Month: July 2010

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Journal: Obama Strike Four…

08 Wild Cards

Chuck Spinney Recommends

Mr. Obama's presidency is now being defined by four intractable problems: (1) Persistent High Unemployment due to the intractable Great Recession; (2) a Financial Giveaway that protected rich Wall Street bankers at the expense of the masses who are suffering economically from the Great Recession the bankers triggered; (2) A BP Environmental Disaster that reveals the feckless incompetence of the Federal Gov't — i.e., Obama's Katrina Moment; and (4) his enthusiastic embrace and expansion of the Afghan War into the AFPAK Quagmire.


Ahmed Rashid, one of the most knowledgeable observers of the AFPAK scene (and, ironically, a proponent of the AFPAK intervention) paints a thoroughly depressing picture the nature of the AFPAK quagmire in the attached blog carried by the New York Review of Books.

Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books (Blogs), July 14, 2010 11:15 a.m.

The surprising and speedy crash of General Stanley McCrystal has been seen in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the wider region as just one more sign of the mess that the US and its NATO allies face in what is looking increasingly like an unwinnable conflict.

The Afghan Taliban are describing the general’s sacking as a military victory—coming as it does at the height of their summer offensive; the most hurtful rumor going around Kabul and Islamabad is that McChrystal wanted to be removed because he didn’t want to have to take responsibility for a losing war. The Taliban claimed another victory when Britain announced a week later that its troops would withdraw from Sangin, a remote and ever more deadly region of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan—although they will be replaced by US marines.

FULL ARTICLE ONLINE

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Journal: Killing Kids with Invisible War

05 Iran
Chuck Spinney Recommends

… read this chillingly important essay by my good friend Andrew Cockburn.

Andrew's subject is the effect of sanctions on Iraq since 1991.  Sanctions are merely a modern form of the oldest and most primitive form of war: blockade or seige.  It reflects a strategic mentality that usually occurs when the attacker has vastly superior military forces but is out of ideas on how to use his superior power to impose his will.  Blockade may be the surest form of war — if it can be sustained, the result is inevitable; but it is also the most expensive and messiest, because it usually ends in indiscriminate killing or viscous collective punishment.  Moreover, it is often (not always) accompanied by a blowback of unintended moral effects that weaken the “victorious” besieger and strengthen the besieged (or their memory), thereby sowing the seeds of revenge that guarantee continued conflict.

Chuck Spinney

Worth It

Andrew Cockburn

London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 14 · 22 July 2010, pages 9-10

Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon
Harvard, 359 pp, £29.95, April 2010, ISBN 978 0 674 03571 3

Few people now remember that for many months after the First World War ended in November 1918 the blockade of Germany, where the population was already on the edge of starvation, was maintained with full rigour. By the following spring, the German authorities were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate. In a later memoir, John Maynard Keynes attributed the prolongation of civilian punishment

to a cause inherent in bureaucracy. The blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall’s finest achievement; it had evoked the qualities of the English at their subtlest. Its authors had grown to love it for its own sake; it included some recent improvements, which would be wasted if it came to an end; it was very complicated, and a vast organisation had established a vested interest. The experts reported, therefore, that it was our one instrument for imposing our peace terms on Germany, and that once suspended it could hardly be reimposed.

FULL ARTICLE ONLINE

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New Declassified Records Showing the Path Down the Vietnam Road of Doubt and Deception

04 Inter-State Conflict, Government, Media, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Open Government, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Records Show Doubts on ’64 Vietnam Crisis
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: July 14, 2010

WASHINGTON — In an echo of the debates over the discredited intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that show senators of the time sharply questioning whether they had been deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Full article here

(clips from the article)
“If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world, the consequences are very great,” Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, the father of the future vice president, said in March 1968 in a closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee.

“In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them,” Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, said in an executive session in February 1968.

Robert J. Hanyok, a National Security Agency historian, said Wednesday in an interview that “there were doubts, but nobody wanted to follow up on the doubts,” perhaps because “they felt they’d gone too far down the road.”

Mr. Hanyok concluded in 2001 that N.S.A. officers had deliberately falsified intercepted communications in the incident to make it look like the attack on Aug. 4, 1964, had occurred, although he said they acted not out of political motives but to cover up earlier errors.

