Rawalpindi (Pakistan): In his quest for the truth about his country's most notorious guest, Shaukat Qadir started where it all ended: the room where Osama bin Laden was killed.
Last August, Mr. Qadir, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier, retraced the steps of the American commandos who stormed through the corridors of Bin Laden's hide-out on May 2.
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Mr. Qadir passed a body outline that marked the spot where Bin Laden's 22-year-old son, Khalid, was shot dead. Then he turned to a small room with a low ceiling, an empty wardrobe and a tight cluster of bullets holes in one wall, he said. Above that, on the ceiling, was a fading splash of blood that, his Pakistani intelligence escort told him, belonged to Bin Laden.
“As a former soldier, I was struck by how badly the house was defended,” Mr. Qadir said in an interview. “No proper security measures, nothing high-tech – in fact, nothing like you would expect.”
When President George W. Bush was pretending to want to avoid a war on Iraq while constantly pushing laughably bad propaganda to get that war going, we had a feeling he was lying. After all, he was a Republican. But it was after the war was raging away that we came upon things like the Downing Street Minutes and the White House Memo.
Now President Barack Obama is pretending to want to avoid a war on Iran and to want Israel not to start one, while constantly pushing laughably bad propaganda to get that war going. We might suspect a lack of sincerity, given the insistence that Iran put an end to a program that the U.S. government simultaneously says there is no evidence exists, given the increase in free weapons for Israel to $3.1 billion next year, given the ongoing protection of Israel at the U.N. from any accountability for crimes, given the embrace of sanctions highly unlikely to lead to anything other than greater prospects of war, and given Obama's refusal to take openly illegal war “off the table.” We might suspect that peace was not the ultimate goal, except of course that Obama is a Democrat.
Syria: Deputy Oil Minister Abdo Hussameddin announced his resignation and departure from the Ba'ath Party to side with the opposition against President Al-Asad's regime. If confirmed, he would be the highest-ranking official to defect, and the third member of the administration to do so. A video of his declaration was posted on YouTube and repeated around the world.
Comment: Most news outlets reported this man as the highest-level official to defect, which means very little. A lengthy search showed the man was a Baath Party member for a long time, but failed to discover whether the defector was a Christian, Druze, Sunni, Alawite or member of another group. The implications of the defection hinge largely on details not available in the public domain.
Syria celebrated the 49th anniversary of the Syrian coup by Hafez al-Asad on 8 March 1963. Revolution Day is 8 March.
Correction: The place names cited by the Red Crescent official and reported in the 7 March edition of NightWatch are governates, not cities and towns. Syria has 14 governates – often translated as provinces – which administer 61 districts.
It is important to enter an instability problem at the right level, meaning at the level of political organization that provides diagnostic and prognostic results. The international press persists in describing unrest in terms of governates. Entering the instability problem at this level results in distorted narratives and exaggerated reports about the strength of the opposition and the weakness of the government.
Readers are justified in wondering why the government in Damascus has not collapsed. The reason is that the government is not now and has never been threatened by a governate-level insurrection. The fight is in local neighborhoods and most are on the political or geographic periphery of the governates, posing little threat to central authority.
Syria is about the size of North Dakota, according to the CIA World Factbook, with a few differences. Syria has 61 districts which more or less correspond to North Dakota's 53 counties. North Dakota's counties, however, are not organized into governates or provinces.
Syria supports more than 22.5 million people in the same space that North Dakota supports just under 700,000, but with a lot less water. North Dakota has no cities as populous as Syria's Homs which contains over a million people. North Dakota has no sea ports or borders with hostile enemy states.
NightWatch has sought to enter the Syrian instability problem at the district or sub-district level so as to guard against bias and get finer ground truth granularity about just what is happening in Syrian neighborhoods.
For example, a careful survey shows that today the Free Syrian Army and its supporting web sites posted situation reports indicating that this force engaged in six operations in five different governates on 7 March. Several were exchanges of gunfire in which no one was injured and one was erection of a roadblock, in a territory the size of North Dakota.
