It may come as a surprise to many readers who are unfamiliar with the evidence surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but explosives were indeed found in all of the dust samples taken from the World Trade Center. Of course, the state organized investigation failed to turn up any, but that was because they didn’t look for the particular type of explosive used. A team of private investigators, physicists and engineers conducted an independent analysis of the dust and found it to contain unreacted nano-thermite, which is a special type of military grade explosive. Engineer Jim Hoffman explains the various properties of the explosives used to destroy the towers:
A film that may even take the Academy Award for “Best Picture of 2012” raises serious moral issues; glorifies a political stunt and is based on an historical fiction. It is the latest in Obama propaganda.
Osama bin Laden was not killed on 2 May 2011 during the raid on a compound in Pakistan. He actually died in Afghanistan on or about 15 December 2001 — and he was buried there in an unmarked grave.
Local obituaries reported Osama’s death at the time. Even FOX News subsequently confirmed it. He was buried in an unmarked grave in accord with Muslim traditions. He did not die in Pakistan.
The debate in both Washington and the mainstream media over austerity measures, the alleged fiscal cliff and the looming debt crisis not only function to render anti-democratic pressures invisible, but also produce what the late sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “a politics of organized irresponsibility.” For Mills, authoritarian politics developed, in part, by making the operations of power invisible while weaving a network of lies and deceptions through what might be called a politics of disconnect. That is, a politics that focuses on isolated issues that serve to erase the broader relations and historical contexts that give them meaning. These isolated issues become flashpoints in a cultural and political discourse that hide not merely the operations of power, but also the resurgence of authoritarian ideologies, modes of governance, policies and social formations that put any viable notion of democracy at risk. Decontextualized ideas and issues, coupled with the overflow of information produced by the new electronic media, make it more difficult to create narratives that offer historical understanding, relational connections and developmental sequences. The fragmentation of ideas and the cascade of information reinforce new modes of depoliticization and authoritarianism.
Region cannot be returned to Mali’s control militarily, says Hugh Roberts
By Hugh Roberts, Financial Times, January 24, 2013 6:03 pm
The writer is Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University
David Cameron’s vision of decades of global counter-terrorist struggle in north Africa sounded like the promise of doom to anyone who cares about the region. The Sahel’s terrorism problem dates back no further than 2003 – the west’s global war on terror gave birth to it; the west’s part in the destruction of Muammer Gaddafi’s Libya aggravated it; and France’s decision to pursue another war in Mali is expanding it.
In 2003, two drastic changes occurred. Washington launched its Pan-Sahel Initiative, soon renamed the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative; and a branch of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (known by its French acronym of GSPC) migrated from north-eastern Algeria to the far south of the Algerian Sahara, announcing its arrival with the abduction of 32 European tourists that year.
These developments were linked. In its drive to involve itself in the Sahel, where it blithely trespassed on France’s traditional sphere of influence, the Pentagon massively hyped the terrorist threat. But what really made the PSI feasible was Algeria’s involvement. Algiers had seized on the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 to align itself with US President George W. Bush’s war on terror. One reason for this was to avoid being marked for destruction, like Iraq. But the country also saw an opportunity to resume normal relations with its western partners, following a French-led boycott begun after a 1994 terrorist attack on an Air France flight.
Don't hold your breath: One impediment to understanding what works and what does not work in war is an out-of-control secrecy system that clogs up DoD's own OODA loops with over-classified needlessly compartmented information. The barriers within this system work to stretch out our own decision cycles. But, as the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed, one of the central objectives implicit in any military strategy is to stretch out the OODA loops governing your adversary's decision cycles. Operating inside your adversary's OODA loops enables you to disconnect his decisions from the reality and collapse him into confusion and disorder (short explanation here, longer explanations here). So, stretching out your own loops is, ipso facto, really loopy.
The attached report by Scott Shane may seem hilarious, but it is really an outward symptom of the much deeper strategic problem posed by the compartmented nature of this self-inflicted wound. Think about the mentality that fuels a predilection to burn books that reveal harmless chickenshit details — like, for example, the widely used nickname for National Security Agency and the real name of Baghram Air Force base, a name that became well known to the entire world during the Soviet Union's aborted occupation, or the reclassification of an unclassified citation for a bronze star medal. Is this the behaviour of decision making system that is tightly connected to its own environment and is trying to improve its performance by learning from experience? To ask this question is to answer it.
