The Puntland Maritime Police Force, trained by dozens of South African mercenaries from sometime in 2010 to June 2012, was run by a Dubai-based company called Sterling Corporate Services that seems to be connected to the CIA.
The Times reports that in July a United Nations investigative group uncovered that the force shared some facilities with the Puntland Intelligence Service, a spy organization that answers to the president of the semi-autonomous Somali region of Puntland and has been trained by the CIA for more than a decade.
A shocking new Federal Security Service (FSB) report circulating in the Kremlin today alleges that an entire American family that sought Russian protection from the Obama regime was massacred by US intelligence agents within hours of their planned escape from the United States.
According to this report, on 22 September a woman who indentified herself as Kathleen Peterson visited the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Washington D.C. under the pretense of signing up to take a course titled Russian Language Express Course A-1 for beginners set to begin on 26 September whereupon she approached director Yuriy Zaytsev and “slipped into his hand,” while shaking it, an encrypted computer thumb drive covered in a small note that said “please help us we’re in danger.”
Following “standard protocols” for such instances, when Russian officials are approached on American soil by US citizens, this report continues, the note and thumb drive in question were “processed” according to “established procedures” and revealed the plans of Mrs. Peterson, her husband Albert [both pictured 2nd photo left], and their two children, Mathew and Christopher, to leave Washington D.C. on 23 September on a flight to Paris where it was requested they be met by Russian security personal as this family feared their lives were in danger.
Within 24 hours of Mrs. Peterson passing her information to Russian officials, this report says, she, her husband and two children were violently gunned down in their Fairfax County Virginia home on 23 September with this massacre being blamed by US police officials on a murder-suicide plot initiated by her husband, Albert, with at least one Western news source, quoting a source indentified only as “Maggie L.”, stating this tragedy was due to his, Albert’s, fears over Obama being reelected as US President.
According to US news sources, Albert Peterson was a longtime employee of the US defense giant Northrop Grumman until he resigned in 2009, and Kathleen Peterson was employed by the US defense contracting firm Blackbird Technologies located in Herndon, Virginia.
. . . . . . . .
This FSB report further notes Blackbird Technologies “tracking and tagging” of those US citizens destined to be placed in America’s most feared prisons called Communication Management Units, or CMU’s. These secretive political prisons for “domestic terrorists” radically restricts prisoner communications with the outside world to levels that rival, or exceed, the most restrictive facilities in the country, including the dreaded “Supermax”, and any other such prison operating in the Western world.
Below is a brief but excellent overview of the tragic Syrian civil war. The US has allowed itself to become allied with the Sunni Jihadis, some of whom are connected to Al Qaeda. Much of what Seale writes below is a summary of a recent report Syrian Jihadis (published by the Swedish Institute of International Affairs). The report's author Aron Lund explains how the Syrian rebellion is mutating into an an Islamist colouring, among other things.
Syria's Long War
Patrick Seale, Agence Global, 28 September 2010
The pitiless, vengeful, blood-thirsty battle now being waged in Syria is not something new or unexpected. Nor is it a mere by-product of the Arab Spring, although events in Tunisia and Egypt have undoubtedly contributed to creating an insurrectionary atmosphere in the whole region. Rather, the Syrian uprising, as it has gradually evolved over the past eighteen months, should be seen as only the latest, if by far the most violent, episode in the long war between Islamists and Ba‘thists, which dates back to the founding of the secular Ba‘th Party in the 1940s. The struggle between them is by now little short of a death-feud.
This is not to suggest that the present rebellion is driven only by religious motives and sectarian hate. Although these are real enough, other grievances have piled up over the past decades: the ravages of youth unemployment; the brutality of Syria’s security services; the domination of key centres of economic, military and political life by the minority Alawi community; the blatant consumerism of a privileged class, grown rich on state patronage, in sharp contrast with the hardship suffered by the mass of the population, including in particular the inhabitants of the ‘poverty belt’ around Damascus, Aleppo and other cities. These deprived suburbs are largely the result of inward migration from the long-neglected countryside, which in the past decade has suffered catastrophic losses from a drought of unprecedented severity.
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.
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.
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.
This has been noticed. Of course we have no direct knowledge.
US Army Training and Doctrine Command, The Army Operating Concept 2016 – 2028, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, dated 19 August 2010, p. iii. Hereafter cited as TD Pam 525-3-1. The Army defines full spectrum operations as the combination of offensive, defensive, and either stability operations overseas or civil support operations on U.S. soil.
In this paper, we posit a scenario in which a group of political reactionaries take over a strategically positioned town and have the tacit support of not only local law enforcement but also state government officials, right up to the governor. Under present law, which initially stemmed from bad feelings about Reconstruction, the military’s domestic role is highly circumscribed. In the situation we lay out below, even though the governor refuses to seek federal help to quell the uprising (the usual channel for military assistance), the Constitution allows the president broad leeway in times of insurrection.
