Brzezinski – Public Intelligence Blog

photo tarpley new — Webster Griffin Tarpley

Russia Times Lead Story

Detroit jet terrorist attack was staged – journalist

The recent failed attack on a US passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit was a set-up provocation controlled by US intelligence, author and journalist Webster Tarpley stated to RT.

“[The terrorist’s] father, a rich Nigerian banker, went to the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19 and said ‘my son is in Yemen in a terrorist camp, do something about this.’ Nevertheless, the son is allowed to buy a ticket in Ghana, paying cash, $2,800, for a one-way ticket,” Tarpley said.

After that, a mentally deficient young man who doubtfully could make it from one gate to another managed to illegally enter Nigeria and get on a plane to Amsterdam.

“There was a well-dressed Indian man who brought him to the gate and said, ‘my friend does not have a passport, get him on, he is Sudanese, we do this all the time – that is impossible!” said Tarpley.

Continue reading “Journal: Historian's View of CIA, Yemen, and Air Threat”

2009/09/062009/09/10

Journal: Ralph Peters on Stifling of General McChrystal

Ethics, Military

O's Afghan woes

White House stifles general

September 3, 2009

The classified status report from Afghanistan by Gen. Stanley McChrystal was censored by the White House before its submission. As a result, it's all bun and no burger.

According to multiple (angry) sources, McChrystal — our top soldier on the ground — intended to ask for 28,000 more US troops. A presidential hatchet man directed the general not to make the request: Troop increases would be “addressed separately.”

. . . . . . .

Cooking the political books doesn't win wars. It didn't work for the Bush administration, and it won't work for Obama. We shouldn't waste another American life without a clear strategy our president will back with his full authority.

When the White House silences the generals in the field, it condemns our troops to the silence of the grave.

Phi Beta Iota: Old news but new anger. The “hatchet man” was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates himself, calling an urgent meeting in Europe. read the full story from August as published in Foreign Policy. Lies kill ones comrades. When the Secretary of Defense is the point man for gutting his own general in the field, it is time for the Secretary to dig deep and either resign on principle, or tell the truth to the public and Congress. The Obama Administration, and we specifically include General James Jones, USMC (Ret) is an extension of the ideological fantasy land that characterizes the two-party tyranny that represents Wall Street rather than the U.S. citizen, voter, and taxpayer. It is high time we restored the integrity of our Cabinet officials, demanded integrity of our Congress and White House, and demanded reality-driven policy that is crafted with the best interests of the American people rather than Wall Street. Zbigniew Brzezinski is behind most of this, and is long overdue for the same war criminal status that Henry Kissinger has enjoyed for the past decade, ever since being chased out of France by a warrant for his arrest.

2009/08/182009/08/18

Journal: Washington Post Continues to Die….

09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, Government, Law Enforcement, Military

Meet Walter Pincus. He has “covered” the U.S. Intelligence Community for over two decades.

Fine Print: U.S. Intelligence and Afghan Narcotics

By Walter Pincus

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Click on the story title to read the story. The entire story is built arouind an Air Force contracting announcement, and everything there-in is taken at face value including the absurd claim electronic processing of Dari information not only allows it to accept locally generated Afghan intelligence but to also return finished intelligence reports in Dari to the Afghan counternarcotics police.

Continue reading “Journal: Washington Post Continues to Die….”

2007/04/012009/12/04

Review: Second Chance–Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

4 Star, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Strategy

Erudite, State-Centric, Useful Observations in Isolation,

April 1, 2007

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Edit of 30 Mar 08 to add links.

I struggled with this book. In the context of all the other books I have read, I was hoping for something a big more fullsome and balanced. This is an erudite state-centric report card on three President's that only a Washington insider would write, and and that most who are not Washington insiders will find daunting.

It is an essay without references. It is also a partisan work, one that recognizes the American political, economic, and social frameworks are broken, but one that assumes the Democrats will have a second chance in the aftermath of the atrocities and high crimes and misdemanors characteristic of the Bush-Cheney regime. In my view, the only thing worse for America than imperial Republicans is inept Democrats. The party “machines” have got to go. (Cf. Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It; The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy); and Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders.

The book ends with a proposition for a joint legislative-executive global policy planning council, with a shared common staff. This is a variation of the strategic body General Tony Zinni discusses in his most recent book, The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose.

I put the book down feeling empty–indeed–with some dispair. Is this all there is? No big ideas such as the restoration of the US Information Agency and the creation of an Open Source Agency as called for on page 413 of the 9-11 Commission. No mention of a miniscule tax on every Federal Reserve transactiion, allowing the elimination of all individual income taxes. No mention of the 5 billion at the bottom of the pyramid, of the ten high-level threats, twelve policies, and eight other major players. No mention at all of the military-industrial complex and the heavy metal military that Presidents from both parties have been all too willing to go along with. No mention of the two trillion a year illicit economy (in the context of a 7-9 trillion total global economy), see Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

No mention of the fact that it was this author who gave the Pakistani's a bye on their nuclear plans, or the direct connection between Iranian funding of the Pakistani program, and their probable possession of a nuclear tipped Russian Sunburn missile (carrier killer, zig-zags at 2.2 Mach).