This data supports leaked information attributed to US intelligence persons that there isn't much of a Free Syrian Army. There is unrest in Syria, but there really isn't much of an insurgency. For the purposes of comparison, in Iraq in 2006, more than 300 firefights occurred daily. In Afghanistan last spring, there were around 50 firefights daily and hundreds of incidents involving makeshift explosives.
Syrian security forces were busy. Opposition sources reported dozens of activities in nine of the 14 governates. A closer look showed that the activities were concentrated in about a dozen of the 61 districts.
Nine governates sounds like a big insurrection. Unrest in 12 districts presents a far more manageable security problem than nine governates supposedly out of control, but in fact not. No governates are out of control and apparently neither are any of the 61 districts.
A still finer focus showed that most of the opposition activities were small, brief street demonstrations (which were not further defined), according to the opposition's own postings. There were no clashes except as noted above; no bombings and no terror attacks on 7 March.
Most of the government operations were local neighborhood sweeps that encountered no resistance. Other reported government actions included over flights of aircraft, some vague armor movements and shelling. The opposition sources that posted the reports were not careful to distinguish whether the operations were by law enforcement and police personnel, paramilitary militias or the Syrian armed forces. Most were attributed to “thugs,” which suggests the paramilitary militias.
Unfortunately the sources also were not specific about which sub-districts or neighborhoods were under stress from government operations. Each of the 61 Syrian districts has multiple sub-districts what are called, nawahi. It is not yet possible to track activity at the nawahi level, but it would show a more fine grained definition of the status of the instability problem in Syria.
Phi Beta Iota: CNN and BBC both appear to be taking direction from US covert operations / media influence staffs. Both appear unintelligent and dishonest. We hold NIGHTWATCH and its editor in the highest regard, consistently superior to the larger organizations that lack both intelligence and integrity. We note with interest that the Syrian Diaspora and the crisis mapping communities are relatively silent on this matter.
1. When you're setting a record for the longest modern war, cutting it short just increases the chances of somebody breaking your record some day.
2. When Newt Gingrich, Cal Thomas, and Lindsey Graham turn against a war, keeping it going will really confuse Republicans.
3. If we pull U.S. troops out after they have shot children from helicopters, kicked in doors at night, waved Nazi flags, urinated on corpses, and burned Korans it will look like we're sorry they did those things.
4. U.S. tax dollars have been funding our troops, and through payments for safe passage on roads have also been the top source of income for the Taliban. Unilaterally withdrawing that funding from both sides of a war at the same time would be unprecedented and could devastate the booming Afghan economy.
5. The government we've installed in Afghanistan is making progress on its torture program and drug running and now supports wife beating. But it has not yet mandated invasive ultrasounds. We cannot leave with a job half-finished, not on International Women's Day.
6. We have an enormous prison full of prisoners in Afghanistan, and closing it down would distract us from our essential concentration on pretending to close Guantanamo.
7. Unless we keep “winning” in Afghanistan it will be very hard to generate enthusiasm for our wars in Syria and Iran. And with suicide the top killer of our troops, we cannot allow our men and women to be killing themselves in vain.
8. If we ended the war that created the 2001 authorization to use military force, how would we justify our special forces operations in over 100 other countries, the elimination of habeas corpus, or the legalization of murdering U.S. citizens? Besides, if we stay a few more years we might find an al Qaeda member.
9. A few hundred billion dollars a year is a small price to pay for weapons bases, a gas pipeline, huge profits for generous campaign funders, and a perfect testing ground for weapons that will be absolutely essential in our next pointless war.
