PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan—The Taliban's influence in northern Afghanistan has expanded in recent months from a few hotspots to much of the region, as insurgents respond to the U.S.-led coalition's surge in the south by seizing new ground in areas once considered secure.
Taliban militants stop traffic nightly at checkpoints on the road from Kabul to Uzbekistan, just outside Baghlan province's capital city of Pul-e-Khumri, frequently blowing up fuel convoys and seizing travelers who work with the government or the international community.
Deja Vu Back Centuries
In many areas here and the rest of the north, the Taliban have effectively supplanted the official authorities, running local administrations and courts, and conscripting recruits.
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The Taliban have consolidated their war gains by tapping into broad disillusionment with the incompetence and venality of Afghan government officials.
“People don't love the Taliban—but if they compare them to the government, they see the Taliban as the lesser evil,” said Baghlan Gov. Munshi Abdul Majid, an appointee of President Hamid Karzai.
Phi Beta Iota: Based on what we now know about Viet-Nam, we predict that the military-industrial complex will declare victory in November 2012, and inform the new President that the US military has been entirely “used up” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and therefore we need to increase the Pentagon budget to rebuy the military from scratch.
UPDATE of 19 Oct to resurface the CORE COMMON ISSUE and add THIRD PARTY book reviews (immediately below the line). The legislative proposal still needs work, e.g. ballot access not well covered, but this is the starting point. It was created by Jim Turner and Robert Steele based in large part on points made by Ralph Nader is his book Crashing the Party–Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender. We cannot understand why Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney, and Jackie Salit–and Mike Bloomberg–don't get serious about this ONE THING they can all agree on….
Click on either of the images to see a collection of documents on Democracy in America as it could be, should be, must be. The Republic has been destroyed by a combination of domestic enemies and a public slow to realize that it was being disenfranchized.
Click on the page below to read the single page summary of eight simple reforms, most conceived by Ralph Nader, as refined by Jim Turner (Nader #2 for many years) and Robert Steele.
Electoral Reform Act of 2009
Only recently have major financial figures such as John Bogle and Peter Peterson come forward with works that call into question the integrity, santiy, and viability of the Republic as it is now being looted by Wall Street and the two-party tyranny. Below are several titles worthy of study, with links to the summary reviews of those titles by Robert Steele. Below them are twice as many titles capturing the spirit of the Republic that has been in re-gestation for decades. The mood of Middle America is clear: we want our Republic back, and we want both government and commerce to be open, honest, and in the public service. We are going to get what we want by 2012, peacefully, on the strength of our numbers and our common collective intelligence.
Use the Reviews menu to rapidly survey over 1,400 non-fiction books all focused on the future of the Republic and the Earth in the context of restoring the faith of humanity in itself. Each review leads back to both the Amazon page, and to the original review on Amazon should you wish to vote on the review.
On Sunday, 60 Minutes reported on a visit to San Diego, where a yearly “Stand Down” event for homeless veterans is designed to change lives in just three days.
A skeptical Scott Pelley found that while the event's clean, safe and empathetic environment can't fix the problems homeless veterans face, the event serves as a “ceasefire” to show vets that they aren't alone.
Phi Beta Iota: There are two threads here, the first being that attention is healing and nurturing, whether it is new-borne babies or hardened vets. The second is that this is a complete break from treating homeless vets or homeless anyone as “the other” that is not “noticed” as if they did not exist. San Diego has done a good thing with this annual event, it ought to take place all across America.
It is to be expected that national intelligence services will sometimes fail to identify and discover a threat to the nation in a timely fashion. But when intelligence warns of a threat that isn’t really there, and then nations go to war to meet the phantom threat — that is a serious, confounding and deeply disturbing problem.
But in a nutshell, that is the story of the war in Iraq, in which the U.S. and its allies attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq because of the supposedly imminent threat posed by Saddam’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction — a threat that proved illusory.
A new book published in the United Kingdom called “Failing Intelligence” provides a remarkable account of the British experience of how intelligence on the Iraqi WMD program was shaped and packaged to support the decision to go to war in Iraq. The book’s author, Brian Jones, was the chief specialist in weapons of mass destruction on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff. He was also a skeptic of the stronger claims made about the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. The book documents his mostly unsuccessful attempts to register that skepticism, to moderate the extreme claims made by government officials, and later to hold those officials accountable for their actions.
