Mali: Special comment. Western news reporters have discovered in Timbuktu confidential guidance documents that the fleeing jihadists failed to destroy.
On the 13th The Telegraph reported that one of its reporters had discovered some confidential documents in the building used by the jihadists in Timbuktu as their command post. One was an account of a meeting in March 2012, but only the first page survived.
According to The Telegraph, the one page document confirmed that al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb had decided to take command and control of all operations in the Sahara. The Telegraph reporter observed that al Qaida seemed to be very bureaucratic.
In the US, natural disasters have caused the US government to declare national emergencies. Now, an old bill has resurfaced in Congress that allows the government to implement at least six military installations to house US citizens when a national emergency is declared. The National Emergency Centers Act or HR 645 gives the Federal Emergency Management Agency power over the camps and before the bill was shot down due to the broad language and the fears of unchecked government power, but can this bill ever pass? Bob English, civil liberties activist and blogger, sounds off on the issue.
Phi Beta Iota: Buried in the six minutes is the key point — regardless of intentions, this furthers the idea that centralized solutions funded by money that is borrowed or printed, are the solution. It is a good initiative in theory, but in practice it is distant from localized resilience. Think Katrina or Sandy to understand how inept FEMA is with what it already has. The bill leaves open the use of the military as internment overseers — with the National Guard now known to be recruiting internment staff for each of the ten FEMA districts.
“Brennan waged his own unilateral operations in North Africa outside of the traditional command structure,” the book says, calling it an “off the books” operation not coordinated with Petraeus and the CIA. The authors then claim that these raids were a “contributing factor” in the militant strike on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex on Sept. 11. The raids, they said, “kicked the hornets' nest and pissed off the militia.” Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack, “was kept in the dark and ultimately killed in a retaliation that he never could have seen coming,” they wrote. “Likewise, the CIA never knew what hit them.”
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“The reality of the situation is that high-ranking CIA officers had already discovered the affair by consulting with Petraeus' PSD and then found a way to initiate an FBI investigation in order to create a string of evidence and an investigative trail that led to the information they already had — in other words, an official investigation that could be used to force Petraeus to resign.”
The civil war in Syria is destabilising Iraq as it changes the balance of power between the country’s communities. The Sunni minority in Iraq, which two years ago appeared defeated, has long been embittered and angry at discrimination against it by a hostile state. Today, it is emboldened by the uprising of the Syrian Sunni, as well as a growing sense that the political tide in the Middle East is turning against the Shia and in favour of the Sunni.
Could a variant of the Syrian revolt spread to the western Anbar Province and Sunni areas of Iraq north of Baghdad? The answer, crucial to the future of Iraq, depends on how the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, responds to the seven-week-long protests in Anbar and the Sunni heartlands. His problem is similar to that which, two years ago faced rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. They had to choose between ceding some power and relying on repression.
Most Arab rulers chose wrongly, treating protests as if they were a plot or not so broadly based that they could not be crushed by traditional methods of repression. The situation in Iraq is not quite the same, since Maliki owes his position to victory in real elections, though this success was not total and depended overwhelmingly on Shia votes. He has nevertheless ruled as if he had the mandate to monopolise power.
Few things cause more frustration than being rejected by a prospective employer because of a “Loss of Jurisdiction” and an “Incident Report.”
When you’re terminated from a job where you held a Department of Defense (DoD) security clearance, your former employer “separates” you in the Joint Personnel Adjudication System (JPAS—the DoD security clearance database). If you were terminated from your job for cause, the employer often concurrently submits an Incident Report via JPAS describing the reason for termination. This occurs when the termination is related to one of the thirteen Adjudicative Guidelines for Determining Eligibility for Access to Classified Information.
Normally when an employer submits an Incident Report to the DoD Central Adjudication Facility (CAF) responsible for your clearance, the CAF reviews the report to decide what action is necessary. If the report doesn’t contain any disqualifying information, the CAF closes the Incident Report simply by updating the JPAS record. Alternatively the CAF can request additional information, including a new Questionnaire for National Security Positions (Standard Form 86—SF86), and/or a limited investigation. Once sufficient information is received, the CAF can decide whether to favorably adjudicate the Incident Report and “continue” your clearance or begin the process of clearance revocation.
When the Incident Report occurs at the same time you’re “separated” in JPAS, the CAF cannot review the Incident Report or take any other action, and a Loss of Jurisdiction is entered into your JPAS record. The Loss of Jurisdiction and the unresolved Incident Report remain in your JPAS record, and your name is flagged in red letters. Getting the red out can be a problem.
Tunisia: Media sources reported an agreement is imminent on a new national unity government for Tunisia to settle the political crisis following the murder of a prominent opposition politician last week. Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda Movement, said that a new government is expected to be announced in two or three days.
Comment: Democracy should have come more easily to Tunisia than to almost all other Arab states because of its tradition of secular, cosmopolitan tolerance. The Islamists, even so-called moderates, have overreached here as in Egypt. Tunisian cities do not seem as unstable as Egyptian cities, but Islamist governments in both states have shown no ability to improve economic conditions.
The article reads as if JSOG and CIA were having a fight and JSOG wanted Petraeus gone. That is not consistent with other reports that suggest that JSOG is not happy with CIA at the operational and analytic levels, and it also does not fully address the much higher probability that Broadwell, who is Jewish, was a straight-up honey trap from the Zionists/Mossad. Has anyone tracked the money that put Broadwell on scholarship into JFK for her “chance encounter” with Petraeus that she artfully managed to turn into both a bankable affair and direct access to Arab private meetings with Petraeus?
New documents reveal that there's far more to the Petraeus sex scandal than meets the eye.
Douglas Lucas and Russ Baker
WhoWhatWhy, 5 February 2013
Paul Broadwell Before Going Under Cover
EXTRACT:
Among other revelations the documents show that:
-Petraeus was suspected of having an extramarital affair nearly two years earlier than previously known.
-Petraeus’s affair was known to foreign interests with a stake in a raging policy and turf battle in which Petraeus was an active party.
-Those providing the “official” narrative of the affair—and an analysis of why it led to the unprecedented removal of America’s top spymaster— have been less than candid with the American people.
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General David Petraeus’s headlong fall from grace cannot be dismissed as the denouement of yet another peccadillo in an unforgiving moral climate. The plot is thicker than that—perhaps as thick as the often-unnamed heart of the story: oil.
