On Tuesday Feb. 23, Iran announced the capture of Abdulmalek Rigi, the boss of the terror organization Jundullah, which works for NATO. The capture of Rigi represents a serious setback for the US-UK strategy of using false flag state-sponsored terrorism against Iran and Pakistan, and ultimately to sabotage China’s geopolitics of oil.
Strategic Port Gwadar
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Tarpley's complete overview is well worth reading and we also recommend watching the short video of his interview with Russian television. To the right is a snapshot of the Port of Gwadar linked to its Wikipedia page–we have felt for some time that the USA is over-extended, out-foxed, and fooling no one, least of all the Chinese.
Strategic Port Gwadar
When US supply ships start going dead in the water from electromagnetic scrambling of their propulsion and navigation systems, we will know that China has had enough of this foolishness. The days of secure non-attributable false flag operations are OVER.
Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace
A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.
Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
Phi Beta Iota: This is righteous, but as Howard Bloom addresses in Global Brain, it will taqke 50 years and it will not achieve the intended result until the children who START with this are adults in power. In the meantime, the adults in power who are both digitally and ideologically impaired, will continue to favor war to profit the few over peace to provide prosperity to the many.
The homemade IED is the extremists’ deadliest weapon and America is spending billions on trying to combat it. We are granted access to this secret, smart and bizarre world
Phi Beta Iota: In 1988 the US Marine Corps told the emerging MASINT community that their highest priority was the detection of explosives at a stand off distance regardless of the container. This was based on USMC experience in El Salvador, where wooden containers were used to defeat mine detectors. The article is incorrect about mines replacing small arms as the weapon or casualty-causer of choice; mines in Viet-Nam took out more people (and the able-bodied needed to carry the wounded) than any other capability. The Israeli solution is a well-trained dog.
Muscling Latin America: The Pentagon has a new Monroe Doctrine (The Nation)
In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote “universal disarmament” and oppose the “imposition” of military bases of “some states in the territory of others.” It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn't resist an easy joke. “We'll renew the lease,” he quipped, “if the US lets us set up a base in Miami.”
Funny. Then Washington answered with a show of force: take away one, we'll grab seven. In late October the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified “facilities and locations.”
Connect these dots: In Nigeria this week, Muslim youths set fire to a church, killing more than two dozen Christian worshippers. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been suffering increased persecution including, this month, a drive-by shooting outside a church in which seven people were murdered. In Pakistan, Christian churches were bombed over Christmas. In Turkey, authorities have been closing Christian churches, monasteries and schools. Recently, churches in Malaysia have been attacked, too, provoked by this grievance: Christians inside the churches were referring to God as “Allah.” How dare infidels use the same name for the Almighty as do Muslims!
Nine key factors are examined by BGen McMaster in his talk to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Answers question on why we were so unprepared. Final paragraph of trip report:
Can’t get much from a database and IT networks, but contractors keep pushing and we keep buying. But what really need is experts from anywhere, context, and also need to ask the soldiers! Make Phebe Marr a general! Also pay attention to: Charles Tripp, R. Kadeiri, Sarah Chayes, Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, Michael Howard, Frontline piece on Children of the Taliban, Fariad Ali Han on borders. Educate analysts (and self-educate) on the place, don’t waste time training them on the process.
There were reports that the airport at Port-au-Prince had run out of aviation fuel, one of the factors that is understood to have led the US military to close it. . . . The scene at Santo Domingo airport was one of chaos, uncertainty and often despair for aid workers.
Ethno-Colonial BIG Africa
Phi Beta Iota: Lesson learned by the USMC the hard way (as of 1992): need Forward Area Refueling Points (FARP) in the FIRST lift.
“Africa’s not high on America’s priority list these days.
Sometimes I feel like the Lone Ranger trying to get people to bring resources to bear out here.”
I had pointed out in an earlier interview that U.S. Army Africa and Africa Command in general are notably absent from the wars in Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, conflicts Garrett said are “currently the world’s two deadliest.”
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For Israel, a Reckoning
A new global movement is challenging Israel's violations of international law with the same strategies that were used against apartheid
Phi Beta Iota: Israeli influence on the US Government has been as bad as post-war Nazi influence on the Cold War ubbas–both have spawned policies that have murdered and displaced millions, with attendant atrocities.
Recent Pakistani military operations in insurgent strongholds in Pakistan also have driven greater numbers of Pakistan-based Taliban back into Afghanistan, the officer said.
UK plans ‘trust fund' to woo Taliban fighters
Phi Beta Iota: Turn in one weapon, get enough money for two…or go enlist and training and food along with a new weapon. Money corrupts and it is not a substitute for Whole of Government Stabilization & Reconstruction accomplishments.
Developing a coherent strategy focused on the right objectives is important, and hard to do. The country team in any normal American embassy (like the one in Sana) does not have the staff, resources or experience to do so. The limited American military presence in Yemen does not either. Despite years of talk about the need to develop this kind of capability in the State Department or elsewhere in Washington, it does not exist. It must be built now, and quickly.
It is becoming increasingly clear that 1981 was a watershed year in the history of the American political economy. What checks and balances that remained broke down. Deregulation, for example, took off and the bomb of private debt exploded (recall the chart I circulated earlier). The trade deficit skyrocketed after 1981, and deindustrialization, which started in the late 1960s took off with a vengeance. The growth in real income stagnated and gap between the rich and poor began to expand rapidly.
The same collapse of political-eocnomic checks and balances occurred in what was already a poorly checked defense sector. During the first 30 years of the Cold War with the Soviet superpower, between 1950 and 1980, the defense budget never experienced more than three consecutive years of real growth (i.e., after removing the effects of inflation) before going into decline. During war and peace, the inflation adjusted budget oscillated around a relatively constant or slightly growing median value (if one believes the Pentagons estimates of inflation). That pattern changed radically with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. The budget began to grow much more rapidly and the checking process weakened markedly during the 1980s and especially the mid 1990s, when the budget began increasing even though the superpower threat evaporated.
With the election of George Bush II in 2000, any remaining checks on budget growth came off (as can been seen in Slide 1 of my June 2002 statement to Congress, which can be downloaded here), and then, spurred on by the politics of fear which enveloped the US after 911, the checking process to ceased completely and the defense budgeting process spun out of control, as a part of it went to fight never ending guerrilla wars but most of it went to propping up a modernization program and force structure that is an outmoded legacy of the Cold War.
Now, if there is any truth to the attached AP report, Bush's insane madness has captured President Obama and he is power boosting the defense budget further, albeit with feeble promises of small declines in the future, which will no doubt be forgotten in the unfolding politics of the permanent war economy.
The Obama administration plans to ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned.
