Special NightWatch Comment: Mirror imaging is a serious analytical flaw. If things are not done their way, analysts are prone to consider them inferior or wrong. It manifests a dangerous, potentially lethal cultural bias.

This week US officers were quoted in international press, yet again, as accusing the Taliban of cowardice because they use improvised explosive devices and don't come out and fight like men. An odd taunt.

In the past nine years of fighting, the Taliban — who go to war wearing robes, sandals and turbans and fight mainly with assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades and IEDS — never accuse US soldiers of cowardice for wearing ceramic armor; riding in tanks and armored fighting vehicles; fighting from forts; using the most advanced artillery invented, helicopter gunships and fighter aircraft; relying on advanced communications, satellites, armed drones; and rotating out after a tour in the field.

The officers might drop the name calling and try to understand what motivates pre-modern men so ill equipped to continue to fight the most advanced military forces in the history of the world for nearly a decade.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: It is an honor and a privilege to read NIGHTWATCH. NIGHTWATCH commentaries, along with those by Chuck Spinney, Ralph Peters, and Robert Young Pelton, are among a handful of analytic commentaries that are consistently intelligent and honest. Few others can make this claim. “Strategic Decrepitude” has been joined by “Intellectual Decrepitude” among the ranks of those officers who would rather fight than think. Sun Tzu would call them assured losers….losers who are enablers of the ideological idiots who lie to the public and betray the public trust. In combination, the lack of integrity by both parties robs the Republic of blood, treasure, and spirit.

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

2010/10/02

Journal: US Government Funding the Taliban…

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Officers Call

David Isenberg

Author, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq

Taliban to PSC: How May We Serve You?

Today we have news straight out of Mario Puzo. It seems the Taliban made local Afghan private security contractors an offer they could not refuse.

Yesterday the Inspector General's office at the U.S. Agency for International released a report that found that millions of dollars in American taxpayer funds may have been paid to Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan to provide security for a U.S. development project. The report says subcontractors hired to protect a development project near Jalalabad may have paid more than $5 million to the militants through local authorities.

Phi Beta Iota: INTEGRITY demands respect for reality. The U.S. Government is knowingly funding the Taliban as a “cost of doing business,” the “business” being the churning of the military-industrial complex–use everything up, wear everything out, so it has to be bought again new. This was done in Viet-Nam, and revisionist history is now showing that it was known that there would be a 50,000 US casualty cost beforehand. As long as the American public tolerates a two-party tyranny that excludes sane and sensible alternative candidates, and that allocates the taxpayer revenue behind closed doors and often without complying with the Constitution, the Republic will remain comatose.

CrisisWatch Report N°86, 1 October 2010

03 India, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, CrisisWatch reports

Seven actual or potential conflict situations around the world deteriorated and none improved in September 2010, according to the latest issue of the International Crisis Group's monthly bulletin CrisisWatch, released today.

Guinea saw increased political and ethnic divisions, exacerbated by controversies related to the presidential elections. Two days of violent clashes in the capital between rival supporters of the two presidential candidates, Alpha Conde and Cellou Diallo, left one person dead and dozens injured. Continued delays in the timing of the run-off and Diallo's rejection of the appointment of the election commission's new head led to further tensions between the two camps.

In Sri Lanka moves by President Rajapaksa to consolidate his power through a de facto constitutional coup transformed the political terrain. On 8 September the parliament passed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which gives the President nearly unbridled power by scrapping term limits on the presidency, abolishing the Constitutional Court and allowing the President to appoint directly officials to the judiciary, police and electoral bodies.

Continue reading “CrisisWatch Report N°86, 1 October 2010”

2010/10/012010/10/01

Journal: Henry Seigman on Israel’s Freeze Scam

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Government, Peace Intelligence

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends

Netanyahu's Freeze Scam

by Henry Siegman 30 Sep 2010

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks at the formal White House launching of the resumed Middle East peace talks on September 2 were the clearest indication yet of his lack of seriousness. But neither the host, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, nor any of the distinguished guests seemed aware of it. Indeed, they applauded his remarks. What they applauded was Netanyahu's dramatic declaration, as he faced Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, that the success of the resumed negotiations will depend on his own and Abbas' readiness to make “painful concessions” for the sake of peace.

If these words have any significance, they must mean that Netanyahu is prepared to make Israeli concessions that match Palestinian concessions: i.e., if Palestinians concede to Israel part of their territory east of the 1967 border, Israel would concede to the Palestinians comparable territory on its side of that border.

