On Tuesday Feb. 23, Iran announced the capture of Abdulmalek Rigi, the boss of the terror organization Jundullah, which works for NATO. The capture of Rigi represents a serious setback for the US-UK strategy of using false flag state-sponsored terrorism against Iran and Pakistan, and ultimately to sabotage China’s geopolitics of oil.
Strategic Port Gwadar
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Tarpley's complete overview is well worth reading and we also recommend watching the short video of his interview with Russian television. To the right is a snapshot of the Port of Gwadar linked to its Wikipedia page–we have felt for some time that the USA is over-extended, out-foxed, and fooling no one, least of all the Chinese.
Strategic Port Gwadar
When US supply ships start going dead in the water from electromagnetic scrambling of their propulsion and navigation systems, we will know that China has had enough of this foolishness. The days of secure non-attributable false flag operations are OVER.
There is no reason why Latin America and the Caribbean should not have their own body of political consensus
Boys on the Beach
Speech by General of the Army Raúl Castro Ruz, president of the Councils of State and Ministers, at the plenary session of the Summit of Latin America and Caribbean Unity, February 23, 2010
The decision that we have just adopted to create the Community pf Latin American and Caribbean States is of great historical significance.
Cuba considers that the conditions are present to rapidly advance toward the constitution of a purely Latin American and Caribbean regional organization, comprising and representing the 33 independent nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Afghanistan: Special note. Lessons from the PBS show, Frontline, titled Behind Taliban Lines.
The first-hand video by Najibullah Quraishi is worth viewing on the PBS home page where it was posted today. Quraishi accepted an invitation by a Hizbe Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) commander to live with a HIG anti-government fighting unit in Baghlan Province. Until the arrival of two men from Pakistan on his tenth day, he had unrestricted permission to video record the fighters.
During his ten days with the fighters, they attacked once. Their primary task was to detonate two homemade bombs on an improved road and destroy “enemy” vehicles.
A few points are worth noting.
Identification of the force. First, this video is the first open source medium to identify the affiliation of the fighters in Baghlan Province, a northern province south of Konduz that has experienced a rise in fighting in the past two years. They are not Taliban, but they are Pashtuns. They called themselves the Central Group, in the sense of the leadership or coordinating group, though no significant coordination with other groups took place in the ten days.
Leadership. The video confirmed that the Central Group is led by a local man and at least some of its members were locals. They were protected or given refuge by villagers who formed for the camera at least a part time militia that claim to support the Central Group.
Walk to work. It also showed that the men walk to their attack sites, sometimes six to ten kilometers. Vehicles in this video were for courier duties or for travel to meetings, to get guns and so on. The HIG are bureaucratic and decentralized.
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times (Syndicated)
Full Story Online
WASHINGTON — The nation's main counterterrorism center, created in response to the intelligence failures in the years before Sept. 11, is struggling because of flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes, according to a new study financed by Congress.
The result, the study concludes, is a lack of coordination and communication among the agencies that are supposed to take the lead in planning the fight against terrorism, including the C.I.A. and the State Department.
Google execs convicted in Italy for Down syndrome video
MILAN (Reuters) – A Milan court convicted three Google Inc executives on Wednesday for violating the privacy of an Italian boy with Down's syndrome by letting a video of him being bullied be posted on the site in 2006.
Phi Beta Iota: The Italians made a mistake. Instead of using the video to aggressively convict the bullies of the Down's syndrome boy, they are shooting the messenger. This is just as ignorant and ill-advised as the police trying to criminalize Twitter texts and cell phone video of police brutality. The right of the people to bear witness cannot be undermined by the courts, IOHO.
Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace
A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.
Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
Phi Beta Iota: This is righteous, but as Howard Bloom addresses in Global Brain, it will taqke 50 years and it will not achieve the intended result until the children who START with this are adults in power. In the meantime, the adults in power who are both digitally and ideologically impaired, will continue to favor war to profit the few over peace to provide prosperity to the many.
KABUL — On their first day of class in Afghanistan, the new U.S. intelligence analysts were given a homework assignment.
First read a six-page classified military intelligence report about the situation in Spin Boldak, a key border town and smuggling route in southern Afghanistan. Then read a 7,500-word article in Harper's magazine, also about Spin Boldak and the exploits of its powerful Afghan border police commander.
The conclusion they were expected to draw: The important information would be found in the magazine story. The scores of spies and analysts producing reams of secret documents were not cutting it.
“They need help,” Capt. Matt Pottinger, a military intelligence officer, told the class. “And that's what you're going to be doing.”
The class that began Friday in plywood hut B-8 on a military base in Kabul marked a first step in what U.S. commanders envision as a major transformation in how intelligence is gathered and used in the war against the Taliban.
Last month, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, published a scathing critique of the quality of information at his disposal. Instead of understanding the nuances of local politics, economics, religion and culture that drive the insurgency, he said, the multibillion-dollar industry devoted nearly all its effort to digging up dirt on insurgent groups.
“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” he wrote in a paper co-authored by Pottinger and another official and published by the Center for a New American Security.
Phi Beta Iota: DoD mind-set time lags are quite consistent with those of other bureaucracies. They are just 21 years late. See the two original publications below:
and so on…..sadly, DoD is still in lip service mode and is about to implode DIOSPO. In Ripley's “Believe It Or Not” column, the joint briefing created by Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele, with help from loyal frustrated DoD personnel who do want to get it right, has not been read and is not being acted on. If anyone is interested, see both briefings here:
