December 9, 2008

Blowback: Unholy war culture

an excerpt from the 12/08/08 article by Arnaud de Borchgrave

It all goes back to the clandestine war the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan fought together against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89). The coalition's secret weapon: Islam and the cult of jihad.

In the early stages of the Soviet invasion and occupation, many of the Soviet troops were drawn from the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. It was a colonial configuration: brown faces with white officers.

The anti-Soviet resistance, funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia to the tune of $1 billion a year (which was real money in those days), flooded towns occupied by the Soviets with Korans and pamphlets declaring jihad, or holy war, against the Russian occupier.

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November 11, 2008

Gareth Porter on Antiwar Radio

Today on Antiwar Radio, Dr. Gareth Porter will be discussing the so-called "smoking laptop" at 1:15pm est.

Dr. Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy. He is also the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He also writes for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

The show is streamed live from the Antiwar Radio page at Antiwar.com,
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Michael Scheuer: Al Qeada and the election

Today on Antiwar Radio, Michael Scheuer will be discussing Al Qaeda and the recent US election at 12:15pm est.

Michael Scheuer is the former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit and author of Through Our Enemies Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.

The show is streamed live from Antiwar Radio page at Antiwar.com,
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October 25, 2008

Abu Nidal: US Spy

Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent – written by Saddam Hussein's brutal security services for Saddam's eyes only – state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida.

President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qa'ida as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Western reports were to dismiss Iraq's claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam's own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the "treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country".


Read the rest.
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October 2, 2008

The Spiraling Money-go-round

blip from bill giltner on the myopic frenzy over the so-called "bailout".


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September 27, 2008

Russia to build missile defence shield

Russia is to build new space and missile defence shields and put its armed forces on permanent combat alert, President Medvedev announced yesterday.

In a sharp escalation of military rhetoric, Mr Medvedev ordered a wholesale renovation of Russia’s nuclear deterrence and told military chiefs to draw up plans to reorganise the armed forces by December.

He said that Russia must modernise its nuclear defences within eight years, including the creation of a “system of air and space defence”.

The announcement puts Russia in a new arms race with the United States, which has infuriated the Kremlin by seeking to establish an anti-missile shield in eastern Europe. The US argues that the shield is aimed at rogue states such as Iran, but Russia is convinced that its own security is threatened.


add to that, that Medvedev and Chávez sign $1 billion military loan, and Russia has sent a warship to Somolia after another ship has been hijacked by Somali pirates, what's an Empire to do?
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Islamabad in rebuke to US after shoot-out

THE first major shoot-out on the tense border with Afghanistan between anti-terrorism allies Pakistan and the US plunged their relations to a new low last night as President Asif Ali Zardari told Washington: "Friends can't be intruders."

In a dramatic escalation of the stand-off between the two nations over cross-border raids, conflicting accounts emerged of what military analysts regard as a serious encounter involving groundfire by Pakistani troops aimed at bringing down US helicopter gunships.

The US forces - part of the NATO coalition force fighting in Afghanistan - fired back at Pakistani positions from their helicopter gunships as well as from the ground in what is the biggest exchange of its kind.

"It is in the interests of both sides at this stage to try to play things down. But there can be no disguising the seriousness of this encounter, and what it means in terms of future co-operation. Things are going from bad to worse," a well-placed military source in Islamabad told The Weekend Australian last night.

Official Pakistani military spokesmen said the shooting started when the US helicopter gunships were spotted flying deep inside Pakistani territory in North Waziristan, a hotbed of jihadi militancy that is a stronghold for militants operating in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.


[more]
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September 23, 2008

Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind



'Pre-crime' detector shows promise

However, last week, the DHS science unit gave an update on the project, now dubbed the less-hostile-sounding Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST) programme. And, if DHS claims are to be believed, the research appears to be getting somewhere.

At an equestrian centre in Maryland, 140 paid volunteers walked through a pair of trailers kitted out with a battery of FAST sensors, including cameras, infrared heat sensors and an eyesafe laser radar, called a Bio-Lidar, that measures pulse and breathing rate from a distance.

