The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
Centre for Research on Globalization, 29 April 2011
EXTRACT:
As Ellen Brown has pointed out, first Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for dollars, shortly before each country was attacked.
Continue reading “Looting Libya: Insider View of Reasons for War….”
There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says
WIRED, May 25, 2011
You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says it’s worse than you’ve heard.
Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.
Phi Beta Iota: Further to our comment on Part I, we strongly believe the time has come to discontinue funding for the US Intelligence Community as a whole, beginning with the National Security Agency (NSA), which is in our view the most mis-managed and corrupt (as well as grotesquely expensive for lack of any reasonable return) part of the US Government. The fact that they are abusive of the Constitution and devoid of any common sense at all is the other half of their crime against humanity. An honest President actually interested in the public interest would create an Open Source Agency, and then on the basis of sound decision-support shareable with the public and Congress, cut the secret world as well as the defense and homeland security worlds by 20% each year for each of five years, restoring 10% each year to new initiatives that pass all common sense tests for need, relevance, and affordability. All it takes is INTEGRITY.
More that should never have been written
Wall Street Journal
May 23, 2011
Pg. 1
Spy, Military Ties Aided Bin Laden Raid
By Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes
In January, the chief of the military's elite special-operations troops accepted an unusual invitation to visit Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. There, Adm. William McRaven was shown, for the first time, photos and maps indicating the whereabouts of the world's most wanted man.
Adm. McRaven—one of the first military officers to be brought into the CIA's latest hunt for Osama bin Laden—offered a blunt assessment: Taking bin Laden's compound would be reasonably straightforward. Dealing with Pakistan would be hard.
A Wall Street Journal reconstruction of the mission planning shows that this meeting helped define a profound new strategy in the U.S. war on terror, namely the use of secret, unilateral missions powered by a militarized spy operation. The strategy reflects newfound trust between two traditionally wary groups: America's spies, and its troops.
The bin Laden strike was the strategy's “proof of concept,” says one U.S. official.
Continue reading “Wall Street Journal On Bin Laden Raid Planning”
U.S. seems to be getting good at killing Taliban, but why?
Friday, May 20, 2011 03:07 AM
BY GEORGIE ANNE GEYER
Columbus Dispatch
While the United States keeps trying to forget about Afghanistan, a new secret program in Afghanistan is quietly boasting of bringing about an end to the decade-long war.
The program is “kill/capture,” and it has been waged by the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, for the past year, with, according to PBS’s excellent Frontline, 3,000 operations in only the past 90 days.
Essentially, it sends special forces out in the dark of night into slumbering Afghan villages to force Taliban leaders out of their hiding places and then shoot them or capture them.
There is only one major problem: It appears rather too often that the American intelligence planners are not certain that the men they are killing or capturing are really Taliban. There is, of course, a larger question: Why are we killing and capturing Taliban when this war was supposed to be about al-Qaida?
Sacrificial Crowds and Radical Power: A Meditation
by Justin Rogers-Cooper, 19 May 2011
Advocate (CUNY Graduate Center)
In early January the BBC reported that Mohammad Bouazazi, a Tunisian college graduate who illegally sold fruits and vegetables in Sidi Bouzid, had died from his self-inflicted burns. He had set himself on fire by dousing his body with petrol when police confiscated his produce. He didn’t have the proper permits. Public protest had been rare in Tunisia before. When he died, the BBC reported that “a crowd estimated at 5,000 took part in his funeral.” The crowd chanted the same message together, out loud: “Farewell, Mohammad, we will avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused your death weep.”
Safety copy below the line–note ending on Bush-Obama “crowd control” plans.
Continue reading “Reflections on Tyranny versus Crowd Power”
This important essay by Robert Parry contextualizes Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's arrogant stuffing of President Obama, which took place after Obama gave a weak-kneed speech on the Middle East. If Parry is right, a really dirty game is in the offing.
