concerns about constitutional rights), or that it (will go too far in compromising constitutional rights in order to investigate terrorism)?” Days after the Boston bombing, 41 percent of respondents said the government will not go far enough, compared to 48 percent saying they’ll go too far. When similar questions were asked in 2006 and 2010, 44 percent and 27 percent said the government will go too far, respectively, signaling that for the first time in years Americans are overly concerned about a misuse of power on the part of Washington.
That isn’t to say that the Boston attack is necessarily inspiring Americans to question authority, though. Two months before Tsarnaev brothers allegedly detonated a pair of explosives near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, 53 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said the federal government is threatening their personal rights and freedoms. In November 2011, that statistic was only 30 percent. - from russia today, Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism
Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
The call came as the opposition accused forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad of “savage” killings in the country’s south.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
The Syrian regime is demanding the UN “fulfil its role and preserve global security” by classing Nursa Front as an Al Qaeda linked entity.
Death stalks the Syrian regime just as it does the rebels. But on the front line of the war, the regime’s army is in no mood to surrender – and claims it doesn’t need chemical weapons – by Robert Frisk
It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers. These are the “bad guys” of the regime, according to the rest of the world – although in truth the country’s secret police deserve that title – and I’m well aware that these men have been told that a Western journalist is coming to their dug-outs and basement headquarters. They ask me to use only their first names for fear that their families may be killed; they allow me to take any photographs I wish, but not to picture their faces – a rule that the rebels sometimes ask of journalists for the same reason – but every soldier and officer to whom I spoke, including a Brigadier General, gave their full names and IDs to me.
Such access to the Syrian army was almost unimaginable just a few months ago and there are good reasons why. The army believe they are at last winning back ground from the Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra Islamist fighters and the various al-Qa’ida satellites that now rule much of the Syrian countryside. From Point 45 they are scarcely a mile and a half from the Turkish frontier and intend to take the ground in between. Outside Damascus they have battled their way bloodily into two rebel-held suburbs. While I was prowling through the mountaintop positions, the rebels were in danger of losing the town of Qusayr outside Homs amid opposition accusations of the widespread killing of civilians. The main road from Damascus to Latakia on the Mediterranean coast has been reopened by the army. And the line troops I met at Point 45 were a different breed of men from those soldiers who became corrupted after 29 years of semi-occupation in Lebanon, who fell back to Syria without a war to fight in 2005, the discipline of the soldiers around Damascus a joke rather than a threat to anyone. Bashar’s Special Forces now appear confident, ruthless, politically motivated, a danger to their enemies, their uniforms smart, their weapons clean. Syrians have long grown used to the claims by Israel – inevitably followed by the Washington echo machine – that chemical weapons have been used by Bashar’s forces; as an intelligence officer remarked caustically in Damascus: “Why should we use chemical weapons when our Mig aircraft and their bombs cause infinitely more destruction?” The soldiers up at Point 45 admitted the defections to the Free Syrian Army, the huge losses of their own men – inevitably referred to as “martyrs” – and made no secret of their own body counts for battles lost and won.
Their last “martyr” at Point 45 was shot by a rebel sniper two weeks ago, 22 year-old Special Forces Private Kamal Aboud from Homs. He at least died as a soldier. Colonel Mohamed spoke ruefully of the troopers on family leave who, he said, were executed with knives when they entered enemy territory. I remind myself that the UN is bringing war crimes charges against this army and I remind Colonel Mohamed – who has four bullet wounds in his arms to show that he leads his soldiers from the front, not from a bunker – that his soldiers were surely meant to be liberating the Golan Heights from Israel. Israel is to the south, I say, and here he is fighting his way north towards Turkey. Why?
“I know, but we are fighting Israel. I joined the army to fight Israel. And now I am fighting Israel’s tools. And the tools of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, so in this way we are fighting for Golan. This is a conspiracy and the West is helping the foreign terrorists who arrived in Syria, the same terrorists you are trying to kill in Mali.” I have heard this before, of course. The “moamarer”, the conspiracy, sits beside me at all interviews in Syria. But the colonel admits that the two Syrian T-55s which fire shells at Point 45 every morning – the very same vintage war-carts as his own tanks – are sets of twins, that his enemies have taken their artillery from the government army and that his opponents include men from Bashar al-Assad’s original army.
On the road to Qastel Maaf, a general tells me that on the highway to the Turkish border, the army have just killed 10 Saudis, two Egyptians and a Tunisian – I am shown no papers to prove this – but the soldiers at Point 45 produce for me three handset radios they have captured from their enemies. One is marked “HXT Commercial Terminal”, the other two are made by Hongda and the instructions are in Turkish. I ask them if they listen to the rebel communications. “Yes, but we don’t understand them,” a major says. “They are speaking in Turkish and we don’t understand Turkish.” So are they Turks or Turkmen Syrians from the villages to the east? The soldiers shrug. They say they have also heard Arabic voices speaking with Libyan and Yemeni accents. And given that the great and the good of Nato are now obsessed with “foreign jihadis” in Syria, I suspect these Syrian soldiers may well be telling the truth.
The laneways of this beautiful northern countryside conceal the viciousness of the fighting. Clusters of red and white roses smother the walls of abandoned homes. A few men tend the mass of orange orchards that glow around us, a woman combs her long hair on a roof. The lake of Balloran glistens in the spring sunshine between mountains still topped with a powder of snow. It reminds me, chillingly, of Bosnia. For several miles the villages are still occupied, a Christian Greek Orthodox township of 10 families with a church dedicated to the appearance of the Virgin to a woman called Salma; a Muslim Alawite village, then a Muslim Sunni village close to the front lines but still co-existing; a ghost of the old secular, non-sectarian Syria which both sides promise – with ever decreasing credibility – will return once the war is over.
Then I am in a smashed village called Beit Fares where hundreds of Syrian soldiers can be seen patrolling the surrounding forests, and another general fishes into his pocket and produces an army mobile phone video of dead fighters. “All are foreign,” he says. I watch closely as the camera lingers over bearded faces, some contorted in fear, others in the dreamless sleep of death. They have been heaped together. And, most sinister of all, I observe a military boot which descends twice on the heads of the dead men. On the wall of the dugout, someone has written: “We are soldiers of Assad – to hell with you dogs of the armed groups of Jabel al-Aswad and Beit Shrouk.”
These are the names of a string of tiny villages still in rebel hands – you can see the roofs of their houses from Point 45 – and Col Mohamed, a 45-year-old veteran of the Lebanese war between 1993 and 1995, lists the others: Khadra, Jebel Saouda, Zahiyeh, al-Kabir, Rabia… Their fate awaits them. When I ask the soldiers how many prisoners they took in their battles, they say “None” with a loud voice. What, I ask, even when they claim to have killed 700 “terrorists” in one engagement? “None,” they reply again.
Opposite a bullet-riddled school building is a pulverised house. “A local terrorist leader died there with all his men,” the colonel states. “They did not surrender.”
Absurd “chemical weapons” claims begin to fall apart amidst NATO’s desperate bid to save its collapsing terror front in Syria.
The Terrorists Have Been Identified
The specter of terror is once again being raised to haunt the collective consciousness of the American psyche. But as the terror meme rears its ugly head, we see an understanding of false flag terrorism creeping into the mainstream discourse. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we explore the real terror paradigm and examine who really hates you for your freedoms.
HERE’S ANOTHER CURIOUS GROUP:
Over the weekend, the pro-Assad hacker group the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into numerous Twitter accounts run by the Guardian. The collective aim to “punish” Western media outlets for writing negatively about Bashar al-Assad’s regime, while also spreading their own version of the truth—that the Free Syrian Army isn’t a popular uprising at all, and that the war against the incumbent regime is a coup attempt orchestrated by al Qaeda.
Last week, the Associated Press’s Twitter account was hacked by the SEA. They published a spurious tweet claiming that President Obama had been injured in a bomb blast at the White House. This sent the stock market into a panic, and, as the markets reacted to the news, the DOW Jones was sent plummeting by a staggering $136 billion. Once everyone realized the tweet was bogus, the markets quickly recovered, but the potential damage cyberattacks can cause was there for the whole world to see.
I spoke to Mikko Hypponen, a security expert at F-Secure, to find out why the tweet affected the stock market so severely. “High-frequency trading bots are monitoring real-time news sources like press feeds and stock-exchange notices,” he explained. “They try to analyze whether the news is positive or negative. Then they will automatically buy and sell stock accordingly. While this is awfully unscientific, on average they make more profits than losses.
“When SEA hacked AP and posted the single fake tweet, trading bots saw crucial keywords from a highly authoritative source: ‘Explosion’, ‘White House’, ‘Obama’ and ‘Injured’, which was a strong sell. It took some minutes until human operators interceded and stopped the madness.”
KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.
All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”
The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”
The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.
At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.
American and Afghan officials familiar with the payments said the agency’s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralized government. The officials spoke about the money only on the condition of anonymity.
It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, makes a statement before meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, left, and Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Asfhaq Parvez Kayani on Wednesday, April 24, 2013, in Brussels, Belgium. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool) INTERESTING ARRANGEMENT…
Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.
Over Iran’s objections, he signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States last year, directly leading the Iranians to halt their payments, two senior Afghan officials said. Now, Mr. Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the C.I.A. to target operatives of Al Qaeda and insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of the Obama administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year.
But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials.
The New York Times, Apr. 28, 2013: Much of it also still goes to keeping old warlords in line. One is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose militia served as a C.I.A. proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a month from the palace, two Afghan officials said.
Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.
The cash does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or even the C.I.A.’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies. And while there is no evidence that Mr. Karzai has personally taken any of the money — Afghan officials say the cash is handled by his National Security Council — the payments do in some cases work directly at odds with the aims of other parts of the American government in Afghanistan, even if they do not appear to violate American law.
Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan since the start of the war. During the 2001 invasion, agency cash bought the services of numerous warlords, including Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the current first vice president.
“We paid them to overthrow the Taliban,” the American official said.
The C.I.A. then kept paying the Afghans to keep fighting. For instance, Mr. Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was paid by the C.I.A. to run the Kandahar Strike Force, a militia used by the agency to combat militants, until his assassination in 2011.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has released its Opium Risk Assessment 2013 report on Afghanistan. Poppy production has been on record high in third consecutive year. The report says increase has been significant in Southern provinces.
More than a third of Afghanistan’s total opium production now takes place in Helmand and Kandahar. The rise in production has been due to high prices for last few years and harvest has now spread to areas which were previously poppy-free. It further says poppy cultivation is not only expected to expand in areas where it already existed in 2012 but also in new areas or in areas where poppy cultivation was stopped. Villages with a low level of security and those which had not received agricultural assistance in the previous year were significantly more likely to grow poppy in 2013.
It has been clear that the US and its NATO allies are concerned with drug trafficking, not poppy growing. They have largely ignored the poppy eradication campaigns.
The percentage of increase shows an alarming situation, particularly at a time when the country is in transition. The UN report says Afghan efforts to stamp out opium poppy cultivation are failing. More help is needed to provide alternatives to farmers, in law enforcement support and in cooperation from other countries in the region. - from outlook afghanistan
THIS IS OLD NEWS – Afghanistan’s Poppy Harvest Soars
Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world’s near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say.
As President Bush prepares for weekend talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, divisions within the U.S. administration and among NATO allies have delayed release of a $475 million counternarcotics program for Afghanistan, where intelligence officials see growing links between drugs and the Taliban, the officials said.
U.N. figures to be released in September are expected to show that Afghanistan’s poppy production has risen up to 15 percent since 2006 and that the country now accounts for 95 percent of the world’s crop, 3 percentage points more than last year, officials familiar with preliminary statistics told The Associated Press.
But counterdrug proposals by some U.S. officials have met fierce resistance, including boosting the amount of forcible poppy field destruction in provinces that grow the most, officials said. The approach also would link millions of dollars in development aid to benchmarks on eradication; arrests and prosecutions of narcotraders, corrupt officials; and on alternative crop production.
Those ideas represent what proponents call an “enhanced carrot-and-stick approach” to supplement existing anti-drug efforts. They are the focus of the new $475 million program outlined in a 995-page report, the release of which has been postponed twice and may be again delayed due to disagreements, officials said.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because parts of the report remain classified.
Counternarcotics agents at the State Department had wanted to release a 123-page summary of the strategy last month and then again last week, but were forced to hold off because of concerns it may not be feasible, the officials said. - from liveLeak
Helicopter flight over the poppy fields of Afghanistan.
how did afghanistan become the world’s opium supplier? and WHY?
Kris Millegan, the world’s leading authority on Skull & Bones, describes how the Yale secret society was built on the profits of opium smuggling, which dramatically increased after opium was made illegal around the world. This talk was given at the 16th High Times Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, also known as The Conspiracy Cup.
Kris Millegan is a writer, researcher and publisher whose father was in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Military Intelligence (G2), and later was in the CIA, rising to Branch Chief, Head of Intelligence Analysis for East Asia. His father told Kris some things that he didn’t understand in the late 60′s. These revelations led to over thirty years of research into the subjects of CIA-drugs, clandestine operations, conspiracy theory and secret societies.
EITHER Tamerlan Tsarnaev WAS THE GREATEST TERRORIST OF ALL TIME, OR HE WAS AN ACTIVE AGENT OF AN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY IN THE U.S.
despite constant surveillance by the FBI, warnings by russian intelligence, his name appearing on numerous american intelligence agencies’ “watchlists,” and attending college at a public AMERICAN university, RIGHT UNDER THE NOSES of HUNDREDS of police and law enforcement personnel – with their face recognition technology, wireless surveillance, and bomb-sniffing dogs – this ONE KID was able to outsmart the entire, multi-billion dollar american security complex and bomb the boston marathon. Single-handedly. and this is the story they WANT us to believe.
while most news outlets are treating the story of last week’s bombing of the boston marathon as…well…last week’s news, the official story continues to come unravelled.
it seems as if the goal is to justify starting a war against syria and then iran. and, until we get with the program, we can expect more attacks like sandy hook and boston.
it also seems clear that the u.s. government cannot achieve the desired results from their domestic terror incidents while the internet here is unfiltered. it must be locked down BEFORE they can impose some official bullshit story upon the american public. so, they have…
The Shock Doctrine (trailer)
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets. – see more about the book and film Shock Doctrine, by naomi klein. there are also several good youtube videos of her speaking about this topic.
The last two weeks have seen a series of victories for the Syrian Army across Syria. It appears that 2 full companies of so-called “Free Syrian Army” fighters have been annihilated near Damascus, while government forces have restored order in parts of Homs and along the previously porous Lebanese-Syrian border.
Time has run out for the West, and it appears that they are desperately seeking any excuse to rescue their failing proxy war. When urgent, but otherwise unjustified military intervention is needed, a “humanitarian” pretext is usually invented – as it was in Libya. Failing that, as the West has already clearly done in Syria, an even more tenuous narrative has been resurrected from its well-earned grave. CNN has reported in their article, “Hagel: Evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria,” that:
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Thursday that the United States has evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.
This comes a couple of days after an Israeli intelligence official said Damascus was using weapons banned under international law against its own people in the country’s civil war. Syria has said rebels have used chemical weapons.
U.S. President Barack Obama has said the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against its own people in the country would be a “game changer.”
Hagel said the intelligence agencies’ assessment was reached with “varying degrees of confidence,” meaning that they lacked proof or overwhelming evidence. He said the conclusion was “reached within the last 24 hours” and that the White House delivered a letter outlining the findings to Congress Thursday morning.
Syrian army seizes strategic town near capital: “The disaster has struck, the army entered Otaiba. The regime has managed to turn off the weapons tap,” a fighter from the town told Reuters via Skype. “The price of a bullet will go from 50 Syrian pounds to 1,000 Syrian pounds (6.5 pounds) now, but we must pay and retake it. It’s the main if not the only route.”
Hundreds of Europeans fighting in Syria, says EU expert: Intelligence agencies are concerned some could join groups linked to al-Qaeda and later return to Europe to launch terrorist attacks. The UK, Ireland and France are among the EU countries estimated to have the highest numbers of fighters in Syria.
Hague warns of new Syrian terror threat: William Hague said there was now “uncontested space” in Syria where Islamist groups were free to establish training camps that would equip and train foreign fighters, including British extremists.
Syria says backing rebels risks new attacks on America: – U.S. support for Syrian rebels may lead to more attacks on American soil like those of September 11, said a senior Syrian official who warned that Islamist fighters would spread “the fire of terrorism” around the world.
‘Confusion and inconsistencies’: How US plans to distract public from real truth about Boston
The initial questions about the Boston bombing are behind us, but former FBI employee Sibel Edmonds believes the pursuit of truth will eventually lead to a far more secret agenda by the US, which she reveals to RT.
RT:We’ve learned in the last hour that Russia warned the FBI about the older Tsarnaev brother and his potential links with radical Islamists, but the FBI found nothing suspicious. How is that possible?
Sibel Edmonds: Actually, we predicted that the unnamed foreign country [Western media didn’t name the source immediately] was in fact Russia, two days ago. We have too little facts, too much false information and speculations. But just look at the period they are talking about. When you listen to the suspect’s mother, she’s talking about a period of three to five years. According to FBI officials, they received this information, this warning, in 2011. So we have that inconsistency right there. The other important inconsistency that we should pay attention to is the mother’s description of FBI mannerisms and conversation with the suspects and the family when they were visiting them for the last three to five years. That fits exactly the recruitment style of the intelligence community. When you go to the suspects, and one moment you’re saying “We know you’re decent, we know you’re doing nothing wrong, we know you’re good”, and the next minute they’re saying “You can be dangerous”, right after receiving that information from the Russian government, to threaten them with that information for what purpose – to recruit them as informants or for other agendas. – see more, including video interview with sibel edmonds, from russia today
Members of a SWAT team search for 19-year-old bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev on April 19, 2013 in Watertown, Massachusetts. (AFP Photo / Mario Tama)
The Shadow Government Of Vice President Dick Cheney Is Only Now Becoming Clear
On Sept. 12, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that ”what we are seeing is the definition of a new battlefield in the world, a twenty-first century battlefield.”
On Sept. 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney said that America would have to “spend time in the shadows” and work on the “dark side.”
Since then the U.S. has been engaged in a global war on terror, but Americans haven’t known how exactly it is being fought.
As The World Trade Center towers crumbled to the ground, so too did the system of oversight and review of lethal covert ops that had been carefully constructed over the course of the previous decade.
In place of that system, Scahill writes, a “War Council” led by Cheney advisor and fellow neoconservative David Addington developed legal justifications for capturing, torturing, and/or killing any al Qaeda suspect anywhere in the world.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev: experts puzzled as hunt for terror links gleans little
Lack of connections to terrorist groups means experts are increasingly seeing the elder Tsarnaev as a self-radicalised lone wolf – underlining the daunting task of piecing together a motive.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev has become the focal point of a global FBI investigation into whether any organised group or wider conspiracy lay behind last week’s Boston Marathon bombings. The 26-year-old, who has been identified through fingerprinting as the man killed in the shootout with police in the Watertown suburb of Boston, is widely assumed to have been the mastermind of the marathon outrage, with his younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev allegedly playing the role of junior partner.
