Insurgents appear confident they can outlast troop buildup
By Greg Miller
An intense military campaign aimed at crippling the Taliban has so far failed to inflict more than fleeting setbacks on the insurgency or put meaningful pressure on its leaders to seek peace, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials citing the latest assessments of the war in Afghanistan.
Escalated airstrikes and special operations raids have disrupted Taliban movements and damaged local cells. But officials said that insurgents have been adept at absorbing the blows and that they appear confident that they can outlast an American troop buildup set to subside beginning next July.
“The insurgency seems to be maintaining its resilience,” said a senior Defense Department official involved in assessments of the war. Taliban elements have consistently shown an ability to “reestablish and rejuvenate,” often within days of routed by U.S. forces, the official said, adding that if there is a sign that momentum has shifted, “I don't see it.”
One of the military objectives in targeting mid-level commanders is to compel the Taliban to pursue peace talks with the Afghan government, a nascent effort that NATO officials have helped to facilitate.
Phi Beta Iota: Winston Churchill has said Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it. We are rather sadly reminded of how Henry Kissinger undermined the Paris Peace talks for political purposes, resulting in 20,000 more dead on the US side, hundreds of thousands more dead on the Vietnamese side, and no change in the ultimate outcome–the expulsion of the US from a foreign land it had no business invading in the first place. It is helpful that the US Intelligence Community seems to be articulating truth to power.
Established in 2006, the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest annually awards $10,000 to a software developer who adds significant value to the nonprofit sector and movements for social change. The Pizzigati Prize honors the brief life of Tony Pizzigati, an early advocate of open source computing.
Our Mission
Software developers who create, for free public distribution, open source applications and tools that nonprofit and advocacy groups can put to good use are making a two-faceted contribution to social change.
Our Application
The Pizzigati Prize welcomes applications from–and nominations of–single individuals. Those nominated for the prize should have developed a software product that is open source, as defined by the Open Source Initiative, and easily and widely available. This software must have already demonstrated its value to at least one nonprofit organization, and be a product that can be a value to multiple nonprofit organizations. Applicants will be evaluated on a range of criteria by an advisory panel that includes national leaders in public interest computing and past winners of the Prize.
Please visit the Prize Information pages for more information about eligibility, the application and nomination processes, and evaluation criteria.
2011 PRIZE NOMINATION PROCESS NOW OPEN
Nominations are now open for the fifth annual awarding of the $10,000 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, the nation's top honor for software developers working with nonprofits to help forge innovative social change. The Tides Foundation will be accepting nominations for this year's competition through December 15, 2010. The 2011 prize winner will be announced this March at the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) annual conference in Washington, D.C.Please visit the Prize Information section for full details on the nomination and application process.
by Greg Palast for Truthout/Buzzflash
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Tonight, my dog Pluto and I watched the PBS ‘Frontline' investigation of BP, “The Spill.”
PBS has uncovered a real shocker: BP neglected safety!
Well, no shit, Sherlock!
Pluto rolled over on the rug and looked at me as if to say, Don't we already know this?
Then PBS told us – get ready – that BP has neglected warnings about oil safety for years!
That's true. But so has PBS. The Petroleum Broadcast System has turned a blind eye to BP perfidy for decades.
If the broadcast had come six months before the Gulf blow-out, after the 2005 BP Refinery explosion in Texas, after the 2006 Alaska pipeline disaster, after the years of government fines that flashed DANGER-DANGER, I would say, “Damn, that Frontline sure is courageous.” But six months after the blow-out, PBS has shown us it only has the courage to shoot the wounded.
Phi Beta Iota respectfully encourages all officers and staff non-commissioned officers to join LinkedIn and Facebook so as to enhance the sharing of information across boundaries.
The “secret” to surviving a security review is to avoid all personal expressions of opinion. Use the systems to create networks of professionals with common interests (e.g. Information Operations) who can then post links that are seen by their network. Provocative questions are different from opinions, and can be used to point out disconnects that might not be obvious.
Opinions are dangerous. Although the security system has improved considerably, all the way from a reasonably clear security form [only foreigners with ties that bind] to reasonably coherent adjudication, the Industrial-Era security system is still not up to understanding the nuances of Information-Era information-sharing and sense-making. “That should be classified” is the operative phrase for those who can do grave damage to careers without realizing that public intelligence has far surpassed secret intelligence in breadth and depth.
Bottom line: you cannot grow as a professional without “jacking in” to the global grid, but opinions will have to wait for another five or six years. Leave those for face to face conversations and be aware that your email is a legal record open for inspection whether you like it or not.
