Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters on Thursday that “temporary adjustments” to low-level joint U.S.-Afghan patrols, enacted in the wake of widespread protests over an anti-Islam video, had mostly come to an end. “I can now report to you that most [U.S. and allied] units have now returned to their normal partnered operations at all level,” Panetta said.
The shift was intended, as Panetta said, to “protect our forces” — not just from anger at the video, but from a broader problem. Afghan forces have killed at least 52 of their American mentors this year. The NATO military command in Afghanistan isn’t totally sure why, and blames a mix of specific Afghan grievances and Taliban infiltration. So last week, the command decreed that the two-star generals at regional headquarters have to approve all joint U.S.-Afghan operations below the battalion level — which accounts for most of them.
Sure, Iran could divert a few tons of 3.5% or a ton of 20% enriched uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment to 90+%. But what then?
No one has ever made a nuclear weapon from gas. It must be converted to metal and fabricated into components which are then assembled with high explosives.
Iran lacks experience with and facilities for these processes which are very dangerous because of potential for a criticality accident or nuclear explosion. Iran would not jeopardize its important, fully safeguarded nuclear programs by an attempt to have a deliverable, one kiloton yield nuclear weapon ten to fifteen years later.
This report is the result of nine months of research by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School (Stanford Clinic) and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (NYU Clinic). Professor James Cavallaro and Clinical Lecturer Stephan Sonnenberg led the Stanford Clinic team; Professor Sarah Knuckey led the NYU Clinic team. Adelina Acuña, Mohammad M. Ali, Anjali Deshmukh, Jennifer Gibson, Jennifer Ingram, Dimitri Phillips, Wendy Salkin, and Omar Shakir were the student research team at Stanford; Christopher Holland was the student researcher from NYU. Supervisors Cavallaro, Sonnenberg, and Knuckey, as well as student researchers Acuña, Ali, Deshmukh, Gibson, Salkin, and Shakir participated in the fact-finding investigations to Pakistan.
EXTRACT (One Sentence from Each Summary Paragraph):
First, while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians
Second, US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.
Third, publicly available evidence that the strikes have made the US safer overall is ambiguous at best.
Fourth, current US targeted killings and drone strike practices undermine respect for the rule of law and international legal protections and may set dangerous precedents.
Central banks could be helping communities instead of enriching predatory, parasitic “too big to fail” banks and financial feudalism.
In a system that depends on lies and the credulity of the citizenry, the greatest lie is that the Federal Reserve's “quantitative easing” bailouts of the banks somehow help our citizens and communities.
To clarify this, ask yourself this question: what else could we have bought with the $29 trillion the Fed loaned or backstopped to the banks?
If you enjoy quibbling about the total sum of Fed support, be my guest; the Levy Institute came up with $29 trillion after poring over all the data, while the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) tally topped $16 trillion. That's 100% of the nation's GDP and roughly 100% of the $16 trillion national debt.
Click on Image to Enlarge
While we're asking about opportunity costs, let's ask what else we could have bought with the $10 trillion that the Federal government has borrowed and blown in the past 11.7 years. The national debt was $5.727 trillion when G.W. Bush was sworn into office on January 20, 2001. It had risen to $10.626 trillion when President Obama was sworn into office in January, 2009. It is now $16.016 trillion, an increase of $5 trillion in less than four years in “debt held by the public” (i.e. the Chinese central bank, the Japanese central bank, the Federal Reserve, etc.)
$500 billion is roughly 3% of $16 trillion. That is rather astounding, isn't it? We could have switched to a (largely) solar-powered electrical grid for a mere 3% of what the Fed squandered to save the “too big to fail” banks. Yes, yes, I know we need a massive energy storage system for any solar-powered grid; shall we throw $1.1 trillion at the problem? That would total a mere 10% of what the Fed has provided to “save” crony-capitalist financial feudalism.
Perhaps the most enduring feature of US foreign policy is a self-righteous sense of divine mission blinds the Orientations of its self-referencing practitioners to the real world consequences of their Decisions, and Actions. Their missionary zeal makes their outlooks impervious to the corrective effects negative feedback from the real world. Put simply, with a few exceptions, our foreign policy elites have evolved a long-term blockage in their Orientation that prevents them from LEARNING from their mistakes, regardless of whether those mistakes evolved out of conflating the impulses of nationalism with the pretensions of a global communist “threat” (e.g., Mossadegh in Iran,Vietnam, etc.) or with a world wide “threat” of Islamic militancy (e.g., using the war on terror to invade Iraq or wage war in Afghanistan and Pakistan by confusing the nationalism of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban with the global pretensions of a criminal gang of Sunni Salafi fanatics ), or by conflating the national interests of Israel with the national interests of the United States.
The U.S. alliance of convenience with Sunni Salafis eastern Libya to effect a regime change is only the latest case study of the blowback (re: in Mali and now the assassination of the US ambassador) that results when arrogance of ignorance* shapes a policy to meddle in the affairs of others.
So you might ask: Has our self-styled elite learned anything from its Libyan misadventure? One need only to look at Syrian civil war to answer to this question.
Today’s nominee for the Larry Silverstein Award for Chutzpah Beyond the Call of Duty: Israel lobbyist Patrick Clawson, who is openly calling for the mass murder of Americans, along the lines of the USS Maine, Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, USS Liberty, and (by implication) 9/11 orchestrated war-trigger events.
Tip of the Hat to Kevin Barrett at Veterans Today.
Phi Beta Iota: The Israel lobbyist ably recounts false flags from WWI and WWII to Viet-Nam, neglects to mention 9/11 and the 935 now-documented lies led by Dick Cheney that took the USA into wars that restored Afghanistan as the world's #1 supplier of opium (and Pakistan as the #1 producer of heroin) while destabilizing the entire Middle East.
WASHINGTON — The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans has dealt the Central Intelligence Agency a major setback in its intelligence-gathering efforts at a time of increasing instability in the North African nation.
Among the more than two dozen American personnel evacuated from the city after the assault on the American mission and a nearby annex were about a dozen C.I.A. operatives and contractors, who played a crucial role in conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.
“It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss,” said one American official who has served in Libya and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the F.B.I. is still investigating the attack. “We got our eyes poked out.”
Phi Beta Iota: We can only shake our heads in sadness. There are a few extraordinary Non-Official Cover (NOC) officers, but they are the exception rather than the rule. CIA is incompetent at clandestine and covert operations. This has been known since at least 1992, but has only become more and more evident since 9/11. CIA is not only addicted to official cover as a simple bureaucratic solution totally at odds with its mission, it is demonstrably incapable of learning how to do non-official cover. Of the 21 companies it created when it was flush with money (so flush it now pays domestic housing allowances and reportedly also gives SES bonuses on a quartely basis), it has been forced to close 20 of them. Our internal view is that CIA was taken out as a Mossad initiative, and more CIA stations will be rolled in the Middle East in the next few months, always via false flag attacks. CIA has no Plan B. DIA is incapable of being Plan C, and SOCOM's “push ups done silently” are frightening in their naivete. CIA, DIA, and SOCOM still do not “get it.”