Some subjects were told to act shifty, be evasive, deceptive and hostile. And many were detected. "We're still very early on in this research, but it is looking very promising," says DHS science spokesman John Verrico. "We are running at about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection, and 80% on deception."

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September 11, 2008

America and Al Qaeda

The first four parts of a two episode series by AlJazeera English Network, featuring Michael Scheuer, Chris Hedges, Asad Durrani, Fawaz Gerges.


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September 6, 2008

AIPAC and the Dobson mob

A Lesson Before Lying
" Even though the anti-Jewish accusations against their bible- praising, hockey mom candidate were scurrilous and spurious, the McCain campaign thought that the best antidote against Palin’s burgeoning Jewish problem was immunization from a group of hastily assembled AIPAC directors, who, I assume, were in town for the Republican convention. The group met with Palin at her hotel. Ironically, she was chaperoned by the man she had replaced as John McCain’s choice for a running mate, Senator Lieberman (Ind., CT, Israel, CUFI). Apparently, it was decided that Lieberman was too liberal on social issues for the Republican base. Predictably, Palin’s appeal to the quickly assembled pro-Israel lobbyists was successful. After the meeting, Josh Block, a spokesman for AIPAC, announced, “We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the U.S./Israel relationship, and we were pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel…. Like Sen. McCain, the vice presidential nominee understands and believes in the special friendship between the two democracies and would work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership in a McCain/Palin Administration." Palin, who is reported to be a quick learner, found out in a most public lesson that genuflecting to the directors of AIPAC is an important part of what passes for foreign policy experience and acumen these days."

CNP Meets in Minneapolis to Vet Palin
" Well, this is the larger issue, which is, you know, what role Sarah Palin would play in a potential McCain administration? And last week in Minneapolis at the Radisson Hotel, without any media present, the most powerful power brokers of the Christian right met and essentially vetted Sarah Palin. They were there to watch her speech accepting her selection as the vice-presidential candidate. And they were delighted.

The only way I found out about this meeting is through a web video posted by the Christian right organization Focus on the Family, in which they discussed attending the meeting. One of James Dobson’s spokesmen discussed attending the meeting and being electrified by the selection of Sarah Palin. The Christian right absolutely loves this woman. And so—and what I wrote in my article is that the Council for National Policy is sort of the hidden hand behind the selection. "

what coercion?
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September 3, 2008

undercover infiltrators

busted in March For Our Lives on 9/2

Your browser is not able to display this multimedia content.



The two would not identify themselves as police nor name their employeeing agency. Another infiltrator who was confronted by activists, and not interviewed on camera, did admit he was a cop, but laughably he claimed he was not "undercover" but simply "plain clothes" — his purpose there being to keep the marchers safe (from themselves presumably). At least a half dozen "plain clothes" officers were spotted in the march, which was already lined with riot cops wearing gas masks for nearly the entire route.

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August 30, 2008

Raid on RNC Activist Convergence Center

according to the latest RNC Emergency Dispatch, the welcome mat was rolled out for our friends as they were just sitting down to dinner and a movie. some people have no manners... and should never be spoken to.





h/t - skinnychef for the blip
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August 25, 2008

Freedom is Golden

Central Planning is sold to a hopeful people as a way to solve societal problems, to right wrongs, and bring about perfect justice and equality. Central Planning promises you everything you are entitled to. As a bonus, goods and services produced by others are added to the list of commodities that everyone has a "right" to. Suddenly everyone is entitled to healthcare, housing, education, food, et cetera. It might sound nice that the state will magically provide all these wonderful things, but these rosy promises mask a dehumanizing, ugly reality. The other side of these entitlements is that now the doctor, the builder, the teacher, the farmer are slaves to the all-powerful state. No longer do they serve patients, students, or customers. They work in complete obedience to the state, their only customer.

Central planning will tell you that you are entitled to many things. Liberty tells you that you are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; to whatever you earn, and nothing that you don't. While it may seem harsh to some, we must look to basic economic truths and to history to see which model is cruel and which model is kind.

