Guardian UK has a review of Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Wrecking Ball,” described as “as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny.” Springsteen is quoted about the causes for his anger: What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account. There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.” Looking forward to Springsteen’s keynote at the SXSW music conference.
Phi Beta Iota: Washington appears to be oblivious. Speaking to Congressional staff, one is astonished at the depth of their ignorance about reality outside the Capitol.
When Spies And Gadgets Come Up Short In The War On Terror
By Dina Temple-Raston
INTEL WARS The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror. By Matthew M. Aid, Bloomsbury, 261 pp., $28
When American aid worker Jessica Buchanan and her Dutch counterpart were freed from a makeshift Somali pirate camp last month, the helicopter flight to the safety of a U.S. military base in East Africa was a brief one. The Black Hawk lifted off under cover of darkness and flew straight to the East African nation of Djibouti, landing at a small American base called Camp Lemonnier.
Matthew M. Aid’s new book, “Intel Wars,” reveals that the base is more than just a dusty, desert lily pad from which to launch covert missions. It is also home to the kind of U.S. intelligence assets that have transformed the way the United States is battling terrorism around the world. Camp Lemonnier, just a small compound next to the Djibouti airport, has a U.S. Air Force/CIA Predator drone detachment and a listening station that, one intelligence official told me, “allows us to blanket Somalia with surveillance.”
According to “Intel Wars,” Somalia is only the beginning.
Camp Lemonnier allows the United States to track “the movement of illegal narcotics between Yemen and Somalia,” the Lord’s Resistance Army in southern Sudan and small guerrilla groups in Ethiopia. Aid says that for the past two years, U.S. intelligence has used Lemonnier to detect “the presence of foreign Muslim fighters claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda fighting alongside Janjaweed militia groups against local separatists” in Darfur, Sudan. The breadth of intelligence Lemonnier provides goes a long way toward explaining how U.S. Special Forces were able to find two lone aid workers and rescue them from that pirate camp in Somalia.
Every chapter in the book is braided with intelligence nuggets. Aid weaves together original reporting, volumes of unclassified documents and his expertise. The book's chapters on Afghanistan and Pakistan are particularly engrossing, although they don't put the intelligence community in a particularly good light.
Aid writes that after 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the United States still doesn’t understand the enemy. “We did not know how many Taliban we were fighting, where they came from or why they were against us,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told Aid in 2010. “Intel did not even have a good bio for Mullah Omar,” the Taliban leader, and “we did not even know who was on our side and who was on theirs.”
In my Foreign Policy column, I discuss whether Admiral William McRaven's request for greater operational freedom for Special Operations Command will extend to an unconventional warfare campaign in Syria.
This week, the New York Times reported on a draft proposal circulating inside the Pentagon that would permanently boost the global presence and operational autonomy of U.S. special operations forces. According to the article, Adm. William McRaven, the Navy SEAL who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and who is now the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), is requesting additional authority and independence outside of the normal, interagency decision-making process.
After the successful direct action strike against bin Laden and SOCOM's important role in training allied security forces in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere, it is easy to understand how McRaven's command has become, as the New York Times put it, the Obama administration's “military tool of choice.” A larger forward presence around the world and more autonomy would provide McRaven's special operations soldiers with some of the same agility enjoyed by the irregular adversaries SOCOM is charged with hunting down.
President Eisenhower had three secret meetings with aliens, former Pentagon consultant claims
Ex-President met with extra-terrestrials on three separate occasions at New Mexico air base
Eisenhower and FBI officials organised the meetings by sending out ‘telepathic messages'
EXTRACT:
The 34th President of the United States met the extra terrestrials at a remote air base in New Mexico in 1954, according to lecturer and author Timothy Good.
. . . . . . .
The initial meeting is supposed to have taken place with aliens who were ‘Nordic' in appearance, but the agreement was eventually ‘signed' with a race called ‘Alien Greys'.
Thanks to the efforts of Jaime Rodriquez Ecuador now has an official investigative commission into the UFO phenomenon with full cooperation of the military. The Ecuadorian military has declassified more than 400 videos and statements by military officials. By presidential decree there will be no negative effects on the careers of military officials making public statements on the phenomenon. The declassified material is now in the public domain and subject of public and scientific debate. As a result scepticism has diminished and the public has become more cooperative in handing over videos and photos.
