The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Attached herewith is an important essay on the long term implications of Netanyahu – Obama spectacle of late May. The Author, William R. Polk, has kindly given granted me permission to distribute it.
Read preliminary comment and full text of William Polk's
Obama and Palestine
What will make Obama willing to move on the issue?
Several issues here: (1) Afghan cultural issues may frustrate success no matter how capable or industrious the military CI agents are or what techniques they may propose; (2) except for a few small and specialized strategic units, military CI is pretty unsophisticated; (3) even though military CI is pretty primitive, we're not exactly overstocked in that particularly skill set; (4) in the case of Air Force and Navy, CI agents are also conventional criminal investigators and that never bodes well from a CI perspective.
U.S. Sending Training Agents To Afghanistan To Stem Infiltration Of Local Forces
By Ray Rivera and Eric Schmitt
New York Times, June 11, 2011, Pg. 8
KABUL, Afghanistan — Concerned over the growing pattern of Afghan soldiers and police officers attacking their coalition counterparts, the American military is sending 80 counterintelligence agents to Afghanistan to help stem the threat of Taliban infiltration in the Afghan National Security Forces, military officials said Friday.
Phi Beta Iota: Sending 80 alleged counterintelligence specialists at this late date (mostly enlisted, none with language or foreign culture skills) is worse than a joke, it is a clear indication that the flag officers in charge of the mess have no intention of leaving and also have no clue. This is bad theater at best.
SHORT URL for this Post:
http://www.tinyurl.com/DrakeWins
Settlement Reached in Thomas Drake “Leak” Case
June 10th, 2011 by Steven Aftergood
In a whirlwind conclusion to the prosecution of former National Security Agency official Thomas A. Drake, Mr. Drake agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “exceeding authorized use of a computer.”
Prosecutors were unable to sustain any of the felony counts against Mr. Drake that were contained in last year’s ten-count indictment, including charges of unauthorized retention of classified material under the Espionage Act of 1917.
A copy of the June 9, 2011 plea agreement is here.
Mr. Drake had been suspected of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the press, though he was not specifically charged with that offense, and he denied committing it.
Much of the case was conducted behind closed doors and off the public record, so many intriguing aspects of its ultimate resolution remain obscure for the time being. But it seems clear that the Obama Administration misjudged the merits of its case against Drake, pursuing minor infractions with disproportionate zeal.
Meanwhile, Mr. Drake’s legal team, public defenders James Wyda and Deborah L. Boardman, did a superb job of defending their client in a challenging legal environment. Drake’s supporters at the Government Accountability Project managed to win a remarkable degree of public sympathy and support for a supposed felon.
Speaking of disproportionate zeal, I wrote last Monday that there was “no possibility” of avoiding trial on June 13. Consider this a correction.
See related coverage in the Washington Post, Politico, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, AP, MSNBC and Emptywheel.
Phi Beta Iota: We are very pleased that Mr. Drake, who is on record about being uncompromising with the truth, has in essence–with some serious help from legal professionals with integrity–buried the unethical Department of Justice and National Security Agency attempt to intimidate, railroad, and destroy one of the few senior executives with the balls to challenge the incestuous pathologically mis-managed mess we call an “intelligence” community. As Congressman Ron Paul puts it, “lying is not patriotic.” We all swear an oath to support the Constitution, and from where we sit, Mr. Drake upheld his oath, and senior officials at Justice and NSA violated their oaths of office–not surprisingly, but reprehensible never-the-less. “Integrity” is the most frequently searched for term on this web site, and rightly so: without integrity, intelligence is not achievable.
“First Joint U.S.-Russia Assessment of Nuclear Terror Threat”
Study Warns of Multiple Dangers, Calls for Urgent Action
June 6, 2011
Belfer Center Programs or Projects: The US-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism
Phi Beta Iota: This is a good initiative, something we should have been doing for decades. However, it does not go far enough. No such study can be credible without the participation of Brazil, China, Iran, Israel, and Pakistan, as well as major “interested parties” such as South Africa and Turkey. In short, we are long over-due for a Multinational Decision-Support Centre that does M4IS2 on all topics.
US and its allies assist will be using neoliberal economic policies to make sure new Arab governments stay in line.