Yet so far the hunt for clues as to the motivation of the Tsarnaev brothers has failed to throw up concrete evidence that they were inspired to militancy by any particular extremist cleric or politician. Nor is there any known link to any nationalist or Islamist group in the Caucasus region that they regarded as their homeland, a link which would suggest they were recruited as foot soldiers and given operational instructions to strike the Boston Marathon.
Federal investigators and counter-terrorism experts are increasingly of the view that the brothers were acting alone. They surmise is that the elder Tsarnaev largely provided his own motivation and training, through the internet. – from the guardian, u.k.
CISPA: The House passed it a week ago, but most don’t know what it is
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, more commonly called, CISPA, is a proposed law that would allow the sharing of Internet traffic information between the U.S. government and technology and manufacturing companies. The Bill, known as H.R. 624, was first introduced in 2012; and then reintroduced to Congress in its current form by US Representative Mike Rogers, on February 13, 2013. It was passed by the House of Representatives on April 18th.
Proponents of CISPA say that it is a needed amendment to the National Security Act of 1947, which does not cover cybercrime, and a powerful weapon that the government can use against the growing threat of cyber-terrorism from countries such as China and Iran. The bill’s purpose, they claim, is to allow federal security agencies to notify tech and manufacturing companies of any detected cyber-attack that may do them harm, and in turn, allow those companies to inform those agencies in kind.
Critics of CISPA, however, don’t buy it. They say that CISPA is an affront to American civil liberties, and the privacy of its citizens. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international non-profit digital rights group based in the U.S., “the bill grants broad new powers, allowing companies to identify and obtain “threat information” by looking at your private information.”
EFF also says that “it (the bill) is written so broadly that it allows companies to hand over large swaths of personal information to the government with no judicial oversight—effectively creating a “cybersecurity” loophole in all existing privacy laws.” – from the washington times
“Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms.”
did the canadian government invent “al qaeda in iran?” are the ruling elites just playing games with us? and the mayor of new york thinks the fact that the boston marathon bombing was pulled off by two kids – who the FBI had been tracking for years – with thousands of security personnel from local, state, national and international law enforcement agencies present, this means we must SURRENDER MORE OF OUR BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS AND DIGNITY if we don’t want to see more of this in the future. that sounds like a threat to me. one of those “we can do this the easy way, or…” type scenarios.
our government already believes it has the right to kill u.s. citizens without disclosing any rationalization for doing so. how much more do we have to give up?
and no wonder obomber doesn’t want to talk about why he kills americans abroad in drone strikes. two out of three americans killed by drone strikes in yemen (so far) were not individuals who were targeted. so, let’s not discuss this…it’s…embarrassing…
this is a card from Illuminati, a card game that i have played and own. more about spooky games below, or in every post on this blog, or both – take your pick.
Police in Canada said Monday that two men suspected of plotting to derail a passenger train were guided by Al Qaeda elements in Iran, but the statement surprised many experts who study terrorism in the Middle East and Iran.
“It frankly doesn’t compute for me,” said Barbara Slavin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “If there is any link, I would think it was extremely tangential.”
Iran and Al Qaeda have frequently had chilly relations, according to Slavin and other experts. Iran is majority Shiite, while Al Qaeda is firmly Sunni. In Syria, Al Qaeda has jumped into the fray alongside opposition fighters while Iran has backed President Bashar Assad. Iran has also held Al Qaeda members in the country under house arrest, monitoring their activities. Documents confiscated from Osama bin Laden’s hide-out in Pakistan and released last year suggested discord between the two. – from the l.a. times, Analysts surprised by alleged Al Qaeda in Iran tie in Canada plot
Al-Qaeda releases video accusing Iran of siding with the US over Afghanistan. (Last Modified: 08 Sep 2008)
Al-Qaeda has released a new video accusing Iran of giving way to the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The new footage, released three days before the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, also attacked Lebanese, Pakistani and Afghan leaders.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader, and other senior al-Qaeda commanders, focussed on what they called the “Iranian-Crusade alliance” saying the Muslim Umma [nation] was being targetted.
In the one-hand-half-hour video, al-Zawahiri said that the Muslim Umma was facing a military, ideological and media crusade by the Iranian “coalition”, which had given way to the US, by letting them invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
Al-Qaeda’s deputy also said Hezbollah and its leaders did not gain victory in the war against Israel in 2006, saying that outcome had been beneficial to Israel. – from al jazeera, Al-Qaeda video rounds on Iran
“Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms.”
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday the country’s interpretation of the Constitution will “have to change” to allow for greater security to stave off future attacks.
“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”
Sitting on the couch watching TV, you hear the news that your country is about to invade another. Horror and amazement mixes with frustration as you realize how absolutely powerless you are to stop it. ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Andy Sheerin to Andy Tomkins as they watched the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. ‘Let’s make a game of it.’ And so War on Terror – The Boardgame was born.
Holding a mirror to the Middle East, the game is all about empire. You start with an empire, build it up through development, fight other empires; and liberate countries from the clutches of empire. Just as in the boardroom, the more oil you have on the board-game, the more money you make. The more money you make, the more countries you can develop and control. And if you don’t like the rate your empire is expanding, then you can always buy terrorists, or turn terrorists yourself. – from the new internationalist, The War on Terror Boardgame
this game is chilling…ruthlessness is always the winning strategy.
MORE GAMES:
Al-Qaeda gaining experience in Syria, eyes ‘Islamic state to fight Israel and Iran’
An Iraqi Al-Qaeda operative has admitted that his organization is taking part in the Syrian uprising against President Assad. The revelation comes amidst increasing evidence that Al-Qaeda is gaining a foothold in Syria.
Abu Thuha, a 56-year-old Al-Qaeda operative living near Kirkuk in northern Iraq, described the Islamist organization’s grand plans to an Iraqi reporter for The New York Times.
“We have experience now fighting the Americans, and more experience now with the Syrian revolution,” he noted. “Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic state for all Muslims, and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”
Similar revelations that “around 90 terror attacks that can be attributed to organizations that are close to Al-Qaeda or jihadist groups were carried out in Syria between the end of December and the beginning of July” have been made by the German foreign intelligence service, the BND.
The information was revealed by the German government in a response to a parliamentary question. The German government admitted that it had received several reports from the German foreign intelligence service, but noted that the content of these reports was to remain classified “by reason of national interest,” in light of Germany’s support for the rebellion and its political arm, the Syrian National Council (SNC).
At least three major German newspapers – Die Welt, the FAZ (Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), and the tabloid Bild – have published reports attributing responsibility for the May 25 massacre in the Syrian town of Houla to anti-government rebel forces or treating this as the most likely scenario.
Writing in Bild, longtime German war correspondent Jurgen Todenhofer accused the rebels of “deliberately killing civilians and then presenting them as victims of the government”. He described this “massacre-marketing strategy” as being “among the most disgusting things that I have ever experienced in an armed conflict.” - see more, including video, from russia today
FBI Arrests Teen Who Tried to Join U.S.-funded Free Syrian Army
A U.S. teenager has been arrested on terrorism-related charges and accused of seeking to join an al-Qaeda-affiliated group in war-torn Syria, the FBI said Saturday.
Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, 18, was arrested Friday night as he attempted to board a flight from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to Turkey, which borders Syria, the FBI said. – from the times of israel, FBI: US teen tried to join Syrian al-Qaeda-linked group
DEMOCRACY NOW HITS ONE OUT OF THE PARK! GRAND SLAM!
Jeremy Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama’s Assassination of Two Americans in Yemen
The Obama administration’s assassination of two U.S. citizens in 2011, Anwar Al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old Denver-born son Abdulrahman, is a central part of Jeremy Scahill’s new book, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” The book is based on years of reporting on U.S. secret operations in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. While the Obama administration has defended the killing of Anwar, it has never publicly explained why Abdulrahman was targeted in a separate drone strike two weeks later. Scahill reveals CIA director John Brennan, Obama’s former senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, suspected that the teenager had been killed “intentionally.” “The idea that you can simply have one branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present any evidence whatsoever — we should view that with great sobriety about the implications for our country,” says Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation magazine. Today the U.S. Senate is preparing to hold its first-ever hearing on the Obama administration’s drone and targeted killing program. However the Obama administration is refusing to send a witness to answer questions about the program’s legality. “Dirty Wars” is also the name of a new award-winning documentary by Scahill and Rick Rowley, which will open in theaters in June. We air the film’s new trailer.
A proposal from France and the United Kingdom to supply arms to terrorists in Syria has split the European Union. If the pair decide to cast international law aside and enable terrorist groups in Syria to upgrade from car-bombings and see what they can do with some serious artillery and combat vehicles, it could ruin the EU’s chances of creating a unified foreign policy.
There’s also a chance that giving more arms to these murderous scumbags could ruin a few people’s days, to say the least.
This Friday (3/15/13) marked the two-year anniversary of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Which was eventually usurped by the CIA’s Islamic Terrorist Networks. In response to the Syrian conflict, European Union member states imposed sanctions, supported diplomatic solutions, pledged aid to refugees and participated in other humanitarian work, just as they did for Libya. Using Libya as an indicator of what the future holds for the conflict in Syria, one can only surmise that air support will be proposed soon, as Assad’s military has proven to be worthy of their reputation, and has retaken many vital rebel positions. If it would not provoke an international incident, Syria would have long ago retaken the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in the 1967 war.
For those not keeping score at home – Israel and Syria have been fighting a cold war in Lebanon since the 1970s.