The truth is that central planning cannot provide for economic success like freedom can. Central planning makes promises it cannot possibly keep. We live in a world of unlimited wants and limited resources. If you put a massive and powerful government in charge of distributing those resources, it is not a surprise that government and those in bed with government are first in line for those resources. The poor and the middle class – the most hopeful and trusting – are hurt the most, as the state always underestimates their needs and overestimates their ability to pay taxes and absorb inflation.


the rest
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August 18, 2008

8/18/2008: it's the End of the World...

as we know it, until after the conventions, anyway.







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August 14, 2008

Facebook: Making Slavery Socially Acceptable

I'm surprised that myspace (read: Rupert Murdoch) didn't beat them to it.

August 14, 2008 (New York, NY) – ServiceNation, a diverse new coalition of more than 100 organizations dedicated to expanding voluntary community and national service opportunities, today announced that it has selected Facebook as its lead social media partner.

The partnership with Facebook will support ServiceNation’s effort to build a national, grassroots movement of Americans who volunteer, share service experiences, and build community around the idea that citizen service can help transform our democracy. ServiceNation aims to elevate the ideal of voluntary service as a core element of citizenship, and the coalition is targeting specific social problems with proven service strategies (http://www.servicenation.org).

Facebook will support ServiceNation and the upcoming ServiceNation Summit with a number of key resources, including technical expertise and advertising. Facebook will help ServiceNation build its presence on Facebook, create awareness and community through the use of Facebook’s tools, and engage Facebook users in a number of critical ServiceNation campaign initiatives.

“Facebook is already a place where people are acting on their interests and ideals, connecting with each other and sharing information that can lead to meaningful change,” said Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Policy, Facebook. “Through this partnership with ServiceNation we can be part of an historic effort to inspire Americans to act together to get more directly involved in and connected to their real-life communities.”

“Facebook has itself made history by helping millions across the world to come together by connecting and communicating in an easy to use, state-of-the-art online environment,” said Michael Brown, CEO of City Year, one of four organizations (along with Be the Change, Inc., Civic Enterprises, and Points Of Light Institute) that did the initial work to lead non-profit organizers of the ServiceNation coalition together. “Using Facebook’s highly-regarded organizing tools, we hope to channel the idealism and energy of our citizens into real-world action that can promote the ideal of voluntary service.”

The ServiceNation campaign will kick-off with a September 11th Presidential Candidates Forum on citizenship and service, featuring Sen. John McCain (Sen. Obama has also been invited) and moderated by TIME Magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel. The second day of the ServiceNation Summit will include distinguished leaders from American business, government, and leading non-profit institutions including New York Governor David Paterson, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Caroline Kennedy, Alma Powell of America’s Promise Alliance, Vartan Gregorian of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP, and Laysha Ward, President, Community Relations and Target Foundation.

The Summit is convened and underwritten by a grant from Carnegie Corporation, and presented by TIME, AARP and Target. The keynote address will be delivered by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who earlier this year became the first governor to create a cabinet post dedicated to service and volunteering.

The ultimate vision of ServiceNation is an America in which, by 2020, 100 million citizens will volunteer time in schools, workplaces, and faith-based and community institutions each and every year (up from 61 million today), and that increasing numbers of Americans annually will commit a year of their lives to national service.

To that end, the Summit will endorse a Declaration of Service that all Americans will be able to sign—in person or online—to declare their support for the idea that citizen service can strengthen our communities, unite and engage Americans in shared sacrifice, and help build a better future. And two weeks after the Summit, on Sept. 27, ServiceNation will stage a national Day of Action where tens of thousands of Americans will gather at hundreds of events across the country to celebrate the power and potential of citizen service. ServiceNation will use Facebook as a key tool to organize and drive both these initiatives.

ServiceNation’s bipartisan Summit Leadership Council includes mayors, governors, former senators and leaders from every sector of American society (full list is available at http://tinyurl.com/617vju). Major supporters of ServiceNation, in addition to AARP, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Target, and TIME, include the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, The Home Depot Foundation, Bank of America, Case Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, and James J. Jensen, the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, and Goldman Sachs.


thanks to FTL for the head up, and to blog of bile for making the connection available.

pound it up sideways, Faceplant. have fun with that lawsuit.
Facebook and its advertising partners are facing a federal class action lawsuit targeting its Beacon program launched last fall, which alleges that Facebook violated federal wiretap law when it began monitoring and publishing what Facebook users were doing on sites like Blockbuster.com and Zappos.com.

