Category: Key Players

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Berto Jongman: Terrorists’ Psywar Strikes Fear From Middle East To Mindanao

04 Inter-State Conflict, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Military
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Terrorists' Psywar Strikes Fear From Middle East To Mindanao

The Ramadan holiday is done and the threat to U.S. diplomats in most of the middle east is over.  Or at least they can return to their embassies and consulates with enough confidence to think the Al Qaeda bombers are not going to strike right away and anyway they’ll be safe and secure behind their barricades.

Al Qaeda, though, is the winner, having made clear their psywar strategy works. They can strike fear among Americans, and others, merely by sending out messages for the U.S. intelligence machine to monitor and distribute with dire warnings.

Meanwhile, from disputed borders between India and Pakistan in Kashmir to the middle east, terrorists of one stripe or another, maybe Al Qaeda,  maybe the Taliban, maybe lesser groups inspired by them, go on in a wave of killings to which there seems no end. A splurge of slaughter in Iraq over the final Ramadan weekend, normally a time for joy and celebration, showed the failure of the hundreds of billions invested there and the tens of thousands of lives lost. Now U.S. forces face frustration in Afghanistan — and President Obama warily avoids a serious commitment to still more mayhem in Syria.

In this cauldron of suffering, it’s gone largely unnoticed that the U.S. ever so slowly is on the verge of expanding a commitment to the Philippines from which enormous U.S. navy and air bases had to shut down in the early 1990′s after the Philippines refused to extend the bases agreement in a surge of anti-Americanism. The Philippines faces a local version of the type of militant forces that are plaguing the middle east and Pakistan. That’s on top of worries about China’s claims to the entire South China Sea, including islands and shoals that are clearly Philippine territory.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Terrorists' Psywar Strikes Fear From Middle East To Mindanao”

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Berto Jongman: Cover-Up on Iraqui Birth Defects Continues — World Health Organization Under Scrutiny

07 Health, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Non-Governmental
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

The WHO must release report on Iraqi birth defects now

The indefinite postponement of the World Health Organisation's report is alarming scientists and activists

Al Jazeera, 11 Aug 2013 13:28

Mozhgan Savabieasfahani

Dr Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a native of Iran, is an environmental toxicologist based in Michigan. She is the author of over two dozen peer reviewed articles and the book, Pollution and Reproductive Damage (DVM 2009).

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Large parts of the Middle East are now contaminated with war pollutants.

In Iraq, war debris continues to wear away and erode populated cities. Such debris includes the wreckage of tanks and armoured vehicles, trucks and abandoned military ammunitions, as well as the remains of bombs and bullets. Left unabated, the debris will act as dangerous toxic reservoirs; releasing harmful chemicals into the environment and poisoning people who live nearby.

Today, increasing numbers of birth defects are surfacing in many Iraqi cities, including Mosul, Najaf, Fallujah, Basra, Hawijah, Nineveh, and Baghdad. In some provinces, the rate of cancers is also increasing. Sterility, repeated miscarriages, stillbirths and severe birth defects – some never described in any medical books – are weighing heavily on Iraqi families.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Cover-Up on Iraqui Birth Defects Continues — World Health Organization Under Scrutiny”

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Berto Jongman: What Do Afghan Insurgents Want?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Academia, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Deeds of Peace, Peace Intelligence
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Understanding Afghan Insurgents – Motivations, Goals, and the Reconciliation and Reintegration Process

Who Are They? What Do They Want? Why Do They Fight?

This paper presents the results of 78 in-depth interviews conducted with self-identified Afghan insurgents. If the interviewees are indeed representative of broader Taliban sentiments, then the future of Afghanistan is grim. It appears that only the return of a ‘pious’ Islamic government will satisfy them.

Download:  English (PDF · 84 pages · 1.0 MB)

Author: Andrew Garfield, Alicia Boyd

Series: FPRI Monographs and Essays Issue: 3

Publisher:  Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), Philadelphia, United States

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Chuck Spinney: White House Blows Iran — Again….

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 08 Proliferation, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

The Washington Jerkocracy Strikes Again

by Rami G. Khouri
Agence-Global, 07 Aug 2013
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.
 
BEIRUT — I would love to know who the jerk is who wrote the White House’s press statement on the occasion of the inauguration earlier this week of the new Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani. I say this is the work of a jerk, or a band of war-addicted zealots in Washington, D.C., because it seems designed to totally bury the opportunity that Rouhani represents to improve the wellbeing of Iranians and resolve Western-Iranian and Arab-Iranian tensions on a variety of important issues.
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Neal Rauhauser: Yemen’s Food & Water Crisis

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, 12 Water
Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

Yemen’s Food & Water Crisis

Yesterday I saw an article that indicated Yemen’s capitol, Sana’a, could be out of water in a decade. There were some shocking statistics in that article and in the ReliefWeb article that provided the above map.

40% of Yemen’s water is used to cultivate qat, which is labeled as a narcotic, but it’s effect is similar to that of milder amphetamines. Fully 75% of all Yemeni men use this drug, which is both legal in the eyes of the government and accepted under the laws of Islam. The drug is commonly used there, as well as in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

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Click on Image to Enlarge

Read full post with two more graphics.

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Marcus Aurelius: False Embassy Threat a Preamble to War? + Syria Islam Divide Iran Nuclear Israeli Insanity RECAP Update 1.1 — More Prison Breaks?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius

The retired Marine colonel who cued me to this report opined that, “This is a hell of a lot closer to the mark than any Administration or DoS blathering.”  I would be totally unsurprised to find him 100% spot-on.  I invite your attention to the final para, highlighted.  If that is true, the (in)actions of our government may have rendered us incapable, fiscally and operationally, of effective response.  Another Task Force Smith, another Kaserine Pass could be the foreseeable result.

Unmasking the embassy threat

Embassy closures are a signal of the rapidly escalated intervention in the region by the US

There is one thing certain about the publicized threat to our embassies; it is not what it is presented to be. To accept the official explanation of a nebulous threat from al Qaeda as the reason for closing our embassies across the Middle East and North Africa is being dangerously naive and simplistic.

This is much more serious than what we are being told, but not for the reasons we are being given. We are seeing the consequences of a long running “Cold War” on two major fronts of political conflict that could escalate into military engagement with proxy nations of world super powers. The world, and life as we know it, could change in an instant should we awaken one morning to the news of bombs flying across the Middle East. That is a very real possibility, as we are now in a heightened proxy war environment. We are standing in a thick forest of dry tinder, and the smallest of sparks could ignite a conflagration the likes of which we have never before seen.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: False Embassy Threat a Preamble to War? + Syria Islam Divide Iran Nuclear Israeli Insanity RECAP Update 1.1 — More Prison Breaks?”

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