1975
The spark that ignited the civil war in Lebanon occurred in Beirut on April 13, 1975, when gunmen killed four Phalangists during an attempt on Pierre Jumayyil’s life. Perhaps believing the assassins to have been Palestinian, the Phalangists retaliated later that day by attacking a bus carrying Palestinian passengers across a Christian neighborhood, killing about twenty-six of the occupants. The next day fighting erupted in earnest, with Phalangists pitted against Palestinian militiamen (thought by some observers to be from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The confessional layout of Beirut’s various quarters facilitated random killing. Most Beirutis stayed inside their homes during these early days of battle, and few imagined that the street fighting they were witnessing was the beginning of a war that was to devastate their city and divide the country. from global security.
1982
when the u.s. sent marines into lebanon, israel allegedly allowed a terrorist car-bombing of a hotel being used to house special VIPs and military personnel. president reagan promptly cut and ran.
The immediate trigger for Israel’s operation into Lebanon was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London on June 3, 1982. The next day, Israeli jets attacked PLO targets in Lebanon and the PLO responded with rocket and artillery barrages into northern Israel. The Israeli cabinet met to approve sending ground troops into Lebanon. Defense minister Ariel Sharon briefed the cabinet on “Operation Peace for Galilee” a plan for a limited incursion of twenty-five miles into Lebanon to wipe out PLO positions in southern Lebanon and thus safeguard Israel’s population in northern Israel. The cabinet, including the opposition Labor Party, supported the plan for a limited operation.
Mr. Sharon and Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, however, had a wider-reaching grand plan beyond that of destroying the PLO’s military power in southern Lebanon and the creation of a security zone there. They envisioned completely eradicating the PLO’s military, political and economic hold over Lebanon, evicting Syrian forces from Lebanon, and facilitating the creation of a Christian-dominated Lebanon which would sign a peace treaty with Israel. The Lebanese presidential election was scheduled for August 23, 1982. Sharon discussed the Israeli plan with Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel, who apparently supported it and agreed to help rout the PLO from Beirut. Counting on Phalangist assistance, Sharon and Eitan ordered Israeli troops to advance as far as Beirut. see the lebanon war, from the adl
By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences — from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot. ”
But all that’s proving to not be enough, with France and the United Kingdom declaring that they are losing patience. French President Francois Hollande at the EU leaders’ conference Thursday called for an end to the arms embargo against Syria so European countries could provide weapons to fanatical Islamic terrorists.
Hollande justified the need to change policy course, “Because this drama has been going on for two years and the number of victims is growing every day.”
He was unclear as to how providing MORE weapons to terrorists will create FEWER victims.
Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron argued that the arms embargo was working in favor of Assad’s regime as Russia and Iran continue to supply government forces with arms used against the invaders from Iraq, Libya, and Egypt.
An analyst says if the EU arms embargo is lifted on Syria, an influx of weapons would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda and this is what Britain and France are pushing for.
In the background of this France has called on the EU to lift an arms embargo on Syria to assist armed foreign-backed insurgents attacking the government forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the infrastructure of Syria and even civilians in order to topple the government and turn the country into a failed state. Like France, Britain is also pushing for lifting the embargo; however several EU countries disagree saying more arms would escalate the conflict and it is already in dire condition. from pressTV, Al-Qaeda front desperately waiting for EU weapons : Michael Maloof
some of the above was directly copied, yet drastically altered by ETN administrator rob los ricos from Deutsche Welle. their on-message wall of bullshit was too laughable too leave unaltered.
Turkish Prime Minister Calls Zionism a Crime Against Humanity
Andy Rogers
5th annual global forum vienna 2013
In his remarks at the opening of the forum, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan bemoaned “a lack of understanding between religions and sects” and said that the way ahead was “emphasizing the richness that comes from diversity.” After he praised “countries which see cultural and ethnic differences not as a reason for division or conflict but as a richness,” he complained of what he called the world’s indifference to the suffering of Muslims in Syria and elsewhere.
About seven minutes into the video, Mr. Erdogan said:
In 1948, 804,767 Palestinian men, women, and children were forced to flee their homes. This photograph shows a train of Palestinians who were soon to become lifelong refugees.
“Unfortunately the modern world has not passed the test when it comes to Syria. In the last two years, we have seen close to 70,000 people lose their lives, and every single day we see innocent children, women, civilians, killed. And the fact that the world has not reacted to this situation seriously injures the sense of justice. In the same way, rising racism in Europe is a serious, problematic area, vis-à-vis the Alliance of Civilizations project.
In addition to indifference vis-à-vis the Muslim countries, we also see harsh, offending, insulting behavior towards Muslims who live in countries other than their own, and this continues to be an inconscionable act that has been ongoing around the world. We should be striving to better understand the beliefs of others but instead we see that people act based on prejudice and exclude others and despiuse them. And that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”
Mr. Erdogan immediately went on to condemn those, including politicians, who use “the media or mass communication vehicles” for “provoking the sensitivities of a religion or a sect or a society.”
The Turkish prime minister has expressed his anger with Israeli policies in blunt terms at international forums in the past, most notably at Davos in 2009. He stormed off the stage at the end of a heated discussion of Israel’s Gaza offensive, after telling President Shimon Peres, “When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill.”
Exposing Israel’s Lies – Listen to a Son of a General
The General’s Son
Miko Peled is a peace activist who dares to say in public what others still choose to deny. Born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well known Zionist family, his grandfather, Dr. Avraham Katsnelson was a Zionist leader and signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. His Father, Matti Peled, was a young officer in the war of 1948 and a general in the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai.
Miko’s unlikely opinions reflect his father’s legacy. General Peled was a war hero turned peacemaker.
Miko grew up in Jerusalem, a multi-ethnic city, but had to leave Israel before he made his first Palestinian friend, the result of his participation in a dialogue group in California. He was 39.
On September 4, 1997 the beloved Smadar, 13, the daughter of Miko’s sister Nurit and her husband Rami Elhanan was killed in a suicide attack.
Peled insists that Israel/Palestine is one state—the separation wall notwithstanding, massive investment in infrastructure, towns and highways that bisect and connect settlements on the West Bank, have destroyed the possibility for a viable Palestinian state. The result, Peled says is that Israelis and Palestinians are governed by the same government but live under different sets of laws.
At the heart of Peled’s conclusion lies the realization that Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace as equals in their shared homeland.
Zionism has created ‘rivers of blood’
Rabbi Yisrael Dovid Weiss explains why he believes that Israel as a state is not legitimate.
When Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, visited Washington last week on the eve of the Purim holiday, he gave Barack Obama, the US president, what he considered a symbolic gift – a copy of the old testament book of Esther.
Netanyahu called it “background reading on Iran”, since its story concerns relations with Jews in the Persian empire some 2,500 years ago.
It is considered by scholars to be mostly fiction, but for Netanyahu Esther represented justification for his stance against modern Iran.
Gaza is the most densely populated place on earth.
”Israel must reserve the right to defend itself. And after all that’s the very purpose of the Jewish state. To restore to the Jewish people control over our destiny,” Netanyahu said.
But Netanyahu’s controversial reading of history, even his fight to preserve the state of Israel, are questioned by many of Judaism’s own religious authorities.
“This is against the will of the Almighty and this is not what it means to be a Jew,” says Jewish religious scholar Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, a spokesman for “Jews against Zionism”, who believes that Israel as a state is not legitimate. He says that Zionism has created “rivers of blood” and he opposes the occupation of Palestine.
On the threat from Iran and President Ahmadinejad he says: “He gives charity to Jewish communities and he says one thing: he has a problem with the oppression of the Palestinian people. And the words “wipe out” he constantly says that Iran doesn’t have a history and he is not talking about harming anybody he says that God will not allow this crime to happen. We concur with him that Jews are in danger because there is Zionism because it says in the Torah if you rebel against God, it will not be successful and there will be catastrophic results and Zionism has brought catastrophic results and it could be much worse.”
Israeli bombs pound a target on Nov. 21 in Gaza City. Israeli warplanes and artillery pounded Gaza, hitting government ministries, smuggling tunnels and other targets. Hatem Moussa, AP
Senator Lists the Death Toll From U.S. Drones at 4,700 People
By Spencer Ackerman 02.21.13
The government says you can’t know how many people U.S. drone strikes have killed, because that’s a state secret. But one of the most hawkish members of the U.S. Senate just said the strikes have killed 4,700 people. And his math raises questions.
Airmen assigned to the 432nd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron assemble an MQ-1 Predator after returning from Afghanistan May 19 at Creech Air Force Base, Nev. The six images on the side of the MQ-1 Predator symbolize the number of Hellfire missiles shot while in combat. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Larry E. Reid Jr.)
“We’ve killed 4,700,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) approvingly told an Easley, South Carolina, Rotary Club on Tuesday afternoon, according to an Easley website. It’s the first public death toll provided by a U.S. government official for the signature method of killing in the U.S.’ sprawling, global counterterrorism campaign. “Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida.” Graham did not evidently offer an estimate of how many innocent people the drones have killed.
Graham staffers did not return voicemails and e-mails seeking elaboration. (We’ll update if they do.) But that’s a very high figure — at least as it pertains to the CIA’s drone strikes, outside the declared battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is what the context of Graham’s remarks make it seem like he’s referring to. As Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations blogs, that’s on the highest end of the drone-death estimate compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from publicly available news reports. Zenko’s compilation of the averages of non-governmental organizations’ guesstimates for drone casualties is about 1,700 people lower.
The CIA declined to comment about whether Graham revealed classified information. Counting the death toll from drones is a notoriously imprecise, murky business.
Graham’s death count would raise questions about the much-vaunted precision of the strikes. Using the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count, the U.S. has launched between 416 and 439 drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia since the U.S. first successfully weaponized an MQ-1 Predator a decade ago. If Graham’s right, each strike would have to kill more than 10 people. It’s certainly possible — the 100-pound Hellfire missile carried by the drones is capable of it — but U.S. counterterrorism officials typically describe the drones as a tool geared for the targeting of a specific terrorist at a time, with minimal civilian casualties. (That isn’t necessarily the case: Sometimes the CIA kills people with drones without knowing who exactly they are.)