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August 7, 2008

Has Suskind been "had"?

well, according to more reliable sources than those that are flacks of the Bush Crime Family, that certainly is the appearance from the latest revelation in the corruption continuum. since when does Cheney entrust the CIA, of which he has been actively trying to dismantle and/or discredit from day one, with such a damning task of fabricating documents, when he has created a specific arm of the bureaucracy for such "Special Plans"?

Philip Giraldi notes just that, for those who refrain from following the leader...
My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.


oh, what won't they do in the name of career advancement:
KWIATKOWSKI: Yes, John’s (ph) story is interesting, just a low-level guy like me, a civil servant, GS-14 I think it was, also an Air Force reservist. He is actually the only trained intelligence person, in my view trained being military intelligence trained person, who worked in OSP, Office of Special Plans. He was on loan to Bill Luti in the year of 2001-2002. His time of going back to his own organization, which was the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was basically on a career enhancement program. They wanted him back. They offered him two jobs. One was in the basement of the Pentagon in J2, and that’s our intelligence arm down there, and the other was back at Bolling Air Force Base, which is DIA headquarters.
Neither one of those jobs would have had him working on Iraq, and Iraq was heating up. So, he asked Bill Luti if Luti would step in and find a place for him. And Luti did that and, as far as I know to this day, John Trigilio (ph) still works in Near East-South Asia policy. So, he really, during the time that OSP was really, really working hard, in the fall of 2002 and spring 2003, Trigilio (ph) was a trained intelligence person working for Bill Luti in whatever way that he could. And I had numerous conversations with John (ph) in the hallway, I think almost habitually, after one of the president’s speeches, or the vice president’s speeches, where I heard crazy things coming out of the president’s mouth about capabilities that Saddam purportedly had.
And I remember talking to John (ph) after one of these briefings the day after. I said, ”Who’s feeding?” I said, ”You guys ought to be worried.” I said, ”Who’s feeding the president this information, because you should be concerned. This is not intelligence.” And he argued with me for a while, and finally, to end the argument, or conversation, as you’d have it, he said, ”Look, Karen.” He said, ”We have sources that you don’t have access to.” And quite frankly, when he told me that in the fall of 2002, I believe him. He probably does. He has better sources, things that I’m not seeing at the secret level he’s seeing at the top-secret level. That’s fine. But see, the bad thing is, after it all comes out, who were his sources? Well, Curveball, friends of Achmed Chalabi, Achmed Chalabi himself, basically to a man previously proven unreliable, sources that the CIA and DIA had rejected, for the most part. I mean, until pressured to go back and pull these little reports that were known not to be good.


that's ok, just keep whistling that happy little tune while the smiling faces are marching you off into tyranny.

Related:
Office of Special Plans
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
The Lie Factory
Has Suskind been "had"?Share/Save/Bookmark

August 3, 2008

The Bogus Intel Game - Rated: PG

as explained by Philip Giraldi,

Some intel types are beginning to express concerns that the Israelis might do something completely crazy to get the US involved. There are a number of possible “false flag” scenarios in which the Israelis could insert a commando team in the Persian Gulf or use some of their people inside Iraq to stage an incident that they will make to look Iranian, either by employing Iranian weapons or by leaving a communications footprint that points to Tehran’s involvement.




The unstated premise for Morris's rant is the assumption that only Israel can be trusted to have nuclear weapons in the Middle East and that Israel has the right to act preemptively if any other country has the temerity to seek to obtain weapons of its own. While this is a formula that would guarantee Israeli regional supremacy it is a policy that is far from reassuring for Tel Aviv's neighbors, most of whom have been on the receiving end of Israel's conceit that it can strike whenever and wherever it wishes. Being victimized by a paranoid Israeli regime is a virtual guarantee that the country that has been assaulted will seek a "weapon of mass destruction" to deter such attacks, ironically providing less security for the Israelis rather than more.


more lies for more war. who's your messiah now...
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Tropical Lumpy Monster

aside from the 9/11 reference, great video.


posted with vodpod

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July 31, 2008

Another federal government shutdown threat

one promise you can be sure they will never keep.

