07 Other Atrocities – Page 417 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/11/27

Chuck Spinney: UK Dunkirk, USA Long Walk Away from Afghanistan – the Military-Industrial Scam is to “Reset, Rebuy, Retrench”

03 Economy, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

… How the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) Will Win By Losing

The old adage that it is easy to get into Afghanistan but painful to leave is true for many reasons — here is a big one described in 27 November issue of the Daily Mirror [also attached below] — the British army plans to use Russian railways, built by the Tsars 140 years ago, to return hundreds of millions of pounds worth of equipment in Afghanistan via a landroute to the English Channel.

If you think the horror described in the Daily Mirror report is bad, think about the US options: Given our deteriorating relations with Pakistan, the long, highly vulnerable land route out of Afghanistan, thru the Bolan and Khyber passes, and then down the road system of the Indus Valley in Pakistan to its port of Karachi, is becoming increasingly problematic.

An optional US exit strategy would be an agonizing variation of the Dunkirk option described in the Daily Mirror report plus a sea lift, perhaps via transshipment points in Black Sea ports, like Batumi in Georgia, or Novorossiysk or Sochi in southern Russia, or even Odessa in the Ukraine (which at least would avoid the problem of different railroad gauges).

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: UK Dunkirk, USA Long Walk Away from Afghanistan – the Military-Industrial Scam is to “Reset, Rebuy, Retrench””

2011/11/272011/11/27

Jon Lebkowsky: Three Reasons 1% Scared Shitless

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

The truth about OWS

Naomi Wolf in The Guardian: we hear that Occupy Wall Street has no clear message, but is it precisely because the dis-organization has a clear message, set of goals, and growing force that we’re seeing efforts to shut the 24/7 demonstrations down?

The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.

Click on Image to Enlarge

No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

Update: Joshua Holland at AlterNet says Naomi Wolf’s piece “takes an enormous leap away from any known facts to suggest that Congress is ordering cities to smash the Occupy Movement in order to preserve their own economic privilege.”

Photo by Lily Rothrock

Phi Beta Iota: It is not Congress that is ordering the leap; it is a combination of Wall Street/Goldman Sachs, Representative Peter King of New York/Michael Bloomberg, and the national security mafia using the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as its stalking horse. Congress is corrupt, inept, and incoherent.

2011/11/27

David Swansson: When the World Outlawed War – A Model for Occupy to Achieve Electoral Reform Act of 2012

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Articles & Chapters, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Deeds of Peace, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

When the World Outlawed War: An Interview with David Swanson

For those who know war only through television, criminalizing it sounds like proposing to criminalize government. But there was a time when the masses made war illegal.

Bruce E. Levine

Alternet, November 21, 2011

David Swanson’s recently released book, When the World Outlawed War, tells the story of how the highly energized peace movement in the 1920s, supported by an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens from every level of society, was able to push politicians into something quite remarkable—the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. The 1920s “War Outlawry” movement in the United States was so popular that most politicians could not afford to oppose it.

David Swanson, since serving as press secretary in Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, has emerged as one of the leading anti-war activists in the United States. While Swanson has fought against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to alert Americans to the fact that U.S. military spending is the source of most of our economic problems, his anti-war activism goes much deeper. He wants to stigmatize militarist politicians as criminals. In his previous book War is a Lie, Swanson made the case for the abolition of war as an instrument of national policy, and When the World Outlawed War provides an historical example of just how powerful war abolitionism can be.

Bruce Levine: At a college lecture that you recently gave, you asked the students and professors if they believed war was illegal or if they had ever heard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and only about 2 or 3 percent of a large group raised their hands. But what really seems to have disturbed you is when you asked if war should be illegal, and only 5 percent thought that it should be.

Full Text Below for Google Translate

Continue reading “David Swansson: When the World Outlawed War – A Model for Occupy to Achieve Electoral Reform Act of 2012”

2011/11/262011/11/27

Richard Wright: More on CIA’s Continuing Implosion

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Government, Methods & Process, Movies, Waste (materials, food, etc)

26 November 2011

Robert,

Not surprisingly your feelings about CIA [Robert Steele: Iran Arrests Twelve CIA Agents] have been echoed by Bob Baer whose principal area of operations was the Levant. As in this ABC interview: Former CIA Agent: U.S. Has Lost Its Spy Mojo [includes short video]

“But former senior CIA officer Robert Baer told ABC News this week that the loss of assets was more than a mere setback, and not an isolated incident but part of a disturbing pattern.