Venezuela- US: For the record. The Caracas government seized two factories owned by U.S.-based glass maker Owens Illinois, because it caused “environmental damage and exploited workers,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on 25 October. Today Venezuelan soldiers took possession of the factories.
Venezuela-Middle East: President Chavez said his government and Libya are creating a $1 billion joint investment fund to pay for projects the two countries will pursue together, according to a report by The Associated Press. Chavez also announced a $100 million joint fund with Syria, which will be used on projects such as aid in the construction of an oil refinery and to establish an olive oil processing plant.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: Chavez invariably goes out of his way to make questionable deals with countries that tend to have strained relations with the US. None of his new allies are in a position to help Venezuela in the event of trouble, which calls into question the wisdom of the investments, the utility of the associations and the soundness of Chavez' judgment.
Phi Beta Iota: We beg to differ with our esteemed colleague. The US is so over-extended in its elective wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as to call into question its ability to be effective anywhere else, including against Somali pirates. Furthermore, the passing of time and the accumulation of public knowledge has a “truth” effect that may not lead to reconciliation but will lead to more and more expropriation of ill-gotten gains by predatory capitalists who in the past were able to call in the US Marines to enforce unethical, illegal, and unjust seizures of property. Just as Australia is now getting serious about Native Title, so also is the rest of the Southern Hemisphere going to get serious about expropriating back into indigenous possession those lands acquired through illicit or unethical means.
The next President, and the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are going to have to lead a 180 degree change in how the US “does” intelligence. Instead of producing 4% “at best,” the DNI is going to have to lead the integration of education, intelligence, and research so as to meet 96% “at worst” of the needs of the Nation in both restoring domestic prosperity and in achieving truth & reconciliation abroad. Absent such a redirection, the US will not survive in its present form to 2025…in our always humble opinion. This will require leaders with integrity who place the public interest foremost.
Poor Goebbels, if only he had access to DVDs and the internet, he could have run a fear mongering operation as effective as the one described so brilliantly by Pam Martens here (also attached below) — a thought which suggests a question: Is 21st Century American Crony Capitalism merely a way station on the road to real fascism (as distinguished from the oxymoronic soundbyte of Islamofascism)? After all, in addition to fear mongering, Mussolini and Hitler enlisted the corporate class to weaken the working class to gain and retain power. To wit, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Mussolini, banned all Marxist organizations and replaced their trade unions with government-controlled corporatist unions. Until he instituted a war economy in the mid-1930s, Mussolini allowed industrialists to run their companies with a minimum of government interference. Despite his former anticapitalist rhetoric, he cut taxes on business, permitted cartel growth, decreed wage reduction, and rescinded the eight-hour-workday law. Between 1928 and 1932 real wages in Italy dropped by almost half. Mussolini admitted that the standard of living had fallen but stated that “fortunately the Italian people were not accustomed to eating much and therefore feel the privation less acutely than others.”
Although Hitler claimed that the Nazi Party was more “socialist” than its conservative rivals, he opposed any Marxist-inspired nationalization of major industries. On May 2, 1933, he abolished all free trade unions in Germany, and his minister of labour, Robert Ley, later declared that it was necessary “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of the factory, that is, the employer.” Nazi “anticapitalism,” such as it was, was aimed primarily at Jewish capitalism; non-Jewish capitalists were allowed to keep their companies and their wealth, a distinction that was made in the Nazi Party's original program and never changed. Although Hitler reduced unemployment in Germany, most German workers were forced to toil for lower wages and longer hours and under worse conditions than had been the case during the Weimar Republic. His solution to the unemployment problem also depended on the recruitment of thousands of men into the military.
But of course any analogy to the United States is absurd. After all, since 1980, deregulation, union busting, a lower standard of living, lower wages, longer working hours, and using of the military and its industrial complex as a jobs program have not been accompanied by a rise in the politics of fear in the United States. … Oops.
There is one difference however, given Congress's and the Supreme Court's supine complicity in promoting these trends (by representing the interests of the Crony Capitalists at the expense of the masses), the President will not need a Reichstag Fire to keep the program moving.
The Far Right's Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive
By PAM MARTENS
Counterpunch
A secretive libertarian nonprofit with ties to Charles Koch bankrolled what was widely perceived to be a fear mongering effort to throw the Presidential election to Senator John McCain in 2008. Until now, where the money came from has been a hotly debated mystery.
Seven weeks before the Presidential election of 2008, approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and St. Petersburg Times, distributed millions of DVDs of the documentary, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” The DVDs were included in the Sunday editions. Altogether, including a separate direct mail campaign, 28 million DVDs flooded households in the swing voter states.
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CounterPunch can now report what this race-baiting, fear-mongering campaign cost and where the money, at least nominally, came from…..