Of course, understanding how we disconnected our own decisions from reality in hot wars does not matter: The epistemological essence of a mindset ruled by the secret compartments of the military-technical revolution is that the future will be different from the past. We are leaving the hot war in Afghanistan and an intensification of the secrecy system will be necessary to extract ever larger amounts of taxpayer dollars to fund the super-secret deep strike ‘precision' weapons which lie at the heart of the Obama's strategic pivot to a new cold war focused on China.
WASHINGTON — In an illustration of the government’s changeable ideas of what should be secret, Pentagon censors have decided that nearly half of more than 400 passages deleted from an Afghan war memoir can be printed without damaging national security.
January 23, 2013, 6:04 pm ET · by Sarah Childress. Lanny Breuer is leaving his position as head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. As assistant attorney … Continue reading →
Did Wall St. Get Away With It? Live Chat Wed. 2 pm ET
January 22, 2013, 10:52 pm ET · by Nathan Tobey. Join us for a live chat on “The Untouchables” with producer Martin Smith and New York Times DealBook reporter Peter Eavis at 2pm ET on Wednesday, January 23rd. You can leave a question now.
Blowing the Whistle on the Mortgage Bubble
January 22, 2013, 9:44 pm ET · by Azmat Khan. Well before the 2008 financial meltdown, mortgage industry insiders discovered a ticking time-bomb that they say went up to the very top of Wall Street. What did they find? Who did they warn? And what happened to their warnings?
Too Big To Jail? The Top 10 Civil Cases Against the Banks
January 22, 2013, 9:44 pm ET · by Jason M. Breslow. In nearly every major legal case to emerge from the crisis, government prosecutors have won multi-million dollar settlements, but companies and officials have not been required to admit wrongdoing.
Were Bankers Jailed In Past Financial Crises?
January 22, 2013, 9:43 pm ET · by Jason M. Breslow. Not one Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for fraud related to the subprime crisis. How does that compare to past downturns?
Phil Angelides: Enforcement of Wall St. is “Woefully Broken”
January 22, 2013, 9:42 pm ET. The current system of enforcement in the financial services industry has done little to deter pervasive fraud, says the former chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Lanny Breuer: Financial Fraud Has Not Gone Unpunished
January 22, 2013, 9:42 pm ET. Prosecutors are holding Wall Street to account for the financial crisis, but success should not be measured solely by the number of convictions to date, says the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
Ted Kaufman: Wall Street Prosecutions Never Made a Priority
January 22, 2013, 9:41 pm ET. The lack of high-level prosecutions from the financial crisis can be traced to the Obama administration’s ambivalence to upset the banks, the former U.S. senator told FRONTLINE.
“Fraud Was … the F-Bomb”
January 22, 2013, 10:29 am ET · by Jason M. Breslow. Well before the housing bubble burst, alarm bells were beginning to sound among key players in the mortgage industry: due diligence underwriters.
And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to… The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of “Geronimo”, aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty.
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It’s now official – coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at theAFRICOM site, the Pentagon’s weaponized African branch.
Exit “historical” al-Qaeda, holed up somewhere in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas; enter al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In Dempsey’s words, AQIM “is a threat not only to the country of Mali, but the region, and if… left unaddressed, could in fact become a global threat.”
With Mali now elevated to the status of a “threat” to the whole world, GWOT is proven to be really open-ended. The Pentagon doesn’t do irony; when, in the early 2000s, armchair warriors coined the expression “The Long War”, they really meant it.
Even under President Obama 2.0′s “leading from behind” doctrine, the Pentagon is unmistakably gunning for war in Mali – and not only of the shadow variety. [1] General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, already operates under the assumption Islamists in Mali will “attack American interests”.
Thus, the first 100 US military “advisers” are being sent to Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Togo and Ghana – the six member-nations of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that will compose an African army tasked (by the United Nations) to reconquer (invade?) the parts of Mali under the Islamist sway of AQIM, its splinter group MUJAO and the Ansar ed-Dine militia. This African mini-army, of course, is paid for by the West.
Students of the Vietnam War will be the first to note that sending “advisers” was the first step of the subsequent quagmire. And on a definitely un-Pentagonese ironic aside, the US over these past few years did train Malian troops. A lot of them duly deserted. As for the lavishly, Fort Benning-trained Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, not only did he lead a military coup against an elected Mali government but also created the conditions for the rise of the Islamists.