Yet Graham’s count is simultaneously low. Judging from the context of his remarks, he’s evidently not counting the U.S. military’s drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the real number of deaths from the strikes between the covert CIA drone program and the U.S. military’s still rarely acknowledged efforts is likely even higher.
a version of this with loads of links can be found atwired.com
Americans push back against domestic drones
Kimberly Halkett, al jazeera
Drones are currently used in the US for everything from search and rescue missions, to snapping survey pictures for oil and gas companies. The tiny cameras found inside are capturing thousands of images of the US landscape every day.
But what concerns many Americans is that the remote controlled aircraft can also be armed with rubber bullets, electric shock weapons and even tear gas. They go by names like “Skysee,” “Dragon Flyer,” “Shadow Hawk” and even the “Hummingbird”. It’s a drone so small it can fit in the palm of your hand making its use almost undetectable.
The stealthy capability of drones is what Mayor Satyendra Singh Huja, of Charlotsville, Virginia, doesn’t like.
There are more than 340 drones already licensed in the US to the military, police departments and even universities. It’s just one reason Huja’s city council voted recently to ban the use of drones for domestic surveillance in its airspace for the next two years.
“The technology is not bad in itself, but our concern is on the individual’s privacy,” Huja told me.
But the mayor’s efforts are largely symbolic as federal law supersedes any regional legislation.
The US Congress has also already directed the Federal Aviation Administration to streamline approving applications for even more domestic drones. By 2020, it’s expected 30,000 drones will be operating over the US.
Constitutional lawyer and head of The Rutherford Institute John Whitehead helped the city of Charlottesville draft its law restricting the use drones. He said at least 13 US states are also considering legislation to prohibit drones for surveillance.
The 1960s and the 1970s saw the making of laws that called for the executive branch of government to be more responsive to basic principles of a division of power and accountability to citizens. Many of its owners were curtailed by the legislative. With Reagan, Clinton and especially Bush-Cheney, many of these laws were violated under the claim of a state of exception due to the “War on Terror”.
What we are facing is a profound degradation of the liberal state. Drone killings and unlawful imprisonment are at one end of that spectrum of degradation, and the rise of the power, economic destructions and unaccountability of the financial sector are at the other end.
The massive surveillance apparatus built up over the last 10 years is the domestic companion of the overseas drone killings. It is one outcome of this deep decay of the liberal state. While much is not known about either, we know enough to recognise its potential for enormous abuse. What is known is that there are at least 10,000 buildings across the US, with a massive concentration in Washington, DC, engaged in ongoing surveillance of all of us residing in the territory of the US. Surveillance and counter-terrorism activities employ about one million professionals with top level secret clearance. One estimate has it that every day over two billion emails are tracked. And on and on along these lines.
A law student in the US has made a novel design for a drone-proof city.
Asher Kohn, 25, designed the Shura City, as a class project, which is an attempt to use architecture to counter surveillance and targeted attacks by the remote-controlled aircraft.
The provocative design uses a range of tricks to confuse the drones and keep the city’s inhabitants concealed, the Daily Mail reports.
According to the report, the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that a minimum of 2,629 people have so far been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan alone, with many more in other countries like Yemen and Somalia. Kohn, who is currently based in the Netherlands, came up with the idea for his drone-proof city for a class on ‘Extreme Architecture’ he was taking at the Sam Fox School of Design in St Louis, Missouri.
In the paper, Kohn wrote that ‘architecture against drones is not just a science-fiction scenario but a contemporary imperative’. He added that such creations are not needed for the John Connors but for the Abdurahman al-Awlakis.
The project is ringed by minarets and built from concrete, which drone sensors cannot penetrate into, its layout would be specifically designed to confuse from the outside, foiling the airborne watchers’ ability to dish out targeted death from above, the report said.
Windows of the city would be made from multi-coloured blocks of glass, to further foil drones’ attempts to get a fix on to their targets. Kohn said that the changing colours would make it more difficult for electronic cameras to peer in and make out one person from the next without hints of skin tone or clothing colour, it added.
According to the report, at the head of Shura City would be a roof, as a physical barrier to prevent drones coming too close, but criss-crossed with lines to break up the profile of the buildings below. Making the city a closed environment would also allow it to be climate controlled, in such a way that heat-seeking cameras would be ineffective at picking out the inhabitants outside, the report said.
He concluded that ‘shura City is about using architecture to create a space for humanity in an increasingly inhuman sphere,’ the report added.
http://www.warcosts.com
Since 2004, up to 884 innocent civilians, including at least 176 children, have died from US drone strikes in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. A new report from the Stanford and New York University law schools finds drone use has caused widespread post-tramatic stress disorder and an overall breakdown of functional society in North Waziristan. In addition, the report finds the use of a “double tap” procedure, in which a drone strikes once and strikes again not long after, has led to deaths of rescuers and medical professionals. Many interviewees told the researchers they didn’t know what America was before drones. Now what they know of America is drones, death and terror. Follow the conversation @WarCosts #UnderDrones
You might have heard about the “kill list.” You’ve certainly heard about drones. But the details of the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s national security approach – remain shrouded in secrecy. Here’s our guide to what we know—and what we don’t know.
being brave and standing up for what you think is right is not a competitive sport, but tell that to people running polls to recognize ONE person as THE “person of the year.”
US whistleblower Bradley Manning. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
It was very much a game of two halves. The overwhelming majority of early votes in the three-day poll went to Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban for defending girls’ right to education. Malala, who is still recovering from injuries sustained in October, had 70 percent of votes at the halfway stage with many readers predicting a foregone conclusion. “What that kid did really focussed the world on the evil that these men can do – and what evil all people can do when they feel inclined. But it also showed the courage to pull through and the will of others to not succumb to evil,” wrote jamieTWC1.
But in the latter stages, following a series of tweets from the @Wikileaks twitter handle telling followers to vote Manning, thousands of voters flocked to his cause. Manning secured 70 percent of the vote, the vast majority of them coming after a series of @Wikileaks tweets. Project editor Mark Rice-Oxley said: “It was an interesting exercise that told us a lot about our readers, our heroes and the reasons that people vote.”
The Guardian Admits Bradley Manning is Person of the Year in Grotesque Sulking Fit
It seems The Guardian was shocked by this outcome, as evidenced by approximately 36 hours of silence, before a pathetic attempt at announcing Manning as the winner.
The article is only a small blurb in the middle of their homepage, which talks about “fishy voting patterns,” their favourite Malala, and making it sound like a few tweets from @WikiLeaks is what won it for Manning. It mentions nothing of Manning’s courage to do the right thing, revealing war crimes, or his treatment amounting to torture since being detained.
To The Guardian: It wasn’t just a tweet, it wasn’t just WikiLeaks supporters that made Bradley Manning your 2012 Person of the Year, it was the awakened masses that value free speech, truth, peace, government transparency and accountability.
Malala Yousafzai officially nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
The teenage Woman’s Rights activist in Pakistan who was shot by the Taliban is officially being nominated for the next Nobel Peace Prize.
More than 150 French lawmakers have formally asked the Nobel Committee to award the next Nobel Peace Prize to the Pakistani campaigner for girls’ education Malala Yousafzai.
Malala Yousufzai
For five years now, Malala has been active as a blogger. In October, she was seriously injured in an assassination attack by the Pakistani Taliban.
Many people are calling for her to be the TIME Person of the Year after this year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to the European Union.
She truly has been an inspiration to many, including Hollywood star Angelina Jolie.
“I felt compelled to share Malala’s story with my children. It was difficult for them to comprehend a world where men would try to kill a child whose only “crime” was the desire that she and others like her be allowed to go to school,” Jolie wrote back in October.
Yousafzai may be among odd company vying for the TIME Person of the Year: Joe Biden, Bashir al-Assad (the Syrian dictator) or Chris Christie.
“Malala is proof that it only takes the voice of one brave person to inspire countless men, women, and children. In classrooms and at kitchen tables around the world, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters are praying for Malala’s swift recovery and committing themselves to carry her torch. As the Nobel Committee meets to determine the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, I imagine brave Malala will be given serious consideration.”
In fact, we may be so close to another mid-eastern war that Syrian President Bashir Al-Assad is emphatically trying to find an exit:
In a regional tour conducted last week, Syrian Vice-Minister of the Exterior Faisal al-Miqdad delivered requests on behalf of al-Assad to Venezuelan, Cuban, and Ecuadorian authorities. The letters allegedly enquire into the possibility of asylum for al-Assad, his family, and a tightknit circle of advisors and collaborators.
Venezuelan authorities confirmed that President Hugo Chávez had received a letter from al-Assad before travelling to Cuba for continued cancer treatment.
And he’s not the only one trying to get out ahead of what is sure to be a massive bombardment should NATO forces decide to take preemptive action. With war raging between rebels and the Assad government, thousands of refugees have been getting out of harm’s way since November:
Thousands of Syrians fled their country on Friday in one of the biggest refugee exoduses of the 20-month civil war…
An estimated four million people will need humanitarian aid by early next year when the country is in the grip of winter.
DEBKAfile Special Report December 7, 2012, 3:09 PM (GMT+02:00)
Sources close to the French Defense Ministry reported Friday, Dec. 7, that a Western-Arab military intervention against the Assad regime is due to begin shortly with the participation of the US, France, Britain, Turkey, Jordan and other anti-Assad Arab nations. debkafile: The reference is to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar’s special forces.
Our military sources add that the French aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle carrying a complement of marines is deployed in the Mediterranean, having joined the USS Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group and at least five British warships which are also carrying a large marine force.
