Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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NIGHTWATCH: China-Jordan, Syria Questions, Russia-Arctic

02 China, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, Government, Military

China-Jordan: The Foreign Ministry also said that on Tuesday, Yang met with King of Jordan Abdullah II ibn Al-Hussein on bilateral ties, the Syria situation and the Middle East peace process.

King Abdullah II is paying a state visit to China from 15 to 18 September, at the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Comment: Jordan is looking for Chinese help with refugees and its economic burdens. China is in a position to advance its interests and influence because of the ripple effects of the Syria crisis, along with Russia. China has welcomed the UN inspection report on Syria, but has not commented about who executed the 21 August sarin attack.

Syria: Special note. The UN inspectors judged that one of the two rockets they examined was an M14 140mm rocket, which is fired from a BM-14 multiple rocket launcher. NightWatch checked the web today to try to determine whether the Syrian Arab Army still fields or keeps in inventory or storage BM-14s. The BM-14 is a an old system, a variation of the Soviet World War II BM-13 towed or truck-mounted, 16-round Katyusha multiple rocket launcher.

One reason for the search is that this weapon system is more than 70 years old and was replaced in most Soviet-equipped armies decades ago. Usually it was replaced by the BM-21 122-mm multiple rocket launcher. Syria can make these rockets.

A second reason for the search is that the BM-14 is an area saturation weapon. An army rocket unit usually would not fire it singly or in small numbers for a tactical mission. Each salvo should launch at least 16 rockets.

Global Security posts to the web detailed inventories of military equipment fielded by most national armies, including that of the Syrian army. Its charts show the Syrian army fields large numbers of BM-21s, but no BM-14s. They also show no rocket launcher that fires a rocket with a diameter of 330-mm. The UN inspectors found parts of such a rocket, but could not match it to any systems they knew. Our search found that Iran's Fajr-5 333-mm rocket is the closest in diameter, but it is 18 feet long.

Global Security's information might be incomplete and the numbers are estimates. However, the site has proven to be a reliable source of detailed military information. Its list of the types of major items of equipment that the Syrian army fields is reliable. The list does not include the BM-14.

The question for Feedback is where did the M-14 rocket come from? Who is still using this system in Syria? Does Syria still have stocks of long outdated rockets? Did the opposition capture any?

Russia: On Monday, President Putin announced that Russia is set to reopen a military base on the Arctic's Novosibirsk Islands, which it closed in 1993 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin pointed to efforts to create a northern coast global shipping route and to defend Arctic energy resources as reasons for reinstating operations on the base. The islands are off the coast of eastern Siberia.

Comment: Russia announced that it has begun patrolling the Arctic Ocean sea lanes which are now passable in summer months. The Northern Fleet flagship, the guided missile cruiser Peter the Great led a ten ship flotilla on a 2,000 mile patrol to the Islands, which arrived last Thursday. Russia announced they have returned to Siberia to stay. Russia also intends to rebuild airfields and other infrastructure in the Arctic region. Strategic air deployments to the Arctic might resume.

One reason is the Northern Sea Route cuts two weeks off shipping time and that cuts shipping costs to Europe. Another is that receding ice sheets have made exploitation of sea and seabed resources cost effective and practical.

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David Swanson: “Strategy” in Syria – Humanitarian Murder

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Peace Intelligence
David Swanson
David Swanson

Humanitarian Murder

This past Sunday night on “60 Minutes” John Miller of CBS News said, “I've spoken with intelligence analysts who have said an uncomfortable thing that has a ring of truth, which is: the longer this war in Syria goes on, in some sense the better off we are.”

Now, why would that be uncomfortable, do you suppose?  Could it be because encouraging huge numbers of violent deaths of human beings seems sociopathic?

The discomfort that Miller at least claims to feel is the gauge of our moral progress, I suppose, since June 23, 1941, when Harry Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

On Monday, Time magazine's Aryn Baker published an article under the headline “Syria's Rebels Turn on One Another, and That's Not a Bad Thing.”  Baker's point wasn't that more would die this way, but that this would allow the U.S. to escalate the war (which of course would mean more dying).

Remember that President Obama's reason for wanting to attack Syria is to “confront actions that are violating our common humanity.”  How is it that support for mass killing rarely seems to violate our common humanity if it's that other 96 percent of humanity getting killed, and especially if it's this 4 percent doing it?  Why is the excuse to kill more people always that people are being killed, while we never starve people to prevent them from starving or rape people to protect them from rape?

Continue reading “David Swanson: “Strategy” in Syria – Humanitarian Murder”

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4th Media: Western Threats and UN Resolution Authorizing Force a Cover Up for Striking and Wrecking Syria?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, IO Deeds of War

4th media croppedWestern Threats Could “WRECK” SYRIA Peace Talks: West Intends to Strike Syria

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday warned that talk by western countries on the adoption of a “threatening” United Nations resolution on Syria could wreck peace efforts.

He spoke after Britain, France and the United States at a Paris meeting agreed on the need for a “strong and binding” UN resolution on the transfer of Syria’s chemical weapons to international control.

Lavrov said Russia opposed proposals by Western powers to swiftly pass a resolution including the use of force under Chapter Seven of the UN charter.

Continue reading “4th Media: Western Threats and UN Resolution Authorizing Force a Cover Up for Striking and Wrecking Syria?”