COMMENT: Only a couple of things wrong with the scenario described below: (1) Vickers works for a POTUS, Administration and Congress committed to emasculating the National security operation IOT underwrite the incompetent/unindustrious/etc.; and (2) not always possible to be optimally surgical.
Even as our troops march hither and yon, we've lost the thread in an ‘era of persistent conflict.'
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Well into the second decade of what the Pentagon calls an “era of persistent conflict,” many Americans have lost the thread of a war that appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse.
On the one hand, the U.S. military has withdrawn from Iraq without achieving victory, and it's trying to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome. On the other hand — in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere — U.S. forces have been busily opening new fronts. A widely noted New York Times story recently described plans for “thickening” the global presence of U.S. special operations troops. Navy plans to convert an aging amphibious landing ship into an “afloat forward staging base” — a mobile launch platform for commando raids — reinforce the point, as does the “constellation of secret drone bases” reportedly being built in the Horn of Africa and on the Arabian Peninsula.
Yet even as the troops continue marching hither and yon, the conflict's narrative has become increasingly difficult to discern.
Today's war on terror looks nothing like it did in Round 1. Back then, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, the war's primary architect and cheerleader, counted on speed and technology to carry the day, operating on the assumption that America's agile, high-tech fighting force would make victory a foregone conclusion. Yet in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Round 1 ended in disappointment.
Today's war likewise bears scant resemblance to Round 2, when Army Gen. David H. Petraeus promoted counterinsurgency as a way to bring order out of the anarchy that was Rumsfeld's legacy. The hope was that successive “surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan would restore some semblance of order, allowing the United States to claim victory of a sort. Yet now Petraeus, as the Round 2 leader, is gone, and so too is any lingering enthusiasm for his favorite tactic.
Round 3 inaugurates yet another approach and brings with it another emblematic figure.
This time it's Michael Vickers. Unlike Rumsfeld or Petraeus, Vickers — who carries the title undersecretary of Defense for intelligence — has not achieved celebrity status. Nor is he likely to do so. Yet more than anyone else in or out of uniform, Vickers embodies the war on terror's latest phase.
With former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates gone, Vickers is the senior remaining holdover from George W. Bush's Pentagon. His background is nothing if not eclectic. He previously served in the Army Special Forces and as a CIA operative. In the 1980s he played a leading role in supporting the Afghan mujahedin in their war against Soviet occupiers. Subsequently, he worked in a Washington think tank and earned a doctorate in strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Even during the Bush era, Vickers never subscribed to expectations that the United States could liberate or pacify the Islamic world. His preferred approach to combating terrorism is simplicity itself. “I just want to kill those guys,” he likes to say, “those guys” referring to members of Al Qaeda. Kill the people who want to kill Americans and don't stop until they are all dead: This defines the Vickers strategy, which has now become U.S. strategy.
Get past the communist source. Focus on the substance. Focus on the fact that no one in the West is paying attention, no western media is reporting on this. Then focus on the fact that India is the largest most complex diverse country on the planet.
People's Democracy: Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Vol XXXVI No 8 19 Feb 2012
Hemalata
THE working class of the country is gearing up for the all India general strike on February 28, the 14th general strike in the last two decades. The call for the general strike, on the basis of a ten point charter of demands, was given jointly by all the eleven central trade unions in the country.
It is for the first time in the history of our trade union movement that both the INTUC and the BMS have joined the other central trade unions to call for a countrywide general strike. In addition, many independent all India federations of workers and employees in different sectors like state and central government departments, defence, public sector undertakings, insurance, banks, telecom, road transport, port and dock and of medical representatives, etc have endorsed the strike call. Several federations held joint sectoral conventions that called upon their members to participate in the strike.
What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world’s most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.
Brockman asked about 130 scientists and several artists the following question: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? Their two- to three-page prognostications bid farewell to the present while disagreeing on the mode of change. Several respondents espy catastrophes such as nuclear war or global warming, but the majority tell readers to expect a fundamental alteration in the human species.