Back in 2002 while I was at a major Command, Friedman made a pitch to provide “ground truth” intelligence on contract. While some folks went gaga over his presentation, there were many small indicators that all was not well. Apparently Friedman was asked to leave LSU for reasons undetermined. Offically, according to STRATFOR ” In 1997, a small company that would eventually grow into Stratfor—called Strategic Intelligence LLC—left Baton Rouge and LSU, where its founder George Friedman had been a professor. A 1999 profile in Texas Monthly said the company “couldn't thrive” in Baton Rouge, and that's why Friedman took it to Austin, where it blossomed into a global powerhouse.”
Reasoning heard on the street by colleagues active in San Antonio, he was bankrolled by Mossad and they wanted him in an area of hightech.
I have read his comments about OSS and you specifically; his arrogance is unbelievable. His “analysts” are currently UT-Austin students with a couple of “seasoned veterans”, none of whom have an intelligence
background.
He has been described as a neocon and I think that fits. From where I sit, I think STRATFOR is finished, they are trying very hard to regain their client base….with little success…
Huh? Here are Mini-Me's post-November 2012 nightmare events:
01 End of all federal grants to all universities
02 By law, all option years on all federal contracts eliminated.
03 30% federal employee Reduction in Force (RIF)
04 Industrial chemical accident of historic proportions (e.g. the really really big rusted chlorine tank above the NJ Turnpike right outside NYC blows)
05 One of NYC's two 1920's water mains blows, followed by a firestorm
06 Our own biological agent used (Forced Population Reduction) across the poorest sectors of the south (“useless eaters” according to Henry Kissinger).
07 Radiological event (dirty bomb) closes down a major transit hub for the next 20 years. Having fun yet?
We live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable, and the potential for an event that could cause “sudden change” to the U.S. economy is greater than ever.
There are dozens of potentially massive threats that could easily push the U.S. economy over the edge during the next 12 months. A war in the Middle East, a financial collapse in Europe, a major derivatives crisis or a horrific natural disaster could all change our economic situation very rapidly.
In the list below, you will find some “sudden change” events that are somewhat likely and some that are quite unlikely. I have tried to include a broad range of potential “black swan events”, but there are certainly dozens more massive threats that could potentially be listed. (List only — links and text at the article.
01 War with Syria
02 War with Iran
03 Disorderly Greek Debt Default
04 Economic Collapse in Spain
05 Price of Gasoline
06 Student Loan Debt Bubble
07 State and Local Debt Crisis
08 Collapse of a Major US Bank
09 Derivatives Crisis (Credit Swaps Collapse)
10 Fall of the Japanese Economy (and government)
11 A Solar Megastorm (1 in 8 chance)
12 Major West Coast Earthquake and/or Volcanic Eruption
13 Tornado Damage to Major US Cities
14 Severe Drought in the United States
15 Asteroid Strike in February 2013
Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday explained why it's legal to murder people — not to execute prisoners convicted of capital crimes, not to shoot someone in self-defense, not to fight on a battlefield in a war that is somehow legalized, but to target and kill an individual sitting on his sofa, with no charges, no arrest, no trial, no approval from a court, no approval from a legislature, no approval from we the people, and in fact no sharing of information with any institutions that are not the president. Holder's speech approached his topic in a round about manner:
“Since this country’s earliest days, the American people have risen to this challenge – and all that it demands. But, as we have seen – and as President John F. Kennedy may have described best – ‘In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.'”
Holder quotes that and then immediately rejects it, claiming that our generation too should act as if it is in such a moment, even if it isn't, a moment that Holder's position suggests may last forever:
“Half a century has passed since those words were spoken, but our nation today confronts grave national security threats that demand our constant attention and steadfast commitment. It is clear that, once again, we have reached an ‘hour of danger.'
“We are a nation at war. And, in this war, we face a nimble and determined enemy that cannot be underestimated.”
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Mr. Qadir passed a body outline that marked the spot where Bin Laden's 22-year-old son, Khalid, was shot dead. Then he turned to a small room with a low ceiling, an empty wardrobe and a tight cluster of bullets holes in one wall, he said. Above that, on the ceiling, was a fading splash of blood that, his Pakistani intelligence escort told him, belonged to Bin Laden.