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Berto Jongman: Reuters Tells the Syria Story [Possible Disinformation]

IO Deeds of War
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Special Report: Syria – A chemical crime, a complex reaction

By John Irish and Warren Strobel

Reuters, 17 September 2013

PARIS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In early spring France's ambassador to the United Nations dined with a Russian colleague and discussed the crisis in Syria.

Ambassador Gerard Araud told the Russian diplomat France was going to go public with proof from its intelligence services that Syria's government was using chemical weapons against its own people. The Russian diplomat laughed, according to a source familiar with the meeting. “Gerard,” he told his counterpart, “don't embarrass the Americans.”

It was a revealing exchange. France and Britain had been pressing for almost a year for the United States to engage more directly in the war in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad's battle against a popular insurgency has killed 100,000 people and displaced more than 6 million. But Washington had resisted pleas for action, reluctant to get sucked into another Middle East quagmire after a decade of fighting and misadventure in Iraq and Afghanistan. It had no desire for France to pile on further pressure by telling the world Assad was committing atrocities with weapons of mass destruction.

Even when the French went public with their claims in early June, the Obama administration said it needed more time and evidence to judge what had happened. A couple of weeks later the White House said that U.S. intelligence agencies had “high confidence” that Assad had launched small scale chemical attacks at various points over the previous year. But while Paris said all options were on the table, Washington played down the attacks, merely promising to give more aid to the anti-Assad rebels in Syria.

The gap between the two Western allies was just one awkward step in an extraordinary two-year dance around the civil war in Syria. That dance, detailed here with reporting drawn from interviews with senior diplomats and officials over the past year, has grown ever more complicated in recent weeks after graphic evidence of a much bigger chemical attack hit computer and television screens around the world on August 21.

Videos posted online after the attack showed hundreds of people in suburbs of the Syrian capital Damascus struck by a mysterious, lethal affliction. Men, women and children struggled for breath, foaming at the mouth and twitching. Other scenes showed scores of corpses with no obvious wounds.

Rebels said Assad had killed hundreds of civilians with chemical weapons. Assad denied it, but the evidence suggested otherwise.

In the first few days after the attack it appeared likely that the United States and some of its allies would launch airstrikes on Assad and his military. In 2012, Obama had called a chemical attack in Syria a “red line” that should not be crossed.

But as the U.S. president began trying to convince Congress to back military strikes, the lack of political enthusiasm became obvious – and not just in Washington.

Read rest of article.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is almost certainly a funded article, active disinformation.  Virtually everything in this article is completely at odds with all other independent sources.

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Greg Palast: Senate Puts Summers Back Into Shit Can

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Greg Palast
Greg Palast

Larry Summers:  Goldman Sacked

By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Monday, 16 September 2013

Joseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears.  Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, “What would Goldman think of that?”

Huh?

Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again:  What would Goldman think?

A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he’d turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on “what Goldman thought.”  As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing.

Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books.

R.I.P. Larry Summers
On Sunday afternoon, facing a revolt by his own party’s senators, Obama dumped Larry as likely replacement for Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
Until news came that Summers’ torch had been snuffed, I was going to write another column about Larry, the Typhoid Mary of Economics.  (My first, in The Guardian, 15 years ago, warned that “Summers is, in fact, a colony of aliens sent to Earth to turn humans into a cheap source of protein.”)

But the fact that Obama even tried to shove Summers down the planet’s throat tells us more about Obama than Summers—and whom Obama works for.  Hint:  You aren’t one of them. [Emphasis added.]

Full email story below the line.

Continue reading “Greg Palast: Senate Puts Summers Back Into Shit Can”

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Berto Jongman: NSA Has Access to SWIFT – Ergo US Government Complicit in all Financial Crimes by All Financial Actors Subject to US Law

03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

‘Follow the Money': NSA Monitors Financial World

By Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark

The NSA monitors banks and credit card transactions — sometimes in apparent violation of national laws and global regulations. The European SWIFT financial transaction network is being tapped on different levels, internal documents from the US spy agency show.

EXTRACT

Monitoring SWIFT

The classified documents show that the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a cooperative used by more than 8,000 banks worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically targets other institutes on an individual basis. Furthermore, the agency apparently has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard. What's more, even new, alternative currencies, as well as presumably anonymous means of payment like the Internet currency Bitcoin, rank among the targets of the American spies.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: NSA Has Access to SWIFT – Ergo US Government Complicit in all Financial Crimes by All Financial Actors Subject to US Law”

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Berto Jongman: Restraint from Al Qaeda?

Cultural Intelligence
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Al-Qaida leader urges restraint in first ‘guidelines for jihad'

Document provides a rare look at Al-Qaida's strategy 12 years after the September 11 attacks.

Reuters in Ha aretz, 16 September 2013

Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri has issued his first specific guidelines for jihad, urging restraint in attacking other Muslim sects and non-Muslims and in starting conflicts in countries where jihadis might find a safe base to promote their ideas.

The document, published by the SITE monitoring service, provides a rare look at Al-Qaida's strategy 12 years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the nature of its global ambitions from North Africa to the Caucasus to Kashmir.

While Al-Qaida's military aim remained to weaken the United States and Israel, Zawahri stressed the importance of “dawa”, or missionary work, to spread its ideas.

“As far as targeting the proxies of America is concerned, it differs from place to place. The basic principle is to avoid entering into any conflict with them, except in the countries where confronting them becomes inevitable,” he said.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Restraint from Al Qaeda?”

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