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Oil-Separating Centrifuges as Partial Relief for Gulf Oil Spill

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, Commerce, Corporations, Government
Article link

Can Kevin Costner's Machines Really Help the Gulf Cleanup?

The oil-separating centrifuges will work, but they would have worked better months ago

By Dave Levitan  /  July 2010

14 July 2010—After 85 days, the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is now partially contained, and relief wells to stem the flow are inching closer to completion. Once the leak is fixed, the focus will shift to removing the oil that’s already in the water. The actor Kevin Costner has appeared on TV and in front of the U.S. Congress to tout his oil cleanup machines, but can they actually make a dent in the still-spreading environmental disaster?

Costner’s testimony on 9 June may have provided comedic fodder for late-night talk-show hosts, but according to David Meikrantz, a chemical engineer at Idaho National Laboratory who developed the technology in the early 1990s, the machines are no joke. He says there is no reason that the devices, essentially liquid-liquid separation centrifuges, shouldn’t work in the Gulf. They performed so well in BP’s initial tests that as many as 32 of them could be spinning in the Gulf in the coming weeks. But even though the technology is proven, Costner’s devices are no silver bullet.

Full article here

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International Center for Biosaline Agriculture & the Global Biosaline Network

01 Agriculture, 12 Water, Technologies
Website link

(Mission & Mandate)
ICBA’s mission is to demonstrate the value of saline water resources for the production of environmentally and economically useful plants, and to transfer its research results to national research services and communities in the Islamic world and elsewhere.

ICBA will help water-scarce countries improve the productivity, social equity and environmental sustainability of water use through an integrated water resource systems approach, with special emphasis on saline and marginal quality water.

ICBA is an applied research and development center located in Dubai, UAE. Its mission is to develop and promote the use of sustainable agricultural systems that use saline water to grow crops. The center, originally known as the Biosaline Agriculture Center, initially focused on forage production systems and ornamental plants in countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council and other parts of the Islamic world. The technologies we develop are, however, of global value and importance. Wherever farmers face problems of saline soils or irrigation with salty water, ICBA is here to help.

Related:
+ ICBA resource links
+ Global Biosaline Network
+ Oase Foundation (Biosaline products)

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Pakistani Intelligence Service Planned Mumbai “End to End”–NSA and CIA Either Missed It, Or Blessed It…Either is Grounds for Shut-Down

03 India, 08 Wild Cards

India-Pakistan: Today, on the eve of the first talks between foreign ministers since 2008, the Indian Home Affairs Ministry announced that India has obtained evidence that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate played a more significant role in the planning and execution of the November 2008 Mumbai attack than had previously been thought, according to Indian Home Secretary G. K. Pillai, Indian Express reported 14 July.

Pillai said information gathered from interrogations of David Headley, a U.S. citizen accused of helping plan the attack, indicated the ISI had planned the attack with Lashkar-e-Taiba militant Hafiz Saeed “from beginning to end.” He added that the ISI was not a peripheral player, but was controlling and coordinating the attack, and that Saeed also knew everything about the attack.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The Indians have sprung a trap on the Pakistanis. It will be noteworthy if the talks are held at all. Every Indian acceptance of talks with Pakistan since November 2008 has been predicated on a discussion of terrorism first, specifically anti-Indian terrorism from Pakistan. Pakistan has argued for broader talks. Today, India narrowed the focus once again, while seeming to accept the Pakistani terms for more general discussions.

The Indian trap appears to be New Delhi's response to last week's Pakistani ministry of foreign affairs statement denouncing Indian “occupation” of Kashmir. The talks will go nowhere unless Pakistan agrees to deal effectively with ISI support to Pakistan-based terrorists, which is now almost beyond dispute. For India, Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism.

NIGHTWATCH Home

Phi Beta Iota:  The incapacity of both NSA and CIA merit emphasis.  For decades the Pakistanis have assured the USG and CIA participarly that the “radical” wing of the ISI was a “loose cannon” when it was in fact the centerpiece of Pakistani policy toward both India and the US.  They did this to keep the billion a year going, from which they skimmed half to two thirds.  CIA and NSA either did not get this, or blessed it, just as they either did not get or blessed the deliberate terrorist attack in Mumbai planned, funded, and executed by the Pakistani government.

noble gold