In the second and third weeks of November, British and French naval forces, plus 2,600 special ops combatants from both nations, performed landing-and-capture exercises against fortified locations on the coast and mountains of Albania as practice for potential operations against similar terrain in Syria, where the Alawite Mountains loom over the coastal towns of Latakia and Tartus.
The troops landing there would head for the Alawite Mts. to prevent Assad and his loyal units from retreating to his mountain stronghold and fighting on from there – as he plans to do if he is forced to flee Damascus.
French sources told Le Point magazine that the NATO mission for Syria, including the UK and the US, would be modeled on the Western intervention in Libya in 2011. It would combine an aerial blitz with ground action by special forces for destroying Assad’s chemical weapons stocks, his air force and his air defense systems.
Over 10,000 US-NATO Troops Mass Ahead of Syria Invasion; Patriot Missiles Deployed In Turkey
The USS Eisenhower, an American aircraft carrier that holds eight fighter bomber squadrons and 8,000 men, arrived at the Syrian coast yesterday in the midst of a heavy storm, indicating US preparation for a potential ground intervention.
While the Obama administration has not announced any sort of American-led military intervention in the war-torn country, the US is now ready to launch such action “within days…”
…If the US decides to intervene militarily in Syria, it now has at its disposal 10,000 fighting men, 17 warships, 70 fighter-bombers, 10 destroyers and frigates and a guided military cruises. Some of the vessels are also equipped with Aegis missile interceptors to shoot down any missiles Syria might have at hand…
NATO moved forward Thursday with its plan to place Patriot missiles and troops along Syria’s border with Turkey to protect against potential attacks.
Assad’s regime blasted the move as “psychological warfare,” saying the new deployment would not deter it from seeking victory over rebels it views as terrorists.
Whether the threat is real or just another WMD psychological operation on the order of Iraq is very quickly becoming irrelevant.
Thousands of US troops arrive near Syrian shore on USS Eisenhower
RT Published: 06 December, 2012The arrival of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the 11 US Navy aircraft carriers that has the capacity to hold thousands of men, is now stationed at the coast of Syria, DEBKAfile reports. The aircraft carrier joined the USS Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, which holds about 2,500 Marines.
“We have (US) special operations forces at the right posture, they don’t have to be sent,” an unnamed US official told The Australian, which suggested that US military troops are already near Syria and ready to intervene in the conflict, if necessary.
The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier steams in Mediterranean waters south of Italy during NATO.(Reuters / Paul Hanna)
If the US decides to intervene militarily in Syria, it now has at its disposal 10,000 fighting men, 17 warships, 70 fighter-bombers, 10 destroyers and frigates and a guided military cruises. Some of the vessels are also equipped with Aegis missile interceptors to shoot down any missiles Syria might have at hand, according to DEBKAfile.
“The muscle is already there to be flexed,” a US official told the London Times about the US military’s presence outside of Syria. “It’s premature to say what could happen if a decision is made to intervene. That hasn’t taken shape, we’ve not reached that kind of decision. There are a lot of options, but it [military action] could be launched rapidly, within days.”
The move comes after NATO made a significant strategic decision Tuesday to deploy Patriot Air and Missile Defense Systems in Turkey on the border of Syria where opposition groups have the stronghold. The defense would be able to protect Turkey from potential Syrian missiles that could contain chemical weapons, as well as intimidate Syrian Air Force pilots from bombing the northern Syria border towns, which the armed rebels control. Syria is thought to have about 700 missiles.
“The protection from NATO will be three dimensional; one is the short-range Patriots, the second is the middle-range Terminal High Altitude Air Defense [THAD] system and the last is the AEGIS system, which counters missiles that can reach outside the atmosphere,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.
DEBKAfile’s anonymous military sources claim the THAD and Aegis arrived at the Syrian coast aboard the USS Eisenhower.
“The United States now stands ready for direct military intervention in the Syrian conflict when the weather permits,” the news source wrote.
The US military held WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning under strict “suicide watch” partly because his gender identity struggle showed he was mentally “not stable,” a witness said.
Manning, a former armyintelligence analyst in Iraq, is accused of the biggest intelligence leak in American history for allegedly passing a massive trove of classified documents to Julian Assange’s anti-secrecy website.
Manning’s purported gender struggle came up at a pre-trial hearing as his defense urged a military judge to dismiss the case, citing alleged “unlawful punishment” endured by thesoldier during nine months of solitary confinement.
Master Sergeant Craig Blenis, who served as a counselor at the Quantico military base where the WikiLeaks suspect was detained, said the gender issue “on top of other things” was a factor that determined his detention status.
It “shows he’s not stable,” Blenis told the court, explaining why Manning was put under stringent “prevention of injury” status at the Virginia base.
The subject of Manning’s alter ego, Breanna, first arose in hearings last year. In court documents, the defense argues that prison authorities displayed “intolerance and homophobia” in their treatment of Manning, now aged 24.
Mladen Antonov/AFP/File A member of the Bradley Manning Support Group holds a banner during a rally at the entrance to Fort George Meade military base in Fort Meade, Maryland on November 27. The US military held WikiLeaks suspect Manning under strict “suicide watch” partly because his gender identity struggle showed he was mentally “not stable,” a witness said Sunday.
Blenis was pressed on why he recommended that the army private remain under harsh, maximum custody despite filing reports that described him as a model detainee and advice of psychiatrists, who said the accused was not suicidal.
The defense also confronted Blenis with an email that shows him joking with his commanding officer about a possible birthday package addressed to Manning that the Quantico jail rejected because it had not been cleared in advance.
In the email, Blenis lists the official reasons why the package was refused but added that the decision was taken because they “felt like being” difficult.
Blenis said Manning’s reluctance to engage in conversations with troops overseeing his detention caused him concern, particularly because the accused admitted to having suicidal thoughts upon arriving at Quantico in July 2010.
Manning’s civilian defense lawyer David Coombs suggested that his client, who was earlier held in US custody in Kuwait, was merely a man of few words.
“Is it possible you’re looking at a quiet guy?” asked Coombs.
“That’s not what I thought,” the sergeant replied.
Manning was held at Quantico until April 2011 before being transferred to a prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where authorities concluded he was not suicidal and could be held under more lenient conditions.
Legal experts say it is unlikely that Judge Denise Lind will throw out the case because of Manning’s detention measures, but she could take the issue into account during sentencing, if the soldier is found guilty as charged.
If convicted on all 22 counts, including a charge of “aiding the enemy,” Manning could spend the rest of his life in prison.
His trial has been pushed back to March 2013 instead of February that year, Judge Lind announced earlier.
In a video presented to the court, Blenis was seen speaking to Manning through prison bars, telling him that he is a trouble-free inmate: “I wish I had a 100 Mannings.”
In the video, Manning can be seen standing naked from the waist up, with his arms behind him — prison authorities forced him to strip at night as part of the prevention of injury (POI) regime.
Lawyer for Bradley Manning describes his treatment as “stupid and criminal”
The lawyer representing Bradley Manning, the US Army private accused of leaking classified information to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, has issued a damning indictment of his client’s “criminal” treatment in solitary confinement.
“Brad’s treatment at Quantico will forever be etched in our nation’s history as a disgraceful moment in time,” Manning’s defense attorney David Combs said in his first-ever public appearance regarding US v. Manning.
“Not only was it stupid and counterproductive – it was criminal,” he continued in his scathing condemnation of the “unlawful pretrial punishment” that PFC Manning was subjected to for nine months while held at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia.
Combs first public comments since becoming Manning’s lawyer two years ago were timed to correspond with the conclusion of the Article 13 hearing – a defense motion alleging Manning had endured unlawful pre-trial punishment.
Manning spent the first nine months of his pretrial detention in a 6-by-8 foot cell in solitary confinement, conditions which Combs described as “draconian.”
Under constant surveillance, Manning spent around 23 hours each day confined to his “cage-like” cell, and was denied basic items such as toilet paper and bedclothes.
The strict conditions were a result of Manning’s designation as a “suicide risk,” though the 24-year-old said during a pre-trial hearing late last month that he “didn’t want to die,” he just wanted to “get out of the cage.”
He was later transferred to another detention center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in April 2011.
“As far as his mental state or how he is …I can tell you that he is very excited about having his case go forward and it’s in the process now. It’s been a long time,” Combs explained.
have the NATO nations already begun forming the coalition government to fight against the terrorists they are arming to topple the Assad regime?
activists manage work-arounds to blackout
the syrian government’s websites are hosted on servers in the u.s., and they are down. why? the government – the u.s. government – demanded it. this an unashamedly obvious tactic to silence criticism of the nato-supplied terrorists (fighters from iran and iraq, weapons from lybia). allowing them to run amok with bloody violence. we should never forget that most of the “rebel” fighters are foreigners, and have no blood relatives to worry about in this massacre.
just the day before the internet blackout, there had been car bombings in the syrian capitol and the u.k. vowed to provide more cars to the rebels, joining france in the growing coalition to loot, pillage and rape the shit out of syria, which israel seems to want in on.
Activists say Syrian rebels and government troops are clashing south of the capital as Internet and telephones lines remain cut for a second day nationwide, AP reports.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there were intense clashes after midnight in villages and towns near the country’s airport but it was quiet Friday morning. It said rebels were able to destroy several army vehicles near the airport.
The group, which has a network of activists around Syria, reported fighting in southern neighborhoods of Damascus including Qaboun and Hajar Aswad.
Mataz Suheil, a spokesman for the Observatory told the Guardian, that the group had managed to talks to contacts in Syria using satellite phones and some landlines.
But his account from the Syria capital still cited reports from the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Here’s an extract:
Throughout the day there was heavy fighting in the south of the capital between loyalist army units and rebels trying to topple the president, Bashar Al Assad, and a fourth consecutive day of air strikes by military jets on Daraya, about five kilometres from the centre of Damascus.
