CAIRO — Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden called for the creation of a new relief body to help Muslims in an audiotape released Friday, seeking to exploit discontent following this summer's devastating floods in Pakistan by depicting the region's governments as uncaring.
It was the third message in recent weeks from al-Qaida figures concerning the massive floods that affected around 20 million people in Pakistan, signaling a concentrated campaign by the terror group to tap into anger over the flooding to rally support.
But while the earlier messages by subordinates were angry, urging followers to rise up, bin Laden took a softer, even humanitarian tone – apparently trying to broaden al-Qaida's appeal by presenting his group as a problem-solving protector of the poor.
“What governments spend on relief work is secondary to what they spend on armies,” bin Laden says on the 11-minute tape titled “Reflections on the Method of Relief Work.”
“If governments spent (on relief) only one percent of what is spent on armies, they would change the face of the world for poor people,” he said
Phi Beta Iota: We believe Bin Laden to be dead or comatose, but it merits comment that some people do take on a life of their own after death, as with many prophets whose messages are refined or corrupted, but carried on. What should shock and awe here is that this message makes a great deal more sense than the current US strategy of spending trillions on elective occupations and Wall Street bail-outs, and nothing at all on eight of the ten high-level threats to humanity, with stark poverty in the USA and elsewhere being #1.
The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reports that President Obama begged Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend his settlement freeze in order to save the so-called peace talks.
As a quid pro quo, Obama is reported to have promised Netanyahu that (1) Israel could resume settlement construction if the peace negotiations failed to produce results and (2) that the United States would give Israel written assurances of its commitment to Israel’s security (suggesting a formal peace treaty perhaps?). Despite Obama’s desperation, Netanyahu blew Obama off and allowed the so-called freeze to expire.
If, as is likely, this report is true, Israel has humiliated the United States once again — a fact that will no doubt be deemed irrelevant by Israel’s shills on both sides of the aisle in Congress, not to mention the mainstream media.
The last president to stand up to Israel was Dwight Eisenhower, when he pulled the plug on the second Arab-Israeli war in 1956 and forced Israel to retreat from the east bank of the Suez Canal and to give up its conquest of the Sinai.
But eleven years later, Israel learned US condemnation was no longer a problem.
In fact, Israel learned it could get away with murder and could treat the United States with utter contempt when (1) its air and naval forces not only attacked the USS Liberty — a high priority US Navy signals intelligence ship — on 8 June 1967 during the Six-Day War, killing 34 and wounding 171 US sailors, but (2) was able to secure a cover up of its perfidy by the highest levels of the US government, including President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and most of the senior military officers in the Pentagon, despite the misgivings of Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State and Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (neither of whom chose to resign in protest, however).
Phi Beta Iota: As has been reported on more than one occasion, even when Israel “promises” to stop settlements, they continue apace. The Israeli government cannot be trusted on any detail.
The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.
A splendid and courageous new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, by Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University (and for many years previously, the U.S. Army), describes with lucidity the degree to which the power of the American presidency over war and peace has been weakened in our day, and, in important respects, superseded.
One might call this a silent coup against the presidency, but a coup implies intention: a responsible actor who sets the coup d’etat into action for a defined purpose. The argument Bacevich makes implies that a coup can be institutional or intellectual, and come from outside as well as inside government. Its characteristic is to create a situation in which a president is no longer free to act as he might wish, because all of the doors except one have been closed.
The name of the bureaucratic game, of course, is to remove all realistic alternatives to the Pentagon's preferred decision before that decision is made. Pfaff's discussion is based on Andrew Bacevich's new book “Washington Rules.” I have not read Bacevich's book yet, and will not be able to until I return to the states in November, but I have read several reviews and from that perspective can say that the behaviour Pfaff describes comports well with behavior I witnessed in my years in the Pentagon.
The picture is more subtle and far more complicated than that portrayed by Pfaff, however.
By Jeff Stein Washington Post Monday, September 27, 2010
The Justice Department said Monday that it found almost two dozen FBI agents, including supervisors, had cheated on an examto test their knowledge of new counterterrorism procedures. It suggested that the scandal might eventually spread far beyond the few offices it investigated.