Al Jazerra, 08 Jun 2011
EXTRACT:
But as US action around the world aimed at eliminating the recently won right to self-determination for the peoples of Asia and Africa under the guise of “Western democracy” fighting “totalitarian communism”, which left a trail of millions murdered by the US and its allies (starting with Korea and moving to the Congo, to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and from Guatemala to Brazil to Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Chile, to Southern Africa and the Middle East), the cruel US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade have hardly changed this anti-democratic trend. Yet two important victories are always touted by supporters of US foreign policy on the democratic front: namely, the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing “democratisation” of Eastern Europe, and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. The US hopes that its policies in both places will guide it to achieve similar ends for those uprisings of the Arab world that it cannot crush.
Joseph Massad is Associate Professor for Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.
Read complete lengthy historical and moral review….
See Also:
Continue reading “Critique of Western “Model” & “Plans” for Arabia”
Revelations of secret bombing in Yemen bring President Obama closer to Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon and their secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War than is appropriate for any Nobel Peace Laureate. How many wars is this President going to start? As many as the American people will allow.
Der Spiegel reports that the Pentagon released the remaining papers of the Pentagon Papers while admitting that lies were told about the war. We know that. But here it is from them. The four volumes of the Gravel Papers can be accessed through Der Spiegel by clicking on the link below. How many more lies will the U.S. government tell the American people and the international community? As many as the American people will allow.
Are NATO's allies child soldiers? Isn't that against the law? So what else is new with this war? How long will war crimes and crimes against humanity be committed by NATO? As long as the American people allow these crimes to be committed.
Please see these:
1. Libyan rebel group sells first oil to U.S.
2. Hedge funds ‘grabbing land' in Africa
3. Children work with weapons to aid Libya's rebels
Silence is the deadliest weapon of mass destruction.
This blaster is intended to bring two very important reports and a short third report to your attention. The three should be thought about together.
1 is an essay by Robert Parry Consortium News. It is an excellent summary of the last 10 years of perpetual war and the debacle wrought by the Neoconmen. It also explains why these wars are now un-winnable and how President Obama has walked merrily into the Aftrap and is being set up as the fall guy to the Neconmen's debacle. (My essay, which appeared in the Jan-Feb issue of Challenge, explaining the domestic politics underpinning the Pentagon's need for perpetual war can be found here.)
2 is a more narrowly focused but deeply disturbing essay in Counterpunch by Gareth Porter, who reports on a recent book by Saleem Shahzad, the distinguished Pakistani journalist whose body was found outside Islamabad last week. As Porter explains, Shahzad has laid out how Al Qaeda, especially Dr. Ayman Zawahiri (the brains of the outfit), laid out a strategy that played President Bush (and his fellow travellers) like like a violin. Porter describes how the name of the game has been to dupe the cowboys in America to overreact to generate blowback in the Muslim word. He explains why Zawahiri wants the US mucking around in Afghanistan. But Belogolova's report does raise a valid concern. If Shahzad is right in his assessment of Zawahiri, the good Dr must be laughing his rocks off … because from his perspective, Afghanistan may turn out to be the gift that keeps on giving.
3 is Olga Belogolova's report on a new Senate study in the 8 June issue of National Journal …. She tells the reader that the Senate report suggests we can not even leave Afghanistan without collapsing the economy. This is kind of thinking can be used as yet another pretext for signing up to Zawahiri's script of the U.S. staying in Afghanistan forever, enraging the Muslim world — and in the near term for scaring Obama into not withdrawing significant forces in July as he has promised to do. I am not so sure this concern over the economic effects of reducing aid is that important. If so much of the aid money goes into the swamp of corruption, a large part of the collapse may be related to corruption. Is eliminating the honey pot stoking corruption that bad for the Afghan people (or the Americans for that matter)? Will Afghanistan really collapse? Who knows? But I doubt it.
The real subject of these essays, however is the sorry state of the United States and its political elites who are either working for the benefit of other countries (i.e., see Parry's discussion of the Neoconmen and Israel) or are brain dead strategists in Versailles on the Potomac, who, as we used to say in the Pentagon, “went for the cape — right off the cliff.” An now the numbskulls who got the United States into these messes are suggesting we must stay the course. Which brings us back to the Colonel's lament in my last blaster.
Chuck Spinney
La Ciotat, France
Phi Beta Iota: Integrity might be lost at the top, but it is the failure of integrity among all ranks that enables the corruption at the top to persist. We swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the chain of command, but all of our officers, with few exceptions, appear at this time to be in violation of their oath to the Constitution.
