James Bond-style weapons found on North Korean assassin
Weapons straight out of a James Bond film have been put on display in Seoul after authorities found them on a North Korean assassin.
EXTRACT
The weapons include an innocent-looking black torch, complete with a wrist strap and the word “Police” along one side, that is actually a gun capable of firing a bullet.
Prosecutors in the South Korean capital say the weapon had a range of around 30 feet and was loaded with a bullet that was coated in a poisonous chemical. A mere 10 milligrams of the poison is sufficient to cause breathing problems or heart failure, they said.
In a televised demonstration of the gun, a bullet fired from the torch penetrated deep into a mattress from a distance of 16 feet.
Phi Beta Iota: The contrast to the Iran plot farce in the USA could not be sharper, especially when the bloated insane US budget of pasty-faced white guys engaged on “domestic security” is taken into account.
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.
In the below essay, famed Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, a veteran of both the Irgun and Knesset, a hero of the 1948 War and true Israeli patriot, paints a portrait of Israel's unfolding grand-strategic ruin.
While Israel's penchant for self destruction is self evident in Avnery's exposition, the extent of Israel's insanity becomes stunningly clear when Avnery's exposition is evaluated within the grand strategic framework evolved by the late American strategist Colonel John Boyd [which I have distributed before but am including again as Atch 2 for ease of comparison]. In foreign policy literature, the term of art “grand strategy' is used without explicit definition in vague often pompous sounding contexts. Part of the reason for this intellectual slipperiness, I think, is that the process of defining, or better, evolving a grand strategy is a creative one of synthesis; and the academy is notoriously poor in teaching or explaining synthesis, which is a messy creative process of trial and error conditioned by selection and reevaluation. One of Boyd's most important contributions in his theory of conflict is that he made the idea of grand strategy a precise concept intellectually that can be evaluated and understood analytically, at least after the fact. As you will see in the excercize below, analysis and evaluation is the easy part of grand strategy; the hard part, as Boyd also showed, is putting the pieces together (synthesis) to create a grand strategic course of action directed toward goals that improve a nation's (or any organism, for that matter) fitness to cope with the threats, constraints, and opportunities in its environment.
So, with this in mind, read Avnery's essay carefully, mark its crucial points, and then compare them to the criteria and argument laid out in my own essay, Chuck Spinney: Criteria for a Sensible Grand Strategy. Now ask yourself three questions:
Is Israel on a evolutionary pathway to ruin?
Is our blind obedience to Israel's policies good for Israel or is it reinforcing its pathway to ruin ?
And most importantly, is unquestioning obedience to Israel a sensible grand strategic course of action for the United States?
You will see that to ask these questions is to answer them. The first step in evolving a new course of action is to recognize that a course change is a necessity.
Chuck Spinney
Badalona, Catalunya (which some say is part of Spain)
AN OLD photo from World War I shows a company of German soldiers getting on the train on their way to the front. On the wall of the car somebody had scribbled: “viel Feind, viel Ehr” (“The more enemies, the more Honor”.)
In those days, at the very start of what was to be the First World War, country after country was declaring war on Germany. The spirit of the graffito reflected the hubris of the supreme commander, Kaiser Wilhelm, who relied on the war plan of the legendary German General Staff. It was indeed an excellent war plan, and as excellent war plans are apt to do, it started going awry right from the beginning.
The foolish Kaiser now has the heirs he deserves. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, a former army Chief of Staff whose intelligence is below the average even of that rank, has announced that Israel could not possibly apologize to Turkey, even though its national interests may demand it, because it would hurt our “prestige”.
Many enemies, much prestige.
It seems that we shall soon run out of friends whom we can turn into enemies to gather even more prestige.
* * *
LAST WEEK a black cat came between Israel and its second best friend: Germany.
Using the extra-judicial liquidation of Anwar al-Awlaqi as a point of departure, Patrick Seale provides very useful and important survey of the strategic and grand strategic implications of the expanding U.S. conflict in what now might be called the Yemen Theater of Operations (YTO) in what is rapidly mutating into a U.S. Jihad against the Islamic world. The United States is now in involved militarily in wars encompassing at least six theaters of operations in the Islamic world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, with possible expansions into the Sahel and Nigeria, not to mention Iran and who knows where else.