“When you lose your entire station, either in Tehran or Beirut, that's a catastrophe,” said Bob Baer, a legendary CIA agent whose Middle East exploits were fictionalized in the George Clooney film “Syriana.” Baer said the disaster was due in part to a new generation of agents that has forgotten, or never learned, the traditional methods of intelligence gathering.

“They don't understand tradecraft,” Baer said. “And we have lost our touch in espionage.”” (Emphasis mine)

Continue reading “Richard Wright: More on CIA's Continuing Implosion”

2011/11/262011/11/25

Naomi Wolf: Federalization of State & Local Brutality Begins Second US War of Independence from Tyranny

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement

Executive Summary:

Occupy has three demands:

1. Get money out of politics

2. Reverse the legalization of the corruption and crime in both banking and related industries (e.g. military-industrial complex.

3. Close loopholes that allow Congress to legally cheat the public at every turn by passing laws favoring their own investments.

Federal Government has federalized state and local law enforcement against its own citizens, and this endeavor is being run by NY Representative Peter King.

The “third rail” of the two-party tyranny has been exposed. A Civil War has begun, between the 99% and the 1%. With the exceptions of Kucinich and Paul Sr., Congress is with the 1%.

Brandon-Watts-lies-injure-007 — Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

Naomi Wolf

The Guardian, 25 November 2012

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

MUST READ full analysis.

Phi Beta Iota: Occupy must focus on King and burn him (metaphorically speaking) out of office. Then it must read/listen to the Open Letter to Occupy /* and place its full attention on the Electoral Reform Summit that will take place, it now appears that event will occur in Washington DC is a very prominent place easily accessible to broadcast television networks. The lines are drawn. Congress has turned against its own people, publicly.

Tip of the Hat to Josh Kilbourn.

2011/11/25

Chuck Spinney: Good, Bizarre, and Ugly

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Corruption, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

WEEKEND EDITION NOVEMBER 25-27, 2011

The Good, the Bizarre and the Ugly

AF-PAK Sitrep

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”

To those readers who disagree with my opening line, I urge you to study Anthony Cordersman’s most recent situation report on the AF-PAK War, THE AFGHANISTAN- PAKISTAN WAR AT THE END OF 2011: Strategic Failure? Talk Without Hope? Tactical Success? Spend Not Build (And Then Stop Spending)? It was issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on November 15. Reading the report is heavy slogging but I urge readers to download and examine it — at the very least, take a few minutes to read the executive summary.

Now compare Cordesman’s systematic, detailed, and workmanlike analysis to the bizarre obscurantism peddled one week later, on 22 November, co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon (Brookings Institution) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (American Enterprise Institute) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled Defining Victory in Afghanistan.

O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz posit the bizarre thesis that the admittedly less than successful outcome against the FARC guerrillas in Columbia is a favorable model for justifying continuing business as usual in Afghanistan. Viewed through the refractions of their Columbian lens, O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz conclude, “Our current exit strategy of reducing American troops to 68,000 by the end of next summer and transferring full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014 is working. In a war where the U.S. has demonstrated remarkable strategic patience, we need to stay patient and resolute.”

Are O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz living on the same planet as Cordesman or do they live in some kind of parallel universe?

I submit it is latter. Here’s why –

Read full analysis.

2011/11/25

Chuck Spinney: Averting Civil War in Syria

02 Diplomacy, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Articles & Chapters, Corruption, Government, Military, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Patrick Seale is one of the finest and most experienced writers now reporting on the Middle East

Averting Civil War in Syria

by Patrick Seale

Agence Global, 22 Nov 2011

Syria is heading for a bloody sectarian civil war. The mutual kidnappings, torture, beheadings and displacement of populations taking place between the Sunni and Alawi communities in the central city of Homs — often described as “the capital of the revolution” — send a fearsome signal of what might be in store for the rest of the country.

To avert this descent into hell must surely be the immediate priority of Arab leaders and the international community.

The Iraqi example next door is there for all to see. The Anglo-American invasion destroyed a major Arab country. The country’s institutions and infrastructure were shattered; sectarian demons were released, triggering a civil war. Hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced from their homes or forced to flee abroad. The country was dismembered as the Kurds established their own semi-independent statelet.

Syria needs the intervention of a high-powered, neutral, contact group to stop the killing on both sides.