He provides a detailed first-hand account of how his efforts were consistently deflected in the rush to war, and how intelligence declined into propaganda. It’s a grim but instructive case study in the overlapping failure of intelligence gathering, intelligence production, and intelligence oversight.
The National Security Archive has recently published three richlyinformativecollections of declassified U.S. and British government documents on the lead-up to the Iraq war (including several key documents cited or relied upon by Brian Jones).
“The more deeply the processes of creating the government reports on the alleged Iraqi threat are reconstructed — on both sides of the Atlantic — the more their products are revealed as explicitly aimed at building a basis for war,” wrote John Prados of the National Security Archive and journalist Christopher Ames in an analysis of the documents.
“In the light of a decision process in which no serious consideration was given to any course other than war, the question of whether American and British leaders set out to wage aggressive war has to be squarely faced,” they wrote.
The rapidly emerging/evolving new field medical doctrine is usually termed Tactical Combat Casualty Care. Not sure how fast it will migrate to civilian sector due to litigation risks.
EXTRACT GOOD: Gone from their repertoire are difficult or time-consuming maneuvers, such as routinely hanging bags of intravenous fluids. On the ground, medics no longer carry stethoscopes or blood pressure cuffs. They are trained instead to evaluate a patient's status by observation and pulse, to tolerate abnormal vital signs such as low blood pressure, to let the patient position himself if he's having trouble breathing – and above all to have a heightened awareness that too much medicine can endanger the mission and still not save the patient.
EXTRACT BAD: But something has happened in the usually smooth communication between dispatch center, aircraft and hospital. No ambulance pulls up to the helicopter. Reece and Helfrich wait. They wait. The pilots radio the dispatcher that they've arrived with a critically injured soldier. Reece and Helfrich, helmeted and inaudible, gesture wildly to people outside the emergency room door to come over. Two other patients have also recently arrived. But that's not the problem. There's an available ambulance 100 yards away. But it doesn't move.
Phi Beta Iota: What has been done in TACTICAL combat medicine in the ten years of constant war has been nothing short of sensational and inspiring. NOTE that it is not just technology, but HUMAN enhancement. This has NOT characterized the rest of the US military nor the rest of the US Government which has the added disadvantage of not having the funding nor the education-intelligence-research mindset needed to enter the 21st Century.
The purveyor of the “suicide vest” story should be named and questioned about what he hoped or expected to achieve by his lie.
Linda Norgrove (RIP)
Phi Beta Iota: It is with such sadness that we contemplate the demise of the US Government and US Armed Forces as effective vehicles for prosperity at home and peace abroad. A careful reading of all of the stories make it clear that “the system” failed at every level from the utterly stupid operational helicopter raids hampering elder negotiations down to the man that threw the grenade that killed the hostage. The death of Linda Norgrove and the lie that was immediately concocted are a fitting epitaph to Empire. We pray that 2012 brings us a restored US Congress and an honest President who can pick honest Cabinet officials who can actually act in the public interest. This is not about individual honor or intent–INTEGRITY is much more complex than that. This is about restoring the Constitutional integrity of the United STATES of America, and ending the inherent corruption at every level of the US Government (and Wall Street) in which humans don't matter and profits take precedence over potency.
Phi Beta Iota: The FBI has two walk-ins on 9/11 in advance of the event, one in Newark, NJ and the other in Orlando, FL. In both instances, because the FBI did not recognize any of the names being reported, it blew off the walk-in. Something similar appears to have happened here, BUT there is also yet another instance of a US person being in the employ of the US Government (similar to the botched car bomb attack on the World Trade Center) and their activities being a) sanctioned by one US agency and b) not being reported to other US agencies or to allies. The US secret world is HOSED strategically, operationally, tactically, and technically….. it is cultural “unfit for duty.” We continue to believe that an Open Source Agency and a Multinational Decision-Support Centre with reach-back to at least 90 countries is the way to kick-off 21st Century Intelligence. See the Virtual Cabinet series at the Huffington Post for the larger context within which we believe US intelligence must be reinvented.