But everyone present at this festive White House event knew this to be completely untrue. Netanyahu has never offered to concede even one inch of Israeli territory to the Palestinians — not even from Palestinian territories Israel acquired in 1948 during its War of Independence, which the 1947 UN Partition Plan had assigned to Palestine's Arab population. In fact, no one has ever asked Israel to make any concession to the Palestinians — whether territory, water resources, Jerusalem or sovereignty. In respect to these and the other permanent-status issues, the concessions have all been demanded of the Palestinians. None were asked of Israel. So Netanyahu's offer of parallel Israeli concessions is a lie. Unless, of course, Netanyahu meant to apply the term “painful concessions” to his willingness to return to Palestinians a part of their own territory, all of which — up to the 1967 border — is universally recognized as being under Israeli occupation, and therefore subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention's strictures that absolutely forbid the transfer of the occupying power's population to those territories. If that is what he meant, what Netanyahu was telling Abbas is that Israel expects to be rewarded for returning some of the territory it unlawfully confiscated from the Palestinians by having Palestinians concede their right to the balance of that territory.

By getting the distinguished guests at this event to applaud this offer, Netanyahu can fairly be said to have done for international peace diplomacy what Bernard Madoff did for financial markets.

Read full article online…

Phi Beta Iota: Mr. Siegman is the Ambassador to Israel designate in the Huffington Post Virtual Cabinet. Here he presents FACTS that neither the White House nor the Department of State nor the US Intelligence Community appear capable of acknowledging. The US is an enabler of the atrocities perpetuated by Israel against the Palestinians.

2010/10/012010/10/01

Journal: Bin Laden, Dead or Alive, Makes Sense

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Bin Laden Tape: Terror Leader Criticizes Muslim Governments For Military Spending

CAIRO — Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden called for the creation of a new relief body to help Muslims in an audiotape released Friday, seeking to exploit discontent following this summer's devastating floods in Pakistan by depicting the region's governments as uncaring.

It was the third message in recent weeks from al-Qaida figures concerning the massive floods that affected around 20 million people in Pakistan, signaling a concentrated campaign by the terror group to tap into anger over the flooding to rally support.

But while the earlier messages by subordinates were angry, urging followers to rise up, bin Laden took a softer, even humanitarian tone – apparently trying to broaden al-Qaida's appeal by presenting his group as a problem-solving protector of the poor.

“What governments spend on relief work is secondary to what they spend on armies,” bin Laden says on the 11-minute tape titled “Reflections on the Method of Relief Work.”

“If governments spent (on relief) only one percent of what is spent on armies, they would change the face of the world for poor people,” he said

Read rest of story online…

Phi Beta Iota: We believe Bin Laden to be dead or comatose, but it merits comment that some people do take on a life of their own after death, as with many prophets whose messages are refined or corrupted, but carried on. What should shock and awe here is that this message makes a great deal more sense than the current US strategy of spending trillions on elective occupations and Wall Street bail-outs, and nothing at all on eight of the ten high-level threats to humanity, with stark poverty in the USA and elsewhere being #1.

Review: Collapse–How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

2010/10/012010/10/01

Journal: Kow-Towing to Israel for No Good Reason

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Government, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Sacrificing Substance for Process

Peace Process to Nowhere

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reports that President Obama begged Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend his settlement freeze in order to save the so-called peace talks.

As a quid pro quo, Obama is reported to have promised Netanyahu that (1) Israel could resume settlement construction if the peace negotiations failed to produce results and (2) that the United States would give Israel written assurances of its commitment to Israel’s security (suggesting a formal peace treaty perhaps?). Despite Obama’s desperation, Netanyahu blew Obama off and allowed the so-called freeze to expire.

If, as is likely, this report is true, Israel has humiliated the United States once again — a fact that will no doubt be deemed irrelevant by Israel’s shills on both sides of the aisle in Congress, not to mention the mainstream media.

The last president to stand up to Israel was Dwight Eisenhower, when he pulled the plug on the second Arab-Israeli war in 1956 and forced Israel to retreat from the east bank of the Suez Canal and to give up its conquest of the Sinai.

But eleven years later, Israel learned US condemnation was no longer a problem.

In fact, Israel learned it could get away with murder and could treat the United States with utter contempt when (1) its air and naval forces not only attacked the USS Liberty — a high priority US Navy signals intelligence ship — on 8 June 1967 during the Six-Day War, killing 34 and wounding 171 US sailors, but (2) was able to secure a cover up of its perfidy by the highest levels of the US government, including President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and most of the senior military officers in the Pentagon, despite the misgivings of Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State and Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (neither of whom chose to resign in protest, however).

Read rest of article…

Phi Beta Iota: As has been reported on more than one occasion, even when Israel “promises” to stop settlements, they continue apace. The Israeli government cannot be trusted on any detail.

2010/09/302010/09/30

Journal: Israelis Executed US Citizen & Five Others

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Government, Military, Officers Call

UN Fact-Finding Mission: Israeli Killing Of US Citizen Was “Execution”

Originally published in Truth-out

By Gareth Porter

The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.

Category: Key Players

Reference: Enemies are Brave, Not Cowards

Journal: US Government Funding the Taliban…

David Isenberg

Taliban to PSC: How May We Serve You?

CrisisWatch Report N°86, 1 October 2010

Journal: Henry Seigman on Israel’s Freeze Scam

Journal: Bin Laden, Dead or Alive, Makes Sense

Journal: Kow-Towing to Israel for No Good Reason

Journal: Israelis Executed US Citizen & Five Others