Chuck Spinney
Badalona, Catalunya (part of Spain according to some)
On Friday, 30 September, Yemen announced that a Hellfire missile fired from a CIA-operated drone had killed Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaqi, in the north of the country. His grief-stricken father, once a minister of agriculture in a Yemeni government, went to the scene to collect and bury the pieces of what remained of Anwar’s body. It was the seventh U.S. strike in Yemen this year.
Anwar al-Awlaqi was a virulent critic of American foreign policy in the Arab world, and a passionate advocate of al-Qaida’s form of Islamic jihad. He was also a U.S. citizen, born in New Mexico, with an engineering degree from Colorado State University. His internet sermons, delivered in fluent English, had a devoted following, especially among young Muslims in the West.
His killing inevitably aroused a storm of controversy in the United States about its legality. In an article in The National Interest, Paul R. Pillar, a former senior CIA officer now a university professor, described it as “essentially a long-range execution without judge, jury or publicly presented evidence.” This is a subject which must be left to the Americans to debate.
What are its probable consequences? The most obvious is that it is likely further to inflame some Muslims against the United States, drawing fresh recruits into the jihadist struggle. “Why kill him in this brutal, ugly way?” a member of his Awalik tribe was quoted as saying. “Killing him will not solve the Americans’ problem with al-Qaida. It will just increase its strength and sympathy in this region.”
A key question, therefore, is whether al-Qaida — including its Yemen-based offshoot, “Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” — is an organisation or a cause.
1800 attacks in the past four years causing 4,000 casualties. An armed conflict largely ignored.
Phi Beta Iota: After the unified default by Europe and the revolution in America (electoral reform in time for 2012 to flush Congressional incumbents), the next big challenge is restoring natural boundaries and dramatically accelerating the recognition of the 5,000 secessionist movements around the globe.
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Click on Image to Enlarge
This report aims to set straight a rather distorted record. It demonstrates the veracity of three vitally important facts usually obfuscated in discussions of the subject: (1) the longstanding and growing ties between the CE and its predecessor organization, the ChRI, on the one hand, and al Qaeda (AQ) and the global jihad, on the other hand; (2) the importance of the CE jihadi terrorist network as a united and organized political and military force promoting jihad in the region; and (3) the salience of local cultural and the Salifist jihadist theo-ideology and the influence of the global jihadi revolutionary movement/alliance as key, if not the main, factors drive the “violence in the North Caucasus.”
On Sunday November 6 the Tar Sands Action will return to Washington DC to send an unmistakable message to the President.
Exactly one year before the election, we want to encircle the whole White House to ask President Obama to reject Keystone XL and live up to his promise to free us from the tyranny of oil. In doing so, we want to remind him of the power of the movement that he rode to the White House in 2008. This is bigger than any one person – President or no – and we will carry on, with or without him.
Phi Beta Iota: November 6th is also a useful target date for demanding that Congress and the White House accept for action the public demand for Electoral Reform.
CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.
Phi Beta Iota: This brilliant analysis cuts deeply to two core points: that a tiny handful of banks have been controlling 90% of the debt and manipulating the destruction of economies — shorting the Euro as well as the US dollar — and that governments have not been acting together. He neglects two fundamentals: the lack of integrity in these same government, most in collusion with the banks against the public; and the lack of integrity — the blatant persistent transnational criminal activities of the banks — of the handful of banks that have brought the world to the brink. Electoral reform is needed to cleanse the governments, and the governments should be taking legal action to destroy the banks and recover the criminally-rooted losses. We totally agree that Europe should default in unison, but we also feel that global criminal action against the specified banks and all of their owners, partners, and senior managers should be taken toward the aim of de-privatizing public goods and confiscating assets back toward the public commonwealths. Put bluntly, it is time we melt Goldman Sachs down and deprive the individual financial criminals of 95% of their wealth that is rooted in deliberate criminal activity against people and nations.
260911 1103
Alessandro Politi
Euro crisis and common sense 1
What does this crisis mean?
In times of emergency clarity of analysis and purpose is of paramount importance, especially when public leadership is so mediocre. In this first piece we will look first at the analysis framework at global level.
Forget about the markets. This is just a misleading shorthand expression that obscures a simple fact. The OECD has observed that, after decades of M&A, during this year 9 major economic actors control beyond 90% of the derivatives market (i.e. CDS, CDO, exchange rate swaps). They are:
J.P Morgan, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC USA;
Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse, BNP-Paribas.
This is an oligopolistic market where small stakeholders are just cannon fodder and governments have generally no sufficient financial muscle. These are the entities that make the market and break national financial reputations, economic fundamentals notwithstanding.
