Category: 09 Justice

Posted on

America’s Next War: Southwest Border–Both Sides

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Immigration, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Government, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence

Phi Beta Iota: Most of the weapons being used by the cartels do NOT come from US gun shops.  They come from the Latin American militaries who have received large shipments of “older” weapons and ammunition from the US, and then turned around and sold them to the cartels.  Just as the US is indirectly funding the Taliban in Afghanistan, it is indirectly enabling the cartels with weapons.  Furthermore, to imagine that with the money they have the cartels cannot “order in” anything they wish from the Chinese, Israeli, or Russian arsenals, is naive in the extreme.  As many or more are dying violent deaths every day in this region as in Iraq or Afghanistan.  In our view, the current era of politicians (1981-date) is going to be held accountable for four major strategic blunders, all of them deliberate:

1.  Elective invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq on top of irresponsible military cuts and acquisition pathologies

2.  Willful acceptance from Bush Senior onwards of the willful destruction of the US economy for the benefit of a few led by Goldman Sachs, Citi-Bank, and Morgan

3.  Ignoring the depth and extent of the Southwest Border instability and threat to local communities

4.  Ignoring the imminent clean water crisis across the entire region as well as across America

On The Southwest Border (Photo Essay) (Latin America News Dispatch)

Posted by Molly OToole on Sep 15th, 2010

These photographs were taken on an 852-mile, 72-hour trip across the Southwest border, from San Diego, California to Arizona and back. Many citizens from the United States and Mexico have never seen the line that divides and defines their countries, marked by walls, barbed wire fences, U.S. Border Patrol checks and, increasingly, controversy.

2010 National Drug Threat Assessment: Southwest Border Smuggling and Violence

GAO: Border fence lagging, over budget, Home Security mismanaged project, report says (Washington Times, 24 October 2010)

Napolitano visits San Diego, says border is more secure from cartels (Los Angeles Times,October 18, 2010)

Time for U.S. to get serious about cartel threat (MySanAntonio, 16 October 2010)

Cartel Threat Grows, Illegal Numbers Drop (Homeland Security Today, 6 October 2010)

Pirate Lake: Mexican Bandits Terrorizing American Boaters on the Border (FOX.News, 4 October 2010)

Governor Perry Releases Statement on Border Violence (KRGV.com Texas, 2 October 2010)

SECURE BORDER INITIATIVE DHS Needs to Address Testing and Performance Limitations That Place Key Technology Program at Risk (GAO-10-158 January 2010)

Secure Border Initiative: SBInet Expenditure Plan Needs to Better Support Oversight and Accountability (GAO-07-309 February 15, 2007)

See Also:

Continue reading “America's Next War: Southwest Border–Both Sides”

Posted on

Reference: How Goldman Sachs Looted America

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Amazon Page

Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's ‘Griftopia'

Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He showed us how Goldman Sachs, that “great vampire squid,” played a central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America , due out from Spiegel & Grau on November 2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

Read the exclusive Griftopia excerpt.

Posted on

Journal: Violating Our Troops, Violating Others, Violating We

03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Military, Officers Call
Chuck Spinney Recommends

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Way We Treat Our Troops

By BOB HERBERT

Published: October 22, 2010

You can only hope that the very preliminary peace efforts in Afghanistan bear fruit before long. But for evidence that the United States is letting its claim to greatness, and even common decency, slip through its fingers, all you need to do is look at the way we treat our own troops.

The idea that the United States is at war and hardly any of its citizens are paying attention to the terrible burden being shouldered by its men and women in uniform is beyond appalling.

Bob Herbert

We can get fired up about Lady Gaga and the Tea Party crackpots. We’re into fantasy football, the baseball playoffs and our obsessively narcissistic tweets. But American soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land? That is such a yawn.

I would bring back the draft in a heartbeat. Then you wouldn’t have these wars that last a lifetime. And you wouldn’t get mind-bending tragedies like the death of Sgt. First Class Lance Vogeler, a 29-year-old who was killed a few weeks ago while serving in the Army in his 12th combat tour. That’s right, his 12th — four in Iraq and eight in Afghanistan.

Read rest of this article….

Posted on

Journal: Is Israel’s Infamy Obama’s Third Strike?

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, 12 Water, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off...

Pusillanimity or Hypocrisy or Both

Memo to Obama: Three Strikes and You're Out

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

I believe Obama's schtick during his campaign for president was to subtly encourage his adversaries to impale themselves of the horns of their own contradictions.  This kind of strategy can be particularly effective in the all-important moral dimension of an election, or indeed, any other kind of conflict. To be sure, Obama had the help of widespread disgust with Bush, as well as an exquisitely timed, terrible financial meltdown, but the parallels in his campaigns against Hillary Clinton and John McCain suggest he had an instinctive feel for gaining leverage by using what reformers in the Pentagon called the Motherhood and Mismatch, or M&M, strategy. (See my CounterPunch essay on that theme.) But to date, his strategy for governance has failed utterly to live up to that brilliance.  He blew at least two stunning opportunities that seemed designed in heaven for a decisive M&M strategy.  He capitulated to a morally bankrupt establishment by bailing out the banksters and then caving in to the insurance companies on health care reform.