Sustained artillery barrages were also fired into the area, with tanks and troops facing stubborn residence from the Free Syrian Army.
Government sources had earlier predicted the military offensive in Daraya, where the regime says it faces al-Qaeda terrorists, would be wrapped up by today …
The heaviest clashes erupted between troops and rebels in the towns of Babila and Hujaira south-east of the capital, and in Harran Al Awamid, just east of the airport.
Army reinforcements had been sent to the area, according to media reports. The army also went on the offensive across the eastern outer belt of the capital, notably in the towns of Harasta and Douma, and in Eastern Ghuta, the Observatory said.
Several host companies said they were taking down those sites. They and similar companies had been identified in reports published by Citizen Lab, a research laboratory that monitors North American Web service providers that host Syrian Web sites.
For example, the Web site of SANA, the Syrian state news agency, is hosted by a Dallas company, SoftLayer Technologies. It is one of a handful of Internet providers based in the United States that sell their services, often unknowingly, to Web sites operated by the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
HostDime.com in Orlando, Fla., hosts the Web site of Syria’s Ministry of Religious Affairs. Jumpline.com hosts the site of the country’s General Authority for Development. The government of Hama, a city that has seen heavy clashes between rebels and government troops, operated its Web site through WeHostWebSites.com in Denver.
An executive order by President Obama prohibits American companies from providing Web hosting and other services to Syria without obtaining a license from the Treasury Department.
On Thursday, State Department officials confirmed that providing the services was a violation of the United States sanctions. “Our policies are designed to assist ordinary citizens who are exercising their fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly and association,” a spokesman, Mark C. Toner, said.
A SoftLayer spokesman, Andre Fuochi, would not comment about the SANA Web site, but in a statement he said the company “rigorously” enforces “prevailing laws and regulations and acts swiftly and vigorously if we find our users to be in violation.”
Dennis Henry, the vice president of operations at HostDime.com, said he had been unaware of the Syrian government Web site, but that it was hosted by a customer’s server housed in HostDime.com’s data center.
“We have contacted our direct client whose server is housing the Web site to express our concerns,” Mr. Henry said.
It’s been almost a full day now and the nation of Syria remains completely cut off from the rest of the Internet (and by extension, the outside world.) Internet analysts who watched the collapse in real-time think they’ve figured out how it was done.
The Syrian government claims that “terrorists”—their standard euphemism for the rebels—cut the major cables supplying internet connections to the country. That’s an unlikely scenario for a couple of reasons. For starters, the Internet is the rebels’ most important communication tool, used to talk to each other and to spread word of the conflict around the world. There’d be no advantage for them to disable their most effective propaganda tool. (Although, the Syrian state media website is also down.)
Furthermore, there are four actual physical cables that deliver connections from the global Internet to Syria. (Image via Renesys.com) Three of them are underwater, in the Mediterranean Sea. The other comes across the Turkish border. To completely stop the Internet in the manner observed, all four would have to be severed simultaneously, an unlikely logistical challenge for the rebels, and one that still wouldn’t fully explain the systematic shutdown observed by technology companies elsewhere.
Syria only has one Internet provider, which is naturally controlled by the state. All four of the cables would feed into a handful of edge routers (the starting point for an ISP network), that would then distribute all the incoming and outgoing traffic to the rest of the country. Since all the routers are controlled by one company, they could simply reconfigure the routers and then, boom. No more internet. (Network computing company CloudFlare explains it in more technical detail on their blog.)
(CNN) — France and the United States put their support behind a new coalition of Syrian dissidents Tuesday, but Damascus slammed the group, saying any effort to topple President Bashar al-Assad will be futile.
French President Francois Hollande said his nation “recognizes the Syrian national coalition as the sole representative of the Syrian people and therefore as the provisional government of the future democratic Syria, making it possible to bring Bashar al-Assad’s regime to an end.”
In Washington, a deputy spokesman for the State Department said the U.S. believes the decision to unite opposition groups marks the start of a democratic future for the Syrian people. The U.S. has yet to formally recognize the group, though, as a representative government.
you’d think that the obama administration’s continuation and escalation of his predecessor’s most insane policies – secret detentions at secret prisons, selling weapons to mexican drug cartels, mass murder through drone attacks in africa and asia, trillions of dollars printed just to be dumped into the accounts of banksters – would have convinced even the most deluded ninny that there is no clear difference between the major parties.
just to drive the point home, now – less than a week after obomber’s re-selection as chief gangster of the red, white, and blue gulag america – his administration is feverishly working to keep the public’s attention firmly pointed away from the fact that the cia has just been caught running cocaine to fund its covert operations. though the operation in question was not directly implicated in the benghazi gun-running affair, one has to wonder about the source of all the money the cia was using to buy up libyan weapons to ship to its proxy, terrorist armies in syria and lebanon.
if an operation by the cia to sell cocaine to fund terrorist groups rings any bells in your old, gray head, it’s because this has happened before, when demigod ex-president, ronald wilson reagan used funds raised by selling cocaine smuggled into the u.s. to fund various terrorist groups around the world – from the mujahideen in afghanistan (who we are now fighting in order to protect the opium fields), to jonas savimbi’s unita in angola, the khmer rouge in cambodia, and the contras in central america.
in reagan’s iran-contra fiasco, the cia flew cocaine out of south america, through secret airbases in central america, and on into the u.s., either through border crossings in california and texas, or secret airfields in arkansas. at least two of ex-president g.h.w. bush’s sons are rumored to have been pilots involved in the operation. covering their asses was the motivation to invade panama and kidnap president manuel noriega, once a trusted partner in the smuggling ring. in order to market the cocaine to people in impoverished communities, the cia initiated the 1980′s crack cocaine epidemic.
more on iran-contra:
The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations
An August, 1996, series in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua’s Sandinista government during the 1980s. Webb’s series, “The Dark Alliance,” has been the subject of intense media debate, and has focused attention on a foreign policy drug scandal that leaves many questions unanswered.This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.
The skullduggery began to unravel in the fall of 1986. On October 5, 1986, a C-123 aircraft ferrying supplies to the contras was shot down by the Sandinistas, and an American named Eugene Hasenfus was captured. He told the Nicaraguans that his flight was part of a CIA-approved operation. Days later, Reagan said of the Hasenfus operation, “There was no government connection with that at all.” He was not telling the truth. Shortly after that, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams testified in Congress that the administration had arranged for no foreign donations–”not a dime”–to the contras–even though he had arranged for a $10 million contribution to the rebels from the Sultan of Brunei. -
oddly enough, the namby-pamby coward-ass liberals at the NATION have chosen to ignore the drug-running operation, as it appears to implicate at least three presidents of the u.s., two of whom are related. much of reagan’s secret war on dissenters within the u.s. remains under-reported. nonetheless, the article from the NATION gives a good look into some of the major international players in u.s. foreign policy, including thinktanks. many of them continue to resurface now and then, despite their criminal background during the reagan bush regime. also – at least one investigative journalist who wrote about this in the 90′s was blacklisted by the u.s. media and died under very sad circumstances.
Gary Webb was an award-winning San Jose Mercury News journalist that was run out of his job and blacklisted from the industry for daring to report what he found out. After losing his career and his family, he was found dead in a welfare hotel room.
the benghazi gun-running operation
According to various reports (Wall Street Journal, Daily Telegraph, repeated in numerous European media organs), Libyan rebels were paid to steal arms from ex-government dumps. Weapons that did get into the hands of the rebels were re-purchased, using secret CIA slush funds – the ‘black money’ – which is never disclosed to Congress.
We learn that here is a strikingly similar parallel to the Iran-Contra arms-go-round mastermind, the Naval Marine Corps Lt.-Col Oliver North. In that infamous affair of mid-1980s, the US covertly paid the fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini – then at war with the current US ally of convenience Iraq – for shipments of weapons, delivered to the Right-wing Contra terrorists engaged in a struggle against the popular Nicaraguan government.
Iran-Contra focused on a CIA network known loosely as ‘The Enterprise,’ weaved by North and composed of hand-picked private brokers, off-screen to the Congress, including arms traders, money launderers and soldiers of fortune (contractors). Daniel Ellsberg, immortalized as the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers (the military’s best kept Vietnam secrets), famously called Iran-Contra “quite the worst covert operation in US history.” It seems there is now convincing evidence of a rival candidate.
North was gleefully circumventing the Boland Amendment which forbade the US to arm the Contras. The Libyan Arms for Syria affair displays a similar false flag stamp, cloaked with the identical conspiracy of secrecy and deception.
Iran-Contra was exposed when a plane loaded with contraband Iranian weapons crashed in the Nicaraguan jungle. Ronald Reagan was able to escape the rap because he invoked the ‘afternoon nap’ escape clause. Benghazi is the new Contra moment. So what are Obama’s expectations in very similar circumstances, even as he celebrates his second triumphant political coronation?
Petraeus mistress reveals secret prison as possible motive behind Benghazi attack
Two months after the storming of an US consulate in Benghazi, questions remain largely unanswered about both how and why insurgents entered the facility on September 11 and executed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The discussion became a heated issue on the campaign trail leading up to Election Day, and conflicting accounts from the White House, State Department and Congress all led to a mess of confusion that has only further spun out of control following the unexpected stepping down of Petraeus on Friday.
In the immediate aftermath of the CIA chief’s resignation, skeptics quickly suggested that there was more to the story, especially given Petraeus’ role as head of the country’s intelligence agency and the relatively unscathing extramarital affair that he rightfully admitted to in citing his departure from office. As journalists and investigators tried to dig deep for info on the alleged mistress, Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell, as expected the story took a drastic turn by Sunday when it was revealed that she may have been briefed on the truth of the Benghazi scandal while the rest of the country claws for answers.