The prospect of a September government shutdown loomed over the Capitol on Wednesday as the two parties fought over rising energy prices.

It’s a fight some members of either party are willing to have, but others worry about who will get blamed for a repeat of the 1995 shutdown that President Clinton pinned on a Republican Congress.


the fantasy continues at The Hill
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July 29, 2008

Chalmers Johnson on Antiwar Radio

Professor and author Chalmers Johnson will be the featured guest on the Scott Horton Show at Antiwar Radio on Tuesday, July 29th , at 1:15PM Eastern.

Chalmers Johnson will be discussing his latest article on Antiwar.com,
The Military-Industrial Complex.

Listen live at:
KAOS Radio Austin & AntiWarRadio
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July 25, 2008

Glenn Greenwald Radio

from Unclaimed Territory:

"a regularly-scheduled program that will include interviews and discussions with political figures, journalists, activists and the like. For now, all of the segments will be recorded as podcasts and then posted on Salon every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 2:00 p.m. EST. The segments will be between 30 and 45 minutes. Each new show will be posted on Salon's front page, posted here on my blog, and will also be permanently archived so that they can be heard at any time."


itunes and rss feeds @ above link.
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July 22, 2008

the coming globalized meltdown?

even though there are countless indicators, of which there are even more speculations heaped on top of even more tales of nigh espousing the perils of the empire's fraudulent dollar and it's potential to drag the entire global economic fractional reserve banking scam down with it, the federal poster boys of dutiful servitude continue to attempt to pacify the pliant public with their magic tricks.

It feels like the summer of 1931. The world's two biggest financial institutions have had a heart attack. The global currency system is breaking down. The policy doctrines that got us into this mess are bankrupt. No world leader seems able to discern the problem, let alone forge a solution.

The International Monetary Fund has abdicated into schizophrenia. It has upgraded its 2008 world forecast from 3.7pc to 4.1pc growth, whilst warning of a "chance of a global recession". Plainly, the IMF cannot or will not offer any useful insights.

Its "mean-reversion" model misses the entire point of this crisis, which is that central banks have pushed debt to fatal levels by holding interest too low for a generation, and now the chickens have come home to roost. True "mean-reversion" would imply debt deflation on such a scale that would, if abrupt, threaten democracy.

The risk is that these same central banks will commit a fresh error, this time overreacting to the oil spike. The European Central Bank has raised rates, warning of a 1970s wage-price spiral. Fixated on the rear-view mirror, it is not looking through the windscreen.


what to do... what to do? tried the game show giveaway twice and the results speak for themselves. maybe someone will call in the fixers?

If there's something weird in the financial world, who you gonna call? Goldman Sachs.

The US government, involved in a firefight against the conflagration in the credit markets, is calling in another crisis-buster from the illustrious investment bank, this time Goldman's most senior banker to finance industry clients, Ken Wilson.

And so with this appointment, the Goldman Sachs diaspora grows a little bit more influential. It is an old-boy network that has created a revolving door between the firm and public office, greased by the mountains of money the company is generating even today, as its peers buckle and fall.

Almost whatever the country, you can find Goldman Sachs veterans in positions of pivotal power.


wouldn't hold my breath on that one, as there are far too many that, continually ignoring the most crippling effectuate in the form of two illegal nation-building occupations and the accompanying sabre rattling for more of the same, have no realistic idea of who threatens them the most.

Nukes or no nukes, Iran threatens me less than the Fed, Congress, the US media or the president.

When the history of the late, great nation known as America is written, our own homegrown jackals will be rightly blamed for the destruction. Forgotten will be the nineteen G-string jihadists with their Korans and boxcutters. If the history books are honest and the historians adroit, the blame will lie less with the Taliban and more with the Ivy League educated in their tailored suits and power ties.



the coming globalized meltdown?Share/Save/Bookmark