America needs a transpartisan government that ends the winner take all approach to leadership, and that starts with a balanced sustainable budget. The Comptroller General has declared the USA to be insolvent. It's going to take a lot more than high-sounding platitudes to get America back on track. There are 27 secessionist movements, Vermont's being the most powerful, for good reason: it is time to dissolve this government, and the two political “gangs” that share the spoils that are not theirs to give, in order to restore the Republic of, by, and for the people. The image I have loaded gives a sense of what I was hoping to see. Joe Nye comes closer with his Soft Power ideas. World War III is about two things: unleashing the innovative energy of the five billion in extreme poverty, and spreading the gospel of tolerance and diversity. Both demand $3 billion a year for a massive global free online educational network in all languages, accessible via low-cost cell phones.

If America gets a second chance, it will be from the bottom up. The existing political enterprise is worse than dead, it is a rotting carcass that needs to be burned. Brzezinski addresses the superficial outcomes of a grotesqley flawed and out-dated system (Kissinger did well on this in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century but then he's also done it wrong, see The Trial of Henry Kissinger. America and the world are too complicated to be run by one white man and his cronies, all controlled by corporations that internalize profit and externalize social cost. If we do not focus on a revolution in the minds and hearts of all humanity, neither our diplomats nor our warriors will be able to stop the immolation of the planet.

Click Here to Vote on Review at Amazon,

on Cover Above to Buy or Read Other Reviews,

I Respond to Comments Here or There

2004/04/292009/12/04

Review: The Choice–Global Domination or Global Leadership

4 Star, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Strategy

End of An Era–And About Time….,

April 29, 2004

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski is considered by the Chinese to be one of America's top strategists (along with Steve Metz from the Army War College), and that is entirely his due. He is brilliant when it comes to state-centric strategy, but falls short with respect to emerging threats, sub-state threats, intelligence reform, and the roles of non-governmental organizations including religions, and civil networks instead of government-driven “command and control.”While it used to be fashionable, when confronted with a choice between, say, market economies and controlled economies, to cleverly say “some of each” and earn the top grade, today things have changed and the answer is more often than not, “none of the above.” This estimable author, whose wisdom must certainly be taken into account at all times, does not actually present a choice, only an opinion as to how a state-centric system–largely irrelevant in the 21st Century–might best be managed.

Especially troubling to me was the almost complete lack of attention to substantive books published in the last ten years, including those, most recently, of George Soros (abusive capitalism), William Greider (immoral capitalism), Herman Daly (ecological economics), Jonathan Schell (unconquerable world), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), Thomas Stewart (the wealth of knowledge as an alternative to violence), and so on. The author is not alone in this oversight–Joseph Nye, whose book on Soft Power I am also reviewing today, bases his work on Op-Eds, many of them not written by the people signing them, and has almost no substantive references either. The think tank culture has lost touch with true scholarship.

The author's claim that Washington, D.C. is the center of the earth (pages 131-132) reflect in my view the last gasp of the Reagan-Smart Bush-Clinton era. While the author alludes to New York as the “other center”, I and my colleagues think instead of a loose network on “nodes”, some financial (Tokyo, London, Kuala Lumpur), some religious (Jerusalem, Rome, Salt Lake City, points in India), and so on. The author's emphasis on the Trilateral Commission and the now-dying World Economic Forum (Davos) as the bastions of a global elite that is in agreement struck me as being astonishing insular and inaccurate. The author says that “This elite is fostering the emergence of a global community of shared interest in stability, prosperity, and perhaps eventually democracy.” I do not think so. All the other books I have reviewed for Amazon suggest that this elite is doing all it can to plunder the world by enriching micro-elites through corruption, while disenfranchising the broader publics (e.g. Canadian companies displacing villages in Peru to loot the gold, French companies buying up the water in Brazil to increase charges to the public for the water they used to own, etc.).

The author is to be commended for at least recognizing that America is losing its moral standing in the world, and this is an intangible value that cannot be easily purchased nor replaced.

In passing, footnote 4 on page 38 is inadvertently incorrect. There are 175 violent internal political conflicts, not 38. There are also 32 countries engaged in complex emergencies, 66 with millions of displaced refugees, 59 with plagues and epidemics, 33 with massive starvation, and 18 genocides now on-going.

The book ends somewhat quietly, suggesting a transatlantic convention and what one other reviewer very appropriately called “baby steps.” My bottom line: Brzezinski is a solid citizen with a big mind and an old framework. He *must* be consulted for his wisdom as we move forward, but it falls to others now to define the bold new steps–faith-based diplomacy, ecological economics, public intelligence, global accountability of leaders–that are essential is we are save the world for our children.

Tag: Brzezinski

Journal: Historian’s View of CIA, Yemen, and Air Threat