A speech given by Broadwell only last month at her Alma matter suggests that she was given information about the terrorist attack that never made it to the American public.
“Now I don’t know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had actually had taken a couple of Libya militia members prisoner,” Broadwell told a crowd at the University of Denver alumni symposium on October 26. “And they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back. So that’s still being vetted.”
Broadwell’s address was publically available on YouTube until this weekend; it has since been removed, although mirrors have surfaced.
Until then, and even today, the CIA denies Broadwell’s claims that the CIA was holding anyone prisoner at what has long been described as a consulate building in Benghazi. Should her account prove true, however, it could mean that the agency had a secret black site prison in Libya, a fact long denied by Washington.
secret prisons have cost the u.s. some support from abroad, as some of the people involved in governments co-operating with america’s black-ops prisons have been removed from power and some may even be prosecuted.
just as the iran-contra scandal included drug-running operations, so does the cia’s latest covert campaign of international regime change. the u.s. has decided that it is high time that it exert – through the executive branch – the right to pick who rules what country, under what kind of regime. sometimes this is done in the name of “national interests,” or it can be undertaken for the flimsiest of reasons, like the bush family’s vanity wars in southwest asia.
however, the american media is spinning the story as a sex scandal to cover up gun-running operations which transferred weapons between syrian and libyan factions of various arab and persian terrorist groups, including our opponent in afghanistan and yemen, al queda.
since when is a gun-running operation seen as a “scandal?” that’s one of the things the cia does. as noted above, there have been many gun-running operations in recent history, particularly in the cold war era. no one in the u.s. has been run out of office because of running weapons to african, south american, asian, and even european terrorists and dictatorships.
Petraeus resigns as CIA director after Ecuadoran President Correa cites “credible” evidence that the CIA is running cocaine to fund regime change there
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said denunciations about US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interference to destabilize his government and hinder his reelection are credible. During a television-broadcast interview with journalist Jorge Gestoso, Correa referred to the denunciations presented by UK ex-Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray and the Chilean journalist Patricio Mery Bell and said they acre credible because there are precedents.
Replying to denigration of those denunciations by the ambassador in this capital, he said: “I trust in Obama’s government. I trust in Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Adam Namm. I believe the government does not know, but it does not mean it is not happening.”
He also said that if a government is carrying out destabilizing operations, it does not mean that country’s ambassador is going to say: yes, we admit what we are doing. He would say those are rumors.
Correa also referred to the denunciation by Chilean journalist Patricio Mary Bell about apparent CIA and DEA operations to bring 300 kilograms of drugs monthly in Chile and financing destabilization of the Ecuadorian government with the excess.
He stated that it was a similar case to the Iran-Contras scandal, by means of which resources from illegal weapon sale to Iran were embezzled to finance the counter-revolution in Nicaragua, to evade the US Congress control.
In one way or another, the U.S. military is now involved with most of the nations on Earth. Its soldiers, commandos, trainers, base builders, drone jockeys, spies, and arms dealers, as well as associated hired guns and corporate contractors, can now be found just about everywhere on the planet. The sun never sets on American troops conducting operations, training allies, arming surrogates, schooling its own personnel, purchasing new weapons and equipment, developing fresh doctrine, implementing novel tactics, and refining their martial arts. The U.S. has submarines trolling the briny deep and aircraft carrier task forces traversing the oceans and seas, robotic drones flying constant missions and manned aircraft patrolling the skies, while above them, spy satellites circle, peering down on friend and foe alike.
Since 2001, the U.S. military has thrown everything in its arsenal, short of nuclear weapons, including untold billions of dollars in weaponry, technology, bribes, you name it, at a remarkably weak set of enemies — relatively small groups of poorly-armed fighters in impoverished nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen — while decisively defeating none of them. With its deep pockets and long reach, its technology and training acumen, as well as the devastatingly destructive power at its command, the U.S. military should have the planet on lockdown. It should, by all rights, dominate the world just as the neoconservative dreamers of the early Bush years assumed it would.
Yet after more than a decade of war, it has failed to eliminate a rag-tag Afghan insurgency with limited popular support. It trained an indigenous Afghan force that was long known for its poor performance — before it became better known for killing its American trainers. It has spent years and untold tens of millions of tax dollars chasing down assorted firebrand clerics, various terrorist “lieutenants,” and a host of no-name militants belonging to al-Qaeda, mostly in the backlands of the planet. Instead of wiping out that organization and its wannabes, however, it seems mainly to have facilitated its franchising around the world.
At the same time, it has managed to paint weak regional forces like Somalia’s al-Shabaab as transnational threats, then focus its resources on eradicating them, only to fail at the task. It has thrown millions of dollars in personnel, equipment, aid, and recently even troops into the task of eradicating low-level drug runners (as well as the major drug cartels), without putting a dent in the northward flow of narcotics to America’s cities and suburbs.
It spends billions on intelligence only to routinely find itself in the dark. It destroyed the regime of an Iraqi dictator and occupied his country, only to be fought to a standstill by ill-armed, ill-organized insurgencies there, then out-maneuvered by the allies it had helped put in power, and unceremoniously bounced from the country (even if it is now beginning to claw its way back in). It spends untold millions of dollars to train and equip elite Navy SEALs to take on poor, untrained, lightly-armed adversaries, like gun-toting Somali pirates.
How Not to Change in a Changing World
And that isn’t the half of it.
The U.S. military devours money and yet delivers little in the way of victories. Its personnel may be among the most talented and well-trained on the planet, its weapons and technology the most sophisticated and advanced around. And when it comes to defense budgets, it far outspends the next nine largest nations combined (most of which are allies in any case), let alone its enemies like the Taliban, al-Shabaab, or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but in the real world of warfare this turns out to add up to remarkably little.
In a government filled with agencies routinely derided for profligacy, inefficiency, and producing poor outcomes, its record may be unmatched in terms of waste and abject failure, though that seems to faze almost no one in Washington. For more than a decade, the U.S. military has bounced from one failed doctrine to the next. There was Donald Rumsfeld’s “military lite,” followed by what could have been called military heavy (though it never got a name), which was superseded by General David Petraeus’s “counterinsurgency operations” (also known by its acronym COIN). This, in turn, has been succeeded by the Obama administration’s bid for future military triumph: a “light footprint” combination of special ops, drones, spies, civilian soldiers, cyberwarfare, and proxy fighters. Yet whatever the method employed, one thing has been constant: successes have been fleeting, setbacks many, frustrations the name of the game, and victory MIA.
Convinced nonetheless that finding just the right formula for applying force globally is the key to success, the U.S. military is presently banking on that new six-point plan. Tomorrow, it may turn to a different war-lite mix. Somewhere down the road, it will undoubtedly again experiment with something heavier. And if history is any guide, counterinsurgency, a concept that failed the U.S. in Vietnam and was resuscitated only to fail again in Afghanistan, will one day be back in vogue.
In all of this, it should be obvious, a learning curve is lacking. Any solution to America’s war-fighting problems will undoubtedly require the sort of fundamental reevaluation of warfare and military might that no one in Washington is open to at the moment. It’s going to take more than a few days spent shuffling around a big map in plastic shoe covers.
American politicians never tire of extolling the virtues of the U.S. military, which is now commonly hailed as “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” This claim appears grotesquely at odds with reality. Aside from triumphs over such non-powers as the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and the small Central American nation of Panama, the U.S. military’s record since World War II has been a litany of disappointments: stalemate in Korea, outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia, debacles in Lebanon and Somalia, two wars against Iraq (both ending without victory), more than a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan, and so on.
Something akin to the law of diminishing returns may be at work. The more time, effort, and treasure the U.S. invests in its military and its military adventures, the weaker the payback. In this context, the impressive destructive power of that military may not matter a bit, if it is tasked with doing things that military might, as it has been traditionally conceived, can perhaps no longer do.
Success may not be possible, whatever the circumstances, in the twenty-first-century world, and victory not even an option. Instead of trying yet again to find exactly the right formula or even reinventing warfare, perhaps the U.S. military needs to reinvent itself and its raison d’être if it’s ever to break out of its long cycle of failure.
But don’t count on it.
Instead, expect the politicians to continue to heap on the praise, Congress to continue insuring funding at levels that stagger the imagination, presidents to continue applying blunt force to complex geopolitical problems (even if in slightly different ways), arms dealers to continue churning out wonder weapons that prove less than wondrous, and the Pentagon continuing to fail to win.
Coming off the latest series of failures, the U.S. military has leapt headlong into yet another transitional period — call it the changing face of empire — but don’t expect a change in weapons, tactics, strategy, or even doctrine to yield a change in results. As the adage goes: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus. That telling line was prompted by a discussion about a controversial cruise missile strike that occurred in December 2009 that killed 41 civilians, including women and children. The Yemeni government insisted it carried out the attack in al-Ma’jalah, Abyan.
![Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. "He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them." Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can't remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination.](http://roblosricos.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bushjfkbookdepo2.jpg?w=593&h=619)
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
“I know, but we are fighting Israel. I joined the army to fight Israel. And now I am fighting Israel’s tools. And the tools of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, so in this way we are fighting for Golan. This is a conspiracy and the West is helping the foreign terrorists who arrived in Syria, the same terrorists you are trying to kill in Mali.” I have heard this before, of course. The “moamarer”, the conspiracy, sits beside me at all interviews in Syria. But the colonel admits that the two Syrian T-55s which fire shells at Point 45 every morning – the very same vintage war-carts as his own tanks – are sets of twins, that his enemies have taken their artillery from the government army and that his opponents include men from Bashar al-Assad’s original army.
gured out how it was done.
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