The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
‘Countering Terrorism in a Changed World’ offers two streams of keynote and case study sessions from an impressive array of national and international expert speakers who will share their unique focus on the most significant global security issues.
The conference will also include a stream dedicated to ‘Protecting Crowded Places’ produced in association with the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NaCTSO).
The Battle for Tora Bora
How Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp: The definitive account.
PeterBergen
I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Continue reading “Journal: Tora Bora Revisited by Peter Bergen”
BOSTON REVIEW
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010
The Obama administration’s troop surge fails to address the real threat in Afghanistan: the insurgents’ efforts to develop a regional strategy in South Asia. Washington’s focus—members of al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the traditional Afghan Taliban—misses the mark. Nir Rosen does, too, when he asks whether “a few hundred angry, unsophisticated Muslim extremists really pose such grave dangers to a vigilant superpower, now alert to potential threats.”
The November 2008 Mumbai attacks and the recent FBI arrests in Chicago for conspiracy to launch attacks in New Delhi suggest that containing the threat from Afghanistan is extremely complicated, and solutions must go beyond troop surges in Afghanistan, training Afghan police and soldiers, or even political dialogue with Taliban commanders inside the country. Intelligence agencies are now realizing that both the Mumbai events and the Delhi plans—plotted directly by al Qaeda affiliated groups, which I call the Neo-Taliban—were directly linked to Afghanistan, but also incorporated wider aims. The goal was to expand the theater of war to India so that Washington would lose track of its objectives and get caught in a quagmire.
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Best viewed at the Wikipedia Page for higher resolution.
NEWSWIRE: United Nations (New York). The Secretary General of the United Nations today called for the death of all pets, but especially dogs and cats. He also called for a 20% reduction in all livestock grown for consumption for each year until all humans adopted a vegetarian diet, citing Francis Lappe Moore's book Diet for a Small Planet as the single most authoritative reference in any language written in all time.
Below is the principal scientific finding, every bit as robust and indisputable as the science of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Secretary General is reported to have said “Now that ClimateGate is old news, it is time for PetGate.”
Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend
PARIS (AFP) – Man's best friend could be one of the environment's worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.
But the revelation in the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale has angered pet owners who feel they are being singled out as troublemakers.
The Vales, specialists in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington, analysed popular brands of pet food and calculated that a medium-sized dog eats around 164 kilos (360 pounds) of meat and 95 kilos of cereal a year.
Combine the land required to generate its food and a “medium” sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) — around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4×4 driving 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.
. . . . . .
And pets' environmental impact is not limited to their carbon footprint, as cats and dogs devastate wildlife, spread disease and pollute waterways, the Vales say.
With a total 7.7 million cats in Britain, more than 188 million wild animals are hunted, killed and eaten by feline predators per year, or an average 25 birds, mammals and frogs per cat, according to figures in the New Scientist.
Likewise, dogs decrease biodiversity in areas they are walked, while their faeces cause high bacterial levels in rivers and streams, making the water unsafe to drink, starving waterways of oxygen and killing aquatic life.
And cat poo can be even more toxic than doggy doo — owners who flush their litter down the toilet ultimately infect sea otters and other animals with toxoplasma gondii, which causes a killer brain disease.
Continue reading “Journal: United Nations–Death to Pets, Cows & Sheep”
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