“We believe the extent of the cheating related to this test was greater than the cases we detailed in this report,” Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine reported.
Robert David STEELE Vivas Click Here to See Personal Page
ON INTEGRITY
1. Integrity is not just about honor–it is about wholeness of view, completeness of effort, and accuracy or reliability of all of the elements of the whole.
2. Industrial-Era Systems do not adapt because they lack integrity and continue to pay for doing the wrong things righter–the Pentagon is a classic example of such as system.
3. In the 21st Century, intelligence, design, and integrity are the triad that matters most. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is the non-negotiable starting position for getting it right, and this is crucially important with respect to the sustainability of the Earth as a home for humanity.
Click on Image to Enlarge
4. Integrity at the top requires clarity, diversity, and BALANCE–it makes no sense for a Secretary of Defense to continue to screw over the 4% that take 80% of the casualties, spending 80% of the Pentagon budget on the 20% that do not take casualties (occupants of really big expensive things that do not actually go into harm's way).
5. Integrity can be compounded or discounted. It is compounded when public understanding demands political accountability and flag officers ultimately understand that they have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, not support the chain of command. It is discounted when flag officers are careerists, ascribe to rankism, and generally betray the public interest in favor of personal advancement.
6. Integrity is ultimately a natural attribute of large groups, and emerges from self-organizing over time. The Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom is one example; the break-up of the Balkans another; the pending secession of Hawaii and Vermont from the United STATES of America a third. Legitimate grievances give the aggrieved the moral high ground–this is a power no government can repress.
7. Universal access to connectivity and content is a means of accelerating both public access to the truth, and the power of the public to off-set “rule by secrecy,” which inherently lacks integrity across the board.
EXCUSES most commonly heard:
1) I work for the government, we serve the public, I consider myself part of the government, not part of the public, and indeed, choose not to vote or otherwise be active as a citizen.
2) The public elects the politicians, they appoint the leadership, serving the chain of command is how one serves the public.
RIPOSTE:
1) Citizenship trumps occupational role. Every employee is supposed to be a citizen first, a public servant second. They swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, that includes a responsibility to protect the public from predatory government actions – the recent assassination of a US citizen without due process is a reprehensible example of what happens with uniformed officers and civil servants become morally disengaged.
2) Information asymmetries between the public and the government are such that a democracy demands whistle-blowers and open government. Rule by secrecy is a form of tyranny, a means of avoiding accountability, and ultimately a clear and present danger to the Constitution, the Republic, and the public interest. Because of their Oath, it can be said that government employees have a special responsibility to detect and confront fraud, waste, and abuse – and certainly to disobey and declare illegal orders and plans or programs inconsistent with the Constitution, such as wars not authorized by Congress, or assassinations not based on the rule of law.
In brief, all of our government employees have been “coping out” and failing to live up to their fullest potential as citizens and human beings. To be silent and complacent is to be a slave, not a citizen. Any employee of the government that fails to think about the Constitution and their role in defending the Constitution at every level on every day across every issue area, is failing to honor their Oath of office.
Mr. Rascoff said the working relationship between the civilian and sworn counterterrorism officials in New York was better than the parallel relationships in the Federal Bureau of Investigation because federal agents, unlike the local detectives, were often as highly educated as the analysts they work with.
“F.B.I. agents sometimes look at their analysts and say, ‘So, basically, we do the same job, but I carry a gun and kick down doors while you sit at your desk all day,’ ” said Mr. Rascoff, who has been working in intelligence since 2003, when he was a consultant to L. Paul Bremer, the special envoy to Iraq.
In the C.I.A., Mr. Rascoff added, the relationship between operatives and analysts is often the chilly one between “an author of cables and a reader of cables.”
In the Police Department, he said, there is an “educational, experiential but not intellectual” gulf that can, paradoxically, bring the sides together.
“While it’s sometimes hard to harness those conflicting energies,” Mr. Rascoff said, “when it succeeds, it succeeds wildly.”