Obama now has a third opportunity, and like his campaigns against Clinton and McCain, it is partly the result of his own making, be it accidental or deliberate.  As Ira Chernus shows in a persuasively argued 19 October essay, Israel's hypocrisy in the so-called peace process has reached stunning proportions.  The Palestinians are going out of their way to accommodate Israel in the so-called peace talks, but each time the Palestinians sell out their patrimony by caving in to a new Israeli demand — like recognizing Israel as a Jewish state as opposed to recognition of Israel per se, the Israelis up the ante by inserting poison pills aimed at queering any deal — like saying that settlement expansion in East Jerusalem will not be part of a settlement freeze because East Jerusalem is a part of Israel, a claim not recognized by international law, the United States, or Europe, and then acting as if Israel is the injured party.

Read balance of article….

Posted on

Journal: Nine Under-Reported Stories on Bank Fraud

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Media

Dan Froomkin

Dan Froomkin

froomkin@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

Nine Stories The Press Is Underreporting — Fraud, Fraud And More Fraud

If it wasn't already blindingly obvious that pervasive fraud was at the heart of the financial crisis and the ensuing foreclosure catastrophe, you would think that the latest news — that banks have routinely been lying their heads off in the rush to kick homeowners off the properties they fraudulently induced them to buy in the first place — would pretty much clinch it.

And yet the mainstream media still by and large hasn't connected the dots.

What we are seeing all around us are the continued effects of a vast criminal enterprise that has never been brought to account, employing a process that, as University of Texas economist James Galbraith explains, involved the equivalent of counterfeiting, laundering and fencing.

So the person with the right expertise to lead us here is a criminologist — in particular William K. Black, one of the few effective regulators in recent history (during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s), a notorious knocker of heads and currently professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the book, “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One”.

I first interviewed Black in April, and recently checked back in and asked him about this ongoing problem of the mainstream media's inability to properly cover this story. He responded with this breathless and breathtaking list of failings (slightly edited for publication):

WOW.   BRUTAL TRUTHS NOT NOT NOT BEING COVERED BY THE CORPORATE MEDIA.  Click to Read Original Nine. US Government passivity (one should say: collaboration in crime) is so deep as to be worthy of massive public outrage–if the story were known to the public….

Posted on

Journal: USG Cannot Control 7,000 of 8,000 Border Miles

08 Immigration, 09 Justice, 10 Security, Government, Law Enforcement

CNCNews.com Tuesday, October 19, 2010

By Edwin Mora

(CNSNews.com) – The U.S. government does not have “effective control” of 1,081 miles of the 1,954-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responsible for securing the border.

– – – – – – –

The Border Patrol, a division of CBP, is responsible for securing a total of 8,607 miles of the U.S. border. This includes all 1,954 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, approximately 4,000 miles of the U.S.-Canada border, plus sectors of coastline in the Gulf of Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

As of Sept. 30 (the end of fiscal year 2010), the Border Patrol had established “effective control” over 1,107 miles of the 8,607 miles it is responsible for securing, a CPB spokesperson told CNSNews.com on Monday.

Read Full Article Online….

Tip of the Hat to Jay DeArrastia at LinkedIn.

Posted on

Journal: Outside the Beltway ….

08 Immigration, 09 Justice, 10 Security, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement
Cheery Waves Recommends....

Pelosi, Boxer star in TV ad telling Latino voters “don't vote”

Unflattering photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Sen. Barbara Boxer and California Rep. Maxine Waters play a central role in a new TV commercial created by a Republican front group, telling Latino voters to stay home on Election Day.

The Spanish-language ads, entitled “No Votes” (“Don't Vote”), are sponsored by a Virginia-based group that calls itself “Latinos for Reform.”

Published reports indicate that the ads are the work of Robert Desposada, a Republican political consultant, former Republican National Committee director of Hispanic affairs and pundit on the Spanish language TV network Univision.

Imagine for a moment that the New York State Police are warning American boaters to steer clear of the Canadian side of Lake Ontario because they might fall victim to pirates.

Imagine that violent gangs armed with military weaponry created a no man's land along a portion of the border shared by the United States and Canada that challenged the sovereignty of both nations.

Would this for a moment be tolerable? Would the president of the United States or the leaders of Congress simply treat it as a regrettable yet acceptable border problem? Of course not. Yet residents of South Texas are expected to endure precisely this situation on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Read Rest of Article….