And look at the banality of language that provoked Netanhahu: Obama's speech purported to analyze the implications of the Arab Revolt with an analysis that was viewed as being weak, inept, and self centered by some Arabs (e.g., see this cogent analysis of his language) as well as his goals for the pursuit in the Arab-Israeli peace process: namely a return to Israel's 1967 borders, with some land swaps, in return for the security of a Jewish state within these borders (a choice of language that may have been an attempt to appease Netanyahu*).
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*Mr. Obama's language was somewhat ambiguous when he said the primary Israeli-related goal of the peace process was to establish conditions for Israel as a Jewish state
and the homeland for the Jewish people.” But it does raise a question of whether he is acceding to the sectarian interpretation of a Jewish democracy demanded by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made recognition of Israel as aJewish nation-state a prerequisite for any final agreement with the Palestinians. This kind of sectarian definition in a democracy has unknowable ramifications for the non-Jewish minority making up 20% of Israel's citizens. For a discussion of this issue, see Isabel Kirshner, “Some Question the Existence of Israel as a Jewish State,” New York Times, 24 October 2010.
Netanyahu Sets Limits for Obama
This public rebuke raises questions about whether Netanyahu will now try to sink Obama’s reelection the way earlier Likud leaders undermined President Jimmy Carter
by Robert Parry, Consortium News, May 21, 2011
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Oval Office rebuke of U.S. President Barack Obama – and the Republicans’ immediate attempt to exploit the dispute to peel away Jewish voters – suggest that American politics may be in for a replay of Campaign 1980.
Continue reading “Carterizing Obama–Netanyhu Tells Him Off…”
20 May
China-Pakistan: Update. On the third day of Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani's visit to China – and the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations, China warned that any attack on Pakistan would be tantamount to an attack on China, The News reported.
After the US, China is emerging as the largest beneficiary from the death of bin Laden!
21 May
Pakistan: An improvised explosive device attack against a two-vehicle US government motorcade on 20 May in Peshawar, western Pakistan, killed one Pakistani and injured 10 others, the Islamabad government said. A suicide bomber executed the attack, according to the US Embassy. No Americans were injured, though a vehicle was damaged. The Tehrik-e-Taliban claimed responsibility.
Comment: This is one of several directions in which the Pakistani Taliban are moving to avenge the death of Usama bin Laden.
Pakistan-US: Pakistan's Punjab Province government has canceled 18 memoranda of understanding with the United States, The Nation reported 20 May, according to the province's law minister, Rana Sanaullah. Speaking on 19 May, he said the federal government should reject foreign aid, as the province has done, and adopt a policy of self-reliance. He said Punjab's ban on aid only applies to the United States and not China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and Turkey.
Comment: This is the first wave of a growing anti-American backlash. Pakistanis in the Army and civilians blame the US for driving bin Laden into Pakistan in the first place.
Americans in Pakistan must expect that Pakistani security forces will not protect them competently, will not respond in a timely fashion to requests for help and that emergency services will not arrive on time.
That is precisely the pattern of Pakistani official behavior when Pakistani rioters burned down the US Embassy in Islamabad after an Arab shooting crisis in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, that was blamed on the US. NightWatch was on duty that night in 1979. Pakistan Army troops are credited with having saved 100 US officials from the US Embassy, but that was after they and the police stood by and did nothing as the US Embassy burned and as a US Marine and another US official burned to death inside it. The British Embassy did more to rescue the 100 Americans than the Pakistanis.
The backlash against the “humiliation” of Pakistan is just beginning. The Tehrik-e-Taliban attack and the action of the Punjab provincial government are different manifestations of the same backlash, reminiscent of 1979. The American civilian community and US military personnel in Pakistan need to maintain special alert for the next few months. A drawdown of nonessential personnel – especially families with children — would be timely.
A period of re-evaluation and transition to a significantly modified and realigned Pakistani foreign policy is beginning. It will be much more hostile to the US.
